stuff like “Well you call them the scum of the earth, why wouldnt they hate you”
Why are parts of the left like this? Seemingly caring more about courting the psychopath incel who wants a white ethnostate rather than stand in solidarity and antiracism with POC?
i always get disgusted and disillusioned when i come upon it
I hate that so much. “Leftists pushed me to the right.” No you were always a piece of shit but didn’t realize it until someone accurately called you out on it. Am I supposed to coddle people who are deliberately calling me the wrong pronoun? Am I supposed to be nice to my cousins who are active Klan members?
When I’ve unionized we’ve inevitably worked with reactionary people who have incorrect priorities. The best way to get them to shut up is show them they’re outnumbered and to tell them to shut the fuck up. Bullying works.
I don’t want the approval of fascists, I want them either dead or so afraid of speaking that they don’t.
Why are parts of the left like this? Seemingly caring more about courting the psychopath incel who wants a white ethnostate rather than stand in solidarity and antiracism with POC?
Because crackers, ‘progressive’ or regressive, will always bear water and run defense for white supremacy before they ever consider liberating the subjects of empire that they feel entitled to camaraderie from and companionship with. It never fails. It’s the same root from which springs the perennial “we don’t have a race issue in Amerika, just a class issue” out of radlibs and anarchists, it’s the same root from which springs the “well he was no angel, clearly he deserved it” out of the copsuckers and conservatives.
Crackers will always close ranks around their own before they ever think about reparating or restituting. “Leftists” like Amber are exactly why I don’t trust the white left, and only organize with Black formations and organizations anymore.
Common frauddogg W.
Marginalized groups should be in charge of their own liberation. If privileged people actually want to help, they should get behind the marginalized groups and follow, not grandstand over them trying to take power and acting with a white savior complex
Malcolm X stated that was the reason he avoided working with white people and he later regretted turning away one white college student because she was like the one white person who genuinely wanted to follow black leadership.
I hate that this is the connection my brain made here but recency bias got me…
A recent BadEmpanada vid contrasted the white anti-apartheid activists in south africa joining the black resistance orgs, vs the israeli “anti-apartheid” types almost exclusively forming their own little NGOs among themselves and condemning actual resistance groups.
Same shit throughout history
we don’t have a race issue in Amerika
I can’t even imagine someone saying this IRL without getting dogpiled. fucking hell
The “common knowledge” amongst normie libs and Chuds is that America is the least racist country on Earth, and actually it is the dastardly Chinese that are the real racists
cool hope they die
Keyboards make everybody a lot bolder than they would be in grass-space
Being a property owner and small business owner who says extremely offensive things and jokes about killing people at 48 years old…. It’s okay, he didn’t go to college, they don’t know any better
Being a debt ridden queer working two minimum wage jobs unrelated to their college degree at age 26, who thinks everyone being more polite and thoughtful would help society… you idiot, you moron, you disgusting bitch.
She literally hates friendless online Bernie leftists more than she hates reactionaries. I’ve also heard her speak longlingly about rightoids, but I can specifically remember like 4 different instances of her randomly getting worked up over “leftists with no friends” like a weird fixation. Like if you’re a lonely loser leftist, she despises you, but if you just turn 4chan alt right, she suddenly sympathizes with your plight.
I wonder if Amber realizes a lot of the times, those fucking white kids are the ones that instigates to the point where POCs have all the right to call them out. No fucking shit they call them scum of the earth when the other side is calling people like me c**** or the usual phrase “go back to where you’re from” while we are minding our own business, but I guess we still have to coddle those fuckers for some reason.
Amber.
I’m calling them the scum of the earth because they already did hate me and I hate them back. We’ve been doing this shit back and forth since Bush Jr., I didn’t just emerge from the ether and instigate this by calling DeusVult69 a fucking dick out of nowhere in 2016
people like amber say shit like this because imo they’re desperate to distance themselves from the fascist’s made stereotype of left wing people, where we’re all overly sensitive, “PC”, whatever bullshit you normally hear. just like when someone from a minority group agrees with white supremacists in hopes that they’ll be deemed “one of the good ones”. i don’t know why certain people are just dying to be called “one of the good ones” by the literal worst people on earth. these people ARE the scum of the earth, going around spreading hate, disinformation, cultural and social rot.
