Project 2025 is being used to legitimize the genocidal Democratic Party by threatening voters with the republican party.

I remember reading somewhere that Project 2025 is sponsored in part by Democrat friendly donors. Am I making this up? I can't find this information again and it is disappointing now that the pressure on people to vote for genocidal candidates seems to be escalating.

I though of it as similar to how in 2016 Trump and Ted Cruz were "elevated" in the media at the behest of the Hillary campaign, believing it would make Hillary look good. I have met blue dogs that admit this and stand by it as a good strategy, so the idea that democrats are also sponsoring Project 2025 seems very believable to me.

Does anyone else remember reading that Dems are also sponsoring Project 2025 in some capacity?

Edit: this article speaks a bit to what I'm talking about

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/project-2025-liberal-donors/

Peace and solidarity with the United American Indians of New England, and to all of the sovereign Tribes accross the continent as we all observe the National Day of Mourning. The multicentury assault on the Indigenous world cannot claim victory, genocide is not the end of the story, but we must remember those who have been lost to settler invasion. Today is a time to reject settler myths that distort history, to reflect on our social positioning and relationships with the many peoples of this land, and to imagine brighter futures without the destructive structures of settler-colonialism and capitalist accumulation. This leaves no room whatsoever for giving thanks to the alter of death which birthed an abomination that has plagued the earth for far too long. Solidarity and reciprocity with the hundreds of millions of Indigenous peoples accross the world is of critical importance for building the coalitions we need to survive and thrive in a post apocalyptic world.

No clue how some of you try to track the events of major conflicts. It just all seems like a stew of piss and vomit designed to spread disease. I can hardly read the NYT, guardian, wapost, etc. at all, much less read their war coverage. War itself is bad enough but adding in the perspectives of western analysts is just masochistic. I never want to hear a liberal of any kind mention hamas ever again. Im so sick of the measured intellectuals and their gratuitous condemnations of #violence ever again.

And before someone thinks I shouldn't hate people, I think Kyle Kulinski and his associates aren't persons so much as they are a media business brand enabled by other corporate brands like youtube and the Democratic Party. It pains me greatly that people consume these brands and turn into consumers of what I see as American apologetics.

Anyway that's all. I hate the prison of American political discourse and its prison guards like Kyle.

Im not going to pull punches on this rant. I am so exhausted by this rhetoric and unfortunately it is pervasive in my personal life and online. I spend most of my productive time reviewing literature on various global issues. Namely land grab discourse, genocide studies, conservation efforts, state development policy, IFI reports etc etc.

Let me tell you something about the lives of rural and Indigenous people in the global south. They get their homes burned down and murdered in their sleep. Their lands are stolen from them with techniques perfected by colonial powers, especially from US settler colonialism.

The state will steal their lands and "preserve it" for use of private capital, for white settlers, or to create a national park or preserves that wealthy foriegners can hunt game and so they can parade to the world how "modern" they are becoming.

If they cannot steal land outright they will use other more complicated manners to incentivise rural people to be tied into market relations, such as dependence on ecotourism or even biochar and other technologies presented as liberatory or as needed due to damages colonialism has done. "A bit of colonialism will help your colonialism problem," if you will.

These relations will contradict and then corrode their lifeways and distracted from effective traditional methods because white tourists don't want to see the cattle of pastoralists when on vacation. They are also shamed by the excess wealth of tourists, and the settlers that facilitate tourism, encouraging them to become more enfranchised into modernity so their lands will either become vulnerable to direct theft or the market relations will mold them into what settlers want them to do for the benifit of their estates.

These extreme minority settlers often own like half of an entire county, while the county next door is over half conservation area. This means fewer lands for grazing and fewer water sources available for rural people. It leads to starvation and death, especially during dry periods such as the current drought in east Africa, all while the state concern trolls about food security and executes the development dance to attract aid and FDI. It also means that lands are degraded by over use because these people are being choked out of their ancestral lands. The state and white settlers then blame the pastoralists and forest dwellers and weaponize Human Rights against them, saying the rural peoples are preventing the states quest for water security as they redirect all waters to metro areas and settler estates.

All of this is the genocidal process of primative accumulation or accumulation by dispossession. It is a privilege I am able to research these situations. It is a privilege that I am able to work with organizations that work with local Tribes on the issues they are concerned about. It is a privilege I am a grad student that is paid to do this, although our union has to fight the university for a fraction of a living wage.

