commontern they/them @ CommonTern @lemmygrad.ml

mean lesbian / bolshevism enjoyer

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3 wk. ago

Now they’re comparing resisting ICE to Hong Kong protestors resisting the see see pee

Most of the anti-ICE organizers I know in my American city are anarchists who are opposed to anything that isn’t “spontaneous” or “autonomous” and try to discourage people from joining or allying with any parties or organizations that try to organize against ICE. They complain that any higher level of organization “co-opts” or “saps energy” from the movement and limits anti-ICE activity to peaceful protesting. If they made these criticisms and then did more themselves then I could get on board with it but when I sat with them during their attempt to blockade a garage that was being used by ICE vehicles I watched as they literally got up and moved the barriers out of the way every time a vehicle needed to pass through. They have bragged about supposedly getting into physical fights with cops during an anti-ICE protest but it seems like that didn’t ultimately make any difference for immigrants. The only other actions I see them encourage are small unaffiliated peaceful protests originating within immigrant communities or documenting and monitoring ICE. I never see them try to grow this baseline into anything that could effectively drive ICE from the city or stop the kidnappings. WTF do I do here. What Is to Be Done. I feel hopeless.

They’re never getting those guys back from the space station

Thanks. I think I read that Red Sails article a while ago but found it hard to understand. I will try to reread that section.

The confusion I have is about how this conspiratorial thinking needs to target a “marked” (for example, racialized) group of outsiders (as I understand it, this group doesn’t have to be Jewish people but often is). I think there is an elemental form of this reasoning you can see when defenders of capitalism blame “corporatism” or “crony capitalism” for capitalism's woes. For those to exist, “corporatists” and “crony capitalists” and perhaps “speculators” or “usurers” — as the Nazis liked to call them — also need to exist, but in this basic form it hasn’t crystallized into a defined group of people. How does that group of people end up being Jewish people?

When Marxists talk about other forms of discrimination we can always pinpoint an economic relation that generates it like colonialism or the gendered division of labor. What, then, is the material basis of 21st-century antisemitism? The destruction of Europe’s Jewish community and the creation of a Jewish settler colony seem to me like the main contributors today, but how specifically do they contribute? Is it that Israel helps reify Jews’ status as “non-European”?

The logic of antisemitism, far from being banished with the Nazis, became completely naturalized in the West. […] The tragic cycle begins to appear eternal: innocent, well-meaning, hard-working folks are, time and again, viciously tricked by the scapegoating of a new rogue in the gallery — Indigenous, Black, Spanish, Jewish, Soviet, Vietnamese, Cuban, Serbian, Muslim, Libyan, Syrian, Korean, Venezuelan, Russian, Chinese.

Is it correct to understand that antisemitism itself is one possible manifestation of the logic of antisemitism and the logic should not be viewed as exclusive to Jewish people?

I’ve just skimmed this so far but this looks very helpful. I am always frustrated by the “bourgeoisie just needed a scapegoat” answer because it does not explain why the European bourgeoisie picked Jewish people as a scapegoat, what continuity there is between early and modern antisemitism, what material conditions it arises from, how it relates to anticommunism, whether a similar discourse can be weaponized against other groups, the role of Zionism, Jewish status as a nation, why Jews were racialized, conflict between bourgeois and proletarian or Eastern and Western European Jewish communities, restrictions on jobs and land ownership, contemporary antisemitism, and so on.

Do you have a link?