Even if a communist can colloquially describe themselves as being on the left, there’s a distinction between communism and “the left.” This is implied right in the title of Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder. Whereas the left, a big tent term for a myriad of incompatible ideologies, aims merely to act as an opposition towards the present order for the sake of it, communists have a coherent vision for how to defeat the system: by advancing history’s development to the next stage. The left, because of its lack of commitment to that central Marxist goal, naturally takes on an opportunistic role. Because when you want only to build a movement as an end in itself, rather than use this movement as a means for defeating the system, you become nothing more than an actor who benefits from discontent without helping solve the problems behind that discontent.
He’s still malding about “Sakaists” is all I take away from this. Frankly, I used to respect Shea-- but this just sounds like settler guilt to me; twice in a row at that. I find it interesting that he has these issues with Sakai, and presents no real alternative other than the typical white left “sit down, shut up, toe the party line, and 'class war only; there is no racial question”'.
Mentalities like his are exactly why I don’t trust a single party with settler leadership-- because they all say the same shit at the end of the day, and for people who claim to have a scientific approach to Marxism, they’re REMARKABLY incapable of seeing that the parameters that worked for the Soviet condition WILL NOT WORK FOR US, and that the contradictions we face INHERENTLY HAVE RACIAL MOTIVES WOVEN INTO THEM.
These are not Marxists to me; but settler-chauvinist, nigh-on white supremacist dogmatists. I said it. tl;dr, I am still not convinced that New Afrikans don’t need to organize for our own self-determination, because I still cannot believe we will achieve equality arm-in-arm with not even the sons and daughters of antebellum oppressors, but those who show every day that they will oppress again.
I am with you. I do think Degrowth is potentially problematic because it’s being used to argue against the need to develop the productive base of overexploited nations. It’s also not really something the West is capable of doing considering it doesn’t have a productive base anymore. Degrowth in the West would be a combination of austerity and literal abandonment of settlements, particularly in the areas that are environmentally hostile to villages.
But I see degrowth being used against the overexploited world as a demand for them to stop developing their economies, especially against Marxists who argue for developing productive capabilities - a thinly veiled chauvinism against China and the BRI.
But even on Lemmy we see people railing against decolonization as though the “working class” of indigenous nations can stand in solidarity with the working class of settler nations because they have to otherwise it’s not “Marxist”.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but aren’t indigenous people vastly outnumbered by the settlers in the US and Canada? If i’m looking at this as a war between the colonized and the colonizer, the manpower numbers and the total assets on the side of the colonized for waging and sustaining war don’t look too good. We are not talking about Palestine where the settlers are still a minority and where the settler state is surrounded by more or less hostile states that can be potential allies to the indigenous population in their armed de-colonization struggle. This is a continent where the indigenous were all but genocided and where there is little outside help that can be expected. Wouldn’t the logical conclusion be that seeking allies among the settlers is just a mathematical necessity?
I can’t speak for the community as a monolith, but from where I sit, if ‘mathematical necessity’ means subordination to the sons and daughters of the same settlers that stripped us of our names, religions, cultures, and place in the world, then no. Flatly. I’d rather be liquidated than assimilate into whiteness-- and make no mistake, that’s all I see the settler-led left parties as.
My genealogical trail to follow disappears after 1900. I will never know where I originally came from, who I was related to, what I am more than a mutt tainted by slavers-- and the constant demands for subordination to settler interests from the white left, over unfinished business in the wake of Reconstruction’s failure really, just reminds me of everything else that was already taken. Things that we need to re-establish ourselves if no one wants to get right.
so what do u think should happen? would something similar to the way the soviets republics worked not be the best solution, cuz thats what i have seen as the predominant idea from the so called “settler” left and i cant really imagine a better solution if autonomy on a national level is a requirement.
NFAC had some good ideas. Not enough to keep perpetuating post-GM Jay getting locked up, especially not with how they cut out Black folk who only have Black moms; but there were some good ideas regarding ‘armed formations all on the same accord finding a way to either buy land, or take it from the settlers.’
Assuming we pull that off, then we coalition build with the other historically downtrod, as I know that NFAC probs wasn’t planning on that-- the more I look at them in hindsight, the more issues I have; but they at least had a start.
I don’t blame you. I think all prols should be free to practice what they please for culture, and religion too so long as it does not pose a threat to the DotP (referencing Christianity mostly here). America has never been a culture of the settlers, that is something they would advocate but this is not the truth of the matter. Many peoples have come to call this land home, it is indeed a ‘melting pot’. We should not aim to seperate these cultures nor pretend they do not exist as the settlers have, we should embrace multiculturalism however from a proletarian standpoint not cynically as the bourgeoisie have
Yes, but the settlers have already established that they refuse to recognize treaties between themselves and the indigenous. The revolution will need to be powered by settler proles but it will need to be led by indigenous and black leaders and organized around decolonization.
That inherently means suppressing many millions of settlers, because the interests of settlers in Las Vegas, most of Arizona, and much of New Mexico requires the appropriation and transportation of water. If they don’t get that water, those cities become ghost towns and the proles in there becomes displaced. It’s as Tuck and Yang say, the interests of the settler proles and the indigenous are incommensurate.
It’s this displacement that will be one of the first major aspects of degrowth in the US, and that displacement is only going to happen in one of two ways: either a vanguard of settler proles led by indigenous communities suppress the reaction to the displacement, or the indigenous genocide will enter a new stage as disorganized settler proles collaborate with the bourgeoisie to extract and transport water in way that will further kill and displace large percentages of indigenous reservations. The second way is already starting to happen.
It’s this incommensurability of interests that requires the settler vanguard to be national traitors, by recognizing that settlerdom is doomed by its own environmental destruction and that if we wish to avoid further genocide we must displace settlers from unsustainable settlements and figure out how to manage them and how to suppress the violent and racist reaction that will inevitably arise.
