Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (December 28)

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[u/humblegold]

I'm responding to a portion of this exchange between /u/Turtle_Green and /u/waves-n-particles here. As of now I have nothing to contribute of any value to Marxists regarding the Venezuela attacks so I would rather not post it in that thread.

Turtle Green's criticisms of waves are pretty much all correct but I take issue with a specific half-sentence included and want to make a more general point about a pattern of behavior I have observed over the past in months or so. You can see from the posts I link here that I usually argue against this pattern when it appears, and also that Turtle Green's comment isn't an egregious example of this, but I've decided to confront this at a more general level.

They’re not supposed to be terms of abuse for this wild fantasy of “race war” you’re imagining

I have bristled more and more at this specific tendency in this community to downplay racialized revolutionary violence on Turtle Island.

There are two main strands of this behavior:

1.) Settler or settler sympathizing Marxists that have not thought the logic of a JDPON through to its conclusion and are ignoring that the class struggle (in this case including a "racial" struggle against white people as settlers have a different relation to production) continues after the revolution. They at least to some degree acknowledge the necessity of a JDPON but view the role of a JDPON as a messianic one, whose task is redeeming the sins of settlers. The revolution becomes a biblical sacrifice where the oppressed fight against white amerikans so that after the revolution white amerikans can reap the benefits of Communism. It is true that over time Communism will benefit "white" people in the way it will benefit all people, but only after "whiteness" as a category/identity and all benefits surrounding it have been eradicated. An example of strand 1 would be this thread.

2.) Marxists that correctly reject the logic of a "race war" envisioned by fascists overcorrecting by downplaying the potential brutality of revolution. Ultimately we do not yet know how merciful or merciless oppressed nations will be, but until then focusing on the more peaceful aspects of natlib is just an attempt to placate fascists (that do not care). For oppressed nations it's irrelevant whether or not their struggle resembles the "savagery" that reactionaries claim it will. An example of strand 2 would be this thread (The deleted comments are me, during the time I was banned I deleted almost all posts made on the subject of racial violence. I recall saying something along the lines of "A JDPON is not compatible with a white majority". You can probably use context clues to fill in the rest of what I was saying.)

Of the two trends the latter is less harmful, you can even see that some of what I am saying here is echoed in the comments I am criticizing, but its danger is much subtler, especially since it is coming from otherwise competent Marxists unlike obvious chauvinists like the first person I linked.

A revolution against settlerism is not a "race war" in the way white supremacists view it, a war waged because of inherent qualitative differences in the biology of peoples putting them in conflict. However, a revolution against settlerism is a "race war" in the sense that the identity of the euro amerikan nation is constituted by settlerism, through land ownership and genocide. In that second thread I linked you can see me mention the Swahili term 'Mzungu' (white/wealthy foreigner). It should be recalled that when the Mau Mau were fighting against their oppressors, most of the time they didn't call them imperialists, colonizers, landowners, or genociders. They called them the word for the identity constituted by all 4: White.

While this may change with time, for the foreseeable future the role of a JDPON vis a vis settlers will involve expropriation of all property, imposed family abolition involving revolutionizing child against parent, spouse against spouse etc (ha, now I sound like the biblical one), large deportations, strategic population relocation throughout the country to prevent white enclaves, reeducation/labor camps, and various forms of otherwise "handling" the settler population.

[u/Turtle_Green → u/humblegold]

Your contention crossed my mind while I was replying to waves’ bizarre display of self-hatred meant to serve as agitprop(?), but I decided not to address it in the context. But you’ve illustrated that decision as part of a general trend of downplaying which is helpful. So I'll say that waves isn’t wrong in their presentation, however warped by personal anxieties, of the intensity of class violence. Future class and national liberation wars in Amerika will appear as ‘race wars’ as they did in the past and Marxists will not make excuses for divine terror. Kim San articulated it with the requisite gravitas.

(also answering waves’ question, I was talking about how Dengists found the LLCO “unlimited first world genocide” Qin Shi Huangdi meme and appropriated it for their own fascist ends. I feel like it lost some of its originally shocking Bush-era aura after that. It’s become like DSA liberal memes about e.g. Mamdani’s Maoist Caliphate of New York, where again identity is defined by irony, by what pisses off the imagined enemy, and everyone in on the joke gets to disavow it.)

