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The white working class: a parasite class?
"The white working class is not a vanguard revolutionary class, it is a backward parasitic class, which directly benefited from the enslavement, land theft, and dispossession of our ancestors in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania. America is not Europe, and the social reality which produced this society is fundamentally different. Although the United States of America did invade countries in the Caribbean and all over Central and Latin America for land and peoples, it did not have to leave its shores to colonize or steal slaves like Europe. It is a white settler nation which has always maintained internal colonies. Know who you are, who the Euro-Amercans are, set the terms for cooperation, but do not allow terms to be set for you."
Thoughts? Reactions?
http://comradebananahead.tumblr.com
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"We’re taught at such an early age to be against the communists, yet most of us don’t have the faintest idea what communism is. Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is."[/FONT][FONT=Century Gothic]
[/FONT][FONT=Century Gothic] --Assata Shakur (1987)[/FONT]
Not the best of times to bring this up, I reckon.
Racist -> reactionary.
Nothing more to say about it really...
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I didn't write that. The author is Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin. I wanted to get some responses to this.
http://comradebananahead.tumblr.com
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"We’re taught at such an early age to be against the communists, yet most of us don’t have the faintest idea what communism is. Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is."[/FONT][FONT=Century Gothic]
[/FONT][FONT=Century Gothic] --Assata Shakur (1987)
Whiteness is part of race, not class. The role of race in power relations and the role of class in power relations intersect but they are not the same relationship of power. If a white worker benefits from his power in racial and gender relationships, he still does not possess class power as long as he is still bound up in the asymmetric distribution of power in the production of commodities. So no, 'whites' are not a 'parasitic class'. 'Whites' are members of a class vis-a-vis their individual position within the chain of economic production. Whether they are 'parasites' in the power relationship between members of 'races' is the subject of race & racism studies. But I think members of those fields would object to the term 'parasite' as imprecise and inflammatory. Not to mention how being subjected to whiteness is problematic for the individual as well.
"Humanity has passed through a long history of one-sidedness and of a social condition that has always contained the potential of destruction, despite its creative achievements in technology. The great project of our time must be to open the other eye: to see all-sidedly and wholly, to heal and transcend the cleavage between humanity and nature that came with early wisdom." - Murray Bookchin
No-one should be held responsible for who they are born to. Blaming whites now for slavery is like saying all chinese are still communist.
formerly Triceramarx
If you believe that "white working class" is a parasite class, come here in Croatia... we are 99.99% white, but in a deep shit. Anyhow, my point is that "white working class = parasites" theory is non-Marxist reactionary theory of silly American Maoists.
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I smell the unpleasant stench of third-worldism here. The white working class is working class. What kind of ridiculous argument is bringing up wealthy, slave-owning landowners or industrial imperialists from a century ago and using that as a basis to condemn American workers, past or present, who have a very militant history of struggle.
What person wrote this nonsense? So the miners, factory workers, and farmers working here in Serbia (a Predominately white nation) are parasites? I think this needs to be rephrased and be more specific, because many "white nations" have not enslaved anybody. Poles, Czechs, Yugoslavs, etc. have not built anything by way of slavery but rather with their own peoples labor.
*shrug* I wouldn't pay much attention to it, seeing as how it's MTWism and all. At least it didn't trot out the old "AmeriKKKa" spelling, though.
America has always had a large white underclass, largely consisting of immigrants of Scot-Irish, Welsh, Italian, and eastern European descent, and these nationalities were some of the fiercest partisans in the labor struggle that would come to define the USA. Their class's historic "privilege" stretches from tenement slums to the trailer courts of today.
What the author and others like him ultimately propose is not a broad class unity but instead Balkanization.
"Win, lose or draw...long as you squabble and you get down, that's gangsta."
Who ever wrote this isn't Marxian and rejects sane class analysis.
Next.
sing me to sleep then leave me alone
But dude, Marx was white and this is very important.
Elaborate pl0x
Don't get me wrong race does play a factor in society but this is a result of class conflict.
sing me to sleep then leave me alone
The white working class, whatever privileges it did have though it can be argued those were exaggerated by the ruling class and white workers themselves, are waning. Not even white supremacy can withstand the leveling effect of the world economy. Unless you honestly think the situation in the industrialized nations is going to get better, or even reach prior levels.
No, I'm afraid that's on it's way out, capitalism has no loyalties except to profit and the accumulation of more capital.
Now what's going to be important is how the white working class reacts to their loss of privilege. Either they will join the rest of the working class in open struggle against the capitalist system, or they will join the side of the reaction and blame immigrants, welfare mothers, blacks, and even gays in their loss of privilege. Taking out their anger and feelings of betrayal against the weak and marginalized.
It could go either way frankly.
But now we must pick up every piece
Of the life we used to love
Just to keep ourselves
At least enough to carry on
It seems to be promoting the same thing a certain band argued against.
