Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary

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Re: Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Sat Feb 18, 2017 1:39 pm

This paragraph got dumped into my twitter feed and very much reminded me of this thread. (I chuckled, I will admit. Chuckled in the kitchen like an animal.)

At its most abstract and all-encompassing, the liberal-progressive racial dialectic abolishes its outside, along with any possibility of principled consistency. It asserts — at one and the same time — that race does not exist, and that its socially-constructed pseudo-existence is an instrument of inter-racial violence. Racial recognition is both mandatory, and forbidden. Racial identities are meticulously catalogued for purposes of social remedy, hate crime detection, and disparate impact studies, targeting groups for ‘positive discrimination’, ‘affirmative action’, or ‘diversity promotion’ (to list these terms in their rough order of historical substitution), even as they are denounced as meaningless (by the United Nations, no less), and dismissed as malicious stereotypes, corresponding to nothing real. Extreme racial sensitivity and absolute racial desensitization are demanded simultaneously. Race is everything and nothing. There is no way out.


Was surprised to googlify it and realize it was from Nick Land's big, bad essay. Makes sense, though - especially tasty how thoroughly the tone mirrors Noel Ignatiev's own hyperbole & framing.
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Re: Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary

Postby American Dream » Sat Feb 18, 2017 2:42 pm

What's being critiqued there is typical of the liberalish believer in privilege politics who hasn't thought through even their most basic contradictions. That's got to be intentional on Nick Land's part. He really is much, much smarter than that. What more radical leftists such as Linda Martin Alcoff and Noel Ignatiev reject is an essentialized and primarily biological reading of race as absolute category. Race as an integral aspect of class dynamics in North America and other post-colonial regimes (with undeniably important material consequences) is a very different animal indeed.
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Re: Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary

Postby American Dream » Wed Feb 22, 2017 5:57 pm

http://kersplebedeb.com/posts/conquest-and-occupation/

Entscheidend ist die Besatzungsmentalität:
What’s crucial is the mentality of conquest and occupation


The following interview with J. Sakai was conducted by Gabriel Kuhn for the German radical monthly, “analyse & kritik” ( commonly known there as “AK” ). Both the German-language translation in that journal and this version, have been edited down considerably for reasons of space.


Q. In an interview from the year 2000, titled “When Race Burns Class”, you said the following with respect to the status of the white working class within the U.S. Left: “So the white workers as a whole are either the revolutionary answer – which they aren’t unless your cause is snowmobiles and lawn tractors – or they’re like ignorant scum you wouldn’t waste your time on. Small wonder rebellious poor whites almost always seek out the Right rather than the Left.” This almost seems prophetic considering the results of the 2016 presidential election. What has gone wrong within the U.S. Left?

A. This is going to be bumpy, since there was both a left generational change and a dramatic class shift in American society itself.

When first joining the u.s. left in the late 1950s, we had our local social-democratic group’s small May Day celebration in a room at the cheap edge of downtown. Memorably, there was a strip-tease joint downstairs, giving the building a kind of lumpen/proletarian air. At the speaker’s side of the room there was an older Jewish worker from one of the garment unions, with an elderly woman garment worker representing the inactive social-democratic “Italian chapter”. The audience was less than thirty persons, almost all whites The meeting was a remnant, of an old u.s. left from the 1930s industrial labor battles.

If you could skip ahead in time only a few years to the start of the 1960s, There would be many more people, but the old white trade unionists would be gone. The white side of the left was mostly young, university students or drop-outs. The many workers and poor street people in the struggle would be Black, and had their own movement. Almost everyone in the young left mixed in the civil rights movement or the student anti-war movement—or often both. It was easy for the u.s. white left to become dominantly middle-class, and the full future implications of that were never faced. This New Left would constantly attract a small stream of white working class kids, but almost as migrants from across a national border.

Once the u.s. left became allies and activists with the Black freedom movement in the 1960s-1970s, white areas even working class ones became enemy territory for us—those were places where you worried about physical attacks and violent mobs. Remember that America was always divided into oppressor territories and oppressed colonial territories—called the rez, barrios, and ghettos—and the white settler population were constantly engaged in daily social policing. Informally, a low-level war by whites of beatings and terrorism and killings happened every day to keep the angry colonies inside their social prisons.

But there was a real division in the white working class communities in the 1960s-70s. The white labor aristocracy, like hard-hat construction workers and over the road truckers, were used as patriotic shock troops by the government, politically and in attacking anti-war protests. On the other hand, we worked with many white working class youth who were being drafted to fight in Vietnam, and were anti-government and sharing a rebel youth culture. Many white working class GIs became antiwar in Vietnam, and some joined us in the resistance.

After Washington’s Vietnam pull-out in 1973, though, this contact with white working class rebels sharply dropped off. Recall, for a while was working in a major parts factory in the far South Side. A crew of young white guys there, who were mostly ’Nam vets and dope smokers, invited me to join their clique and come party at the Indianapolis 500 auto race with them. They even supported me for being night-shift union shop steward. The only thing they warned me about—is that i had to stop hanging with the young Black workers or else they wouldn’t even say hello. The euro-settler/Black divide was and is everything here, really.

