Just wanted to prove that political diversity ain’t dead. Remember, don’t downvote for disagreements.
I believe that the stance against nuclear power (specifically, nuclear fission, as opposed to radioisotope power used by spacecraft) by greens undermines the fight to stop global warming, and that many of the purported issues with nuclear power have been solved or were never really issues in the first place.
For instance: the nuclear waste produced by old-gen reactors can be used by newer generations.
I fully agree that nuclear SHOULD have been part of the solution. I disagree that it should now be part of it. We have lost too much knowledge regarding nuclear power to lack of investment. We no longer have time to rebuild that to get it online. Hopefully it can become part of the solution eventually, but 10-20 years is now far too long to wait.
Yeah same. It makes the elections quite annoying because I agree with the local green party in almost every other way. But to me nuclear power is an important way to get reliable green energy. Something that still provides energy when the wind is not blowing and the sun isn’t shining. And to me some of the arguments feel way too “feeling based” instead of facts based. That its unsafe or dirty.
Preferably we’d have fusion, but until we manage to get that going I think nuclear fission is a decent alternative. Not forever, but for the coming 50-100 years until we find a better alternative.
Freedom of speech for absolutely everyone, especially people I disagree with and that disagree with me
Also the freedom to punch each other in the sternum
Insane take. We don’t have the right to physical violence just for a difference of opinion.
Who said anything about opinions?
I did. We were talking about freedom of speech, so opinions and beliefs are about the only things people really disagree about to the point of violence with regards to speech.
You can be Jewish and even support the idea of a Jewish homeland while also being fervently appalled by the actions of the state of Israel (Netanyahu, West Bank settlements, unarmed Palestinians shot/killed, houses being bulldozed, mass displacements).
Liberal zionists are still zionists
There’s countless invaluable Jewish voices in the anti-zionist movement of course, but what Jewish homeland could you support that wouldn’t be an ethno-state? /g
Agreed. Antisemitism != antizionism.
I think we need to figure out how to make leftism more appealing to centrists, and particularly to the cis/straight/white/male demographic.
That is a controversial opinion here.
(And I agree with it. I don’t know what the way is, but I hope it can be found)
I think the first thing to do is to shift sentiment toward solving the problem of how to make things appealing to centrists and the apolitical. Let’s get “I agree – but that has bad optics so let’s focus on something else first” into our lexicon. Once the left is able to be more strategic about this, then I think we’ll gain a lot more strides. I have some thoughts about what that might look like, but it’s outside the scope of this post.
When you’re coming from a position of extreme privilege and you’re either a bit stupid or lack empathy or general social awareness being treated equally with “lesser people” (like women, brown people or people from particular religious backgrounds) can seem an awful lot like you’re being discriminated against.
I think you’re missing the point a bit. Liberal/centrist values are already to treat everyone equally, but not equitably. So when leftism comes in with suggestions for change, it looks to centrists like inequality. If you listen to centrists objections to leftism, this is what they say repeatedly, so I’m inclined to believe that is how they legitimately feel. This is why I think we need slightly different messaging/branding/whatever, or to talk about these issues in a different way, so that centrists actually understand what we’re getting at. It’s also not hard to find instances of leftists who, when angry, lash out at the majority – which while relatable to me, doesn’t help make leftism look appealing.
(By “majority” I mean the average joe, not billionaires.)
The white nationalist movement preys on alienated young white men (more than other groups). Creating avenues for including these people in our movement means less people we have to fight.
I’m not saying everyone is able to fit into our movement, or they may require so much education that we just don’t have the resources to depropagandize them, but as a mass movement, more is generally better.
I think the most insidious part is that the far right feeds on men’s anger and negative emotions and just keeps telling them that if they go farther right, if they become more dominant alpha male, it’ll make all their negative emotions go away. And then when it doesn’t, they just keep pushing right.
100% agree. I honestly think that in ~2015, the left’s failure to appeal to young white men caused them to turn to the alt right. I think we scared them off with things like “check your privilege” etc., and should have focused more on getting them amped about class warfare.
I’m a straight white male that leans left, and ya, I’ve had friends (who, it’s sad to say, are hard to talk to now) who were center go right because they were welcomed with open arms by the right and shat on by the left. Before Elon went on a rant about the dude trying to rescue those trapped kids, before Joe Rogan started leaning into the propaganda for ratings, and when Bernie had a chance, we were on the same page… But since trump got involved, Bernie got shut out, and (it’s obvious now) the rich started weaponising the media against us, we have very little media that we consume that’s the same.
