Thread by @HelenRazer

Editors: The Australian iteration of purported Fight Homelessness enterprise the @BigIssue has a board packed with finance industry personnel who have turned their backs on vendors. Oh. They also enjoy a CEOs Sell The Big Issue day.

https://twitter.com/JeremyPoxon/status/1405392168756207617

The revulsion many homeless people feel when another "CEO Sleepout" unfolds is the entirely justified response I imagine might greet the @SBS LARP obscenity, Filthy Rich & Homeless, or this, now deleted, @bigissue promotion.

When the egoistic pile of illusory bullshit Filthy Rich & Homeless (celebrity edition) premiered on SBS, I asked a participant how in fuck they thought it could achieve anything but their own sense of smug. They answered by sending me a @wef report.

The @wef or World Economic Forum—Davos, more colloquially—is yet to "solutionise" the persistent problem of poverty its leaders persistently cause by their upwards redistribution of wealth. This is how billionaires on a Swiss mountaintop "check their privilege,", via @MkBlyth

I'm legit grateful for an era of discussion re microaggressions. It wasn't long ago I was last justifiably told what-for by a Blak person & such open notice of my klutzy whiteness is first unpleasant but an ultimate relief. But FFS wake up to the macroaggression of billionaires.

To be clear, my instruction "wake up to the macroaaggression of billionaires" is not directed at persons classified or self-identified with oppressed identity groups. It is to the class of the falsely conscious privilege-checkers in white majority nations, often known as Woke™

To be clearer and less entertaining still, one can be both falsely conscious about one's class— very effing likely not to be the ruling one—and quite keenly or even personally aware of racism, for example. Class is an economic relation. It is not an identity group.

I note a rise in recent years of a crudely peculiar view which holds: it is now the "turn" of women, transpeople, POC etc to accumulate great power AKA wealth. Notwithstanding this has not fucking happened in any meaningful way, wtf is it to be so uncritical of truest privilege?

of course of course of course the populations of persons now classified medically, criminally and by other institutional means as oppressed and, freely now or in the past, as identities are those who accumulate less wealth. but wealth accumulation is in itself the fucking problem

I believe a chap called Fred has much the same to say. Owned a Manchester textile factory?

https://twitter.com/omically/status/1405761649940713474?s=20

Just as sexism has been naturalised in the past or racism has been long considered a biological response and even justified by science and state programs of eugenics, so has the right to accumulate power over workers, which is the first essential step toward wealth accumulation.

The "profit motive" is not natural. Capitalism is not the inevitable product of essential human drives. Ask yourself or ask a neoclassical economist or anyone to explain how capitalism, a mode of production imposed by Western Europe mere centuries ago, is "human nature."

All of which to say is that the CEO Sleep-out is the class equivalent of blackface and if you have issues with that parallel, feel free to expand as I believe that my white privilege was checked before making the declaration.