I am not privileged to not vote Blue. It is more like a curse of understanding. Who do you think backs these violent efforts of dispossession? USAID is never far away. The EU is never far away. The IFI are always right there. Conservation as we know it was created in North America to conquer the continent and take the land from Indigenous peoples and it has exported these methods abroad. All of this is supported by institutions and policies that democrats and republicans alike believe in and enable globally. It is supported by finance capital which is the foundation of the present democratic party

Let me tell you what people who vote blue do about this. Kenya or some other post colonial state will massacre people and burn down their homes and create a national park. Netflix will then hire Obama to narrate a docuseriese on the glorious national parks of the world. Blue voters will then consume the erasure and genocide of rural people as feel-good, green(TM) content with satisfaction that the world is becoming a better place. That's it. Then they go vote blue.

Anyone who says I am privileged to not vote blue has no clue or no care regarding how the world works and is a combination being hopelessly US centric, too focused on bourgeoisie partisanship and embarrassingly naive about the world. Voting blue is the opposite of solidarity. The people who say they are not privileged enough to not vote Blue fail to see their own privilege of living in the Disney land of the global north. What ever gains they think Democrats will give them will either never happen or will be cut from the flesh of people they are happy to sacrifice.

I will not be extorted by bourgeoisie partisans. My moral worth and political identify is mine to create, not theirs to demand. My concern is with the fundamental machinations of capital and the devestating impact it has on people while it reproduces itself, and it is most destructive in places far from the minds of democrats regardless of issues in the US. I'm not going to be tricked into supporting a party that enables the process of accumulation by dispossession, and that stands on a foundation of genocide. They only have moral arguments but they do not have moral standing.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/516254

Over the last several years I have, in song with others, pushed for priorities to be directed toward a “socialism with American characteristics.” The discourse that the quest has generated has often been a disaster. The obvious worst of this being the “patsoc” thinking that has thankfully quieted for the most part. In order to better advance this cause of creating a revolutionary theory, and to combat my personal angst which arises in the face of Maoists trying to force me to read about the Philippines instead of something that could be even more relevant for North America, I believe it would be generative to show an example of how Marxist theory has been used by Dene scholar Glen Sean Coulthard.

Not entirely unlike how Mao and the communists of China facilitated a “sinophication” of Marxism, some scholars and activists are arguably indigenizing Marxism, or making it “transformed in conversation with critical thought and practices of Indigenous peoples” to make it compatible for North American realities (p. 9).

In his book, Red Skin, White Masks, Coulthard explores the subjectivity that is enforced on Indigenous people by colonialism and the complications that arise. Coulthard may not be an explicit Marxist, he probably does not go around claiming to be ML, his aim is more to mold Marxism into a weapon for Indigenous people and not the other way around. Personally, I find this to be a worthy cause that more should be aware of.

I can’t do justice to a full summary at this time, but to partially summarize the book I will focus primarily on the context shift toward colonialism that Coulthard uses alongside his views on primitive accumulation. Most of this will be from just the introduction. I’ve chosen this because I believe this text provides a bridge between Indigenous thinkers and Marxist thinkers and can be a kind of gateway for a complex topic. Hopefully, this can expose comrades here to Indigenous thinking that can help us understand what is to be done.

Subheading: Into the Weeds

This context shift is a move toward a context of colonial instead of just capital relations by way of primitive accumulation. He defines colonialism as structured dispossession and utilizes chapters 26-32 of Capital vol I to stand on this.

He writes (p.7): In Capital these formative acts of violent dispossession set the stage for the emergence of capitalist accumulation and the reproduction of capitalist relations of production by tearing Indigenous societies, peasants and other small-scale, self-sufficient agricultural producers from the source of their livelihood—the land.

Many are already familiar with Primitive Accumulation, but I will attempt to flesh it out regardless. Primitive accumulation often seen as a temporary state of brutality were it forcefully opens up “what were once collectively held territories and resources to privatization” which inevitably leads to proletarianization. It is this violent transformation of non-capitalist relations into capitalist, market relations that constitutes primitive accumulation. Before continuing on to how Coulthard would like to recontextualize primitive accumulation he briefly touches on the fact that Indigenous thinking and Marxist thinking are oftentimes at odds. Part of his goal is to rescue both Indigenous people from the oftentimes racist, chauvinist, reactionary attitudes that Marxists often deploy and rescue Marxism from a “premature rejection” by Indigenous thinkers (p. 8). By doing so (he holds that feminist, queer, anarchist, and post-colonial thinking will be helpful) he believes more light can be shed on colonial domination and resistance.

Transforming Primitive Accumulation

In order to transform Marx’s primitive accumulation, he addresses three problematic features, and several important insights about these features. Some of these criticisms you may already be familiar with.

