Just listened to a conversation with amber where she basically makes excuses for Fascists for 40 minutes
Just listened to a conversation with amber where she basically makes excuses for Fascists for 40 minutes
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
You're viewing a single thread.
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.
"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.
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.
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 brain thinking.
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.
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.
I'll take all the downboats now.
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.
Ah yes the "if only everyone read settlers" argument. "If only everyone was a good person there'd be no problems. - The Democratic Party"
If you want to throw read theory at me, you should probably be prepared to defend the idea that efficient ideologically consistent societal transformation working on an even gradient from bad to good is even possible. The most successful Communist Party in the world doesn't even believe that. Reforming the US is going to be a sequence of less bad stages, not a magical wormhole through the theoryverse.
Listen Settlers is important and all, but let's be honest a lot of people who say read Settlers like the fact that settlers is a polemic condemnation that makes them feel vindicated in various ways. Settlers doesn't actually pose a realistic answer, simply explains a highly technical problem.
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.
I deleted my post before you replied because I feel like I cannot be fair to you in this discussion. I think I made the right decision.
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
What does "agitate" and "arm" even mean here? What does "betray" even mean here? You're talking in the most vague generalities.
Your plan as far as I can understand it is:
- Pass out leaflets of Fanon and Sakai to basically everyone
- ???
- settlers betray settler colonialism (?)
- ???
- FALGC
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.
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.
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.
Cool, what does a concrete example of "betray" look like for Amerikkka and why does it matter. Fanon's work cannot even be simply applied to Algeria anymore because the context is so different.
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.
Okay so, I'm again frustrated by the lack of everything 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>.
This is the strategy of the Lincoln Project.
But I do think that we can’t have a workers’ struggle until the settler-colonial situation is dealt with.
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.
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. Even the JDPON is not a permanent alliance because material reality and the advance of a Thirdworldist may disqualify people previously in the JDPON from continuing to be in the JDPON, and through the uplift the society must peacefully transcend the JDPON without recreating the need for it again in order to actually achieve communism.
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".
Lastly in general one of the reasons that I do not really think a whole lot about "settler colonialism" focused work is because it's incredibly hard to apply it to the modern world. Fanon talks about colonialism and the Algerian revolution. Algeria cast off colonialism in 1962 a year after Fanon's death. In 2 years Sartre releases Colonialism and Neocolonialism (prefaced by Wretched of the Earth) a book explaining how the systems of colonial control in Algeria were reimposed through the market created a new system of neocolonialism.
The abstraction of these problems into market problems inherent changes the equation because there's no "people" to fight. There's no French Colonist to turn into an Algerian.
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.
this should be an effort post
Gosh I just listen to audiobooks at work 😅
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.
Do you think there could be a colonial relation that exists across the US spatially? You claim Black people are very dispersed across the US but within a city, there generally is a segregation that places them on one side while settlers are on another. I definitely agree that the Colony as Fanon described it doesn't map 1:1 to the US, but there is still a spatial separation between a settler group and a colonized group which could form the basis for anti-colonial struggle.
Just because the crackers have infested the land from sea to sea over generations doesn't mean they're not still settlers to this day. As long as there's still even one unhonored treaty, as long as there's still even one unreparated subject of empire, Native or Black, these crackers are still settlers and I will not hear a counter to this point. Settlerism is an ongoing, eternal process until the settler is removed, like a splinter from the skin-- it doesn't end just because a couple generations went by.
You might as well be preaching for those colonized by crackers to "just lay down and let them finish what they started since we're so outnumbered". I hope you understand why I spit on that take.
Cool. Just hopped on my alt to say, I had another effort post, but I got banned from most of hexbear for "defending fascists" so that's gone now. Which is the lulziest thing ever and just reinforces the hugbox nature of conversations on here that make it difficult to have real discussions. Ultimately the "nice try FBI", the lack of real analysis of theory and the denigration by mods having a real one is really shitty for fostering any real conversation in the community, meanwhile low effort bullshit of "I hate this person therefore fascist" is promoted.
tl;dr Y'all win Amber is the dumbest person ever and she loves fascists so much and has a shrine of Mussolini in her bedroom with the lips worn out and anyone who disagrees with me is actually a fascist
anyone who disagrees with me is actually a fascist
This, but unironically since I'm the most leftwing person here and all of you are liberals.