Q. In the 1980s, you wrote the book Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat. A new edition has been published recently. How is settlerism different from racism? It seems that some folks use the terms interchangeably.

A. Yes, often young anarchists or socialists here do use the words in an uncertain way, as though they mean the same. Settlerism, as we know, is a very specific type of capitalist colonialism. It is the most complete colonialism. A conquest society, where a loyal national population was brought in to both economically populate and be the permanent garrison for capitalism over the conquered territory.

Settlerism has within it the broader phenomena of racism, but is importantly different. The culture is capitalist but twisted further. Sometimes you can see the cultural mark of being a garrison population, like the American white “gun mania.” The ruling class has always supported a heavily armed white citizenry to keep colonized people under the boot. This is their neurotically guilty culture of would-be conquerors and genocidists. Settlerism means that we are always fighting “Americanism” itself, not just some extreme nationalistic form.

Q. You have said that settlerism has made fascism in the U.S. unnecessary because “however good or bad the economic situation was, white settlers were getting the best of what was available”. Is this changing? Does it, at least partly, explain Trump?

A. Think of settlerism as having its own shape but being co-terminus with fascism, its kith and kin. To sum it up, believe that fascism is much more widespread among settler Americans than anyone admits. The unspoken key to Trump’s victory was certainly fascism, although no one wants to say it. Instead, we get all this liberal capitalist coverup about how resentful white workers and others in their backward “loser” post-industrial communities are to blame.

What the real deal is: Between 1963 and 1968, as violent and massive Black ghetto “riots” spread, the u.s. ruling class made two critical decisions. That Civil Rights would be made national law as an “airbag” to cushion the crash of repressing Black revolution, and that the real costs of any “integration” would be shifted completely onto the euro-settler working class.

People who weren’t around then can’t realize how bitter and explosive this was. Before, euro-settler workers may have gotten their hands dirty, but they had all the good paying jobs, it was that simple. Suddenly it was the same but different. About that time was graduating from the u.s. government mechanics school, trying to find a job. The state employment office sent me to the mechanics department at the big railway freight yards. In the office, the supervisor leaned back in his chair and said unhappily: “We heard that the government was going to pass this law, so we figured it was better you than a nigger!” That was still in the old days, when we always knew what white men were thinking, because they felt free to say out loud whatever crossed their minds. Of course, the white mechanics had gathered nearby in the garage to see the “new hire”, and together serenaded me with the then popular toothpaste commercial: “You’ll wonder where the YELLOW went/When you brush your teeth with Pepsodent.” ( Starting the daily harassment on the job. )

The point was, the white working class never had any “democratic” vote or say over this social tax on their communities. For two generations the u.s. ruling class solidified government, political parties, media and elections into an iron wall, enforcing this unpopular strategic concession. For the euro-settler working class communities shifting from being very privileged to less privileged. There never was any plebiscite or national popular vote on civil rights—which wouldn’t have passed. When the rare candidate to major office appeared who dead-on opposed civil rights, the establishment united to shoot him down. Famously, when Ku Klux Klan and neo-nazi leader David Duke ran for governor of the state of Louisiana in 1991, both parties united behind the Democratic candidate to block Duke, who still won 55% of the white vote. That was a signal flare of shipwreck sent up by settler communities, including but no means limited to their working class.

Donald Trump was today’s more respectable version of Duke. Marketing smarts told him that running on a platform of settler nationalism, of restoring the white nation to power and having a state publically dedicated to only their racial interests, would be the path to his elevation. The key to that would be his “dog whistle”, silently giving the piercing signal to euro-settlers that his was a united front of all whites in their common racial interests. He wouldn’t sell them out. What better way to silently do that than by conspicuously including the neo-nazis and klan haters in his campaign. Promoting the Confederate flag at his campaign rallies. Every Trump sexist vulgarity, every hate message and bullying threat, was only further proof to his enraptured followers that he wasn’t “politically correct” against them. That he would restore the white nation because at long last through him they could vote “civil rights” and the whole establishment agenda down.

Q. After Trump’s victory, Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times: “There turn out to be a huge number of people — white people, living mainly in rural areas — who don’t share at all our idea of what America is about.” This quote makes it sound like there is a bad backward America and a good enlightened America – represented by people who live in the big cities and read the New York Times. What do you make of this?

A. Think that Krugman and his wife, who co-writes that column, mean well, but got sucked into this liberal capitalist propaganda line, because it uses in a flattering way their own falsely positive views of their elite.

