so we all have to get offended on behalf of people who strongly identify with codified European Phrenology?
But my point is that people who don’t give a fuck about that identity are still subject to it. Whiteness is an ingrained social phenomenon. It’s in the US census!
A person who doesn’t consider themselves white is still considered white by a society, regardless of mass groups like entire nationalities/races to move between classification or determine new classes. Yes, there is (for lack of a better work) mobility of races between classes, but that doesn’t change that typical people will look at another person and decide if they are white or not, and that other person’s opinion or lack of one doesn’t matter. If a light-skinned European-American puts ‘Black’ on their census form, this has approximately 0 effect on anything.
should we all start identifying as capitalists because our lives are defined by capitalist social relations outside our control
No, the analogue would be that even if we decide to identity as socialists, we still live within capitalist social relations imposed on us, until we overcome that system. Until we overcome whiteness, we are subject to our society’s (dynamic) interpretation of it. An individual does not have the transformative power necessary to change their own imposed whiteness class, even if large groups do over time.
That’s all irrelevant, because someone killed those people over bullshit race crap. That is racism, and it was lethal. We need to counter racism in all its forms if we want to unite the proletariat, because even person-to-person racism in private with no structural protection is harmful and sectarian.
ok now were the perpetrators protected by the state?
Just the same as the Buffalo shooting, same as the Christchurch mosque shootings. Life in prison, no parole. Again, not that it’s relevant; it’s still racism even if you’re not protected.
I asked how you define racism, because I can’t understand why you keep suggesting that structural support is required for racial supremacy bullshit to become racism. It’s not a prerequisite. Racism is racism, it’s just more powerful when a state or society institutionalizes it.
Places outside the USA haven’t had as strict of a racial divide and so yeah I can see how it would get muddled.
Yes, although it’s also all these secondary things, I’m guessing there was an implication in your comment that speaking Spanish was a sign someone had Central or South American heritage/etc. and was therefore non-white, whereas in other countries the main people speaking Spanish and Portuguese were from Europe so that isn’t a signal in the culture.
You mentioned Dominican people, and I think this generalizes to many other countries with European colonialism history without much diverse post-WW European immigration (contrast: USA, Australia) and they retained a strict racial divide as a result. An interesting counter-case is a memetic documentary clip filmed during an uprising in Tanganyika (basically now Tanzania) where the filmmakers are dragged out of their car and approaching a wall to be shot, when a soldier sees their passports and says “these aren’t whites, they’re Italians”. My (naïve!) guess is that their understanding of white stems from their British and Belgian oppression, and possibly even shaped by around a hundred thousand Tanganyikans fighting for the Allied forces in WWII.
Bashar al-Assad is an excellent test, because most people in the West envision Middle Eastern people as inherently having darker skin, certainly not light skin and blue eyes which are primary traits racist whites boast about. There’s a strong dissonance there, the same kind that makes dumbass neo-nazis start obsessing about poorly guessing who is Jewish or not. The point being, people assume they can tell, and often get it wrong, as you’ve shown.
But why is structural power or hegemony considered a prerequisite? Racism exists and has dangerous power regardless of structural factors like legality, see mass shootings. It doesn’t need to be institutionalized or dominant to be relevant and dangerous, that just makes it more dangerous.
Just to be clear, I’m of course not trying to equivocate. White supremacy is hegemonic within ‘the West’, but that hegemony doesn’t prevent other racial supremacy movements from local dominance, or even from members performing lone-wolf racially-targeted shootings as an extreme example.
‘Whiteness’ is a label assigned by society, not self-identity. I think race is absolute nonsense and also don’t identify as black nor white, that doesn’t stop people assigning it to me when they see me outside. And if someone says they want to kill people based off of their own interpretation of white or black, our self-identity or lack of one means nothing.
Like you, the comment itself doesn’t insult me because it’s not about a group I identify as, but the normalization of conditional racism here absolutely does concerm me.
Yes, ‘white’ (and of course ‘black’) is absolutely a nonsense concept that expands and contracts arbitrarily, but race and whiteness isn’t (in practice) a self-identity. It is imposed upon people by racists, and has been institutionalized and normalized so much that it’s unavoidable. One can’t just say ‘I’m not white’ or ‘I’m not black’ in a way effectively recognized by society at large. The point being, people are visually identified as being ‘white’ or ‘black’ through things including skin tone. 99+% can look at a license photo and will decide ‘white’ or ‘black’. It is a term with racial implications. A light-skinned Frank who is anti-racist, anti-capitalist and anti-state will be considered ‘white’ by almost everyone, just as someone with darker skin will be labelled ‘black’ even if they are a US Republican, pro-capitalist, pro-police racist. So when someone says ‘kill white people’, why shouldn’t a person considered ‘white’ by society see that as a sign of distrust?