Ehh, I challenge your concept of the term ‘settler’ in reference to proletarian decedents of settlers. Quite simply, class determines politics (Lenin), not race. The only people in America today who have a continuing interest in their heritage of exploitation are those whom still benefit from such behavior - the pette and big bourgeoisie.
The proletariat of the settler nation clearly have interests that are incommensurable with the indigenous of the nation. Read Tuck and Yang. The question isn’t whether or not those interests are at odds, the question is what we can do about it.
Cities in deserts are the best example. Indigenous people require water to live and they have water rights. The settler proles require water to live and they have water rights. But the indigenous live sustainabily with the water and the settlers live unsustainably. The solution is the mass abandonment of desert cities. This is in the interest of the indigenous. It is against the interests of the settlers, proles and all, because they have nowhere to go. They will all band together to oppress the water rights of the indigenous and they will import water from elsewhere. There are tipping points beyond which it will be too late for the settler proles to come to some sort of eco consciousness.
But on a different point, the concept of settler descendants not being settlers is completely at odds with the entire theory and history of settler colonialism. The descendants are part of the point. Breeding and expanding your settlement is violence. It’s not like settlements stop being settlements because the people who did the sailing died. The settlements are multi-generational oppressive structures by design and we see it everywhere we see settlerism.
I’m unfamiliar with Tuck and Yang, and since they are not well known Marxist theorists such as Marx or Lenin, could you raise their arguments here? One cannot simply walk into a theoretical space and say “x is fact, read person largely unknown in the space” and expect myself or others to simply accept the authority of these authors.
Cities and deserts are included in Marx’s evaluation of the contradictions between city and country side. The city exploits the country and in doing so must hold leverage over it (water). You conflate all of society which lives under settler society with those who benefit from it and thus maintain it. This is pointing to a contradiction which does not exist equating “white” Americans with the pette bourgeois simply because of their ethnicity. Class not “race” determines politics, Lenin makes this perfectly clear. Your argument that “all white people will band together to suppress the indigenous” falls flat once one looks to Standing Rock or the various pipeline protest movements.
It is indeed at odds with the historical reality of settler colonialism, which has changed over time and is no longer the same as it once was. The descendants don’t magically have some racist gene, once’s interests are formed by their material conditions and their relation to the means of production of which the indigenous and proletarian “whites” share. You advised me to read Tuck and Yang, I advise you to read Marx and Lenin.
As though I haven’t. Thanks, though.
Your lack of reading past Lenin is not my problem. There’s an entire contribution to critical theory in intersectionalism, post-colonialism, and decolonization. You could read Fanon, Freire, Sakai, or Tuck and Yang. In fact, I recommend you read all of them and wrestle with their writings in earnest. They may not have everything correct, but the process of moving beyond Lenin is important for all of us to continue to develop our understanding of the world in the spirit of scientific socialism.
I don’t. I expect you to commit yourself to reading the continuously developing and evolving corpus of theory as the world continues to develop.
Here’s a link to Tuck and Yang’s Decolonization is not a Metaphor.
And here’s an excerpt from their abstract:
The argument is significant, and it draws upon decades of prior work, which it seems you may not have read, so it becomes difficult to summarize. Let me try to address your strawmanning of my position.
First off, in the desert example I gave, the city is in the desert. The city does not exploit the country, it exploits quite literally another nation. The leverage it holds over this oppressed nation is genocidal leverage, meaning both mass murder of bodies and mass murder of cultures.
This accusation is rich coming from someone who claims to read and understand Marx and Lenin. You may as well say Marx is conflating all bourgeoisie with those who have shared interests and thus maintain it. You have literally defined a class, a group of people who inhabit a structural role in society that share interests and use the mechanisms of the system, including violence, to maintain their shared interests through the reproduction of their way of life.
This is also a complete misunderstanding of the colonial context. Settlers do not need to be equivalent with the petite bourgeoisie for them to share interests that are incommensurable with the interests of the colonized. It is, in fact, possible, and indeed is the case, that the settler proletariat do not have a shared interest with the colonized, most of whom would not neatly fit the definition of proletariat. In fact, this is the primary point. The colonized have interests and these interests are shared and the interests are maintained through reproducing their livelihood in a way that is fundamentally distinct from the settler proletariat.
Indeed, but race is an expression of class warfare and in colonial contexts is entirely inextricable from that class warfare. One cannot solve the class question without addressing the race question as equally urgent. It is not an either/or but a both/and. And it just this way because the bourgeoisie have used race as their secondary expression of class war, second only to private property, and private property in colonial contexts is inextricably bound up with the expression of race. In the colonial context, race and class interpenetrate.
Surely you just. No one ever said “all white people will band together” just like no one ever said all proletarians will join together simultaneously nor that no proletarians will betray their class nor that all bourgeois will use violence to defend their property. We are talking in terms of classes. Settlers, as a class, will see individuals who betray their class and stand with the indigenous. This is good, but it is in no way an indication of class interests breaking down, but rather a heightened consciousness of the settler class’s place in history.
This is a strawman of the actual argument. No one is arguing from a position of race. Settler colonialists obtained the land for their factories through genocide, rape, torture, child abduction, cultural grooming, and scorched-earth environmental destruction. The descendants don’t need a racist gene. The descendants’ entire way of life depends on the maintenance of the structural dispossession of the indigenous from their lands. Everything from language to education, from social mores to art, from religion to location, from production to consumption, absolutely everything about settler society is entwined legally, physically, culturally, ideologically, politically, and violently with the oppression the colonized. Decolonization explicitly works against the interests of the settlers AS A CLASS, regardless of their individual feelings or beliefs.
