this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2024
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To put it as plainly as possible, if the proponents of the U.S. settler-colonialism theory are correct, then there is no basis whatsoever upon which to build a multinational working class communist party in this country. Indeed, such a view sees the “settler working class” as instruments of colonialism, hostile to the interests of the colonized people, rather than viewing all working and oppressed people as natural allies in the struggle against imperialism, our mutual oppressor.

A shame, a sad sad shame. For anyone that's read settlers, or knows about the history of labor zionism, or prioritizes any kind of indigenous voice in their praxis, this is really bad. No peace for settlers! Settlers cannot lead the revolution! I hope we see an end to any respect given to this "settler colonialism is over" politic soon.

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[–] whoami@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Sorry, what is "yts" in this context?

[–] queermunist@lemmy.ml 25 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Fanon makes it clear: there's a place for settlers, but only if they subordinate themselves to the anticolonial struggle. Their job is to be the nice white face that distracts the police, not to lead the vanguard or tell it what to do or how to think.

I still have trouble with this, even though I know better. I'm a know-it-all by nature, it's so fucking hard to sit down and shut up when I think I know what's best. I need to learn that lesson.

[–] DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.ml 8 points 1 week ago

It is really hard to fight against the "main character syndrome" all of us white folk have been raised with our entire lives. Some simply cannot handle the idea that in a people's struggle they won't be the "main character" and will need to listen and support others, not lead them.

[–] porcupine@lemmygrad.ml 22 points 1 week ago (5 children)

I’ve never seen people who insist that the settler-colonial nature of the US disappeared at some point in the past account for intergenerational wealth transfer. Do these people think that folks with all the money, land, and power tend to be white because whites just coincidentally happened to be better at capitalism on the day America “ended segregation”?

So much of this shit stems from the need to center yourself as the main character of revolutionary struggle and work backwards from there. “If I’m personally not the proliest prole to ever prole then why should I bother?” is just a few steps removed from “what do you mean I probably won’t see the post-capitalist utopia in my lifetime? Why should I bother then?” My answer to both is that if “bothering” is just posting online, giving to local charities, and voting for Democrats, then I don’t care: dress it up in whatever narrative you like; the results are the same.

Marx didn’t start his analysis of class society by going “ok so there’s two classes and I’m obviously in the good one or I might as well just tear all this shit up”. I’m fairly sure Marx didn’t die believing he’d made a giant mistake because he didn’t personally overthrow capitalism in his lifetime.

[–] StalinistSteve@lemmygrad.ml 17 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

It's just another form of the settler move to innocence, there is no point in which the relation stopped. It's the same argument as "racism is over because civil rights!". Settlers never stop being settlers as long as they rely on a settler colonial government structure, nearly every company you will work for is going to be using underpaid black labor and on still stolen land. The natives are still here as much as these people want to forget that. Many black people are still practically enslaved. So why do white people get to say "It's over now I'm actually inherently revolutionary" even though their class historically has never led anything revolutionary and has been making the same argument even when settler relations were more obvious?

[–] porcupine@lemmygrad.ml 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

because liberal indoctrination trains people to see the world through the lens of individualism: "I'm white, and I don't think of myself as privileged, so white people as a group must not be privileged"; "Sure I own a few rental properties, but I don't think of myself as exploitative, so landlords as a group must not be exploiters."; "My friend's a cop, and I've never heard him say anything I thought was racist, so it's wrong to say that US policing is institutionally racist!"; "I worked hard enough to own my own small business (I earned it with nothing but determination and a loan from my parents), but don't you dare tell me that means I'm not working class! you're basically telling all of us (me and my friends) to not even bother doing revolution (posting!)"

some people can only understand class struggle through a moral lens. they see a class contradiction, recognize a "good" group and a "bad" group, then conclude that if they're not on the "good" side, then the taxonomy needs to change to accommodate that. it's difficult for some people to reconcile how they can belong to groups with "bad" class characteristics and personally do good in spite of that. I don't feel "bad" or "good" about being born white or having a settler background, but I know that any good I aim to do in this life will disempower those groups as a necessary prerequisite to empowering the vast majority of the world. I also know that the people leading those struggles must necessarily come from the other side of those class contradictions. education and expertise are invaluable assets to revolutionary struggle, but there's a reason that successful socialist revolutions haven't come from the most comfortable, educated elites using their superior knowledge, expertise, and influence convince everyone to give them power so they can benevolently distribute it to the grateful serfs.

