[ home / rules / faq / search ] [ overboard / sfw / alt ] [ leftypol / edu / labor / siberia / lgbt / latam / hobby / tech / games / anime / music / draw / AKM / ufo ] [ meta ] [ wiki / shop / tv / tiktok / twitter / patreon ] [ GET / ref / marx / booru ]

/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

"The anons of the past have only shitposted on the Internet about the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it."
Name
Options
Subject
Comment
Flag
File
Embed
Password(For file deletion.)
Check out our new store at shop.leftypol.org!
[ Return / Go to bottom ]

File: 1775414055328.png (755.4 KB, 1729x1215, IMG_3312.png)

 

I see a lot of talk concerning how Israel should be supported by the USA and European countries for various reasons and, notably, none of them concern with material benefits for either native Europeans or long-time American citizens, instead focusing on abstractions and ideals. As Trump has led the USA into another forever war with Iran (at the behest of Israel, per the words of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio), it is pertinent to talk about a common anti-Zionist talking point that I find counterproductive. Namely: Israel’s colonialism is the same as that of American settle colonialism from the late 18th century to the early 20th century.

This is incorrect as, while America is a settler-colonial state, nonetheless was founded on the basis of enlightenment principles like equality before the law and liberty, considering how the American and French revolutions at the time were leftist at the time of the events, with the notion of equality of men itself being already extremely radical at a time when absolute monarchies were the standard in Europe. That’s not all, as contrary to popular opinion the Founding Fathers themselves weren’t conservative. Whether it’s the lack of any mention specifying the USA as a “white Christian country” founded on the basis of theology in the constitution and the federalist papers, George Washington himself coming to oppose slavery before the abolitionist movement began to gain momentum, many of said fathers being at best deists or nominally Christian, the USA being effectively the first democratic republic in history with limited suffrage being a short-lived experiment that was swept away in favour of universal male suffrage, Thomas Jefferson himself owning a copy of the Quran and a version of the Bible excised of all supernatural elements and among other examples show that the USA was far from the hotbed of reactionary politics both liberals and chuds tend to portray it as. Even the Indian Removal Act that led to the infamous “Trail of Tears” wasn’t unanimously agreed upon, with strong opposition by Christian missionaries and other politicians who opposed it based on the shared humanity and parity between white settlers Native Americans. Indeed, while such ideals coexisted with institutionalised inequality, it is precisely by appealing to those founding ideals unique to America's foundations that movements like MLK's civil rights was even possible. Indeed, had it not been for America, most of the progressive movements in other parts of the west wouldn't even exist (e.g., Germany's gay liberation movement, extirpated by nazism and only resurged in the postwar period because of the rise of America's gay rights movement.)

So it’s no wonder given all this that, despite the reproduction of reactionary politics like Manifest Destiny and Jim Crow laws, the notion of equality (or pretence to it) persisted throughout American history, which laid the seeds for the civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements of the contemporary era. And I would argue that it is said notion that distinguishes the American project from other settler-colonies that were more explicit on their racial/ethnic/theological basis, such as Argentina, Australia, Canada, and of course, Israel.

It should also be noted that the USA, for all of its faults, isn’t currently segregating Native Americans from mainstream American society via a state-sponsored countrywide system of racial segregation, nor bombing every Indian reserve and sponsoring white Americans (immigrant or not) to steal land from indigenous people and kicking out of their home by force. So, one could counter-argue that it’s a difference of ‘degrees of coloniality’ rather than absence of it. But I digress. Not to peddle Whig history slop, but it’s undeniable that America was founded on a notion of equality between races and faiths that is completely absent in contrast to the founding of Israel.

Israel just isn’t analogous to America, especially given how Israel both defines itself in particularist ethno-centric ways and has a theological basis that America lacks, as well as how Israeli settler-colonialism follows along the models of standard European colonialism combined with state terrorism both against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza (to the point that Israel is engaging in genocide there). So while the USA isn’t currently engaging in genocide against its natives, the same can’t be said for Israel and its society, where the grand majority of Israelis are effectively kahanists per the latest opinion polls. And that goes for the entire political right and most of the political left in Israel, so let that sink in.

