Yes, I chose to do that because both comments worked to minimize Canadian bigotry, and state facilitation and investment in the continuation of that bigotry (which you also just did). So, I wanted to make sure it was clear that Canada will always do this anyway, whether as a result of English imperialism, USAmerican imperialism, and ultimately, its own imperialism.

These movements are also not people who are "tricked," and you sound like maybe you have some unadressed internalized values by perceiving it as a trick at all. In this system, people who are privileged have a material interest in maintaining and strengthening their access to that privilege. Bigots are not incorrect when they say this system is for them, because it is, and they are moving to strengthen their claim to that because they correctly understand that the Canadian state will protect them before it does any queer, racialized, disabled, colonized, or any other politically disruptive groups of people. Why? Because this is fundamentally still a fucking white supremacist settler state. This article emphasizes the growth of trans genocide politics; how many fucking trans people are in positions of power within this system, how many indigenous and First Nations people are? And how many cishet white people are?

These movements haven't grown because gpaw was tricked by Facebook, we are seeing the inevitable result of decades of liberal appropriation of social justice values and disarmament of their respectively challenging politics. Queer politics used to be about abolishing heteronormativity not coexisting with it, and for good reason. Decolonialism aims to deconstruct the very system of power we are all subject to and its respective social constructs, that is an existential threat to Canada as it exists, and bigotry is not. Any amount of "progressive" policy surrounding marginalized groups is in reality contingent on its benefit to the continuation of this system. As the limitations of liberal capitalism becomes undeniable, it will fall back onto its most foundational and hierarchal means of social control, which is white patriarchy. You fucking think this fascist moment has coincidentally emerged along the visible decline of North American hegemony and worsening climate change? It's incompetence alone that keeps this ideology alive while others are so strategically and effectively disabled?

No, you and every other person in this country has been raised to understand the world within settler-colonial sensibilities; "primed" in the context you apply it alienates this socialization from the material reality of this way of life. Every white person understands that whiteness gets them something, every cishet person knows that they are "normal," every liberal knows that cooperating with the state will afford them better treatment than challenging it, and they don't have to challenge it when there's less privileged people it will target first. These movements grow because they are honest expressions of what this system is, and they're gaining power within it because this system benefits from their existence more than it does from erasing them.

If you can't accept this basic concept about the country you are in, I do not think you are equipped to talk about it in any serious way.

[–] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Bigots are not incorrect when they say this system is for them, because it is,

Not really. It's less against them than it is against people lower on the pecking order, and that makes them happy because that means they get to shit on people, but they too get fucked by those above them. Most bigots do not live happy lives. They live in houses designed to make them sad, working jobs designed to make them feel meaningless, interacting with people through institutions designed to make them lonely.

Maintaining white supremacy requires fascism to get funded and leftist movements to get violently suppressed because people can swap out their social narratives. Bigots can learn to see the advantages of mutual aid, and then quietly bury their bigoted behavior because it would mean they get less aid.

White bigots are being tricked into believing they're better off getting physically abused by underpaid interns in a privatized care facility than being an elder in a small multigenerational commune where everyone shares their meals and works according to their ability. It takes constant effort to keep them convinced that the first is the best they can hope for; the "only realistic possibility".

[–] orioler25@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Jesus fucking Christ with you people. A great example of a liberal who thinks that people can only see what you show them.

Material security is a fucking privilege. The fact that people are miserable doesn't mean they aren't privileged. And why do you think they are privileges? Hm? Where did they get the idea that they are? Is here, perhaps, good reason to think that in the white settler state? Hmmm, almost like the entire fucking country was designed to the benefit of people like them, specifically.

The amount of Canadians in this thread who pretend to not get what this place is is getting on my nerves. They know they're miserable, nobody is having fun, they want to be secure and they know they can get that by being bigoted because that's how they fucking got what they have.

It's obvious that many of you warp reality to parse some sense of empathy or understanding for these people, and it shows that you clearly don't care about the people who are victimized. Everyone has bigots in their family, you have to learn to understand they're sad people and also that nobody is going to force them to be otherwise, they're still a threat. This piece of shit country was about to elect an explicitly trans-genocidal PM before Trump stole the election for Carney, maybe you shouldn't say anything about this if these people weren't about to fucking kill you. No, they aren't being tricked, they're adults, grow the fuck up.

[–] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Neither a Canadian, nor a liberal, nor disagreeing with your general point that Canada is a white steller colonial project in which whites are given the role of Specialest Boys (and my country, the Netherlands, is a white colonial home base that is still enriching itself with stolen wealth).

My point is that even if they get the privileges of class traitorship, they're still worse off than in an egalitarian society. They have less material stability too than they would have.

Do you disagree? Do you think most white people are better off in the current system than in what you hope to build?