The first feature is “Marx’s rigidly temporal framing of the phenomenon” (p9). The idea here is that PA (primitive accumulation) is confined to a specific phase in time. For example, in England PA has passed and completed but in the colonies PA is present. Along with many other Marxian thinkers (like Harvey et al), a persistent role of PA is what we should see, and certainly with neoliberal hegemony. “[U]nconcealed, violent dispossession continues to play in the reproduction of colonial and capitalist social relations in both the domestic and global contexts” (p9).

The second feature is normative developmentalism. This is basically what was especially present in early Marx, a modernist view of history. This leads some of Marx’s work to portray PA as a historical inevitability that is apart of a historical metanarrative. Coulthard seeks to rescue Marx from this fallacy by shifting emphasis from capital relations to colonial relations.

Marx sees PA as a process of dispossession that leads to proletarianization. His concern was with understanding capital as a social relation dependent on the separation of workers from the means of production. Thus Marx was not nearly as preoccupied with dispossession as he was with arriving at proletarianization as a focus (p11).

He writes (p11): By repositioning the colonial frame as our overarching lens of analysis it becomes far more difficult to justify in antiquated developmental terms (from either the right or left) the assimilation of non-capitalist, non-Western, Indigenous modes of life based on the racist assumption that this assimilation will somehow magically redeem itself by bringing the fruits of capitalist modernity into the supposedly ‘backward’ world of the colonized.

This is something late Marx was more comfortable with. However, his point is well taken. I personally have seen “patsocs” of the last few years attempt to say what happened to Indigenous people was merely them being added to the work force. Proletarianization, but ignoring the colonial relations in order to assert this was a natural and inevitable event, even a desirable one. Also, I find that within the academy, Marx is often taught as a snapshot of his early self, so this criticism is good for those who have been confined to early Marx (Tangentially I think the academy misrepresents Marx’s totality regularly so its good to have criticisms that are not based in liberal chauvinisms.) It is evident that “egalitarian” voices will use modernist fallacies to reproduce dispossession. For example, advocates who seek a return of the commons fail to understand that there are no “commons” in Canada or the US. There is only the land of the First Peoples.

He writes (pg12) By ignoring or downplaying the injustice of colonial dispossession, critical theory and left political strategy not only risks becoming complicit in the very structures and processes of domination that it out to oppose, but it also risks overlooking what could probe to be invaluable glimpses into the ethical practices and preconditions required for the construction of a more just and sustainable world order.

Further insight into this critique regards the role of Indigenous labor. As industrial capitalism matured in North America, Indigenous labor was rendered increasingly (though not entirely) superfluous. This helps us furthure understand why the context of colonial relations and the emphasis on dispossession can illuminate more than the normative developmentalist views that prioritize proletarianization can.

Forgive my metaphor, but in many ways the civilization policies that were levied against Indigenous peoples were the John the Baptist that preceded the Christ of industrialism. This is seen in how slavery was spread through Henry Knox’s civilization policy, something I’d be happy to post about separately another time. As Canada’s commissioner of Indian Affairs wrote in 1890, “The work of sub-dividing reserves has begun in earnest. The policy of destroying the tribal or communist system is assailed in every possible way and every effort has been made to implant a spirit of individual responsibility instead.”

(Note the red scare language. This is something that is present throughout the history of Indigenous resistance to colonialism.)

However, you could point to proletarianization as a distraction, usually it is said dispossession was meant to facilitate proletarianization, but for Indigenous people dispossession was meant to acquire land and resources for capital. Dispossession is the “dominant background structure” and “continues to inform the dominant modes of Indigenous resistance (p13).”

He writes further: (p13) The theory and practice of Indigenous anticolonialism, including Indigenous anticapitalism, is best understood as a struggle primarily inspired by and oriented around the question of land—a struggle not only for land in the material sense, but also deeply informed by what the land as a system of reciprocal relations and obligations can teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and the natural world in nondomination and nonexploitative terms—and less around our emergent status as ‘rightless proletarians.”

Grounded normativity cannot be stressed enough as a key for understanding pan-Indigenous philosophies and how they can interact with Marxism. For Indigenous philosophers, ethics cannot be simply separated from cosmology, or from anything, certainly not from land. The universe itself has a moral character that is revealed by co-relationality. I would recommend works by Vine Deloria Jr and Richard Atleo to have a better feel for how this works although Coulthard himself gives good insights himself later in the book.

For now, grounded normativity can by defined as “the modalities of Indigenous land-connected practices and longstanding experiential knowledge that inform and structure our ethical engagements with the world and our relationships with human and nonhuman others over time” (p13). I will focus on this more in later posts if I can.

