"Read Settlers" is a meme, but it's also a true meme. You should read it, or read other things about this thesis regarding the white working class in the US (I've heard other Marxists have since improved on Sakai's thesis but I don't know who they are).
White Americans are doubling down on the racism. As white settler colonialism is starting to face just a little bit of opposition (like teaching kids that maybe the US isn't a perfect, God-blessed country), they are losing their minds over the idea of losing even a tiny bit of their privileges. This is still a perfectly material explanation. White folks have enjoyed an incredible level of privilege since the beginning of this country and they will fight viciously to keep all of it.
IMO the bulk of white Americans are a lost cause. Not to say white folks can't be revolutionary (I'm white), but I think we probably should be spending our very limited time and resources on folks outside the imperial core break from western imperialism, and focus on the oppressed within the core. Any white Americans who want to join in are welcome but any concession to white supremacy is unacceptable.
Edit: to clarify, I'm not saying the Dems lost because racism or whatever. I don't care if the Dems win or lose, it doesn't matter. My point is much more about using electoral results and the campaigns that precede them to see where winds are blowing. It seems that "CRT" and fear-mongering about crime (and thus the need to fund even more cops) was a very effective message in appealing to large segments of the population - particularly the white population.
Honestly. Sakai really brought it home for me when he started using his argument towards the end to encapsulate the existence of completely bullshit jobs. The current foundation of the imperial core is treats and the illusion of work, no four day work week will change the fact that large swathes of American work are a net drain on the globe, no matter how much they believe otherwise.
Have to agree with your last point, you can't force someone to give up their privilege and advantages, you either have to take it from them by revolution or they have to radicalize internally and yield them.
This. The wrath and reaction you see from people even on the left to the suggestion that they might need to educate themselves on privilege is really telling.
See: stupidpol and other class reductionists, the pronoun struggle session before the transphobes got purged.
There’s a reason libs co-opted a lot of the language around privilege. Pseudo-leftists based in contrarianism completely miss that aspect.
it is honestly hard to give up privilege because it feels normal and you don't even notice it. You worked hard and your parents worked hard, it wasn't handed to you. I realised every rich person says that, so I doubted the argument. I needed a lot more time to really see how much privilege I had, but it was my own analysis or active pursuit of better perspectives which turned me.
what reactionary BS is this? privilege exists under certain systems, it is NOT inherent to human nature.
argue me if I'm wrong, agree with me if I'm right. This behavior of smugness is a performance on your part to ignore criticism.
As a vegan, I’m pretty sure this is based in the perspective of viewing all/ most living creatures as having a degree of personhood. Hope that helps explain things!
I feel like these are some internalized brainworms, friend. Privilege is very much systemic, which is part of why it’s stupid when people are offended at the idea that they might have privilege (they view it as being accused of a moral failing).
I’d bet my left foot human nature is mostly collaborative, but we’re forced into a competitive dynamic by our current system (crabs in a big ole classist bucket).
Oh no doubt about that comrade! I’m just saying that power/ privilege hierarchies are not instinctual or a part of human nature.
Depends on the animal, that much is for certain. I’d like to think we have more in common with bonobos than chimpanzees.
The latter is possible though! That's what happened to me. I grew up super privileged and eventually developed a conscience. Now I would happily give up my stuff and class in support of equality and good living for all.
I'll also add that the lib to leftist pipeline can sometimes be real, but I'm starting to think that it's more real on a generational scale. My grandparents were very liberal. My parents are very liberal and one of my aunts is a communist. Now my siblings and I are communists, along with our cousins.
Help the poor with means tested programs -> help the poor in ways that will actually help -> abolish poverty in the first place by abolishing capitalism , isn't that crazy of a progression. I think a common thing for many leftists who did grow up in privilege was essentially being taught good morals as a kid, and then realizing as an adult that leftism is the only way to actually be consistent with those morals.
But note that you yourself did the analysis to become a leftist. I did the same. My point is that there is no argument, no magic line of theory which will force people to yield privilege. I came from a background of hating the wealthy and wishing everyone to have equal footing for their pursuits, with dignity for every life. As such, I came to the conclusion, after much stupidity and some research, that communism is the goal.
oh, yeah, I gotcha. yeah, changing people's minds on stuff is generally hard-to-impossible, and that becomes even more true for stuff that affects them personally.
sniff :zizek-preference: the glasses of ideology are painful to take off, you must be forced to take them off
Who is doing that?
I've reread this thread like five times and I have no idea what you're talking about.