The metropolitan elite, university-educated, residing in major urban areas, dominates the computer industry and global corporate sectors like finance and media. While backing Hillary and LGBT human rights for public politics and all that, in their own worlds they live in apartheid racial/gender discipline. In the futuristic Silicon Valley, computer firms like Twitter and Pinterest are each coincidentally 92% white and Asian for tech employees. Google is right there, too, with tech employees being 94% white and Asian. Same at other computer corporations. It isn’t hard to guess that there are ethnic quotas or near-blanket exclusions secretly agreed upon between these outspokenly liberal corporate leaders. It’s ironic that conservative white factory workers and small industrial employers in the Midwest may be for Trump, but have much more integrated workplaces. Incidentally, the liberal icon New York Times, where Paul Krugman’s columns appear, has 6 White House reporters, but none of them are Black. It has 21 sports reporters, but none of them are Black ( although basketball and American football, for instance, are heavily Black ). Their lifestyles section has no Black writers, although Black people do have real lives. So who is more racist and backward?

Right now we are at intermission. As the previous left from the 1960s-70s has finally faded away, and exited the stage. In this transition, protest and struggle is starting all over again from ground zero. A new kind of radical movement with its own politics and startling ideas is still to come. But it had better have a real power hook-up for working class heroes and outcasts.
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Re: Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary

Postby American Dream » Fri Feb 24, 2017 2:52 pm

https://indypendent.org/2017/02/21/end- ... ectability

The End of White Respectability

BY NICHOLAS POWERS
FEBRUARY 21, 2017


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"Flava Flav should run for president,” I told my friends. “Donald Trump? Really? We’ve got better celebrities.” They laughed bitterly. Whether at a party or riding the train, we all felt thrust into a strange limbo. The rules we’d been taught our whole lives were suddenly being rendered meaningless.

After the election, we seesawed between anger, fear and sheer wonder. It was the wonder that tells us the most about our times. How could a man who is so ignorant and vulgar, win the presidency? We had witnessed, without knowing it, the end of white respectability politics.

White America had been split by class but fused together by the reality and mythology of upward mobility. Each generation moved up, and each lower class policed itself to fit the norms set by the one above it.

It worked for decades like an escalator, until capitalism broke down and America became too diverse for them. Now those left behind acted out a desperate revenge. They elected a cretin to the highest office in the land. Whether they know it or not, they bankrupted whiteness for whites. Its elites are shamed and visionless. Its poor are panicked. The future is elsewhere.

Respectability Politics 101

“For Black people to reach the Promised Land, Flava Flav has to be shot.” Chris Rock paced the stage. “We have a Black man running for president. We don’t need a nigger running around with a Viking hat on his head.”

We howled in laughter at this bit from Rock’s 2004 comedy special Never Scared. It spoke to a truth we had lived our whole lives: We had to keep ourselves clean-cut, arrive on time, talk proper and be twice as good. In short, we had to be respectable.

For most of American history, ethnic minorities practiced respectability politics. We policed ourselves to embody white middle-class beauty aesthetics, mannerisms, styles and culture. Professor Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham in her 1993 book, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, wrote how Black women, “felt certain that respectable behavior in public would earn their people a measure of esteem from white America, and hence they strove to win the black lower class’s psychological allegiance to temperance, industriousness, thrift, refined manners and Victorian sexual mores.”

For most American minorities, respectability politics is bound to “double consciousness”: We know of the warping lens of caricature by which the majority sees us. So we blend in or turn the mirror back around at it. Malcolm X practiced it. Marian Anderson practiced it. Dr. Martin Luther King practiced it. Barack Obama practiced it.

A countercurrent pulsed in the street. In smoky juke joints and jazz clubs. In the jails. In the alleyways where men rolled dice. In the blues. It was just a countercurrent until the Black Power movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, when Black became beautiful and handsome by rebelling against white middle-class norms. The Black Power aesthetic was commercialized, and remade our culture. We have been living in a Black anti-respectability culture for nearly four decades. White America is just catching up.

Welcome to the Machine

“Meet George Jetson!” The cartoon showed Mr. Jetson, zipping in a space car, dropping his family off in a gleaming, futuristic suburbia. I was transfixed. Growing up, I was engulfed by whiteness. “Leave it to Beaver.” “Gilligan’s Island.” “Laverne and Shirley.” “Happy Days.” You name it, I saw it or read it or heard it.

But I knew the stark contrast between media whiteness and the real, living breathing people who were supposed to be white. They did not have laugh tracks turning their pain into humor; their poverty did not end after 30 minutes with credits. They were friends, and they welcomed me into run-down homes, fed me and yes, sometimes hurt me.

We don’t think of white America as having respectability politics. Whiteness seemed to be a background setting. Yet the split between media whiteness and real people creates a class-based double consciousness, a way that poor and working-class whites see themselves through an ideal whiteness.

It began with colonial whiteness, the fusing of ragged European immigrants into an imaginary race. After the interracial 1676 Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia, a terrified colonial elite made whiteness into a set of magnetic privileges, to divide the restive European working class from African slaves and indigenous peoples.

Whiteness was a generational escalator. It moved new ethnic groups up, up, up into a bright new future. Irish, Jewish, Italian, Greek, Eastern European ­— people became “respectable” to the degree that they dissolved their cultures in the blandness of the postwar GI Bill-subsidized suburbs. The ’50s were a white golden age. Wives with pearls vacuuming. Men with gleaming new cars. The American president was the final authority in this world, and his decorum, behavior, speech and mannerisms were the embodiment of the ideal.