From a leftist standpoint, it can be said that settler-colonialism in the Americas played a historically progressive role in developing productive forces, while simultaneously producing deeply reactionary social relations. The same cannot be said of modern Israeli settler-colonialism, which does not represent a transition to a higher mode of production, but rather a reproduction of imperial domination in a more concentrated form. Ultimately, the claim that “Israel is just like America” obscures more than it reveals. Both are products of colonial history, but they occupy different positions within the global capitalist system. Recognizing this distinction allows for a clearer analysis of imperialism today, especially as Palestinians (unlike the indigenous peoples of the Americas) had their own conception of private property alongside their own bourgeoisie that predates the Balfour Declaration.

Now, if we had to give the closest western analogue, that would be Australia. Back when he was just a war-mongering liberal instead of a war-mongering white nationalist radlib, Drew Pavlou debated (and lost) against neo-nazi Joel Davis on immigration, with Joel making the interesting point that Australia was ran as a white nationalist colonial state and that the founding fathers of Australia and its past PMs were under no delusion that Australia was anything more than a white nationalist state, the “White Australia Policy” being the formalisation of such ideals into law. Indeed, since the dominion’s government lacked any significant armed opposition on the part of Aboriginals of Australia, it can be said that the current Australian policies towards mass immigration and multiculturalism were less about equality than they were about chasing after cheap labor per the needs of the capitalist elites and perhaps tailing after America. The same can be said in the cases of the republic of Argentina and the dominion of Canada, both of which were ran explicitly as white nationalist states, albeit with special emphasis on their links with their metropoles (formerly Spain and currently the UK/France, respectively), the liberalisations of immigration laws and moves towards a less racially-exclusionary definition of their identities only occurring in the late 20th century long after the US did the same.

All in all: There’s nothing inconsistent between being an anti-Zionist and being an American patriot on the basis of opposition to genocide and anti-imperialism. It's best not to give zionists more ammo, as it is a common hasbara talking point to equate Israeli settler-colonialism with America's one, and thus equivocate all critiques of zionism as being implicitly anti-American.

Sources:

https://newrepublic.com/post/207325/donald-trump-marco-rubio-israel-iran

https://www.newarab.com/news/poll-huge-majority-israelis-back-gaza-ethnic-cleansing

https://southasiajournal.net/the-problem-isnt-just-netanyahu-its-israeli-society

https://www.meforum.org/middle-east-quarterly/the-conundrum-of-israeli-arab-citizenship

https://www.britannica.com/event/White-Australia-Policy

P.S.: I’m not trying to make apologetics for American atrocities then and now, I’m simply pointing out the need to fight against the attempts of both Hasbara mockingbird media and misguided anti-zionists to equivocate American history with Israeli history to sway American public opinion on Israel’s favor. Unless you think America as a nation is in any way redeemable, then you might as well give up on agitating for revolution in America and just go to another country. What more can I say?

I admire your efforts to debunk rabid self-hating radlibs but I've literally never seen anyone here, not even unironic Third Worldists, equate the USA with Israel

File: 1775414659389.jpg (132.44 KB, 800x1200, 71zAYCBn5HL._SL1200_.jpg)

>>2768993
>>2768987
I do equate them and I go a step further saying that those englightment principles you talk about lead to genocide.
Liberal Whig historians and marxist positivist are not ready to talk about this.

>From a leftist standpoint, it can be said that settler-colonialism in the Americas played a historically progressive role in developing productive forces, while simultaneously producing deeply reactionary social relations. The same cannot be said of modern Israeli settler-colonialism, which does not represent a transition to a higher mode of production, but rather a reproduction of imperial domination in a more concentrated form.
Good trvke

>>2768994
The text you cite is the byproduct of Holocaust trauma, unironically. It is deeply biased by the tunnel visioned pessimism of the authors, not unlike J. Sakai with Settlers (reacting to the political failure of the New Left). It would be helpful for your critical thinking skills to consider the historical context of a text before treating it as gospel. For them, the Holocaust is on a psycho-emotional level the Big Evil. We call that recency bias. Ever heard of the Circassian genocide? I'm guessing not. I invite you to check out the opening summary on Wikipedia.

