I fail to see how MLKs words about white moderates pacifity can be applied to any method of acheiving a goal, its clearly about using direct action from the bottom up to achieve goals outside of the completely pacified and useless manner white 'haves' protest in historically, and the disdain they have for people actually trying to work outside of the 'red vs blue' dichatomy that does nothing for them.
Unfortunatly, they sort of do. Neo-liberalism or state capitalism seems to be a required stage in the devolopment of an ecomony towards socialism and the Chinese model seems to be the best compromise existing today between socialism and state capitalism as it manages to provide 90% housing, modern standards of living, wide spread education, high speed rail & subways etc to billions of people while still retaining Marxist ideological reasoning.
The Chinese understanding of this means basically 'speedrunning' through capitalism while keeping the products of it on a tight leash, so far that seems to be working. Income gaps are widening in China though, but people still retain a much lower cost of living in comparable economies such as California. I dont think billionares should exist either but I dont think its the biggest issue facing China either.
I think a better marker for China is, is poverty increasing? Do the poorest people get what they need? I would say thats yes they get everything they need (housing/healthcare) and there circumstances are improving too through investment. In cities larger than London rent is 70% cheaper on average like in Shenzen and quality of life is higher. It would be hard to care if billionares exist if you lived in a society that provided everything you needed, and also held said billionares accountable; which again I would argue China does as demonstrated by the high profile rich people they have executed or imprisoned in the last decade.
Is it perfect? No, but they seem to be willing to do more then we do.
They mention that think tank in the book, they also talk about how this attempt to associate black music with violent stereotypes is hardly anything new, its been going on to grime artists prior to this, I suppose the new thing about it is that drill artist get banned from even entering certain postcodes and given 4-5 year prison sentances for not comitting a crime, but refrencing a already convicted murder they where just aware of as it had been publicized in the news. Its clearly not about just censoring supposed violent music but about removing voices from the victims of austeirty.
So I was re-reading the German Ideology by Marx recently and I found his bit about 'Mental Production' really relevant in regards to Drill music in the UK.
So if you take what Marx is saying, that the mental production (art) of a society is controlled by the upper class, and those who lack the means to engage in mental production will be dominated by it. He gives the example that you just need to read history to realize this is true, as the only art that gets filtered through history and that gets to survive and be representative is what the upper class allowed to be uncensored, and what the upper class deemed valuable enough to fund with money both in purchasing, artists expenses and education.
In a modern context in the UK over 900 drill artists have been entirely banned from making music; 80% of them where never implicated in any crime what so ever, and 92% are black; the idea that drill music is an inherently violent genre of music that increases crime is a moral panic. Think about mods vs rockers, or satanic panic with metal etc; the only new element to the moral panic around drill is that it is now also racialized; it represents a sub-culture of defiance and is a truely bottom up from the underclass genre of music and as such it needs to be comidified, neuterued and the real pioneers of the genre stopped from making music so that the representation of what 'drill' even is can be whitewashed in history by the mainstream.
Agreed on both points, it reminds me of a conversation I had with a trot org when I was trying to find a ML party to throw my political weight behind in the UK; I live in one of the most deprived areas, there idea of organizing was handing out there own newspaper in the deprived area, right outside a methadone clinic; the paper they wanted me to hand out was anti-china, anti-russia and anti-cuba confusingly.
I suggested they focus on rent instead and didnt contact them again lol.
I think part of fixing the left in the UK is removing trots infulence from it by creating parrell sources of information and news.
Trot outlets and the daily star often serve as curious leftists first entry into communist-adjacent politics, and they do a utter shit job of it everytime; from throwing trans people under the bus to spending there political energy and capital appealing to angry socialist boomers over the age of 60
Yeah dont get me wrong im not holding up Osama here, I know he wasnt a figure to idolize or hold up up in a current day settin and im not a twitter Osama video rider. I do think that the creation of Osama by the US state apparatus is what turns a lot of people on to just why things are the way they are in the middle east though, and I think thats why 9/11 is significant as a honest academic material analysis of the situation always leads to the US.
The conditions of all of these things where put into place by the US; I dont deny that those who attacked had extermist views, and non-alligned views with our own, outside of the scope of anti-impearlism; however I view it a symbollic moment the US realized the bombs go both ways.
Im also less likely to give credit to the idea that Osama's rants, and the wider radical islamic doctrine are again products of being colonized violently, given that im not going to blame the oppressed for holding these views when we keep bombing any schools they build.
While people might be inconvienced by these protests remember how inconvienced the people being genocided by american bombs are currently being