I like calling the organized effort to prevent white people from supporting a better world a trick because if not for white people there is no narrative-backed demographic in-group that can save the status quo.

Like, suppose there was a secret ballot where people could say they would fight in support of an anarchocommunist revolution if X% of the population is also ready to fight in support of it, and where if at least Y% of the population answers Y% or less then all of them get notified. Then white people could just put X=80% and end up with a bloodless revolution (because cops aren't going to fight 80% of the population) that makes their lives instantly better for free.

Thus the rich need to convince white people that their X should be higher and that Y never surpasses their X. And since setting X at a point where they have nothing to lose while Y is known would be enough to have a successful revolution, it takes a trick to keep white people in support of the status quo.

[–] orioler25@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Unreal the amount of liberals who try to claim ownership over values they clearly don't subscribe to; wonder where they'd learn to do that so comfortably.

Bud, that world does not exist, the one with a Canada in it does. I am not tricking anyone when I tell them that doing exactly what is currently done is going to do with it currently does. You're working backward from a fantasy because you think that's what "socialism" is. No, socialism is about materialism; analyzing the social relations oriented around material needs to generate cricisism and prescribed ideological solutions. These people, including yourself, live in a system where white supremacy is already the norm and is the system of power by which they experience the high standard of living they are afforded by default by being compliant with that hierarchy, willfully or otherwise.

You seriously have no idea what the hell you're talking about, and your whatever, hypotheticals are irrelevant since they do not actually contend with the reality of what this system is, again (and honestly, shows that you have never learned about any revolutions outside of YouTube and History Channel). Do you actually think you've gotten to the party this late and know better than people who have fought this system for generations? Yeah bud, hey, why wouldn't there be a fucking ballot like that in this system? Why is every major party neoliberal? Almost like there's reasons why the current state of affairs have developed the way they have. And of course you've arrived at the conclusion that you do by not even reading about it, otherwise you would have used these terms that have been normal in polisci and poliphilo fields for fucking sixty years.

You literally had to invent a convoluted scenario to describe what you think is a "trick" to describe appropriation, which is how libs ** like you** use language to rearticulate preexisting settler-colonial values through the terms of challenging political movements. No, you and every other dumbass colonizer like you is not "tricked" into supporting a system that already produces your material security through these social relations. People act in accordance with their security, bigots recognize correctly that if this system continues to their benefit, it will do so through white supremacy, heteronormativity, and settler-colonialism, as it always has and why they are benefited by it today. People like you do that, but your discomfort with the obvious immorality of such behaviour encourages you to convolute some reasoning where whatever you were taught to believe by the state is only misguided, misused, and not fundamentally incompatible with an empathetic way of life. Whether or not that this system is sustainable is irrelevant to the fact that people benefit from it now and therefore are inclined to maintain their level of material security. The only difference between you and a bigot is that they are far more comfortable with the violence of this system than you are, the values are fundamentally the same; neither of you are free of responsibility or liability for your beliefs. If you do not like the sound of that, maybe take a minute to think about this.

Go back to talking to your chud uncs at the bbq, that is clearly where you worked through these ideas.

[–] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

So, according to you, it is in my best interest as a privileged white person to support the oppression of non-white people and support the status quo?

Can't imagine why generations of people like you never achieved anything. You're basically doing fascist propaganda for them.

Which, considering the amount of trickery going on, is quite interesting. Why wouldn't the state let Marxists whose interpretations empower the status quo just barely dodge the axe while cutting down those whose ideas have teeth? Realistically, any current of Marxism that "has fought for generations" will have had generations of evolutionary pressure applied to it, either domesticating it (labour) or rendering it a relatively harmless pest (far-left radicals).

[–] orioler25@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Tell ya what bud, you bring a citation, and I'll read this. I know you don't know what you're talking about, and I'm not going to engage with you until you show that you do.

[–] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

A citation? For what? White workers being better off in socialism than capitalism? Well I'm going to have to go with my boy Karl Marx on that one.

[–] orioler25@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Sure, what piece of his writing? Would be very interesting to find something of his that directly addresses positionality in that way. Please, tell me where.

[–] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

The physicist either observes physical phenomena where they occur in their most typical form and most free from disturbing influence, or, wherever possible, he makes experiments under conditions that assure the occurrence of the phenomenon in its normality. In this work I have to examine the capitalist mode of production, and the conditions of production and exchange corresponding to that mode. Up to the present time, their classic ground is England. That is the reason why England is used as the chief illustration in the development of my theoretical ideas. If, however, the German reader shrugs his shoulders at the condition of the English industrial and agricultural labourers, or in optimist fashion comforts himself with the thought that in Germany things are not nearly so bad; I must plainly tell him, “De te fabula narratur!” [It is of you that the story is told. – Horace]

Intrinsically, it is not a question of the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonisms that result from the natural laws of capitalist production. It is a question of these laws themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results. The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.

