Notices by Rozalia Sofia (redrozalia@kolektiva.social)

@MakBerberovic
@AnarchoDoggo
how easy voting, or convincing people to vote, may be is irrelevant. voting has nothing to do with ending the war in gaza. if you all banded together to give the democratic party a win in president, house, and senate for the next ten election cycles, the u.s.a. would still be engaging in imperialist wars.

dont worry, you probably dont have to do much convincing. the results of this coming election are far beyond your capacity to affect, anyway.

@MakBerberovic
@AnarchoDoggo
if anti-imperialism is politically impossible now, even for the most leftist of american politicians, continually voting for them isnt going to change that state of affairs. i dont presume to tell you whether you should vote or not, that isnt at all relevant to my point. but if you want put a stop to the murder of gazans, there is no politician you could conceivably vote for that would help you do it—not this year, not in four years, and not in forty years.

therefore, getting righteously defensive of these politicians when you see them derided for their "tactical" complicity in genocide is getting nobody nowhere. the criticism is no less valid, people who dont want to vote will still not vote, and the democratic party is zero steps closer to eventually becoming the leftist party you wished for.

@MakBerberovic
@AnarchoDoggo
you believe that if the democrats dont win, fascism wins. and you believe that if left-wing democrats criticize the president or refuse to support him, the democrats will surely not win.

the second thing may be true. the u.s. government is controlled by capitalist interests that have a stake in supporting imperialism. one might say that anti-imperialism is politically impossible from within the government. so in that regard, i kind of agree with you.

but the first thing is all backwards. you see, fascism and liberalism are not two competing factions in politics. they are better thought of as being two "attitudes", or two policy directions. it is possible for one government to express both liberalism and fascism. just as crypto-fascists hide behind the language of liberalism to justify themselves, alleged liberals will quickly turn to support a fascist policy or government to save their skins.

if your standard for "liberalism vs fascism" is completely unconnected to an ongoing genocide in gaza, and no amount of genocide could convince you that democrats are anything less than sincere but flawed liberals, you may be one of those liberals who is willing to accept fascism.

actual resistance to fascism consists of nothing less than resistance to capitalism and imperialism, on the part of the organized working class. if you believe that by voting for democrats, you are saving america from fascism, you have already lost.

@inthehands @baldur
youre not wrong in pointing that out. one big difference between now and the heyday of the car is that their economy was in a post-war recovery, whereas ours is in a free-falling crisis. maybe capitalism has run out of even marginally useful new ideas to sell people.

@inthehands @baldur
no, but railroad companies did abandon or destroy rails in the middle 20th century due to the rise of the car and a lot of state help.

so if it makes you feel any "better", destroying valuable infrastructure so you can force people to buy your shitty product is just a normal feature of capitalism, and not new.

what is freedom?

a right protected by a state constitution is not freedom.

a declaration of the united nations is not freedom.

running off into the woods and hiding in a bunker by yourself is not freedom.

no individual can be free on their own, in fact. no exclusive part of humanity can be free, either.

by "none of us are free until all of us are free", it means that our solidarity across the globe is the very condition which makes all of our freedom possible.

https://mcmxix.org/2018/07/09/zionism-and-marxism/

"Once in power, nationalists will turn on any leftists who were naïve enough to make common cause with them, and suppress independent organizations of the working class. For workers, it does not matter whether they are exploited by foreign or domestic capitalists. Their enemy is international capitalism, which honors neither arbitrary border nor national division. Every particular oppression they experience — racial, sexual, national — is integral to the universal relation of wage-labor, and can only be effectively challenged by challenging the capitalist system as a whole. “Partial” struggles, as some have called them, are nonstarters because they cannot be knitted together into some sort of rainbow coalition."

@be
@zeh
i really must warn you about this book. the error is in redefining peoples *class* in terms of their *race identity*, which is placing the cart before the horse: it puts the idea or the identity of whiteness as the causal factor that allows a worker to have the same interest as their own boss.

i agree that the identity of whiteness forms part of the ideological complex that keeps workers isolated and impedes their ability to relate to one another. but this is also true of "manhood" and of "straightness", and sakai doesnt do much to unpack those problems.

but going by "settlers", its not that white workers lack class consciousness, its that they are literally bourgeois themselves, lost causes that have no place in a revolution. going by "settlers", the revolution is a racial one, because there really is no "white proletariat" at all. so i recommend you take this book with a hefty shaker of salt.

