I always feel like I'm hanging out in a punk/hardcore music scene (various anarchist groups, psl to some extent) or with lame improv nerds (dsa). I don't see either of these groups connecting with very many working class people. This is obviously a huge problem but (at least where I am) there is very little attempt to organize or recruit people making minimum wage, fast food workers, service industry, manual laborers etc. I mean shouldn't this be the main priority right now? I don't know I'm just venting but I'm baffled by how bad at organizing these groups are. Do they really just like being this cliquey group that is hard to get into and that's what really matters?
Seizing white wealth is fine and dandy. The problem is the "redistribution" part i.e. the complete lack thereof. You can criticise our ANC government along the same lines: yes, they ended apartheid and that is good. Obviously. But the idealism and ideology of the Mandela era rapidly decayed into sickening corruption that made a few political families extremely fucking rich while selling huge chunks of the state off to corporate interests and destroying every attempt to uplift the poor (see: state capture, Estina dairy farm, etc.)
The "liberation" both these movements have achieved is ultimately pretty fucking shallow since neither has done anything much to liberate people from the economic/material subjection they face (and actually made it worse in many cases). They didn't end an oppressive ruling class, they became it.
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But that's the thing: the Zimbabweans I was talking about aren't the white ones. All the white Zimbabweans I know are fine - they all went to good private schools in South Africa. It's primarily black Zimbabweans that got utterly fucked and are having to eke out a living doing menial work here while frequently being victims of xenophobic violence, due to the narrative that they're "stealing work from locals" (sound familiar?)
And here, during our very strict lockdown, the worst a white, middle class person could typically expect to deal with from the police was being asked firmly to go back inside if they got caught walking a dog, while black people were getting dragged out of their homes and beaten to death in the townships for supposedly having illegal alcohol. Sure the cops are black now, and the political and corporate interests they protect are largely black-owned, but they're still enforcing oppression of the black poor. Obviously that doesn't make the ANC equivalent to the apartheid government, or Mugabe's Zimbabwe equivalent to colonial Rhodesia, but I still don't think they deserve anything beyond the most critical support from the left. I also don't think it's class-essentialist to demand that decolonial movements work to free people from the material oppression of colonialism, rather than just changing who the small elite is that benefits from it.
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