For every demand of the indigenous, there is a settler interest that will be impinged. There is no other way because settler society is structurally organized, intentionally, to harm and oppress the colonized. Whatever settler society is, it is such through a process of dispossession and genocide. Settler proletarians who have successfully taken control of the machine of state can negotiate nothing except either capitulation to indigenous leadership or oppression of indigenous needs. There is not middle ground because, as Tuck and Yang argue, the interests of the colonized and the settlers are incommensurable.
Each thing that the settler proletariat must solve for in the revolutionary mode - distribution of land, distribution of extracted resources, extraction planning, waste management, national defense - inherently will impinge on indigenous interests. Including indigenous leadership in the decision making process can only lead to either the interests of the indigenous being upheld or the interests of the settlers being upheld, with the possibility of the deferring of one of those interests to a later decision making time. In any case, there is no possibility of indigenous people’s negotiating with a settler state in a position of equal power, and certainly in no way as nationally self-directed, as Lenin would require. Instead, the national boundaries would be those boundaries drawn by the settler imperialists, changing the boundaries would require settlers living their to live under indigenous sovereignty, and the indigenous may freely choose to organize their state according to settler interests or not. To assume that settler will simply adopt indigenous culture because all cultures are interchageable and the only thing that matters is one’s relationship to the means of production is to completely misunderstood what is meant by “need”.
That we’re having this debate at all is indicative of a massive gulf that cannot be crossed by me attempting to summarize 60 years of theory and practice. Please read Fanon, Freire, Sakai, and Tuck and Yang. You’ll find that these thinkers have read and engaged with the idea of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and others. There’s an entire world of indigenous, anti-colonial theory that has been developing for decades and ignoring it will get you nowhere.
I have read past Lenin, I was suggesting a primary Marxist theoretician because the argument you are raising displays a lack of understanding of class politics and economic relations.
I would indeed commit myself to reading a series of works if they were recommended by respectable and principled Marxists, you are simply a person on the internet but one I have yet to meet thus far aside from this conversation.
You referenced a few options which would suffice in your opinion to demonstrate your points, one of whom is comrade Fanon. I have been unable to locate a set of works by him thus far and am interested in reading his works. Do you happen to have a link for his works? As I see is this would benefit our conversation.
My argument was not a strawman, I was under the impression we were discussing native Americans (in general) not the tribal nations.
“You may as well say Marx is conflating all bourgeoisie with those who have shared interests and thus maintain it.”
…He does, it’s called the pette bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy. Although in some cases proletariat or semi-proletariat, these groups hold an interest in society which aligns with the bourgeoisie, the proletariat do not. This is a reason why I questioned if you had read Marx or Lenin.
“This is also a complete misunderstanding of the colonial context. Settlers do not need to be equivalent with the petite bourgeoisie for them to share interests that are incommensurable [sic] with the interests of the colonized. It is, in fact, possible, and indeed is the case, that the settler proletariat do not have a shared interest with the colonized, most of whom would not neatly fit the definition of proletariat. In fact, this is the primary point. The colonized have interests and these interests are shared and the interests are maintained through reproducing their livelihood in a way that is fundamentally distinct from the settler proletariat.”
This is you simply restating your understanding of the situation, however no underlying logic is explained how this is the case in your opinion. I have stated my case already, and I will add 1 thing I thought of since yesterday:
When America was created, the economic relations were of a slave nation, and the land was predominately the means of production. Then the industrial revolution came and with it bourgeois-proletarian relations evolved. This is an example of how the nature and indeed character of the settler state changed. The settler “whites” no longer entirely benefited from the economic relations, there was a middle class now who maintained the privileges allocated to the “white” settlers, and the slave class merged with other “white” settler families to create the proletariat. Yes the tribal nations remained this is true, but their relations to the new class of prols changed.
" in colonial contexts is entirely inextricable from that class warfare"
I agree however you blend the past with the present conditions and as I’ve stated things have developed since then.
You now: “No one ever said “all white people will band together” just like no one ever said all proletarians will join together simultaneously nor that no proletarians will betray their class nor that all bourgeois will use violence to defend their property.”
You last reply: “It is against the interests of the settlers, proles and all, because they have nowhere to go. They will all band together to oppress the water rights of the indigenous and they will import water from elsewhere.”
“A straw man fallacy (sometimes written as strawman) is the informal fallacy of refuting an argument different from the one actually under discussion, while not recognizing or acknowledging the distinction.” - Wikipedia
This is not a strawman, it is a simplification of your argument, not a distortion of it. You are arguing from a position of race determining economics when it is the reverse. Race is not unimportant, however race relations do not determine economic relations, it’s the other way around.
“the settlers AS A CLASS”
As I explained, the settlers no longer constitute a class, but a nation with it’s own economic relations, of which the oppressed in that nation’ interests align with the interests of all oppressed peoples.
If I’m understanding your logic correctly, you seem to be centering your arguments around the idea of the tribal nations v the settler nation America, yes? My answer to this paradigm is the destruction of America and the recombination of tribal nations with the people who lived in America. I understand how this is not historically just however it is impractical to simply move 340 million people to satisfy this justice. This can be done over time however the destruction of America is needed not only for this issue but for the peace of the world giving it a certain urgency. So what is to be done to reconcile this contradiction? Are the tribes to wage a nation war against the people who still exist on the land of the fallen settler nation to take it over? Or would it perhaps be a better choice to work with the people who lived there?
Now comes the question of who should rule? Your position presupposes the natives should take back their land and rule it however they please. This is a nice idea however as Marxists we must insist on a class-based approach - the proletariat ruling both indigenous and settler-descended.
In all due respect comrade this is a horrible argument. It’s basically saying “yeah but what can they really do about it?” It comes off as disrespectful to the indigenous imo.
