EffortPostMcGee

Cuz it sounded like you were saying the settler-colonial question has been settled and doesn't matter anymore

I don't really know how you read that in my reply when I even said "...I don't dispute the existence of a labor-aristocracy and it being the difficult obstacle to overcome still..." in the last paragraph of the original reply.

Not to be combative, but that basically sides you with the MAGAcommunist.

Okay, well I'm glad that you've jumped to this conclusion as a result of not fully reading what I wrote, but yeah, I don't think Jackson Hinkle and his ilk are very smart people with a lot of interesting things to say. I believe that Settlerism is a fundamental contradiction and needs to be reckoned with if we want to have any serious discussion of discussing revolution and capitalism in particular in the United States. I really know what else to say to that.

What, exactly, did you disagree with?

I think this is the misunderstanding though. I didn't disagree with you. Like, I don't intend to be lecturing here, but when high school/freshman college students consider the "perfect sphere rolling across a frictionless surface" the point of doing so is because they haven't developed enough knowledge of physics to be able to analyze more complex physical dynamics, in other words, because the discussion of physics of such a scenario is incredibly theoretical and simple. But everything said about such a hypothetical is entirely correct and applies downstream when considering perfect spheres rolling across surfaces with friction, and imperfect spheres rolling across frictionless surfaces, and then what needs to be developed for these students to be able to analyze this is a more complicated understanding of physics. Apologies for the analogy but I hope we can see where I'm going here?

I want to now keep in mind this part of the reply:

Bourgeoisified workers are not frictionless spheres in a vacuum on a perfectly flat plane, they're like, probably at least 20% of the US workforce.

as I respond to what we might disagree with (and more specifically, to say what I'm trying to say more in a more plane fashion).

I think that, as United States hegemony, and respectively, the capitalist system of the United States dies, that members of the labor aristocracy will continue to become proletarianized and ergo have the potential to become revolutionary anti-capitalists. Granted, this is like classic Marx and Engels levels of analysis, but this is alluded to in the Manifesto and then later developed further in developed a bit in Das Kapital.

Okay great, so if you agree with me on that, then, while at the moment, as you say probably 20% of the population exists as members of the labor aristocracy, then, your analysis is correct, right now and the nature of settler colonialism makes it the primary obstacle of concern in developing revolutionary socialism in a settler colonial state.

But I think that it is increasingly become less and less correct; as I allude to in my original reply, financial capital is consuming the wealth of the labor aristocracy in an effort to stay alive at the moment. In which case, given, I don't know, say 10 - 15 years, I think that the present situation will develop in an entirely new and unexpected direction with the potential for this fundamental contradiction to not be able to be fully explained by Sakai-style-capital-S Settlerism anymore at the level of just principally the class of US Laborers.

So now, as a reply to the original post, and a point made by a few other replies, my argument is that settler colonialism is going to continue to erode as the primary contradiction and become simply one of the many primary contradictions, and I hope that clears up what I was and am trying to say.

I don't think you needed a more extreme example and I'm not really sure what this question is aiming to achieve. This is like asking "did Frontiersmen in the United States have the same class interests as the Native Americans that they were slaughtering for sport?" To which the answer is clearly no.

Your reply reads as combative to me, by the way, due to the way you've instantly decided to purity test me on the issue of Israel-Palestine. I've been a vocal critic of the apartheid state of Israel in real life for over 12 years. So can you please explain to me why you've decided to pursue this question?

I made my reply to say that doing the mind game of "pick a hypothetical worker" isn't a very good form of analysis in the United States because this hypothetical worker increasingly doesn't exist and more than that, is incomplete when we are talking about settler colonialism. I mean, this hypothetical example could've actually applied to a Native American person, who, even if they are in a compradore relationship with settler-colonialism, has a fundamentally different relationship to it than an actual descendant of settlers.

So let us imagine a hypothetical worker. They went to college on the GI Bill and have clear path of advancement in their career, they have retirement savings in the stock market and savings in the bank, they have a home which is accruing value in the real estate market, and they keep up with their credit and debts and bills because of that well paying job. Their kids can grow up to be real estate agents, investment bankers, and corporate executives.

To me this seems like the equivalent of saying "imagine a perfectly spherical ball rolling across a smooth frictionless surface" in terms of picking a member of the "bourgeouified portion of the working class". Note that, I'm going to refer to the "bourgeouified portion of the working class" as being members of the "labor aristocracy" for this reply. That may lead to some disagreement, but from my understanding both of what labor aristocracy means and of your post, this is essentially what we are talking about.

