Because you boiled the struggle of an alliance between multiple neighboring Mayan ethnic groups to resist colonization and subsist on their own land without being beholden to the interests of European/USian powers, something many other indigenous societies succumbed to, including the Inca and Aztec Empires to “playing commune out in the jungle”. It shows a complete and naive misunderstanding of the issue. You speak with authority when you have nothing of interest to say. That’s how it was so easy for me to clock you as white.
Your opinion was so much more haughty than my original explanation and when you encounter resistance to your holier than thou mentality you cry like a little fascist. If you really are a marxist then do some self-crit and distance yourself from this superiority complex you’ve got going on. It’s unhelpful.
The point, which is going waaaaaayyyyyyy over your head is that it’s not the place of a bunch of white people to surmise or steer the discourse on what indigenous people should be doing. If you respect them and their autonomy, as you say you do, then you would listen to what they have to say or mind your own business. An armchair socialist isn’t the peer of actual fighters and border defenders. Buying some coffee doesn’t mean you own a share in your investment or whatever you think that affords you.
To my understanding, the majority of the population in Mexico are mestizo, which makes calling them settler seem a bit off.
https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/12/dialectics-of-dependency-by-ruy-mauro-marini/
proletarians would end up having to crush them and dispose of their unprincipled practices, right?
This cracker mentality is exactly why they don’t take marxists seriously.
they are not trying to build any kind of solidarity with other colonized people in Mexico
They will if those people try to do things their own way, but as it stands they have enough on their plate holding their own border (similar to Cuba, which sends aid but not soldiers due to US pressure). It’s like asking a starving man why he won’t donate to charity while doing nothing yourself, and why Galeano calls out the Basque revolutionaries who pointed a finger while failing to take root in their own territory. They haven’t shown they can do the work, while the EZLN has. You are the chauvinist he is addressing in his letter.
I think it makes more sense if you consider the perspective of indigenous people who read Marx: that he was a copycat inspired by “primitive communism” to formulate proletarian communism. Marx/Engels were aware of certain elements of human evolution and the nature of indigenous societies through flawed early studies, and if you look in their notes, these used these ideas to formulate their theories of human nature and communism.
Their ideology is in their indigeneity. They do study western leftist currents, but don’t see them as their own movement. Rather, they see the proletarian struggle (as colonizers with colonizer class interests) as something separate from their struggle against colonization by the mexican federal government. They welcome Mexicans to engage in their own struggle, but believe it will be a fundamentally different thing with different aims. Proletarians do not understand the EZLN’s aims or ideology in such a way that a communist state would necessarily be compatible. The EZLN sees global communism as a noble goal to end imperialist hegemony, but they don’t believe a proletarian communist state will automatically consider their interests in the same way they currently can manage under self governance. For them to integrate, respect would have to be earned.
While we are on the subject of rebellious indigenous peoples, a parenthesis would be in order: the Zapatistas believe that in Mexico recovery and defence of national sovereignty are part of the anti-liberal revolution. Paradoxically, the ZNLA finds itself accused of attempting to fragment the Mexican nation.
The reality is that the only forces that have spoken for separatism are the businessmen of the oil-rich state of Tabasco, and the Institutional Revolutionary Party members of parliament from Chiapas. The Zapatistas, for their part, think that it is necessary to defend the nation state in the face of globalisation, and that the attempts to break Mexico into fragments are being made by the government, and not by the just demands of the Indian peoples for autonomy. The ZNLA and the majority of the national indigenous movement want the Indian peoples not to separate from Mexico but to be recognised as an integral part of the country, with their own specificities. They also aspire to a Mexico which espouses democracy, freedom and justice. Whereas the ZNLA fights to defend national sovereignty, the Mexican Federal Army functions to protect a government which has destroyed the material bases of sovereignty and which has offered the country not only to large-scale foreign capital, but also to drug trafficking.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/subcomandante-marcos-the-fourth-world-war-has-begun
Zapatistas have won the right to the word: to say what we want to, about what we want to, when we want to. And for this we do not have to consult with or ask permission from anyone. Not from Aznar, nor the king Juan Carlos, nor the judge Garzo’n, nor ETA.