As materialists we have to remain grounded in reality. No disrespect intended but wars aren’t won just by having the moral high ground. I’m not saying it can’t be done but if you are serious about decolonization then it can’t just be rhetoric and moral principles, you need a plan, you need to figure out how to overcome the various material obstacles and disadvantages. It is not clear to me how they achieve victory in this particular struggle without allies.
And what is exactly the goal? Full independence for indigenous nations? And if so in what borders? Would those borders even be defendable, would they allow for the survival of the indigenous states or would they be able to be blockaded and cut off from trade with the rest of the world? Would population transfers have to happen to ensure an indigenous majority? Because if there is a majority settler population within the borders of the new indigenous states then there is a risk of the usurpation of power by the settlers and the previous power dynamics just being replicated again.
Or is the goal just the destruction of the settler state and its replacement with a pluri-national model like Bolivia’s? Would that even be sufficient? Is that not also in essence a kind of assimilation? Would that not require a partnership between the settler proletariat and the indigenous people? These questions are not for me to answer but they do need answering in order for a coherent strategy to be formulated.
A big complicating factor here is that unlike with the Soviet republics or the various autonomous regions in China for ethnic minorities, the population of the colonized nations in the US is not concentrated in one contiguous geographical territory, rather it is spread out and interspersed with a numerically superior settler population. It is more akin to what the Zionist apartheid state seeks to achieve in Palestine.
That has clearly been purposely done by the settler state to cripple the potential of the colonized for banding together and posing a threat to the settler-colonial project. They were also purposely pushed onto land that is as resource scarce as possible. If all majority indigenous areas were to declare independence tomorrow the settler state could isolate them, starve them out and crush them one by one.
These are some of my thoughts as someone trying to analyze the situation looking at the US from the outside. I’m sure there is a lot that i am missing or don’t know about and i’m sure other people have had the same thoughts and maybe even figured out elegant solutions to these problems. I’m eager to learn.
“wars aren’t won just by having the moral high ground.”
Of course not, I was simply saying perhaps utilizing a different argument or even rephrasing the one you put forward so as to not stoke conflict within the discussion. For example, instead of pointing out the lack of forces instead focus on the fact that the argument being made by them isn’t based in the first place. Show them that they are theoretically wrong instead of going to the material inferiority, which only presents itself to be a challenge to overcome, and not a disqualification in of itself.
“And what is exactly the goal? Full independence for indigenous nations? And if so in what borders? Would those borders even be defendable, would they allow for the survival of the indigenous states or would they be able to be blockaded and cut off from trade with the rest of the world? Would population transfers have to happen to ensure an indigenous majority?”
Yes, indeed. This is what we are here to determine. What IS the goal?
-> “A big complicating factor here is that unlike with the Soviet republics or the various autonomous regions in China for ethnic minorities, the population of the colonized nations in the US is not concentrated in one contiguous geographical territory, rather it is spread out and interspersed with a numerically superior settler population.”
-> This is a great point and I add the arrow so as to draw attention as this adds to the overall conversation on the matter. IMO socialist policy would have to incorporate the specific needs of minorities within the proletarian class, it would have to be similar to how it is now under the neoliberals - general law effecting society. As for the issue of land ownership I believe an interstate labor transport project which would be similar to the EU’s free to travel between states policy except gov provided and for labor, could also help move specific populations from several areas into a few specific ones (tribal lands which will be expanded). The only issue I would have is the same one I have when comrades suggest a minority-only-ran government: It has to be socialist, it has to serve the cause the best. We can help them get there if that is what the nation (of our class) decides but as such these tribal nations must too be under proletarian control, they cannot become sanctuaries for parasites.
I personally advocate for a proletarian state which is blended and in harmony, where all needs are respected no matter who is in power as our class is the only one in power and so our interest of equality is enforced.
I wonder how many of the “scientific socialists” actually have a scientific education (formally or self taught).
I think mainstream media likes to present science as one megalithic cohesive dogma, rather than simply just a collectivist approach to advancing our knowledge of the sciences based on impiricism, peer review, hypothesis and such
To be clear, I absolutely do consider myself a scientific socialist. I’m just not as knowledgeable about political theory as I am about scientific theory
While I respect your willingness to call a spade a spade as you see something as such, I have to disagree with much of what you have said. I’m unfamiliar with Sakai, however comrade Shea does not come off as a settler-minded person to me. I will also note that although there are far less minorities in the bourgeois class, there still are some, and so a race-based analysis will not suffice here as a shortcut towards class, nor should it even if this were the case as liberalism is the ideology which views the world according to conqueror v conquered constantly seeking exploitation of another, as Marxists we view the world through dialectical materialist and historical development - the clashing of opposites based on their contradictions to create a new tomorrow, not the outright rejection of a portion of that synthesis.
If you’ve never read Sakai’s work, you have no frame of reference for what he’s talking about when Shea completely misses the point to damn near misconstrument w/rt what Settlers was trying to say. And it’s not the first time he’s swung at “Sakaists”, either.
Which is a matter for the community to handle; not for you to talk on from outside. Do you think we don’t talk amongst ourselves about these Thomas DuBois-assed, Boulé-assed misleaders?
Do you really think this mentality can be excised from the settler without incurring losses, heavy losses? How many of our leaders do they have to kill? How many of our babies? And how many of the so-called ‘good settlers’ that so many take pains to emphasize they’re not part of the malevolence will get in the way of those bullets when they come? I have my doubts.
This is why I say if you’ve never read Sakai’s work, you have no frame of reference-- because Sakai’s work looks at the historical trend of Amerikan settlerdom closing ranks around settlerdom at times like these; and posits that historically, they’d rather die than give up the fruits of their labors. It doesn’t immediately discount the potential for enclaves of desettlerized proles to happen; but it does point to how unlikely that’d be with 400+ years of settlerdom baked into the white Amerikan experience.