Amber.
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.
Amber is not trying to build communism
Neither is anyone involved in this discussion. We're all just posting.
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?
I don't think that individuals can actually rehabilitate fascists. I don't think most people even can change their minds with actual debate. I think people change their minds based on emotional connection more often than debate / logic / facts/ and reason. I'm autistic and I can see my limitations here, I think a lot of people cannot even if they're not autistic.
Lastly I think society can rehabilitate as many fascists as possible by removing the sociological reasons that people radicalize from, things like housing, food, meaningful work, and social connection, while maintaining exposure to "the other". Our society through capitalism has effectively destroyed these things and created a world where materially these basic human functions are out of reach of most people.
Ultimately there's no scientific or industrial silver bullet to the problem of fascists existing, ultimately the fascist has to want to change and if it's even possible to get an individual to that point the only way you're going to do it is by making them feel safe materially and socially.
Fascists deserve these things because they're people, as much as we find them disgusting they are people and all people deserve these things for simply being people. Communism is not treats for the most noble of victims, communism is a base standard of living applied to all that is its justice. We can argue about the order of operations here, and I think there's valid arguments you can make there, however even in historical practice the order of operations is arbitrary based on material and political conditions. In fact most people shy away from mistakes of agency made by communists in their order of operations because they don't learn about this shit critically.
What union work does Amber do?
She literally worked for LaborNotes and has been part of various union drives in the past. I'm too lazy to pull the excerpts from Dirtbag because it ultimately does not matter.
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.
I don't even know where to start with this, and it's. bit of a headache so all I'll say is that the idea that everyone must be in your party in order to be politically useful is the most braindead limiting idea that most leftists subscribe to. This isn't about having a big tent, this isn't about having a big party. This is about effectively communicating what your political movement will do for people, all people, not just the people that you like and want around, because in practice that's a very small number, and this community like all "left" communities loves to shrink that number based on new rules and regulations that make certain people feel better about how good they are, without actually doing good work or providing things to people.
The community's rejection of the majority of "Amberisms" is often proof. If I disagreed with Amber 99% of the time, I would still want her in or allied with my political movement because practically we want the same things, and she has an ocean of real life experience compared to most leftists.
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.
A vast majority of this board operates as an echo chamber, no normal person goes here. There is an immediate jump to "you're talking about allying with Hitler" instead of your average mildly chudly person. The reality is that most people's average coworkers would be banned from this board in an instant for their ambient chud ideas.
remember you yourself said
Amber is a SocDem. She projects more sympathy for chuds than for the marginalized.
The magical chud category has been an amazing development of Chapo Trap House because it's become this wonderful word for "people I don't like that are beyond reproach but also whoever I'm slandering in any given argument for their political views".
Also in general I have a much more negative outlook on the actual politics of Americans than you do. There's a real common strain of ambient fascism in America it's merely sublimated through the market rather than through brown shirt mobilizations. Most liberals are fascsist, they simply reject the aesthetics of Mussolini and the more obvoius of them are more in line with Pinochet, but in practicality they love the idea of hiding their immorality behind the market, which launders the morality of their actions and beliefs through the economic system.
Almost every fucking common thing drives us to this instinct. I cannot get mad at food delivery drivers no matter how much I tip them because they are an exploited class, and to get mad at them for their "failure" in a fair way is more energy than I'm willing to expend on a trite problem especially when I'm hungry. And yet this very common problem creates a mass of psychotic online fascistic posting and op-ed column drudgery. This type of latent fascism is due to the alienation of people from their labor, the commodity fetishism of people's consumption and ultimately by a market that is squeezing everyone. That's what the core of fascism is to me, the political, social and systemic expression of an entitlement to denigrate the living conditions of other people to meet your current convenience. The fasces is a tool of judgement.
Also there are downboats, hexbear just hides them in the CSS.
Amber.
Amber.
Amber.
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