Will this be part of our "we actually won Vietnam"?
Believing it is anywhere close to happening is foolish. But having an elected Democrat say this is useful for agitation -- it's not some radical notion any reasonable person would reject; it has some level of institutional legitimacy.
Yeah but did you hear the cool sound it made
It begs the question: how do you even know the gender of an author? If we did the Pepsi challenge with a bunch of short stories and had people guess who wrote them, how accurate would those guesses even be?
Every time I read a passage from Sakai I think:
- A good chunk of this is insightful material that is not common elsewhere and seems hard to contest (the U.S. has no feudal or communal past, and a major reason for its founding was to continue the oppression of indigenous and enslaved peoples).
- Another good chunk is a lot more contestable, certainly if the argument is that the U.S. is unique among capitalist states (all classes and strata have a preoccupation with petty privileges and property, moreso than other capitalist societies).
- A third chunk that seems like a huge stretch (there is no U.S. proletariat).
The support for the latter two groups has struck me as thin and/or unconvincing.
For example, the "no (white) proletariat" argument seems to boil to down to "they are paid too well to be proles." ArcanePotato cites a passage elsewhere in this thread stating that 18th- or 19th-century U.S. farm workers made more than their European peers, and there's also a passage in Settlers with figures on how many white households in the U.S. in the 1980s had a variety of modern conveniences (refrigerators, TVs, cars, etc.). I think this ignores that class is traditionally thought of as based more on one's relationship to the means of production than to any absolute level of wealth -- exchanging your labor for wages is what makes you proletariat, even if you make more than the person working next to you. If you're working a wage labor job and your wage doubles, your interest in class struggle may become less urgent, but your relationship to the means of production doesn't change. Temporarily placating the proletariat through higher wages isn't the same as the proletariat not existing.
holodomor, and xinjiang abuses
"They took down my misinformation but said they took it down because it's misinformation!"
Where's this from?
Live reaction from Charles Entertainment Kirk:
"We didn't land on Sherwood Forest; Sherwood Forest landed on us!"
No, the Soviets did not use human wave tactics (that would be Imperial Japan).
Also, what do you call the landings at Normandy?
https://projects.propublica.org/american-citizens-detained-dhs-civil-rights/
The article this one refers to.
Where would you recommend starting with Gramsci?