But apart from this. Where capitalist production is fully naturalised among the Germans (for instance, in the factories proper) the condition of things is much worse than in England, because the counterpoise of the Factory Acts is wanting. In all other spheres, we, like all the rest of Continental Western Europe, suffer not only from the development of capitalist production, but also from the incompleteness of that development.

Alongside the modern evils, a whole series of inherited evils oppress us, arising from the passive survival of antiquated modes of production, with their inevitable train of social and political anachronisms. We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead. Le mort saisit le vif!

The social statistics of Germany and the rest of Continental Western Europe are, in comparison with those of England, wretchedly compiled. But they raise the veil just enough to let us catch a glimpse of the Medusa head behind it. We should be appalled at the state of things at home, if, as in England, our governments and parliaments appointed periodically commissions of inquiry into economic conditions; if these commissions were armed with the same plenary powers to get at the truth; if it was possible to find for this purpose men as competent, as free from partisanship and respect of persons as are the English factory-inspectors, her medical reporters on public health, her commissioners of inquiry into the exploitation of women and children, into housing and food. Perseus wore a magic cap down over his eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters.

Let us not deceive ourselves on this. As in the 18th century, the American war of independence sounded the tocsin for the European middle class, so that in the 19th century, the American Civil War sounded it for the European working class. In England the process of social disintegration is palpable. When it has reached a certain point, it must react on the Continent. There it will take a form more brutal or more humane, according to the degree of development of the working class itself. Apart from higher motives, therefore, their own most important interests dictate to the classes that are for the nonce the ruling ones, the removal of all legally removable hindrances to the free development of the working class. For this reason, as well as others, I have given so large a space in this volume to the history, the details, and the results of English factory legislation. One nation can and should learn from others. And even when a society has got upon the right track for the discovery of the natural laws of its movement – and it is the ultimate aim of this work, to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society – it can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development. But it can shorten and lessen the birth-pangs.

From Capital.

Marx addressed white European workers, people in the heart of colonial empires rather than the periphery. He presented British workers as an example of people who "have it bad" not despite the highly industrialized colonial empire that nominally exists for them, but because of it

In finding this passage I did come across people criticizing the interpretation of this that only the most industrialized people can have a valid communist revolution. It makes sense that socialist uprisings will happen in states that are experiencing lapses of control that can be filled with a revolutionary society rather than in smoothly running states.

But whether a state runs smoothly does not depend on whether it is the core of empire or the periphery. Russia itself was an imperial core, even if it was less industrialized than western European empires, it was merely destabilized by war.

So if Canada destabilizes - by collapse of global trade, by trade war with the US, by physical war with the US, by climate change, by an AI economic bubble, by successful AI automation creating an economic shock, whatever - there is space if we/you are ready to seize it.

De nos fabula narratur.

[–] orioler25@lemmy.ca 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Right, that's some text, and I'm sure the AI told you it was a very good quote, but you don't seem to understand how it contradicts you. And I'm honestly not sure what you think you're arguing at all besides "socialism is a thing," despite my constant advocacy for it, just not in a way that makes you feel like a good person.

Could you point out where Marx talks about decolonialism in this, which is what apparently this was meant to address? Firstly, if you were in any way familiar with contemporary socialist scholarship, you wouldn't make the mistake of conflating "English" and "European" as "white," when it refers to a specific understanding of whiteness as it exists in a settler-colonial system of power, as a fluid category that rationalizes or pathologizes violence and functions as a primary organizing principle of how resources are distributed in our society. Marx does not understand whiteness in that way, and never claimed to. In fact, the universalization of his economic criticisms both draws on and reproduces settler-colonial practices of erasure and domination that neglects the cultural and material specificities and needs of different places. You seem to think that you're defending socialism, and yet have discarded a century and a half of work of its development to adopt the most favourable elemetns of Marx's argument here to maintain a sense of moral rightness without addressing your own position of power within this system.

Even further, you don't even understand how the materialism applies to this topic. Materialism, both as Marx applies it and throughout subsequent socialist scholarship, is an analytical tool to explain why certain social constructs emerge, and how they relate to the physical, real world conditions. You have misunderstood multiple times now that when I say white settlers behave in their best interest, that it is the moral thing for them to do, which is the exact wrong reading. No, it means that they have a material incentive to do so that is only energized and validated by institutions of knowledge production which discursively constructs the world around them in accordance with that system of power; i.e. thinking that borders exist, thinking that there is a "natural" state of existence relative to this. Those are not real things, they are constructs that exist to facilitate the social relations of domination which Marx is talking about here.