>>2768987
Israel is not quite the same as the US but everything you said about the founders and US history is bullshit.
Washington never freed his slaves. Neither did Jefferson. The US freed the slaves decades after Britain did. There is nothing special about the US when it comes to ideals of "equality". It's a fake narcissistic history. If you want to believe in that history to manipulate people to positive ends that's fine but it's not real.

>>2769030
"Ideas shape history" isn't Marxism, it's not even Hegel, it's literally garden variety liberalism. The Enlightenment didn't invent genocide. Carthago delenda est. The historical myopia and lack of self-awareness of critical theory is embarrassing.

>>2768987
This attempt to throw Israel under the bus is pretty revealing. Disturbed Americans can wash away their guilty conscience by pinning all the blame on Israel. The Zionist entity's founding fathers were all firm believers in Enlightenment values of liberty, equality, reason, and secularism. The Zionist understanding of Jewish identity is entirely secular.

The Enlightenment was always the movement of an elite, the European bourgeoisie and especially the slave-planter class of the Americas. Slavery, colonization, and the exploitation of the working class didn't contradict Enlightenment ideals at all. Go read what Locke or Jefferson had to say about Native Americans or what Kant had to say about blacks. When Napoleon began the French colonization of Africa in Egypt, he did it in the name of spreading Enlightenment values to oppressed Egyptians, something latter French admins would do, albeit without his Islamic garb. Enlightenment values should always be suspect because they reflect the attitude of the Euro-American elite and served their interests.

Israel is a secular and liberal democratic nation-state and behaves just like one, eliminating its rivals, maximizing productivity, genociding natives to steal their lands etc. these are all the outcomes of the Enlightenment.

>>2769009
>>2769009
>he text you cite is the byproduct of Holocaust trauma, unironically. It is deeply biased by the tunnel visioned pessimism of the authors
That's an interesting take, but doesn't make the text any less lucid. Truth is that people can't handle trukes dispensers.
There is a whole strand of criticism enlightenment ideology from the right and the left that are just as valid as the ones DOE or Minima Moralia without being written by victims of persecution, but /leftypol/ is not ready to drop their whiggish shit
>Circassian genocide? I'm guessing not. I invite you to check out the opening summary on Wikipedia
If the point you are trying to make here is that DOE claims that englightment created genocide you are wrong, it's throught its self negation that enlightment reproduces the forms that it seek to abolish. Example: economy in the hands of the experts, no different than the bible in the hands of the church.

File: 1775417998441.jpg (43.48 KB, 705x540, Aid Israel largest.jpg)

>>2769038
The United States has already given Israel more aid than South Vietnam and Afghanistan and there is no end in sight. American should just walk away from that quagmire.

>>2769013

Correction: In his lifetime, Washington only freed one of his slaves, but all of them were freed after his death since he decided to free them in his will after h the death of Martha, his wife. Regardless, they were all freed a year after his death. Washington’s abolitionist views late in his life are well-attested.

Source: https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/slavery/washingtons-1799-will

Although imperfect, Tbf to both the French and American bourgeois revolutionaries the entire idea of equality among men was already radical for the 18th and 19th centuries, so can’t really blame them for their flaws as, cliched as it sounds, they were men of their times.

>>2769036
Ideas do shape history because they reflect relations of power, economic structures, they motivate people to take action, they justify etc. In any case, your Marxism is pretty vulgar because no serious Marxist would deny that the superstructure influences the base. I'm also not sure how criticism of liberal values as genocidal is somehow liberal. Even the Carthage case doesn't really apply, because that refers to the destruction of a city state and its inhabitants as enemies of Roman state, whereas the Native American and Palestinian genocides is built on the theology of progress: "we have a right to steal their land and kill them off because they are less evolved than us, they were doing nothing with the land, they are non-productive, enemies of humanity etc." This ideology doesn't even refer to a specific enemy (any particular tribe or group of natives) but rather all native Americans in general on the grounds all of them simply are this way. Massacres are of course nothing new in human history, but the idea of dispossessing a whole group of people on liberal grounds is.

>>2769043
America is Israel's cornerman. Israel is simply a proxy of the US, one with its own level of independence, but a proxy nonetheless.