I left reddit, rogan and switched to Lemmy and breaking points, and they have leaned in harder to Rogan and we’re drawn down the rabbit hole of tim pool. Everytime I’ve tried to reason with them I get “what about isms”, “the left is more violent”, “the left hates everyone”, and borderline conspiracy theory non-sense. Even my own mom was pretty center left when I was growing up and now she’s bought into the non-sense because that’s the media she sees.
The right tells good tales, and a lot of people on the left are gate keeping, so… Just by fact of barrier to entry the right is going to be easier to drift towards. I hope we get our shit together.
Agreed 100%. I’m glad we’re collectively starting to realize this. It’s a bit late, but hopefully it’ll still do good.
Late is better than never
Well, I posted about this in this topic because I think it’s not a perspective that’s gained traction. Please help spread the good word…!
I’ve been thinking of starting some sort of group to help with that goal-- would you be interested? I’m not sure what we could do, but I want to do something, you know? I figure the best impact I can have is to convince other people that I mostly agree with to adopt this approach, which is what I envision the group could help with.
I’m curious
DM me. :)
IMO the biggest problem is media. They report through a center-right lens and focus on sensationalism. So all people see of the left is the “check your privilege cis white boy” and “anarchists have burned down the entire city” BS lines instead of the vast aid efforts and daily work.
For years I’ve been hearing “the media has a left bias” though. I guess that’s left=democrat party, not left=leftist.
The fox news viewer see CNN as “leftist” and anything further as “The Commies”. CNN/MSNBC/whatever "liberal” orgs see themselves as the leading charge of the liberal movement and anything more progressive or actually leftist as “The Commies”.
Ehh, can’t expect anything short of that sort of bias from corporate media.
It depends on the material conditions. Also there is a reason “centrists” even exist as they are now and appear to you as some kind of constant monolith. Or as Marx did put it “Ideas of ruling class are the ruling ideas”
I think you should read J. Sakai’s Settlers. It explains this (in a US context) quite well and I think that it refutes the concept of just making leftism “more appealing” for people
I can read the book, but… I just don’t understand how leftism can be successful without followers.
That doesn’t make sense. You need to start with a correct historical and material analysis before you can approach anything else. Socialism is based on dialectical materialism, not gaining ‘followers’. Leftism is not a religion that aims to have many converts but rather should understand why neocolonialism and other such institutions would deincentivize white people from being leftists in the United States in the first place.
It’s all well and good for leftist individuals to achieve that understanding, but how can we effect change without more of the population being swayed to this ideology?
You still haven’t achieved that understanding. Ideology does not come about from ‘convincing’ or ‘swaying’ anyone. I once again suggest you to read Settlers to see why this thought process is flawed. I understand where you are coming from but the material precedes the immaterial
Ideology does not come about from ‘convincing’ or ‘swaying’ anyone.
Tell that to the propaganda model. False consciousness is a real barrier which can, and has, dominated material class interests.
Propaganda functions with a pre-supposition of the initial dominance of the material over the immaterial. People are functionally motivated to accept specific ideological and social viewpoints where the material state encouraging that comes first. I think this article makes an interesting case for why this general concept is non-Marxist: https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/
Very well, I’ll look at it.
Fundamentally, what Centrists want is stability, for people to get along, to find solutions that the majority on both sides would agree with. For the status-quoish state of stability.
A Centrist would be a Liberal (as its defined today, and not how it was defined in the 70’s/80’s) before they would be a Leftist. They perceive Capitalism as a stable foundation of the society.
To get a Centrist to believe in Leftist ideals you’d have to try and show that Leftism is also stable, AND describe how the transition/change to Leftism on its own would not be an unstabilizing thing. And also how Capitalism is a dead-end alley for the species ultimately, and how its ultimately hurtful to a society by encouraging fighting and competition between its members.
You’d also have to show Centrists that Rightists would understand that Leftism works. Centrists want both Leftists and Rightists to be ‘happy’ (loaded word I know, but you get the gist of what I’m trying to opine on).
No idea how to do all that, but IMO that’s what would need to be done. You’d have to get the Right on board with Leftism, and you’d have to show Centrists that moving to Leftism won’t be destabilizing to their current way of existing.
Best guess would be to appeal to common belief systems (safety, fairness, freedoms, respect) that all three pillars would have in common.
