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

    • Barx [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      32·
      5 days ago

      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.

    • queermunist she/her@lemmy.mlEnglish
      32·
      5 days ago

      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.

        • queermunist she/her@lemmy.mlEnglish
          21·
          5 days ago

          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.

            • queermunist she/her@lemmy.mlEnglish
              19·
              5 days ago

              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.

                • queermunist she/her@lemmy.mlEnglish
                  24·
                  5 days ago

                  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.

                  • Murple_27@lemmy.mlEnglish
                    8·
                    5 days ago

                    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 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.

                    Different person here, but I have my own issues with what you’re arguing about here.

                    My main point of contention with this whole line of reasoning, is that I don’t think that they United States actually properly qualifies as a Settler-Colony anymore. That isn’t an argument against the existence of a racialized hierarchy within the US, but specifically what I’m getting at is that the material circumstances of Israel & America are not comparable in 2024.

                    The United States is the world financial-capital hegemon, it is a wholly independent & (potentially) self-sufficient nation-state. It does not have a Metropole that it relies on to guarantee it’s security, or that it has to funnel imperial super-profits to, in 2024 the United States is THE Metropole. It also does not have the national composition of the kinds of countries in which Fanonist Anti-Colonial struggles were applicable & successful; but which does exist in Israel.

                    In the United States the people who make up the descendants of Settlers comprises the absolute majority of the population, and likely also the majority of the proletariat (if only narrowly) as a consequence. Of those people who are not the descendants of Settlers, they are also themselves, for the most-part, not indigenous to the territory either. They do not have pre-extant social structures, or a genuinely solid national identity independent of the existing Settler state to draw from when trying to resist it.

                    The single largest non-white ethnic group in the country are African-Americans/ADOS people; who are both a highly dispersed diaspora population that do not make up a majority of most of the places that they live in, and who’s identity while hostile to the current US State (for very good reason) doesn’t generally have a strong articulation towards forming any kind of alternate independent State. Most of the other remaining “Non-Settler” Americans are primarily immigrants of one-form-or-another who are not actually here to try to supplant the existing American State or nation. They would be broadly willing to integrate into the US as it currently exists if they were actually allowed to. Of the remaining actually indigenous population of the country, they consist of somewhere between 1-2% of the population of the entire country, and they struggle to retain even a semblance of autonomy on the insultingly limited reservation land that they have been granted.

                    Ultimately what I’m getting at here is that there is no real evidence that the strategies of Fanonist Anti-Colonial resistance have any actual material applicability to the United States in the way that they do for Israel; regardless of their ostensible common origin as Settler-Colonies, largely because the modern US has developed past the point that it can even be described as a Colony in the first place.

    • frauddogg [they/them, null/void]@hexbear.netEnglish
      8·
      4 days ago

      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.