To an extent. I try to use my resources to help others, for example, by housing trans people and SA survivors rent-free. But it's also a balancing act because completely impoverishing myself would not only be unwise in a country with no safety net, but would also likely limit my ability to do good in the long term.
So the point of my comment was essentially to say that while I try to do praxis and help right now, I would be happy to give up much more as part of broader societal reforms that may necessitate it. But me giving up my house absent those sweeping changes won't do any good.
That's just the trap of "you're a socialist yet you have money" vs "you're a socialist because you don't have money so you must just be jealous." Which is never a good argument.
The Democrats had a predictably bad election night and your takeaway is "whites can't into communism"?
Stop emotionally investing yourself in the successes and failures of a liberal party that was never gonna do a communism in the first place :no-copyright:
A majority of the voters in VA electing a candidate who had being against CRT as a core part of his platform is a pretty strong signal.
The majority of voters in the past backed literal segregation. We are not, nor have we ever been, fighting for a conscious majority. The majority of those allowed to vote in SA backed apartheid, does that mean the calculous for people like Joe Slovo should have been "whelp no helping here"
This person (OP) is an obvious wrecker with the same tired DNC "what's the haps, don't we all hate YT" shtick.
Believing that a majority of white people will continue supporting racism and the class system built on top of it doesn’t equal hating mayos lol
If you're equating the revolutionary potential in America with how many people vote Democratic each election, I don't know what to tell you :shrug-outta-hecks:
Becoming a doomer because Terry McAuliffe fumbled what should have been an easy win is silly. Fumbling is what they do, how are you still surprised by it?
If you’re equating the revolutionary potential in America with how many people vote Democratic each election, I don’t know what to tell you
If I was doing that, I would 100% agree with you. But as I mentioned in my other comment, it's more about the GOP whipping white people up about "CRT" and how there's this massive increase in crime that we need the cops for, and that message appears to be gaining traction. Fuck the democratic party, of course, this isn't about their success or failure.
You do realize i want to go back to brunch was not a joke right? Biden barely won by engaging a bunch of party animals and whipping them into a frenzy.
They are gone. Litteraly they are at brunch.
The gop has whipped a large section of poor white people into a frenzy and those fuckers love sports.
Bud we were never gonna win by stopping the racists of america from bitching about CRT or whatever other boogeyman. the GOP has been even more braindead and evil before this, it shouldn't matter much for the hope of revolution how invested elderly white conservatives are in GOP BS. Far more people had investments in the Tsarist regime, many in continuing WW1, a not-insignificant amount in the Black Hundreds; how insane the farthest right is, does not detract the revolutionary potential from people with the same amount of melanin. If that was true how did the KKK resurge and Jim Crow was in full effect while CPUSA had its biggest membership and power? If that's not what you are saying, then what are you saying beyond just that racist whites are being racist? Cause trust me, the surge in anti-CRT stuff is not any bit worse than how universally bloodthirsty the american consensus was for murdering Muslims 20 years ago, or towards LGBTQ during Bush's 2nd term. Bush won reelection running on trying to legally block gay marriage constitutionally
Nobody's being "whipped" into anything. Thousands of white workers are on-strike telling their companies to shove offers up their ass, but some stupid culture war bullshit making a shitty Democrat lost means all is lost, because clearly the "revolutionary potential" has to do with whether or not liberals win elections (straight out of the DNC slack channel, God damn)
If people can be manipulated this easily by the GOP, they can be manipulated by a revolutionary force.
Naw, never said that. Electoral outcomes can be useful as a temp check for wider opinions of the people / workers in a community.
Extreme example: if a city elects someone who is openly a member of the klan, that tells you something is fucky. Could be voter suppression or low turnout instead of wider support, but it’s one data point.
Electoral outcomes can be useful as a temp check for wider opinions of the people / workers in a community.
For example, we can hazard that the one of the "wider opinions" of Virginia is that Terry McAuliffe sucked and people didn't like him.
oh yah, no doubt there. If being against racism was important to these folks though, they probably would have voted against the GOP or not voted at all even if the other guy was mediocre. Again, temp check and not the end all.
Hating mayos is cool and good. Acting like whiteness is some sort of original sin is Lib bullshit. If whites are completely unreachable, where do you go from there? Best case you're fetishizing the noble Brown saviors, worst case you're just declaring open war on 60% of the population because they were born evil. Not good.
Why do you think I said whites are completely unreachable? They just have a material interest from the “benefits” of racism and because of that many support the systems that maintain apartheid.
