“All you need is love class consciousness!”

…not all you need but a good beginning.

 

The bits quoted below are from Google Translate (my Spanish is very rusty).

28/9/20:

Venezuela: riots in 19 of the country’s 23 states…100 protests throughout country

“In the south of San Carlos, Cojedes, protests continue. At 7:30 pm  citizens who were on Rómulo Betancourt Avenue, burned a vehicle due to the absence of electric service in the state….Likewise, residents of La Herrereña burned rubber due to lack of domestic gas. They register 17 protests due to lack of gasoline this Monday in Nueva Esparta. At least 76 protests have been registered this Monday in various regions of Venezuela due to failures in the supply of services such as: electricity, drinking water, domestic gas and gasoline, a situation that has unleashed numerous demonstrations in recent days . Through social networks, riots have been reported in 19 of the 23 states of the country, some of which have involved the use of tear gas and pellets by security forces…Since Friday, the Venezuelan Observatory of Social Conflict has counted nearly 100 demonstrations in almost all regions of the country….Venezuela closed August with 748 protests motivated by the precariousness of services, especially due to the shortage of gasoline, but also due to the difficulty in accessing medicine and food and the “pulverization of wages”. The president in charge of the Republic, Juan Guaidó on Sunday urged Venezuelans to join the protests, especially one called by the teachers for next October 5.”

25/9/20:

Venezuela Yaracuy: clashes in 3 towns due to lack of everything (water, gas, electricity, food); mayor forced to leave  town

“The security forces could not cope trying to  suppress the protest …The street protest took place in the municipalities Bruzual, José Vicente Peña, Cocorote, San Felipe and Independencia, where a sea of ​​people came out to demand from the government in power a better distribution of gas, food, equitable sale of fuel and better services of toilet, water and electricity….Abuses of power by representatives of Poliyaracuy were one of the most frequent complaints; The uniformed men openly entered the houses located on Avenues 4 and 5 of the Bruzual municipality to arrest the protesters, whom they mounted on their motorcycles with physical violence. This same irregular situation was seen in the municipalities of Peña and San Felipe, where neighbors reported to El Pitazo the arbitrary apprehension of a 16-year-old teenager and an athlete from the Yaracuy state cycling team for recording street activities….Likewise, State Police officials attacked a group of journalists who were covering the events of social protest in the municipality of Independencia, after throwing a tear gas at their feet….One of the most critical moments on the third day of the protests that shook the Yaracuy state was when an angry mob smashed the glass of doors and windows of the Mayor’s Office of the Bruzual municipality with stones and beat four military personnel guarding the headquarters with sticks …These actions of social discontent motivated the governor, Julio León Heredia, to move in the afternoon to the jurisdiction of Bruzual, guarded by a strong security cordon to assess the damage caused to state buildings by the social outbreak…The assistance centers located in the municipalities where there were street disturbances were not able to cope with the number of people who entered due to suffocation due to the inhalation of smoke from tear gas, as well as those injured by blunt objects.Unofficially, it was learned that of the 12 people who were injured in these street protests, eight are military personnel and four are civilians…“

More here “The municipality of Bruzual, in the Yaracuy state, in western Venezuela, turned into a nightmare. There has been no gas for four months, electricity is out several times a day and the water supply is constantly cut off. Fed up and desperate, the neighbors took to the streets. An unknown number of people were detained and at least one public building was damaged after a series of anti-government protests in the state…”Repression of special forces of the GNB (Bolivarian National Guard, militarized Police) was responded by demonstrators with stones and fire at the headquarters of the Mayor of Chivacoa, Bruzual municipality, (state of) Yaracuy,” said OVCS on Twitter. In the same message, the NGO attached a video in which around fifty people can be seen confronting riot police, who leave a sector after being overwhelmed. Later, the protesters set fire to the ground floor of the building where the Mayor’s Office operates, which also suffered serious structural damage caused by stones. …The protests in this state of the interior of Venezuela, punished by the severe crisis that the country is going through, began 4 days ago to demand the regularization of the supply of fuel, scarce like other goods, and of the electricity service, which presents failures throughout the country . According to the OVCS, this Saturday there were protests in at least 7 of the 14 municipalities of the entity, most of them dissolved by the police forces with the use of tear gas and pellets.”

