it appears I’ve opened the floodgates
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Why the fuck is everyone talking about Settlers lately? It’s not even a typical ML thing, like, wtf.
Lately?
There’s been “read settlers!” People since like 2008 dude.
I do think you should read settlers FYI, but the people who can’t shut up about it are really fucking obnoxious. Also I suspect half of them haven’t actually read it, if you grill them on details about the book they usually just end up calling you a “honky” or something. Plus they all talk like 14 year olds.
Yeah ok good dunk but you should read Settlers though.
Isn’t the point of settlers that white people can enver be revolutionaries in the US, because they decent from colonisers, and thus only black and brown people are the “true” proletariat?
That sounds very defeatist, and you’re giving up on the majority of people in the country. I just don’t believe that 73.3% of a country has petit-bourgeois characteristics.
These takes are basically a one way road to either throwing your hands up in the air and saying “well it’s all fucked and I can’t do shit”, or starting an underground ultraleft movement that ends up with half of the members in prison and the other half going back to step 1. This attitude had some utility back in the days of the Black Panthers etc, not so much now, and it is inherently limiting. Like, pls don’t buy into this shit because it is a surefire way to defeat, if not even an excuse for not doing shit for some people.
That book sounds pretty useless for a non-american person then.
Yeah, and I’m also interested in how people who buy in to the thesis of that book explain white revolutionaries in Latin-America (Ché Guevare, Fidel Castro etc). They also live in regions where the genocide of natives happened, so by their logic it would also make them part of the privileged strata in their countries.
If I understand the argument of the book, is not thay white people can’t be revolutionaries, it’s thay they can’t be working class. You can still be a class-traitor revolutionary though, which, many of the best have been. Looking at you, Zhou Enlai.
the argument of the book, is not thay white people can’t be revolutionaries, it’s thay they can’t be working class
Yeah, but that’s just silly. You’re a worker if you have no other means of supporting yourself besides selling your labour to a capitalist.
You don’t need to accept all the points or even the overall point of the book. The primary reason most of us want people to read and understand it in detail is to get people to focus on the American struggle as more of a strategic struggle as part of a wider whole. The very concept that revolution in the heartland of capitalism, the most valuable and important, the core of the beast, would ever be possible – it is extremely unrealistic. That however does not mean that struggle, pressure and anti-imperialist action within it is not incredibly useful in the wider worldwide fight.
Our victories – practically all of our victories – occur in the periphery, the so-called “third world”.
We want American leftists to have a greater understand of this, of the impact on the global struggle that their activities can have. Anti-imperialism is the single most important effort of the world today because anti-imperialist successes have genuinely resulted in the emancipation of countries from imperial rule. It has freed millions and millions of people.
You don’t have to accept the concept that revolution is never possible in the US. But you should take away from it the points comparing the minorities of America and that of the struggles of the periphery, and you should take away from it a far greater understand of the need to be anti-imperialist. Every country we free in the world is a tentacle of the beast cut off, if we cut off enough tentacles we may one day be able to kill the beast once and for all.
You don’t have to subscribe to this argument for third-worldism to understand it has incredible value. It is an argument that promotes the radical acceptance of anti-imperialism, this is why it is pushed so much.
First of all, thank you for actually engaging in a productive manner and not just calling everyone who disagrees with you an idiot, like in some of the other reactions I’ve got here.
I don’t live in the US, so for my personal engagement with politics it’s irrelevant, but it saddens me to see that comrades give up on 3 quarters of their population. That’s defeatism in your own country, and it weakens the support you can give to revolutionaries in other nations.
Anti-imperialism is the single most important effort of the world today because anti-imperialist successes have genuinely resulted in the emancipation of countries from imperial rule.
This is true if you’re in the third world but if you’re in the US and you only limit yourself to solidarity with different peoples, you won’t achieve anything. If you want to engage in a large scale struggle you’ll need to talk about the issues close to home to the proletariat that you’re organising. Why are they living in poverty? Why do their lives suck? And then organise on the basis of their suffering. You have to start from their lived experience (sorry if that phrase sounds liberal), that’s what all succesfull revolutionaries always have done.
My own party always starts with doing surveys in the working class neighbourhoods about what people think is the most important issue that affects them. Before we did that, we only had a couple of hundrerds of members and we were irrelevant in every sense of the word. Since we switched in our approach we steadily growed and now we’re a major political player.
I think that optimism is nice but ultimately unrealistic. We’ve seen several hundreds years so far of failure to achieve a revolution within the core, not a single one has succeeded. Not just the USA, all of them across Europe, Canada, Aus etc. This isn’t caused by a lack of effort and it’s not going to be resolved by simply trying all the same basic strategies (such as mass line) that have been tried.
I believe it is more realistic for communists to simply cripple the core in such a way that projects elsewhere in the world may flourish. Then the core can simply collapse as its power shrinks. It has demonstrated time and time again the ability to prevent the efforts of the left.
This is not a defeatist attitude, it is a “we should be focusing on a different strategy as the existing ones have proven uneffective” attitude.
Let’s accept the premisse: the imperial core has been too strong to allow a revolution. You’d still have to grapple with the fact that the relative power of the imperial core is shrinking in comparison with the rest of the world, which in turn would make it possibel again. (Accept if you’re talking about absolute power instead of relative, but then the amounts of places where it’s possible has been shrinking and there’s probably nowhere left.)
Well maybe then it would be better to read books that actually take that point of view and not the weird online third worldist POV. I’d say that the worst thing about the praxis of the people who buy into third-worldism is that they have a very counterproductive view of praxis. Like, do as many anti-imperialist marches with 5 people as you want, set up weird blog posts, whatever, you’re never gonna achieve anything if you don’t actually pay attention to class struggle that concerns a big chunk of the population, because no one will care, and if no one cares, then you will never manage to be relevant, and no one will care when the cops show up either. This viewpoint diminishes the value of broad class struggle in first world countries and particularly the US. This is bad. And it is evidenced by the fact that literally none of the people who have followed this advice by heart have ever managed to do anything remotely resembling even inching close to a minor victory (not talking about 3rd world people, just 1st world third worldists).
white people can enver be revolutionaries
Enver Hoxha
they decent from colonisers
It’s always funny when liberals pretend like “the indigenous genocide happened a long time ago, slavery is over!” Colonization is an ongoing project
Everyone that doesn’t agree with me is a liberal!
I’m a marxist who doesn’t agree with your point. I’m not an American, so in practice it doesn’t make any difference to what I do political, but yes, it saddens me to see that comrades give up on 3 quarters of their population. That’s defeatism in your own country, and it weakens the support you can give to revolutionaries in other nations.