An overall generic example would be to prove to a Rightist that a hand-out to someone is not being unfair, but its just helping someone out until they get on their feet, and can’t be exploited, to try and “raise all boats” in society. And you’d have to tell some Leftists to stop trying to exploit the system, that they’re now back on their feet, and that they need to put in as much effort as everybody else does.
For Leftists/Rightists stop yelling across the divide at each other, and start talking to each other, trying to understand what is important to them, and see if both sides can meet in the middle on those things that are important to both. Centrists will be happy that the fighting has stopped, and then you’d have to be extra careful not to destroy that non-fighting in trying to move the center to the left.
Oh, and do all of this while we have freedom of speech and people purposely trying to shape the narratives towards what they just want and to F with everybody else. A.k.a., “Free Will is a Pain in the Ass”.
Thank you for coming to my 🧸-Talk.
Centrists want the status quo, yes, but mostly just for themselves. This is why fascism starts with minority groups. Centrists will accept fascists “coming for the” communists/trans/migrants/etc, since it mostly isn’t effecting their status quo.
Centrists want the status quo, yes, but mostly just for themselves.
That’s not true at all. I know Centrists who care about everybody, and want everybody to be safe/happy/successful. They see it as a “floating tide raises all boats” kind of thing.
But only in a kind of theoretical sense. They think the status quo is best for everyone, but it’s really only best for them. What is a more centrist sentiment than “our system may not be perfect, but it’s the best there is”? See Dr. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” for an eloquent condemnation of “moderates”.
But only in a kind of theoretical sense. They think the status quo is best for everyone, but it’s really only best for them.
You’ll have to elaborate/defend that statement. I think you’re just imposing your own perspective/worldview without facts in evidence.
What is a more centrist sentiment than “our system may not be perfect, but it’s the best there is”?
That would be said by Leftists about a Leftist-bias system, or Rightists about a Rightist-bias system. What you described is not just in the domain of the Centrist. There are many “systems” that groups of humans gather around, and each system may look very different from other systems.
See Dr. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” for an eloquent condemnation of “moderates”.
I have not read this, so apologies if I get this wrong, but I will judge this sentence based on the overall message of your comment reply.
Being a moderate does not mean settling for whatever no matter what, no matter how harmful it is. Its about trying to have a consensus that most/all can live with, in how we run our society and how we act towards each other.
For example, if everybody agreed on Leftism, then should the middle of the Leftism population be condemmed (as they would now be the Centrists of Leftism)? Or Centrists of Rightism?
If human history teaches us anything, governing from the fridge/edges never works out well for everybody else.
You aren’t exactly wrong in your first two quote-responses, I will give you that. “The Left” commonly answers the second with an idea called ‘eternal revolution’. The idea being that we cannot stop improving, or become so lazy in our ways that we begin to ossify into a form over function society.
I urge you to read the letter. It will raise your consciousness a hundred times more than any conversation you’ll have on Lemmy today.
I urge you to read the letter. It will raise your consciousness a hundred times more than any conversation you’ll have on Lemmy today.
I’ll take a look.
I think an awful lot of them actually have more leftish values, but they are convinced (and there is a huge self reinforcing bubble of that mentality, between media, politicians, and voters) that only the weakest, most watered down version of that can possibly succeed, politically.
I feel like one obvious answer is “stop being so eager to alienate cis straight white men”
I think a lot of conversation is “men go to therapy” but therapy alone isn’t enough? We kind of cast men off of having all the privilege in the world without recognizing that patriarchy hurts them too, and in lots of facets of their lives in a way that just going to a therapist once a week does not help.
Yeah, therapy is not a viable solution for broad societal issues
I think this advice is not very actionable as is, and needs more digesting into more specific strategies.
Like, for instance: let’s avoid making people feel rejected by the left for having privilege, and instead focus on guiding privileged people so that they can use their privilege to help the cause.
I agree. I’m glad you made this post and are actually interacting in the comments to be constructive.
There’s a book I was introduced to last year called “good strategy bad strategy” that is worth a read, most of it’s somewhat obvious and a little dated as far as examples, but the framing of how to think about strategy is pretty solid. Its an easy read, and like most non fiction books, you get most of the meat in the first half.
Are you active in any socialist parties?
I would like to be, but I just can’t figure out how to get involved in my area.
I was going to follow up with a sick zinger but instead I’ll just be normal, ha.
