• queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
    41·
    3 days ago

    The US is still a settler-colony, even if it is highly reformed. That means we need to slightly stretch Marxist analysis to account for the colonial context or else we’ll keep earning Fell For It Again awards.

      • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
        6·
        3 days ago

        Obama wasn’t much different from any other president, yeah.

        But, in the colonial situation the economic base is also its superstructure. “White” is a settler identity, it has no history before settler-colonialism. There is no white language, culture, nation, religion etc etc. It exists only as a way to weld together disparate ethnic groups into a single cohort. The colonial situation imposes whiteness onto the US, the decolonial struggle would destroy it.

        • davel [he/him]@lemmy.mlEnglish
          6·
          3 days ago

          Obama wasn’t much different from any other president, yeah.

          The Obamas, Rices, and Powells as well, though I was thinking of minorities who join the military, and minority workers who internalize an imperialist mindset.

          • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
            2·
            3 days ago

            Joining the military can have different effects for minorities because it’s actually a hostile environment. They might embrace pessimism and shame towards their bodies and histories and families as they try their hardest to integrate into whiteness, or they also might become embittered by their experiences in the military and reject white supremacy and imperialism.

            But for whites who join the military it takes an awful lot to get them to reject the empire because they have to become race traitors.

  • Weydemeyer@lemmy.ml
    191·
    3 days ago

    It’s a fair point, but whenever I see Platner and Fetterman lumped together I feel a little gaslighted. I feel like I remember that election cycle clearly and no where I do recall Fetterman getting even 1% of the support Platner has received from the “left”. He (Fetterman) was an open Zionist then too, and no the left didn’t just ignore it it was brought up nearly every time I did see Fetterman mentioned. I do recall the left treated Fetterman like say Raphael Warnock or Ro Kanna - a guy with a few progressive points in his favor but overall too many shitty or just standard dem policy positions for the left to meaningfully “support” them.

    We should of course self-crit and try to evaluate our own mistakes and blind spots as a movement. But trying to turn Fetterman into some ur-Platner feels like an attempt to change the reality of the past to fit a present narrative. While we have a lot of work to do in being better especially in regards to race and white supremacy, saying there is a white supremacist problem on the left (especially when this is the evidence), does feel a bit to me like “Labour has an anti-semitism problem” vis-a-vis Corbyn.