So there was a bit of a heated discussion recently on the topic of "anti-white" or "reverse" racism and we (some of the mods) figured we would clarify some rules for this community:
- "White people" is a very vague term. Having low expectations of people in the imperial core is understandable for someone in the Global South, but it's better to be specific. Saying "I'm racist against white people" when you mean "I don't trust the average person in <insert imperialist country>" is going to cause misunderstandings
- People who were racist in the past are not necessarily racist in the present. Many of us were liberals before becoming Marxists, and there's a significant overlap between liberals and racists
- No matter your ethnicity, don't use terms like "subhuman" or "orc" to describe yourself and your group; it may make others uncomfortable
- Don't call for violence (particularly against ethnic groups, but it's best to avoid it in general so the instance doesn't get in trouble)
- Stick to Lemmygrad's rules of good-faith discussion
that's all, folks
I'm very relieved reading that. In some places in the past this topic was often really hot and incredibly USA-centric.
There are communists in Sweden. Good and honest people. So there are in Norway, Finland, Canada and the USA; in Belgium, the UK, Denmark and the Netherlands too.
Be kind. L'Internationale sera le genre humain.
geniune question: are we able to call for traitors and enemies of the working class to get the wall or no?
it's probably fine if it's something vague like " gets the wall", but direct death threats to individuals might get the instance in trouble with the server provider (you'd have to ask an admin for a concrete answer)
Shifting the topic from anti-capitalism to anti-"insert gender/race/colour/nationality/other biological/natural-born traits here" is just helping the capitalists.
Capitalists are happy to incite division based on anything, even ideology, this helps to keep the exploited divided and not a threat to their rule, which is what happens if people keep bickering about issues like the ones in question.
I'm saying this also as a reminder that capitalists will allow anti-capitalist ideology to exist, to a certain degree, because anti-capitalist can mean anything from Marxism to anarchism or worse. More time spent on debating the right path is less time spent on putting theory into practice, which is more time for capitalism to live on.
Division is what capitalists employ to break the unity of the proletariat, which is why they emphasize individualism and demonize collectivism. Capitalists want a monopoly on unity and democracy, a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie rather than the proletariat.
This is not to say that we should all forget the wrongdoings of certain people and groups and join up in fake-unity, but instead hold on to those thoughts, and keep in mind the fundamental enemy that is capitalism.
capitalists will allow anti-capitalist ideology to exist, to a certain degree
You see this with fascism, which is in many ways pretends to genuine anti-capitalism, and so ends up capturing a lot of well-meaning people whenever it takes power.
Fascism is just ultra-capitalism, and they loveeeeee capitalism, that's why capitalists allow it to exist.
Well, gringo doesn’t have to be American or white at all. It’s usage (at least among the Spanish-speakers I know) seems to be much more akin to the term foreigner. I would definitely see gringo as having a different meaning than “white” or a word referring to people in the USA like Yankee or Statesian.
I thought gringo meant someone who doesn't speak Spanish. Particularly if they can only speak English and are/act like a white person.
I've heard it used to broadly refer to people from western countries and also nth-gen Latin Americans who don't speak any Spanish. But that's it (from my experience).
I never heard gringo being used in meaning other than "white Usian" (or occasionally their also Usian PoC lackeys), but i'm not from there, so...
I’ve certainly heard Caucasian Europeans called gringos before. I think the usage of the word gringo (at least my understanding) is that it can be used in radically different ways dependent upon the region as well. (For example I have heard people from Argentina called that.) I am from the USA but at least I have heard it used that way here in the past. It is probably depended on the area though.
Caucasian Europeans
As in, Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis etc? /s
I think we should stop using nonsensical US terms.
it can be used in radically different ways dependent upon the region as well
I guess.
I can understand the practical realities of moderation in an anonymous online space in which such sentiments can quickly escalate to a personal level.
But we really need to kill racial ideology. I don’t think we should be that uppity about it.
We SHOULD be racist against “White people”!
Because it doesn’t exist in real life!
Why are we treating a colonial stratification of peoples into “races” and “ethnicities” at face value? Why are we offended like there is a global White genocide?
People in the global south don’t need white guilt. They don’t need self-flagellating whites on one hand and white supremacists on the other. They need “white people” to help tear down this globe-spanning economic and ideological system of stratification that has caused so much pain and suffering.
The hatred of white people is a hatred of this racist system of Capitalism that forcefully and continuously suffocates the entire world.
Mental colonization runs deep in postcolonial societies - and when the colonized lashes out, it is an expression of the humanity that has been denied. The least of my problems is when the oppressed uses the oppressor’s language to demonstrate the false justifications of the oppressor’s existence.
To phrase this another way to make it really on the nose: there are 1.5 billion Global Northerners, while there are 6.5 billion Global Southerners, and since might makes right, “white people” should really be the ones oppressed (lol).
So the "white" thing is interesting. White supremacists like to talk about "white culture" and "white identity," but in practice being "white" means having no culture and having no identity; whatever culture you originally possessed has been assimilated to the general American anti-culture of mass consumerism and social climbing. You have become the atomized individual, without family or communal ties, which is required by the capitalist machine. This evident in the way European immigrant to the US have historically not been considered "white" until their original culture is entirely lost; even the Germans, who are about European as European can be, were for a long time somewhat stigmatized as "Dutchmen."
In other words: people who are proud to be "white" are fighting for a cipher, something which, as you said doesn't really exist. Maybe in remote parts of Appalachia, say, there is something approaching a "white culture;" but even that is more a regional Southern thing than it is a "white" thing. White persons in (say) Washington or Seattle have little in common with it, and it seems to them quite foreign and "exotic."
My conclusion is that communists should stop using specifically usian terminology.