• Going to university on the GI Bill could be a veteran or it could be a spouse or child of a veteran, so this complicates the analysis slightly. Especially because not every household of this demographic is the idyllic leave-it-to-beaver family with kids that are like "Gee golly mom/dad, it sure was swell that you killed all those people overseas when you were in the Army", even if they do directly benefit from their parent doing that. Plus, the existence of anti-imperialist and/or socialist veterans implies, to me at least, that even amongst this demographic, there must be something which could interest this worker in socialism.
• Barely any careers have a clear path of advancement anymore. I can't even really think of more than 10, and even amongst those, not all of them would be jobs I would consider to be apart of the labor aristocracy.
• The portion of college graduates who can comfortably save and invest has gone down dramatically (see the next point).
• The portion of college graduates who are able to afford a home (which is accruing value) has gone down dramatically. I mean, the average age of first time home buyers increased from 35 to 38 in just this last year.
• It seems dubious that, even if you did find someone for whom all the above factors do hold, that they would assume that their child would be able to easily be successful in any of the types of career which do enjoy an elevated relationship over ordinary labor, especially in 2024/2025.

Above all of that, climate change affecting them or their children, decreasing standard of living and lowering life expectancy all still seem like plausible reasons for even this hypothetical worker to adopt socialist politics, even if it's unlikely.

However, I don't dispute the existence of a labor-aristocracy and it being the difficult obstacle to overcome still, especially when we consider the direct relationship members of the labor aristocracy have with settler-colonialism and imperialism in the US. I just think that as the contradictions inherent in capitalism continue to progress into their terminal phase, we're going to see less and less of this type of worker because the US capitalist system is being forced to liquidate this exact kind of worker at the moment in order to stay alive. Consequently, I think that this type of analysis is becoming increasingly outdated at the moment.

Thanks for the clarification! In my mind, I sort of just think "metric first" so the topology induced by that metric is always just assumed, but that's because I don't ever work with non-metrizable spaces.

I'm not really confused about what you're saying here exactly, and since the original post is deleted, I can't really even see what was originally said, but I was confused about this:

(like the real number that that sequence converges to given the standard topology of the space of real numbers).

Why make mention of the standard topology here exactly? It's not exactly clear to me why this has anything to do with what you two are discussing.

I just graduated and most of the people I was going to school with agreed that, regardless of if we pay these loans or not, the crisis is so bad that they'll have to forgive us all eventually anyway. So the only people even entertaining the idea of paying these things off are people with internships to ghoulish corporations or non-profits. Otherwise, we are all just acting like they simply ✨ do not exist ✨

How could we prove the Riemann Hypothesis?

So are you saying that in your opinion, all nuclear reactors, which includes this one developed by this team of researchers and engineers, are unsafe because you've seen the careless disposition of other people in the workplace(s) that you worked in? What exactly about this qualifies you to make all the other claims you're making?

But, why has no one pointed out the obvious chauvinism or overt racism in your comment? You are saying that no nuclear reactor designed thus far has been safe, and therefore this one made in China must also be unsafe, or that these scientists and engineers in China must be lying or over hyping the claims they are making. Concerning the technical limitations you are trying to gesture at, you can only come to the conclusion you are coming to if you think that there is something about China, or Chinese people, that forbids it from doing science and engineering better than wherever you come from. Concerning the only thing of substance you make a claim of knowledge for, you are saying that there is something about China or Chinese workers that forbids them from actually giving a fuck about their jobs as nuclear reactor technicians, scientists, and engineers, such that they strictly could not design safer processes or conduct themselves in an appropriately professional way better than wherever you come from.

Moreover, I don't really understand why you think other people should listen to your perspective on the matter when you have put basically 0 effort within your comment to give any real justification. Essentially you are saying "I worked with these things, so just simply trust me."

Summer "this year" started for the southern Hemisphere last December 21st. So minus those 9 days from the previous year, it doesn't seem odd to say "Earth's summer", no?

Maybe a problematic take, but how could Europeans have colonized the land in Western Russia, when that land mass sits atop the European continent? Wouldn't any people and their civilizations originating from Europe also be European? I'm only asking because I've been confused by this in the past with discussions surrounding colonialism, and maybe it's just because the term has a different meaning than the webster dictionary version + some extra understanding developed from some socialist theory I've read... but I've never read anything that stated that Europeans colonized Europe, except for here usually pertaining to like the Sami people residing in the modern day states of Sweden & Finland, and now this as well, and all of it has equally has me confused.