23/9/20:

Venezuela, Yaracuy: massive protests

“Five days of protests leave at least 18 people injured and about twenty detained for demanding water, electricity, gas and gasoline…The constant failures of public services caused Venezuelans to return to the streets. Such is the case of the inhabitants of Yaracuy state, who since Tuesday, September 22, have not stopped protesting demanding water, electricity, gas and gasoline, receiving in return repression from state security officials. The citizens of the Urachiche community expressed their feelings through a demonstration to denounce the shortage of fuel, the collapse of all public services and the lack of public transportation in the region….The inhabitants who were stationed in the surroundings of the Plaza Bolívar, expressed that they will complete four months without receiving gas service, apart from the constant power cuts. Minutes later, the local security forces dispersed the demonstrators with tear gas canisters and detained at least eight people who were placed under the order of the Prosecutor 4 of the Public Ministry for the alleged crimes: disorderly conduct, terrorism and incitement to hatred. .
…The mayor of the Bruzual municipality, Carmen Victoria Suárez, indicated that street demonstrations are “prohibited” and that people who go out to “create” disturbances “do not have permission to concentrate on public roads.”

See also this.

A few incidents from the last 6 months

26/7/20:

Anzoategui: cops kill man during riot over fuel shortages

“This is the second death in a month in protests against fuel shortages in Venezuela – on July 17 an 18-year-old man died of a gunshot wound on an island in the state of Zulia, in the west of the country.
Since the beginning of the year, the OVCS has identified more than 4,000 events organized in the country to demand in particular an increase in salaries or the improvement of public services. Dozens of people were injured and four people were killed – including the two deaths on Sunday – during these demonstrations“. Should be pointed out that this article doesn’t seem to be entirely accurate: 1 death was on the 26th, the other on the 17th.

9/5/20:

Venezuela, Monagas: riots and looting during food distribution day

8/5/20:

Tachira: riot over electricity cuts

1/5/20:

Venezuela,  Guanare: “Socialist” state celebrates mayday by  murdering 17 during prison mutiny

26/4/20:

Venezuela, Margarita: hotel looted

“a group of vandals looted the tourist Hotel Portofino located in the Manzanillo sector, Nueva Esparta. Photos and videos published on the Twitter platform demonstrate the theft of mattresses, furniture, chairs and even washing machines … at least 35 people who participated in the robbery were captured by REDI officials, including women, men and minors. Mattresses, furniture, beds, air conditioners, kitchen implements, plastic chairs, televisions, among others, was part of what the security forces were able to recover.“

25/4/20:

Venezuela, Miranda: looting in 2 areas as scarcity bites during lockdown …More about other looting in April

24/4/20:

Venezuela: looting in several areas of  2 towns

“The top communications official at the powerful cabinet department in charge of combating the coronavirus made outlandish and false accusations on Sunday that career government scientists were engaging in “sedition” in their handling of the pandemic and that left-wing hit squads were preparing for armed insurrection after the election.

Michael R. Caputo, the assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, accused the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of harboring a “resistance unit” determined to undermine President Trump, even if that opposition bolsters the Covid-19 death toll.

Mr. Caputo, who has faced intense criticism for leading efforts to warp C.D.C. weekly bulletins to fit Mr. Trump’s pandemic narrative, suggested that he personally could be in danger from opponents of the administration. “If you carry guns, buy ammunition, ladies and gentlemen, because it’s going to be hard to get,” he urged his followers.

He went further, saying his physical health was in question, and his “mental health has definitely failed.”” – https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/14/us/politics/caputo-virus.html

US: on the Democrats taking up Trump’s ideology

X writes:

The analysis offered here is a joint project of IGD and Crimethinc. The critical points it makes about the Democrats adopting Trump’s talking points and making the demand that “anarchists are prosecuted” echoes the prescient comment of the comrade who said more than a fortnight ago that the election was going to be “the party of law and order vs. the party of law and order.”

