[RD] Most White People Want to Keep Their Priviledge (And Know They Have It)

[Kyriakos]

This "privilege" thing is a fallacy. This isn't a video game where you choose balanced stats characters. Most white people are poor as well, and outside the US there isn't this "black vs white" angle, or at least not in this kind of incredibly fallacious manner, where the whole debate is chasing chimerae.
And other than fallacious it is also used to make things worse for most people, eg notice how the ludicrous "berniebros" spin cost your country a serious potus (Bern ), and you ended up with Trump.

 

[Lexicus]

It's a critique of capitalist politics, but not of capital economy: of the ways in which access to wealth and power are regulated, but not of the people doing the regulating.

'Access to wealth and power' is politics. You're describing political economy, and I don't really recognize the arbitrary separation of 'politics' and 'economy'.

But it can also be a starting place for a more radical critique. What's important isn't the specific policies which are proposed, its where they originate and how they are brought about: Sanders was no more a revolutionary than Tony Blair, but where Blair represented the ruling class and its sense of "good government", Sanders represented, or at least was able to represent, widespread working class discontent with the prevailing economic order.

Well, I basically disagree with you insofar as I think all social formations are cross-class constructions. Which leads me to this...

All real social change has come from the solidarity of the working class, whether in whole in part.

I don't agree with this at all, except insofar as 'real social change' is defined as 'social change that comes from the solidarity of the working class' (whatever that phrase actually means in practice). Social formations and social movements are pretty much always cross-class constructions, with few historical exceptions.

Privilege theory rejects class solidarity, not simply in the sense of the old Marxist chesnut that "identity politics divides the working class", but in the sense that it explicitly frames class solidarity as impossible.

It's strange, because I think you are arguing against the sort of reductionism that I criticized earlier." Privilege theory" (your phrase - I don't really know what it means - what works form the corpus of 'privilege theory' in your view?) is only one tool in the box, and of course people who try to rely too much on that one tool are going to run into trouble.

 

[Mouthwash]

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Moderator Action: This is what the 'watch thread' button (top right above the first post) is for. FP

 

[Commodore]

There was even an incident when me and my girlfriend went to a fancy tea shop in Capitol Hill that was actually hosting a meeting on letter writing to state representatives to combat police shootings. My girlfriend, who's black btw, stood to the side while the store owner was talking to a customer and was about to quietly ask about the petition before she was cut off in the middle of her sentence, whereas I stood on the other side of the store and hollered at her about the same and literally got between her and her customer and was still treated better for my boorish behavior.

I remember you telling that story before, and I'm still convinced it's a case of the squeaky wheel getting the oil and not a matter of racism. Your girlfriend was quiet, polite and didn't press the issue, which made her easy to dismiss. You were loud and making a bit of a scene so the store owner had to deal with you as, in her mind, that was probably the only way she was going to get rid of you. If anything, that's a lesson on the importance of assertiveness rather than a lesson on racism.