Thank you for articulating this point, comrade. I am certainly a part of the labor aristocracy myself and that white fragility has been very tough to overcome because no sensible person wants to think of themselves as an oppressor.
But finally I realized that no sensible person should want to be oppressed either. So how about I just do my part to bring down systems of oppression and use the privileges I have in the process to do so.
If Engels can do it, us western white folks can too.
I think liberalism has diminished our dialectical thinking; if one is a westerner labour aristocrat (a definition? One cares about property value) and not at the receiving end of the settler-colonial dynamic, no matter the colour - though we can’t ignore ethnicity, then at the very least we are a cog in the racist machine against the Global South which we only have a chance of mitigating through organisation.
It doesn’t, however, excuse the racism. By being real of what our place in the world is we are going to have a better chance of tackling this beast (though as one can tell from my comment history I am not very optimistic about us westerners. Like this is an ML forum and I see blinders all the time. To the point whenever someone says “what can I do” I feel like saying move to China, though this is not the correct take from a global revolutionary standpoint).
A famous example of attempting to do it right is Che Guevara - a Chilean labour aristocrat physician who decided to tackle the beast.I’m not saying that we all have that level of charisma and skillset but you know aim for the stars and you may at least land on the moon. Or as Zhou Enlai said to Khrushchev: we are both traitors to our class.
Well Zhou meant that as an insult Khrushchev because Khrushchev was born a Russian peasant while Zhou was born into the Mandarin Chinese class which had considerably more social privilege than other Chinese ethnicities.
But I agree nonetheless! One cannot engage in material analysis and revolutionary politics without first coming to grips with material reality. What’s very important is that we remember the circumstances of our birth do not diminish our value as human beings (that notion is fundamentally idealistic and liberal). But it does change what our role is in revolutionary organization.
Thank you for articulating this point, comrade. I am certainly a part of the labor aristocracy myself and that white fragility has been very tough to overcome because no sensible person wants to think of themselves as an oppressor.
But finally I realized that no sensible person should want to be oppressed either. So how about I just do my part to bring down systems of oppression and use the privileges I have in the process to do so.
If Engels can do it, us western white folks can too.
I think liberalism has diminished our dialectical thinking; if one is a westerner labour aristocrat (a definition? One cares about property value) and not at the receiving end of the settler-colonial dynamic, no matter the colour - though we can’t ignore ethnicity, then at the very least we are a cog in the racist machine against the Global South which we only have a chance of mitigating through organisation.
It doesn’t, however, excuse the racism. By being real of what our place in the world is we are going to have a better chance of tackling this beast (though as one can tell from my comment history I am not very optimistic about us westerners. Like this is an ML forum and I see blinders all the time. To the point whenever someone says “what can I do” I feel like saying move to China, though this is not the correct take from a global revolutionary standpoint).
A famous example of attempting to do it right is Che Guevara - a Chilean labour aristocrat physician who decided to tackle the beast.I’m not saying that we all have that level of charisma and skillset but you know aim for the stars and you may at least land on the moon. Or as Zhou Enlai said to Khrushchev: we are both traitors to our class.
Well Zhou meant that as an insult Khrushchev because Khrushchev was born a Russian peasant while Zhou was born into the Mandarin Chinese class which had considerably more social privilege than other Chinese ethnicities.
But I agree nonetheless! One cannot engage in material analysis and revolutionary politics without first coming to grips with material reality. What’s very important is that we remember the circumstances of our birth do not diminish our value as human beings (that notion is fundamentally idealistic and liberal). But it does change what our role is in revolutionary organization.
Haha yes I included it because of the insult :) (ie it is both aspirational and critical of us westerners in this context)