The additional point that the Democrats, in their increasing anxiety that Trump may actually thumb his nose at them and stay in office if the outcome of the election doesn’t suit him, will  have to depend on the very forces of BLM and antifa they are presently using as their scapegoats, the only entity with the chance of effectively counteracting what will amount to a right-wing coup d’ etat, is well taken. What is missing from this, or insufficiently pursued it seems, is what the anti-authoritarians and and anti-racists are going to do right now to make themselves strong enough that the natural evolution after a coup is thwarted – namely the suppression of the ‘unruly elements’ that will have allowed the parliamentary pseudo-opposition to Trump to crawl back out of the ashcan of history – is thwarted as well. That is where the real discussion now must begin.

Trump endorses summary execution

““That’s the way it has to be,” Trump said after U.S. marshals killed a man suspected in a deadly shooting in Portland, Oregon, last month….Trump also appeared to suggest that law enforcement officers take similar action against demonstrators suspected of committing violent acts. He made his comments as protesters across the country demonstrate against racism and police brutality amid the police killings of Black Americans. “You can’t throw bricks at guys with shields on them,” he said. Reinoehl’s shooting death came the same day that Trump took to Twitter to call for Reinoehl’s arrest, calling him a “cold blooded killer.”…One witness told The Washington Post that he never saw Reinoehl pull out a gun. Nate Dinguss said he saw officers pull up to Reinoehl in two unmarked police vehicles, get out without identifying themselves and immediately start firing their weapons at him. But two other witnesses told The Olympian that they saw Reinoehl fire what they thought was an assault rifle at the unmarked SUVs after the vehicles pulled up to him…If Reinoehl threatened officers or posed a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to them, they would not need a reason to warn him before opening fire. The American criminal justice system presumes that a suspect is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Taking punitive action against a suspect before then would run counter to that system.”

X writes:

Keeping in mind the statement of Trump ally Stone that Trump impose martial law if he is not elected, we can see an increasingly clear profile of one section of the US ruling class that has left bourgeois legality completely behind, is not effectively challenged by the proponents of legality (principally because they must support a law enforcement that is already heavily disposed toward extra-judicial measures and composed largely of fascist sympathizers) in government or civil society, and is increasingly committed to an eventually unsustainable rule by means of state and vigilante/Freikorps terror. Trump’s speech here amounts to open advocacy of political murder of anyone who manifests a public physical opposition to the regime and who advocates self-defense against the state-sponsored domestic terrorism presently taking shape.

WWII 2.0 is looking like it’s going to be a planet-wide civil war, with the anti-fascists starting in a considerably more dire situation than they did in 1918-1937, when they were effectively defeated before the war moved on to become a conflict between imperialist powers. Those expecting the Democratic Party or the US military to provide a bulwark against this accelerating movement towards fascism are to be sorely disappointed.

Trump does not always endorse summary execution

Cops sadly not executed

A study in contrasts:

