Even if a communist can colloquially describe themselves as being on the left, there’s a distinction between communism and “the left.” This is implied right in the title of Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder. Whereas the left, a big tent term for a myriad of incompatible ideologies, aims merely to act as an opposition towards the present order for the sake of it, communists have a coherent vision for how to defeat the system: by advancing history’s development to the next stage. The left, because of its lack of commitment to that central Marxist goal, naturally takes on an opportunistic role. Because when you want only to build a movement as an end in itself, rather than use this movement as a means for defeating the system, you become nothing more than an actor who benefits from discontent without helping solve the problems behind that discontent.
This is untrue. The class matter is enforced via the race matter. It is literally impossible to solve the class matter without simultaneously solving the race matter. If you attempt to only solve the class matter, it will fail because the race matter will reproduce it. Race and class exist in a dialectic and they cannot be solved independently.
This critique is tone deaf and identifies you as a settler. You are focusing too much on class and not enough on race. You clearly haven’t read the mountains of analysis about how race is a vehicle of class war and how race and class interpermeate.
It’s necessarily both, because if it’s one or the other, it’s neither. If you don’t have a racial revolution, meaning a changing of the power holders, then what you imagine is a socialist revolution will be born as a fascist revolution. The analysis is fairly strong on this point. Read Sakai, read Tuck and Yang, read Crenshaw, read Fanon, read Freire.
This necessarily requires the dismantling of race. Race is not epiphenomenal. It didn’t just accidentally emerge from the state of production. The way that production was developed was through racism. The way that society is organized is through racism. The existence of counties, towns, cities, and states in the US is literally a structural replication of indigenous genocide. The existence of police forces in the US is literally a structural replication of black genocide. The solution must be a racial revolution - that is replacing the power structures of today with new power structures, and that must be proletarian AND colonized AND women, intersectionally. If it remains white and man and colonizer, then the resulting structure will incorporate the structures of racism which are literally inextricable from the structures of capitalism.
You are completely ignorant of race. Race’s don’t have unique needs. Races don’t have a base. They exist only in the superstructure. The only solution to racism is destroying race entirely, and the only people who can do that are the racialized. White people are unracialized - they stand outside of race by definition. Each racialized group has only one unique need, which is the dismantling of racism. Dismantling racism means destroying huge sections of law, huge swathes of the built environment, huge chunks of ideology. And all of these destructions result in harm to white people, which is why white people will become reactionary and use their positions of power to replicate oppression and ultimately reproduce capitalism. It’s why reading theory is so critical, because you don’t think you personally would ever do it, but when you analyze history through historical materialism you see it clear as day.
This is not true. Placing race above class is liberalism. I am incorporating an understanding of ethnic relations and the necessities of minority workers into my analysis, to promote this any further would place identity or race above class relations which again is liberalism.
One cannot be a settler when one has not settled or currently maintains the relations of settlerism. This is because after the Civil War, slave relations were abolished and the economy evolved to worker-owner relations under bourgeois democracy. I have already explained this, I’m unsure what you’ve missed on this.
"It’s necessarily both, because if it’s one or the other, it’s neither. If you don’t have a racial revolution, meaning a changing of the power holders, then what you imagine is a socialist revolution will be born as a fascist revolution. "
We are saying the same things however you misunderstand “racial revolution”, this would be a fascist revolution.
“The way that production was developed was through racism” No, you have it reversed. Superstructure (such as apartheid or other racist laws) serves to reinforce the base (economic relation to the means of production). The system creates racists, racists did not create a racist system.
Back in slavery times, the mode of production was crafted to serve the needs of humanity. A hierarchy was crafted and so were “lessers”. This became racist the same way imperialism does - one values their herd, their family, their nation over those of whom they do not share an intimate relation with. These modes of production necessitate expansion and as is demonstrated by imperialism today, and so they necessitate intimate and foreign to be compared within the minds of those within said system. “White” people were not born racist, the material conditions following the dialectic process of development created the idea of racism as well as created racists.
“The solution must be a racial revolution - that is replacing the power structures of today with new power structures, and that must be proletarian AND colonized AND women, intersectionally. If it remains white and man and colonizer, then the resulting structure will incorporate the structures of racism which are literally inextricable from the structures of capitalism.”
We are Marxists, we are not liberals. We promote and select leaders based on merit, not based on their identity or racial terms. This is because socialism itself is a system which promotes and is made of merit. Capitalism is a system which superfluously promotes various products to reach an ideal profit and then collapse and repeat the process (such as white supremacy, black supremacy, LGBT supremacy one day, etc…). Of course we must incorporate the needs of minority workers, however this should be done as it was in the Soviet Union, through ethnic councils whose membership consistency and purpose is to address the needs of minority workers. Of course all laws must be made with consideration to the needs of minority workers as well, my issue is with the idea of appointing someone based on their ethnicity, sex, gender, etc… and not on their merit.
