Remember, the social Democrats sided with the Nazis over the socialists. They’ve done it every time they’ve been given the opportunity, and will continue to do so as many times as people fall for their shtick.
“The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."
-Audre Lorde
As much as Lorde didn't like capitalism, she was talking about the idea of using division and difference in minority movements, enforcing a rigged view of a shared black experience or a shared woman experience. White feminists were the majority of feminists, and often left little room for minoritized women to share the way their racial identity and gender identity intersected. Lorde didn't want Black feminists to be relegated to their own groups and separated from the white feminists. She wanted them to have a voice in the feminist movement. To work with her white peers on liberation from patriarchy. She just wanted them to acknowledge that the experience shared by the majority of white feminists didn't speak for all of them. She wanted them to no longer look at differences in their midst as vice, but as a virtue. Setting one experience as the norm is the master's tool, and it would never dismantle the master's house.
If there's one thing we don't need when fighting fascism, it's leftists purity testing people who use the levers of power at their disposal. I don't give a fuck if a person thinks capitalism just needs limits and liberal democracy is a great system. If you stand with me in opposing fascists, I'm not going to say that you can never be my ally.
I don't like people like you who think current day China is great. Lorde certainly wouldn't like a queerphobic authoritarian state that paves over cultural divisions and crushes dissent. However, if you actually stand with me in defeating fascists, and won't use this fight as an excuse to mandate your ML agenda, I will work with you. I will stand with you against our common enemy. I will not ignore our disagreements, but fascism is an existential threat. Everyone from Joe Biden to Noam Chomsky must work together to defeat these fuckers.
If you refuse to work with capitalists because you think you can also grab a chunk of a country the fascists are taking, don't be surprised when they invade you and kill of most of a generation. Fascists must die.
No I feel you entirely. I think what you’re missing is that a country is a product of its material conditions. The Chinese government isn’t forcing anti gay laws onto the Chinese people. It’s reacting to the citizens, who are homophobic and transphobic. China also doesn’t pave over dissent, they have one of the most robust protest movements in the world. There are literally nearly constantly protests taking place in China. Hell, it literally only took TWO weeks of protest to entirely end Zero-Covid(which has lead to thousands of excess deaths, but if the people prefer that over zero-covid, that is their right). What I would give to have protest movements succeed in two weeks haha. We had the largest protests in the history of the world after George Floyd, and an absolute majority of the population supported defunding the police, and yet both the federal and local governments put record amounts of funding into police. We are not the constituency of the Us government. We are merely the cattle used to feed their real constituency, corporations and oligarchs.
I appreciate your info on Audre Lorde, that all jives with what I know about her also. I just thought it was a great quote, and I like to share quotes when I post here :)
Also, I agree, fascists must die. Trying to play respectability politics while they’re rigging the game won’t kill them though, and it seems that’s all the non-fascist elements of our government are capable of doing.
You can live in a made up reality that uses lies and half truths to justify regimes. It's really annoying and disgusting, but it's not the biggest problem right now. What is even less tolerable is you using those strategies to divide the resistance to fascism for the purpose of growing your tankie movement. Not all people on the liberal spectrum will side with fascism. Many side with leftists over fascists throughout history. If anything, Stalin trying to take part of Poland, only siding against the Nazis after getting stabbed in the back, shows just how hollow your arguments in favor of MLs and against social democrats are.
I can provide documents from both western and eastern sources that verify what I said about China. Harvard University itself found well over 90% approval by the people of the Chinese government. If we want to talk about appeasement, we can talk about how the USSR tried to form a three way defense pact over Poland with Britain and France, but instead the western nations refused. It was only after that that they signed a non-aggression pact, and that pact only lasted long enough for them to build up their industry to prepare for the inevitable invasion by the Nazis. You can read the letters between Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Hitler, they’re available online. You can see how western leaders preferred appeasement to defense. You can see how many western leaders not only didn’t dislike the Nazis or Mussolinis fascists, but admired them for their privatization and suppression of working class movements. If Hitler would have kept his genocide to Germany, the west would never have cared. They really didn’t even care about it during either, as evidenced by the wests refusal to take Jewish refugees, a large majority of which were taken in by the Soviet Union.