American whiteness worked as long as the escalator kept moving people across the class divide. But the inner dynamics of capitalism act like a suction tube drawing wealth from the many to the few at the top. Politics strained to bridge the gap.

Presidents overcompensated with populist gestures; Bill Clinton brandished his sax and flaunted a baby-boomer sexuality, George W. Bush had a folksy twang and barroom swagger. But neither their theatrics nor their policies could stop the class divide from getting wider until the aura of white respectability snapped. The elites of both parties had been coasting on a social contract that had been defaulted on. Then along came a man called Trump.

The Village Idiot

The president doesn’t read. The president hangs up the phone on other world leaders. The president speaks like a middle-school kid bully. The president sends angry 3 a.m. tweets at his TV critics. He held the hand of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for a long time, petting it like the head of dog.

Every day, we get more evidence that President Trump is embarrassing himself and the country. And yet it is exactly his vulgar, crude and ignorant ways that endeared him to some white voters who found themselves living at the end of whiteness. Their racial privilege is more visible at the same time that their class privileges have stalled or been revoked. And their psychological allegiance to the white ruling class has broken enough for them not to care about respectability. They are no longer looking down at themselves from the position of the elites, but are looking at the elites as frauds. In a fury, they have thrown off white respectability politics.

But in a telling gesture, they, in voting for Trump, threw away their dignity. Respectability politics, whatever race, is implicitly a transactional act. I pay for entry into the club with good taste and good behavior. It is performative, meant for the appraisal of others, one that Jean-Paul Sartre would call “bad faith” or psychologist D. W. Winnicott would call life as a “false self.” It is a mask.

In voting for Trump, a man who laughed at the disabled, gleefully dumped slurs on whole peoples and is too entitled to bother to think, white voters did not free themselves from their elites. Respectability politics can only be seen as a trap if it was first seen as a source of freedom, but it never was.

Dignity is. Dignity comes from a deeper place. Dignity is the source of true revolutions. It’s the realization that you, no matter how poor or tattered, are the embodiment of an immeasurable worth that cannot be defined by status or property.

When you feel that power within, you feel it with everyone, because it is our universal truth. When Trump tried to enact his Muslim ban, tens of thousands of immigrants and native-born allies showed up at airports to protest. It was a deeply loving act of dignity, to reach out in the name of shared humanity to those being scapegoated. It was the birth pangs of a New America, where everyone is welcome, including Flava Flav. Yeah Boyeeeeeee!


Nicholas Powers is a Professor of African-American Literature at SUNY Old Westbury and author of The Ground Below Zero (UpSet Press, 2013).
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Re: Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary

Postby American Dream » Sun Feb 26, 2017 8:20 am

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“White Genocide” and the Myth of White Victimhood

George Ciccariello-Maher interviewed by Daniel Denvir – Part 1

The idea that white people, not only in the United States, but in the world, have been systematically victimized by anyone is absurd and is a fantasy and it actually very much goes hand in hand with this white genocide fantasy, although it is a very different manifestation of that.


https://abolitionjournal.org/white-geno ... ictimhood/
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Re: Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary

Postby American Dream » Sun Feb 26, 2017 8:27 am

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Nazi-Punching Praxis: Against the Liberal Theology of Reason & Non-Violence

George Ciccariello-Maher interviewed by Daniel Denvir – Part 2


We’re also in a moment where it’s difficult because the reprehensible and the illegitimate have taken over institutions of political power and have done so through the institutions of the electoral college. So people are struggling, I think justifiably, with trying to figure out how it is possible to deem something illegitimate but also recognize that it has institutional legitimacy. The fact that Richard Spencer may have a right to speak, versus the fact that we actually need to build an anti-fascist culture that does not recognize the content of that speech as legitimate at all.


https://abolitionjournal.org/nazi-punch ... -violence/
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Re: Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary

Postby American Dream » Sun Feb 26, 2017 6:01 pm

http://www.garthmullins.com/2017/02/a-m ... hanks.html

A mono-cultural Canada? No thanks

by Garth Mullins - originally published in 24 Hours Vancouver

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Multiculturalism policy is a clunky, unfinished, official acknowledgement that there’s more to Canada than just white guys. Now it’s under assault.

Many nations have thrived here since time immemorial: Tsimshian, Anishinaabe, Tsleil-Waututh, Dene, Tsilhqot’in and more besides. But for most of the last 150 years, settlers have run things as if they alone counted.

British ‘mono-culturalism’ started to unravel after WW2, as Indigenous peoples and immigrant communities won reforms from government. While colonialism and institutional racism continued, room opened up for other voices, albeit on the margins.

In 1988, the Multiculturalism Act called for “equality of all Canadians in the economic, social, cultural and political life of Canada.”

But now the far right is on the march, nostalgic for the ‘good old days’ when only white men were in charge. For them, multiculturalism isn’t about inclusion - it’s an existential threat. Political scientist Samuel Huntington wrote, “multiculturalism is in its essence anti-European civilization.” Reality just doesn’t support this notion, but that hasn’t stopped mass deportations, wall building and immigration bans.