Heavily armed federally-deputized gunmen murder an antifascist whose only crime was to defend a friend of color against a fascist with a knife, and “that’s the way it has to be,” says Trump. “There has to be retribution” so that fascist trash can invade and terrorize communities with impunity and not have to worry that someone will get the idea to finally finish off all fascists, in and out of uniform. Meanwhile, the notion that we have a right to defend our communities against neo-nazi filth who invade them and inflict violence upon us is a topic on which Joe Biden, and the rest of the Democratic Party pseudo-opposition, remain silent. Now there’s a surprise!…But a single person (with perhaps a lookout) and a single pistol shoots two members of the notoriously brutal LA County Sheriff’s Department, and it’s a “cold-blooded shooting” which is “unconscionable,” and whose perpetrator must be brought to “justice.” (see this) Now there’s another surprise! Even at the scene of the shooting, LA law enforcement found themselves incapable of restraining their proclivity for unprovoked violence as they beat up and arrested a member of the press. About that attack Biden was silent again. A night of surprises! The Democratic Party’s attitude toward the struggle against the ultra-right in the US is at “best” one of passive obstruction. This is the “practical alternative” neo-liberalism presents as its tepid alternative to Trump’s aggressive and increasingly overt neo-fascism. On such a frail and rotting reed depends bourgeois democracy (the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie) in our time. But then the bourgeoisie and its allies have always played with  fascism &/or let it develop if they feel threatened – from the Freikorps of 1918 to the present day via Churchill’s admiration for Mussolini. The uprising  in the US following George Floyd’s murder threatened the multi-millionaire Biden as much as it did the more obvious advocates of dictatorship. The election poses a clear choice: the party of law and order versus the party of order and law. “Order” here  being a synonym for the chaos and constant disorder imposed on the majority of people’s lives by the constant  “anarchy of the market” system, which just as you think you’ve got some sense of stability pulls the rug from right under you.

See this

Posted 17th September 2020

This, from a Green EU politician,  states that the European Union, on 10th July 2020, gave the go-ahead for the production of Genetically Modified vaccines without verifying, through experiments, any environmental or health safeguard!!! This means the whole world – or at least EU countries –  have  been explicitly transformed into involuntary guinea pigs. Meanwhile, this story that hit the headlines for 5 minutes before being buried under endless pictures of people not maintaining social distancing,  reports “The Oxford coronavirus vaccine trial is facing a “challenge”, the health secretary has admitted, after it was put on hold due to a suspected serious adverse reaction in one of its volunteers…The nature of the adverse reaction and when it happened are not currently known.” However, after 4 days the trials were resumed without  any official indication of what had gone wrong. But the New York Times reported that the just mentioned volunteer in the UK trial had been diagnosed with transverse myelitis: “Symptoms include weakness and numbness of the limbs, deficits in sensation and motor skills, dysfunctional urethral and anal sphincter activities, and dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system that can lead to episodes of high blood pressure….sensation to pain or light touch is impaired. Motor weakness…mainly affects the muscles that flex the legs and extend the arms…Back pain can occur at the level of any inflamed segment of the spinal cord…all four limbs may be affected and there is risk of respiratory failure ^…Lesions of the lower cervical region (C5–T1) will cause a combination of upper and lower motor neuron signs in the upper limbs, and exclusively upper motor neuron signs in the lower limbs. Cervical lesions account for about 20% of cases…A lesion of the lumbar segment, the lower part of the spinal cord (L1–S5) often produces a combination of upper and lower motor neuron signs in the lower limbs. Lumbar lesions account for about 10% of cases.”

Not hard to recognise what might happen if GM vaccines are permitted without even standard trials which are not even a guarantee of much safety anyway (eg the hundred thousand or so people each year who die in the US from totally “safe” – ho ho – drugs, drugs that have passed these standard tests). And these scum complain Dr.Raoult’s specific mix of hydroxychloraquine and the antibiotic azithromycine has not been subjected to any “scientific” health experiments . Certainly further proof that this crisis is an opportunity for the maniacs who  rule us to do things that they think they could not do before. Whilst anti-vaxxers can often be simplistic and dogmatic, there’s a fundamental basis for such fears.

And now there’s this: Scientists are working on vaccines that spread like a disease. What could possibly go wrong?

“Self-spreading vaccines could indeed entail serious risks, and the prospect of using them raises challenging questions. Who decides, for instance, where and when a vaccine should be released? Once released, scientists will no longer be in control of the virus. It could mutate, as viruses naturally do. It may jump species. It will cross borders. There will be unexpected outcomes and unintended consequences. There always are. While it may turn out to be technically feasible to fight emerging infectious diseases like COVID-19, AIDS, Ebola, and Zika with self-spreading viruses, and while the benefits may be significant, how does one weigh those benefits against what may be even greater risks?”

