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.