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Tay Zonday pfp
Tay Zonday
@tayzonday
I dislike identifying as leftist, liberal, centrist, conservative or right-wing. I prefer to identify as the truth. That being said, I also dislike identifying as “black” in a discursive vacuum, but there’s a combination of historical realities that has made declining to do so untenable. Like blackness, leftism is a set of epistemological assumptions with real-world power dynamics. When in Rome, one may not always do as the Romans do but one sometimes has to speak as the Romans speak. It just so happens that species goals grounded in moral and socioeconomic truth are sometimes described as “leftist” the way that certain dermatological melanin lineage is “black.” My humanist goals can be articulated with modern monetary theory, poststructuralism, socialism, libertarian individualism and a range of other things— just like an application can be written in C++, Java or Swift. “Leftist” is where my humanist goals frequently fall in taxonomy by others just like “black” and “male.”
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lick nand pfp
lick nand
@0xlicknand
Obsessing over what one identifies as, ironically, is just adopting a liberal frame. "Leftism" isnt about identity. The left (in its forms that actually achieved anything) is fundamentally a materialist tendency. People need stuff to do things, stuff is unequally distributed, so our politics should aim to rectify that. It doesnt matter what its called. Chartists, anabaptists, communists, socialists. It's all contingent on the politics of the day. Today we obviously need new words, but actual material politics needs to come first. Reducing it to identity is just to fall down the chasm of the deadend that has been the left since circa 68.
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