It is important to grow the left, to turn it from like 100-1000 people in a given city into 5-10%. I can agree with that motivation, as can the vast majority of socialists. Our aim is revolution, that doesn’t happen from just a few reading groups, it has to become more.
The entire country already caters to the demo you mentioned. Everything is ready-made for them. Many orgs are dominated by them, such as the DSA. You should not write off straight white cis guys but they are consistently the hardest to reach because they are dismissive of others’ experiences with oppression and have been more shielded from capitalism’s worst in their country, but tend to feel very entitled to an opinion about it.
Centrism is the only described characteristic that is a chosen identity and it is a political tendency, if you can call it that. It’s a person with no political development whatsoever, they just vaguely cobble together an incoherent mishmash of common liberal and reactionary ideas that they can’t really defend but they call themselves an outsider as if that means something regarding someone whose political life can be summed up as, “sometimes votes”.
So what would it mean to try to boost efforts to recruit straight white cis dude centrists? Because the first things that would come to mind for me are usually called tailism by socialists and has a long track record of failure in the US in particular, where the US had a gargantuan labor movement that was entirely scuttled by liberal cooption and playing straight white cis dudes off of marginalized groups. There were entire unions that were segregated or disallowed black membership, for example. Those were the easiest to coopt into the red scare and, once they were used to out and isolate socialists, were then easily undermined and shrunk when their anticommunist government came for labor a couple decades later, having no radical core remsining and no material leverage.
Leftism is unpopular by definition, especially to the privileged classes. Leftism seeks to upend the status quo, and loss aversion is a problem.
Not that efforts can’t be made.
Where in the definition of leftism is it said that leftism is unpopular?
it’s manifested in our reality; only the liberal branch of leftism is permitted (particularly in the united states) while the other branches are openly denigrated by moderates and rightists alike and persecuted by our governments and militias.
That’s hardly definitional.
Leftism is unpopular by definition
This really depends how you define “leftism”.
If you mean ‘whichever side of politics is left of the population’s center’ then sure, it can’t be a majority.
If you mean ‘whichever side of politics is left of the political center’ then that doesn’t imply it’s unpopular, and there’s direct electoral evidence of ‘left’ parties achieving a majority government.
If you mean socialism and communism, they certainly aren’t unpopular by definition. If anything, their definition makes them a mass movement of the proletariat, the vast majority of a post-industrial society.
That progressive people should prioritize economic equality ahead of social issues.
I’d argue nearly every single social issue is an economic one. Abortion? Anti-abortion laws are intended to force people to have kids they can’t afford, making them desperate for work to keep their kids fed and clothed. Racial equality? I mean, do I need to say more than the fact that most minorities are statistically poorer? The only one that can be argued is purely social is Trans people, and I simply can’t fathom letting people die for being who they are, or ignoring the blatant attacks on them from the right.
They go hand-in-hand, though, and moreover “true economic equality” isn’t possible when humans vary wildly in needs and abilities, hence Marx’s whole attack on the so-called “equalitarians.”
They do not, as evidence by the last two decades of “progressive” politics here in the US.
The US has not had either, truly.
you can’t learn much about leftism from the USA
The left has become so focused on illegal immigrants and identity politics that they have abandoned working class economic issues and rural white voters and it has cost them elections.
Are these elections in the room with us right now? Mind naming a single “election” that the left was “lost” over illegal immigrants?
If the left you’re talking about is the dems, no the fuck they aren’t. Dems aren’t the ones constantly putting forth bills about Trans people. The most any dem has done is post some milqtoast “trans rights” sticker or something.
But I agree I think the dems shouldn’t have justified the fear mongering about immigrants when the right started screeching about it. But that’s also on news orgs justifying it.
Yeah it seems it’s conservatives who are the ones who like to obsess and make it the topic of discussion to make their followers think it is the left’s primary platform of focus.
And then they also fixate on entertainment like games or movies to further play up how everything is woke as though it’s the left politicians making all that.
And it’s because that’s really the only compelling thing they have to play up to their followers who too make it their entire identity of conflict, since their other policies aren’t working class friendly.
since their other policies aren’t working class friendly.
It can not be stressed enough that every single other policy they have is damaging to the working class. I think that’s why they push on transphobia so hard, because it’s the only one that doesn’t.
Yup.
