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Another day, another Rainer Shea L, this reads like. Disappointing. It genuinely sounds like he’s advocating for red-brown bullshit tryna ‘come together’ with these Mises Caucus motherfuckers-- and make no mistake, these are BROWNS.
It ain’t just me side-eying y’all anymore. Like… The way this Shea blog(bc I’m honestly not calling this admonishing, frankly paternalistic screed an ‘article’) reads, he doesn’t get how this looks from the outside. It honestly vindicates the vibe I get when I see a settler-led ‘left’ organization-- that “these people aren’t interested in liberation, they’re only out for self and for kin.”
I am still not convinced that concepts like Haywood’s Black Belt Republic aren’t the direction my folk should be going in-- because frankly? If Shea’s take is the take among the settler left, and if we’re really gonna have to listen to y’all pearl-clutch about “buh buh buh why won’t you make common cause with people even the old-guard libertarians call racists and phobics who definitely won’t long-knife y’all when your usefulness is through”, that tells me that your movement is predicated on anyone else’s sacrifice but your own, and leaves me considering you as deeply unserious to the point of being literally hazardous to any oppressed folk in your orbit.
Forgive me if I don’t believe that settler-left bigotry will ever be addressed within those spaces.
Agreed. I don’t have much to say about it as Shea has come rather dangerously close to essentializing left-critics of the LP, CPI, PCUSA and RAWM (so many fucking acronyms) as ultraleftists divorced from the masses. I appreciate that he at least acknowledges the necessity to refrain from tailing the bigots, and the DOJ/state department targeting poor black people and activists shouldn’t ever be lauded…
but
why mention the accusations against PCUSA which are apparently entirely disproven without even grazing the CPI’s past and present issues with sexual misconduct and cult-like behavior? The lukewarm defense of Black Hammer, another middling pseudo-Maoist cult rife with sexual abuse, robbery of its cadre, and seemingly genuine Hitlerite sympathies is not great either. I do not understand why time and energy is being wasted here. The most advanced of the masses were not being sponsored by the LP, CPI or Black Hammer, they were out in force on March 18. I feel Rainer may be falling into a trap of worker fetishism, or abstraction of “Workers” from “Communists” or the left anti-imperialist movement. Those comrades are the most advanced section of the working class.
At risk of sounding liquidationist or sectarian or whatever, the people in CPI and Black Hammer who have been swayed into staying by charismatic sex pests probably ought to receive help leaving and be encouraged to join non-cult formations. I do not accuse CPI and Black Hammer of being cults lightly, but anyone who knows knows and I can go into detail for anyone who doesn’t.
My current take on the RAWM is basically summed up as: “great, whatever.” Allow the libertarians and the cults to pretend to be anti-imperialist and capitalize on their voice if there is political opportunity in doing so. To act like there is a genuine coalition forming… I guess we’ll have to wait and see, but you can count me out. There are organizations and coalitions that already exist that are larger, more principled, and far safer for BIPOC & LGBT anti-empire activists. I think with the state and size of the anti-empire left, Shea’s idea of an equal coalition (with Libertarians et al) or a coalition fronted by communists a la the French resistance is far and away a pipe dream, and the ideological infection he mentions in the article is an inevitability, even if he has not witnessed it yet.
I won’t accuse Shea of this because this article, although I disagree heavily with it, seems to be made in good faith – an attempt at education or convincing people, and he seemingly believes principled anti-imperialists have the power to defend themselves from the bourgeois-reactionary elements of the RAWM, but demanding that the colonized submit themselves to the political whims of more powerful political groups who benefit from and even gloat about colonization… no. ANSWER, CodePink, Black Alliance for Peace, PSL – all anti-imperialist formations far more worthwhile than tailing the Libertarians. Even if Shea thinks that that won’t happen, I disagree.
I do not represent the PSL anymore unfortunately. Hopefully as soon as I am in a position to be able to. I will say that they, and I, support black sovereignty up to and including the right to secede and achieve full autonomy via the construction of a genuine black republic in Amerika, if there is a demand for it. I don’t necessarily like the idea of even voluntary segregation as such, but it has been proven time and again that a majority settler-led state in Amerika cannot properly represent the interests of colonized Afrikans and indigenous groups and it is far beyond time that black people everywhere achieve true political autonomy. I do not think tailing the LP is a great way to achieve this goal.
