what a lack of dialectical materialism does to a mothafucka.

“Latent racism” as if this shit is an inherent property of humanity and not an instilled ideology, an “original sin”. The christian moralism and idealism reeks from here.

making absolutist moralist denouncements instead of trying to see the chain of events, the cause, and to fix it

when Liberals and Idealists make racism into a “true” platonic eternal evil, all they are doing is admitting they will never fix or solve the issue and don’t know how to. They are even admitting that it’s somewhat correct or at least has a basis in reality because it’s an inherent law of the universe apparently that we can never escape. Racism was invented on a specific date, not too long ago, and it can be abolished. Anything that was created by people can be destroyed by people too.

Age of Napoleon Bonus Episode that examines the intertwined origins of capitalism and racism

https://soundcloud.com/user-279595680/bonus-episode

this is idealist nonsense and is itself playing into/flirting with lending legitimacy to racist ideas.

It’s true. America is such a segregated society it is almost inevitable, so long as the construct of race exists. The anxiety causes even good-natured people to do awkward shit sometimes. But the elites will literally use anything they can to divide us up. Skin is one of the easiest, humans are such visual creatures and it’s the biggest organ, and we are segregated anyway. The construct of race works better than the elites could have even predicted though.

It’s true not just economics anything that impedes our ability to empathize with one another will create the possibility of this. Though I think for demogogues economic stress it’s the easiest to exploit and misdirect to protect from “levelling”. Also geographic segregation makes it much easier to “otherise” people etc etc regardless. Look at the Brits and the Irish and they are all pale af but Brits wanted the land so they created a construct to legitimize it.

Yes of course even for the wealthy they are going to invent whatever construct they need to justify their own position in their own head. The capital is so concentrated though so there aren’t too many of that kind.

Racism is not when white dudes with cowboy hats feel afraid of Black teens and call the cops on them.

I don’t know about you but that’s the most salient part of racism. Not sure I give a fuck about the metaphysical analysis when my literal skin color is being used to impale me with gunfire or make my conditions worse than oh, I don’t know, fucking yours or the average white dude on this here site.

Palestine and Nicaragua are literally the last thing on my mind when im living my day to day life, talking about these things while I live in despair might as well be a form of escapism

Admittedly, I hadn’t quite considered racism in the way you describe (though I’m aware of that take of discrimination + social power = racism).

I’d say I fall somewhere between you and @[email protected] in this regard, though I also feel that my own experiences with racism and racial alienation and how they have shaped my mentality in- well, just about everything, do also result in me having an immense bias I don’t know if I can entirely overcome. Logically I agree more with you and that aforementioned (racism requires power) take- mentally it is hard to do, FWIW I will admit that I myself similarly cannot fully divorce myself mentally from identity politics (though “imperial idpol” as I described in my previous comment was in response to the “white idpol” mentioned in the post- and I do think is absolutely a thing, though idpol as an… atomization of the proletariat and humanity in general does probably have an infinite number of takes that can be derived from the concept- imperial idpol being just a particularly vile and ubiquitous one across the imperial cores).

Since I @'ed Lussy though, figure I’d respond also here in saying-

Palestine and Nicaragua are literally the last thing on my mind when im living my day to day life, talking about these things while I live in despair might as well be a form of escapism

While not dunking on you for that take, I have to infinitely disagree with it. Solidarity is not escapism, and if we cannot hold onto it even in the worst despair then we are both truly doomed, and at least somewhat wretched. We can’t look away, particularly not if we want others to stand by us in turn.

I get what you’re saying, 100%, in regards to living in despair (I do as well)- and sometimes we need to just live disconnecting from these things for a while, because it isn’t healthy and we can’t survive like that while living with our own despair ourselves. But we can’t disconnect from it altogether, when it comes up (and it always does) we cannot keep silent and keep to ourselves.

Honestly on some level I feel if I were to do it- for those who do it as well- honestly, perhaps we would deserve it then. Surely we would have asked for it, by looking away from those in even further despair and facing literal industrial genocide or kill squads. Think about it and just what you said (though I don’t think the full meaning of it was intended)- is this what we want to be? Are we any better than those who are persecuting us for our race if we do so? Maybe it’s just me and my ex-Catholic mentality, but I reject it (the empire) in its entirety even when it is far away doing more horrifying things to others I don’t know in Palestine and Nicaragua, I would like to think I would reject it and would not look away or shy from it even if it kills me.

And like any social system, it exists within the broader context of our social structure, divided into its economic base and the superstructure, as part of the superstructure. And as we should all understand by now, the superstructure is shaped by the based

And the base also shapes the superstructure.

The implication of your brow beating is pretty clear. It’s to whip votes for the DNC, this shit always spikes right before elections around here

That is the entire point of this immigration, as Samir Amin states:

Successive waves of immigration also played a role in reinforcing American ideology. The immigrants were certainly not responsible for the poverty and oppression that lay behind their departure for the United States. But their emigration led them to give up collective struggle to change the shared conditions of their classes or groups in their native countries, and adopt instead the ideology of individual success in their adopted home.

Adopting such an ideology delayed the acquisition of class consciousness. Once it began to mature, this developing consciousness had to face a new wave of immigrants, resulting in renewed failure to achieve the requisite political consciousness. Simultaneously, this immigration encouraged the “communitarianization” of U.S. society. “Individual success” does not exclude inclusion in a community of origin, without which individual isolation might become insupportable. The reinforcement of this dimension of identity—which the U.S. system reclaims and encourages—is done to the detriment of class consciousness and the forming of citizens.