I don’t like extreme leftists (they live in a bubble) but they’ve been right about everything and they are our best chance at resolving economic disparity
I appreciate the recognition, but I think being right implies a lack of living in a bubble, right? Like, we might be annoying, but certainly not detached.
I’m curious how you square “they live in a bubble” with them being right?
Doesn’t sound like they live in a bubble, then.
Mental health focused communities exascerbate their members’ issues
Only when there’s no professional playing a role. A self-help group with professional oversight is great.
- permanent revolution;
- that parties should be democratic institutions;
- that burocratization leads to deformed proletarian states.
Are you saying you disagree with Trots on these matters, or that you agree with Trots despite their unique positions among Marxists in general?
I don’t think anyone would disagree with you regarding parties needing to be democratic, so I assume you are referring to a specific type of democracy.
As for Permanent Revolution, I think that was kind of “debunked” when the peasantry showed itself to be a genuine ally of the proletariat. Abandoning building Socialism because a revolution in Germany never appeared and instead focusing your efforts on exporting revolution ultimately would have led to a lack of developed industry, and a loss in World War II for the Soviets. Communism still requires global revolution, but it makes more sense to build up Socialism domestically and use that to fuel revolution globally than it does to focus almost entirely on the idea of a global revolution.
i think that in most communist movements around the world, we fourthists are minority. hence i tend to disagree on some points with the majority (mostly m-l’s). but we mostly agree on marx’s method for analyzing society and economy.
Gotcha, I don’t agree with you but your comment makes sense if you are comparing yourself to the broader Marxist movement, and not just within your tendency.
I don’t really know what constitutes a “political creed,” really, so I don’t know how to answer.
He means who do you circlejerk with on tinternet
Poor choice of words, perhaps. I meant those who generally share your political opinions in other respects. For instance, “anarcho-communist” or “libertarian”
Sure, but I do feel that by the time you’ve picked a niche label, you’ve filtered out where you disagree.
I don’t think so. Labels only have so much resolving power. They represent people who are broadly aligned in values, but not necessarily on every specific issue.
For instance, I think most libertarians have individual dissent from their norm on various topics. It should be easy to find examples in the case of libertarianism, but I believe this applies to other political ideologies too.
“Libertarian” is far more broad than, say, Marxist-Leninist or Anarcho-Communist. When you go from “Marxist” as an umbrella to “Marxist-Leninist” as a category within Marxism, you are generally conforming to that specification’s tendencies. At that point of specificity, there are more “solved” questions than unsolved.
Oh yeah sure. More solved questions than unsolved seems like a good way to put it. But there are still points of dissent though.
I think if we eliminated money, we would just invent it again and call it something else.
Well yah. The alternative is barter and farmers only need so many cell phones and software developers.
The alternative is barter
No. Never has been.
Depends on what you consider “money” and what Mode of Production you have.
Anything you exchange as a representation or substitute for something else of value. I think communism would reinvent what I consider money but wouldn’t use it as it’s used under capitalism.
Some Communist theoreticians consider Labor Vouchers to be distinct from money, as they would be destroyed upon first use and serve more as a “credit” for labor, and would eliminate the concept of accumulation of money from labor exploitation and exchange.
I am aware of this. It’s functionally no different than a dollar bill. The fact that I intend to melt down an axe after I use it to chop a tree down doesn’t make it not an axehead. If I used that same axe to hack my neighbor to death, well, that’s a completely different use. In the case of communist ‘money’, I think we would cease using money to kill our neighbor.
I don’t understand how the issues of money persist if you can only earn LVs through labor, and can’t be accumulated through Capital ownership. Why would you kill your neighbor?
I wouldn’t kill my neighbor? Was that too complicated an example? I think that money, like an axe, is a tool that can be used differently in different contexts. ‘Money’ isn’t the issue. How it’s used is the issue, which is why I think we would invent it. You don’t solve the ‘issues’ of an axe. You don’t solve the ‘issues’ of money. Capitalism uses stand-ins for value to harm people, but I am not convinced it’s an inherent trait of value stand-ins. I think LV’s are money, so I think you think that is true also.
I’m asking what’s wrong with money that carries over to LVs. Why is money an issue?
It’s functionally no different than a dollar bill.
In the case of communist ‘money’, I think we would cease using money to kill our neighbor.
Seems like a big difference to me
People should be free to vote outside the two party system secure in the knowledge that their vote will still be counted if their preference didn’t win.
Videos on Electoral Reform
First Past The Post voting (What most states use now)
Videos on alternative electoral systems we can try out.
