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this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2024
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chapotraphouse
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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.
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.
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.
I bought her book and shit, it's not like I hate her or anything. She's fine.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 😅
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.
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.
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.
This, but unironically since I'm the most leftwing person here and all of you are liberals.
Amber.