• relay@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    Yes this article seems to summarize the Midwestern Marx group’s schtik.

    Tactically for the movement as a whole it is good to have Americans be more anti imperialist and unionizing in order to undermine the power of empire and funnel people to a more marxist lenninist way of thinking. I don’t think they want the disaster of unions for whites.

    MWM doesn’t say much about marginalized people other than say that they are not revolutionary subjects for their minority status, but by their status as workers. They are very much in favor of AES countries. There is the linguistic criticism that Americans can be proud of the historical workers struggles without opposing their American identity. It seems that it is a linguistic strategy to not trigger barriers to conversion.

    Is the criticism that they post very long winded stuff and still don’t mention how the secondary contradictions of ablism, anti LGBTQ, and white supremecy are superstructural elements that support the base of capitalism?

    From an ideological funnel perspective I don’t think that they are bad, but useful to the socialist cause. If there were an actual party with power and they were doing what they are doing now, I’d say that they serve the forces of reaction because their kind of discourse isn’t necessary when a communist party with effective power exists. In that situation that party would need to push against our old superstructure even further with a cultural revolution.

    For those that can be radicalized with compassion, use one kind of rhetoric. For those that can be radicalized with self interest use another. The core of the party must though be those that are compassionate either initially or eventually.

    It is sus platforming Haz or Maupin though.

    Unless you are a third worldist that thinks that the USA needs to be militarily destroyed by the periphery nations, I don’t think they are inherently opposed to the building of the socialist movement in the United States. Tell me where I am wrong.

    • Kaffe@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      The US will be destroyed by the fourth worlders. I’ve posted elsewhere in this thread why American Communists absolutely need to be decolonial revolutionaries. MWM meeting white supremacists halfway leads them away from the decolonial movement, let’s them keep their reactionary views, and puts them into opposition to our liberation. Instead of platforming indigenous and Black revolutionary voices they party with white supremacists like Haz and Hinkle.

      • relay@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        Supporting indigenous people’s liberation is certainly morally correct. The way about linguistically supporting it must appeal to the interests of the people you are trying to convince though. We can talk about how we can use indigenous knowledge to have a healthier relationship with the land and live happier and healthier lives. We can utilize the treaties as a means to an end to give rental properties on their land back to the tribes as a means to undo the exploititative rent of corporations like black rock.

        What does being “destroyed by fourth worlders” mean exactly? They are locked out of power to destroy the country without help from colonizers thus proclaiming such a strategy is immaterial.

        If we see all workers as workers regardless of background and organize in such a manner, but listen to the marginalized about the ways that the capitalist superstructure is perpetuated within our new organizations in order to take actions to meet their needs.

        Who they platform is sus though.

        I think the core issue is that the working class in the USA is having trouble conceptualizing how to actually achieve power.

        • cucumovirus@lemmygrad.ml
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          1 year ago

          The thing is that the majority of the working class in the US and the white sections of the working class in particular simply aren’t revolutionary classes due to their material conditions. They all benefit from imperialist superprofits from abroad (not just by higher wages but also by cheap goods, commodities, services, and things like entertainment, etc.) and the whites also benefit from the greater exploitation and oppression of minorities within the US. Not all workers in the US are the same, some are much more oppressed than others. These are key points to analyze when considering the revolutionary potential in any country.

          You can see examples in the US historically of large sections of white workers being opposed to or at best indifferent towards indigenous or black revolutionary liberation movements. These examples exist because of the material conditions causing differences in interests between these groups. The white settler population will not give up its position without significant pressure both internal and external. Not necessarily military defeat (although that’s a likely road due to current imperialist politics) but certainly economically by breaking enough of the chains of imperialism externally (by the third world liberating itself) causing more exploitation internally which will push larger sections of the population to revolutionary action the first among which will again be the minorities.

          • relay@lemmygrad.ml
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            1 year ago

            When the whites exclude marginalized people from unions, that always makes the unions less effective. Yes I agree. China liberating the the third world will make things worse for people in the first world and I suspect that will increase both the revolutionary potential and the forces of reaction. The previously colonized world sanctioning the USA would be an effective tactic for bringing a socialist world into being.

            • Kaffe@lemmygrad.ml
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              1 year ago

              How do you expect a bourgeoisie with this many nukes to allow that to happen? I’ve pointed out in this thread the US increasing internal Imperialism to massively expand oil production to maintain dollar imperialism. It’s frankly a Trot opinion to think America will die from external causes. Block America’s access to internal wealth and you can choke Imperialism from within. I don’t know how much protesting Ukraine aid is gonna hurt Imperialism, but the no DAPL protests certainly did. The Cop City protests prevent international states from studying urban occupation.