Second coronavirus vaccine volunteer suffers rare neurological condition 

“A 37-year-old woman suffered a rare neurological condition that left her struggling to walk…”
Marvelous the way they say “the two cases were unlikely to be associated with the vaccine…” A rare disease amongst 2 people volunteering for the trial of the vaccine. Pure coincidence! Like the melting of the icecaps being just something that happens naturally every few thousand years – nothing to do with commodity-induced rich-man-made climate change, nothing to do with the car economy and capitalist industry in general.
This article also says that only one third make a full or near full recovery from this ‘transverse myelitis’ “with most of their symptoms gone” after 2 years. Nothing to worry about then.

Cons like snake oil at least had the advantage of not usually having an adverse effect on those seeking a quick cure

For a long chronological list of aspects of things relevant to the Coronavirus crisis see this

US: “Extremist watch” group says “Anarcho-Socialists” are  responsible for riots, partly by preaching hate crimes against whole groups (ie cops etc.)

Original report here

X writes:

This, linked through a Voice of America “extremist watch” segment, notes that the people who put this together, “affiliated with Rutgers University” ultimately are to be considered part of the “Contagion Network research Institute, an independent non-profit that tracks hate on social media. The group lists the United Nations, the Anti-Defamation League and the liberal billionaire George Soros’ Open Society foundation as its affiliated patrons.

Effectively then, this amounts to liberal counter-insurgency’s attempt to understand (their characterization, “anarcho-socialist” suggests they have a rather long way to go) the anti-authoritarian anti-capitalist movement and its allies, something it clearly sees as a threat. One notable feature evident from a superficial glance: the report considers that it is dehumanizing “hate” if one sees individual members of a group of people who are part of an organization whose actions are structually determined to undertake repression of spontaneous social movements (against captalism, the state and the reactionary constellation of beliefs – racism, sexism, patriarchy, authoritarianism, etc. – that reinforce them) and act uniformly as per their organizational discipline, such as the police, FBI, etc., as enemies to be uniformly detested and opposed. Would George Soros think it were “hate” to uniformly detest those in the SS? And if not what are the unspoken and underlying values that would account for this apparent inconsistency?

SF write: Surely this, by its own logic,  is a hate crime against “Anarcho-Socialists” (whatever that is) – dehumanising them by bunching them up all together.

T writes:

These type of articles or police reports reminded me of a part in W. Reich’s account of treating a schizophrenic patient, where he wrote:

“It was soon after the FBI had mistaken orgone research for German (or
Russian?) spy activity and had taken me into custody (as an ‘enemy
alien’) at the entry of the United States into World War II. The fact
that I was soon released unconditionally after a hearing did not matter
much to the patient. What mattered was the fact that I had been
suspected of subversive activity, and this, of course, was in harmony
with the general attitude of neurotics as well as psychotics to distrust
everything, especially their own inner feelings. Our patient wanted to
be able to trust me because, as she said plainly, she needed my help in
her fight against the ‘forces’. I assured her that I was not a German
or, for that matter, any other type of spy and never had been. Thereupon
she said that everybody thinks only in terms of his own nature or
character structure and that hence the FBI could not think of anything
but spy activity when they could not understand what I was doing. I had
to agree with this statement, and I found my liking of the schizoid mind
again justified. Schizophrenics are able in their lucid periods to see
through individual and social matters intelligently, as no other
character type can. Later we shall see that this lucidity of
intelligence in the schizophrenic is one of the major dangers which
threaten his existence in present-day society.”

 

Nazis have not disappeared – they have simply said they are not Nazis: On Kenosha and the difficulty of recognising Nazism in the US

This says a lot of  dubious stuff, such as this: “As many have laboured to remind this society, Hitler’s genocidal project was inspired by (if not a tribute to) the American colony. Contrary to the racist claim that racism is un-American, it is more accurate to say that the Third Reich was a type of Americanism. European innovation and efficiency were added to the blood quantum laws, Black codes, eugenics,  forced relocation, work camps, and killing fields of rugged America. Slave ships to cattle cars, Tuskegee experiments to Josef Mengele, the Nazi project was less an otherworldly “radical evil”that came out of nowhere than it was a facsimile of the white supremacist order of the colonies.…Devotees of a death-cult to pink pigmentation, responsible for murders from Goa to Gambia, are given more benefit of the doubt than a Black boy in a convenience store.”

