Rosa Roja's words.

rosa roja  Joseph Nathan  5 days ago
In the broader sense ALL racism can be traced to the ruling class. That doesn't make it any less harmful, and it doesn't mean that the incidents did not happen.

The article did mention that the incidents could have been manufactured by police agents, but it also cast doubt on whether they happend at all! There is no factual basis for this doubt, but it's quite natural for a website that goes out of its way to pretend that racism (and the euro-american imperialism which is its source) is irrelevant or even nonexistent.

As usual they can't be bothered to solidarize themselves with the victims, but they are keen to denounce the supposed racism (oops, sorry, racIALism) on the part of the students.

rosa roja  Don Barrett  16 days ago
1. "Telling the truth is the necessary revolutionary task."

Yes it is. Telling it in a condescending, arrogant and heartless manner is not.

Allende made mistakes. His most inexplicable mistake, obvious at the time, was to trust the army. Nevertheless, he died resisting the coup. In doing so he did indeed "make a stand", as Barbar's comment said, and as you felt you had to deny. Could you not tolerate even one good thing being said about Allende?

Your comment about a leader murdered by fascists is a little hard to take from someone who seems to be sitting safe and sound in the home country of imperialism.

2. I attacked your comment, not you personally. You on the other hand, affected not to understand my objection, and instead attacked my whole world view, of which you know almost nothing.
That's not an honest way to deal with criticism, and as I wrote, I don't think it was Trotsky's way either.

3. I am not "hostile to the perspective offered by this site." I concur with it in many ways. In other ways, I think it is disastrously mistaken.

rosa roja  Gabriel Black  2 months ago
Instead of replying to what I wrote, you have amplified a bunch of points from the article which I neither disputed nor addressed. I'll try one last time:

1. Jim Bergren understood the article to be saying that Hannah Jones promoted a biological basis to racism. She wrote no such thing, and I pointed that out to Bergren. Do you have a problem with that?

2. It's no accident that Bergren drew the conclusion he did. The article
says "Hannah-Jones’s reference to DNA is part of a growing tendency to derive racial antagonisms from innate biological processes." Most readers would interpret this to accuse Hannah-Jones of deriving racism from biology, which is tantamount slandering her. That is what I was pointing out in my original comment.

rosa roja  TJ  2 months ago
Thanks for your response TJ.

1. "a worldview that sees the fundamental conflict in society in racial,
and not class terms, is clearly incorrect and dangerous." It is EQUALLY dangerous to ignore the fundamental division of the world wherein core capitalist nations oppress and exploit (or annihilate) the remainder of the world's people. Racism/imperialism is this, and it must be fought openly, not covered up as this website does. That is the point I always tried to make before I realized it was a waste of effort here. (The wsws is way behind people like Lenin on this.)

2. Let me ask you this. I wrote in my previous reply to you the following. Do you disagree with it? "It was European (i.e. "White") imperialism that plundered the non-European world, instituted chattel slavery, organized the genocide in the settler colonies, and carried out all those crimes that Marx denounces so eloquently in Capital."

3. The "Enlightenment" heritage you refer to is a mixture of good and bad. It included disgusting racist views about non-Europeans which served to justify colonial genocide and plunder.

4. I quoted Trotsky, NOT to claim that nothing has changed in 80 years, but to show he was not afraid to recognize racism on the part of white workers. (If you have not read his writings on this, I urge you to do so.) Have you ever seen such a recognition here? Have you even seen criticism of the mass incarceration of black people in the u.s, which is no less oppressive than Jim Crow was?

5. "Regarding racist ideology sinking its roots into the US. Yes, that clearly happened". It's clear to you and me, but is it clear to the wsws?

6. "There were sincere anti-racist views that inspired many people to fight in the civil war." Absolutely true.

7. Yes, I dislike the term "racialist". It is just the word "racist" in disguise. It amounts to calling black people that the wsws doesn't like "reverse racists"(!) I don't think that any term is needed to replace it, but if you think one is necessary, what about "race-based"?

(Incidentally, in the UK "racialist" is a synonym for "racist".
Considering that this website often reports from there, you'd think they'd be more sensitive to British usage.)

8. Let me ask you one last question, since you reject collective responsibility. Do you think that the Euro-americans who lived in the US in the last half of the 1800's shared some degree of collective responsibility for the genocide of the indigenous nations?

rosa roja  Anna Maus  3 months ago
On "DNA", you are being evasive. The article accused Hannah-Jones of saying something that she did not say. And if you think the article did not imply that she posited a biological basis to racism, then just read some of your defenders who drew exactly that conclusion.

