skipmyseashells posted:

quote:

Yet the labor bureaucracy was not immortal, and we in the united $tates have seen a great decline in both union membership and in the excessive privilege of this bureaucratic layer. That is not to say they have become irrelevant, but certainly their political leadership of the now organic labor aristocracy has reached an impressive low. The workers, in fact, traded the supremacy of this bureaucratic layer for even more short-term benefits, due in part to the reality that the labor aristocracy had outgrown its political representation, and with such a “gracious” ruling class, the direct leadership of bureaucratic structures seemed to hamper, rather than expand their own sovereign interests. This short-sightedness has, more than likely, doomed them in the long-term, as they have no unitary political structure with which to fight the digestion of their gains.

Victory Position posted:

I'm a good bit busy with things on my end, but I will cite this second paragraph, as it does lead to a few questions I'd like to follow up on:

specifically, when he refers to "short-sightedness", what exactly is he referring to, historically? what is this reality that he refers to in which union bosses and the heads in the rank and file decide they decide to blow up their own structures? I don't exactly think of the Teamsters as a global union, so I'm very confused as to that. as to "short-sightedness", is he referring to the erosion of union authority as a nebulous thing rather than something eroded by direct government interference?

do agree with last part, though, as without any sort of discipline, it does swallow you up, nebulous as it is right now

quote:

We can use imperialism’s wars itself as our depth gauge of their historic decline. Two generations ago the u.s. empire fought a great world war 2 against other industrial capitalist powers. A brutal, bloody, fighting toe-to-toe war of near-equals in which millions of soldiers crisscrossed oceans and borders, leaving well over 60 million dead bodies as their rotting residue. In one single European battle alone, in one week in a forgotten Luxembourg forest, 33,000 white GIs died in combat (with another 10,000 dying from exposure and disease). And it doesn’t mean a thing now.

Then one generation ago the u.s.empire threw a 500,000 man expeditionary force that was the heart of the u.s. military into a protracted, eleven-year war to stop Communist-led national liberation movements in three Southeast Asian countries. To their white surprise, they lost big time and 58,000 GIs and Marines and sailors and airmen lost their lives as well (though to be sure they each got an engraved line on that spiffy black wall in Washington – ’cause in America there’s always a prize in every box of crackerjacks). And it doesn’t mean a thing now.

Today, in contrast, the u.s. bubble empire, with its heavy-technology storm troopers, struts and preens itself in decadent ecstasy whenever they can recapture any small, poverty-stricken Third-World capitalist neo-colony (often done in a fake war, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, with cooperating bribed warlords and generals). Hollywood invasions of Haiti, Afghanistan, Panama, tiny Philippine islands or dysfunctional oil field dictatorships mark the true level of their beat power now. But if a few hundred or a few thousand of its mercenary techno-legion GIs get whacked, then the whole society is weeping and wailing. Privileged amerikkka is too soft to slug it out anymore. We might say that the u.s. empire is less like a great military power in the old sense and more like a superbly-armed private mafia for a gated suburb. Its power is very dangerous on a tactical level – like a SWAT team blowing down your front door will really put some concern on your mind – but strategically it is more and more dysfunctional and immobilized.

Crowsbeak posted:

At the end the last half page of responses shows me if there will be change in the USA it won’t come from you

Crowsbeak posted:

At the end the last half page of responses shows me if there will be change in the USA it won’t come from you.

Brain Candy posted:

look i'm going to read the meme book

quote:

A 1983 book published by a Marxist group you belonged to included a chapter with the title “What Can Communists in the Imperialist Countries Do?”. What’s your answer today?
We are a minority, but an important minority. The priority must be to support antiimperialist forces in the Global South; forces that have a radical anticapitalist profile and a popular base. These can be revolutionary political organizations, labor movements, or the remnants of the national liberation struggles in Palestine, Kurdistan, Western Sahara, and elsewhere. We must support these forces materially, practically, and politically. Solidarity means action and must be concrete. But it must also include analysis and the development of strategy.

Another important aspect is to make the imperialist hinterland less safe. We must oppose political and military interventions in the Global South. We must also fight racism and demand citizenship for refugees and migrants. We must support the free movement of people across borders. Solidarity is not based on citizenship but on class.

