Theres enough racist people that hes a candidate
Thats it, lets stop putting our heads in the sand with ‘economic anxiety’
thread locked. everyone put out their good faith arguments, but its devolving into hostility.
economic anxiety and racism go hand in hand. blame life stresses on the other simple as. classic demagogury.
I think sometimes people are just racist dude. Economic anxiety may exacerbate latent racism, but its not always the cause.
what a lack of dialectical materialism does to a mothafucka.
“Latent racism” as if this shit is an inherent property of humanity and not an instilled ideology, an “original sin”. The christian moralism and idealism reeks from here.
making absolutist moralist denouncements instead of trying to see the chain of events, the cause, and to fix it
when Liberals and Idealists make racism into a “true” platonic eternal evil, all they are doing is admitting they will never fix or solve the issue and don’t know how to. They are even admitting that it’s somewhat correct or at least has a basis in reality because it’s an inherent law of the universe apparently that we can never escape. Racism was invented on a specific date, not too long ago, and it can be abolished. Anything that was created by people can be destroyed by people too.
thank you. “people are just racist” is such idealist nonsense and is itself a take playing into racist ideas. wild to see that shit on here, would think folks would know better by now.
I’m not sure, I know a lot of enjoying life racists that love Trump. Country club going never been to a minority neighborhood but quote Tucker Carlson racist, own multiple properties and boats due to underpaying day laborers and call them wetback racist, north shore mansion Long Island Zionist that think the Dems are soft on Palestine racist.
Like economic anxiety my ass, most of the wealthy people I know love Trump and love being racist.
Age of Napoleon Bonus Episode that examines the intertwined origins of capitalism and racism
I mean ive heard all these arguments before saying capitalism is the sole cause of racism, i dont agree with it.
Racism will be here regardless of whether we are in capitalist shithead land or not, i think we have an obligation to speak out against it and organize against it.
this is idealist nonsense and is itself playing into/flirting with lending legitimacy to racist ideas.
It’s true. America is such a segregated society it is almost inevitable, so long as the construct of race exists. The anxiety causes even good-natured people to do awkward shit sometimes. But the elites will literally use anything they can to divide us up. Skin is one of the easiest, humans are such visual creatures and it’s the biggest organ, and we are segregated anyway. The construct of race works better than the elites could have even predicted though.
It’s true not just economics anything that impedes our ability to empathize with one another will create the possibility of this. Though I think for demogogues economic stress it’s the easiest to exploit and misdirect to protect from “levelling”. Also geographic segregation makes it much easier to “otherise” people etc etc regardless. Look at the Brits and the Irish and they are all pale af but Brits wanted the land so they created a construct to legitimize it.
Yeah! Economic anxiety and racism go hand in hand, except for, like, half the time but every other instance than when it doesn’t
As someone who is trans and queer, a POC, and coming from an immigrant family- I have to agree with u/Z_Poster365, this post and the comments come distastefully close to spoilerism (against the most basic simple stance against literal genocide).
Trump supporters are ghouls and whether they like it or not, racist through their willingness to stand alongside and fend for racism, yes- but the nasty, honest truth is that the same goes for all of Klanmala’s supporters, with the disgusting caveat even that many more of those are not simply ignorant, but genuinely vile to their core, having seen the full extent of what they support and yet still making their peace with it.
Both sides (if the sides of 100% Hitler, orange flavor vs. 100% Hitler, coconut flavor are "separate sides) are truly and irreconcilably wretched. They might take minor detours in how they rationalize it, but at their core is imperial identity politics (that the lives of the “enlightened west” are worth infinitely more than those of the global south) and imperial anxiety (that those they would see as their slaves if not exterminated altogether are liberating themselves).
Thank you. Racism is not when white dudes with cowboy hats feel afraid of Black teens and call the cops on them. Racism isn’t even when white ladies clasp their purse and feel afraid when they see an Arab at the airport. Those individual instances of racist behavior are part of the system of racism; racism isn’t evil, it’s not Darth Vader or Voldemort, it’s a system. And, as a system, it’s modular and multivariate. It’s a complex phenomenon full of contradictions, like the liberal imperial identity politics you mention which exist in contradiction to the less hegemonic “white working class” aesthetics of the American right. But both aspects are part of the same social system. And like any social system, it exists within the broader context of our social structure, divided into its economic base and the superstructure, as part of the superstructure. And as we should all understand by now, the superstructure is shaped by the based. They are inseparable. Trying to explain racism without understanding that the system of racism operates within capitalism as one of several mechanisms that maintains the economic base is a fool’s errand.
Racism is not when white dudes with cowboy hats feel afraid of Black teens and call the cops on them.
I don’t know about you but that’s the most salient part of racism. Not sure I give a fuck about the metaphysical analysis when my literal skin color is being used to impale me with gunfire or make my conditions worse than oh, I don’t know, fucking yours or the average white dude on this here site.
Palestine and Nicaragua are literally the last thing on my mind when im living my day to day life, talking about these things while I live in despair might as well be a form of escapism
I don’t know about you but that’s the most salient part of racism. Not sure I give a fuck about the metaphysical analysis when my literal skin color is being used to impale me with gunfire or make my conditions worse than oh, I don’t know, fucking yours or the average white dude on this here site.