The right prefers a “melting pot” of assimilated individuals, not communities. But Canada is supposedly a “mosaic,” where cultural identity need not be abandoned. Sociologist John Porter cautions that it’s a “vertical mosaic” - those of British ancestry still tend to wind up on top.

Real equality calls for a radical transformation, not just changing symbols or faces in power. Canada must deepen its commitment to diversity, not roll it back.

Globally, 65 million are in flight from war, persecution, climate disaster and famine. They’re running, hiding, in detention, adrift on leaky boats, stuck in refugee camps and finding fewer welcoming countries.

Last week’s photo of a Mountie carrying a refugee child across the snowy Canadian border went viral. But the arrest and detention of the child’s family afterwards was out of frame.

A polite veneer of multiculturalism can obfuscate jagged class and colonial relations. We are too often lulled to sleep with bedtime stories of a happy, progressive Canada, free of racism.

This dynamic was thrown into sharp relief following the murders of people at prayer in a Quebec Mosque.

I’m glad MP Iqra Khalid introduced motion M103, to "condemn Islamophobia and all forms of systemic racism and religious discrimination." The tsunami of slurs and death threats she’s received since only prove her point.

We must keep turning out in large numbers to protect our neighbours and counter racism.


This isn’t just about policy. It’s about people’s lives.
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Re: Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary

Postby American Dream » Tue Feb 28, 2017 7:32 am

“Where Are the People of Color?”

Guilt is a sad, passive emotion — and it won’t help us build a more diverse left.

by Asad Haider


“Where are the people of color?”

It could be any meeting — an ad hoc general assembly, an emergency gathering for immigrant defense, a planning session for an upcoming strike. The speaker is usually white, but not always — and depending on this, their tone is guilty or accusatory.

On the rare occasion that this query is accompanied by a positive proposal, it is abstract, likely no more than a call for reflection. When the speaker is white, it often functions to absolve them of the need to actually do something about it.

Sometimes, on its face, the question is reasonable. Any political collectivity in the age of Trump which consists only of white people is an example of an abject failure — a failure of outreach, at the simplest level, but also a political failure, a failure to challenge the white supremacy which is threaded through American history.

But sometimes the question reveals nothing more than sanctimonious ignorance. It would be hard for me to count how many times I have sat in a meeting, often right next to several other people of color, and watched as someone righteously declared, “Everyone here is white.”

In the moment, it makes my blood boil. As a Muslim American, I have been detained at airports and verbally abused in public places. When I heard the news of Trump’s Muslim ban, I wondered whether I would be able to see my parents again. And I am one of the lucky ones.

Given the opportunity to cool down, I have to reflect on the strange psychology of these statements. Could it be simply the racist assumption that anyone who attends a political meeting and can speak English well must necessarily be white? It is hard for me to read it otherwise, and it is disturbing to imagine the potential consequences of this white practice of speaking for others. We should hope that this does not become a self-fulfilling prophesy, alienating and driving away people of color whose presence is erased by guilty whites.

The question is itself exclusionary, in its reliance on the empty abstraction of “people of color.” In your city, wherever it is, there is likely a young white male who is addicted to Vicodin, struggles to support his children on fast-food wages, and is on the verge of eviction. Where is he during this political meeting?

Middle-class activists are adept at deluding themselves with complicated explanations. But it is not a difficult question to answer. Like many people of color and many other whites, he is doing what he can to make it to the next day.

As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes, “the privileges of white skin run very thin in a country where nineteen million white people languish in poverty.” Every day in a capitalist society is a struggle for the poor. Attending a meeting called by some unknown organization — and we all know how excruciating these meetings can be — will not put food on the table for your children. It will not help you recover from long hours of monotonous, draining work. It will not compel your landlord to fix your broken toilet. It will not stop the collection agency from calling.

This is not an appeal to holding up some mythical “white working class” as the abandoned core of the American masses. It is a simple recognition of lived reality of the working class, which contains white people and people of color, people of all genders and sexualities, the employed and the unemployed — a multitude of people irreducible to any single description.

Many socialists argue that across these differences, all of these people have a common interest — a point easily skewered by the identitarian liberal who asks how the young woman seeking an abortion and the evangelical protester, the undocumented immigrant and the salaried worker, can possibly have the same interest.


Continues at: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/02/left ... ifference/
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Re: Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary

Postby American Dream » Fri Mar 03, 2017 10:36 am

I've got 99 problems but a class analysis ain't one

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Some things should have been left in 2011, the mystifying 99% slogan is one.

We are the 99% was the rallying cry of the Occupy movement. While its usage has slipped since 2011, we’re starting to see efforts to revive the slogan as protests against Trump gather pace. This may be because people want to revive the spirit of Occupy itself, whether they just like the slogan, or because the phrase has slipped into the common vocabulary of class analysis and activism in the meantime.

Rather than explaining class relations in an accessible way, the 99% mystifies how capitalism works and leads to a very confusing interpretation of class struggle. It leaves the door open for a conspiratorial view of how capitalism works, and often acts as a cover for reformist, social democratic methods for how to fight it.

