T34 [they/them]

From the W. E. B. Du Bois article:

In 1956, I shall not go to the polls. I have not registered. I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no “two evils” exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say. There is no third party. On the Presidential ballot in a few states (seventeen in 1952), a “Socialist” Party will appear. Few will hear its appeal because it will have almost no opportunity to take part in the campaign and explain its platform. If a voter organizes or advocates a real third-party movement, he may be accused of seeking to overthrow this government by “force and violence.”

…

The present Administration is carrying on the greatest preparation for war in the history of mankind. Stevenson promises to maintain or increase this effort. … The “other” party has surrendered all party differences in foreign affairs, and foreign affairs are our most important affairs today and take most of our taxes.

…

Is the refusal to vote in this phony election a counsel of despair? No, it is dogged hope. It is hope that if twenty-five million voters refrain from voting in 1956 because of their own accord and not because of a sly wink from Khrushchev, this might make the American people ask how much longer this dumb farce can proceed without even a whimper of protest.

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o7 I totally agree!

One of my favorites is Gerda Lerner. She grew up fighting Nazis in Austria in the 1930s. At one point they came for her dad. Gerda refused to snitch so the Nazis threw her in prison. After she got out, she fled to the US and tried to have a normal life, got married, founded a communist group, had a couple kids. Then she went back to school and became one of the founders of the academic field of women’s history. She wrote The Creation of Patriarchy, a materialist history of the patriarchy that goes back over 5000 years.

Sakai is right. This notion that Black workers are being manipulated by the ruling class against white workers is white supremacist propaganda that goes back to the post-Civil-War reconstruction period. W. E. B. DuBois writes about this in Black Reconstruction in America. Foster is using Klan rhetoric.

They know little of the race problem in industry who declare that is can be settled merely by the unions opening their doors to the negroes. It is much more complex than that…

Bullshit. The solution was full and total desegregation. The only thing “complex” was the white supremacy of the white settler labor aristocracy.

ETA: Calling something a lie is more than just disagreeing with it. It’s claiming a deliberate misrepresentation of the facts. Sakai used a direct quote from Foster’s own work, then put it in the context of post-Civil-War white supremacy. Even if you disagree, where’s the lie?

Allende tried something similar in Chile in the 1970s called Cybersyn. I can’t find the article, but I saw something by modern computer scientists that said that computers just weren’t powerful enough in the 70’s to do what they needed.

Snitches get stitches.

Yeah, agreed. We need a proletarian identity politics. Because identity really only matters in the working classes.

The US even had Black slave owners. There were probably liberals back then trying to use them as examples of progress. Diversity within the bourgeoisie doesn’t help us.

We shouldn’t look at the enslavers, we should look at who’s enslaved. Don’t look at the bombers but who’s being bombed. Who’s being killed in prisons and concentration camps, who’s being killed by their water. It’s working-class POC every time.

Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.

Proletarian identity politics is about worker solidarity and worker emancipation. Getting diverse bourgeois imperialists to bomb the workers is the opposite of that.