Best case you’re fetishizing the noble Brown saviors, worst case you’re just declaring open war on 60% of the population because they were born evil
:yikes-1::yikes-2::yikes-3:
How did you get “blacksploitation and race war” out of “BIPOC are subjected to significantly more systemic oppression than white people and because of that are more likely to fight back”?
Don’t disagree with ya there, just talking about the hand we’ve been dealt in Amerika!
star_wraith
Join Date: Aug 02, 2020
NaturalsNotInIt
Join Date: Apr 29, 2021
Yeah come on, a person can have a bad take without being a wrecker. star_wraith is obviously not a wrecker.
Yeah, I didn't see OP was someone I recognized. Still a demonic take straight out of the most cynical DNC operations. Welp, a boring white man lost a close election to another white guy, Mayos must be unreachable.
This it the hexbear equivalent of "ok Vlad, what time is it in Russia"
I mean, wreckers are a problem, but they typically don't have 15 months of history with 4,000 comments. Doesn't mean I'm immune to a bad take (this site raked me over the coals over my views on shared living spaces), but that doesn't a wrecker make.
Same. I've been dragged before, but my heart is in the right place. I'm just a human trying to do better every day
Long story, but where I live it seems like every well-off person feels they have to own a house with a bedroom for each kid. And your shamed if you can't provide that for your kids. My point was that I shared a room with my brother growing up and it was fine. My point was no one should feel bad about maybe having their kids share a bedroom, it can even be a positive experience for kids in some cases. Lots of people got upset and pointed out how everyone needs privacy and there are abusive siblings. Which is true, but also isn't really arguing against the point I was making.
My point isn't about the Democratic party losing. It's looking at what the things reactionaries are focusing (and winning) on.
There's plenty of white cope all over the comments now that this post got popular lol.
Even as a kid in 2nd grade, that's what bothered me.
"So, the white people started it and black people just need to forgive them hard enough and maaaaaaaaaaybe the white people will be less mean?" when we were learning about how "MLK never used his fists".
Indigenous movements tend to be very radical from my experience and I think they're the future of the left in NA. But if you're getting involved with them don't go in telling people they're not following anarchist or Marxist theory properly, because they're not necessarily following a western system. Like the Zapatistas many Indigenous movements recognize the similarities of their traditions with communism but want to maintain their own cultural independence (for obvious reasons).
Every communist movement is different, even cuba's revolution didn't start as "communist" explicitly. That was part of the reason the chinese revolution looked differen, as well as the dprk. What binds communists is the goal of equality and commitment to scientific methods of achieving those ideas.
You good, I'm typing with one hand rn so I wasn't being therough. Thanks
I typed out an effortpost once that I entitled Who Can Be Radicalized? I never posted it since I don’t really know enough theory to feel confident in it, but it was I guess trying to make the point that we discuss radicalizing libs and chuds on this site, and it’s very idealistic bc we try to find the perfect argument or book or logic that will finally cut through liberal/chud bullshit and finally make them see the light. Which is nonsense because radicalization does not depend on one’s ideology or how “close” someone is. It depends on class and material conditions. Which frankly leaves much of the white American population out. And yeah there are white PMC types who have been radicalized and that is good, and there are many on this site, but if you are in the US, not to start BMF posting, but the focus of your organizing should not be comfortable PMC office drones or chud petit bourgeoisie, but the oppressed working class and lumpen in this country regardless of ideology
It depends on class and material conditions. Which frankly leaves much of the white American population out.
This is perfectly articulated.
And yeah there are white PMC types who have been radicalized and that is good, and there are many on this site
Yeah, this is more or less me. And I will be the first to admit I am not the kind of person we should be focusing our efforts on. Class traitors are good but expending energy on them is a waste. They need to sort of figure things out for themselves, you know?
the focus of your organizing should not be comfortable PMC office drones or chud petit bourgeoisie, but the oppressed working class and lumpen in this country regardless of ideology
I 110% agree but the challenge is wrapping my head around what this looks like pragmatically.
It looks like going to Union drives and reengaging them. I think the big reason you are getting so much pushback is because literally just back in the 80s you had a labor movement tenfold what we got today. The calculous that those strikers and union members all died or became GOP petite bourgeoise is goofy. We need to organize among unions, make a consistent party, not just the occasional electoral movement like Bernie, and go from there.
Also PMC and/or anti-CRT folks are not remotely as big as you are acting like they are, and PMC sure as hell are not as distinct. Like what does not trying to get class traitor PMCs have to do with writing off the majority of white people in this country? The PMC distinction as if it is an actual class has been toxic for discourse.
