Image from Tampa Bay TimesThanks for reading Rainer’s Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. When Marxists Speak Out wrote their recent May Day statement The Escalation of the World War Danger and the Need for a New Communist International
Browns combined the right and the left into a political leadership over the country, Shea is speaking of bolstering the anti-war movement’s numbers and thus power with the right instead.
“that “these people aren’t interested in liberation, they’re only out for self and for kin.””
This is not how he comes off to me but you are entitled to your opinion.
“I am still not convinced that concepts like Haywood’s Black Belt Republic aren’t the direction my folk should be going in”
Black Americans do not have the numbers to accomplish such a task as a Black Republic and hold it without the US bourgeois state along with the Canadian lapdog seizing the land back. This just isn’t realistic. If you want your people to be free, socialism is the best way to achieve such goals because it takes into account the interests of all workers equally. It does not cater only to the needs of black workers, no, however this is not something Marxism aims to do.
“definitely won’t long-knife y’all when your usefulness is through”, that tells me that your movement is predicated on anyone else’s sacrifice but your own, and leaves me considering you as deeply unserious to the point of being literally hazardous to any oppressed folk in your orbit.”
I understand your distrust however I remind you that even utilizing race relations analytics defensively is still viewing the world on terms of race. Marx shows us that method of analysis is useless, it is one which serves to create and then re-enforce capitalism.
I keep coming back to this point because y’all keep doing it: lifting hundred-year old theory with no brushup on what your actual material conditions are. In Marx’s time, there was no understanding of the two Amerikas. He looked at it as a singular beast as though we were just another England or France; but that is not the case. In my Amerika, in the Amerika anyone who looks like me is relegated to, we don’t get the luxury to not analyze things on a racial line, because that is how the state and how the society both punish us for not staying in our perceived place, never fuckin mind assimilation.
Like, do you realize that when there’s only one or two Black folk in a room full of crackers, those Black folk immediately know two things: that they’re now ‘the fly in the milk’ as far as this gathering is concerned, and that the odds of one of those hypothetical white people getting buck and calling cops on us, regardless of what the function says it’s for, has skyrocketed? In an age where you’ve got white cops-- and shit, sometimes Tom-assed Sunken Place’d Black cops blowing us away, we don’t get that luxury. We have to know what the danger is, where the danger is, know where the exit is, and have a plan to get there before anything; and right now, I’m seeing all the warning signs of needing an exit.
You might as well ask a fireman to divest himself of PPE before tending to a five-alarm call.
Thank you for sharing this. Black Americans are forced down the race rabbit hole because the settler whites (MAGA, the middle class, the racist pigs, etc…) drag you down it. I understand you see things as race for survival. Do you recognize that the slavery economic mode of production from which their terror originates has passed and we are in the capitalist mode of production and with it capitalist relations to the means of production?
This means that the only escape from this terrorism this racist tyranny, is through a working class revolution. America has never had a feudal mode of production. It is likely that if we were to go the way of barbarism here at the point of capitalist crisis instead of socialism, we could very well see slavery come back. This being the backfoot of the bourgeoisie is likely how these settlers still persist similar to how the remnants of the Russian Empire (White Army) persisted in Soviet Russia.
I cannot simply waive my mouse and like magic this contradiction of needing the non-black working class and not trusting the non-black working class will be resolved. I simply as that you listen to the points I’ve made. The rest is a matter of struggle and solidarity within our class.
The slavery economic mode never passed on; due to the thirteenth amendment, corporations all over Amerika profit off the backs of prison slaves. Who were often pipelined into those cages, given mandatory minimums far beyond what they actually did, mandated to ‘work’(read: slave) at the end of a baton, or at the end of deliberate coercive tactics, and then left in a place where their likelihood of recidivism is so high that they’ll be right back in clink within six months. The economic mode did not change, it just put on a layer of camouflage that you’ve fallen for. Because you’re not in community with those who’ve been there.
And y’all don’t get in the way one bit. Never have I ever seen a white person interpose themselves between a cop and their soon-to-be victim. What ‘working class revolution’ can I count on out of y’all when I can’t even count on y’all to stop a pig? Speaking of, how am I supposed to believe the collective you would be abolitionists in the event of the return of mask-off, societal chattel slavery in these circumstances where y’all don’t even stop pigs? Your analysis just is not there.
Many nations maintained slave labor (slave relations) after evolving into feudalism and even into capitalism. What constitutes a system of production are the relations of the classes to the means (and by large majority here it is proletariat and bourgeoisie), the nature of the economy itself in relation to the production of resources (the exploitation of surplus labor value), and the method of production of resources in the economy (industry). Many aptly describe capitalism as “slavery with extra steps” and on the surface debt slavery does look a lot like slavery, however in economic terms they are as different as apples and oranges.
It is true, our society has not radicalized to the point that “de-arrests” happen frequently. I understand your cynicism however ask any proletarian (I’m speaking in strict terms of economic relations…those workers who’s job is to produce commodities), things do not simply come into existence, they must be crafted and that takes time and effort. I also understand your fear of the slave mode of production coming back, however thankfully there is a simply fact which should put some ease into your mind: Slavery is obsolete economically speaking. Society advanced to the extent that slavery because too expensive, too inefficient, and too chaotic as society developed and evolved. That is why a class as wicked as the bourgeoisie went along with it’s abolition (many systems transitioned into hybrids before outright changing, many bourgeois were also slave owners at one time). All we could see is an expansion of slave relations however that would be to the detriment of the economy. If America collapsed into barbarism and such things did return in a hypothetical situation, the now ancient American economy would be easily overtaken by larger more advanced economies in the world, namely China as they are the dominant economic force in the world today and are geographically close.
Solidarity, class consciousness, the breaking of liberal programing…it all takes time and effort. Change is a process, and no process has ever been completed by not taking action towards it’s development.
Hey, I’m wading into an old discussion that’s totally out of my depth here, but I just wanted to post a counter-example to what you said. This doesn’t invalidate what you said and that’s not my intention, as this is obviously a rare exception, but I just wanted you to know that it has happened. Perhaps it will give you a glimmer of hope.
https://atlantablackstar.com/2023/02/10/were-much-more-scared-of-the-f-police-in-this-situation-than-this-guy-video-shows-seattle-police-standoff-with-unarmed-black-man-until-crowd-intervenes/