So what’s the answer to that? Trust in some nebulous ‘plan’ the settlers push forward that’s totally not gonna get vast swathes of us killed when the backlash hits? Or how about exporting the theory of another nation in a different part of the world whose material conditions don’t line up 1:1 with ours, leaving the historically-colonized to fall through the gaps where y’all didn’t account for having to adapt parts of that lifted philosophy to your own conditions?
I recognize how Marxism is supposed to work in a society not polarized across racial lines as atrociously as the two Amerikas are. What I feel settlers and settler-adjacent leftists miss, though, is that Amerika is a unique and pernicious abomination in history, buoyed by a hundred and fifty years of the most potent propagandizing the earth has ever seen. In light of that understanding, I don’t believe the methods we lift from anywhere else will 1:1 apply to our experience, and I especially don’t believe settlerdom capable of changing its ways on trying to conserve as much of their plunder as possible without a catastrophe hitting. An outright nation-balkanizing catastrophe.
“Which is a matter for the community to handle”
The progress of society (socialist construction) is not a “race” matter, it is a class matter, no matter it’s racial complexion.
“Do you really think this mentality can be excised from the settler without incurring losses, heavy losses?”
You missed my point about the liberalism conflict concept. I was not saying Shea was phrasing things as a matter of conflict, I am seeing yourself focusing too much on racial divide and not enough on class imo. Race isn’t removed, but this isn’t a “racial revolution” it’s a socialist one, one based in economic progression, of advancing the mode of production and relations so as to meet the new needs of society today (justice, equality, even distribution of resources).
“So what’s the answer to that?”
Although I am unfamiliar with Sakai I am not ignorant of the settler state issue. I would never say to put your trust in anything you yourself do not have a direct say in, that’s a bad idea go move forward with. I recommend you work with your class no matter it’s racial complex for the interest of your class and your race’s unique needs. And I’m saying due to being the same class, and the proletarian class whose interest is equality, that it is within the goals within socialist construction to address the unique needs of all sections of the proletarian class.
This is untrue. The class matter is enforced via the race matter. It is literally impossible to solve the class matter without simultaneously solving the race matter. If you attempt to only solve the class matter, it will fail because the race matter will reproduce it. Race and class exist in a dialectic and they cannot be solved independently.
This critique is tone deaf and identifies you as a settler. You are focusing too much on class and not enough on race. You clearly haven’t read the mountains of analysis about how race is a vehicle of class war and how race and class interpermeate.
It’s necessarily both, because if it’s one or the other, it’s neither. If you don’t have a racial revolution, meaning a changing of the power holders, then what you imagine is a socialist revolution will be born as a fascist revolution. The analysis is fairly strong on this point. Read Sakai, read Tuck and Yang, read Crenshaw, read Fanon, read Freire.
This necessarily requires the dismantling of race. Race is not epiphenomenal. It didn’t just accidentally emerge from the state of production. The way that production was developed was through racism. The way that society is organized is through racism. The existence of counties, towns, cities, and states in the US is literally a structural replication of indigenous genocide. The existence of police forces in the US is literally a structural replication of black genocide. The solution must be a racial revolution - that is replacing the power structures of today with new power structures, and that must be proletarian AND colonized AND women, intersectionally. If it remains white and man and colonizer, then the resulting structure will incorporate the structures of racism which are literally inextricable from the structures of capitalism.
You are completely ignorant of race. Race’s don’t have unique needs. Races don’t have a base. They exist only in the superstructure. The only solution to racism is destroying race entirely, and the only people who can do that are the racialized. White people are unracialized - they stand outside of race by definition. Each racialized group has only one unique need, which is the dismantling of racism. Dismantling racism means destroying huge sections of law, huge swathes of the built environment, huge chunks of ideology. And all of these destructions result in harm to white people, which is why white people will become reactionary and use their positions of power to replicate oppression and ultimately reproduce capitalism. It’s why reading theory is so critical, because you don’t think you personally would ever do it, but when you analyze history through historical materialism you see it clear as day.
This is not true. Placing race above class is liberalism. I am incorporating an understanding of ethnic relations and the necessities of minority workers into my analysis, to promote this any further would place identity or race above class relations which again is liberalism.
One cannot be a settler when one has not settled or currently maintains the relations of settlerism. This is because after the Civil War, slave relations were abolished and the economy evolved to worker-owner relations under bourgeois democracy. I have already explained this, I’m unsure what you’ve missed on this.
"It’s necessarily both, because if it’s one or the other, it’s neither. If you don’t have a racial revolution, meaning a changing of the power holders, then what you imagine is a socialist revolution will be born as a fascist revolution. "
We are saying the same things however you misunderstand “racial revolution”, this would be a fascist revolution.
“The way that production was developed was through racism” No, you have it reversed. Superstructure (such as apartheid or other racist laws) serves to reinforce the base (economic relation to the means of production). The system creates racists, racists did not create a racist system.
Back in slavery times, the mode of production was crafted to serve the needs of humanity. A hierarchy was crafted and so were “lessers”. This became racist the same way imperialism does - one values their herd, their family, their nation over those of whom they do not share an intimate relation with. These modes of production necessitate expansion and as is demonstrated by imperialism today, and so they necessitate intimate and foreign to be compared within the minds of those within said system. “White” people were not born racist, the material conditions following the dialectic process of development created the idea of racism as well as created racists.
“The solution must be a racial revolution - that is replacing the power structures of today with new power structures, and that must be proletarian AND colonized AND women, intersectionally. If it remains white and man and colonizer, then the resulting structure will incorporate the structures of racism which are literally inextricable from the structures of capitalism.”
