Share this page!

Roderic Day Profile picture
Twitter logo
21 Oct, 6 tweets, 2 min read
>No one is talking about reducing anything

there are tons and tons of very high-profile people, very explicitly arguing for various forms of class reductionism
Glenn Greenwald and Angela Nagle, to name two
Angela Nagle was very prominently featured on the likes of ChapoTrapHouse and CurrentAffairs. She argues for abandoning "identity politics" to appeal to the platonic racist white construction worker, attacking immigrants, queer people, etc.
I think these issues should be taken very seriously.

A lot of accusations of class reductionism get dismissed as "idpol", which is plain bad Marxist analysis imo.

The best essay on the topic, as far as I'm concerned:
Capitalism goes hand-in-hand with White Supremacy everywhere because Capital destroys mass living standards in its murderous profit-drive, so it then has to pay strategic bribes to protect the accumulated holdings.

However, who would sign up for this?
Recent collaborations between cops and white fascist militias in Kenosha, or Cruceñista Bolivians, show how Capital collaborates with those looking for a non-monetary payoff: racists, sexists, xenophobes, bigots.

And via the BPP and MAS, we see the reverse is true as well!

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
　

Keep Current with Roderic Day

Roderic Day Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @RodericDay

Roderic Day Profile picture
8 Sep
Absolutely fascinating Foreign Policy article about China, Xinjiang, and Uyghurs from May 2014!

Before Obama's "pivot to Asia" got going, propaganda was still wall-to-wall "Muslim Terrorism", so people wrote about Chinese issues more sympathetically.
foreignpolicy.com/2014/05/14/one…
Opens up by clearly explaining that there is indeed ongoing terrorism in the region, but that Uyghurs lived normaly lives all over China.

This fact is nowadays obscured, terrorism merely an "allegation" from the "regime".
Look at this! The "some would say" is reserved not to demonize those who hold back on demonizing China, but on those who do!

Nowadays we hear wall-to-wall the opposite: "China's propaganda machine (some would say news station)"
Read 13 tweets
Roderic Day Profile picture
23 Aug
Black Ribbon Day effectively constitutes a collaboration between anti-communist Nazis and collaborators imported into Canada as "refugees" post WW2, and the capitalist ruling class who appreciates their fervent opposition to pro-social communist activism and agitation.
Since 2009, in Canada, both Liberals and Conservatives have been trying to make "Black Ribbon Day" a thing.

The August 23rd remembrance attempts to draw an equivalence between the Holocaust and "the crimes of Communism".
"Nazi hunter" Steve Ramban points out that "between 2,000 and 5,000 war criminals fled to Canada after the Second World War, but not one Nazi has ever been successfully prosecuted in this country".
nationalpost.com/news/canada/na…
Read 20 tweets
Roderic Day Profile picture
31 Jul
@calicoarse Unfortunately my mandarin isn't yet so good that I can improve on anyone's translations, but I do have some information on this leak.

I think the "framing" of the report itself does a lot of the work, though. Take these three screenshots: ImageImageImage
@calicoarse One of the authors, Austin Ramzy, was recently caught by a Chinese commentator tipping his hand a bit too hard in terms of revealing his feelings towards China via some aesthetic choices on Twitter.
@calicoarse He's now changed it to something more innocuous.

So with these two points in hand, I think you can do something akin to what the person who did the BBC analysis did, and separate fact from spin. Image
Read 5 tweets
Roderic Day Profile picture
26 Jul
I'm gonna make a thread about key resources that I encountered as I researched Xinjiang/Uyghur accusations. No particular order, maybe vaguely chronological.

This documentary critique by Sun Feiyang was the first, flipping the BBC narrative on its head.
medium.com/@sunfeiyang/br…
I happened to be taking Mandarin classes at the time, so tidbits like deliberate mis-translation really grabbed me. Or the "dramatic irony" wrt leaving.

It's really quite something watching the documentary before and after.

Basically a top-tier class in recognizing propaganda! ImageImageImage
Then I started looking at the more "grassroots" kinda evidence, little videos from regular people in social media crying, making it seem like existence there was quite sad and miserable.

That turned out this thread full of debunked clips and stories:
Read 72 tweets
Roderic Day Profile picture
8 Apr
Western-leftist critiques of capitalism, informed by anarchism/libertarianism, tend to focus on the mechanisms of exploitation. The best example is the simplistic anti-communist metaphor by Bakunin, rehashed by Chomsky, about "the People's Stick".
Adherence to these platitudes explains why they offer only begrudging praise in acknowledgement of how well China and Cuba are handling the crisis. Communist lessons are largely ignored when westerners look to improve their own situation.
The issue is that, when it comes to exploitation, the anarchist critique focuses on *how*, whereas Marxist critique focuses on *why*. The difference between Feudalism and Capitalism was the most interesting thing in the world to Marx, whereas anarchists focus on similarities.
Read 28 tweets
Roderic Day Profile picture
5 Apr
wrt the work of analyzing and learning from the failures of Sanders, Corbyn, NDP:

all the power "the left" ever had in "the west" was concessions resulting from capital fearing the USSR. there's nothing these figureheads can do or say that would have made any major difference.
researchgate.net/publication/33…
stop examining with a microscope where you suspect they went wrong rhetorically, where they forged the wrong alliance, where they said the wrong thing. there's no magic incantation you can chant to go back to the pre-Blair, pre-Clinton era.
Read 12 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

Like this author's thread?

Get email notifications when new thread is out from this Author!

Check out other threads from this Author!

Read all threads by @RodericDay