Finally, we need to develop viable forms of organization, practical skills, knowledge, and tactics for the struggles that lie ahead. We must think strategically: this means to think several years ahead, not just until the next election. This implies, of course, that we must be prepared for the repression we will face by an increasingly authoritarian state.

What role does the state play in the coming struggles?
Antiimperialist politics cannot be advanced without engaging with the state in some way. The state defines the political reality we live in. But seizing state power should not be the focus of our activities. Socialism in one country is impossible. The nation state is the champion of the political right, which ties in with its nationalist, racist, and chauvinist orientation.

It is also wrong to portray the welfare state as a bulwark against capitalism. The European welfare state cannot exist without imperialism; anyone who believes so denies the realities of the global accumulation of capital. What, for example, would an independent economy of a country in the Global North look like? Who would produce all the things that people have become dependent on? How many people in the Global North are still involved in industrial production? Most work in the service industry, in design, in advertising–in jobs that are dependent on other people producing what they consume.

There is nothing wrong with welfare. The problem is that the capitalist welfare state rests on imperialism, and that a global capitalist welfare state is impossible. Welfare for all requires a fundamental change of the system.

skipmyseashells posted:

ignoring the rest of this spazz out of a post, hell yeah. nobody wants amerika to change we want it gone just like you, goodbye

gradenko_2000 posted:

"United $tates" is so deliciously petty

Crowsbeak posted:

At the end the last half page of responses shows me if there will be change in the USA it won’t come from you.

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

the only thing that is for certain is that there will be change

Crowsbeak posted:

Just not you or the other losers. Caleb, Wolfe and Dore are far more likely.

Crowsbeak posted:

Just not you or the other losers. Caleb, Wolfe and Dore are far more likely.

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

we communists and liberals have similar goals... just with some minor differences...

Crowsbeak posted:

Just not you or the other losers. Caleb, Wolfe and Dore are far more likely.

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

history doesn't move in accordance with the individual will so i'm comfortable with not having a some big, promethean, individual impact on world history. but i also think that a large share of what these guys generally consider important history and culture will be washed away by the ascendancy of colonized peoples and reckoning with this honestly and fairly is the central political question, not the welfare state or developmentalism

Brain Candy posted:

yeah but you sound like you aren't in a place where the bridges are falling down and hospitals are closing, maybe for you history happening is a choice

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

there's an error called voluntaryism in marxist parlance (the opposite is determinism i think) where people think that willpower and not economic conditions are the foundations of their revolutions.

it's like taking a shortcut. so for this trucker thing there's a whole lot of "i observer ENERGY in these protests, therefore there MUST be a way to harness this energy!"

but that does not follow. you need to be specific: exactly how are you going to harness this energy? what kind of energy is it? what energy do you lose if you move to try to harness that energy? there's many ways to look at it in the end. but what a lot of these groups and individuals have, whether the "patriotic socialists" or the austin red guards, is being impatient, non-strategic, etc.

or like saying "the bridges are falling down and hospitals are closing right now and imperialism is in decline." that's all true, but it doesn't follow either that this makes objective conditions right for revolution everywhere all the time, or that you have a strategy to make revolution or a mass base to do so. but with the objective factor already "decided," all that's left is the subjective factor: does the party have the "correct" ideology and enough willpower

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

but i'm actually not so sure how true it still is, seems like it has decayed a bit since sakai wrote settlers. remember that he wrote it in the early 1980s when, if you were a depressive maoist type on the downslope of the NCM, then things would've probably seemed really doomed and blackpilled with a really ugly and unstoppable reagan counterrevolution powering to victory after victory.

skipmyseashells posted:

did you read settlers like you promised or are you a liar too

Brain Candy posted:

yes, I finish chapter 2 last night. what the gently caress is wrong with you?

skipmyseashells posted:

sorry for asking if you read the book the thread is about, I hope in time you can shift your anger from me onto the united $nakkkes of amerikkka

Probably Magic posted:

y'all need to settle down

Brain Candy posted:

I’m sorry I’m not treating your bible with the reverence you’d prefer, but to everyone else it’s just a book

Brain Candy posted:

I’m sorry I’m not treating your bible with the reverence you’d prefer, but to everyone else it’s just a book

Crowsbeak posted:

The only thing you should outside of the Bible itself treat with reverence is the seminal book of Stalinist Theory: God Emperor of Dune, by Frank Herbert.