>>2769013
>The US freed the slaves decades after Britain did.
Britain never really abolished slavery anymore than the USA did. It would continue in its colonies well into the 20th century. In Australia, Aboriginals were used as slave labor until the 1970s.

>>2768994
both these kaikes supported zionism btw

File: 1775423490319.jpg (288.1 KB, 1374x1911, 94gtqi.jpg)

>>2769048
>>2769041
And here we arrive at the confusion of critical theory. The reification of ideology. Let's pull up "vulgar" Karl Marx for reference, to set the record straight (bolded emphasis is mine):

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Chapter 1
>Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95.
[…]
>When we think about this conjuring up of the dead of world history, a salient difference reveals itself. Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, St. Just, Napoleon, the heroes as well as the parties and the masses of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their time – that of unchaining and establishing modern bourgeois society – in Roman costumes and with Roman phrases.
[…]
>But unheroic though bourgeois society is, it nevertheless needed heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war, and national wars to bring it into being. And in the austere classical traditions of the Roman Republic the bourgeois gladiators found the ideals and the art forms, the self-deceptions, that they needed to conceal from themselves the bourgeois-limited content of their struggles and to keep their passion on the high plane of great historic tragedy. Similarly, at another stage of development a century earlier, Cromwell and the English people had borrowed from the Old Testament the speech, emotions, and illusions for their bourgeois revolution. When the real goal had been achieved and the bourgeois transformation of English society had been accomplished, Locke supplanted Habakkuk.
>Thus the awakening of the dead in those revolutions served the purpose of glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the old; of magnifying the given task in the imagination, not recoiling from its solution in reality; of finding once more the spirit of revolution, not making its ghost walk again.
[…]
>The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past. The former revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to smother their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content. There the phrase went beyond the content – here the content goes beyond the phrase.
Chapter 3
[…]
>Before we pursue parliamentary history further, some remarks are necessary to avoid common misconceptions regarding the whole character of the epoch that lies before us. Looked at with the eyes of democrats, the period of the Legislative National Assembly is concerned with what the period of the Constituent Assembly was concerned with: the simple struggle between republicans and royalists. The movement itself, however, they sum up in the one shibboleth: “reaction” – night, in which all cats are gray and which permits them to reel off their night watchman’s commonplaces. And to be sure, at first sight the party of Order reveals a maze of different royalist factions which not only intrigue against each other – each seeking to elevate its own pretender to the throne and exclude the pretender of the opposing faction – but also all unite in common hatred of, and common onslaughts on, the “republic.” In opposition to this royalist conspiracy the Montagne, for its part, appears as the representative of the “republic.” The party of Order appears to be perpetually engaged in a “reaction,” directed against press, association, and the like, neither more nor less than in Prussia, and, as in Prussia, carried out in the form of brutal police intervention by the bureaucracy, the gendarmerie, and the law courts. The Montagne, for its part, is just as continually occupied in warding off these attacks and thus defending the “eternal rights of man” as every so-called people’s party has done, more or less, for a century and a half. If one looks at the situation and the parties more closely, however, this superficial appearance, which veils the class struggle and the peculiar physiognomy of this period, disappears.
>Legitimists and Orleanists, as we have said, formed the two great factions of the party of Order. Was what held these factions fast to their pretenders and kept them apart from each other nothing but fleur-de-lis and tricolor, House of Bourbon and House of Orleans, different shades of royalism – was it at all the confession of faith of royalism? Under the Bourbons, big landed property had governed, with its priests and lackeys; under Orleans, high finance, large-scale industry, large-scale trade, that is, capital, with its retinue of lawyers, professors, and smooth-tongued orators. The Legitimate Monarchy was merely the political expression of the hereditary rule of the lords of the soil, as the July Monarchy was only the political expression of the usurped rule of the bourgeois parvenus. What kept the two factions apart, therefore, was not any so-called principles, it was their material conditions of existence, two different kinds of property; it was the old contrast between town and country, the rivalry between capital and landed property. That at the same time old memories, personal enmities, fears and hopes, prejudices and illusions, sympathies and antipathies, convictions, articles of faith and principles bound them to one or the other royal house, who denies this? Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, rises an entire superstructure of distinct and peculiarly formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought, and views of life. The entire class creates and forms them out of its material foundations and out of the corresponding social relations. The single individual, who derives them through tradition and upbringing, may imagine that they form the real motives and the starting point of his activity. While each faction, Orleanists and Legitimists, sought to make itself and the other believe that it was loyalty to the two royal houses which separated them, facts later proved that it was rather their divided interests which forbade the uniting of the two royal houses.
>And as in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must distinguish still more the phrases and fancies of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality. Orleanists and Legitimists found themselves side by side in the republic, with equal claims. If each side wished to effect the restoration of its own royal house against the other, that merely signified that each of the two great interests into which the bourgeoisie is split – landed property and capital - sought to restore its own supremacy and the subordination of the other. We speak of two interests of the bourgeoisie, for large landed property, despite its feudal coquetry and pride of race, has been rendered thoroughly bourgeois by the development of modern society. Thus the Tories in England long imagined that they were enthusiastic about monarchy, the church, and the beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about ground rent.

