Liberalism

An interesting take I’ve seen from some marxists is the idea that “race is class”. It more or less functions as its own class system. Gender is also a kind of class. It gets close to the idea of intersectionality but hasn’t been co-opted to be toothless yet.

I hope for my ashes to be mixed with the soil of the land my ancestors were stolen to build.

I would hope that socialists would at least be aware enough of the culture to be open to reparations.

Bigots are occasionally good at multitasking.

Wasn’t he rumored to be softening to legalization during his campaign? Funny how that turned out.

Imagine thinking the people you buy your computers from wouldn’t be able to engineer them too.

Almost one in four of the respondents – equivalent to more than 60 million Americans – could conceive of violence being justified “to preserve an American way of life based on western European traditions”.

The hoi4 nerds have entered real life.

I agree in that I think bourgeoisification is a bad term to use when Labor Aristocracy is a perfectly good term for the same idea. But I think some context is needed:

• America has 20 million millionaires.
• 50% of Retiring Americans have at least $100,000 in savings, and depend heavily on investments to supplement their income.
• 16% of millenials have at least $100,000 in savings.
• 25% of Americans make over $100,000 per year, which puts them in the class of people who can enjoy owning a boat, buy a “second property”, or pay off their debts in a few years without too much hassle. The system is working well enough for these people.

Obviously there is a huge rift between these people and the 60% with less than $1000 in savings. I’m not going to deny that they’re exploited, as I’ve said before. But they’re essentially fighting the 30-40% with savings and financial planning. The top half of the country lives vastly different lives from the bottom half. It doesn’t know what a food bank is and thinks most people using food stamps are exploiting taxpayers. They think they should pay for their own healthcare so they don’t have to share it with the dirty poors. They think home ownership is just a matter of personal effort. And they fight tooth and nail to pay less taxes than the bottom 50%. They think they owe nothing to society and society owes nothing to them, and the richest among them propagandize the bottom 50% into believing all the same things.

I think Engels was correct in saying that speculation and investment banking need to completely collapse before most Americans are willing to look at the situation honestly. Until then, PoC seem to be the most likely to understand how bad the situation is, and I’ve seen them dunk on white libs. Downwardly mobile white people come at a close second place, but it seems like only a small percentage are capable of self-crit. Most seem to prefer the air of superiority their party ideology gives them.

This convo is happening in two places, so I’m going to focus on the other one, except for two points:

The basic premise of Gramsci’s theory on Hegemony is that colonial powers bribe the proletariat and use cultural norms to convince their own citizens to consent to their own oppression. Yes, white proletarians are oppressed, that is not in question. What is in question is their ability to recognize and respond to this in a way that is not simply reaction.

As far as the Lenin thing, Lenin actually had a lot of faith (at least in some of his speeches) that the growing labor movement in the US would succeed in bringing about the Revolution if it could align itself with the Comintern. Books like Settlers and Hammer and Hoe go over in detail how American labor movements ran into friction with local populations and within the American Left itself, ultimately weakening itself to the point that capitulation was inevitable at the start of the Cold War. A more robust party could have weathered the storm. But American socialists simultaneously couldn’t prevent factionalism and outright racism from splitting the movement, and consistently received pushback from a liberal population that was resistant to change, particularly during the era when FDR’s reforms improved material conditions for tradesmen and landowning farmers.

Tbh, the problem is just that white people are little kids who can’t handle criticism. Sakai ends his book by saying:

The thesis we have advanced about the settleristic and non-proletarian nature of the U.S. oppressor nation is a historic truth, and thereby a key to leading the concrete struggles of today. Self-reliance and building mass institutions and movements of a specific national character, under the leadership of a communist party, are absolute necessities for the oppressed. Without these there can be no national liberation. This thesis is not “anti-white” or “racialist” or “narrow nationalism.” Rather, it is the advocates of oppressor nation hegemony over all struggles of the masses that are promoting the narrowest of nationalisms — that of the U.S. settler nation. When we say that the principal characteristic of imperialism is parasitism, we are also saying that the principal characteristic of settler trade unionism is parasitism, and that the principal characteristic of settler radicalism is parasitism.

Every nation and people has its own contribution to make to the world revolution. This is true for all of us, and obviously for Euro-Amerikans as well. But this is another discussion, one that can only really take place in the context of breaking up the U.S. Empire and ending the U.S. oppressor nation.

He EXPLICITLY states that his goal is using historical materialism to understand the failure of American communism, but readers don’t like what history says about them and close their ears. This is why I personally don’t have faith in them. But Sakai’s thesis is not mine. He wants people to break the colonial state, and to do that you’re going to need white people to become disillusioned and see it for what it is.