That seems to be at the root of it, huh? The liberal idea that by not being like what the fascists say you are, you might get them to listen to you. Maybe a deep desire to avoid existential conflict, or rather to avoid acknowledging it for what it is: inescapable. She seems like she still believes on some level that…I don’t know. That this can continue somehow, that fences can be mended this late in the game? That the scope of her focus hasn’t been rendered qaint by how much worse and horrifying everything has gotten in the last few years?
I feel like if you have a solid understanding of how your philosophy relates to your politics, you shouldn’t have to make stylistic concessions and conformations, like the case here.
Always claim authority if you’re in a position to (and I would certainly expect someone who’s been organizing since the 2000s to have that kind of position).
This attitude is part of what generated Chapo and the “dirtbag left”
That’s not true at all. The “dirtbag left” was basically just a bunch of people fed up with civility politics of the Liberals, and CTH was very good at skewering freakoid reactionaries in ways that would make Liberals faint. That was the appeal, that people were willing to bite back against reactionaries with polemic and incisive language instead of the boring banality of the Dem Soc wet blankets
It’s not true that it was “a part”?
Amber.
amber? i barely know er
Amber.
I remember when I finally “got” Amb3r. She was talking about Kim Klassic (a young conservative woman) and she was practically writing a love letter to her. It was weird. I then thought back to whenever she would talk about a reactionary, and she would ALWAYS make some excuse for them or find something positive to say about them. She always makes excuses for reactionaries. I stopped listening after that.
Yeah it’s funny cause Felix does this too but it drips in sarcasm and it’s clear he’s making a joke (nah this guy rules actually). Amber does it but with complete seriousness
Amber.
I miss matt
They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats that are in there
They said come and see but there was nothing on only reruns
I never hear or read enough of her stuff to have fully got the anti-amber-aktion from the old subreddit or the early days of hexbear.
This comment chain has been somewhat enlightening. I’ll try to pay more attention when I happen to read/hear her opine in the future.
Amber.
to the Hexbear flag
Cause deep down they understand them. White settlers identifying with other white settlers. Even though they might legitimately disagree with them, fundamentally they don’t see them as a threat to their existence and view the disagreement as purely academic. They understand and are sympathetic to how these people arrived at their views. And really they’re only one hardship away from becoming completely reactionary themselves, as we saw with Covid.
Idk, that’s always been my take.
good take, yep
i can see myself going down the incel path, if circumstances were different and i was AMAB, it coulda happened. therefore i have a certain level of empathy and understanding towards those ppl inherently (not that i give a shit about courting them or whatever, fuck that shit lmao). but with poc i need to actually listen to other people’s perspectives and stuff instead of just inherently getting it. that’s waaay too hard for most white ppl
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I don’t argue with people John Brown would’ve shot and your bullshit sounds like he’d have turned you into a speed loader
We can talk about white people or reactionaries or whatever all we want till the cows come home, the real problem we ignore by doing that is that there are 322 million people in this country and only a teensy tiny bit are your glorious soviet-realist gang of comrades, less than like 1%.
Understand that I have no fucking issue with tagging the toes of as many crackers as humanly possible if it means my people finally achieve the liberation that’s been tacitly withheld from us. I already approach living as a subject of empire in this country with the understanding that settlers are fundamentally-irreconcilable, fundamentally-existential enemies.
i am smashing the favorite button
Because Amber understands that you practically have to build communism with some of the dumbest stupidest most racist and most reactionary people, and not a glorious soviet-realist style gang of clear eyed ideological comrades.
Amber is not trying to build communism. Amber is a SocDem. She projects more sympathy for chuds than for the marginalized.
“escape” from fascists is literally a reactionary individualistic daydream. You can either kill them or rehabilitate them, and the idea of a glorious purge of evil is also a deeply reactionary individualistic daydream.
The US doesn’t have very many active fascists, it just has a swarm of reactionary liberals that play with fascist rhetoric.
However, I don’t see any logic here tied to the post. Do you think you rehabilitate fascists by holding your tongue and not criticizing them or something? How much success have you had “rehabilitating” fascists without criticism? What could thay even ever mean?