You go on to ask what I disagree with. Omigod! I disagree with almost everything wsws says about race, starting with the word "racialist" which is a thinly disguised proxy for "racist". I've posted so many comments explaining my disagreements without getting anywhere that there's no point in trying yet again. If you read my second response to TJ you might get an inkling of my views. If you find something there to disagree with, we can discuss it.

rosa roja  TJ  3 months ago
Your main question is this: Is "white America" collectively responsible for the oppression of black people? If you ask it in those words, I will answer No, but I don't think a one-word answer is adequate. If you bear with me, I will try to indicate where I think a fuller answer lies.

The starting point must be that the ultimate responsibility for the oppression of "black people" in the US and everywhere, falls on the ruling class in the core capitalist nations of Europe and America. They are the ones who organize it, and who benefit the most from it. It was European (i.e. "White") imperialism that plundered the non-European world, instituted chattel slavery, organized the genocide in the settler colonies, and carried out all those crimes that Marx denounces so eloquently in Capital.

But to promote this process, a racist ideology had to be created, and it has sunk its roots into the culture of Europe (and the US, etc). This culture influences the thought -- and therefore the actions -- of everyone, not just members of the ruling class. (I don't see how any one who has lived in the US could deny this, or how a historical materialist could have expected anything different.) In a sense then, a shared culture does imply a kind of "collective responsibility".

Since you read this website, you might be interested that Trotsky did not feel the need to mince words in discussing white racism of his era (1933): "But today the white workers in relation to the Negroes are the oppressors, scoundrels, who persecute the black and the yellow, hold them in contempt and lynch them." And he exhorted his followers in the US to carry out "an uncompromising merciless struggle ... against the colossal prejudices of the white workers". You might also be interested, if you haven't seen it, to read what Lenin had to say about how a layer of English workers benefited materially from the super-exploitation of the English colonies, and how this hobbled the workers' movement.

I'm not sure I've answered your questions, but I hope at least it's the beginning of an answer.

You also asked about my "position on Hannah-Jones". I know her only from this one article. She writes well and with passion, and she brings out some historical facts that eveyone needs to know. But her analysis leads to a dead end. It operates at a superficial level that ignores the material basis of racial oppression and its roots in capitalism/imperialism. Some of her prose descends into what people sometimes called "Pork Chop Nationalism" in the 1970's, when what's wanted is the "revolutionary nationalism" of people like Fred Hampton, who before his murder by the state was forging an alliance between workers and community members of all colours (the original Rainbow Coalition). She even seems to want to drive a wedge between Africa and its diaspora! Claiming to combat racism without connecting it to imperialism as Malcolm X did is dangerously misguided.

 rosa roja  Yasir  3 months ago
"All you scholars should know, the conditions and the execution of slavery was much different than what was done in the Americas."

This is very important. You have put your finger on what is dishonest about this article. Equally important is that modern slavery was part of a bigger phenomenon, a Euro-American racism/imperialism that is a fundamental mode of organization of capitalism on a world scale.

One thing I would add, however, is that I do not think that a "level playing field" is a good description of what we want. We want a cooperative society that has no economic winners and losers.

rosa roja  9 months ago
This is the first time I've encountered the organization, ZOA. But whoever runs it should be informed that your sort of unsubstantiated smearing of anyone who dares to criticize Israeli actions is out of date. It no longer has the desired effect, because the barbarity of Netanyahu &co is too obvious to be denied. Before you tar every critic of Israel as an anti-semite, I advise you to consult some genuinely anti-semitic web sites. In order to "prove" that Jews rule the world, they say "if you want to know who rules you, just ask who it is that you cannot criticize". By trying to suppress criticism of Israel, you are just playing into their hands.

rosa roja  David Brown  a year ago
You raise several important points, David, that deserve thought.

I of course agree that on a moral plane there is no equivalence between the Black Panthers and the KKK, but my point was that the asymmetry goes deeper. The "nationalism" of an oppressed group differs from that of the oppressors because one has revolutionary potential while the other does not. Malcolm X and the "Black Power" movement illustrate this precisely because they changed and evolved with time. (One must look at their whole development, not just a snapshot at any single moment.)

The nationalism of Garvey and the Nation of Islam can develop in two directions. It can link up with anti-imperialist struggles in Africa and workers' movements in the US or it can turn into the bourgeois nationalism of someone like Ron Karenga, the "ultimately reactionary direction" you speak of. To view the nationalism of the oppressed undialectically as some sort of fixed essence is the mistake I was criticizing. Malcolm started by promoting the line that white people are devils, and he ended by denouncing capitalism and cooperating with socialists. DRUM in Detroit was even more explicitly proletarian in orientation. Martin King evolved in a similar direction from a different starting point. There was a potential for an internationalist and class-wide revolutionary current to grow, and that is why the state felt it necessary to destroy all of them.