We know that the Zapatistas don’t have a place in the (dis) agreement of the revolutionary and vanguard organizations of the world, or in the rearguard. This doesn’t make us feel bad. To the contrary, it satisfies us. We don’t grieve when we recognize that our ideas and proposals don’t have an eternal horizon, and that there are ideas and proposals better suited than ours. So we have renounced the role of vanguards and to obligate anyone to accept our thinking over another argument wouldn’t be the force of reason.
Our weapons are not used to impose ideas or ways of life, rather to defend a way of thinking and a way of seeing the world and relating to it, something that, even though it can learn a lot from other thoughts and ways of life, also has a lot to teach. We are not those who you have to demand respect from. It’s already been seen how we are a failure of “revolutionary vanguards” and so our respect wouldn’ t be useful for anything. Your people are those you have to win respect from. And “respect” is one thing; another very distinct thing is “fear”. We know you are angry because we haven’t taken you seriously, but it is not your fault. We don’t take anyone seriously, not even ourselves. Because whoever takes themselves seriously has stopped with the thought that their truth should be the truth for everyone and forever. And, sooner or later, they dedicate their force not so that their truth will be born, grow, be fruitful and die (because no earthly truth is absolute and eternal) rather they use it to kill everything that doesn’t agree with this truth.
It seems to me like the general distaste for lumpen is a blindspot in the class consciousness of some marxists, and sex work is at the forefront of that because it’s held as the symbol of moral decay in polite bourgeois society. You can dress it up all you like, but throwing lumpen into the clutches of the bourgeoisie state always harms them and makes them dependent upon it, even when it’s under the guise of liberal harm reduction. Freedom comes from solidarity that’s independent of state actors and involves the support of communities, community orgs, and unions who are meant to lay the groundwork for a revolutionary state in the long term.
The whole book can be handily summarized by this section:
Although revolutionary leaders may also have to think about the people in order to understand them better, this thinking differs from that of the elite; for in thinking about the people in order to liberate (rather than dominate) them, the leaders give of themselves to the thinking of the people. One is the thinking of the master; the other is the thinking of the comrade.
Domination, by its very nature, requires only a dominant pole and a dominated pole in antithetical contradiction; revolutionary liberation, which attempts to resolve this contradiction, implies the existence not only of these poles but also of a leadership group which emerges during this attempt. This leadership group either identifies itself with the oppressed state of the people, or it is not revolutionary. To simply think about the people, as the dominators do, without any self-giving in that thought, to fail to think with the people, is a sure way to cease being revolutionary leaders. In the process of oppression the elites subsist on the “living death” of the oppressed and find their authentication in the vertical relationship between themselves and the latter; in the revolutionary process there is only one way for the emerging leaders to achieve authenticity: they must “die,” in order to be reborn through and with the oppressed.
We can legitimately say that in the process of oppression someone oppresses someone else; we cannot say that in the process of revolution someone liberates someone else, nor yet that someone liberates himself, but rather that human beings in communion liberate each other. This affirmation is not meant to undervalue the importance of revolutionary leaders but, on the contrary, to emphasize their value. What could be more important than to live and work with the oppressed, with the “rejects of life,” with the “wretched of the earth“? In this communion, the revolutionary leaders should find not only their raison d’être but a motive for rejoicing. By their very nature, revolutionary leaders can do what the dominant elites—by their very nature—are unable to do in authentic terms.
The rest of the book essentially exists as a way to justify this and give a general idea of how to accomplish it. Libs like it because they think it’s metaphorical, and will apply this sort of rhetoric to running private schools for rich kids. But when he starts talking about fascism you see that he’s referring to actual revolutionaries working against a fascist death of the world.
What do you mean by way of life of the settler? Living standards or some bullshit idea of “American Values”?
