mathemachristian[he] @ mathemachristian @lemm.ee

my other account: https://hexbear.net/u/mathemachristian

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2 yr. ago

Yeah people only saw the treats West germany had but not the shameless exploitation needed to acquire them. They didn't know what actual life under capitalism was like. After reunification the mass layoffs and wholesale of entire industries came as a big shock, some people genuinely thought the state could just provide them with a different job if the capitalists fired them. A lot of women were shocked to find out how much gender equality was lagging behind what they previously had had.

I know? I don't really understand what you're trying to say here, if it is "OPs post is not just talking about people being persecuted but also about people looking for a better life" then I hope my edit to my original comment answers that

When people say that immigrants to the US were looking for "a better way of life" it suggests that they are fleeing a life of hardship and poverty. This is wrong when talking about the "early" white settler immigrants to the US, a period which still spans a couple centuries. And the later, white working class immigrants still looked for ways to profit off slavery and genocide, the "better life" for them was built on stolen land and labor. It's nothing like the current immigrants to the US which the GOP loudly and the Dems quietly look to oppress.

I would also draw your attention to the first line of the quote in my original comment which explicitly calls out this "seeking a better life" fable, which is only true for the white settlers ("almost" all of them) if we consider a life furthering slavery and genocide to be better than what they had at home.

At any rate the goals of the white immigrants were exploitative while the goals of the current immigrants is to escape exploitation and putting them as equal is dishonest at best.

If I misunderstood what appears to be a throwaway comment please elaborate

If people thought it was "just" an article a lot of the responses start to make sense lol

I don't know why the spelling with "k" is chosen unfortunately.

"some" sure, but definitely not "almost all" as the post says.

Right, well, that is a rather small portion of what is an entire book on the subject matter which goes into a lot more depth on the other 360 years as well. But the commenter seems to imply (rather obviously in my opinion) that all I'm basing my statement on is this quote and not the entirety of the book which I linked. There actually is a lot more said about the "later" settlers, that is the european proletariat brought in to replace the non-white workers, but since it's a lot more detailed I couldn't remember a succinct quote.

As for the context in which I made my original comment, the tweet talks about how "almost all of us descended from people fleeing persecution or trying to find a better life", to which the passage I quoted does say:

The mythology of the white masses holds that those early settlers were the poor of England, convicts and workers, who came to North Amerika in search of “freedom” or “a better way of life”. Factually, that’s all nonsense.

This is the mythology the tweet in the post is referencing and hence my comment on it. The rest was to provide context on what the "early" settlers demographic looked like.

Whats the "45% were middle class" referring to? Also I didn't say nobody coming into the US was poor, my main gripe is with the "Almost all of us", as if the white immigrants benefitting from slavery and genocide were a small part. As for what the white laborers were up to, we only need to read a bit further in the book I'm urging everyone here to read:

What was the essence of the ideology of white labor? Petit-bourgeois annexationism. ... To this new layer of European labor was denied the gross privileges of the settler bourgeoisie, who annexed whole nations. Even the particular privileges that so comforted the earlier Euro-Amerikan farmers and artisans - most particularly that of "annexing" individual plots of land every time their Empire advanced - were denied these European wage-slaves. But, typically, their petit-bourgeois vision saw for themselves a special, better kind of wage-slavery. The ideology of white labor held that as loyal citizens of the Empire even wage-slaves had a right to special privileges (such as "white man's wages"), beginning with the right to monopolize the labor market.

We must cut sharply through the liberal camouflage concealing this question. It is insufficient - and therefore misleading - to say that European workers wished to "discriminate against" or "exclude" or were "prejudiced against" colored workers. It was the labor of Afrikan and Indian workers that created the economy of the original Amerika; likewise, the economy of the Southwest was distilled from the toil of the Indian/Mexicano workers, and that of Northern California and the Pacific Northwest was built by Mexicano and Chinese labor. Immigrant European workers proposed to enter an economy they hadn't built, and 'annex', so as to speak, the jobs that the nationally oppressed had created.

If you want to actually know about the irish and other immigrant workers and don't like to read that much I would recommend Chapter 4.5 "Contradictions of white labor" where this passage is from, but again the whole book is superb.

One if our own making. If we stopped defending genocide we wouldn't be here.

Because that's what makes it wrong. If "better life" for one is profiting off slavery and genocide and for the other its "chance at a peaceful life" then comparing them whitewashes the formers intention.

Edit: it also seems to elude everyone that literally the first line in my source goes against the "seeking a better life" line, so I don't know why people think my source doesn't cover that

Why not? It makes sense to me, it carried me through some very difficult times and is a good way to think about how I interact with the world and my moral framework.

What kind of adventure though? Freedom to do what exactly? What they were seeking is a bit different from what the current immigrants are seeking dont you think?

Edit it does invalidate the narrative that the early settlers were impoverished or convicted people fleeing an oppressive feudal england, which the tweet seems to suggest.

No, the whole thing is wrong because its a false equivalence. "Better life" meant different things for the white settlers and the current immigrants.

Helpful...

understood them fine, still disingenuos phrasing. "Better life" for one was from middle class to slaveowner and for the other giving up their homes because of US backed wars and trying to find a chance at a peaceful life

What do you think is more likely: that I think 48% yeomen and husbandmen is a good representation of all of the immigrants to the USA or that you misunderstood my comment?

Read the book its very good

The Palestinians being genocided aren't colonizers but descendants of the Jews that didn't flee. Get out of here with that "everyone was a colonizer at some point" bs

They didnt flee persecution. Also the "better life" was built on the back of slaves, which seems a bit disingenous phrasing.

Edit I guess the point is that the people coming to steal land and genocide peoples aren't like the immigrants today, its a false equivalence

Edit2 also the first line literally disagrees with that

Wrong, readsettlers.org

The mythology of the white masses holds that those early settlers were the poor of England, convicts and workers, who came to North Amerika in search of "freedom" or "a better way of life". Factually, that's all nonsense.

...

A study of roughly 10,000 settlers who left Bristol from 1654-85 shows that less than 15% were proletarian. Most were youth from the lower-middle classes; Gentlemen & Professionals 1%; Yeomen & Husbandmen 48%; Artisans & Tradesmen 29%. The typical age was 22-24 years. In other words, the sons and daughters of the middle class, with experience at agriculture and craft skills, were the ones who thought they had a practical chance in Amerika.

...

It was this alone that drew so many Europeans to colonial North Amerika: the dream in the settler mind of each man becoming a petty lord of his own land. Thus, the tradition of individualism and egalitarianism in Amerika was rooted in the poisoned concept of equal privileges for a new nation of European conquerors.

Edit: this seemed to confound a lot of people, so maybe a bit more explanation. When people say that immigrants to the US were looking for "a better way of life" it suggests that they are fleeing a life of hardship and poverty. This is wrong when talking about the "early" white settler immigrants to the US, a period which still spans a couple centuries. And the later, white working class immigrants still looked for ways to profit off slavery and genocide, the "better life" for them was built on stolen land and labor. It's nothing like the current immigrants to the US which the GOP loudly and the Dems quietly look to oppress.

For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.

Matthew 18:20

I mean what you call a masterstroke some might call a hypocritical attempt to destabilize China simply because it resists capitalist exploitation