You blame oppression and play the role of criminals
To rape and burn show progress is minimal
White hoods and militants you know it's such a pity
Living, breathing
Violence in your city
If one man
Had one home
In one world
Held live alone without variety
Full of anxiety
No one to point at, question
Or even talk to -- in his private grave
No matter what color
He wouldn't be saved from hell
He dwells
A closed mind playing the part of prison cells
Another band comes into mind especially about slanderous fucks
And I raise my middle fingers
to those that
Murder us, silence us
Divide and conquer us
As they lead, as we die
Adventures of a Pagan Anarchist
I see you haven't beat idiots in the head with that sack of door knobs. Get to work slack ass.
That was fucking stupid and that is all I have to say about that. Sounds like reverse-racism and third worldism at once. I have no shame about being white. The crimes of the white bourgeosie are not my crimes.
It's certainly third worldism but reverse racism? Nonsense. The default notion of "equal treatment" is going to be whatever white people consider equal treatment. (Similarly, in a world wherein people claim not to see, say, sex, the default notion of "equal treatment" is going to be whatever men consider equal treatment.) No consensus; no alternative view. In other words, because white people are the predominant group and because they are going to base their notions of "equal treatment" on their own experiences, without taking into account the relevance and validity of other people's experience -- and in fact outright denying that those experiences are as equally relevant and as equally valid as white experiences -- they are prejudiced against non-white conceptions of "equal treatment." Not only are they prejudiced against those conceptions (in the sense that they don't even really think about or consider them because it's just not worth the time and, look, we already have a ready-made conception of "equal treatment," so let's just go with that, shall we?), but because they are the predominant group, they also have the power to establish their exclusive conception as the norm. That is prejudice + power within a racial context. Therefore, racist.
Race may very well be a social construct, but that doesn't mean that the fact of race-based discrimination and oppression is somehow less real or less relevant than it would be if race were an essential human characteristic. Hell, wealth is a social construct, but that doesn't mean that the relative privilege for the wealthy and the relative disadvantage for the poor that result from that social construct don't actually have some actual bearing on our daily lives -- and it certainly doesn't mean that we should just treat everyone as though they're all equal regardless of their economic status (because, hey, it's just a social construct and so we shouldn't really consider the privileges and disadvantages that result from people's perceptions of that social construct).
I'm not saying race, sex, gender, etc. should be given special consideration at all. But that doesn't mean we should just try to ignore them altogether. Those things should be taken into consideration because they are relevant. Simply taking something into account isn't giving it special consideration, problem is that we aren't there yet as a society; in fact, we aren't even close to there yet. And as long as we live in a society where prejudice exists among people who use their power to normalize their prejudices, the differences between people and the variance of their experiences will always remain relevant.
Adventures of a Pagan Anarchist
I see you haven't beat idiots in the head with that sack of door knobs. Get to work slack ass.
my experience with this type of arguments is that the people who spell them out are generally male and white. the real anti imperialist movement, that represent a real historic dynamic, generally make appeals to solidarity of struggles of the "white working class". for example, maoists in the third world have a positive view of #occupy.
Formerly dada
[URL="https://gemeinwesen.wordpress.com/"species being[/URL] - A magazine of communist polemic
Goodness me ! Unclebananahead.....I rejoice, ma and pa threw the genetic dice///2x6's....bingo....there I was.. bluest of blue eyes, blond locks and the cutest pink bottom. I have changed very little over the last 64yrs. Some who reached the shores of the Americas were lucky enough to have their full name on a passenger list. I don't have any taste to regard anyone as a PERMANENT VICTIM...at least not on the basis of the colour of their skin. When class by its very nature is such an inclusive term...however it is used. Why the confusion? We put things into classes every day a bird watcher or pig breeder or engineer they would fail if they could not at least classify. Our objective membership of the working class might be a matter of joy to some. Others might throw up their hands in despair. The city of Chicago refuses to do business with companies connected to the slave trade. (BOYCOTT century or two, too, too, late!) How pious. Any chance of us all getting down to some serious reading about who we are, where and how our class came into existence. I have to ask the question, if colonies were such grand places, why did so many reach there in chains, oft times branded or tattooed? Indentured...CITY STREET KIDS....PEASANT CLEARANCES. TRADE UNIONISTS. The real history is a 1,000 times more exciting, challenging than hypocritical concerns for imagined virtue or victimhood. The real lessons, learned, more profound. Clever folk like Lenin and Engels, though not Marx saw in organized labour an aristocracy, Still held true by some ....discredited as an idea by others. To say a whole class is parasitical when it is so productive is perverse in the extreme. I admire the American working class it is disciplined and energized though poorly served by its capitalists. Unchained it will set the world ablaze.
>Working Class
>Parasite Class
Pick one.
Partija Rada (Party of Labour)