Lastly Amber knows this because she works with actual union members who aren’t ideologically consistent terminally online communists in general, but typically blue collar physically broken Amerifats who have no issue voting for Trump.
What union work does Amber do?
I do work with blur collar workers all the time and they are mostly incoherent, ignorant, and manipulable, not fascist.
We can talk about white people or reactionaries or whatever all we want till the cows come home, the real problem we ignore by doing that is that there are 322 million people in this country and only a teensy tiny bit are your glorious soviet-realist gang of comrades, less than like 1%. Slightly above the total votes that De La Cruz got in the 2024 election. The vast majority of them are various levels of idiotic reactionary. Being mad at them for their own stupidity is Democrat braincheerlead a .
Few socialists ignore the problem of small membership or our numbers. Nearly all of our strategies are around how to increase membership and to do more with less. The more idealist segments, socialists or socdem, are actually more in line with your line, here. The Democrat tailist strategy, the idea that you do not need principles or hard lines lest they alienate reactionary sentiment and that you grow by being “big tent” all the way up to, say, having no real position on Palestine, celebrating every union action regardless of its content (including anti-war groups applauding war machine machinists and attending their rallies with no plan to join or coopt). They end up having no lines at all and are just a reflection of bourgeois electoral politics, of bureaucratized captures unions and no plan to coopt or agitate within them, just to cheerlead where “the working class” is, which is reallt just a false stereotype spread by right wing media putsches.
Literally your answer is in your complaint: “Well you call them the scum of the earth, why wouldn’t they hate you” – literally a basic understanding of human communication.
A basic understanding of human communication would acknowledge that you must have an actual negative line on key reactionary sentiments and that you will have enemies based on that line. The question to ask is who are you going to recruit. If your strategy is to go for those who are already as far to the right as it gets, you will alienate everyone else and shoot yourself in the foot every time. This is not how anyone that actually does anything productive irl operates.
Half of this thread is saying how white people basically need to be John Brown to be good allies. I agree with that sure. How the fuck you actually gonna get them to do that though? Kill all the Non-John Browns? If the logical ends of your ideological thinking is that “everyone is just going to have to do the right thing and I’m not going to deal with icky people”, you’re no different than the Democratic Party’s core offering.
In the US, it takes a pipeline. Few people go straight from dedicated reactionary to communist, but they may take a path via SocDems or othet forms of liberalism. Often it is the fact that socialists are consistent allies of the margibalized that brings them to us, that we havr had a consistent line during theit journey. You do not attract those people through opportunism.
I’ll take all the downboats now.
This instance does not have downvotes.
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Amber.
Amber.
The reactionary character of many workers in the US comes primarily from being in the imperial core and from the settler-colonial situation within the US creating racial, gender, sexual, religious, ethnic, and nationalist antagonisms. It’s more complicated than just uniting the workers, because some workers are elevated to a special status by their placement within imperialism and settler-colonialism.
I’m not entirely pessimistic about this like Settlers, but the situation is very difficult. Vulgar workerism like Amber is presenting is not grounded in theory or material reality.
Amber.
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You might as well try to reform Israel. 🙄
We can not build a workers’ movement when a segment of the workers in the US are privileged by the distribution of superprofits and divided by the settler-colonial situation.
What we can do is agitate the colonized masses within the US and arm them with “theory”, and we can agitate settlers to betray settler-colonialism by doing the same. I’m not pessimistic, Fanon observed that people from the privileged racial caste can be agitated to become traitors to colonialism, but you have to recognize the actual material conditions to be able to do this.
Vulgar workerism is a failure to identify the primary contradiction within our specific context. That’s why reading theory is important.
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What does “agitate” and “arm” even mean here? What does “betray” even mean here? You’re talking in the most vague generalities.
Okay, so Fanon talks about how white French nationals were able to smuggle guns to Algerian patriots because the French colonial police wouldn’t search their belongings. That’s a concrete example of what “betray” meant in that context.
Once a white French national understood the Algerian struggle (or was made to understand it) they disposed of racialized colonial paternalism and, in effect, become Algerian. That’s where our agitation comes in within our own settler-colonial context.
That’s why I think Settlers is too pessimistic, and didn’t actually recommend it. I think the privileged caste of workers can be awoken to the anticolonial struggle and become very useful to it.