Huh I actually agree with you about PMCs are actually small, though I do believe in the separate labor aristocrat designation.
And being in a union doesn't automatically make you good. My grandfather was a hardcore union guy and he was also racist af, if he was alive he'd 100% be a Trump supporter today.
If you want to actually change things, if you want people to have any real chance of fighting against the system that instills racism, you need to fight along class lines and that means unions. It doesn't matter if they are personally all good people, the goal is to identify material enemies and organize on class lines. If some of those union men being racist or trump supporters detracts from that for you, then you don't want political change. People are not going to come to you and say "hey I identified that there is a ruling class, please tell me more about race discrimination" you build along the lines of class warfare. Stop with the individualist "is this person good or bad" metric and view strategy on whether it furthers class warfare.
If you write off unions or recruiting from unions because there are racists therein, you will never win or help anyone. The bigots will organize for survival or leave. The individual moral worth of each person in your party or union is irrelevant; the actual collective action and what it furthers is the point. If you care about breaking the system that encourages racism in the working class, you need to actually fight on that front, not an immaterial front of the morally good
If people are bigoted because of capitalism, then you continue the fight against capitalism where it is being fought, and you educate and build solidarity. among the workers. The tools of the ruling class being effective is not an excuse to justify ceding to them
Imagine if Lenin had said "there are antisemites within some of these unions, so there is no revolutionary potential in Russia, not organizing among you anymore" instead of freaking organizing upon a common struggle and urging solidarity through that and untangling bigotry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZzOgFY45s8
Get the unions a cause that will fight for them and rally them, and they wont as easily be unused or individually vote GOP. This defeatism is why people are pushing back hard. These things are struggles, and none of this will go anywhere if you dont have a base of people willing to fight at all against capital. Rally them, organize them, and reeducate them. Giving excuses for writing them all off is not enlightened, it merely means helping diffuse class tensions by being focused on essentializing class power based on individual failings. You can't identify capitalism as causing our racism, and then use it as an argument against organizing those susceptible against capital, this is how you deprogram. If you don't want to just get PMC class-traitors, then you have to organize the working class. Or just give people a reason to fight our common enemy. If you want class revolution, then this is non-negotiable
I think I agree with your last point. The Google alphabet union fiasco kinda proves this as well. I'll always support that kind of organizing, but I'm not as hopeful as I was.
As someone who has contemplated PMC office drone organizing at my new PMC workplace, I really think my efforts are better put into supporting labor elsewhere. Local DSA chapter has done some good shit for various strikers in the past. It's kind of an unsatisfying answer but I think that's where it's at right now. Making striking a tiny bit easier.
Of course this is all theoretical, currently too depressed to do anything worthwhile other than donating to strike funds :)
Yeah I don’t really mean to say we shouldn’t talk to PMC types, and unionization I wholeheartedly support. But I do think other aspects of the socialist program run so counter to these peoples' material interests that I think socialism (real socialism and not Bernie Sanders socdem stuff) needs to become embedded in the oppressed classes before middle class libs and chuds start getting radicalized en masse
I'm a bit more 'demsoc' when it comes to America personally. Like I still kinda think the Bernie Sanders stuff is as far as we can hope for, including as much anti-imperialist 'harm reduction' as possible. At the same time I can't deny there is theoretically more radical potential in the TRULY oppressed classes. Would love for this to be proven correct.
In that sense I feel a bit more revolutionary hope in third-worldism. Love what the commies are doing in India for example. But honestly I have no idea I'm just along for the ride lmao
Anyone can be radicalized if they see a bad thing happen to someone they have empathy towards, then understand the story isn't unique by systemic, and the system can change. Which I think a lot of people are at.
But then the potential changes they want to see done are shit.
Which frankly leaves much of the white American population out.
We should also keep in mind though that material conditions are certainly not static, as we've seen since 1970's with the white middle class being slowly destroyed. This decline will accelerate, and when revolution does happen, it could very well be partly because the suffering has gotten to a point where many of these people no longer have anything to lose. At that point, a revolution could go either way and it doesn't seem like the worst idea to do whatever we can now to make sure things go our direction when shit does hit the fan.
yeah I agree, I don't mean to say we shouldn't talk to anyone who isn't in the lowest rungs of the working class. We’re all gonna become proletarianized at some point, and so we need our ideas out there so that they are available to be taken up once people begin to recognize their declining conditions. But I also think we can see with the whole Trump/Q/Jan 6 stuff, many in the middle-classes are more likely to shift right as their conditions decline in an attempt to regain lost economic/social/political privilege/status. Maybe that is just the propagandized anticommunist nature of the US at this point, who don't know/understand socialism, but this trend of the middle-class shifting right also bears out historically. So we can't stop talking to anyone regardless of who they are, but I think its most important to set up mutual aid and create a base in the working class and lumpen, so that when people become proletarianized we don't say great, now that you're here we can actually get started, but instead we already have a base to catch those people falling.