I’ve had English people call me a terrorist and a savage for being Irish, not because I have pale skin.
May I assume “English people” is here referring to people generally considered white? This may factor into why they don’t use whiteness as an insult against native Irish.
The Troubles and British colonization of Ireland are probably going to be far more present in assholes’s minds than race in this situation, since my impression is most British people consider Irish people white these days (as you said, the definition expands), even if there are still specific anti-Irish racist tendencies.
Interstate Highways and similar systems are “successful” socialism, as far as I understand socialism
I must be blunt here: socialism is not about taxation. At all. Socialist communes don’t even require taxes or money to exist.
Socialism is about workers’ relationship with work.
I acknowledge that ‘socialism’ is a vague term with dozens of definitions, but this strange strictly-American idea that publicly-funded infrastructure is socialist isn’t a useful definition, nor a common one. It will really just confuse people.
Historically and presently, socialism is a labour movement which, despite all the variations, had the common goal of the workers controlling their means of production, rather than the owning class. Almost every political dictionary and socialist will back that up, and also Wikipedia (for something we can check right now). It’s not about whether something is private or public.
Paying taxes and voting in a (systematically broken, throroughly corrupted) government representative democracy isn’t really accomplishing this. We are arill beholden to the owning capitalist class. How I spend my working hours is still governed by a bourgeois board of directors, I don’t own the tools I use, I don’t have meaningful power to make democratic decisions about my work or my society governance.
You are correct that socialism exists (present tense! see: Zapatistas) without planned economies. But if you want to see what socialist modes of organisation look like within capitalism, it would be a workers cooperative.
Anti-car movements are not socialist nor socialism. They are good and pro-society, but are completely incidental to the socialist movement.
Collectively-funded operations like roads, police and our military airstriking hospitals aren’t socialist nor socialism. We have no control over the use of our money and labour; even if voting was democratic power in practice, a campaigning platform isn’t a guarantee of policy, they can completely ignore that once elected. And also, no matter who you vote for, your tax money will still go towards anti-socialism!
As for the parts about communism, well, no. The definition you’ve invented wildly conflicts with both theory and historical events. You’re gonna have to start from scratch on that one, even just looking at the Wiki article will provide a much better base. Very popular ideologies like anarcho-communism just completely contradict all that.
A different response, which comes from a different angle to those pointing out that Marxism-Leninism is not fascist:
The word ‘fascism’ is used so fast and loosely outside of a technical context that I wouldn’t say one interpretation is necessarily right or wrong. It depends on context. (Incidentally, same for ‘socialism’, even principled well-read communists can’t agree on a definition.)
For example, if we’re talking about the actual Fascist ideology (think of Mussolini and associates) then I would even hesitate to include Nazism due to the very different roots: they’re both nationalist anti-liberal anti-democratic, anti-socialist ‘third way’ ideologies and they did ally in the war, sure, but to group them both as ‘fascism’ trivializes core differences in how they formed, why they successfully formed, how they appealed to their followers (fascism actually recruited many self-identifying socialists in Italy and its important to recognise why to prevent it), and why they were ultimately antisocial and unsuccessful in their goals.
This isn’t just some academic masturbation nitpicking or anything: I believe that the ignorance of Classical Fascism by lumping it in with the far more obvious and baseless idiocy of Nazism makes it harder to recognize and counter, especially when neo-Nazis are such ridiculous cartoonish farces. Fascism stemmed from National Syndicalism and has core economic ideas like corporatism (from ‘corpus’) that could fool people, and sounds much less stupid that Hitler’s bizzare esoteric fantasies about Aryan racial supremacy: even Mussolini considered Hitler crazy.
The point of me making this distinction is that the dictionary definition you gave isn’t even wrong in describing fascist ideologies, but, I don’t think that list of common traits should be mistaken for a definition. Those traits are the results, not the foundation of the ideology, and a neo-liberal state like the USA can easily match many of those traits despite being a very distinct ideology. Any you will absolutely see people saying ‘USA is fascist’ as a shorthand for nationalist, racist, imperialist, oppressive, blah blah blah, but it’s definitely not post-National-Syndicalist faux-socialist corporatist collectivism. We should obviously fight both but they are not the same and manifest differently.
If your criteria requires the amount if music, movies and content that comes with being the most rich and popular video host in the world, then I don’t think there is a competitor. You’ll need at least two different tools to get the content of YouTube, or the ability to host videos outside of YouTube.
If it’s free music and movies you want, I sincerely recommend just torrenting it or finding reputable download sources.
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