But I do think that we can’t have a workers’ struggle until the settler-colonial situation is dealt with.
Listen if you don’t like Amber, you can not like Amber. You don’t need a real reason not to like someone. Trying to elevate whatever the reason you don’t like Amber using political theory is very silly.
I bought her book and shit, it’s not like I hate her or anything. She’s fine.
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Cool, what does a concrete example of “betray” look like for Amerikkka and why does it matter.
Nice try FBI.
Kidding. But seriously, I think I was pretty clear about what it takes for crackkkers to become traitors to the settler-colonial project.
Okay so, I’m again frustrated by the lack of anything except reading Fanon back to me. The most charitable case I can make here for how this applies to Amerikkka, is you’re going to claim that there are <TRUE AMERICANS whatever the fuck you wanna name your good group> and there are Amerikkkans and you’re going to explain to Amerikkkans how they need to be <TRUE AMERICANS>.
There are internally colonized peoples within the US who have been racialized as an inferior caste and there are whites that have benefited from that colonization and racialization, but have no actual historical or material understanding of their own place within settler-colonialism.
Unless a cracker is a direct agent or beneficiary of colonialism, a cop or finance bro or some shit, they can actually be made to understand the colonial situation.
And it’s happening. Whites in the US are awakening to the colonial situation in Israel, and that’s not far removed from awakening to the colonial situation in the US.
In fact Fanon is much more loosey goosey with this shit than Maoist Thirdworldism is because under Maoist Thirdworldism there is no “becoming Algerian” there is no permanent alliance based on culture/ethnicity.
There is no permanent alliance when settlers are nationalized either, this only makes sense in the stage of the struggle against colonialism. This is merely the recognition of the primary contradiction and the struggle against it, and once the colonial situation is dealt with the situation changes. Mao had the same position.
The problem here is that ultimately this is the same struggle with different rhymes. “dealing” with settler-colonialism is actually an even more difficult struggle because the workers struggle is postmodernist (e.g. workers are a newly manufactured unified people, the proletariat) in nature where the settler-colonial struggle is modernist because it must deal with a moralistic re-alignment of a caste system of preexisting peoples.
Do you think settlers aren’t a manufactured unified people? Racialization into castes is a project of settler-colonialism, it’s not a preexisting part of society that must be realigned and it’s certainly not moralist. That’s why a settler can betray colonialism and become Algerian in the national struggle.
You can’t build a workers’ movement until you deal with the contradictions between colonized and colonizers, because white workers will work against the international workers’ movement for their own special interests. A union that shuts down the ports for all commercial traffic except for Israel is a fucking problem, because colonized people see that shit and conclude union isn’t for them.
Not only that but you’ll find it really hard to explain to your average Amerifat how they’re settler colonists in 2024 without them saying “Get away from me weirdo”.
That’s why you heighten the contradictions and make the reality of colonial conflict an unavoidable and undeniable reality. Again, Israel is doing the hard work for us. It is making the contradictions easy for everyone to see. Our job is to agitate and stop Zionists from obscuring or occluding the contradictions again.
It’s why I’m not pessimistic.
Amber.
She comes out of a trend that primarily exists in the DSA that functionally believes all the same things American Democrats do, just with Medicare for All (which itself is a half-assed liberal pollicy that they latched onto because it wasn’t as “scary” as state run healthcare) and Green New Deal haphazardly tacked onto the platform.
They only believe in one thing, their own individual power. They don’t care about advancing materially definable working class politics, proletarian revolution, or even some sort of morally righteous politics. Just get more racist so the racists will put them in power and they’ll take care of the rest. Many of these people are minorities but they feel vindicated by the pundits saying the Democrats lost because of identity politics because they’ve taken to the politics of the reactionary proletariat.
They sow the seeds of their own destruction with their opportunism though. Their lazy organizing and blatant opportunism is what has cause the DSA to collapse from its height a few years ago. I’m sure they’ve seen new growth since then but they’ll chase those new people away too.
I’ve never been able to satisfactorily sum up what is is exactly that kept me from fully liking her, can’t find the right word or phrase to encompass her specific blend of
Some of the people here have such a way with words that listening to them feels as clear and logical as looking at a photo, and I appreciate those people for helping me tease out the contours of my problem with her.