Sure. That’s understandable. My objection to this is that, despite the fact that the immediate violence that you are forced to face is the most salient part of racism, not engaging with the entire system critically from a materialist perspective leaves you with a poor position to fight against it. Short sightedness is the essence of liberalism, being unable to see the forest for the trees. This is how you end up fighting racism with Black capitalism, instead of fighting racism, understood to be one of several systems that reproduce capitalism, with socialism.
Admittedly, I hadn’t quite considered racism in the way you describe (though I’m aware of that take of discrimination + social power = racism).
I’d say I fall somewhere between you and @Lussy@hexbear.net in this regard, though I also feel that my own experiences with racism and racial alienation and how they have shaped my mentality in- well, just about everything, do also result in me having an immense bias I don’t know if I can entirely overcome. Logically I agree more with you and that aforementioned (racism requires power) take- mentally it is hard to do, FWIW I will admit that I myself similarly cannot fully divorce myself mentally from identity politics (though “imperial idpol” as I described in my previous comment was in response to the “white idpol” mentioned in the post- and I do think is absolutely a thing, though idpol as an… atomization of the proletariat and humanity in general does probably have an infinite number of takes that can be derived from the concept- imperial idpol being just a particularly vile and ubiquitous one across the imperial cores).
Since I @'ed Lussy though, figure I’d respond also here in saying-
Palestine and Nicaragua are literally the last thing on my mind when im living my day to day life, talking about these things while I live in despair might as well be a form of escapism
While not dunking on you for that take, I have to infinitely disagree with it. Solidarity is not escapism, and if we cannot hold onto it even in the worst despair then we are both truly doomed, and at least somewhat wretched. We can’t look away, particularly not if we want others to stand by us in turn.
I get what you’re saying, 100%, in regards to living in despair (I do as well)- and sometimes we need to just live disconnecting from these things for a while, because it isn’t healthy and we can’t survive like that while living with our own despair ourselves. But we can’t disconnect from it altogether, when it comes up (and it always does) we cannot keep silent and keep to ourselves.
Honestly on some level I feel if I were to do it- for those who do it as well- honestly, perhaps we would deserve it then. Surely we would have asked for it, by looking away from those in even further despair and facing literal industrial genocide or kill squads. Think about it and just what you said (though I don’t think the full meaning of it was intended)- is this what we want to be? Are we any better than those who are persecuting us for our race if we do so? Maybe it’s just me and my ex-Catholic mentality, but I reject it (the empire) in its entirety even when it is far away doing more horrifying things to others I don’t know in Palestine and Nicaragua, I would like to think I would reject it and would not look away or shy from it even if it kills me.
And like any social system, it exists within the broader context of our social structure, divided into its economic base and the superstructure, as part of the superstructure. And as we should all understand by now, the superstructure is shaped by the based
And the base also shapes the superstructure.
I dunno about that. Based on the osmosis I get from an old co-workers group chat, a dude from India is definitely voting for Trump after getting his citizenship last year. Another from Hong Kong is like 80% for Trump at this point. And that’s just what’s being discussed in the open.
I think you’re underestimating how much it is really coming down to “what is Biden (Harris) going to give me?” and that Trump is at least pretending to promise something.
Also, don’t be surprised that Trump has a solid hold on a certain bloc of non-white immigrants. The “Democrats are the party of handout for lazy people and going to bankrupt the country” and the “Republicans are the party for hardworking people” stereotypes continue to hold in the minds of many people who emigrated to the US.
I got to know many Chinese immigrants in the US when I used to live there and most first gen immigrants were solid Republican voters. They really bought into the “government spending billions on handout for lazy people is why our economy is going so badly” narrative.
I hate a lot of the immigrants the US lets in because they are all these ultra-capitalist greedy bootlickers from around the globe. the US has been doing this for the last century (since the russian revolution), and I think it is making the US an even more right wing pro-capitalist hellscape.
That is the entire point of this immigration, as Samir Amin states:
Successive waves of immigration also played a role in reinforcing American ideology. The immigrants were certainly not responsible for the poverty and oppression that lay behind their departure for the United States. But their emigration led them to give up collective struggle to change the shared conditions of their classes or groups in their native countries, and adopt instead the ideology of individual success in their adopted home.
Adopting such an ideology delayed the acquisition of class consciousness. Once it began to mature, this developing consciousness had to face a new wave of immigrants, resulting in renewed failure to achieve the requisite political consciousness. Simultaneously, this immigration encouraged the “communitarianization” of U.S. society. “Individual success” does not exclude inclusion in a community of origin, without which individual isolation might become insupportable. The reinforcement of this dimension of identity—which the U.S. system reclaims and encourages—is done to the detriment of class consciousness and the forming of citizens.
Communitarian ideologies cannot be a substitute for the absence of a socialist ideology in the working class. This is true even of the most radical of them, that of the black community.
Is there anyone here who really believes Kamala’s campaign core isn’t imperialist war and genocide and smug bourgeois paternalism?
There’s enough genocidal people that she’s a candidate
That’s it, let’s stop putting our heads in the sand with ‘harm reduction’
The implication of your brow beating is pretty clear. It’s to whip votes for the DNC, this shit always spikes right before elections around here
I dont give a shit about the DNC or Kammala i cant even vote im a drug felon, weirdo.