[–] Sodium_nitride@lemmygrad.ml 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

some people can only understand class struggle through a moral lens.

A huge part of it is how liberals/conservatives criticise Marxism. The idea that classes equated to morality in Marxism and that marxists were obssessed with equality above all else was probably one of the biggest criticisms of Marxism I used to hear back when I was a liberal.

It was basically what kept me away from Marxism for a pretty long time. I used to think that Marxism was deeply rigid and moralistic so was put off by it. Now I'm beginning to understand that for a lot of people, rigid moralism is a selling point.

[–] StalinistSteve@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

A lot of people have vested interest in counter-revolutionary organizations as well. For some reason, despite a lack of accomplishments, any critical look at the material cause of their issues is met with aggression. Either the orgs are actually great and it's just those uppity black people that don't like it (weird that white people are saying this hmm) or native people were erased so completely their criticisms don't matter because the genociders just won.

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[–] amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml 13 points 1 week ago (11 children)

I read through it and I'm sort of confused what the sides of the argument even are here, apart from arguing over abstractions of terminology.

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[–] Idliketothinkimsmart@lemmygrad.ml 12 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Are there a lot of reactionary white people? Yes. Are there a lot of reactionary Americans in general, yes. That being said, I don't think it's really realistic to think that all Americans aren't capable of organizing for revolution. America is a settler colony, this is true, but it's already established and it's inhabitants don't stand as much to lose as the settlers in Israel if Israel collapsed tomorrow. I don't think the average American has as much affinity to the Idea of being "American" as much as the average Israeli settler does to being an "Israeli".

[–] Beat_da_Rich@lemmygrad.ml 9 points 1 week ago (2 children)

America is also heavily populated with those who were the descendents of enslaved people and those who were themselves the victims of US imperialism, whether indigenous or immigrant. While there is the US government and a dangerous faction of US white nationalists, the people themselves are a whole lot more complex than the Israeli populace. Time will tell when more things come to a head here, but there's more reason to be optimistic about the American working class than other countries in the Global North.

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[–] StalinistSteve@lemmygrad.ml 6 points 1 week ago (6 children)

It's not necessarily that they can't organize, I just think they've been trying to lead parties when the only really successful attempt at an ML communist party in America has been from the Black Panther Party and that's for good reason. I see what EFF has been doing in South Africa to move on from some of the failures of the SACP which feel very similar to those of the CPUSA and I think it ought to be learned from. There are quite a few white people in the EFF as well, it's just that they aren't the majority in the org.

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[–] Verenata@hexbear.net 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Uncritical support for black and indigenous comrades in the US!

People cracker posting in this thread lmao.

White people need to learn to cope with the uncomfortable reality of our colonialist history and whats required to fix that. People spitting their dummies out cos a non white person told them they can't trust them is very funny to me.

[–] King_Simp@lemmygrad.ml 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I think my main issue with your stance here is that it's based much more in absolutism than actual material conditions.

What does settler colonialism provide for its benefittors? Well, as they themselves will often say, land. I resent the term "reset" but settler colonialism is the closest humanity gets to actually turning back time in class society. It slows down the centralization of capitalism and allows for the creation of a large petite landowning population. Of course as well it makes room for large immigrant populations who are generally more friendly to being the exploited proletariat than either the conquered peoples or the settling population.

The problem is, how much does the American proletariat benefit from these things today? How easy is it for a American proletariat to gain land, how many resources remain completely untapped and can be exploited to increase the rate of profit? Etc.

This isn't to say that America and Americans don't benefit from the legacy of settler colonialism, but I agree with the CPUSA that it is not the primary contradiction. It certainly is an existing contradiction, but it isn't the primary one that determines the material conditions of the American proletariat.

[–] bunitor 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

[settler colonialism] slows down the centralization of capitalism and allows for the creation of a large petite landowning population

tf lmao

colonialism as whole is a necessary precondition to modern capitalism and imperialism. it is, in absolutely no way, a setback to capitalism and is in fact the only reason global capitalism and western dominance was possible at all

is this what yankee communists actually believe?

[–] King_Simp@lemmygrad.ml 9 points 1 week ago

I was writing this at like, 3 in the morning dude cut me some slack.

