Comradeship // Freechat

It’s me, I’m the third worldists. I feel like the American left still has some vestigial ideas of sin and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps that you absorbed through your lifetime. You see the concept of labor aristocracy and equate it to some sort of personal moral failure instead of a way to understand class relations under imperialism. You get told that revolutionary potential in the imperial core is low and you can’t simply take control of history to conjure up revolutionary conditions out of thin air and deliver a McRevolution to your doorstep in 30 minutes or money back and think it’s nihilism and defeatism and communism is impossible.

I mean, you're not wrong about the obsession with sin and moral failure (I am reminded once again of Jones Manoel's excellent essay on Christian culture's influence on marxism in the west: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:Western_Marxism,_the_fetish_for_defeat,_and_Christian_culture), but let's not act like everyone who brings up third worldism online is solely doing a detached, detailed class analysis. When people use it as a vague means of disregarding those who live in the imperial core under the guise of scientific socialism, or reduce the entire class dynamic there to a single blob of labor aristocracy, they aren't helping anybody learn or build solidarity. You might not do this, I don't know, but it does happen. You don't represent everyone who espouses this stuff.

I can't say how much of a problem it is. Maybe it's a very minor online problem. But it is a thing that comes up.

That said, to put it bluntly, I would not blame non-white-designated peoples for being very wary about trusting white-designated peoples on having revolutionary solidarity and I would say that's the more stark aspect of this that's real and dangerous, than the overly vague application of labor aristocracy (which looks silly fast when considering, for example, a diaspora scraping by working class non-white person in the US vs. a tech bro white european person who was born there). White supremacy is a very real system of power and has a lot of racism embedded in it, and the stuff going on with ICE in the US illustrates how very alive and well it still is. So that's a very real and concrete concern. And I think it's much easier for a white person to turn against white supremacy and organize with non-white peoples than it is for them to grapple with some convoluted analysis about the spoils of empire, which mainly leads to "don't be a soc dem or a western chauvinist", which we have other arguments for already anyway.

Or to put it another way, if the tendency is that westerners are going to internalize third worldism as a hair shirt and go no further with it than that, then maybe it's not a very useful framework when engaging with them.