As someone who was in a supportive relationship with a transgender person for 3 years and who personally struggles associating with my own gender (masculinity was never my thing lol), I never really got into the stating my gender pronouns.
I get why it’s done for the times it matters and can do so in a sensitive space, but I get the sense it’s usually done as public compliance (like a cis neolib as an email sig), which can lead to shallow support or worse, resentment. What we ultimately need is more genuine contact with people different from ourselves because that helps reduce “othering” a group.
Oh, but I do tend to default to “they” out of old internet habits. Always disliked the assumption all gamers are men.
I do think stating pronouns at the beginning of conversations is a bit clunky, but in almost every internet interactions (including email),having a reference to someone’s pronouns helps both when they’re trans and when it’s faceless. Like if someone’s has a gender neutral name, it can save confusion between a group message or email chain to be able to refer to them with the right pronouns.
I’ve heard that use case before, and it’s fairly reasonable in a faceless contract. Funny enough, my father is a perfect case study, his name is rather unique and one letter off from a common feminine name so he gets misgendered quite frequently as a cis man (plus, to make matters worse, hes very insecure about his masculinity and is sensitive about being called a sissy because his father abused him).
Thinking on his use case, it might help him to have pronouns at work, but according to him people pick up on his pronouns almost immediately because they hear it from a co-worker in reference to him, there is almost never a completely blind email despite it being a rather large city hall. In other words, only people who misgender him are spam. While pronouns wouldn’t have stopped the abuse and bullying growing up, the culture of acceptance behind the trend probably would have.
Ironically, he won’t do the pronouns because he’s a bit conservative leaning. And his alcoholic, homophobic ass certainly didn’t do me any favors when I dated a transgender person.
because that helps reduce “othering” a group
Which is, ironically, what the pronoun-stating thing was supposed to avoid. Personally I agree that it’s not really necessary, and that it actually is a form of compelled speech.
It makes me uncomfortable to state my personal pronouns. Years of growing up as a woman on the internet makes me not want to reveal my gender, even when it’s obvious (like in person).
Sounds like my sister and a good friend of mine, the latter who prefers playing games as a male character to avoid the attention. I totally get where you’re coming from on that.
I’m really appreciating how much restraint y’all guys are showing with the downvotes. Thanks everyone.
This question is difficult to correctly answer, as anyone can define their own political boundaries. They can be wrong about those boundaries and they can define many different ones that are all valid. Is my “political creed” to be a communist? Which subset might that mean? Am I friendly with certain subsets despite disagreeing with them (yes) and if so would they potentially count as the majority? Am I a (de)famed Western leftist or part of a worldwide effort in terms of having a less popular view of a subject?
I would say that among the people with whom I have the most general agreement, my least popular opinion is the potential for imperial core workers to become radicalized and organized for the left. A very large amount of organized resources is constantly poured into efforts to prevent this from happening, including those that reinforce settler, white supremacist, and chauvinist attitudes that permeate our cultures. That means that our struggle is very challenging right now but also means that if those flows are ever cut off or undermined, there will be immense opportunity and we have to be ready to channel the inevitable accompaniment to the conditions (austerity) that got us to that place away from neoliberal fascistic movements.
Basically, there is a common pathway in understanding that goes from hope for revolution from within the imperial core (no successful precedents) to attempts to understand this and explain why it’s least likely to happen there. This can lead to a self-defeating cynicism towards all imperial core organizing or to curb vision. But I think it is our duty to continually reformulate as needed to discovery organizable enclaves, to grow with current and upcoming conditions. We owe that to each other.
I think I agree with your unpopular opinion. It might be an unpopular opinion because it’s conditionally-expressed, and conditionals are hard to reason about (“I think if X happens then Y would be a good idea” really sounds a lot like “I think Y is a good idea.”)
Reading this reminded me about another unpopular opinion: I think “settler” and “colonizer” are poor terms for non-indigenous people broadly.
The settler mindset is taught to basically every American either through school or wider social conditioning. It is an ongoing challenge to left organizing and has to be unlearned so that one can take liberating actions rather than explicitly oppositional settler ones. It is a mixture of white supremacy, colonial chauvinism, national chauvinism and myth-making, and some other reactionary ingredients that many have trouble observing because they are so normalized. And indigenous people can have this same mindset to varying degrees just like a black American can internalize anti-black racism.