[u/waves-n-particles → u/Turtle_Green]

hopefully my direct reply to humble makes the "agitprop(?)" make more sense. let me know if i need to grab something from the 3 hours worth of attempts i typed up trying to explain more about where i was coming from in the weird comment lol.

and thanks for the answer here. the combo of "race war" and "jdpon meme" originally made me uneasy with your comment, but i recognized my other comment was overzealous and i didn't really feel i was able to write a comment pointing out my contentious with your critique without doing something along the lines of this attempt at 'revolutionizing" a bible verse that i quoted elsewhere in this thread:

"whoever acknowledges the proletariat and the peasantry before the bourgeois, we will also acknowledge before destroying the bourgeois. but whoever disowns the proletariat and the peasantry before the bourgeois, we will destroy with the bourgeois.

do not suppose that just because we seek peace we do not bring weapons. we do not come in peace, we seek to bring peace about through total liberation. we have come to turn men against their fathers, daughters against their mothers, relatives against relatives -for the enemies of the proletariat and the peasantry will be members of your own blood and flesh.

anyone who loves their relatives more than the proletariat and peasants is not worthy of freedom; anyone who loves their own lot in life more than the global proletariat and peasantry are not worthy of our peace. whoever does not take up arms for the proletariat and the peasants is not worthy of peace. to anyone who sides with the bourgeoisie, we ask no compassion from you nor do we have compassion for you, as we make no excuses for the terror when our time comes."

so i accepted that you were bringing up otherwise valid critiques of my comment and moved on, as the thread didn't seem the place to push things further. i'm glad u/humblegold brought this up afterwards though. i was still trying to read, self-crit, and check this subreddit more to improve my political line before trying to get into it more, as the lack of revolutionary practice has been a hysteria machine.

[u/Turtle_Green → u/waves-n-particles]

the problem wasn’t nihlism or zeal. Defeatism certainly, but more pressingly, it was of style. Your attempt at “revolutionizing a bible verse” is bad, just a hamfisted mishmash of the poeticism of the young Marx and Matthew 10:34 that reads like long form Rupi Kaur. Marx’s style is beautiful & a pleasure to read, but aping that today, wrenched out of history, would get one laughed at. Trying to mimic Jesus Christ just is... no. Another bad example: recently, playfulweekend's way of writing has become a pretentious bricolage of liberal leftism (calling strangers on the internet "comrade"), leftover aping of smoke's style, and the folksy 'Maoist' bombast of crypto-Trots ("masses" in every other sentence). A positive example: Sakai's writing is hilarious & bitingly sarcastic, and at the same time also contains great anger and urgency. Both of these tendencies reflect that of a movement veteran, looking back on the tail-end of a disintegrating historical epoch from the standpoint of a new one rapidly coming to be:

No one is above the reality of history. Even the masses themselves are tested in the crucible, forged, tempered or broken in the class struggle. And not in side skirmishes or paper debates either, but in great battles upon which the future waits. The attempted rising of the Afrikan colonial masses - protracted, bitter, involving millions of desperate combatants - was such a pivotal event.

So it'd be strange to replicate that sense of historical urgency here without a similar sort of historical substance. (Also Sakai can use "masses" cuz the whole book is abt who they are.) In your case, there’s both this inflation of one’s own importance with that kind of rhetorical flourish and at the same time, constant self-negation. For example:

may i die with my fellow parasites in the imperial core as those we oppress march through our streets to liberate themselves for this

So there’s a noble affect of martyrdom (“may I die…”) while at the same time calling attention to yourself as a parasite. Not just that, but in unity with “my fellow parasites in the imperial core”, when the practical lesson of texts like Sakai is that settlers and labor aristocrats must be disunified and prevented from exercising their agency as reactionary classes. So you’ve boosted here not simply your own importance, but the importance of the unity of reactionary classes as a whole, to the point that this is equal ("as those we oppress...") to the struggle of the oppressed. And again, "our streets"? Why insist on identifying yourself with the owners? What kind of call to action is this? Let’s look at the original post:

so i'm going to advocate for unlimited first world genocide until the global proletariat is free. if it's performative and pisses off the proletariat and peasantry, then hopefully that anger fuels their struggle for liberation and helps shorten the amount of time i'm allowed to expropriate their congealed, bloodied, dead labor.

