I’d say it’s defined by the dominant group, but that group isn’t necessarily an ethnic group. For example, Sundar Pichai and Jensen Huang are certainly a part of that group. It’s not limited to white Anglo-Saxons anymore.
We really need to stop looking at the issue by pigeonholing it into racial, gender, or sexual categories, because that does not reflect the reality. There are gay oligarchs. There are women oligarchs. There are oligarchs of every skin tone.
These are counter-examples, of course; deviations from what we might consider the “norm,” which is cishetero white male oligarchs. Pointing out that it’s not limited to the latter isn’t a denial that the latter form a disproportionate majority of oligarchs. That’s the part a lot of people miss when I bring this up.
The fundamental issue though is class disparity, which we cannot lose sight of; even if there are other demographic trends within that disparity. Trying to make it about anything else is overly reductive and harmful.
Here in Australia, there was a genocide for a long time where the goal was to destroy Aboriginal culture. I mean, there was plenty of murder and eugenics in there too, but the culture was a really big thing. Kids were stolen from their parents and put on missions where they couldn’t speak language or practice religion. English and Christianity only. For a long time, Aboriginal people could only be granted citizenship if they renounced their Aboriginality. No more interacting in any way with the community, no language, no culture.
Aboriginal ontology and metaphysics are fundamentally different to European ontology and metaphysics. It’s a different reality. Consensus reality was made by white people, practicing whiteness in their actions. And then everyone else was forced into it, at least in “the west”. I assert that nonwhite people in the anglosphere are only allowed to join the dominant class, if they give up their own culture and its reality, and practice whiteness and white reality instead. Which isn’t that hard for a lot of bougie people of colour to do, because they’ve been colonised and assimilated.
I think the intersections of race and class are really important to understand, because if we rebel against race and not class, we’ll just end up with racist socialism. You know, like China and the USSR. And we’ll be doing “the people’s genocide” against the Uyghurs or whatever.
I propose instead that the revolution must be decolonial. Communism was invented by Turtle Islanders and Aboriginal people. Engels got the idea from reading Lewis Henry Morgan’s books on the Haudenosaunee. We will achieve successful communism, with no state, by working together with Indigenous people as our Elders and teachers, because they’re the experts. They’ve got the social science to do it already.
I’d say it’s defined by the dominant group, but that group isn’t necessarily an ethnic group. For example, Sundar Pichai and Jensen Huang are certainly a part of that group. It’s not limited to white Anglo-Saxons anymore.
We really need to stop looking at the issue by pigeonholing it into racial, gender, or sexual categories, because that does not reflect the reality. There are gay oligarchs. There are women oligarchs. There are oligarchs of every skin tone.
These are counter-examples, of course; deviations from what we might consider the “norm,” which is cishetero white male oligarchs. Pointing out that it’s not limited to the latter isn’t a denial that the latter form a disproportionate majority of oligarchs. That’s the part a lot of people miss when I bring this up.
The fundamental issue though is class disparity, which we cannot lose sight of; even if there are other demographic trends within that disparity. Trying to make it about anything else is overly reductive and harmful.
Here in Australia, there was a genocide for a long time where the goal was to destroy Aboriginal culture. I mean, there was plenty of murder and eugenics in there too, but the culture was a really big thing. Kids were stolen from their parents and put on missions where they couldn’t speak language or practice religion. English and Christianity only. For a long time, Aboriginal people could only be granted citizenship if they renounced their Aboriginality. No more interacting in any way with the community, no language, no culture.
Aboriginal ontology and metaphysics are fundamentally different to European ontology and metaphysics. It’s a different reality. Consensus reality was made by white people, practicing whiteness in their actions. And then everyone else was forced into it, at least in “the west”. I assert that nonwhite people in the anglosphere are only allowed to join the dominant class, if they give up their own culture and its reality, and practice whiteness and white reality instead. Which isn’t that hard for a lot of bougie people of colour to do, because they’ve been colonised and assimilated.
I think the intersections of race and class are really important to understand, because if we rebel against race and not class, we’ll just end up with racist socialism. You know, like China and the USSR. And we’ll be doing “the people’s genocide” against the Uyghurs or whatever.
I propose instead that the revolution must be decolonial. Communism was invented by Turtle Islanders and Aboriginal people. Engels got the idea from reading Lewis Henry Morgan’s books on the Haudenosaunee. We will achieve successful communism, with no state, by working together with Indigenous people as our Elders and teachers, because they’re the experts. They’ve got the social science to do it already.