From a historiography standpoint I actually really dislike Settlers. The historical tradition pioneered by Du Bois and culminated in Theodore Allen's two part Invention of the White Race is much more robust as an explainer for a) how whiteness operates in the United States and b) what to do about it. Sakai puts forward the thesis that white folks are essentially a lost cause, part of the labor aristocracy, and betrayed the revolutionary movement for their privileges. While mostly true, he ignores the historical context that led to this development, and doesn't really examine the "wages of whiteness" and how poor whites got hoodwinked into this non-material wage to support a ruling class that views them with nothing but contempt. I would encourage you to read Du Bois' Black Reconstruction alongside the aforementioned Allen books, or peruse this and this for a more nuanced critique of Settlers that I don't want to get into here.
Invention of the White Race has been on my list for like a year but my book addiction keeps fucking me
It's one of the most important texts I've ever read, and so well written to boot. Cannot recommend it enough, you should really prioritize this one. It makes the construction of whiteness so so clear and a lot of things about the United States click into place after reading.
Alright, you convinced me. I'm still trying to finish Monsters of the Market and The Half Has Never Been Told, but that'll be my next
How does it compare to ibram x kendi’s explanation of the structural creation of whiteness in colonial America? Is it the same?
Rashid of the NABPP-PC has some good quotes from Mao.
“If there is to be a revolution, there must be a revolutionary party, without a revolutionary party, without a party built on the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory and the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary style, it is impossible to lead the working class and the broad masses in defeating imperialism and its running dogs.”
And
Furthermore, Lenin said those who flee the real revolutionary movement for fear of repression are to be pitied and counseled, but as for those who try to blame the workers and portray their flight as politically principled, he denounced them as “apostates” and “disgusting renegades,” stating “[t]hese runaways then becomes the worst advisors for the working class movement and therefore its dangerous enemies.”
It makes me wonder how many people here bemoaning the democrat party's loss as the sign of the Oracle of Settler-Delphi to divide the working class and write off the majority to fetishize the minority from their theater boxes like petty bougeoise onlookers
It makes me wonder how many people here bemoaning the democrat party’s loss as the sign of the Oracle of Settler-Delphi to divide the working class and write off the majority to fetishize the minority from their theater boxes like petty bougeoise onlookers
See I think I have fallen into that myself, and really think a lot of us here have a tendency to do just that. It's why the "read settlers" meme, while accurate, has always put a bad taste in my mouth. What people want as a take-away is not necessarily productive, or conscious. We had revolutionary moments in the past here, and even with serious problems racially within them; we did show revolutionary tendencies. If the original sin of settlers is true, then why have people broken through labor aristocracy? How did CPUSA see massive gains even when the dems where at their best ever?
Oh sure, Settlers is certainly incomplete IMO. I've had Allen's books on my list for a while.
This is almost a take straight out of msnbc or the dnc minus the radicalization part.
The dems ran on Trump is bad that's why they lost. Even Nancy pelosi has realized that they stripped to much out of the build and have done nothing for 10 months. She just readded paid family leave and a few other things.
Biden barely won and he won with bringing out the brunch crowd. They are gone. Many of them are pro blm pro lgbtq+. But what all you have to realize is that they also want the old normal back. They want to party than wake up and brunch and that's it. They want things to be nicer but not better. My cousin who was protesting and running from cops last year is right back into the edc festival scene. Alomg with all her friends She was only at the protests cuz that was where the party was last year.
Trump barely lost by taping into the white trash and becoming their god. Those people are not going anywhere. WHITE TRASH IS 70% OF THE COUNTRY. It's a sport and religion to them cuz they need more distractions in their life.
The dems lost Latino support. They lost women etc etc.