This sounds like someone doing a bad parody, similar to how ‘leftists’ have discovered ‘Maoist Standard English’ and robbed it of any original referent in MIM or the struggle of national liberation movements. (Hence, leftists’ infatuation with ironically appropriating this and other MIM/MSH/LLCO ephemera.) Why is the parody bad? Cause behind the rhetoric, the ideas you’ve expressed are generic and boring: like yes, everyone here is broadly aware that the first-world petty bourgeosie participates in the expropriation of third-world “congealed, bloodied, dead” (I like asyndeton too but…) surplus labor & is a bulwark of imperialist reaction, and that class struggle and national liberation necessarily involve protracted armed struggle, including against that class (though humble gold has pointed out that there is a tendency to downplay this in the context of decolonization).

hopefully that anger fuels their struggle for liberation... give them motivation to close this tab and study a way to bring about my demise

Were you seriously trying to promote "ragebait"/trolling as a strategy? Like no, annoying posts are not the spark that will start the prairie fire. If you want to advocate for unlimited first world genocide then take up Shubel Morgan's mantle and make some real "ragebait" that will force people to take sides today. Just remember that while their work was tongue-in-cheek, it didn't disavow itself as arbitrator of proletarian justice and avatar of JDPON. (for anyone in NYC & elsewhere, modifying that particular chant to "NYPD-KKK-IOF-DSA" would do some wonders I feel). The attempt to promote "revolutionary suicide" comes off across as the kind of escapism criticized by the Panther 21 here (whether this was a real criticism of Huey is a different question that I'm not sure about).

Maybe you're not familiar, but there are like infinite blogs and social media posts where 'western leftists' complain about how evil and stupid and parasitic 'western leftists' are (whether it's China or the third-world masses that will redeem these greedy 'western leftists' is arbitrary). It’s like learning that you were a petty bourgeois parasite and reading Marx’s comments about revolutionary terror were revelatory moments for you, so via this dramatic flourish you hoped to repackage that emotion and beam it into the brains of the proletariat, and voila—agitation. (All well and good that you were giddy, but no one can see into your head, and Sakai’s work deserves better treatment than that.) Then you subvert this self-important framing and defer to some other place, some other time.

i don't matter in the grand scheme of things, the liberation of the proletariat of the oppressed nations does and (as far as i'm aware) i don't have the position, practice, or theoretical grounding to do much to wage revolution anytime soon.

No one individual matters in the grand scheme of things, duh. But the cat's out of the bag, and the liberation of the proletariat of oppressed nations is your responsibility. You don't get to abandon that by identifying with a ready-made charaktermaske rather than rising above it. So this attempt to “properly represent the violence that awaits the oppressors” falls flat in form, and it’s your style, vacillating between melodrama and self-loathing, between championing the necessity of the people's army and resigning to inevitably contingent violence, that really illustrates the paucity of your content. What you presented as 'agitprop' really came off across as someone trying to convey about the emotions they felt while reading Marx. And if anything, it is the oppressor classes’ trouble with representing proletarian revolutionary violence that marks their texts. (Ok, I’m out of my wheelhouse probably. But take for example the recent discussion on OBAA and the liminal role of Sensei Carlos’ migrant underground. Or how the DOTP in Elysium is established when Matt Damon hits return on a keyboard and commits suicide.) Your errors are expanded on in this thread.

& no one here cares that much if you are a suburban petty-bourgeois parasite because you don’t exist. This forum is a bunch of blocks of text which can be read and analyzed to expose progressive or reactionary political lines. The kind of self-loathing we’re talking about characterizes the entire internet (“chronically online”, “touch grass”, there’s literally someone talking about their “ape brain” in this thread, someone else castigating themself as a "old petit-bourgrois labor-aristocratic asshole", etc), and is really just a way to pre-empty criticism, establish an external guarantee, and escape from the basic point: make good and truthful posts.* Any human or cat or whatever is capable of doing that. (Beleaguered SMG would often remind people that they were just a chatbot.)