First let’s look at the 1%. This generally means the top 1% richest people in the world. Presidents, CEOs, Wall Street Traders. As Naomi Klein recently put it, the Davos Class.

The 99% is literally everyone who isn’t in this group. By design this includes the CEOs of quite a lot of small and medium enterprises, low- to mid-level managers in corporations, trade union bosses and NGO executives, police, prison guards, journalists, aspiring politicians, academics, as well as regular workers and the unemployed. Some early occupy protests had chants like “Cops are the 99%!" "We're fighting for your pensions, too!", usually shouted shortly before the cops tear gassed people rather than afterwards.

The 1% are the billionaires, the tech oligarchs, the Wall Street traders.

The 99% are the people, the vast majority of society.

The 99% has recently been used by the 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign , in a recent Guardian article calling for a Global Womens’ Strike on March 8th which mentions it three times, “a feminism of the 99%” counterposed to the feminism of “Lean In”, and was defended vigorously by Conor Kilpatrick in Jacobin as a simple way to figure out what class you’re in.

Capitalism however is not maintained by the actions of the Davos class or the 1%. Rather it’s a hegemonic social system that is maintained primarily through the social relationships of wage labour and commodities.

You have to earn wages to get money.

You have spend that money on rent, utilities and food in order to survive.

Your work either involves the creation/distribution of commodities, or the maintenance (or management) of the workforce itself if you work in sectors like education and health.

If you’re unemployed or imprisoned, you may be working anyway via workfare and prison labour, just on wages and benefits below the rate of subsistence.

Robots might be taking your job, but they aren’t delivering food free of charge to your door each week to make up for it, or wiping your arse when you get old.

These are not hard concepts to grasp, every time you wake up on Monday morning or look at your bank balance they confront you. Every hour you spend at work reinforces the system you’re fighting against one way or the other.

How do we struggle against the 1%? Unless you live in San Francisco, London or New York (or even if you do), you might never see a member of the 1% in real life. What we’re left with is usually symbolic protests inside or outside civic and financial institutions, which locate the source of power as something unattainable and remote. At its worst, talk of ‘bankers’ tends towards structural anti-semitism and locates all the world’s problems in the shadowy conspiratorial meetings held at international summits. Often it results in coalescing around left populist electoral campaigns, which need as broad a constituency as they can possibly have to hoover up disaffected voters.

Despite these limitations, Occupy did get involved with protests that disrupted capital and especially in Oakland made links with workers including the November 2nd 2011 demonstration. These aspects of the movement should be revisited as the reaction to Brexit and Trump gathers pace, but the idea of the 99% should be left behind in 2011 where it should have stayed in the first place. We should also be looking at other recent movements such as the 2010 student occupations and protests in the UK, the 2006 movement against the CPE in France, the 2012 student occupations in Quebec, the 2015 prison strike in the US, the uprisings in Ferguson and Baltimore against police violence in 2014/15, and the 2006 immigrant strikes in the US.

When you struggle against work via strikes, slow downs, and slacking off, you confront capitalism at the point of production. When you struggle against police violence, evictions, immigration raids and homelessness you confront capital as it maintains property relations and social control.

Rather than the 1%, these struggles come against the letting agent, the HR department, the police, immigration authorities, property developers, local government officials. Those who enforce borders, wage cuts, gentrification, rent hikes, criminalisation of communities and all the other shit. They cannot be mobilised as part of the 99%, if at all by rejecting their role entirely. The abolition of the police, not their co-operation as we saw at Occupy Sandy. The expropriation of tech CEOs, not their incorporation into cross-class liberal #resistance.

Focusing on the 99% or the 1%, rather than encouraging class analysis, focuses attention away from class struggle and towards protests against abstract and remote actors. Even when owners of companies and housing are far away, the offices, shops, warehouses and housing blocks they own are the places we live, work and shop.
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Re: Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary

Postby American Dream » Sat Mar 11, 2017 11:34 pm

Regrouping: White workers, “identity politics” and multiculturalism (Bromma, March 17, 2017)


White working class

This is a perennial issue for US Left. A widespread, false narrative holds that white workers—because they are workers—must be inherently progressive. Whenever white workers commit racist acts, it’s claimed that they do so out of ignorance, acting against their own best interests. J. Sakai’s classic book, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, demolished this opportunist narrative decades ago. But it keeps spontaneously regenerating within the US Left, like a vampire rising from the crypt.

The white working class isn’t part of the world proletariat. It’s a systematically privileged worker elite. It was created and cultivated by the US ruling class to serve as a population of overseers, wardens, shock troops and labor fakers. Originally deployed to contain and control rebellious workers of color, the white working class later became a willing social base for the US’s rise as a predatory world empire. Like the white working class in apartheid South Africa, or the Zionist working class in Israel today, the white working class in the US is essentially parasitic. In return for its special privileged status, which is enshrined in a system of institutional racism, this class consistently opposes and undermines the struggles of oppressed peoples both in the US and around the world. Over the course of generation after generation, the white working class has embraced the atrocities of US capitalism: land theft, genocide, slavery, imperialist war, segregation, mass incarceration. And now, Trump.