And you really must drop the term “racial revolution”, it implies a revolution based solely on race alone, of which you clearly do not aim for.
“You are completely ignorant of race. Race’s don’t have unique needs. Races don’t have a base. They exist only in the superstructure.”
…You have critiqued yourself while referring to me, you do realize this don’t you?
“And all of these destructions result in harm to white people,”
I believe we’ve found the root cause of our disagreement. Show me the laws or actions which treating “black” Americans worse than they treat “whites” makes a net positive for “whites”. This a false paradigm following a zero sum game. The bourgeois do not treat “white” Americans better because they treat “black” Americans worse, they simply treat “black” Americans worse however we are all living in hell as workers (and not labor aristocrats). They are more oppressed however this does not mean that “white” workers are not oppressed, this is exactly what the democratic party emphasizes, that only minorities in America are oppressed and not workers. This is IDPOL. This is liberalism selling us minority supremacy, another product to profit from (check all of the blm gear and rainbow merch floating around).
Marxists reject this analysis of reality (individualism) and this methodology of action which is a critique which is safe for the power relations: “We simply need more minorities in power and all is well”. I believe you understand the necessity for the end to reflect both economic and cultural evolution from revolution, however some of the specific details are still being viewed through a liberal framework.
You lack reading comprehension. At no point did I say race is above class. In fact, I explicitly said that class is enforced via race. Literally, race is a mechanism by which class warfare is prosecuted. The idea that you can solve class first and then racism completely misunderstands the role race plays in society.
Reducing racism to ethnic relations and minority needs it to completely ignore racism entirely. If this is the entirety of your understanding and commitment, you are incapable of establishing a sustainable revolutionary movement. You fail to understand the difference between race and ethnicity, the difference between racism and ethnic relations, and the difference between the needs of minority workers and the oppression of the global majority.
Let’s take that as a given. The existence of municipalities in all former and current European colonies is literally the maintenance of setterism. The consumption of fresh water extracted from indigenous lands in the maintenance of settlerism. The consumption of petroleum to fuel your vehicles so you can get to work is the maintenance of settlerism. Working in factories that rely on extraction of natural resources from unceded territory from indigenous nations is the maintenance of settlerism.
What I missed is your level of ignorance. Slave relations were NOT abolished. First of all, slave relations were maintained through indentured servitude, through sharecropping, through prison slavery, and through indigenous boarding schools. Second, under Jim Crow and under much of the current legal regime, black workers were used explicitly to appease white workers, by assigning to black workers the most abusive and lowest paying jobs so that white workers wouldn’t revolt. This still continues to this day, where the historically marginalized both in the US and around the globe are sacrificed to the machine of capitalism in order to appease the white worker. Reversing this course would immediately through white workers into revolt and the fascist populists have been repeating the propaganda that the problem is black and brown bodies harming the economy, and a large portion of the North Atlantic believe this to be the case. Reversing this course will cause immediate violent reaction of white people against brown people, because melanated people working shit jobs and dying early is literally part of the system that reproduces the lives of the white labor aristocracy.
Calling national liberation of black and brown peoples “fascism” is the most reactionary take I’ve seen from someone who considers themselves a communist. This is usually a position I see from white supremacists. You are woefully on the wrong side of history, comrade.
Perhaps you don’t understand what racism is. The System of Racism created racist people. The System of Racism was created by the bourgeoisie to implement class warfare and extraction of surplus value. The entire system of production in the US was built on the backs of slaves. Without slaves, the system of production would have been different. Without Racism, slavery would be untenable. Racism and Slavery and Production INTERPERMEATE. You cannot abolish capitalism and then demand racial reckoning take a back seat on the theory that eventually racism will go away. In order to abolish capitalism you must ALSO abolish the System of Racism, and when black and indigenous MLs write about this, that means national self-determination inline with Lenin’s theory.
Jesus christ. No. Stop. Racism is not about familial ties. It’s not an individual problem. You are the liberal here. You think racism is what people feel in their hearts. Racism is literally a legal system whereby throwing black people off a ship in the middle of the Atlantic was not considered murder but was instead considered destruction of property! Literally! Argued in court that legally black people aren’t people and therefore cannot be murdered! It has nothing to do with individual beliefs about people being lesser. It has everything to do with a system of extraction that reifies profit extraction from the bodies of workers to the degree that it literally consumes the bodies of the workers. The only way it could get to this level was to create a system that ensured one part of the working class would not be consumed and another part of the working class would, so race is enshrined in law and then rationalized through the university system. It has nothing to do with people valuing their family over others.