For all you zoomers. This is what Obama looked like immediately. It's the same thing. 2022 is going to be a blood bath. Trump will return in 2024. America will continue to spiral down wards as boomers age but don't die off fast enough
I wouldn’t dismiss op entirely, but your point is equally important. I think we underestimate and laugh about white supremacy and crt but that brought people out. Look at any school council right now. This has to be one of the most effective right wing talking points in recent memory
Like op may be using radlib talking points, but those dismissing them are ignoring crt being more important to get out the vote on the right than lack of campaign strategy or efficacy by dems
There's a lot of rad lib posting in this thread.
Like i said in my original post white people are 70% of the country. The left needs to do out reach and not just talk down to poor white people that feel they have no actual privilege. The left needs to stop being the screaming rad libs it seems to mostly be. It's a huge turn off. You are playing right into the elites hands and sowing more division amongst people of the same class.
I honestly have no idea why people are freaking out about this election. This is just 2009 all over again.
Do you really think the bulk of the folks bitching about CRT aren’t educated? The scary thing is that they are. They are the elite. The financial advisors. The real estate agents. The jet ski dealers.
College educated.
I agree, but I think you are taking the opposite meaning from Vanjones, they are not saying those jet-ski dealers are the people to reachout to, or that the CRT bitchers aren't educated, they are clearly talking about the entire rest of that 70% who are NOT those groups. Their initial point is expressing this exactly, that there are more whites than just those specific demographics. Responding to that by saying we shouldn't appeal to that specific demographic is doing exactly what they warned about; conflating reaching out to workers who are white, with reaching out to GOP base voters
While I'm not very familiar with Buffalo or India Walton, I do think racism has a part (certainly when we add Virginia and Minneapolis into the discussion). Obviously not because Walton is black - so was her opponent. But racism 100% drives white peoples' worship of the cops and "law and order". They want their white enclaves "protected" from black and brown people. In their minds, the cops are the only thing that keeps all those "dangerous" people away. So anyone advocating a more just approach threatens white supremacy.
there are other people besides whites who work forces and support police. Loving the police is more about property rights nowadays. Walton ran on supporting the police as workers and still lost. She lost because she waffled with her union support while trying to appeal to conservatives on issues like law enforcement. Conservatives voted for her black opponent because class trumps race, theyd rather vote for a black guy than what the media is telling them is a real deal commie.
Loving the police is more about property rights nowadays
:doubt:
its certainly shifted that way since it became less acceptable to lynch minorities
its certainly shifted that way since it became less acceptable to lynch minorities
”less” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Heck, it’s practically an olympic power-lifter.
Here is a list of 229 black people publicly executed by police between the murder of Eric Garner and May of this year:
https://www.newsweek.com/full-list-229-black-people-killed-police-since-george-floyds-murder-1594477
Tell me those are not “socially acceptable” lynchings. Most of those pigs walk free and faced no consequences.
“Property rights” is a justification and a dog whistle. Chauvin was a sacrifice to get the libs to go back to brunch.
Yup, this exactly. Support of the police is support for racial apartheid.
I may not be a guy, but there are zero photos of me in existence. The only images of me are X-rays from childhood because I'm that cool and fragile.
I should publish more theory.
I have actually published a few things. Just nothing I wanna post here lmao, I'll get my ass dragged over my cringe ass Ph. D. thesis. Also the lack of photos is very deliberate.
Same actually. I hope you get photos one day tho, when we dont have to live in fear of the chuds. I hope J. Sakai gets a photo too after they take his mugshot from beating me to death with my own keyboard cuz that would really make my day. I would get murdered by legendary theorist J. Sakai.
I hope J. Sakai gets a photo too after they take his mugshot from beating me to death
:wut:
mrw someone fantasizes about POC being enslaved by the carceral state.
Sunmary, but it’s more than this: From the moment the first settlers landed in Amerika, they constructed a system of enslavement built on a European definition of race. Many of the first slaves were the indigenous people of the continent.
This system of exploitation and “cheap” labor was the foundation that the white class system was built on. Amerikan capitalism (really all capitalism) is dependent on forms of slavery. Even a poor/ working class white person participates in and benefits from the exploitation of minorities.
Sakai argues that the true proletariat of Amerika are these minorities. Their labor is exploited and used to fund economic benefits for the white ruling class. The New Deal, for instance, was largely racially segregated.
It is not impossible to be an ally, but it is very much like how a wealthy person can become a class traitor. It is not in their material interest and because of this it will be pretty rare. Liberation from capitalism is most likely to come from and be lead by the workers exploited by racial apartheid.
Unsurprisingly, this theory/concept greatly upset the white man for a similar reason someone born into wealth instinctually rejects class analysis. “I worked hard”, “I’m not racist”, etc. That betrays a liberal outlook of individualism instead of a systemic understanding.