X’s critique of this:

This article by Yannick Giovanni Marshall  is irritatingly simplistic and typical of identity politicians  (who as a group are mainly to be credited with having elevated narcissism to the level of a political principle) who reduce a phenomenon to the level of their own single narrow concern, oblivious of whether the phenomenon they attack historically preceded the object of their monomania or not. The idea that “the charge of fascism conveniently leaves out or makes subordinate that race hatred that fuels, enables and is the primary reason for the support of this burgeoning authoritarianism [in the US today, not to mention the world]” is the idea of someone who does not know what fascism is, and cannot distinguish the part from the whole. Racism was baked into fascism from the beginning and is not the only thing that comprises it, nor the only thing that makes it what it is. One could say with equal reason that hatred of women and the notion they have equal rights, hatred of anti-militarism and hatred of anti-capitalism were the sole components of fascism and, unsurprisingly, be equally wrong.

One can detect these components of “hatred” to one degree or another in the different varieties of fascism to be found historically, around the world, whether the Marxism-Leninism of the Bolsheviks, Maoists or Ho Chi Minh (despite their spurious support of “national liberation” – tell it to the Tatars, or the Tibetans, or the ethnic Chinese Vietnamese – or their equally fake support of “women’s liberation,” or equality as a principle itself – in the light of “one-man management” for instance, or the number of pockets on cadres’ uniforms, or if one likes, the corpses of Lev Chernyi or Wang Shiwei), or Peronism, Putinism or Trumpism, Obanism or Bolsonarism, but they are always there, because these regimes always need to mobilize their populations against someone demonstrably else, lest they mobilize themselves against them, the ones who are truly responsible for their misery. Depending on conditions, the modus operandi, the road to power, was either the usurpation of the workers’ and peasants’ movements (Bolshevism, Maoism), or their suppression (Italian, German and Spanish fascism), but its fundamental object was the same. The centrality of fascism as first and foremost a reaction to the movements against class society is totally outside Marshall’s comprehension. He sees colonialism everywhere and class-struggle nowhere.

The uniqueness of fascism and the ultimate determinant of its character lies in its ontology. It is the cutting edge, the most toxic, product of the reaction against the workers’ movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was the joint project of the petty-nobility (von der Goltz, Lenin), bourgeoisie, and, above all, the bureaucratic stratum (this includes the army, the police and the civil service) of the European states most threatened by these movements and at the same time threatened by the most developed capitalist states around them. It is, most of all, authoritarian and developmentalist. Workers, peasants, women and minorities were, first of all, impediments to modernization and/or entities ripe for suppression, by way of super-exploitation, and those who resisted or stood out as poles of opposition, were the perfect scapegoats. These states, established in part through the mobilization of hatred for “what was in the way” of “modernization,” were “poor man’s empires” and they had to make up for lost time through a more ferocious exploitation of labor and resources than their more developed competitors (who also had empires abroad that they had already super-exploited as part of their process of capital accumulation). No wonder that the unrestrained looting and colonisation that attended the “birth of a nation” in the United States, along with the modernity of its mass-production techniques (this to both Stalin and Hitler) were so attractive.

Marshall also writes “A leftist that comes away from reading a history of Nazi Germany denouncing first, the Third Reich’s subversion of political norms should be suspected of anti-Semitism.” The leftist who does that should be more than just suspected of not understanding what happened at all. The Third Reich did not subvert political norms, it restored them with a vengeance, and for that job, anti-semitism was an extremely useful instrument, one that any perceptive opportunist would have likely neglected at the price of success. Turning the entire working class into an “other” was beyond reach; it was vital therefore to make the leading and most outspoken members of the German Revolution deviant foreigners. The relatively high proportion of Jewish (Luxemburg, Landauer, Leviné, etc.) and female members of the radical intelligentsia and radical working class made the misogyny and racism already embedded by Christian patriarchy and anti-Jewish bigotry easy to mobilize in the service of the fatherland, as did the fact that the apparent “success” of the revolutionary movement then underway had started in “oriental” and “barbaric” Russia. Finding a population grouped as “other” was an enormous advantage to the reaction, and a tool that was largely unavailable to the other side (this did not prevent certain social-democrats before the first World War, and the “National Bolsheviks” afterward, from trying). This was equally true in the US suppression of the workers movement, especially the IWW, during the same period.