You seem to think that being oppressed means you're not free from privileged, and that is the mentality of someone who has benefitted from privilege. Did you consider, for a moment, why Marx's prediction for England was wrong? Why white labourers in the metropole continue to subscribe to the exact same system they did then, why political reforms that emerged afterward worked to reproduce that system while creating a tolerable level of inequality for maintenance in the metropole? I thought you were joking when you said you thought this discussion was about whether capitalism is bad, you think this is how someone who supports capitalism talks? No, I know it is bad, and I recognize that people like you, privileged liberals, appropriate and weaponize these values to your own benefit, as your positionality affords you both the resources to pressure this system, and you require less from it for your satisfaction. Yes, being white means that you have a material incentive to perhaps challenge this system when it begins to fail you, but also to maintain it as your entire way of life and standard of living is tied to the privilege you inhabit as a settler. What you are doing is exactly what I am warning against, which is refusing to address that you have to give up privilege even though you feel like you don't have enough as it is due to the oppression that we all experience under capitalism, but white settlers less so.

What I am describing is how the prison industrial complex emerged following the Civil Rights era in the US, how homonationalism emerged following the AIDS genocide, how environmentalism is currently appropriated by white activists who want green spaces while still having bananas in winter. It is colonizing. Marx does not take any of this into account, fucking guess why.

Go read Patrick Wolfe's Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (1999), and "Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native" in Journal of Genocide Research, no. 8 (2006): 387–409; Jasbir Puar's Queer Times, Queer Assemblages (2005), and Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007); Pauline Wakeham "The Slow Violence of Settler Colonialism," in Journal of Genocide Research (2022); and Jean O'brien's, Firsting and Lasting (2010).

You'll do better for yourself and everyone else by actually learning about this shit rather than assuming you know everything because you like how people talk about Marxism online. Yeah, people like socialism, it hasn't happened just because we've all been waiting for you to get here, and right now, people like this are as big a threat to its realization as fascism is because, guess what, liberalism has sustained several waves like this in the time since Marx wrote Capital, and it has always been quelled by satiating the white labourers like you seem to be.

[–] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 1 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Let me make this simple for you: I am white. I can't change that. What can I do that is better than colonizing resistance?

Read those books/articles, sure, but what then? Books won't change my material conditions or my whiteness. I may be more informed about my complicity in oppression, but how could I be any less complicit?

If your answer is to read those books and then I'll know, then you have conceded the argument. If mere information can get me a point where my material incentives pull me towards healthy contribution to a better world, then the deliberate suppression of that information is a trick pulled on me, a white worker. And other white workers can similarly be reached by being given that information in a format they haven't been tricked into rejecting.

Or do you expect white people to act out of self-sacrifice once they see the horror of what they do? Because if so, lol. lmao even.

[–] orioler25@lemmy.ca 1 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

"What can I doooo, learn and change how I think??! !!!?!"

Yes, the bare minimum you can do with the power afforded to you is learn how to address these things so that you don't fucking colonize. It is the least you can do.

Patrick Wolfe is white, many decolonial scholars are white. Acting like you're powerless over yourself is not very convincing or, honestly, a respectable way to behave. It's honestly quite petulant. Just be honest and admit that I ruined your little LARP that many "socialist" like you on Lemmy participate in. White guilt doesn't exempt you from being responsible for yourself or your actions, and that includes how you think.

and lol, thanks for making it "simple," I'm sure that was quite a burden for you what with your immense and innate knowledge. I'm not going to read another response from you.

[–] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 1 points 5 days ago

So yes, white workers can resist in a non-colonial capacity, working towards a society in which their material situation is better, if only they understood the truth.

You've spent thousands of words trying to get one of those white workers to see the truth, yet you lambast me for saying that doing so is useful.

Essentially, you fully agree with me in word and action, you're just a tremendous asshole about it.

There is a lot of leftist literature to read. I don't know if these books turned you into an asshole with bad praxis, but just in case, your suggestions are going to the bottom of my list.

Now let's see if you keep your promise and don't read this.

[–] PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca -1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

If you're unable to engage people in a reasonable way, then you're just as much of a problem as I am regarding progressing equality. People who mostly agree with you don't deserve a novel belittling them via straw man.

Im not one for centerism and half measures, and I fully get the idea of the paradox of tolerance; but you're exhibiting conservative purity culture, which is the very real failure to deconstruct our upbringing that causes progressive movements to constantly self destruct.

[–] orioler25@lemmy.ca 0 points 1 week ago

"You're as bad as them because youre not nice to me." I don't care, people don't have to be nice abour things.

Bud, we are not allies, you do not have compatible values with me and you don't get to dictate when you do because you wish to claim ownership over anything vaguely "progressive." I was serious when I said that an inability to engage with the very fundamental reality that this is a settler-colonial system disqualifies you from a serious discussion on the topic. That is not purity politics, that is recognition of the pervasive nature of the social constructs that system relies on and the opposing interests that exist between colonizer and colonized.

Libs like you hate it being pointed out, but you are a fucking colonizer. Either grow up and change or stop clutching your pearls.