If you think that that disillusionment is anti-white, then you’re basically admitting that white people and imperialism cannot be separated, and that you have to advocate keeping colonialism alive to avoid hurting their feelings.

If white people in the US were capable of revolution, they wouldn’t have disappointed Lenin.

If you think I’m wrong, actually read the book and note its 477 citations mostly cited from the era that Lenin and Stalin worked. Read Gramsci, whose works attempted to diagnose the failure of communism in fascist Italy. Heck, read my last set of comments on this very topic about the creation of racism in the US as a method of insulating the bourgeoise class (which it still does!).

Have you ever spoken with a black american? Have you had even a taste of the lives they live and the struggle of fighting state-sanctioned violence every single day? Do you know how many white people are apathetic at best and complicit at worst to this issue? Do you think a people who can be so oblivious and complacent to the suffering of those who often live within a few blocks of them have what it takes to form an internationalist and anti-racist coalition?

I don’t. I hear the police sirens blare every 30 minutes. I’ve seen little kids and teenagers get shot, and the police tape, and the crying neighbors. I’ve worked with immigrants, ex-cons, and just regular ass single women with kids whose lives are in the hands of apathetic teams of white managers and office drones. You don’t get to tell people that the things they see with their very own eyes aren’t reality. White people in the US don’t give a fuck about anyone but themselves.

Edit: @OP I’m not mad at you, I hit reply to the wrong post. 🙃

Tbh, I think the crux of his analysis, which mirrors mine, is that the US can be fixed BUT it will require a lot of white people to get their heads out of their asses and stop acting like self-centered labor aristocrats. In the absence of some kind of mass epiphany of racial solidarity, the US is going to be plunged into straight fascism before things get better. We’re watching it happen right now.

What are you even talking about? Sakai has anti-imperial aims like every other communist and sprinkles Lenin quotes throughout his work. It is not un-marxist to believe that the United States cannot be rehabilitated. Lenin was right about the class contradictions in the US but he was objectively wrong in his optimism of the American working class given that western socialism failed where socialism in the global south didn’t.

The 32nd Annual Convention of the American Federation of Labour, as the association of trade unions is called, has come to a close in Rochester. Alongside the rapidly growing Socialist Party, this association is a living relic of the past: of the old craft-union, liberal-bourgeois traditions that hang full weight over America’s working-class aristocracy.

…

For, strange as it may seem, in capitalist society even the working class can carry on a bourgeois policy, if it forgets about its emancipatory aims, puts up with wage-slavery and confines itself to seeking alliances now with one bourgeois party, now with another, for the sake of imaginary “improvements” in its indentured condition.

The principal historical cause of the particular prominence and (temporary) strength of bourgeois labour policy in Britain and America is the long-standing political liberty and the exceptionally favourable conditions, in comparison with other countries, for the deep-going and widespread development of capitalism. These conditions have tended to produce within the working class an aristocracy that has trailed behind the bourgeoisie, betraying its own class.

https://www.marxists.org/archive//lenin/works/1912/dec/07.htm

Marx and Engels did not reconcile themselves to it on this ground; they exposed it. They did not forget, firstly, that the trade union organisations directly embraced a minority of the proletariat.

…

Neither we nor anyone else can calculate precisely what portion of the proletariat is following and will follow the social-chauvinists and opportunists. This will be revealed only by the struggle, it will be definitely decided only by the socialist revolution. But we know for certain that the “defenders of the fatherland” in the imperialist war represent only a minority. And it is therefore our duty, if we wish to remain socialists to go down lower and deeper, to the real masses; this is the whole meaning and the whole purport of the struggle against opportunism. By exposing the fact that the opportunists and social-chauvinists are in reality betraying and selling the interests of the masses, that they are defending the temporary privileges of a minority of the workers, that they are the vehicles of bourgeois ideas and influences, that they are really allies and agents of the bourgeoisie, we teach the masses to appreciate their true political interests, to fight for socialism and for the revolution through all the long and painful vicissitudes of imperialist wars and imperialist armistices.

The only Marxist line in the world labour movement is to explain to the masses the inevitability and necessity of breaking with opportunism, to educate them for revolution by waging a relentless struggle against opportunism, to utilise the experience of the war to expose, not conceal, the utter vileness of national-liberal labour politics.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/oct/x01.htm

Compare with Sakai, who sounds almost exactly like Lenin but with a little Gramscian twist to account for the failures of 20th century western socialism:

The Euro-Amerikan “left” has completely mystified the question of class consciousness. They see in every labor strike, in the slightest twitch for reform, examples of proletarianism. Some “socialist scholars” (a self-awarded title, to be sure) conduct almost anthropological expeditions into the settler masses, seeing in every remembered folk song or cultural nuance some profound but hidden nuggets of working class consciousness. Others, who have spent years as working class “experts,” find proletarian vision in every joke about the bosses told during coffee breaks. This is not politics, whatever else it may be.