I guess I did have a bit to say lol. Agreed, this is an L.
edit: Russia is indeed the major artificial enemy at the moment and the state is gonna go even more hogwild accusing black activists of being Russian trolls, something they’ve been doing since the first red scare. China is next on the chopping block, though, and our allegedly anti-imperialist temporary allies may shake our hands, but they only do so with a knife behind their back. If this is to be done, the communists involved would have to be principled beyond measure for Amerikan formations. I do not believe they are, not even close.
Man, the last time I even heard about Black Hammer, they were popping off at the mouth about ‘Anne Frank is a colonizer’-flavored mess and I thought we had them sussed out from there as little more than an R. Kelly situation gone grift-political. Fully agreed about offering the swayed membership their outs, but why are we acting like the organizations as entities are somehow ‘allies to the cause’ is my question w/rt the blogpost.
This whole Rage Against The War Machine thing frankly reeks of kayfabe to me; and for so-called ‘principled communists’ to lend such a kayfabe legitimacy-- it reeks to me. This can only come back to bite us; the only winning move where Mises Caucus is concerned is not to play. So there too, I’m right there with you-- count me out. If I’m still alive by the time it happens, I’ll be saying ‘I told y’all so’ when y’all’s “new white man”(rip John Witherspoon) starts coming out with the cutlery.
Welcome to the internet where things are discussed and seldom acted upon. Building organizations are not an easy task. To what extent of what any of us build here, spurious accusations of Russian/Chinese collusion are concerning in lessening on the extent that freedom of speech can protect our cause in the bourgeoisie state. I don’t blame them for playing to the kayfabe because it seems that all other avenues of effective praxis have a similar result.
Protests and posting online are easier than effective praxis, however are still useful to making the superstructure more pliable towards our aims.
Plenty of these right-wing “anti-imperialists” are against US involvement in Ukraine because they support Russia as a capitalist, socially conservative project that they truly believe is allied with the American conservative movement. They see contemporary Russia as a model to emulate. When the US state abandons the Russian front and attempts to aim the totality of their resources at China, these right-wing coalitions are gonna buy 100% into it and abandon any of the anti-imperial politics that they’ve pretended to have. Anticommunism and racism will be their open objective and settler-leftists calling for allyship with them will have helped build their platform. If we ally with these fucks, all we’re gonna have is a more legitimized AmeriNazi movement.
Agreed.
In Shea’s defence, PCUSA and CPI (with all of it’s flaws) are 2 of the only genuinely anti-imperialist parties in the states. And it’s no surprise they are attacked as such. Although personally I would keep CPI at an arms distance with a gun trained on them at all times. Maupin has extremely troubling views, however like MAGA in terms of the Russia war, they can be counted on to oppose ukrainian nazism which makes them beneficial to an anti-war movement so long as it is within the Russian front stage.
Browns combined the right and the left into a political leadership over the country, Shea is speaking of bolstering the anti-war movement’s numbers and thus power with the right instead.
“that “these people aren’t interested in liberation, they’re only out for self and for kin.””
This is not how he comes off to me but you are entitled to your opinion.
“I am still not convinced that concepts like Haywood’s Black Belt Republic aren’t the direction my folk should be going in”
Black Americans do not have the numbers to accomplish such a task as a Black Republic and hold it without the US bourgeois state along with the Canadian lapdog seizing the land back. This just isn’t realistic. If you want your people to be free, socialism is the best way to achieve such goals because it takes into account the interests of all workers equally. It does not cater only to the needs of black workers, no, however this is not something Marxism aims to do.
“definitely won’t long-knife y’all when your usefulness is through”, that tells me that your movement is predicated on anyone else’s sacrifice but your own, and leaves me considering you as deeply unserious to the point of being literally hazardous to any oppressed folk in your orbit.”
I understand your distrust however I remind you that even utilizing race relations analytics defensively is still viewing the world on terms of race. Marx shows us that method of analysis is useless, it is one which serves to create and then re-enforce capitalism.
I keep coming back to this point because y’all keep doing it: lifting hundred-year old theory with no brushup on what your actual material conditions are. In Marx’s time, there was no understanding of the two Amerikas. He looked at it as a singular beast as though we were just another England or France; but that is not the case. In my Amerika, in the Amerika anyone who looks like me is relegated to, we don’t get the luxury to not analyze things on a racial line, because that is how the state and how the society both punish us for not staying in our perceived place, never fuckin mind assimilation.
