On Privilege

A commenter at The Apostate remarks:

My OPINION…I am not trained in sociology or psychology…and speaking from the point of view of a once-married gay man: is that straight guys revel in their privilege. Most of them don’t realize the shear amount of bennies they get for just being born heterosexual with a penis. They just go along with it as ‘how things are’.

As they age quite a few realize that they’ve had it good and some change for the better, but most will begin to defend their privilege and refuse to acknowledge that the deference they expect isn’t earned and is a sort of cultural mistake.

I'm a straight, white, christian (well, christian-appearing) man, and trust me: we don't receive "deference". What we do get is that — unlike non-straight, non-white, non-christian people and women — we're not routinely and constantly fucked over just because we're non-straight, etc. It's clearly wrong to fuck people over just because of their looks, sex or sexuality, but it's not like we SWCM are handed a free pass in life just because we're white, etc. Most of us are routinely and constantly fucked over because the capitalist system routinely fucks most people over on general principles.

Of course, it's really important to remember that members of hyper-oppressed groups are in fact hyper-oppressed. A far larger proportion of black people, for example, live in poverty because in addition to fucking most people over on general principles, the American capitalist system fucks black people over more and has been fucking them over more for centuries. The same is true for women, gay people and members of other racial/cultural minorities.

The difference is subtle but important: with regard to all discrimination, including race, sex and sexual-orientation, the point is not to take away some "undeserved" privilege from SWCM, but to extend the freedom from hyper-oppression and hyper-exploitation to everyone.

It's also important that the capitalist system requires that some group be hyper-exploited. Ideally (according to capitalist ideals) everyone should be hyper-exploited, but that's usually not politically and socially viable. But someone needs to clean the toilets and change the diapers and it's a lot easier to find some marginal group and oppressively push them to the bottom so that cleaning toilets for subsistence wages is a matter of economic necessity to this group. Capitalists will resist civil rights with every weapon at their disposal. And at best when one group receives equal status under capitalism, the capitalists will simply find another group — such as immigrants — to hyper-exploit.

Because only a small number of people can rise to the capital-owning class — and only a slightly larger number can rise to the labor aristocracy — equal status under capitalism still means that most members of presently marginalized groups will still be fucked over, but they'll be fucked over on general principles rather than because they are in a formerly marginalize group. This is an improvement, of course, but we can set our bar higher: no one should by oppressed and hyper-exploited.

Under capitalism, members of marginalized groups will never be "one of us" to the capital-owning class or the labor aristocracy. Only a select few will even be granted some capitalist privilege. And equal entry into the upper and middle classes just dooms some other group to exclusion and marginalization.

Communism, on the other hand, is much better.

First, communists — at least this communist — would use the brute force of state power to not only prohibit all discrimination but also to correct the effects of centuries or millennia of discrimination and oppression. No bullshit, no equivocation: equal rights for all and affirmative action where necessary shoved down the throats of the bigots without apology and without compromise.

Second, by eliminating class distinctions, communism eliminates the necessity of oppressing any group in order to hyper-exploit them and give them the (literally) shit jobs.

If what you want is to break into the small fraction of people that have capitalist privilege, standing on the necks of your brothers and sisters who don't have the wherewithal to break in, then, by all means, satisfy yourself with reforming capitalism. If what you want is just to say, "Hey, I personally am being exploited, but it's nice to know that someone else who looks like me can break through," well, I'm sorry to say you're an idiot.

If, however, you want equal rights for everyone and freedom from exploitation from everyone, make common cause with the communists.