To continue with the main point here: The Third Reich was a radical restoration of Wilhelmine capitalism that the social democrats had undertaken, but at which they had failed, despite, and because of, their oversight of the destruction of the workers’ movement on whose back they rose to power. The destruction of that movement was the basis for this restoration, but the social democrats, having destroyed at the same time their own base of power in a now demoralized working class, were afterwards no longer capable of holding on to authority – particularly in the face of the right-wing militias, the Freikorps, they had created, and the strength of the political base of the Freikorps in the old military hierarchy and industrial capitalist class which had always disdained and distrusted the social democrats anyway. Under the social democrats, all the old institutions and norms were back, above all, the special status of the military outside the jurisdiction and control of the institutions of civil society, but they were only able to come out into the sun again after the Nazis had been put at their head. Marshall is dazzled into incoherence by superficial appearances.

He says that “…Hitler’s genocidal project was inspired (if not a tribute to) the American colony. Contrary to the racist claim that that racism is un-American, it is more accurate to say that the Third Reich was a type of Americanism.” Yannick Giovanni Marshall, despite his cosmopolitan-sounding name (which could just as easily be an American-sounding name), is as fervent a believer in American exceptionalism as any right-wing American politician, and seems to think in his presentation of social reality that the nature of the American Experience positions it in the center of the world and at the center of history. All he seems to want is to do is paint it black. Marshall’s obsession with the Black experience in America leads him to minimize the experience and crimes committed against Native America, the real “original sin” of the American colonial project (but not even the real “original sin” that got the imperial expansion started in the first place). Never mind the work farms, they were preceded by a rolling genocide which remains, even today, more proportionally murderous than the current, egregious oppression against Black people. The dispossession of Hispanic occupants of the immense territory of Mexico, seized in a deliberately provoked imperialist war, is also completely unmentioned, as is their continued marginalization. Yet these are all essential parts of the fabric of the American imperial project, as is the story of its overseas adventures, whose fruits were not only in all the material and cultural things looted and accumulated for the Empire, but the techniques of surveillance and repression that were brought back home to destroy the workers’ movement in the early 20th century here, a movement that included all the ethnic groups and the genders that make up this country. Not only these things, but most importantly of all, it is the class struggle that is invisible to Marshall and debilitates his critical vision.

Women and their subjection don’t even turn up on his radar, and yet their post-bubonic subordination and that of the peasantry (1381) laid the behavioral and institutional foundations for the merchantile/imperial expansion of what would become capitalism abroad, along with the later suppression of the Levellers’ movement of resistance to the dictatorship of Parliament and its Lord Protector, and the subsequent Restoration, which evolved into the continuously expanding expropriationist domestic policy of the Crown. This seizure of the commons from the ordinary people of England and the war of subjugation waged aganst the Irish and the Scottish highlanders was the dress rehearsal for so many of the instrumentalities that would be more masssively and genocidally employed in the theft of Native America and the kidnapping, murder and super-exploitation of the slave trade, but it just doesn’t rate in Marshall’s narrow vision. It all begins with America for him. But it doesn’t, and it never did.

 

Another research project reducing everything to racism

Same kind of shit … with an even less sophisticated spin. If it isn’t (relatively non-violent) economic conservatism, it must be racism…so are the wild rumors about people setting fires in Oregon about Black people doing it? No, they’re about antifa. An expensive study done at Vanderbilt University by expensive people, and the result is cheap intellectual bullshit.