Fighting racism among white workers is possible and necessary. But catering to the politics of the white working class is poison to the struggle against racism and capitalism. It’s disloyal to the freedom struggles of oppressed nationalities and nations, which have always spearheaded meaningful social change in the U.S., often while being forced to battle white workers. Out of pure necessity, those national movements are autonomous struggles, struggles for survival, self-defense and self-determination.


More at: http://kersplebedeb.com/posts/regrouping-bromma/
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Re: Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Sun Mar 12, 2017 3:19 pm

American Dream » Sat Feb 18, 2017 1:42 pm wrote:That's got to be intentional on Nick Land's part. He really is much, much smarter than that.


He really is not. I am tempted to say "read more of his work," so that you might agree, but overall, I'd recommend you don't. Your comrades will be block-quoting enough of it in the years to come anyway.

American Dream wrote:
Regrouping: White workers, “identity politics” and multiculturalism (Bromma, March 17, 2017)

The white working class isn’t part of the world proletariat. It’s a systematically privileged worker elite.


10-4, good buddy!

I appreciate the clarity of being named for the Kulak I am: the blood enemy of the anti-racist revolution. Such a curious inversion, but then, this does all ultimately flow from Hegel's horseshit convolutions.

Let's keep the Cracker Abolition going, though. There's going to be a lot of new content incoming this spring about White Rage & Demographic Terrorism and such.
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Re: Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary

Postby Karmamatterz » Sun Mar 12, 2017 5:03 pm

Yes, please do. The victimization syndrome needs more fuel. Can't let that thing die and wither on the vine.

Love the hilarious "Cracker Abolition" choice of words.
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Re: Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary

Postby American Dream » Mon Mar 13, 2017 1:43 am

I have definitely found a lot that is useful in the work of Andre Gunder Frank, Walter Rodney and Immanuel Wallerstein for understanding world systems, though I've never agreed with those (of a very different school) who argue for the wholesale writing off of First World workers. That's a bad road to go down.
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Re: Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary

Postby American Dream » Mon Mar 13, 2017 7:57 pm

The Question of Hierarchy: An Interview with Colin Jenkins

Image
The Pyramid of Capitalism


Some people would argue that hierarchies are needed as people aren't really capable of leading themselves or that if they did, we wouldn't have a stable modern society. What is your response to that?

First, I would ask where this "stable modern society" is? For a majority of the world's population, life is incredibly unstable. For many, life is dire. Even in a so-called "advanced" society like the US, tens of millions of people suffer from homelessness, food insecurity, joblessness, a lack of reliable and affordable healthcare, and with no means to feed and clothe their children. Tens of millions must rely on government assistance. Tens of millions do not receive adequate education. Tens of millions live paycheck-to-paycheck and can't pay their bills. And millions are terrorized by police forces and government agents in their own neighborhoods. Most Americans have less than $1,000 in savings , if any, and studies have estimated that more than half of all working Americans are one paycheck away from being homeless . And even those who appear to be getting by just fine are actually buried in debt, with credit card debt averaging $16,000 per household , mortgage and car payments that are barely doable, and student loan debt averaging at $49,000 per borrower, many of whom are in no position to ever pay that back. Our collective existence, despite a general appearance of comfort, is extremely fragile. And this economic reality doesn't even begin to touch on the compounded social realities lived by historically marginalized sections of the working class - people of color, women, immigrants, etc… The US is a ticking time bomb on the verge of exploding at any moment. Stability is a mirage.

Second, the idea that "people aren't capable of leading themselves" stems from a need to maintain fundamentally unequal societies where a very small percentage of the population controls most of the wealth and power. This has become part of the dominant ideology of most of the modern world. Because, quite simply, when a very small percentage of a particular population controls everything, there must be various ways to justify and enforce this control.

One way is through brute force or the threat of such force, which the modern nation-state holds a monopoly on. This is accomplished through the mere construction of a criminal justice system that has laws and ways of enforcing those laws. Over time, these laws become equated with some vague form of morality that is not questioned by most. You see the effects of this everywhere. For instance, when people try to condemn political struggles for doing things that are "illegal," they have subconsciously bought into the idea that written laws which have been drawn up by millionaire politicians , who are directly influenced by billionaires, should be revered as some sort of moral code. In reality, many of these laws are constructed to keep our extremely unequal society intact, and are directly tied to protecting those who own this illegitimate wealth and power . They are designed to keep most of us powerless and stuck in our increasingly precarious lives. Under such a society, a person who does not have access to food for themselves or their family is punished for taking food. A person who is homeless is punished for squatting in an abandoned building. A person who does not have medical care is punished (financially, if not criminally) for seeking medical attention. So on and so on… and all of this takes place in a very strict hierarchical arrangement where the appearance of "stability" remains at the forefront. It's an inherently unjust arrangement for so many, and the threat of force is constantly held over our heads to maintain this façade of stability.

