20201006 LINKS
https://illwilleditions.com/the-return-of-john-brown-white-race-traitors-in-the-2020-uprising/
“Violence with racists is inevitable. But there are enough of them, and they have enough guns and support from the state that we cannot defeat them on military terms alone. Confronting them on the streets is important, but in the long term we must also try to convince some of them that their commitment to whiteness only subordinates them to the bourgeoisie. This will be a slow, difficult, even dangerous process, but it can be done.”
Theses on the White Proletariat White people, like all people, are divided by politics and class. These divisions were revealed through the recent uprisings, which showed us that there are whites who are willing to go the distance, and there are whites who are willing to violently defend capitalism and the state./ We need a revolutionary strategy for white proletarians not in spite of, but precisely because of their racism. Enrolling the white proletariat into a white supremacist alliance has been a crucial tactic of American capitalism, for the simple reason that white workers have always been the largest demographic in this nation. A successful proletarian revolution requires breaking up this alliance./ The white proletariat has revolutionary potential, but this potential is simultaneously inflected with racism and anti-Blackness. This contradiction takes the form of a civil war within the white proletariat. This civil war is defined, on the one hand, by solidarity with the rest of the proletariat, and on the other hand, by whiteness./ The so-called ‘white outside agitator’ is the name for a living creature who breaks the spell of a united white bloc of civility, protocol, and allegiance to capitalism and the state. It reveals that there are white people who are not invested in whiteness./ As more white race-traitors emerge, they too will be hunted down and murdered. In this sense, law and order is not only about disciplining Black and Brown proletarians but also white race-traitors. This is the revolutionary fate of all proletarians who pose a threat to the racial order./ The white proletariat is not frozen. It can change, evolve, and break from its history of settler colonialism, racism, and imperialism. We need not entertain romantic illusions in order to see this. Actual people make revolutions, not saints and angels./ The historical moment that sheds the most light on the current white proletariat is the era of the Civil War. This history powerfully informs the trajectory of what will come. The Civil War and Reconstruction are the unfinished business of this land. Only crisis, civil war and revolution can smash the alliance between the white proletariat and capitalism.
There is a lot of abstract and shallow accounting of how whiteness is to be overcome through guilt, self-sacrifice, charity, and interpersonal behaviors, but the clearest road ahead is when whites join the mass struggle, fight the police, burn cop cars, burn police stations, burn courthouses, burn department of corrections buildings, and commit their bodies to the uprising.
https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2020/9/10/degrowth-and-mmt-a-thought-experiment
With this approach, the age-old question of “will we have enough GDP in a degrowth scenario to provide for thriving lives?” becomes irrelevant. We can generate the funding for public services and the job guarantee without even a thought to GDP. GDP becomes an irrelevant indicator. Indeed, parts of the economy that are presently measured by GDP might shrink, but that’s okay because GDP is not the primary arbiter of provisioning. In the scenario I have described, the majority of provisioning is done directly. So, exchange-value (GDP) might decline but use-value (access to the things we need to live well) improves.
This leaves us with an interesting point. MMT proposals align elegantly with one of degrowth’s key observations, namely, that if growthism depends on the perpetual creation of artificial scarcity, then by reversing artificial scarcity — by providing public abundance — we can dismantle the growth imperative. As Giorgos Kallis has put it, “capitalism cannot survive under conditions of abundance”. MMT provides an opportunity for us to create a post-growth, post-capitalist economy.