Thoughts on "Settlers" by Sakai?
Kaffe @ ProbablyKaffe @lemmygrad.ml Posts 8Comments 52Joined 3 yr. ago
Kaffe @ ProbablyKaffe @lemmygrad.ml
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it seems like the homegrown rpg round as well as the AGTMs used by Hezbollah are popping Israeli tanks left and right. It really looks like armor will not be reliable for Israeli offense.
The EZLN is an indigenous nat-lib movement, rejecting the idea that their lands can be controlled by the Mexican government. Many of the nations in the US and Canada had similarly fought with settlers and armies to maintain their lands, the reservation system is the residue of those conflicts, a suspended state of war.
If you have to say “we were successful until…”, how successful were you, really?
This can be said for any revolution, does the collapse of the USSR deny tested praxis of the Bolsheviks? The existing parties dominated by settlers have yet to provide a theory for revolution that moves beyond somehow changing the minds of the American workers, overwhelmingly labor aristocracy and reproducing with more labor from overseas than they put in. They haven't been able to change many minds; there are some 200k "Socialists" between the ML parties and the DSA, this is smaller than the number of Dine people and dwarfed by the number of Hawaiians who are building an alternative state in opposition to the American occupation. Dozens of millions of Americans straight up don't engage in electoral politics yet the Communists can't seem to make a dent there. The Fish Wars which saw collaboration with what would become the American Indian Movement and the Black Panthers got real wins in forcing the states to recognize treaty law. AIM and the Panthers attracted the most brutal state oppression, not disconnected from the general value American society assigns to black and indigenous bodies, and nothing of the sort has ever been directed at the CPUSA leadership as what befell the Panthers. The CPUSA fell into revisionism and tailed the Liberal Assimilationist line of the so-called "Black Bourgeoisie" which Frazier had proven was lying about the conditions of Black people in the US for the benefit of the Imperialist Settlers. This is not to say that amount of oppression is directly associated with revolutionary-ness, but that AIM and the BP clearly upset the settler order in a way in which Communist parties lead by settlers and white-dominated trade unions never could, and that opportunism for groups capable of upholding the settler order just doesn't exist for groups like AIM and the BP.
Indigenous protests have been at the vanguard of the environmental "movement" and indigenous lands have almost all of the biodiversity on the continent and indigenous nations are at the fore-front of conservation and environmental science. Black people are at the fore-front of politics surrounding police and have mobilized the largest protests in US history. We focus on black and indigenous people (with special attention towards Latinx and migrant workers given their super-exploitation) because these groups are most readily organized on an anti-Colonial basis. More than half of the settlers frankly live good and have little interest in unsettling the colonial order. This is why our direction needs to build up the most oppressed spectrum of workers in solidarity with those who do not fit in settler-society for one reason or another, push these community building movements into direct conflict with the settler order and stress the contradictions of settler-colonial Imperialism, like what the Palestinian Resistance is doing as we speak, and what the EFF is pushing to do in South Africa, the forms of our struggles differ by conditions but the dynamics are the same, a (class) war of national liberation for decolonization. We just won't see the level of organization from settlers in reaction required to defend themselves from us, our prediction is similar to that of what we are seeing in "Israel", the settlers will run and hide while their society collapses under its own contradictions. We will be there for the refugee settlers who wish to experience a different road.
Settlers as a book just shows actually existing history of the labor movement and choices made by settlers. Today we can see a deep lack in investigation of conditions from the "Communists" here. We will work with settlers who are sympathetic towards us but we will not rely on their assistance, with our without them we will fight.
Critical support to Roderic from Red Sails while he tries to convince Johnstone to engage with scientific theories surrounding propaganda and political behavior (Marxism).
Brainwashing theory doesn't hold up to reality so treating it as a model of why Americans and other European diaspora are passive to supportive of Imperialism is a misdiagnosis and leads to unreliable treatment. Counter propaganda is only so effective and is never going to threaten Empire and class society in general.
So tbh, if she doesn't want to accept criticism from Marxists then we should really just ignore her and others like her. We need to put our own theories out to people we are organizing around and for.
Frankly if we're talking about the western continents, it's because nobody has seriously studied the history and conditions of the land underneath their feet. PatSocs are superficially "close" to the Communists here because they do zero investigation of the internal structures of the continent, and view outward facing Imperialism from the Americans as an obstacle to "American Socialism". So like many of the other parties in the US, they focus on protesting foreign intervention.
Hot take, the other parties are pretty much the same. Where they differ is that PatSocs dream of a great assimilation into American so-called culture, so subjugation of Black and Indigenous peoples is a focal point, and it's why they are willing to work with the right opportunistically. The other parties expect to take full control of the leftovers of America, but with "respecting treaties" and giving "self-determination" and the ability to "secede", secede from what tho? If the PatSocs are settler-chauvinists then this is settler-blindness. PatSocs succeed in grifting because the other parties have yet to put out real theories on how to destroy the empire from within, so they just appeal to the American (or Canadian, Mexican) chauvinist extremes.
In ML terms the settlers are not the subject of revolution. National Liberation for the prisons of nations beneath the Empire is primary. Policing, enclosure, ecological exploitation. Spontaneity from the colonized masses and even Anarchists is focused at the symptoms of settler-colonialism, and until Communists study their conditions and give direction to these people we can only alienate and frustrate them when telling them to vote or show up to a protest at city hall. It's extremely frustrating for Natives when they ask for solidarity from settlers against megacorps looting their lands only for the unions to back the corps for jobs and then for Communists to agitate about unionization and maybe a "land acknowledgement".