Bullshit or not American “values” made America what it is. The reflection of the ideology manifests as armies, guarded borders, racist policies that actually harm people, redlining, etc. Artificial divisions between people aren’t just illusory. They are made real through actual physical violence.
For example: the early stages of the Northwest Indian War were fought by militias and white insurgents who settled west of the Proclamation Line of 1763 technically illegally. It wasn’t until these groups failed that Washington raised an army himself to finish the job. And this army was still using the manpower of settler proles.
Obviously, the bourgoisie did fully intend to design the system around their interests in land speculation. The immediate result of the Northwest Indian War was Washington being granted access to 20000 acres deeded to him in Ohio. But it was the colonists already living there ahead of legal tracts being established that create impetus for and foment the war path.
We can see a similar situation in the West Bank. Suburbs of Israeli colonists are illegally cropping up all over, and they’re filled with the worst people who think they deserve to live there, and will aim to do so no matter how much Palestinians try to reject them to enforce treaties. In their minds, they are victims, because they don’t see their posession of Palestinian land as violence.
If I had to guess, I’d say because their content usually had a lukewarm reception. Yelling into the void is for twitter and masto. For long-form discussions it’s really draining to put a lot of work into something for no one to read it or care much. I’d imagine some of them also just had stuff going on irl, which happens often enough but is more noticeable in smaller communities.
The play in question can be read here: https://a7sharp9.com/dragon.html
See, what professor Kirstein didn’t tell Bartlett — and what Bartlett himself clearly does not know anything about — is that the entire reason the UK ARPANET node existed back then was because it was used as a data link for a covert anti-Soviet surveillance program — a program that attempted to detect underground Soviet nuke tests by monitoring seismic vibrations from Norway and other spots around the world, and then sent that data to America for processing and analysis.
This ARPANET-connected surveillance program was designed to look like an academic earthquake monitoring service — a cover that masked its intelligence purpose. Naturally Vint Cerf, the Founding Father of the Internet/ARPANET contractor who Bartlett says I’m supposed to implicitly trust, was involved with this nuke surveillance project from the very start. (As I explain in my book, Cerf had done a lot of classified work for the military. Yet today he enjoys wide acclaim as visionary techno-radical, all while collecting fat paychecks as a celebrity lobbyist for Google. His official title: “Chief Internet Evangelist for Google.”)
It federates and some chats are encrypted, so it’s up to you which host you’d prefer.
https://matrix.to/#/!blaEvZxzzOCloGIcFH:matrix.org?via=genzedong.org&via=matrix.org&via=tedomum.net
https://toots.matapacos.dog/ is friendly to overt MLs and is open to sign-ups. However they don’t accept sectarianism against anarchists (which I know is important to a lot of you). But imo the vibe is chill.
Anime is also an example of media referencing itself so often that the original concept is lost in translation. New anime takes abusive harem protagonists seriously, for example. But the first harem anime (Ranma 1/2) was originally written in the manga in such a way that the Ranma is repeatedly punished for straying from the main ship (with Akane). The author is also a woman and she went to great lengths to make Akane into a strong character that readers would find interesting.
The anime (largely produced by men) throws out most of Akane’s subplots and focuses largely on fanservice, leaving most of the relationships ambiguous enough that fans could make their own decisions. The anime also cuts out certain scenes to make the men in the series more sympathetic and less like the buffoons they were actually supposed to be (who needed the women they had in their lives to keep them from self destructing). The original message had a very conservative brand of patriarchal monogamy, but the numerous series that have since spawned from it take all the negative traits of harem tropes and spin them into positives.
Find a job that allows you to make a decent wage without being too annoying. If you allow work to be your passion it will swallow up the rest of your life. Or if you want a small easy job with low pay so you don’t feel pressed to keep it, first ensure you have a strong social network that can support you, otherwise you’ll be in too bad of a situation to focus on organizing.
Because people post stuff like this without a hint of irony or self awareness.