We are Marxists, we are not liberals. We promote and select leaders based on merit, not based on their identity or racial terms. This is because socialism itself is a system which promotes and is made of merit. Capitalism is a system which superfluously promotes various products to reach an ideal profit and then collapse and repeat the process (such as white supremacy, black supremacy, LGBT supremacy one day, etc…). Of course we must incorporate the needs of minority workers, however this should be done as it was in the Soviet Union, through ethnic councils whose membership consistency and purpose is to address the needs of minority workers. Of course all laws must be made with consideration to the needs of minority workers as well, my issue is with the idea of appointing someone based on their ethnicity, sex, gender, etc… and not on their merit.
And you really must drop the term “racial revolution”, it implies a revolution based solely on race alone, of which you clearly do not aim for.
“You are completely ignorant of race. Race’s don’t have unique needs. Races don’t have a base. They exist only in the superstructure.”
…You have critiqued yourself while referring to me, you do realize this don’t you?
“And all of these destructions result in harm to white people,”
I believe we’ve found the root cause of our disagreement. Show me the laws or actions which treating “black” Americans worse than they treat “whites” makes a net positive for “whites”. This a false paradigm following a zero sum game. The bourgeois do not treat “white” Americans better because they treat “black” Americans worse, they simply treat “black” Americans worse however we are all living in hell as workers (and not labor aristocrats). They are more oppressed however this does not mean that “white” workers are not oppressed, this is exactly what the democratic party emphasizes, that only minorities in America are oppressed and not workers. This is IDPOL. This is liberalism selling us minority supremacy, another product to profit from (check all of the blm gear and rainbow merch floating around).
Marxists reject this analysis of reality (individualism) and this methodology of action which is a critique which is safe for the power relations: “We simply need more minorities in power and all is well”. I believe you understand the necessity for the end to reflect both economic and cultural evolution from revolution, however some of the specific details are still being viewed through a liberal framework.
You lack reading comprehension. At no point did I say race is above class. In fact, I explicitly said that class is enforced via race. Literally, race is a mechanism by which class warfare is prosecuted. The idea that you can solve class first and then racism completely misunderstands the role race plays in society.
Reducing racism to ethnic relations and minority needs it to completely ignore racism entirely. If this is the entirety of your understanding and commitment, you are incapable of establishing a sustainable revolutionary movement. You fail to understand the difference between race and ethnicity, the difference between racism and ethnic relations, and the difference between the needs of minority workers and the oppression of the global majority.
Let’s take that as a given. The existence of municipalities in all former and current European colonies is literally the maintenance of setterism. The consumption of fresh water extracted from indigenous lands in the maintenance of settlerism. The consumption of petroleum to fuel your vehicles so you can get to work is the maintenance of settlerism. Working in factories that rely on extraction of natural resources from unceded territory from indigenous nations is the maintenance of settlerism.
What I missed is your level of ignorance. Slave relations were NOT abolished. First of all, slave relations were maintained through indentured servitude, through sharecropping, through prison slavery, and through indigenous boarding schools. Second, under Jim Crow and under much of the current legal regime, black workers were used explicitly to appease white workers, by assigning to black workers the most abusive and lowest paying jobs so that white workers wouldn’t revolt. This still continues to this day, where the historically marginalized both in the US and around the globe are sacrificed to the machine of capitalism in order to appease the white worker. Reversing this course would immediately through white workers into revolt and the fascist populists have been repeating the propaganda that the problem is black and brown bodies harming the economy, and a large portion of the North Atlantic believe this to be the case. Reversing this course will cause immediate violent reaction of white people against brown people, because melanated people working shit jobs and dying early is literally part of the system that reproduces the lives of the white labor aristocracy.
Calling national liberation of black and brown peoples “fascism” is the most reactionary take I’ve seen from someone who considers themselves a communist. This is usually a position I see from white supremacists. You are woefully on the wrong side of history, comrade.
Perhaps you don’t understand what racism is. The System of Racism created racist people. The System of Racism was created by the bourgeoisie to implement class warfare and extraction of surplus value. The entire system of production in the US was built on the backs of slaves. Without slaves, the system of production would have been different. Without Racism, slavery would be untenable. Racism and Slavery and Production INTERPERMEATE. You cannot abolish capitalism and then demand racial reckoning take a back seat on the theory that eventually racism will go away. In order to abolish capitalism you must ALSO abolish the System of Racism, and when black and indigenous MLs write about this, that means national self-determination inline with Lenin’s theory.
Jesus christ. No. Stop. Racism is not about familial ties. It’s not an individual problem. You are the liberal here. You think racism is what people feel in their hearts. Racism is literally a legal system whereby throwing black people off a ship in the middle of the Atlantic was not considered murder but was instead considered destruction of property! Literally! Argued in court that legally black people aren’t people and therefore cannot be murdered! It has nothing to do with individual beliefs about people being lesser. It has everything to do with a system of extraction that reifies profit extraction from the bodies of workers to the degree that it literally consumes the bodies of the workers. The only way it could get to this level was to create a system that ensured one part of the working class would not be consumed and another part of the working class would, so race is enshrined in law and then rationalized through the university system. It has nothing to do with people valuing their family over others.
RACISM CREATED RACISTS
This is so insultingly dismissive. I’m not talking about selecting a leader, I’m talking about theory. It is impossible to establish a sustainable communist society within a settler colony where the entirety of that colony is predicated on the continued oppression, genocide, rape, pillage, and extraction from subjugated peoples. Lenin’s theory on this is quite well supported. National self-direction is critical to the establishment of sustainable communism. And that means indigenous and black national self-determination on Turtle Island, free from the dominance by the settler colonial state that rules them.
Yo, what the fuck? You think socialism is a meritocracy? Ok, now I know you’re a lost cause.