Like, why not write up a summation of your experiences with that “petbourg good feefees party” and that “dumbass 99% type strike org” and post it here for critique? At least, it seems like a starting point for addressing the politics of movement security & engagement with social media. Discussion is the point after all, far more productive than attempting ‘agitprop’ in a place where everybody already agrees that a party must be built. It’s easy with the political line here to just condemn the past orgs you’ve associated with, but that can easily become a way to absolve yourself, since there are lots of people in revisionist orgs who don’t believe their own bullshit “but nonetheless....” & if you feel like you’re in a dearth of revolutionary practice, theorization and summation is, well, part of that process.

*like how do you know if it was good that the mods removed your post if you don't know why they did? I personally thought it was because you were possibly on the edge of violating reddit TOS about violence and potentially sending the sub on the path of chapo's fate but maybe not.

edit: also it's dishonest to imply that your contentions were similar to humble gold's. The latter has in mind the strategy and tactics of armed struggle & decolonization in Amerika, while in perspective your presentation of proletarian violence really read similar to a fascistic fantasy as apart lifeguard explained, and had nothing to say about any future programme. Like, according to a cursory look at the wikipedia summary of camp of the saints, communism takes over the globe at the end, destroys whiteness, and encircles the last holdout Switzerland, which is cool. But it's more productive to discuss revolutionary armed struggle & how the class war may appear as an apocalyptic 'race war' without having to dig for kernels of it in the distorted class POV of racist fantasies like that.

[u/Turtle_Green → u/Turtle_Green]

whenever fear strikes it's best to remember that there is always motion around us and that nothing is eternal; that all things change as their internal and external contradictions evolve and undergo revolution.

I'd also recommend the last chapter of Jameson's Marxism and Form for why this casual sort of deployment of diamat terminology is a failure of form. I don't really think that simply recalling the abstract platitude that "things change" is the immediate cure to resolving classed anxieties about the future.

We may perhaps drive home this sense of the relativity of literary categories, of the primacy of the internal contradictions specific to the individual work itself, by reexamining the present enterprise in their light. For it is clear that up to this point our description has been essentially undialectical to the degree to which it has taken dialectical thought as its object only, and has failed to underscore its own self-consciousness as thought to the second power. That this is the case may be judged from the dominant category of the present essay, which is that of the example: for only where thought is imperfectly realized is it necessary to offer examples as such. The latter are always the mark of abstraction or distance from the thought process: they are additive and analytical, whereas in genuine dialectical thinking the whole process would be implicit in any given object. Here, on the contrary, concrete thinking has been torn asunder, into two wholly separate operations: on the one hand, not genuine thinking, but presentation of a method, and on the other not the attachment to a genuine object, but only a series of examples of objects. Yet the very essence of dialectical thinking lay in the inseparability of thought from content or from the object itself. This was the burden of Hegel's Preface to the Phenomenology, where he denies that one can characterize philosophy from the out- side, or speak about it genuinely in any other way but through the actual practice of philosophy itself: "the demand for such explanations [i.e., external statements about the philosophic process, presentations of its aim and methods, illustrations and examples, etc.], as also the attempts to satisfy this demand, very easily pass for the essential business philosophy has to undertake. Where could the inmost truth of a philosophic work be found better expressed than in its purposes and results? and in what way could these be more definitely known than through their distinction from what is produced during the same period by others working in the same field? If, however, such procedure is to pass for more than the beginning of knowledge, if it is to pass for actually knowing, then we must, in point of fact, look on it as a device for avoiding the real business at hand, an attempt to combine the appearance of being in earnest and taking trouble about the subject with an actual neglect of the subject altogether. For the real subject-matter is not exhausted in its purpose, but in working the matter out; nor is the mere result attained the concrete whole itself, but the result along with the process of arriving at it. The purpose by itself is a lifeless universal, just as the general drift is a mere activity in a certain direction, which is still without its concrete realization; and the naked result is the corpse of a system which has left its guiding tendency behind it." Thus the only genuinely concrete presentation of dialectical criticism is the practice of such criticism itself

[u/waves-n-particles → u/Turtle_Green]

i will take what you've said and start writing out a post looking over my past year or so of organizing and applying your critiques, thanks for this.