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5 days agoAI slop?
MarxMadness [comrade/them]
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Joined 6 years ago
Cake day: April 4th, 2021
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0·5 days agowhat are the oppressed? Advocates for incrementalism?
A lot are, there’s no way around this. There isn’t any mass revolutionary movement in the U.S., and there really aren’t even regional ones. At best you have a decent PSL chapter that’s probably dwarfed by your local DSA. Incrementalism is the only game in town at the moment, so a lot of people support it because there isn’t anything better.
The argument against incrementalism is that it doesn’t work. If an incremental improvement is your goal from the start you’ll get only scraps and they’ll always be subject to being rolled back – look at abortion, look at wage gains, look at the halting steps to check the imperial machine. It’s not privileged to recognize when someone is trying to buy you off with scraps, and being oppressed does not magically grant anyone political acumen.
On the “is China communist” topic, at some point I often roll out:
If your whole government and everyone in it formally rejects capitalism and cares about people, someone who actually believes those things could rise in a way that is impossible under capitalism.
Sure, I’ve never been there, I don’t speak Mandarin, I haven’t done a graduate-level inquiry into the nature of their government. Sure, governments lie about their intentions all the time. But if someone was a Real Communist and wanted to go far in government, China greases the skids for them the same way the U.S. greases the skids for a wealthy guy who’s willing to sell out to the highest bidder.
Every time I read a passage from Sakai I think:
- A good chunk of this is insightful material that is not common elsewhere and seems hard to contest (the U.S. has no feudal or communal past, and a major reason for its founding was to continue the oppression of indigenous and enslaved peoples).
- Another good chunk is a lot more contestable, certainly if the argument is that the U.S. is unique among capitalist states (all classes and strata have a preoccupation with petty privileges and property, moreso than other capitalist societies).
- A third chunk that seems like a huge stretch (there is no U.S. proletariat).
The support for the latter two groups has struck me as thin and/or unconvincing.
For example, the “no (white) proletariat” argument seems to boil to down to “they are paid too well to be proles.” ArcanePotato cites a passage elsewhere in this thread stating that 18th- or 19th-century U.S. farm workers made more than their European peers, and there’s also a passage in Settlers with figures on how many white households in the U.S. in the 1980s had a variety of modern conveniences (refrigerators, TVs, cars, etc.). I think this ignores that class is traditionally thought of as based more on one’s relationship to the means of production than to any absolute level of wealth – exchanging your labor for wages is what makes you proletariat, even if you make more than the person working next to you. If you’re working a wage labor job and your wage doubles, your interest in class struggle may become less urgent, but your relationship to the means of production doesn’t change. Temporarily placating the proletariat through higher wages isn’t the same as the proletariat not existing.
“Controlled opposition” does not simply mean “does things differently than I’d like.” It means they’re getting paid to lie to you by the people who pay your overt opponents.
Exaggerations like this don’t help us see the world more clearly, and unless someone is already on our side they’re just going to dismiss this as crankery.
Any more on this than an undated screenshot?
There is still a South Africa after apartheid. I’m guessing that’s what this refers to.
I think we should reject the “which take is more privileged” framing wholesale. You can argue it either way, it’s all hypothetical (in the sense it’s “people who think this must be privileged” rather than talking about actual people and their opinions), and it ignores the real question: what’s actually going to improve people’s lives in a meaningful way.