Welcome again to everybody. Make yourselves at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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I suspect it’s a bit of a memeification of a more poignant quote by Aimé Césaire, which you’ve probably seen. The one from https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:Discourse_on_Colonialism
Treatlerite, by comparison, seems to imply that people are okay with genocidal Hitler-like policies mainly because they get treats out of it. Which reduces complex dynamics of class and caste contradictions to basic hedonistic drives.
The irony here is that Césaire was encouraging, in the words above, “to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century”. In other words, to put great detail effort into understanding just what the hell is going on with white people precisely, especially the bourgeoisie of them, and how insidiously they hide behind faux pro-social narratives.
And reading Indi’s more recent articles makes me think Iran worked out precisely what would make the white bourgeoisie finally hurt and is going through a gradual process of making it happen: https://indi.ca/the-after-math/
But, similar to Russia’s gradual, plodding advances in Ukraine, they are not in a rush. They don’t need to make it all happen tomorrow. They only need to make sure that the trajectory keeps going down for the white bourgeoisie, that it is, in a sense, “a controlled explosion” as much as possible.
I think a similar understanding of the imperial core working class is needed and analyses of them often seem inadequate, from what I’ve seen. A framing like “treatlerite” doesn’t elucidate much. Sometimes the implication made is that the treats are treating the symptoms of the awful conditions, but if that’s the case, then it’s not the treats themselves that are sought after, it’s other needs and the treats are a coping mechanism; and if that really is a big part of what’s going on, that means the imperial core working class are a lot closer to revolt than they may seem at a glance. But I don’t think this explains all that much because having a means to treat symptoms does not explain the active support that many still have for the system and how it works.
One thing that repeats in my mind, is that it’s vital to look at the internal caste-like systems of imperial core regions. Such as in the US, which, roughly speaking, goes down something like: white man, white woman, black man, black woman, indigenous man, indigenous woman
Is the white working class just a mini version of the white bourgeoisie in terms of racism, colonial practice? Or is it more complicated than that? I’d think the contradictions would have to make it more complicated. That the white working class is intentionally meant to be racist enough for the white bourgeoisie to recruit from them as needed, but their racism (in today’s world) is often more of a passion-based racism than a plotting, logistics-based one. This makes a kind of sense to me because if the working class is good at logistics, they are harder to control, whereas passion alone can be directed via media and the like.
But I am only trying to expand the conversation, not do a comprehensive analysis.
You are more likely to see this behavior among wealthy suburbanites, not really among proletarians in North America or Europe, tbh.