They’re not minority workers. They literally constitute the global majority. White Europeans are the global minority. So long as you keep thinking that white people are the majority, you are going to continue to have incorrect understand of the world and how it works and therefore will be incapable of formulating correct theory.
What are you talking about? This is the least of what the USSR did. They established completely autonomous nation-states for national populations and gave them autonomy over their nation and established the constitutional right for them to secede at any time without penalty. You completely skip over the national question entirely with your liberal understanding of racism. You don’t even seem to understand the difference between race and ethnicity.
This is the most white European thing I’ve heard on Lemmy.
I don’t think you understand what revolution is. Revolution means a replacement of existing power structures. There absolutely must be a racial revolution. There cannot be a socialist revolution without a racial revolution. They must be the same thing, and that means that the leaders of that ONE revolution must not consist entirely of white European men attempting to maintain the integrity of their settler colonial state on the premise that eventually everyone will be assimilated into it without oppression. Assimilation into white settler states is genocide.
Oh god. No, comrade, I am not critiquing myself. You are simply trapped in your false beliefs and that is preventing you from understanding the point. The superstructure itself manifests racism, not the base. The national borders, the municipalities, the system of courts, the rights to water, the rights to land use, the treaties, the allocation of resources, there are all superstructural and they all manifest racism. To abolish race requires the abolition of this superstructure, and that means entire cities become unlivable immediately. It means displacing millions of settlers. It means giving sovereignty to nations that have been denied sovereignty by that very state. We’re not talking about meeting the needs of racialized groups, we’re talking about abolish race.
Seriously? Go read about water rights. Go read about land distribution. Go read about national parks. Go read about adoption laws. Go read about red lining. Go read anything even remotely rigorous about reparations. I mean, it’s all around you. You’re swimming in it. White people live in places explicitly because they were stolen by white people from melanated people. White people rely on international subjugation to ensure the flow of cheap goods. The US and Europe have no ability to supply themselves with necessary goods anymore, they rely entirely on subjugating labor internationally. They rely entirely on white ownership of resources that exist in the homes of non-white people, both domestically and abroad. The very concept of the Grand Canyon National Park is “we had to get rid of all these indigenous people so you could enjoy this park”. The drought in Lake Mead and Lake Powell are requiring EVERYONE who is party to the water rights treaty to reduce consumption by 15%. But those lakes represents theft of water from indigenous communities that were displaced entirely and subjugated, and the resulting concentration camps where they live today barely use any water and their portion is already vanishingly small, by treaty, but now because white people water their lawns, indigenous people have to go without more water.
It’s literally happening every single day thousands of times a day that the superstructure of white society is inextricably interlaced with racial oppression. Go fix your ignorance.
This is what we refer to as White Fragility. You refuse to see how you play the role of an oppressor in society while you simultaneously refuse to even listen or read works from those people who have been organizing against oppression for over a century.
We’re not playing oppression olympics. We’re engaging in theory. The white working class is exploited. They are also enlisted by the bourgeoisie into supporting the exploitation of racialized peoples. The ruling class has organized society for 600 years to align the interests of white workers against the interests of racialized workers. They have done through numerous institutions, one of the largest being - settler colonialism, wherein the reproduction of white worker society is predicated on the continued oppression of racialized peoples.
The fact that you think I’m espousing this line, after multiple engagements with you, means you have a blindspot that prevents you from seeing the actual arguments at play here. You are arguing with ghosts in your own head.
You haven’t even managed to approach my argument, you have no standing to levy this critique. You haven’t bothered to read anything that would disagree with you. Your position is one of ignorance, reductionism, and deliberate and willful dismissal of the actual work of the oppressed, including revolutionary MLs who have written extensively on this.
“Reducing racism to ethnic relations and minority needs it to completely ignore racism entirely.”
I am not reducing racism I understand as you should that when the relations to the means of production advance, the social relations which maintained the previous mode of production will be shed as the new relations necessitate equality (all share the same class), and so the physical reason for racism to exist has been purged. This is the elimination of racism. What remains are capitalist pre-conditioning which must be combated via education, socialization, and solidarity.
"Race"s do have unique needs, as do sexes and genders. An ethnic minority who has been the victim of racism requires justice, requires a remedy for this injustice on a systemic level, requires protection and expansion of their ethnic cultures which were oppressed and mocked under white supremacy. Just as women require the remedy for sexism, and trans people require social justice and healthcare.
To ignore these needs is to perpetuate the same sort of cultural downfall the Soviet Union failed with and Mao aimed at solving. It is purging the superstructure of the capitalist system and creating the superstructure of the socialist system.
"The existence of municipalities in all former and current European colonies is literally the maintenance of setterism. "
This isn’t the maintenence of colonialism, it is the dialectical process of development. The global south is exploited by the social democratic European nations. This is not the same system, it grew out of it and share similarities however the relations to the means of production and the mode of production are different.
“What I missed is your level of ignorance…slave relations were maintained through indentured servitude, through sharecropping, through prison slavery, and through indigenous boarding schools. Second, under Jim Crow and under much of the current legal regime, black workers were used explicitly to appease white workers, by assigning to black workers the most abusive and lowest paying jobs so that white workers wouldn’t revolt”
(proceeds to demonstrate their-own) I have already covered this in my previous reply. You are not taking in the information I am providing. You said it yourself: “black workers were used explicitly to appease white workers, by assigning to black workers the most abusive and lowest paying jobs so that white workers wouldn’t revolt” WORKERS not SLAVES. The means of production were evolved and so the economic relations evolved. I am not saying nor have I ever said that the racist social relations which originated from Slavery went away entirely, I am saying they evolved and no longer govern the process of production. They are inferior to the relations of worker and owner, not that society hasn’t retained any semblance of Slavery. This is evident if you look at the overall picture of society and not solely the experiences of minorities in America who experience the effects of the remnants of these relations. It is possible for black Americans to own businesses, there are latino labor aristocrats, etc…this was not possible under Slavery. And yes I recognize the lag between abolition and the Civil Rights movement, but you must also recognize the ability for the Civil Rights movement to succeed under capitalist relations where it could not before industrialization and worker - owner relations developed within the late old system. So again, what are you missing here?
