[ home / rules / faq ] [ overboard / sfw / alt ] [ leftypol / siberia / edu / hobby / tech / games / anime / music / draw / AKM ] [ meta / roulette ] [ cytube / wiki / git ] [ GET / ref / marx / booru / zine ]

/dead/ - Post-Left

Name
Options
Subject
Comment
Flag
File
Embed
Password (For file deletion.)

Join our Matrix Chat <=> IRC: #leftypol on Rizon


File: 1634934273836.png (53.96 KB, 1280x771, a//e.png)

 No.2751

Can equality be salvaged?

I know that it has a bad reputation. Everyone loves to shit on it. They build strawmen that it actually means that everyone is exactly identical or add bullshit qualifiers to it. But can anarchists abandon equality? Isn't the lack of hierarchy a form of equality? And when people talk about meeting others as their equals, I don't think they think about those people and themselves as abstract human beings like Stirner claims. I certainly don't. Even the anarcho-individualist nihilist CCF say that they are anarchists because they create "the conspiracy of the equals". But when I look at the library there's only nine texts under the "equality" tag.

 No.2752

You can talk about being equals in the sense of not being differentiated by society as different classes or different kinds, but you will never achieve equality in a strict formal sense. Every person is different. To be equal in that sense is to be identical. So that's not only not possible but not even desirable. What matters is whether there are social forms of discrimination against people based on their differences. That's all "equality" really means. And it does include in it an implicit abolition of any hierarchies of some people over others. But that implication itself does not get you very far. It's not such a bad starting point, but you must proceed from there to figuring out how you actually demolish a hierarchy.

 No.2754

File: 1634935691246.jpg (56.66 KB, 960x784, bruh-zone.jpg)

>>2752
Please anon don't do this to me, I even mentioned in the OP the strawman about it being just identity. Nobody actually uses it to mean that. Please practice a little equality and don't assume that we are this stupid.

 No.2755

>>2754
All I was doing was expanding on why that's silly.

 No.2756

>>2755
Nobody uses "equality" to mean "identical". The silly thing is to endlessly repeat this caricature.

 No.2758

Equality means if you fuck my wife, I fuck your daughter.

 No.2759

>>2756
>>2754
>Nobody uses "equality" to mean "identical"
>I even mentioned in the OP the strawman about it being just identity
Well, what is it about to you then?
What does "equal" describe to you if not that two things are similar in certain characteristics? And if we talk about society, these two are human individuals or social groups, so how you gonna talk about euality without identity in this case?

>And when people talk about meeting others as their equals, I don't think they think about those people and themselves as abstract human beings like Stirner claims.

They undoubtedly do. Since their concrete selves are not equal, the only selves they could be talking about is an abstract one.

 No.2762

>>2759
Well, if you consider yourself unique, then equality would mean recognizing others as unique too. Inequality would be holding them as your superiors or inferiors.

 No.2767

>>2762
>>2762
>Well, if you consider yourself unique, then equality would mean recognizing others as unique too.
In a literal sense, I would have to agree. My unique I exists, as far as I can tell, alongside other I's who are unique. But there is no equality here other than Me and You fitting into the same ontological category.
What I mean is that the Unique famously describes the (creative) nothing, so the equality between them also describes nothing. In other words: their relation could be any. That I am unique and the other I is equally unique is true wether or not I am slave in Rome and they are an patrician, I am peasant and they are a feudal lord, or if I am antifa activist smashing a fashist with a stone. In every case I act upon them and they act upon me as equally unique beings. That is the reason I was curious how you would describe the content of equality without describing characteristics or identity, because if you use it through a stirnerite lense, it becomes meaningless.
So if this was you point all along, I agree: bring about the absolute euqality by declaring everyone equally unique and thusly kill the content of equality once and for all! But the second part of your post leaves me to believe you intended another interpretation.
>Inequality would be holding them as your superiors or inferiors.
You see this doesnt follow: if someone is my superior, be that in a hierarchy or in ability of mastering a certain field or whatever relation you could come up if, he would still be unique. Being unique doesn't have any conditions. Superiority or inferiority aren't disqualifiers when it comes it wether or not You are an unique being. In fact it could be argued that comparing My and Your properties, the set of things that our uniqueness contains, is a better way of identifying the me as an I than the insistence onour equality. Not holding someone as superior or inferior, because you recognise them as an equally unique individual, seems to me to imply that you shouldn't act maliciously towards them or at least in a way that befits a unique I. But this is peak spook territory, because you essentialise oneof their properties, their uniqueness, as their real existence. Stirner describes this with liberal humanism:
>Whom does the liberal look upon as his equal? Man! Be only man — and that you are anyway — and the liberal calls you his brother. He asks very little about your private opinions and private follies, if only he can espy “Man” in you.
>But, as he takes little heed of what you are privatim — nay, in a strict following out of his principle sets no value at all on it — he sees in you only what you are generatim. In other words, he sees in you, not you, but the species; not Tom or Jim, but Man; not the real or unique one,[Einzigen] but your essence or your concept; not the bodily man, but the spirit.
>As Tom you would not be his equal, because he is Jim, therefore not Tom; as man you are the same that he is. And, since as Tom you virtually do not exist at all for him (so far, to wit, as he is a liberal and not unconsciously an egoist), he has really made “brother-love” very easy for himself: he loves in you not Tom, of whom he knows nothing and wants to know nothing, but Man.
Just like the liberal loves in you not Yourself, Anon or whatever, but instead Man, you would love in others not themselves but Uniqueness, the fact that they are unique.
>Seeing Man in each other, and acting as men toward each other, is called moral behavior. This is every whit the “spiritual love” of Christianity. For, if I see Man in you, as in myself I see Man and nothing but Man, then I care for you as I would care for myself; for we represent, you see, nothing but the mathematical proposition: A = C and B = C, consequently A = B — i.e. I nothing but man and you nothing but man, consequently I and you the same.
Of course I don't wanna put words into your mouth, that's just how I read the second part, and I wanted to explore the implications of that a bit.

 No.2771

>>2767
But if you see someone as your superior, and yourself as their inferior, how is that different from seeing both yourself and some other as Man (human being)?

 No.2773

>>2771
First off, somebody being in a superior or inferior position in a hierarchy is not really a matter of opinion - the individual on the top can enfroce their desire and the individual on the bottom has to give their desires up in favor of the others.
This describes a power dynamic which can be observed in the concrete world.
Seeing both yourself and others as Man (human beings) is a moral judgement. It means that you have a concept of what it means to be human (the essence of humanity) and judge people according to it. Since these concepts are only abstract copies of concrete things, you put up an abstraction of humans, something that doesnt describe any one individual but some vague, general human, as their real essence.
Abstractions are ideas and therefore can't be observed in the concrete world.
That's the difference.

 No.2795

File: 1635440848133.png (237.85 KB, 733x716, ClipboardImage.png)

Looked up equality in A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze, what do you think?


Unique IPs: 5

[Return][Go to top] [Catalog] | [Home][Post a Reply]
Delete Post [ ]
[ home / rules / faq ] [ overboard / sfw / alt ] [ leftypol / siberia / edu / hobby / tech / games / anime / music / draw / AKM ] [ meta / roulette ] [ cytube / wiki / git ] [ GET / ref / marx / booru / zine ]