blatant class reductionism

San Francisco CA

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Don’t bother reading Settlers .Ross Wolfe has been effectively and is currently still being outted as a racist— a condemnation beyond simple class reduction. This article has been shared with multiple Anti-Racist Action chapters. We are demanding a public apology, and reparations to all those censored on Anti-Fascist News. We are demanding justice for the damage done to our communities by giving racists a platform. Anti-Fascist news has published an apology for their disregard of our history as people of color as something ‘divisive’ after recognizing Mr. Wolfe has divided the Left between class reductionist, and comprehensive Leftists. Settler News An excerpt from the review posted by Wolfe states As an aside, why lim­it the cat­egory of “set­tler” to those from Europe? People from Africa were im­por­ted to the west­ern hemi­sphere to pro­duce sur­plus-value, which was sub­sequently trans­formed in­to cap­it­al. Were they “set­tlers” too? And what about Mex­ic­ans and In­di­ans already here, and Chinese im­por­ted later? They also pro­duced wealth used to dom­in­ate oth­ers. The blatant class reductionism portrayed here obscures the reality of settlers arriving on the shores of North America out of their own volition. A settler is defined as someone who settles in an area, typically one with few inhabitants. North America bursting with human life and culture was not only settled, but colonized. As a result, settler-colonialism is the nomination we use to describe the tactics of genocide and chattel slavery that came with European settlers. Who did the genociding? Some academics argue that because both African American slaves and indigenous peoples were contracted by militias to clear the land, via mass murder, to produce surplus labor, that they were complicit in imposing the settler movement on Amerikan soil. Again, blatant victim-blaming is apparent as the situation both victims (indigenous and African) were forced to perform these acts of violence. How accountable in genocide are oppressed populations in their own settler-colonialism if they are threatened with death and starvation for refusing to people of color off? I would hope the answer to this question is not at all; even as a basic biological concept, the desire to remain alive is inescapable. The review goes on to make light of the job opportunities available to Europeans settlers versus the Chinese, African, and indigenous proletariat upon Amerika’s colonizing. Chinese workers being massacred by Irish union workers, labeled as coolies in typical fascistic manner to justify genocide sent a clear message to people of color, the vast majority who did not own land of their own and were no more than slaves. Surprisingly, there was not a single mention of Irish servants during this foundational point in Amerikan history. Often times, these Irish servants are portrayed as slaves alongside the many Black and Brown workers of the time. However, unlike institutionalized chattel slavery, However, unlike institutionalized chattel slavery, indentured servitude was neither hereditary nor lifelong; unlike black slaves, white indentured servants had legal rights; unlike black slaves, indentured servants weren’t considered property. It takes a short visit to any slave-record site in the Caribbean to see that the vast majority of workers in the Caribbean were Irish. Demands of Mr. Wolfe’ So after I pos­ted this a couple days ago it was picked up by Anti-Fas­cist News, which linked to it along with the sole re­mark that it was “in­ter­est­ing.” This led some fans of Set­tlers to then launch a cam­paign against me per­son­ally, re­fer­ring to me as “a sac­ri­fi­cial pig to be made an ex­ample of” (a Mar­rano, per­haps?) and ap­plaud­ing the fact that I’d been doxxed in the past as a “com­mie Jew” by Storm­front neo-Nazis. One per­son even threatened to send people to my door, all be­cause I cri­ti­cized a book she likes. Joshua Mou­fawad-Paul of the blog M-L-M May­hem, whose meta-re­view I linked and whose name I un­for­tu­nately mis­spelled, also re­spon­ded to the post. Now the per­son who threatened to send people after me is de­mand­ing a re­trac­tion and an apo­logy, fol­lowed by “mon­et­ary re­par­a­tions will be made to the mul­tiple Black and in­di­gen­ous people who have had to de­fend their his­tory from the de­valu­ation of a White per­son for their labor.” You can’t make this shit up; it’s way too elab­or­ate and de­ranged. Rather than en­gage with a small group of ded­ic­ated and ob­vi­ously dis­turbed trolls, however, I’d prefer to sub­stan­ti­ate some of the cri­ti­cisms made in my open­ing tirade. Ad­mit­tedly, most of this con­sisted in me sum­mar­iz­ing en­gage­ments with Set­tlers un­der­taken by oth­er Marx­ists, with very little in the way of ori­gin­al com­ment­ary. Hope­fully this ad­dendum will give some sense of what it is I ob­ject to in the book.