Sakai doesn’t pull any punches. He uses clear, loaded language and his writing should be loaded. Amerika is unjust and evil. There are clains he’s a fed and “dividing workers”. To me that reeks of white cope and gosh damn is it ever stinky.
The closest Amerika came to socialism was moderate social democracy with FDR and even then it was still dependent on apartheid. You cannot make any real progress on a socialist project in Amerika without accepting this, otherwise you will just be trying to build a socialist state on top of that actual proletariat.
Someone please correct me if I missed a spot, I’m responding based off memory and still chugging coffee. I tried to use as little jargon as possible.
I haven’t had a chance to read much Fanon yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s a sobering analysis that realistically could only come from someone who is affected by that system.
Why does that matter? He’s written other works if that’s what you’re asking.
Regardless, this analysis was largely based on conversations and thought within the remnants of the Black Liberation Army (BLA) and Sakai articulated it within Settlers.
Settlers was written as an underground document for the surviving members of the BLA in prison trying to re-assess their strategy and the historical reason why the white Left abandoned them and other Black Liberation groups seems to be lost on a lot of people as well.
To quote Dan Berger's "Subjugated Knowledges: Activism, Scholarship, and Ethnic Studies Ways of Knowing":
Sakai is the child of Japanese immigrants and a former autoworker. Butch Lee is a transfeminist who published the 1980s feminist zine Bottomfish Blues. Both were politicized through their involvement with the black freedom struggle, from the civil rights phase through its revolutionary nationalist incarnations that described itself as part of a black liberation movement. These books were written and circulated within a semiclandestine network shaped by revolutionaries close to or part of the Black Liberation Army (BLA), the military offshoot of the Black Panther Party. Sakai and Lee have been key nodes in the circuits of intellectual discourse among imprisoned radicals, especially from the BLA. Their political biographies, like the books they produced, are tied to the fascinating but little known history of revolutionary nationalism based in Chicago from the 1960s to the 1990s. It was a political environment shaped by the racial geography of Chicago, which included a heady mixture of black liberationists, Puerto Rican revolutionary nationalists, Iranian Marxists, Palestinian militants, and white anti-imperialists. As a result the history of these books hints at the hidden history of Chicago’s late twentieth-century revolutionaries.
If you also accept his claim that False Nationalism, False Internationalism was written by the group, which included Sakai, which was the "Red Rover" of Night Vision, then you might be able to tell at least which organizations, etc., that he was in contact with given the things that they were interested in at the times they were interested in them with the level of sophistication they had in their analyses. These people and those that worked with them are still out there but they probably have little interest in talking to you.
That being said, even if we discount False Nationalism, False Internationalism and Night Vision as being at least co-authored by Sakai, there are a number of additional works published under that name, most of which are collected here: https://readsettlers.org/extras.html (The "Cash & Genocide" piece included as an appendix in Kersplebedeb's 4th printing of Settlers is for instance not included.)
I have to read Fanon first, I think I can personally trust him more. I sincerely think Sakai sounds like a post-left version of Wretched of the Earth, but I've barely gotten into the text.
I still refuse to believe this guy is real. Regardless of how right they are, his theories havent accomplished anything so far and I cant measure the progress. If people want to use this theory to organize, be my guest but please tell me there is a plan.
Why does there need to be a plan involved for a piece that’s focused on a structural analysis? Sakai is a Maoist in the style of the Black Panthers, if I remember correctly.
Can’t speak to how much its directly informed organizing. The book is useful for understanding racial apartheid and highlights why intersectionality is necessary.
I was asking @Brak cuz I thought he brought up Sakai's background influencing his theories. And it does matter as much as any history matters.
Racism is inherently tied to the opposition of communism in this country and has been for over 50 years. Racism is the primary mechanism for the justification of anticommunist sentiment at home and activities abroad by the capitalist class.
I think America has made more progress in the tolerance between races than tolerating communism.
That’s impossible. If America had actually made improvements in tolerance between races, there wouldn’t be so much anticommunism.
My point is that objectively America is more tolerable of racial difference than it was in 1950. You can improve racial tolerance in order to defend capitalism, thats why it accepted integration in the middle of the cold war.
I actually think property rights are the primary mechanism (see Mao: primary contradiction), for the justification of anti-communism AND rascism.
But thats cuz i read :marx-joker:
not :sakai-no-picture:
I think the intolerance probably just slightly changed forms. With integration came a ton of more subtle ways to discriminate. Like it became less socially acceptable to lynch people, but behind closed doors the state kept doing all it could to harm minorities and still does.
