Firstly, I am white so I really want to do my best to not be a shithead when discussing this topic. I was in a conversation with a classmate who has Iranian family regarding the question of reform and revolution.
She pointed to general points about harm reduction and improving conditions now, while I attempted to make the case that revolution is the only way to bring true equality and protection and that the push for liberal reforms must be coincided by militant communist action (dual power ect). I was fairly cautious about my handling of my knowledge of race issues I believe, and I mostly reiterated what I understand as written by black and 3rd world communists: the US (and capitalism) is the direct cause of the issues facing the rest of the world and there are no practical circumstances in which one would be safe from the west without the dissolution of capitalism.
Also in discussions regarding white "communists" (mostly in reference to youtubers and people like that, she brought it up) I asserted that putting effort into the education, agitation, and organization of white people is a mostly lost cause in america, and that the majority of effort should go towards the organization of people of color. I cited this with reference to the BPP's work with rural americans and their firm belief that the black minority power structure must be built first and that the support of white people is secondary.
What would be the best way to go about this in the future. How can I make the case for revolution, as a white person, to a poc? How could I communicate the communist message more clearly?
i don't understand the position that whites are a lost cause, and i don't know how you can assert that credibly as a white person. if your workplace is full of white people, you don't really have the option to preach your scripture to POC only.
Respectfully, you're taking broad idea (white folks in the US are generally a lost cause) and trying to boil it down to individual action. Sure, we should all try to influence things in our most immediate circles first. So if you're white and most of your coworkers are white and you feel you can get them to unionize... yeah, go for it. But that doesn't negate the idea that white Americans as a group have been given certain privileges and advantages that make them unreliable at best allies of the oppressed. And as a movement that's not where we should spend our precious resources.
Yeah I second this. I think it's incorrect to write white people off entirely - it's just a matter of priorities and meeting the people where they're at. The people most open to radicalization and revolutionary messaging are those most exploited and beat down by our current system. That clearly applies to many POC, but there's no shortage of white people who have experienced the shitty end of neo-liberalism too. Also, 76% of the US is white, so I don't see how we're going to pull off a revolutionary movement without at least some of them being at worst sympathetic to the cause. PMC and petty bourgeois types might be a lost cause, but that doesn't encompass the entire white population much less even a majority.
I think that when it comes to organizing that we need to be uncompromising when talking about class independent politics. We're not interested in compromising with capital, we're not interested in some greater share of the spoils of exploitation of others, we're here for the working class only. Of course, the working class is disproportionately people of color and women, so their issues ARE working class issues, but that doesn't mean writing off the millions of working class whites who we need solidarity and cooperation with. Organizing them will just look different and might come later, which is fine.
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you don't come out of the womb bourgeois
whiteness is as real as class. they're deeply analogous.
If you're talking about whiteness as an idea or a culture then I misunderstood my bad
my dude, whiteness isn't about skin color. it's a social relation just as much as class is. it's constructed and changes with time and place. if you go back one thousand years and start talking about the common whiteness of all europeans, people are going to look at you like an insane person because you're talking about a diverse group of people who fucking hate each other. it's only their shared economic, cultural, societal relationships over the past thousand years that has constructed any unitary identity that can be called whiteness today. and who is considered white or not white changes over time - ask the italians, the irish, the hispanic, etc.. in the US, various groups are white in some contexts and not in others. whiteness is weird. whiteness is fake. whiteness is no more real than bourgeois identity and it's just as easily cast aside in recognition of shared proletarian struggle. essentialization and self-flagellization over skin color instead of just like not being shit a person, learning how your privilege colors your perspective and correcting for it, and reading and learning from people different from yourself is just another kind of racism wrapped in a woke shell of woe-is-me doomerism. fuck that.
yeah that's basically what I was trying to say I just don't think I understood or got that across right
ahh got it, thought you were saying whiteness was something real to worry about.
yea I see how I wasn't really clear about that now, my bad
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I worded that inappropriately, I more-so meant that white people in the USA are significantly more difficult to radicalize, and shouldn't be the primary focus of leftist movements in the US. Very few movements in the US in the past century haven't been led by nonwhites, and I don't see that any of the underlying causes for that fact have changed in the past 10 years. Unionizing PMC workers is exceedingly difficult and wouldn't, in my calculus, have nearly the revolutionary effect as working to unionize tenants in urban areas.
Yeah, this was a big miss on my part. I conflated a lot of things and wasn't really clear on what I meant. It would be pretty silly to discount a majority of the US just on the account of their skin colour. Thank you for pushing back against me, I definitely needed to do some self-crit and fix a shitty opinion.