Like, do you realize that when there’s only one or two Black folk in a room full of crackers, those Black folk immediately know two things: that they’re now ‘the fly in the milk’ as far as this gathering is concerned, and that the odds of one of those hypothetical white people getting buck and calling cops on us, regardless of what the function says it’s for, has skyrocketed? In an age where you’ve got white cops-- and shit, sometimes Tom-assed Sunken Place’d Black cops blowing us away, we don’t get that luxury. We have to know what the danger is, where the danger is, know where the exit is, and have a plan to get there before anything; and right now, I’m seeing all the warning signs of needing an exit.
You might as well ask a fireman to divest himself of PPE before tending to a five-alarm call.
Thank you for sharing this. Black Americans are forced down the race rabbit hole because the settler whites (MAGA, the middle class, the racist pigs, etc…) drag you down it. I understand you see things as race for survival. Do you recognize that the slavery economic mode of production from which their terror originates has passed and we are in the capitalist mode of production and with it capitalist relations to the means of production?
This means that the only escape from this terrorism this racist tyranny, is through a working class revolution. America has never had a feudal mode of production. It is likely that if we were to go the way of barbarism here at the point of capitalist crisis instead of socialism, we could very well see slavery come back. This being the backfoot of the bourgeoisie is likely how these settlers still persist similar to how the remnants of the Russian Empire (White Army) persisted in Soviet Russia.
I cannot simply waive my mouse and like magic this contradiction of needing the non-black working class and not trusting the non-black working class will be resolved. I simply as that you listen to the points I’ve made. The rest is a matter of struggle and solidarity within our class.
The slavery economic mode never passed on; due to the thirteenth amendment, corporations all over Amerika profit off the backs of prison slaves. Who were often pipelined into those cages, given mandatory minimums far beyond what they actually did, mandated to ‘work’(read: slave) at the end of a baton, or at the end of deliberate coercive tactics, and then left in a place where their likelihood of recidivism is so high that they’ll be right back in clink within six months. The economic mode did not change, it just put on a layer of camouflage that you’ve fallen for. Because you’re not in community with those who’ve been there.
And y’all don’t get in the way one bit. Never have I ever seen a white person interpose themselves between a cop and their soon-to-be victim. What ‘working class revolution’ can I count on out of y’all when I can’t even count on y’all to stop a pig? Speaking of, how am I supposed to believe the collective you would be abolitionists in the event of the return of mask-off, societal chattel slavery in these circumstances where y’all don’t even stop pigs? Your analysis just is not there.
Many nations maintained slave labor (slave relations) after evolving into feudalism and even into capitalism. What constitutes a system of production are the relations of the classes to the means (and by large majority here it is proletariat and bourgeoisie), the nature of the economy itself in relation to the production of resources (the exploitation of surplus labor value), and the method of production of resources in the economy (industry). Many aptly describe capitalism as “slavery with extra steps” and on the surface debt slavery does look a lot like slavery, however in economic terms they are as different as apples and oranges.
It is true, our society has not radicalized to the point that “de-arrests” happen frequently. I understand your cynicism however ask any proletarian (I’m speaking in strict terms of economic relations…those workers who’s job is to produce commodities), things do not simply come into existence, they must be crafted and that takes time and effort. I also understand your fear of the slave mode of production coming back, however thankfully there is a simply fact which should put some ease into your mind: Slavery is obsolete economically speaking. Society advanced to the extent that slavery because too expensive, too inefficient, and too chaotic as society developed and evolved. That is why a class as wicked as the bourgeoisie went along with it’s abolition (many systems transitioned into hybrids before outright changing, many bourgeois were also slave owners at one time). All we could see is an expansion of slave relations however that would be to the detriment of the economy. If America collapsed into barbarism and such things did return in a hypothetical situation, the now ancient American economy would be easily overtaken by larger more advanced economies in the world, namely China as they are the dominant economic force in the world today and are geographically close.
Solidarity, class consciousness, the breaking of liberal programing…it all takes time and effort. Change is a process, and no process has ever been completed by not taking action towards it’s development.
Hey, I’m wading into an old discussion that’s totally out of my depth here, but I just wanted to post a counter-example to what you said. This doesn’t invalidate what you said and that’s not my intention, as this is obviously a rare exception, but I just wanted you to know that it has happened. Perhaps it will give you a glimmer of hope.
https://atlantablackstar.com/2023/02/10/were-much-more-scared-of-the-f-police-in-this-situation-than-this-guy-video-shows-seattle-police-standoff-with-unarmed-black-man-until-crowd-intervenes/