I'm going to stop here because frankly it's not my job to recite a whole god-damned long essay to prove a point. I could also cite parts of The German Ideology, I'm thinking of the camera obscura metaphor, but it's unnecessary in determining what is "vulgar" Marxism as we can tell.

For Marx, ideology is self-deception. A feel-good lie that masks the underlying historical process. Regardless of what shape the mask takes, does not affect the fundamental "necessary" (overdetermined) historical process.

We can see this very clearly in the extraction of agricultural surplus value in virtually every single "actually existing socialism" state for the sake of industry, or defense in the cases of Cuba and Democratic Kampuchea. Soviet economist Evgeny Preobrazhensky, during the 1920s economic debates, proposed extracting surplus value from the peasantry, calling it "primitive socialist accumulation", in reference to the primitive accumulation of capitalism, that is the privatization of the commons, displacement of the countryside and external colonial wealth extraction through which capitalism "funded itself". Bukharin, favoring Lenin's NEP, criticized him, calling this model "internal colonialism". Well, guess what happened? Though Stalin's administration later executed Preobrazhensky during the Great Purge, they literally copied his model. Soviet agricultural laborers were exploited. All the following socialist states imitated the blueprint, with varying degrees of success, including "peasants are revolutionary subjects" Mao and Pol Pot, what a shocker. "We take agriculture as the basic factor and use the fruits of agriculture systematically to build industry […]." said Pol Pot, who had plans to import machinery by exporting rice, though it never came to fruition (no pun intended).

I had an illuminating interaction with a Chinese socialist about this. Mao is idealized as a hero of the peasantry by those who reify his slogans rather than looking at the historical process being masked. Even today, the rural population of China is taken advantage of through the hukou system, which denies them social programs if they move away from their village to a city, which inevitably happens as the cities are where the jobs are. Though I did not verify this, I was told their pensions are also disproportionately lower than the pensions of people from the cities, and Chinese economists justify this by literally using "bootstraps" rhetoric and saying determining the "true contribution" of their labor is impossible.

But of course, it's not limited to China or "actually existing socialism" states, if you've been paying attention, since we mentioned primitive accumulation, which came in great part from looting the countryside for the benefit of the city, even Marx/Engels wrote about the rural/urban divide. The USA today relies on illegal migrant labor to feed itself. The food is only cheap because of stolen wages. And it must be cheap or else there will be riots. No state in history so far has "solved" this problem… regardless of their ideology, that is, "costume", as "vulgar" Karl Marx would say.

>>2769048
>"we have a right to steal their land and kill them off because they are less evolved than us, they were doing nothing with the land, they are non-productive, enemies of humanity etc"
But all of this is irrelevant unless they have the material basis to do so.


Unique IPs: 10
[Return][Go to top] [Catalog] | [Home][Post a Reply]
Delete Post [ ]
[ home / rules / faq / search ] [ overboard / sfw / alt ] [ leftypol / edu / labor / siberia / lgbt / latam / hobby / tech / games / anime / music / draw / AKM / ufo ] [ meta ] [ wiki / shop / tv / tiktok / twitter / patreon ] [ GET / ref / marx / booru ]
[ Return / Go to top /