It strikes me as odd that the opposition to socialism is that by abolishing one hierarchy, capitalism, you cannot guarantee that it will abolish another hierarchy, white supremacy. So the solution is to not abolish capitalism and instead plead with it to diminish the severity of capitalist and white supremacist hierarchies.
Now
RustyShackleford
I know that you have a skeptical view of Marxism. That's too bad. Liberation from the bonds of capitalism is necessary though not a sufficient precondition for ending white supremacy.
For those who are open to Marxism but concerned that it is maniacally focused on class at the exclusion of race, please consider that Marx and his cothinker Engels, analyzed and remarked among the inseparability of capitalism from the enslavement and subsequent exploitation of Africans and the domestic exploitation of the unwaged labor of women, respectively. Marx died in 1881 and thinkers and practitioners of Marx has added and enriched and expounded upon his insights to this day. Many of the most notable of these people were leaders of anti colonial movements in the global South and the Black Panthers right here in our own country, hardly a roster of affluent white men hell bent on laundering white supremacy.
Lastly,
Methodical Management
I have to be honest. Every interaction we've had since I started to support Bernie and voice support for abolishing economic power structures boils down to you throwing out a back handed "you're pretty not class reductionist, for a Marxist." You were cool when I rejected white supremacy, an ideology which I tolerated for far too long in my life, to be sure. Yet when I later on started to wholesale reject capitalism, that was too far.
I'm a Marxist and a socialist and that makes me part of a community which I'm proud of. Like all communities, we have our problems and we have people in our community whose own personal conduct and world views are not always exemplary. But it feels offensive having to be told that our belief system is invalid because each and every member of our community is not perfect in every facet. believe me, we hate the
red scare pod more than you do because their awful racial, gender and even body politics has probably scared off people who are on the fence about moving from liberalism over to leftism.
Now you are one of if not the most passionate and sharp advocates for social justice that I have come across and surely you know that if whites supremacy is to be abolished and the wounds that it has caused are to be healed, there can be no sanctity of private property. Concentrated capital must be broken up. In order to achieve such an end, it will require radicals, radicals in theory and in practice. It will require working with people whose politics are not ideal in every way but who share the resolve that hierarchies have now have to go. Typically, though tragically not always, people who categorically oppose one sort of hierarchy are relatively easy to convince that they should *** other hierarchies to their list of hierarchies to be abolished.
Even if you may not be a Marxist or a socialist or an anarchist, the sort of reforms that I know you want will require people who are more radical, on economics and political theory, than you or I might be. Consider the fact that we, for all intents and purposes, do not live in a democracy and it becomes even clearer that our political fates are bound up at this point.
So to you and
RustyShackleford
please don't forget who the biggest enemy is and don't let me forget it either.