Another insight into normative developmentalism that is briefly mentioned, is that it doesn’t always see the land itself as exploitable, people are. There is a tendency to deploy poor understandings of the environment and a presumption that Marxism is designed to ignore ecocriticism. I did not go into detail about grounded normativity, but we can already see that if we see Land as a system of relations then this anti-environmental tendency is problematic for Indigenous thinking in unique ways even when it is routinely levied by ecological thinkers. A final insight into normative developmentalism is economic reductionism. I’ll let quotes take this one as other authors tackle this regularly and I’d rather his voice shine for this article.

He writes: (pg 14-15) …the colonial relation should not be understood as a primary locus or base from which these other forms of oppression flow, but rather as the inherited background field within which market, racist, patriarchal, and stat relations converge to facilitate a certain power effect—in our case, the reproduction of hierarchical social relations that facilitate the dispossession of our lands and self-determining capacities. Like capital, colonialism, as a structure of domination predicated on dispossession, is not ‘a thing,’ but rather the sum effect of the diversity of inter locking oppressive social relations that constitute it.” Basically, shifting toward colonial relations doesn’t “displace” class struggle, but “situates these questions more firmly alongside and in relation to the other sites and relations of power that inform our settler-colonial present.”

OK so now on to the 3rd and final problematic feature. Which is more of a question on governmentality. This one is interesting because I think his peers have pushed against this. Basically, he believes that because the liberal Canadian state is developing less overtly brutal methods of subjugation it differs from the explicitly and incredible violence that Marx asserts goes hand in hand with primitive accumulation—as Marx says, “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, in blood and dirt.”

He asks readers: (p15) What are we to make of contexts where state violence no longer constitutes the regulative norm governing the process of colonial dispossession, as appears to be the case in ostensibly tolerant, multinational, liberal settler polities such as Canada? Stated in Marx’s own terms, if neither ‘blood and fire’ nor the ‘silent compulsion’ of capitalist economics can adequately account for the reproduction of colonial hierarchies in liberal democratic contexts, what can?

I take this as more of a question of understanding what the state is up to than a statement that violence has lost its place in primitive accumulation. Much of the book is about “recognition” and how relying on state recognition is bunk, so in that light, it makes sense to me to ask these questions in hopes of understanding the role that pursuing state recognition plays in primitive accumulation. But clearly violence is still the status quo for Indigenous people, thus I find this to be his weakest but most intriguing point.

Conclusion

So, I have laid out Coulthard’s initial points on primitive accumulation. In the future I hope to make a post on more parts of this book, and maybe others as well. I especially intend to flesh out grounded normativity and recognition, which the book is mostly about in the first place as I think these can be helpful concepts for comrades.

Edit: this article is the source

My relationship with balloon is over. Airship is now my best friend.

That is all.

Furthermore we are seeing major euro chemical corps taking preservation measures that may be a signal for a death spiral for the competitiveness of European capital. We also see leaders like Macron pissed that the US is in such a good spot relatively speaking. All of this is only getting harder to watch. The US truly is cannabalizing the west.

Just got done listening to one of their episodes. I've heard several before and had to quit because its just kind of garbage. More than just bad content that usually fails to engage with whatever it is talking about, but its actually pretty reactionary.

When I look back on how the sub for the podcast was so big and influential I just cringe.

Decided to go to a sporting event. I did my due diligence and arrived on time for the game as to avoid the screeching nightmare of people standing for the Star Spangled Banner.

However, there was no escape from imperial chuavanism because I happened to find myself at a game that celebrated US Millitary personnel the entire time, complete with pre-recorded videos of players droning on about the "sacrifice" the military makes to ensure our freedoms. Someone from each branch threw a ceremonial first pitch and got the ball signed by a player. This event was literally sponsored by Boeing, proudly. I saw from videos played on the jumbo screen that people in Boeing collared shirts were the ones that spread out the massive US flag that was present during the anthem.

Every baseball game sings God Bless America during the 7th inning stretch so i went to the bathroom to avoid that of course. But between every inning there was some gooftroop being honored for their service with the backdrop of Boeing iconography littered around the ballpark. They even had a fucking enlistment ceremony where several people swore allegiance to the US military.

Obviously, this isnt new. There is no discovery here. The Empire is who we thought it was, make no mistake. But it is always chilling to hear the cheers for the American death cult, all brought to you by the military-congressional-industrial-complex.

Wow would it be nice if a few more people would just boo at this shit like they boo 27 year olds that cant throw a strike. Like damn I might cry tears of joy if 25+ thousand people would ruin the national anthem by just booing the shit out of it. Or if these military personnel and their families could be humiliated on their special day. They are part of the problem and they deserve to receive vitriol and malice. Fuck their service and fuck their valor. They dont deserve an autographed ball they deserve one that says "baby killer."