this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2024
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No, but you've as much said that you avoid agitating among settlers and are content to ignore them until they spontaneously join the anti-colonial struggle. You literally said " Wake me when they turn on themselves." How else am I to interpret that but you choosing only to react to spontaneous solidarity among settlers?
I think we should be looking for these points of contradiction that push settlers into action against imperialism and colonialism, yes even when those actions are protest and demands and peaceful demonstration. A settler is ripe for agitation even before they decide to douse themselves in fuel and light themselves on fire in front of an embassy. Things drive them to take on an internationalist character or an anti-settler-nationalist character; we must try to learn from why this and not that drove them to act. Scientifically approach the settler question.
Historically it is clear that settlers will betray the mother land under the right conditions. That's useful.
No, but you're saying they're unproductive, even though they use their labor to produce a service.
And the literature uses production to refer to services in addition to goods and widgets.
Like???
Right, but they're not owned by the growing mass of first world workers who do not and will never own a home, and that is significant. Who gets to be a settler is not set in stone, it's determined by how many bourgeoisified workers can be supported by the existing base of superprofit collected from imperialism.
Once the rate of superprofit declines, some settlers suddenly find themselves losing their privileged status.
The kind of military hardware they have access to these days the cops in the 1960s could scarcely dream of, not just because tech advances, but because the relationship between military and police was made closer and closer throughout the 80s and 90s and 00s up to today.
The so-called War on Terror was a reaction to the decline of the empire and in response the police had to become more violent and more invasive and more lethal and more secretive etc etc in order to control the proles. The police became occupation soldiers to fight "terrorism" and this has been boiling over into more and more massive uprisings against them.
Maybe you won't wake up until the streets run red, but I think it's worth trying to anticipate what comes next.
None of them are acknowledging the need to give up their settler society, you're telling me to value the statements on Israel that don't mention settler-Colonialism. Settlers are national oppressors as a class. In a context with no Colonialism, we still wouldn't ally with the petty bourgs as a class and center their demands, we have to slice them up and pick friends from foe. We shouldn't care about the demands of an oppressor nation unless they are in line with ours: prisoners, the homeless, and people oppressed for their bodies are people we intend to work for. If you want science on the settler question hit the books sibling, become an expert on colonial history in your immediate realm. Chunka Luta library exists for free.
Why does it bother you so much? Does it change that these goods and services are being paid from value stolen overseas? Quit projecting workerism onto my line.
The streets are already covered in my peoples' blood, quit playing with me. Read Blood in the Land, Fire this Time. You gotta be kidding me if you think my sense of urgency is lagging when y'all don't notice shit until you think it might be affecting you and your kin. Thinking the police presence is for you is absurd, the conditions for our oppression has already been here. The cops are killing us now, and most of us aren't Communists, square that.
Btw lets zoom in on that wage chart, looking at median wage (where half of wage workers do better), It has been increasing in the recent decades with an unusual spike in 2020 due to pandemic stimmies. Why hadn't there been revolts of white workers and youth in the 90s like Black and Latino youth? Economically the situation was worse then. Again we are looking for declines in conditions, not stagnation, for some reason "class consciousness" spiked in spite of increased earnings during the pandemic, you posit inflation economistically, I blame eugenics and national oppression. Your chart enthusiastically removes supervisors, who are a fifth of the workforce (remember 20% of white men don't even participate in labor anymore). There's really no way to see a real decline in US workers if the median and average wages are at a 4 decade high (excluding 2020). It doesn't line up with your hypothesis. Inflation did not peak with wages in 2020, it peaked in 2022, after a spike in real earnings for USians.
More police and settler-vigilante killings year over year since the 70s, police budgets expanding every year. For some reason these things occurred during "bourgeoisification", you never quite explained why that occurred.
No, I'm telling you to look for trends that may show segments of settler society are ripe for agitation, not to see them as "good" or something.
You literally said "I would consider people going from overpaid factory workers to white-collar work a bourgeois-ifying transition" because it is supposedly unproductive labor and because the rise of white collar work comes from imperialist superprofits, which mystifies social production. White collar work rises over time in every country country as development occurs and the societal needs for social labor increase. That's just a factor of development, it's not a sign of bourgeoisification.
The lacking white collar work in the Global South comes from underdevelopment which is caused by imperialism, but development itself is not inherently bourgeoisifying. Blue collar workers in the US are bourgeoisified by superprofits too, the actual job that they perform is not the source of bourgeoisification.
White collar work isn't inherently removed from the MoP either, many simply produce a different commodity than the widgets in the Sparks and Steam Factory. Work becomes unproductive when their """job""" is just to tell other people to do work for them i.e. managers, supervisors, executives, directors, etc. They don't actually produce anything, not even a social service, they're merely beknighted middlemen whose primary job is labor discipline and prole control and spying on workers to watch out for unionization.
The colonial police are being transformed into colonial soldiers by the heightened contradictions, but yeah, they were always meant to keep the peace for settlers.
But in Algeria the colonial police did, eventually, start torturing and killing white Algerians. Who gets to be a settler changes as conditions worsen for the empire.
For example, I get to be a settler as long as I stay white passing and am not visibly trans. That goes away if I don't do my makeup or get literally any Sun etc etc but soon enough that shit isn't going to protect me because the knives are out for white passing trans folk, and I blame imperial decline. Who gets to be a settler will be winnowed away.
Supervisors and managers and other beknighted sectors of the workforce are certainly our class enemies, they're almost always white for a reason! You'll see no disagreement from me on this. They will not join the struggle against settler-colonialism and capitalism when their conditions worsen, they'll pick up guns and enthusiastically kill us.
Did you think I was arguing in favor of them?
Bourgeoisification comes from superexploitation, which necessarily means some people need to be colonized and superexploited. This happens abroad, obviously, but the US is settler-colonial and so the colonization also happens within its borders. More colonial police were necessary to enforce the social hierarchy and ensure the settler's protected status and to extract superprofit from internally colonized people. Settler-vigilante killings are an outrgrowth of the growing contradictions between settlers and colonized peoples, as settlers become deputized to enforce racial hierarchy.
Inflation is a rate of change, which means even if it has peaked prices continued to rise.
More useful would be comparing the price index to wages, and here we see that consumer prices have continued to increase even after wages fell.
Thanks. I'm currently working through How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, but new book recommendations are always welcome!
While we're talking book recommendations, read Black Skin: White Masks, The Wretched of the Earth, and A Dying Colonialism.