Communists need to connect with the workers being gentrified out of their homes, connect with the Natives of their locales, unite these struggles, that's the unity. What we think about China is a discussion to be had in a party that comes together to liberate the colonized nations. Settler-chauvinism, and setter-blindness (I also like "Left-PatSoc") are the deal-breakers for unity.
National Chauvinism, Capitalism, and Patriarchy make up Colonialism. Gender based oppression in most places is directly rooted in Colonialism. Decolonization means attacking all fronts meaning we cannot negotiate with chauvinists, opportunists, and sexists (whether male chauvinist, TERF, NB-phobic, homophobic, etc.).
They think European consumption being equalized with Africans means that they'll have to eat bugs, because this is their view of Africa...
And not shit like, chocolate being more expensive (relative to wages) and less available because African farmers aren't being superexploited by Neo-Colonialism.
thanks, will check it out
I'm updating to this one now, but honestly no it's not worth it. I'm on P6P and weird stuff like my call notification just not showing up and random gesture nav freezes has turned me off of participating in future betas. Missing phone calls because I can't see them has been problematic in multiple events these last few months. I'm going to reset my phone come the official update.
For both the Syrian and Ukrainian wars you have to remember what each of the challengers to state power wanted to do, destroy anti-Imperialist forces. So I think the only way the US has another civil war is in reaction to a serious disturbance of Capitalism where a progressive force challenges the the sovereignty of the state/property order (like the German Revolution). The US police/militia forces would do what the French police threatened to do a month ago, break from the authority of the state to "restore order". I don't think this is a civil war as much as it is the property order recovering from a crisis. A civil war will only come from revolution.
I think we have to be prepared as a movement for serious disturbances to society from the environment. I don't think people realize how badly the Gulf of Mexico states collapsed during and after Katrina. Millions of people left the region, white supremacist gangs were lynching Black people. Only the military had the capability of entering the New Orleans. There are many disasters like this brewing in the US (fires and earthquakes in the west, Colorado River crisis, aquifers depletion in the prairies, tornadoes in the mid-west, hurricanes in the south and east). We need to prepare our communities for these crises, which Capitalism will actively attempt to prevent us from doing, this is where we can prove that Capitalism is holding us back.
We are overpaid to produce useless shit that is overvalued under monopoly capitalism because software as a service is hyper efficient rent seeking. Because we make rich people so much money there is industrial level propaganda to make our work out to be some revolutionary science that will solve all of humanities problems.
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?
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.
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.
I also want to point out that many of our comrades here who disagree with our takes on Decolonization are being good party members and holding the lines that their and many parties around the world are holding, hope in the American workers. But these parties especially the ones in the settler colonies of North America have not done the necessary investigation of their settler society and land and resource theft. Many of them are petit/semi (landed) bourgeois, educated, and through this have privileged entrance into Marxist theory, me included. We know that Lenin and the colonized comrades had an uphill battle against European Chauvinism within the international Communist movement which is what crystalized Marxism Leninism in the first place.
There is no reason to abstract internal colonization as either finished or different from external colonization, even calling it internal colonization makes it seem like the solution for the colonized Africans and indigenous nations is to absorb them into the settler nation. No, the settler states exist on stolen resources that they use to dominate the rest of the world, but its connection to wealth is here, inside its borders. It needs settlers to take land and hold it for the bourgeoisie to later expropriate. It needs settler dominated unions to build and work the environmentally extractive and damaging infrastructure that only benefits the settler masses. I posted about armed indigenous resistance (backed by the Panthers) to racist fishing enclosures in the 1960s that sparked the American Indian Movement, and that post had far less traction than this one about MWM.
American comrades, find out what tribes inhabited the places you have physical connections to. Learn how they came to no longer own that territory and why you and your people now do. You will learn far more about capitalism and America than through studying other movements, because our conditions are not the same. Apply the methodologies of MLism to the history of this continent, stop importing the solutions from others.
Like confused men they don't understand that the system of oppression can hurt them while still overwhelmingly benefit them
Uncritical platforming of Haz is the most recent example. He called everyone who criticized him for that Liberals. Haz is anti-Land Back and a settler nationalist.
And look, I overall have a positive view of RBN, but Nick is the one I'm most worried about. It's coming to the point where he's either in it for clout or fails to differentiate clout from correctness.
His content sits almost entirely within the corporate media landscape, as in he's either siding with one or reacting to it.
He's outside of the democrats now but still limits himself to discussions within that space.
He's a journalist/podcaster that relies on audience donations to stay in business. He may not be a grifter in intentions but he relies on grifters to grow his platform. He's ultimately a tailist, but what's the qualitative difference between a tailist and a grifter?
MWM (Eddie) and Rainer Shea are crypto patsocs. They don't believe in Land Back and Black Liberation, they believe Settler Colonialism in the US is over and thus the decolonial movement doesn't apply.
They are dogmatists who refuse to do any historical research of North America, and are class reductionists (who ignore that racism and colonialism are class systems in the first place).
Nick from RBN invited Eddie and Haz on after Eddie debated Vaush. Nick b talking to LaRouchites on his show so at this point I'm not surprised. These guys are all grifters.
Yes and we can and should compare movements of some classes compared to others. The settler class has proven itself incapable of resisting opportunism. MLs in the core need to focus on the classes with revolutionary outlook. Far too many do zero study of the conditions here.