Crowsbeak posted:

The only thing you should outside of the Bible itself treat with reverence is the seminal book of Stalinist Theory: God Emperor of Dune, by Frank Herbert.

quote:

That extinction, he told his followers, was only Divine Will, and all for the good. Rev. Theodore Parker was one of the leading spokesmen of radical abolitionism, one who helped finance John Brown's uprising at Harper's Ferry, and who afterwards defended him from the pulpit. Yet even Parker believed in an all-white Amerika; he firmly believed that: "The strong replaces the weak. Thus, the white man kills out the red man and the black man. When slavery is abolished the African population will decline in the United States, and die out of the South as out of Nor- thampton and Lexington."(22)

quote:

This unconcealed attack on Afrikans was in point of fact a compromise, with Van Buren restraining the white majority which hated even the few, remaining shreds of civil rights left for well-to-do Afrikans. Van Buren paid for this in his later years, when opposing politicians (such as Abraham Lincoln) attacked him for letting any Afrikans vote at all.

quote:

National political movements were formed by settlers to bring this day about. The Colonization movement, embodied in the American Colonization Society, organized hundreds of local chapters to press for national legislation whereby Afrikans would be removed to new colonies in Afrika, the West Indies or Central America. U.S. Presidents from Monroe in'1817 to Lincoln in 1860 endorsed the society, and the semi-colony of Liberia was started as a trial. Much larger was the Free Soil Party, which fought to reserve the new territories and states of the West for Europeans only. This was the main forerunner of the Republican party of 1854, the first settler political party whose platform was the defeat of the "Slave Power".

The Republican Party itself strongly reflected this ideology of an all-White Amerika. Although most of its leaders supported limited civil rights for Afrikans, they did so only in the context of the temporary need for Empire to treat its subjects humanely. Sen. William Seward of New York was the leading Republican spokesman before the Civil War (during which he served as Lincoln's Secretary of State). In his famous Detroit speech during the 1860 campaign, he said: "The great fact is now fully realized that the African race here is a foreign and feeble element, like the Indian incapable of assimilation... " Both would, he promised his fellow settlers, " altogether disappear. " Lincoln himself said over and over again during his entire political career that all Afrikans would eventually have to disappear from North America. The theme of Afrikan genocide runs like a dark thread, now hidden and now visible in the violent weaving of the future, throughout settler political thought of that day.

quote:

Afrikan soldiers who had learned too much for the U.S. Empire's peace of mind were a special target (of both Union and Confederate alike). Even before the War's end a worried President Lincoln had written to one of his generals: "I can hardly believe that the South and North can live in peace unless we get rid of the Negroes. Certainly they cannot, if we don't get rid of the Negroes whom we have armed and disciplined and who have fought with us, I believe, to the amount of 150,000 men. I believe it would be better to export them all..."

quote:

Not surprisingly, these stands only increased Watson's popularity as a leader of the " poor whites." In 1920, shortly before his death, he was finally elected to the U.S. Senate. At his death Eugene Debs, leading figure of the Euro-Amerikan Socialist Party, hailed Watson as a true hero of the white workers:

"He was a great man, a heroic soul who fought the power of evil his whole life long in the interests of the com-
mon people, and they loved him and honored him."

quote:

Not surprisingly, these stands only increased Wat- son's popularity as a leader of the " poor whites." In 1920, shortly before his death, he was finally elected to the U.S. Senate. At his death Eugene Debs, leading figure of the Euro-Amerikan Socialist Party, hailed Watson as a true hero of the white workers:
" He was a great man, a heroic soul who fought the power of evil his whole life long in the interests of the com-
mon people, and they loved him and honored him."

quote:

These Japanese laborers were subjected to the most vicious persecution and exploitation, with the bourgeois politicians and press stirring up mob terror against them constantly. Both the Socialist Party of Eugene Debs and the A.F.L. unions helped lead the anti- Asian campaign among the settler masses. In April 1903, one thousand Japanese and Mexicano sugar beet workers struck near Oxnard, California. They formed the Sugar Beet & Farm Laborers Union, and wrote the A.F.L. asking for a union charter of affiliation.