Communitarian ideologies cannot be a substitute for the absence of a socialist ideology in the working class. This is true even of the most radical of them, that of the black community.

high praise lol thank you it’s just one of my favourite things to call people out for on here (and happens all too often)

It’s not about “giving excuses.” It’s about scientifically analyzing and breaking down the reality of the world around you.

For example, I (hope) you’d never say “I’m not giving that thief an excuse for stealing!” You understand that society, under a capitalist economic system, drove that person through a variety of ways to desperation that led down that path. We all recognize that attributing actions like stealing to “human nature” is inherently a reactionary way of viewing humanity. People, for the most part, would much rather cooperate than compete.

Further, racism the way it exists in the modern world was essentially invented. No that doesn’t mean white Europeans in 1400 meeting darker skinned American continent natives didn’t immediately have whatever crazy thoughts about their nature and wonder “Are these even the same as me?” We know pretty absolutely that they did have racist thoughts, beliefs and of course actions.

However, the way racism evolved from that time period up to today follows a deliberate path set out by people who weren’t capitalists, correct, but also not far off in their views of humanity, human nature, exploitation of human labor from any capitalist that came along shortly after them (couple hundred years or so).

For example, without rewriting books from memory (trying not to anyway…) Catholics, the religion of the first Europeans in the Americas, at the time basically had a system that was Catholic-exclusive. Ie you could enslave a non-Catholic. But if someone converted to Catholicism they could no longer be enslaved. That’s what the Church laid out basically. Race was irrelevant on paper. A black Catholic or indigenous American Catholic was supposed to be treated the same as a white European Catholic.

Obviously that presents a problem if your name is Cortez or Columbus and you want to enslave and rob entire continents. So long story short, “race”-based (skin color-based) systems were soon implemented to override the “problem.” Instead of religion determining your worthiness of freedom and rights such as they exists society shifted to race, skin color, ethnicity being the determining factor. This was a great change for those involved in the slave trade and generally involved in exploiting labor. Now people were permanently locked out of personhood, legally, based on their skin color. A system the United States took its inevitable heights in the hundreds of years prior to the civil war. And clearly the remnants of that system of American Apartheid still exist.

Anyway, none of this gives excuse to anyone, then or now, for their actions and beliefs. But if you have a system that at its core is built upon exploitation of labor, as we do, and that exploitation of labor leads to horrific outcomes like extreme poverty causing starvation, homelessness, lack of medical care, etc. Meanwhile you have “opportunists” telling the exploited masses “Hey, you know why your life sucks? No, no… not your boss! It’s actually that transgender teenager in another state on the swim team! Isn’t that fucked up?! Aren’t you really angry about that?!” Mix in purposeful defunding and de-emphasis on education for decades and decades resulting in functionally illiterate adults, living in ever-shittier standards, with no material analysis or knowledge to guide them… and you get people freaking the fuck out, some cynical and some legitimate, about “transgender Mexicans” invading the US.

It’s a long path to get people to this point, and obviously they are, due to their actions and beliefs, an enemy of humanity currently. It’s still extremely important to always understand how people get to that point. And understand that society and economic systems organized by political forces drive to these reactionary tendencies. If we change the political system, we change the economic systems, we will see differences in how people act.

Capitalism doesn’t cause racism any more than it causes markets. But it takes advantage of both to maintain control over society.

you literally said “sometimes people are just racist”. do you not see how that is an idealist statement? do you understand the difference between materialism and idealism?

no, they don’t think they will be treated equally; it is an inherent part of colonialism (from which white supremacy arose) to condition a projection of a ‘reversed consequence’ if power is let go by making the colonized subject into a ‘dangerous’ and ‘unpredictable’ embodiment of ‘barbarity,’ against whom the colonizer is instead a ‘civilized’ and ‘rational’ embodiment of ‘good’ in dialectical antithesis to it. It is where the ideological dynamic of ‘civilizing the savages’ comes from in the material relation of colonialism and its white supremacist expression in history (how European colonialism unfolded and reified its relations). ie. there is an underlying understanding in the white supremacist consciousness that “they want to do to us what we did to them or worse, and will if we let them” (the implication being, we can never ‘let them,’ meaning never give up vigilance and power over them, securing the colonial relation).

It comes out very obviously from white liberals in conversations about decolonization when they are pressed that they are not to and can not insert themselves into deciding ‘how’ the colonized ‘should’ carry out decolonization. There is a deep primal fear in this projection which dialectically necessarily grows out of the material relations of colonialism and colonization; as for there to be a colonizer there must be a colonized — which inherently necessitates dehumanization and justifications for ‘why’ maintaining control and dominance over the colonized subject is “right,” “natural,” or “the only option.” Which then cyclically reinforces the material relations to the material base — land, resources, labor, means of production and subsistence and reproduction of labor. Cyclically because then every act of defiance and resistance against this colonial relationship by the colonized, in the perspective of this superstructural ethos, ‘justifies’ the claim of the ‘dangerousness’ and ‘barbarity’ of the colonized and so the colonizer’s need to ‘keep them under control’. As we saw it also with oct7 in Palestine. As we see in every uprising and riot of colonized people or major push against the structures and systems of their subjugation.

I recommend The Wretched of the Earth by Fanon for a good understanding of colonialism and decolonization and all its inter-relations.

that is economic stuff, it’s about people who are “cutting in line” for the american dream when many americans feel left behind. if those americans didn’t feel left behind (by 40 years of neoliberalism) they wouldn’t be looking for someone to blame and trumps BS wouldn’t work.

What’s the difference?

That includes them, alright!