Content warning: This video contains content.
There's gonna be a lot of discussion about transphobia, and that could be upsetting to some viewers.
Liberals use the term "class reductionism" wrong.
That shouldn't surprise you. Liberals use every term wrong.
We shouldn't let liberals learn new words. They'll just use them badly.
Liberals will use the term "class reductionism" to just mean, like,
someone who talks about class, and that's bullshit and that's not what it is.
When I use the term "class reductionist", I'm not necessarily calling anyone a bigot.
I'm not saying you're a bad person or a bad leftist, necessarily.
I think it's a thing that anyone can just do sometimes, myself included, and it's a problem.
You take a variety of factors and reduce it down to simply class.
And sometimes, you gotta do that. Sometimes, it's a useful shorthand.
But it may have the unintended -
or in some cases, very much intended -
side effect of erasing or making apologetics for someone else's oppression.
The fact that a small handful of rich ghouls owns most of the money
and we'll all die of starvation and exposure if we don't get some of it,
even though we're producing more than we need and throwing away almost half of everything
at a time when that overproduction is poised to make our planet uninhabitable
just so that the already unfathomably rich ghouls
can have a computer readout that says that their wealth increased by .0001%,
and the only way that you can get the means of your survival
is by throwing yourself into perpetual and worsening exploitation forever...
That's - that's a big problem.
And it's a problem that's inextricably tied to class,
and cannot meaningfully be divorced from it.
It's a problem that affects all of us - literally everyone that's watching this video.
All of us need to worry about making a living
and surviving the forthcoming end of the world,
while the aforementioned handful of rich ghouls don't!
They're not gonna watch this video. I can say whatever I want about them.
They have more fun shit to do. They have cocaine fountains.
Th-they have... champagne enemas. I don't know what rich people do all day.
Golf? Is it golf?
But here's the rub: while we share that in common and should work together at dismantling that problem,
many people also face other problems
based on some sort of marginalized identity that compounds their experience of class.
Me and a Black dude might be equally exploited working at a Borger King together.
But I'm more likely to get the job and be exploited in the first place
and less likely to be fired for bullshit reasons once there.
I'm more likely to be promoted to management at that Borger King than a coworker who's a woman.
And while I'd still find the work physically taxing,
I'd find it a lot less taxing than someone who's disabled.
If our project as leftists is to liberate the working class,
we gotta understand these complications and work to fix them.
These facts do not distract from class analysis,
cause these facts are class analysis.
Rich bourgeois parasites don't work at Borger King.
They have more fun shit to than that.
And even if they had to work at a fast food place, like,
you wouldn't work at Borger King. You'd work at, like, Five Guys.
But probably, you'd wanna spend your time at the cocaine fountain,
rather than at the shitty fast food job.
All of this is pretty 101 shit, right? Like, nothing I'm saying here is all that controversial,
but there's a reason I feel I have to reiterated this type of stuff over and over.
It's because of how perniciously shitty analysis
can use the pretense of class to dismiss the concerns of marginalized people.
Case in point:
[Maupin] Now, back to what I was asking you about before,
about kind of distinguishing yourself as a communist from the mainstream of the left.
I noticed that your political organization has taken quite a stand
on the transgenderism debate. Can you talk about that position?
[Brar] Sure.
[Matt] Before you, you see Nazbol ghoul Caleb Maupin,
talking to Joti Brar of the Communist Party of Great Britain,
and what she's saying sucks!
[Brar] Our view is - and it's not about people. We're not against a trans person.
It's the ideology that's being pushed on people that says "You are what you think you are."
Now, this is total idealism -
idealism in the philosophical sense of the opposite of materialism.
It says "I think, therefore I am.
Whatever I think, that's reality."
Now, as a Marxist, we have to...
uphold the idea that - or the reality that
material reality is real. And it's the basis of our ideas.
Life teaches us that materialism is true.
Materialism can be tested by science, by living.
 
Idealism is a human construct.
It's what makes gods, okay?
Transgender ideology is pure idealism.
It says "If I feel something, it's true.
We've all got our own reality. We've all got our own way of - "
Now, of course we all have our own feelings.
Yes, can't dispute that.
Differences between men and women exist.
They're not imaginary. They're not a societal construct.
