“A featherless biped” and then you shit in your hand and toss it at them

Edit: Actually, I had an edgelord acquaintance ask me this at a DND gathering I no longer play with and tbh my answer was, “someone who identifies as a woman”. Of course, he was instantly like, “Well what if I told you I identify as a woman? What would you say then?” and I told him that quoting Matt Walsh would be a very sad way to tell someone you’re trans.

I think if I could do it over, I’d just ask for his pronouns and try to convince my friends to be overly welcoming about his “gender exploration”.

A big insight of intersectionality for me has been that looking at systems of oppression in isolation is like unweaving a blanket to understand its pattern.

The other, as it relates to class, is that class oppression is not a system whose liberation involves the coexistence of its opposing groups.

Straight people are going to need to learn to live in peace and respect with gay people.

White people are going to need to learn to live in peace and respect with people of color.

The bourgeoisie must be eradicated.

The class’s constituents must take on a different class character entirely. A class-conscious coexistence of the working and owning classes is the material base for fascism. This cannot stand. So while class is inextricably tied to the oppression of these social groups, class stands out as a system of oppression whose eradication will remove the very distinctions it preys on.

I think to put base and superstructure into a hierarchy is to ignore their dialectical nature.

It’s really that simple. But also, when I heard that a few years ago I thought it was nonsense jargon, so here’s an explanation for anyone reading who had that sentence slide right off their brain.

We’re obsessed with thinking of everything as hierarchical. Even in a group of two things or people, many of us find our brains trying to figure out which one is dominant over the other. The Marxist concepts of base and superstructure are often seen through this lens. The economic base is everything about a society that involves its people’s relationship to the means of production. The superstructure is everything else. Culture, politics, media, religion, etc. The relationship between these two parts of society is like this: One part shapes the other part, and in return the shaped part protects its shaper. So for example, the economic base of exploitation of people in the color in the US gave rise to the cultural construction of race as we know it, but that same construct protects the economic order of capitalist oppression via white supremacy.

So which is the shaper and which is the protector? Base or superstructure? The key insight relevant to this conversation is that both parts perform both functions. That’s the dialectical portion. So to run with the racial example, the economic conditions of chattel slavery and indigenous genocide in the US were themselves made possible by racial pseudoscience which arose to justify colonialism. The base and superstructure push and pull one another this way.

There may be people reading this who have a lot to say about me implying that base and superstructure perform both functions equally, but I specifically didn’t say that because it’s generally not true. But I do believe that balance has changed in the west since the time of Marx and Engels.

I think of these systems like a river. You have the water and you have the riverbed. They’re a dynamic system and if you want to redirect the river, it doesn’t make sense to move the water’s path without modifying the bed as well.