The core precepts taught about US history are fundamentally a lie to benefit this mindset. As Marx said, the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. A bit of seemingly harmless Americana like [fruit] picking, a little farmhouse that sells [fruit]-based goods. Well, about 100-200 years ago you can usually bet that land was native. Not much folksy history to draw on. Not much tradition, aside from what was imported and normalized by waves of settlers for which whiteness was invented by ruling class interests to mollify the newly white people and further exploit everyone else. An identity that rationalized the theft of that land, of “settling” it for the imported culture’s definition of stewardship, of extraction for [fruit]. The history of that place is told as a “family farm for 7 generations”. Its crop is picked by underpaid workers, many of them undocumented: the labor underclass established for the modern settler mindset. Wage slaves and sometimes actual slaves, something considered perfectly normal in the settler mindset. An actual horror and overt injustice often just a few meters away and yet everyone is not up in arms demanding equal treatment. Instead, they respond to the ruling class’ demands to blame the marginalized for the bourgeoisie’s harms, they call for cruelty and deportation or they call for the status quo in response. Rarely do they call for liberation or equal treatment. The idea of open borders is used by the far far right to ridicule the far right that also wants closed borders. The idea itself is considered absurd by the mainstream settler mindset, as they are told it is absurd because it is against settler interests. “Imagine having to make just as little money as a Spanish-speaking brown person!”, they internalize. They pick the [fruit] by the pretty white farmhouse and talk about how nice it would be to own their own place just like this. So long as they eventually own a house - or believe they will - they tend to not organically question the system that benefits them, surrounded by a system that discourages or coopts such thinking.
It is a potent force to overcome and it is why a full socialist education in The West takes so long. So much to unlearn. So many potential pitfalls. So many places where you are basically asking a person to have empathy for others and not interpret this as a form of self-hatred and get all defensive. Because to understand US-based oppression is to hate it. To be revolted. To reject all forms of settler thought as best you can, as you refuse to ever intentionally celebrate genocide or chattel slavery or the crushing of entire nations’ simple dreams of sovereignty, food security, intact families, and limbs.
So I basically agree with you, semantically, about the problem that needs to be solved. I just think it’s not a good idea to call non-indigenous people “settlers” in general. For one thing, it doesn’t fit the literal meaning of the word settler (somebody who comes from away to settle down), since most so-called settlers have never moved to a different country in their whole lives. For two, it causes a knee-jerk reaction to those who are called settlers, which is not conducive to converting centrists to leftists. It’s just not productive to call people settlers in most cases. I don’t mean to say settler-colonialism isn’t a useful concept or doesn’t exist – I just mean specifically that the word “settler” applied to individuals is a bad idea in most cases.
The settler mindset has long outlived the immediate settler colonists that were genociding the natives or otherwise assisting it by stealing land (with extra steps). Nobody who uses the term has that meaning. We are referring to the settler colonial psychology that persists, and particularly its US version that is merged with white supremacy and national chauvinism.
You can also recognize it in other Euro settler colonists like the Afrikaners and “Israelis”. They tell the same stories about deserving the land, of doing a better job with it, of blaming the colonized for fighting back or “bringing up the past”, they seed conversations with racial supremacist implications and sometimes just overt racism. Are cowboys the good guys? Is it cool to be a cowboy? If you picture a cowboy in your head, are they a white guy? Most cowboys were brown and a substantial minority were black. American settler psychology has in some ways moved beyond those examples, however, as the “settlement” is nearly complete so they can entertain performative actions like cynical land acknowledgements while never supporting Land Back or even just basic material improvements for natice people. They can temporarily “feel bad”, but not so bad as to need to actually do anything, because the national genocide doesn’t warrant doing even one tangible thing per year.
I have not gotten too deep into the material basis of the settler mindset, but it is also prevalent and the most important. The fundamental fact of free or almost free land (stolen land) led to an economic base premised on it that has been slowly closing up. It acted as a release valve for social pressures that advanced in Europe, it could create profits from essentially nothing and be a carrot dangled in front of the face of generations that told their kids and grandkids that you could just work hard and go be a farmer. Two depressions resulted from the loss of the material basis for this but not the culture, as The New Deal and associated red scare then coincided with the US firmly taking over as prime imperialist, propping up the welfare of white people of settler culture via neocolonial exploitation. Pineapples on tables and virtual guarantees on jobs and cheap houses for a few generations. Not so much for black or brown people.