What I mean is that, essentially, class divides are lessened between the classes of settler colonialists. You can see this in Israel, for instance, in that white Israelis get to live in "socialist" kittibutzes (however you spell that infernal thing) while underpaid migrant workers and such do much of the work. Ergo it gives white Israelis much more economic and consequently political and social freedom compared to those oppressed people's.

In the same way imperialism uses super exploitation to create a labor aristocracy. Settler colonialism does something similar with land. If you were a poor prole in America, an option you had was to "go west young man." Land monopolization could be delayed in the western terroritories with the expulsion of natives, while the labor power could be bought cheaper from the waves of immigrants from Ireland, Italy, etc.

This isn't to say that it was "good" or avtually slowed down capitalism at all, in fact I'd argue, concurrently with you, that it did indeed speed up the adoption of capitalism. Its a complete mischaricterization of my response. Class conflict and monopolization still occurred, and mainly occurred in the states settled earliest that weren't dominated by slave owning plantations (like new York, Philadelphia, Ohio, Michigan, etc.) However i argue that it occurred to a lesser extent because of the lack of resource competition on the continent, along with the aforementioned boons of settlement and such. This is my general explanation for the lack of class consciousness for much of American history (combined with other factors of course). I use "reset" as a term in comparison to other states on the two continents. In Mexico and other Spanish colonized states, the encomienda system made lesser even the people considered Spanish who did not come from Spain. Of course they held a higher position than slaves and indigenous peoples, but the land owning class was quickly centralized (at least in comparison to the United states). And so class conflict was accelerated in these nations. I'd argue that you can even see this in the American south, where instead of Yeoman farmers you had the slave ran plantations which stifled the growth of capitalism in these areas.

Ergo, what I was arguing in my comment is that, while the legacy still exists, the American proletariat no longer profits primarily from settler colonialism. Rather I say they benefit mainly from imperialism, same as in Europe (i.e, France and Britain). So while I do think that white Americans definitely benefit from the latent boons, it is just as possible for white Americans to be as revolutionary as white Brits or French people in comparison to Israelis because the class contradictions between them and the Bourgeoisie are greater than the material differences between the white proletariat and the black, Latino, etc. population.

This is of course not ignoring the labor aristocracy created by imperialist super profits and such, and so them being revolutionary is unlikely, but not as impossible as, say, a 1900s Boer or modern Israeli.

[–] bubbalu@hexbear.net 9 points 1 week ago (2 children)

This type of defeatist third-worldism is even worse white man's burden. If genuinely nothing can be done in the imperial core, than all that remains is to wait for revolutionaries in the Global South to establish JDPON. Unless you are going to put up and join in with the 'legitimate proletariat' in the Global South, you are basically saying you are entitled to do the intellectual work of revolution while revolutionaries there do all the fighting and dying. This seems like a sublimated justification for inaction.

From 'A Critique of Maoist Reason' by J. Mouffawad-Paul:

What ultimately disqualifies [third-worldism] from correctly representing [revolutionary] reason is that it has no logical basis upon which to develop its theoretical insights. If there is no proletariat in the imperialist metropoles, and thus no proletarian movement, the first world third worldist cannot make a correct assessment of anything since it cannot practice the mass line.

I would be interested to see a single vibrant organization in the Global South that upholds this line. If you know of any, please share.

[–] Xiisadaddy@lemmygrad.ml 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Its a very all or nothing take too. Like lets assume that theres a 0% chance of any successful revolutionary action in the USA. There are still actions people in the USA can take. Things they can do to take the pressure off the global south. Every soldier in the states fighting rebels, every bullet, and bomb not made in the factory workers walked out of. Is one less weapon for the empire to use against the rest of the world.

[–] bubbalu@hexbear.net 4 points 1 week ago

But how is the ideology prerequisite to taking those actions going to form if all white workers are principally settlers? The point in the FRSO article isn't that racism doesn't exist or that racially/nationally oppressed people aren't exploited at a higher rate. It's that settler-colonialism is a specific stage of development where the dominant force in the economy is the primitive accumulation of indigenous wealth. Whereas now the "USA" is mainly an imperial power characterized by the export of capital. Calling the main economic paradigm of the "US" settler-colonialism is not an accurate or useful characterization.

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[–] DankZedong@lemmygrad.ml 7 points 1 week ago

Please behalve y'all or we will have to lock the thread

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