“Calling national liberation of black and brown peoples “fascism” is the most reactionary take I’ve seen from someone who considers themselves a communist. This is usually a position I see from white supremacists. You are woefully on the wrong side of history, comrade.”
A strawman…I expect this from Reddit liberals not here.
“The System of Racism created racist people. The System of Racism was created by the bourgeoisie to implement class warfare and extraction of surplus value.” That’s capitalism you’re describing and calling it “The System of Racism”. Are you referring to apartheid, a divide and conquer technique leveraging PRE-EXISTING social relations and the new advent of the middle class to maintain power (a form of superstructure OF CAPITALISM)?
“Racism and Slavery and Production INTERPERMEATE. You cannot abolish capitalism and then demand racial reckoning take a back seat on the theory that eventually racism will go away. In order to abolish capitalism you must ALSO abolish the System of Racism, and when black and indigenous MLs write about this, that means national self-determination inline with Lenin’s theory.”
Read several paragraphs up. As for the line of national self-determination I agree and this is not contradictory. America and the native tribes are already separate though interconnected countries. America is of land stolen from the latter yes but it is a distinctly separate country as are the native territories despite the capitalist system not respecting them. We can and should talk about changing the size of these nations to be more just but to pretend America isn’t a country (in fact) and to conflate it with it not being a country (in terms of historical lineage and of course justice) is idealist. America, the country with the capitalist mode of production and relations, exists today. It should no longer exist and we work towards this goal but to say “it’s simply land stolen” is to ignore socialism and aim for communism as the anarchists do. It ignores a vital step of addressing the physical issue of the resolution of that state known as America. And in this resolution, the nation of America must determine it’s future as well. One cannot simply ignore the existence of America and the people (workers) who live in it for historical justicial needs of the native territories. And do not conflate this with “you see, the whites will revolt”, I never said we would have to choose to maintain America, in fact I have brought forth several arguments as to why I believe the two nations will merge and the cultural roots of the former could be migrated into the new nation (akin to handing the new nation to the natives), however the natives are not currently in a state where they are able to govern a socialist country but they can be.
I see what you are saying I believe, a nation is not a race and so it is not liberalism to advocate they govern. Yes, this makes sense, we must simply train them in Marxism. Yes in the case of the natives it makes sense to advocate they lead. In the case of other minorities this is again necessary so they can ensure justice for their groups specific needs however simply excluding non-minorities from governing because they do not suffer under the modern remnants of slave relations isn’t based imo. American workers who are not labor aristocrats suffer under the yoke of capitalism and no longer benefit above the rate of poverty due to their lack of suffrage under the modern remnants of slave relations.
“Racism is literally a legal system whereby throwing black people off a ship in the middle of the Atlantic was not considered murder but was instead considered destruction of property! Literally! Argued in court that legally black people aren’t people and therefore cannot be murdered! It has nothing to do with individual beliefs about people being lesser.”
I have been moving forward under an understanding of this premise. I understand what racism is, I’m not a suburban labor aristocrat, I grew up and am still poor, I am white however I have seen racism first hand with friends and family. You misjudge me.
“RACISM CREATED RACISTS” Yes, but Slavery and agriculture created racism. This is what I’ve been trying to get you to understand. That fact and it’s implications.
“They’re not minority workers. They literally constitute the global majority.” I’m speaking on national terms. In America they are minorities. I believe we are speaking on America yes?
"They established completely autonomous nation-states for national populations and gave them autonomy over their nation and established the constitutional right for them to secede at any time without penalty. "
This is part of what I was referencing, I simply gave the example of the committees. We must build on the successes of previous worker states in similar situations.
“This is the most white European thing I’ve heard on Lemmy.” (continues to use the term ‘racial revolution’ unironically)
“White people live in places explicitly because they were stolen by white people from melanated people.”
I am aware of this. America developed on an injust notion of imperialism. This is why we oppose America and believe it must be destroyed. I’m not sure what notion you are going off of here comrade, I am trying to work with you but you are presenting a lot of misjudgements in regards to me despite my best efforts to demonstrate my positions to you. Much of what we are arguing about we agree on the what just not the how.
“You haven’t even managed to approach my argument, you have no standing to levy this critique.”
I’ve rebuffed your arguments continuously, I believe I do. I have not read anything you have suggested as you continue to demonstrate a lack of fundamental understanding on Marxism. Why would I expand my knowledge outward when you have not satisfied the rudimentary? Why is that necessary if we cannot agree on the process of economic development, social relations under the means of production, or dialectics? This would be entertaining building a roof when the base has not been set.
I mean, this all that needs to be said, isn’t it? There has been so much scholarship on this topic. So much written. So much conflict in the CPUSA on this topic that eventually led them to full on revisionism. And yet, you won’t read Haywood, Crenshaw, Fanon, Freire, Tuck and Yang, Newton, X, because I personally haven’t managed to get through your rhetorical smokescreen?
Why would you expand your knowledge? Because you claim to be a Marxist. What you demonstrate, however, is that you are a chauvinist.
This is chauvinism.
I mean, I don’t know what to say anymore. I have clearly stated that racism is not what your friends and family do, that it is a super structural system, and you make noises with your rhetoric to pretend like you understand what I’m saying. And then you say this? I mean, at this point I just walk away.