RACISM CREATED RACISTS
This is so insultingly dismissive. I’m not talking about selecting a leader, I’m talking about theory. It is impossible to establish a sustainable communist society within a settler colony where the entirety of that colony is predicated on the continued oppression, genocide, rape, pillage, and extraction from subjugated peoples. Lenin’s theory on this is quite well supported. National self-direction is critical to the establishment of sustainable communism. And that means indigenous and black national self-determination on Turtle Island, free from the dominance by the settler colonial state that rules them.
Yo, what the fuck? You think socialism is a meritocracy? Ok, now I know you’re a lost cause.
They’re not minority workers. They literally constitute the global majority. White Europeans are the global minority. So long as you keep thinking that white people are the majority, you are going to continue to have incorrect understand of the world and how it works and therefore will be incapable of formulating correct theory.
What are you talking about? This is the least of what the USSR did. They established completely autonomous nation-states for national populations and gave them autonomy over their nation and established the constitutional right for them to secede at any time without penalty. You completely skip over the national question entirely with your liberal understanding of racism. You don’t even seem to understand the difference between race and ethnicity.
This is the most white European thing I’ve heard on Lemmy.
I don’t think you understand what revolution is. Revolution means a replacement of existing power structures. There absolutely must be a racial revolution. There cannot be a socialist revolution without a racial revolution. They must be the same thing, and that means that the leaders of that ONE revolution must not consist entirely of white European men attempting to maintain the integrity of their settler colonial state on the premise that eventually everyone will be assimilated into it without oppression. Assimilation into white settler states is genocide.
Oh god. No, comrade, I am not critiquing myself. You are simply trapped in your false beliefs and that is preventing you from understanding the point. The superstructure itself manifests racism, not the base. The national borders, the municipalities, the system of courts, the rights to water, the rights to land use, the treaties, the allocation of resources, there are all superstructural and they all manifest racism. To abolish race requires the abolition of this superstructure, and that means entire cities become unlivable immediately. It means displacing millions of settlers. It means giving sovereignty to nations that have been denied sovereignty by that very state. We’re not talking about meeting the needs of racialized groups, we’re talking about abolish race.
Seriously? Go read about water rights. Go read about land distribution. Go read about national parks. Go read about adoption laws. Go read about red lining. Go read anything even remotely rigorous about reparations. I mean, it’s all around you. You’re swimming in it. White people live in places explicitly because they were stolen by white people from melanated people. White people rely on international subjugation to ensure the flow of cheap goods. The US and Europe have no ability to supply themselves with necessary goods anymore, they rely entirely on subjugating labor internationally. They rely entirely on white ownership of resources that exist in the homes of non-white people, both domestically and abroad. The very concept of the Grand Canyon National Park is “we had to get rid of all these indigenous people so you could enjoy this park”. The drought in Lake Mead and Lake Powell are requiring EVERYONE who is party to the water rights treaty to reduce consumption by 15%. But those lakes represents theft of water from indigenous communities that were displaced entirely and subjugated, and the resulting concentration camps where they live today barely use any water and their portion is already vanishingly small, by treaty, but now because white people water their lawns, indigenous people have to go without more water.
It’s literally happening every single day thousands of times a day that the superstructure of white society is inextricably interlaced with racial oppression. Go fix your ignorance.
This is what we refer to as White Fragility. You refuse to see how you play the role of an oppressor in society while you simultaneously refuse to even listen or read works from those people who have been organizing against oppression for over a century.
We’re not playing oppression olympics. We’re engaging in theory. The white working class is exploited. They are also enlisted by the bourgeoisie into supporting the exploitation of racialized peoples. The ruling class has organized society for 600 years to align the interests of white workers against the interests of racialized workers. They have done through numerous institutions, one of the largest being - settler colonialism, wherein the reproduction of white worker society is predicated on the continued oppression of racialized peoples.
The fact that you think I’m espousing this line, after multiple engagements with you, means you have a blindspot that prevents you from seeing the actual arguments at play here. You are arguing with ghosts in your own head.
You haven’t even managed to approach my argument, you have no standing to levy this critique. You haven’t bothered to read anything that would disagree with you. Your position is one of ignorance, reductionism, and deliberate and willful dismissal of the actual work of the oppressed, including revolutionary MLs who have written extensively on this.