[Matt] She's wrong in so many ways, but
lemme just break down a few of them for you.
She deliberately confuses gender and sex in her tirade -
I say "deliberately" because she later says that she understands the distinction.
But she views what you or I would call "gender" as merely gender stereotypes.
[Brar] The people who push this transgender ideology
have tried to make a confusion
and say that gender is something different to sex.
It isn't. They're talking about gender stereotypes.
[Matt] Very few people dispute that there are differences in general between the sexes,
but anyone who is credible would dispute that it maps neatly onto the binary categories
of male and female, because, y'know,
intersex people exist.
Also, the entire concept of biological sex is
not really that simple. It's kinda pseudoscientific to pretend it is,
and you can learn more about that later in the Eyeball Zone!
That biological differences exist between most men and most women
is not something the average trans person would dispute.
So pinning the majority of her argument on this point dodges the central issue
that gender, the way we perform masculinity or femininity,
is very much socially constructed
and not immutable laws of nature.
Women don't come out of the womb with long hair, wearing dresses.
Men don't come out of the womb with full beards and a wood-chopping axe.
The words "he" and "she" were not discovered in a laboratory.
They were sounds we applied to people.
And yes, some aspects of gender are indeed stereotypical.
However, since these expectations are placed on people,
if they fail to perform these stereotypes,
people are deemed to be insufficiently masculine or feminine.
If a trans man continues to wear makeup after transition, for example,
dickhead weirdos like Ms. Brar would use that as evidence that they're faking it.
Trans people do not believe that they have somehow miraculously developed new chromosomes,
that their belief manifests in changing their biology.
They believe that the gendered category they have been placed in is not the one that they would prefer.
And since gendered expectations are arbitrary,
a fact Ms. Brar went ahead and conceded when she started talking about gendered stereotypes,
that's pretty reasonable, actually!
We can't use material analysis to determine how someone feels in their brain,
but we can use it to determine what happens when that isn't respected
and it turns out the answer
is a whole lot of suicide.
So let's not forget that that's what Joti Brar is advocating for here.
And just - let's - and just -
set aside the trans issue for a moment...
this is kind of garbage philosophically. First of all,
to divide each side of an issue into "materialist" and "idealist"
and then suggest that the materialist side is always correct
and the idealist side is always wrong
is not exactly dialectical thinking,
especially when the materialist side
just so happens to be whatever you would intuit based on things you saw around.
Material analysis is good for a lot of things.
It can help you build a bridge or manage an economy.
It can't tell you whether a poem is good.
Materialism can help you feed the homeless.
It can't tell you people dying of starvation is bad.
That's something that you have to determine outside of material analysis
and then you use material analysis
to achieve your goal of stopping people from starving to death.
To suggest that in order to be a materialist,
one must therefore reject any thought that is not materialist
is nonsense! It's gobbledygook!
It sounds meaningful until you think about it for even, like, a fuckin' second.
Oh, sorry, honey, I can't say that I love you.
As a materialist, I have to wait until love is discovered in laboratory conditions.
What do I "want" on my pizza? Irrelevant!
Bring me the most nutritionally complete ingredients
and arrange them in the most efficient way.
No anesthetic for me, doctor.
Pain is merely a sensation within the body, not material reality.
Begin the surgery, please.
It's horseshit and she knows it.
The whole idea that this is "merely material analysis" is a fig leaf.
A way to lend an air of objectivity to what she's saying.
[Bronx accent]
"Hey, oh, hey, I don't got a problem with individuals!
I'm just following the science." [laughs]
I don't know why she's from New York now. "Oh, hey!" [laughs]
"I'm doing a hate speech over here!"
A little bit later, she goes into the same tired logic about how feminism and race theory
"divide the working class".
That's what she's really mad about,
and she'll use whatever specious logic it takes to make that point.
[Brar] I mean, what we're really seeing today is
the culmination of forty years of identity politics
wheedling its way into the working class movement so that
particularly the more privileged sections who go to universities and are influenced by the academics
which is where, you know, lots of people from the black nationalist movement,
from the women's liberation movement, the bourgeois feminists, ended up in academia.