              Our Bourgeoisie thinks they can survive a nuclear war. They can’t survive one if we are sieging their neighborhoods. Necessarily we owe it to the world to end America, we don’t have the privilege to sit it out.

              You mention that America’s imperialist contradictions will increase revolutionary potential and reaction. Which direction do you think will work best in our favor? Bending to reaction at the expense of the colonized peoples, or guiding them towards the decolonial movement?

              • relay@lemmygrad.ml
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                1 year ago

                External factors will contribute to the fall of western capital, not the only factor. Domestically building a means to support people in a socialist manner when that system falls is an important goal. Protesting the movements of capital are defensive but necessary.

                I guess my point is that we should focus our energy on building socialism rather than destroying capitalism. I also think that the decolonization should be done in a socialist manner, not in the liberal essentialist manner.

                • Kaffe@lemmygrad.ml
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                  1 year ago

                  What Liberalism advocates Decolonization at all. Liberal Decolonization is the propertied nation giving nominal rights to their colonies, i.e. neo-colonialism. Any system that gives the settlers political or economic supremacy is going to maintain settler Colonialism.

                  I’m uninterested in what the settlers deem socialist, because they don’t even understand their own settler relationship to the colonized peoples. They are overwhelmingly illiterate in the history of how we became colonized.

                  Building socialism necessarily includes black and indigenous sovereignty, not something given to us afterwards. It is the path towards Socialism. Our Bourgeoisie is nothing without their ongoing colonization of Indigenous land and their comprador settler workers who labor those resources. Ideally the American workers’ movements wake up to this contradiction and exercises it, otherwise the fight against Colonialism will take other, less ideal forms.

                  • relay@lemmygrad.ml
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                    1 year ago

                    I don’t dispute that black and indigenous people should fight for their rights. I’d be in favor of minority groups politically being able to stonewall any proposals that undermine that group’s needs like the supreme court. I also think that settlers ought to have the superstructure respect these marginalized communities and learn the history from a Marxist Lenninist lens.

                    After the end of the enforcement of bourgeoisie laws, the material basis of being in the bourgeoisie stops existing. The same can be said for being a settler. If the material basis in employment opportunities, housing, healthcare, wealth, ability to raise a family are available to everyone independant of their ancestry as a settler or not, in the same matter, nobody is a settler at that point.

        • Kaffe@lemmygrad.ml
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          1 year ago

          It’s nothing to do with morals. It’s ending the colonial relationship to land and depriving the settlers of landed property rights. The struggle for indigenous sovereignty won’t end until this happens so it doesn’t matter if white Americans build their national socialism they’ll have to fight off attempts of the indigenous and Black nations asserting their sovereignty.

          Frankly we are soon heading towards the settler nation abandoning large swathes of territory due to their own economic practices. California was settled by the refugees of the self imposed Dust Bowls who were given Californian farms managed by Japanese migrants who were interned by the settler states during WW2. There is no new West to bail them out of their contradictions. It’s not listening to indigenous, it’s working for them. The decolonial government will take sovereignty over the lands out of the hands of the colonizer class. Political supremacy of the settlers is a continuation of white supremacy. I have no interest in respectability politics if the audience is settler nationalist, we do not politic for the settlers, this is not their liberation (nor was American Liberty calling for the emancipation of slaves). There will be millions of Americans who will follow us, I’m sure of it, but we are right to select them ourselves, and set standards for working together.

          We are not trying to convince reactionaries of our cause, we will work with those who are not. Those who’d rather be approachable to the reactionaries than work with colonized revolutionaries are preparing themselves for the dustbin of history.

          Someone recently said something like (paraphrased): Many of us Communists will end up going to prison. For you White Communists, you will be forced to chose between the White gangs and the Communists/Brown folks. If you think there is tactics in pretending to be a white supremacist to save yourself, you are not a Communist, you are an enemy.

            • Kaffe@lemmygrad.ml
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              1 year ago

              Yes and you misunderstand. The indigenous people are not marginalized groups of Americans. They are not Americans, they are their own nations, their own political and cultural bodies. Black Liberation comes in the form of becoming an independent nation and indigenous liberation comes in the form of total sovereignty over stolen land. We literally cannot wait for settlers and white supremacists to change their minds and treat us better, we will fight for sovereignty with or without them. Asking us to be subjugated into a settler socialism is assimilation and genocide. We will have white allies, not white saviors.

              Anarchism and herrenvolk democracy cannot guarantee our safety and emancipation.

              If you believe that a Vanguard can lead a revolution then you must understand that the political beginnings of a Vanguard confederation of decolonial states is a much more realistic and material goal than performing a cultural revolution on American settlers while still under bourgeois rule. How could we ever know if a white supremacists has changed their views? Is it their views that matter or their ability to exercise bigotry through access and adjacency to power?