@be
@zeh
it is little-discussed history that deserves more attention, i agree with that. but the element of the analysis i was criticizing was the "challenging the conception of ashkenazim etc. as proletarian because of assimilated whiteness", the claim that the class character of a group changes because of how they change their self-identification.

@aral
not to say that religion has NOTHING to do with it. but i have questions:
1. what prevents an atheist from supporting fossil fuel use/imperialist war/etc.? (there are plenty of atheists who do.)
2. why is religion such a powerful ideology in the 21st century, given the nature of present society?
3. what would have to change in society, to release the grip of religion on peoples minds?

@anarchopunk_girl
@Outersider @VPS_Reports
no need to be "concerned", escarpment is in fact a staunch zionist. all they seem to do is go into random threads and rant about how evil hamas is, which is why you should support and defend israel. they arent worth bothering with.

@escarpment
@VPS_Reports
if you condemn them ten times as much for essentially having the same opinion, it means that you are disproportionally biased.

consider that you can condemn homophobia no matter which country it comes from, while also condemning imperialism. instead of turning every dispute into a battle of Us and Them, think critically.

@escarpment @VPS_Reports
creepy public comments sounding like serial killers? republican party, check. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/7/2151410/-Yes-Republicans-are-discussing-genocide-against-LGBTQ-people <= (this is Vishal Singh again! Hi Vishal!)

taking of american hostages? well, the country with proportionally the most people imprisoned is america: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/incarceration-rates-by-country and besides, in america, it is legal to force prisoners to work for nothing and to deny them the right to vote.

jailing and torturing women for NOT wearing hijabs? to my knowledge this doesnt happen, but considering the fact that "muslim ban" and "muslim registry" have been serious suggestions by the republicans, i would argue the opposite is more possible.

orwellian morality police? er... they do keep banning a shit ton of books. the smearing of trans and queer people as "groomers" has been going on for years. they overturned roe v. wade and are now attempting to ban abortion everywhere possible.

sponsoring terrorist organizations? are you fucking kidding, have you read ANY recent american history? ruhollah khomeini, saddam hussein, manuel noriega, usama bin-laden, abu bakr al-baghdadi, all of these motherfuckers have been lent a hand by the u.s. at some point.

so yes! you ARE in fact being disproportionally biased. all of these things are true of iran, yes, but they are at least as true if not more true of the u.s.a. and especially its extreme right-wing republican party.

@escarpment @VPS_Reports
holy shit! fuck you! im glad you support those nice things, but also, fuck you! i am trans and a jew. I NEVER DECLARED THAT I'D "PREFER TO LIVE IN IRAN". are you an ignoramus or just evil, what is wrong with you?

@anarchopunk_girl @mira
as a marxist, in my opinion you cant be a self-consistent marxist unless you understand that the "socialist" states since 1917 have never advanced further than capitalism. unfortunately myself and others who agree with me are far outnumbered among those who call themselves marxists (sigh)

marx himself advocated ruthless criticism; the paris commune was what he saw as the closest workers had ever got to overthrowing capital and yet his thought developed because of his criticism of the paris commune, not because of his love or it. and he mocked at the party of guesde who called themselves marxists, saying "i am no marxist". that is what i see as valuable in marxism, not the "adherence" to marxs specific opinions, but the critical attitude.

@benda
@SocialistStan @condalmo @moondog548 @Radical_EgoCom
they wouldnt see why they should stop even if lots of people vote against it. (whatever that would look like...) but in reality voting for biden is voting for the guy that said "we need to fund the police more and better" in 2020.

@benda
@SocialistStan @moondog548 @Radical_EgoCom
well this is just the issue, though. fascism and liberalism arent like a quality of a particular person, like saying "Donald Trump is a Fascist and his opponent, Joseph Biden, is a Liberal".

rather, fascism and liberalism are ideologies used by the capitalist state, at different times and in different contexts. liberalism is what allows a relatively stable capitalist state to pacify workers demands with reforms, and benefits from supporting the illusion of "true democracy" to encourage workers to think of themselves as having a say in the state.

fascism, on the other hand, becomes dominant when workers are not content with reforms and are getting involved in revolutionary politics. the point of fascism is to defend capital from revolution; the fascist states of the 20th century all came out of countries with failed workers revolutions; and it was the revolutionary organizations and politically militant workers who were first targeted by these.

if you want to "organize against that [liberal] administration", i wont stop you. but you will quickly learn that the more of a threat you pose to capital, the more FASCISTIC will capital behave, no matter who was elected to defend it. biden, the most "labor-friendly" president in american history, broke the rail workers strike while citing a need for national unity in a time of war.