There is nothing mystical, elusive or hidden about real working class consciousness. It is the political awareness that the exploiting class and its state must be fought, that the laboring masses of the world have unity in their need for socialism. The Red Army is class consciousness. An action for higher wages or better working conditions need not embody any real class consciousness whatsoever. Narrow self-interest is not the same as consciousness of class interests. “More for me” is not the same slogan as “liberate humanity.”

Lenin wrote on this: “Only when the individual worker realizes that he is a member of the entire working class, only when he recognizes the fact that his petty day-to-day struggle against individual employers and individual government officials is a struggle against the entire bourgeoisie and the entire government, does his struggle become a class struggle.”

…

This thesis is not “anti-white” or “racialist” or “narrow nationalism.” Rather, it is the advocates of oppressor nation hegemony over all struggles of the masses that are promoting the narrowest of nationalisms — that of the U.S. settler nation. When we say that the principal characteristic of imperialism is parasitism, we are also saying that the principal characteristic of settler trade unionism is parasitism, and that the principal characteristic of settler radicalism is parasitism.

Every nation and people has its own contribution to make to the world revolution. This is true for all of us, and obviously for Euro-Amerikans as well. But this is another discussion, one that can only really take place in the context of breaking up the U.S. Empire and ending the U.S. oppressor nation.

There is no place yet in America for a third party, I believe. The divergence of interests even in the same class group is so great in that tremendous area that wholly different groups and interests are represented in each of the two big parties, depending on the locality, and almost each particular section of the possessing class has its representatives in each of the two parties to a very large degree, though today big industry forms the core of the Republicans on the whole, just as the big landowners of the South form that of the Democrats. The apparent haphazardness of this jumbling together is what provides the splendid soil for the corruption and the plundering of the government that flourish there so beautifully. Only when the land — the public lands — is completely in the hands of the speculators, and settlement on the land thus becomes more and more difficult or falls prey to gouging — only then, I think, will the time come, with peaceful development, for a third party. Land is the basis of speculation, and the American speculative mania and speculative opportunity are the chief levers that hold the native-born worker in bondage to the bourgeoisie. Only when there is a generation of native-born workers that cannot expect anything from speculation any more will we have a solid foothold in America. But, of course, who can count on peaceful development in America! There are economic jumps over there, like the political ones in France — to be sure, they produce the same momentary retrogressions.

The small farmer and the petty bourgeois will hardly ever succeed in forming a strong party; they consist of elements that change too rapidly — the farmer is often a migratory farmer, farming two, three, and four farms in succession in different states and territories, immigration and bankruptcy promote the change in personnel, and economic dependence upon the creditor also hampers independence — but to make up for it they are a splendid element for politicians, who speculate on their discontent in order to sell them out to one of the big parties afterward.

The tenacity of the Yankees, who are even rehashing the Greenback humbug, is a result of their theoretical backwardness and their Anglo-Saxon contempt for all theory. They are punished for this by a superstitious belief in every philosophical and economic absurdity, by religious sectarianism, and by idiotic economic experiments, out of which, however, certain bourgeois cliques profit.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1892/letters/92_01_06.htm

I think maybe you should chill and consider why you’ve made me into a caricature in your head. You’re punching at shadows.

Maupin and Haz are American and everything about them reeks of American exceptionalism. Why would you even be into that? America is a garbage country.

The problem with Haz and Maupin is that they let their love of Great Men™ eschew internationalist, pro-indigenous, racial, and lower-class solidarity. It’s really obvious they have an ideological preference for the middle class, which gives them money-backed visibility but very little real proletarian power. All AES states leveraged serfs/lumpenproles as the bulk of their war economies and soldiers. It doesn’t matter how good the appeals to authority are if you fundamentally cannot grasp the social and numerical importance of people living on the boundary between base and superstructure.

Also Haz is an insecure little incel.

Exactly, you have to stay grounded in material reality. Capitalism has had 300 years to get its shit together. Why do our everyday lives suck? Show them drone flyover videos or walkthroughs of Chengdu. Tell them that Vietnam legalized social transition for transpeople and has a land grant program for indigenous people. A better world is already becoming possible right now without reaching for utopianism.

Is this an argument for neolib governments? Lmao. As long as no hammer and sickle it’s fine.

I genuinely had no idea Chomsky was an anarchist. I thought he was one of those postmodern post-marxists who write takedowns of Stalin in university libraries.