For similar reasons, I cannot agree that "The Nation of Islam's demands ... were direct reflections of white supremacist views". Rather than reflecting some "inverted racism", the NOI was a *defensive reaction* to a separation that had been *imposed on* people of African descent against their will -- once again more of an asymmetry than a symmetry. Do present-day currents like Black Lives Matter have the same sort of revolutionary potential? I don't know enough about them to hazard an opinion, but if they do your unreserved attacks on them will only serve to drive them in the direction of bourgeois nationalism. (Nor do I understand what you mean by "a stunning number of calls for segregation among the pseudo-left".)

The above comments about nationalism also apply in part to syndicalism. That would be a whole other conversation, but again I feel that you underestimate its potential.

Finally, a couple ofcomments on your final paragraph: I think we need to admit that white supremacy, especially in relation to imperialism, does benefit white people in certain ways. I've posted Lenin's comments on this before and won't repeat them here. It's even the case that the Nazis benefited significant parts of the German population in certain ways, notably ending unemployment (my
impression from Otto Nathan's book on the Nazi economy.)

rosa roja  R_O  3 months ago
Thanks for your reply R_O. Just three points of clarification and a final comment.

1. I did not mean to imply that speculation by wsws was bad or that it was done without evidence. (Ukraine is not even speculation, it's established fact.) On the contrary, I mostly AGREE with the speculation that wsws does, except where it claims to read the mind of political actors it dislikes.

2. wsws has apparently decided to ignore the issue of US and UK interference in Hong Kong. WHY? This is what puzzles and disturbs some of us.

3. I agree with you that one of the articles exposing the roles of NED etc was biased toward the CCP and concentrated on just one or two personalities. That doesn't mean there's no involvement, as I think you agree. It's obvious on general principles that the NGOs etc are doing their dirty work. What's not obvious is how effective they are in this situation.

4. You are WAY more optimistic about what's happening in Hong Kong than seems warranted. Where is the anti-capitalist critique among the demonstrators? It's hard to be sure what's happening when there are no good reports, but do you see any evidence of an orientation to the working class? One thing that is going on is resentment of Hong Kong natives against immigrant Mandarin speakers from the mainland. I know this from friends, but again I don't know how important it is.

 rosa roja  Marshalldoc  3 months ago
You are right, and I've been wondering the same thing. In other cases this website is not shy to speculate about the involvement of intelligence agencies. Why then the silence in this case?

There can be no doubt that the U.S. government is involved in Hong Kong. How much influence they wield is another question, but to ignore their presence altogether really is peculiar.

rosa roja  Zalamander  a year ago
Right! To defeat imperialism is critical. But I would not see it as a *precondition* to defeating capitalism. Imperialism is part and parcel of capitalism, just as much as wage slavery.

Capitalism seen from inside is wage slavery. Seen from outside it is imperialism. If you defeat one you defeat the other, because they are the same thing.

And when you say "in all its manifestations", that is also critical because the most important manifestation of imperialism is racism.

Only a few organizations, like Black Agenda Report, seem to understand these essential points.

rosa roja  R_O  5 months ago
Unfortunately the wsws DOES shy away from the genocide, and this is doubtless why Lidiya reacted as she did. For you, it is apparently "the height of simplicity" to call attention to the fact that the U.S. was founded on genocide and nourished by slavery. But when the wsws minimizes or even ignores these fundamental facts, that is by some magic not simplistic at all! This has things precisely backward.

I am not going to reopen this debate because it is futile to do so on this website. I will just say that calling attention to plunder and genocide is not the same as saying that "race is the main factor throughout history". To say that would not only be false, it would be silly.

But what *is* true is that the "factor" of race, or more correctly Euro-american imperialism based on "race", has been inseparable from capital, starting more than 500 years ago and continuing today. Whoever ignores the decisive role of this "factor" in the internal make up of "really existing capitalism" is no historical materialist, but someone in the grip of a dangerously partial and incomplete understanding.

rosa roja  R_O  5 months ago
Much as I disagree with лидия on many things, I have to say that it is you who are engaging in simplistic argumentation. Her comment was perfectly valid as a corrective to the article's one-sided adulation of the American war of independence from Britain. I had exactly the same reaction and was going to post the same quotation from the Declaration of Independence. This one-sidedness is unfortunately part of a pattern on the part of this website to minimize or ignore entirely the genocide on which the US was founded.

Incicentallly, I'm not sure about your quote about blood dripping from every pore. I might be wrong, but I remember it being in Das Kapital vol I, not the manifesto.