The moment the real "Amerikkka" feels sort of threatened by minority power in the US all the violence will come right back.
I mean you can see it happening right now. The neo-fascist movement that happened in response to Obama and then BLM is fucking scary and wraps communism, LGBTQ, and all non white people together.
Oh dang howdy, do I ever agree with this. The “AntiFa anarchist thugs” squealing from the hogs only really showed up once the BLM movement started fighting back even more.
My point is that objectively America is more tolerable of racial difference than it was in 1950.
Only among young people......we're trending backward lately from what I've experienced and seen
It's being reported that India walton used scabs and the union came out against her in the past few days.
I think America has made more progress in the tolerance between races than tolerating communism.
This isn’t accurate at all. Jim Crow and segregation still exist, it’s just been restructured so white moderates feel better about it.
Shaking hands with someone and smiling at them doesn’t matter if you support government death squads occupying their communities.
Examples: prison system, war on drugs, the ongoing genocide of BIPOC by the pigs, means-testing, ongoing denial of reparations, etc.
Meanwhile, you’re much less likely to be killed by a cop or denied housing for being a communist. Sure commies only rarely get elected to public office, but we’re all aware electoralism is a dead end.
I mean that we've made progress in the field of civil rights, Im not sayings its not still bad. You dont think integration helped at all?
Meanwhile there is a longer way to go towards building a racially diverse socialist America than a racially diverse capitalist America. Red-baiting is arguably becoming more effective than race-baiting. Antifa gets mentioned a lot in chud propoganda.
You dont think integration helped at all?
Pal, I did not say that. I said People Of Color in this country are less “tolerated” than communists.
People of color get fucked over by the state and then get gaslit into being told rascism is over in America. I am not trying to say this.
I am trying to say that communism as a theory is farther from acceptence than the theory of racial tolerance
Maybe. In Amerika they’re pretty much linked to the extent I’m not sure they can be separated. Amerikan culture is deeply entrenched and built upon apartheid.
:shrug-outta-hecks:
Idk, I just think is easier to talk to coworkers about how shitty the boss is, instead of how white he is and that should be the premise of organizing. Thank u for coming to my TED (turner is literally a confederate apologist) Talk.
That’s a step of it and necessary to deprogram and make progress. The reality of it being easier to talk about class than race with other white workers also demonstrates what I'm talking about.
Not just that. Integration was a failure. Most of the US is still pretty heavily segregated
i agree. some white people have the ability to be radicalized but it is way more of an uphill battle than most (white) activists/ liberals/ leftists admit and more than I think even black activists, liberals, leftists etc want to admit. Regardless, if you're a poc and you find yourself figuring out whether you should lean in to explain something / accommodate some white person or persuade them that you're worthy of respect, don't. just smoke weed instead
If they haven’t figured it out by now, they’re not gonna. BLM was a loud wake up call for anyone still in denial about this country. Time spent convincing a racist is time wasted.
some white people have the ability to be radicalized but it is way more of an uphill battle
Yeah I like how you described it here. It's not impossible but it's gonna require expending a lot more energy, and something no poc comrades should feel any obligation to take part in. I hate to admit it but I know there are times in my life where trying to get me to where I am now would have absolutely been a waste of energy. I feel like when you grow up white in the US you get all these... walls? built up in your brain that you first need to tear down yourself. I don't know of that makes sense.
Surprised this very radlib take is getting a bunch of upbears
You all must be more liberal than I thought:deeper-sadness:
You all must be more liberal than I thought
:astronaut-2: :astronaut-1:
you dont even need to read settlers, read marx or lenin and you will arrive at the same conclusion.
Isn’t that what you said in the first comment or am I just having a stroked?
McAuliffe is a clown who didn't even fucking try to win. Telling people "parents should have no say in what their kids learn" is moronic, epicly stupid messaging and that has nothing to do with CRT or settler colonialism or any of that crap.
The Democrats completely phoned in this election and didn't even try to offer people anything, at all. You can't blame Youngkin's win on "people doubling down on white supremacy" when he effectively ran unopposed.
In conclusion, fuck off back to Reddit you stupid fuckng radlib.
McAuliffe. Made the exact same mistakes as :hillary-apartment: . Focus on Trump and focus on Raytheon Acres. He was always a one trick pony though. He was a very effective fundraiser, and ads cost money. They problem is that Virginia got saturated with a simple message: Youngkin = Trump, and voters weren’t that dumb