Another way to justify and enforce this control is through what Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci referred to as "cultural hegemony," or dominant culture. Ruling classes throughout history have relied on both formal and informal channels to mold a dominant culture (ideology) that supports their rule. This can be established through a formal education system, through media sources, through organized religion and churches, etc… Under capitalism, this doesn't have to be done in a conspiratorial kind of way because the basic inequities stemming from the economic system create a sociopolitical structure that mimics and protects these inequities through social, cultural, political, and "legal" avenues. One of the results of this is a widespread, conditioned belief that we are not capable of caring for ourselves, our families, and our communities; and thus need so-called "extraordinary" people (politicians) to do this for us. It is a lie.


In a social sense, why do you think that social hierarchies and larger societal norms still reign when we don't seem to need them anymore? (Social norms were important in the early days of humanity as if one wasn't part of the group, they often wouldn't survive, but now it is rather easy to flourish alone or find people who you link with.)

Social hierarchies still exist because they are a natural extension from the more tangible/structural economic hierarchy. The dominant culture in this type of society needs such social norms. The Marxist theory of base and superstructure is useful in this regard. A materialist conception of history tells us that society is constructed on an economic base, or is based on the modes of production, because it is this fundamental arrangement that ultimately determines how people fulfill their basic needs. Everything else builds off of that arrangement. In a capitalist system, a large majority of the population is forced to rely on wage labor. This is an incredibly fragile and unstable existence because we are completely dependant on a privileged minority to provide us with jobs and living wages, things that capitalism inherently cannot provide to all. So, most of us are set up for failure from birth. This is why Frederick Douglass recognized that a "slavery of wages [is] only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery." Hence, Marx's focus on exploitation and alienation. This structural oppression created by capitalism explains the need for a Welfare State, because societal unrest would be inevitable without the state supplementing these inherent and widespread inequities.

So, according to this analysis, there is a superstructure that builds from this unequal base, and this includes social, cultural, and political realities. Naturally, the superstructure mimics the base, while it also helps to maintain it. In doing so, these corollary developments tend to take on the same characteristics as the base, which, as already noted, consists of a high degree of alienation and exploitation. This basically means that social systems stemming from an inherently exploitative base tend to become exploitative themselves. One of the best examples of this is white supremacy, which is an artificial system of valuing human worth based on skin color. White supremacy is a modern cultural phenomenon that extends throughout the superstructure in both overt and undetected or insidious ways. And it is a valuable tool used by the capitalist/ruling class to create division within the working-class majority. This is why Malcolm X once proclaimed that "you can't have capitalism without racism."

Other cultural phenomena like patriarchy and homophobia work the same way. These things easily catch on within the working class because they are a source of empowerment for an otherwise powerless group. We're all economically disenfranchised, but poor and working-class white men can still grasp on to whiteness, "manliness," misogyny, and homophobia as sources of power and social dominance. You see this psyche develop not only in white people, but also throughout the working class. Some black men, despite their own intense structural oppression, will become misogynistic or homophobic as a source of empowerment. A particular immigrant community will dehumanize another immigrant community as a source of empowerment. American workers across the board will target and dehumanize immigrants. So on and so on. What we're seeing here is the formation of social hierarchies within the working class, all of which mimic the hierarchy created by the economic base. Tragically, this perceived power over others within the working class is easily accessible, and it's a cheap and toxic source of empowerment. But it is a good thing for the capitalist class, as it keeps working-class angst directed within its own ranks and away from the real culprits - the rich. It's the ultimate distraction.

On a related note, these social hierarchies are worthy of examination to all of us who oppose the capitalist system. When we look at developments within the superstructure, we can strategize and build liberation movements that will ultimately break them down, which will in turn allow us to build a formidable resistance against the economic base. This is why intersectionality is crucial. But intersectionality only works if it is based in a fundamentally anti-capitalist orientation. Because if we don't approach this with the ultimate goal of attacking and destroying the economic base, it won't matter in the end. We'll find ourselves in the same position, only under a multi-cultural, multi-sex, non-gender-descript boot, as opposed to a "white, cisgender, male" boot. And this is the pitfall that identity politics fall into. Capitalism has the ability to accommodate these types of political movements by simply allowing individuals from hyper-marginalized sections of the working class to assume positions of power within these hierarchies. This approach is only about assimilation; and because of this, it only demands that that the power structure become more inclusive, not that the power structure be eliminated. Capitalism can and will seek to appease this kind of tokenism without changing its inherently authoritative and exploitative structure.


Continues at: http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/colin ... view.html#
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Re: Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary

Postby Elvis » Mon Mar 13, 2017 9:50 pm

Colin Jenkins wrote:In a social sense, why do you think that social hierarchies and larger societal norms still reign when we don't seem to need them anymore?


Thanks for bolding that paragraph, it caught my eye because I recently read a passage concerning the roles of both aristocracy and peasantry; for a brief shiny moment the Greeks—as a whole people—were getting it:


TheGreeksKitto p108.jpg


p108 The Greeks by H.D.F. Kitto, 1951

(It's a good book and Kitto is a card.)
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