These are things in living memory. They color all of our experiences, ambitions, cultural references, and attitudes towards one another - and what we think we owe each other (usually nothing per this mindset).
Re: knee jerk reactions, yes of course, it is supposed to be dismissive when you call someone a settler to their face. It is usually an irrefutable fact and they don’t know how to deal with it because they don’t understand it. Is it always wrong to be dismissive? I think it can carry important emotional content so as to agitate others. Maybe the audience isn’t the centrist settler, or is otherwise someone they think it would be a waste of time to try and convert directly. Most of the time they are going to be right about that. A “centrist” sharing their opinion already lacks humility and that’s rarely the place a person can improve from.
The overwhelming majority of leftists I know used to be centrists at some point in their lives. Also, I’m really astonished that you openly admit that you use the word “settler” specifically to be antagonizing. I kind of thought that was the bailey, not the motte.
Given that you don’t organize, how many leftists do you know? The people I know ran quite the gamut before winding up coherently left.
I don’t know why you’d be astonished at the term being used dismissively. Generally it’s when someone is being white supremacist, racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, etc. They may not even realize it at first because it’s normalized for them, but when they respond negatively to correction well guess who’s digging in their heels about being shitty. That’s exactly who you don’t want to cater to. They will eat up all of your time and fight you the whole time because they have not developed basic humility.
Like, all my friends are leftists. When we talk about politics, they sound like leftists, they say leftist things, and espouse leftist values. My friends are all leftists because my friends’ friends are leftists and I make friends with my friends’ friends.
Regarding “settler,” I think it’s a motte-and-bailey tactic you’re using. The motte – the easily defensible position – is that settler refers to people who are bigoted. The bailey – the hard to defend position, but which is easily equivocated for the motte – is that it refers to any non-indigenous person. The reason I see this equivocation is because in my mind, a settler does not stop being a settler simply because they turn into an ally for indigenous people. Settlerdom is a property of a person that depends only on their geographic location and ancestry, not their philosophy. Father Le Jeune is generally regarded as an ally to the linguistic preservation of indigenous languages in the pacific northwest, and he even helped develop a writing system for Chinuk Wawa – but was he not a settler?
I don’t deny that it’s a useful verbal weapon against bigots. I would merely like it to be well-understood that a verbal weapon is what it is intended to be.
The invention of money was a blight on our society. Abolishing it immediately is the first step to proper environmental recovery.
What the systems of getting people their food, supplies would look like, I don’t know, but having corporations hoarding wealth and polluting everything needs to stop.
Money can and should be abolished, but the best way to do so is to work towards a fully publicly owned and centrally planned economy and work towards the use of labor vouchers, which are destroyed upon first use. Eliminate production for profit and replace it with production for use.
I see the sentiment that money should be abolished here all the time, but this is the first time I’ve actually seen a proposed replacement. It’s an interesting idea.
It’s Marxist, so you can go to Marx for more on that, though he didn’t spend much time describing how he thought Communism would function.
If anyone wants do go deep into non-monetary economic systems, I haven’t read/listened-to much of their work but economists and computer scientists like Cockshott have researched planned non-money economies.
A summary: https://dessalines.github.io/essays/paul_cockshott_cyber_communism.html
A few related thoughts.
- Money, capital, and profit are not the same things.
- Labor vouchers are a form of money.
- Every time you give fiat money back to the government which owns the “money printer,” that money has been in effect destroyed.
- I’m not of the opinion that money should be abolished, not even necessarily “eventually.” Maybe a time will come when it makes sense to, but I don’t have the foresight to speak meaningfully to that.
I think it’s important to understand that “money” as it exists within markets exists in a manner to be exchanged and accumulated. Labor vouchers are a type of "currency,” but as they can’t really be accumulated in the same manner money for exchange can be, may make sense in the far future.
It’s mostly a moot point because we lilely won’t make it to the level of centralization necessary for such a system in our lifetimes though, and our successors can figure out potentially an even better system.
Idk how we’d get rid of money, but it needs to be done. We’re literally the only species on the planet with this concept and we’re suffering for it.
Yup. We’re producing the goods, we need the goods, why the hell are we doing this with shareholders and money?
Oh right, cause human time is limited and automation isn’t good enough.
Humanity also just can’t coexist peacefully with anything. We ruin everything we touch. Our hubris will be our downfall and I take comfort in the fact that the Earth will heal after we extinct ourselves.