And they have created these disciplines, you know, feminism,
I don't know what you would call the Black nationalist type of versions,
but, you know, they've created these disciplines
where they look at sex, sexuality, color,
in a very liberal way,
but it's presented to better-off educated workers
as left-wing consciousness. It isn't left-wing. It's not Marxist.
It's got nothing to do with the class struggle for socialism.
It is a way of diverting that struggle
down kind of navel-gazing, academic,
very liberal, bourgeois liberal paths.
[Matt] And here's what I really wanna stress to you today.
It - that's the opposite.
The truth is the opposite of that.
Say you're working at Borger King. Your coworker comes to you because
they know you're a big time lefto, big time workers' rights kind of person, and they're like "Hey,
I think I might be trans, and I wanna start to transition,
but I'm really afraid that if I do, I'll lose my job."
Which of the following responses is more likely to get that person involved
in the struggle against capitalism?
A: "I'll support you however I can.
As workers, we have to stick together, because our bosses will seek to divide us.
I'll do whatever it takes to protect your rights. How can I help?"
Or B: "No! You're delusional.
You're oppressed in this job, and that's the one thing that matters! Read Marx!
Marx happens to agree with whatever bullshit I believe!"
These struggles are part of class struggle.
Just as it's toxic for liberals to divorce the two
to focus exclusively on identity politics,
it's equally toxic for leftists to divorce the two to focus exclusively on class.
Both of these approaches fall flat on their dicks, because you can't help one without helping the other.
You wanna unite the working class, you have to stand up for the whole working class. All of them!
And all of their struggles. Otherwise, you're the one being divisive.
You're the one excluding people!
Identity can only divide us if we choose not to care about the struggles of others,
if we decide that the problems of others can wait while we sort out the ones that we share.
How can we expect people to extend class solidarity to us
when we withhold our solidarity from them?
Capitalism is built on white supremacy. It's built on patriarchy.
It's built on cisheteronormativity, on ableism, on settler colonialism, on imperialism.
It's an interlocking and mutually reinforcing system.
We don't get to pick and choose. You either fight the whole thing,
or you're fighting none of it. You're giving quarter to it.
And if you wanna hold up the fight until everyone agrees to exclude one vector of oppression or another,
until we dismiss the concerns of trans people or indigenous people
or women or disabled people or whomever,
then you're no different than any other reactionary.
Hello and welcome to the Eyeball Zone!
You escaped our grasp last week. You eluded us only briefly.
You have but delayed the inevitable.
We have found you once more, and nothing will stop us
from highlighting small leftist content! Hey,
biological sex isn't a very accurate idea, don't you think?
Wanna see someone perform some actual material analysis on that?
Check out this video from Lextra,
where she outlines how the whole idea is just kinda nonsense.
Just a bunch of nonsense that seems to make sense on the surface,
but breaks down under actual scrutiny.
A lot of common-sense assumptions that we make about sex are just kinda guesses.
Like, weird approximations of what is usually true.
And that can lead to problems, to say the least.
Woe betide you! Robbed of my power last week,
I will exact double my usual toll.
Hey, I don't want you to watch this video and come away thinking that I think materialist thinking is bad.
I consider myself a materialist. I think materialism is important.
I believe in science. I...
fucking love science. And I want people to take materialist thinking seriously.
That's why I love this video by Ordinary Snowflake that goes into how skeptic communication
can often rely on condescension, and actually turn people away from scientific consensus.
A lot of the times, we just use science to treat people like dumb-dumbs,
and then they're like "Well, fuck you then. I don't believe in vaccines."
Do you have a small leftist project which you're willing to sacrifice to gain the power of eyeballs?
Send me *no more than one email*
at thoughtslimeeditor@gmail.com, and perhaps you will find yourself trapped here...
in the Eyeball Zone.
Hey, thanks for watching this video.
I hope you liked it. If you did, you know...
why don't you go crazy? Hit that like button!
You know what? You deserve it. Hit that like button.
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I'm Thought Slime! That's me. That's why I put those names there.
Still backed up on the patron drawings, as usual.
Just know that. Just know that I'm never on time with patron drawings, and therefore
don't be mad at me, please.
Have a wonderful weekend,
and a wonderful New Year.
[laughs]
Ho ho ho! It's Christmas now.
