In our time of liberal fascism, where the Biden administration is indicting communists for doing anti-imperialist work while trying to use the RESTRICT act to codify this practice, the main “Red-Brown alliance” is the one between the liberal fascists and the “Marxists” who tail them. Our equivalents of the Strasserites, the element of socialists who allied with the Nazis, are largely the liberal tailists who claim to be “Marxists” while volunteering to be Democratic Party discourse agents. There are still the types who are right opportunists, yet they lack the kind of narrative power that the left opportunists have.
I’m personally a fan of Black Agenda Report, i think they do a lot of good work, i always enjoyed reading them and listening to their programs and i find it quite sad to see this conflict that has developed between them and certain parts of the communist movement in the US. But i was also quite shocked at how many NATO talking points about the Ukraine conflict that they have repeated. I don’t believe that they do this for any malicious reason but simply because the imperialist propaganda is so overwhelming and omnipresent, and the pressure to accept at least part of it in order to not be completely ostracized and demonized in progressive and other liberal adjacent circles is so high.
It’s of course your prerogative to disagree with Rainer, there are valid critiques to be made of the strategy that he endorses, but i do think it is about as unfair and disingenuous to accuse him of “carrying water for fascists” as it would be for the other side of this debate to accuse you of guilt by association with imperialists because you support BAR who have connections with so-called progressive and pro-Democrat organizations.
Ultimately coalition building is always going to be messy. Someone is always going to be disappointed and some of the temporary alliances of convenience that one enters into are going to make some people feel “impure”, as if merely by associating with certain people with whom one has ideological disagreements one’s soul becomes “tainted” or “dirty”. This is understandable as we all have certain ideological positions that we are very heavily emotionally invested in, and when we encounter people who take the opposite position our negative emotional reaction is very strong, particularly when the issue in question is one that affects us personally.
For instance if your number one enemy are internal reactionaries and the threat they pose to you and your community then it makes sense for your own self-interest to compromise on imperialism and ally with liberal adjacent forces. I can’t blame anyone for making such a choice for the sake of their own safety and survival, even if i do fear it may be short sighted. It takes a certain amount of privilege to be able to assign a lower priority to the threats that reactionaries pose to marginalized communities. But by the same token don’t be surprised when people for whom the primary threat are not domestic US reactionaries but the actions of the US empire abroad (which is the case for most of the global south) choose the compromise that they feel keeps them safer.
On the whole i will say though that i think both sides of this particular debate make some valid arguments but i also see problematic aspects in each camp. I am hopeful that this can be resolved because i think there are more commonalities than differences, and in my opinion the disagreements are kind of being exaggerated…it’s not so much that there is a major qualitative ideological difference but merely a difference of where the focus lies, what each side sees as their number one strategic priority.
I do wish you would continue to read what Rainer has to say and continue to seriously critique it, i think that these discussions are valuable, they are the kind ideological struggle that needs to be carried out internally among the left until we arrive at a synthesis to resolve this contradiction we are seeing.
If you’ve seen their coverage of the Uhuru House raids, then you already know why their speech has been chilled since. New Afrikans are held to a different set of rules than settlers where journalism is concerned. Rainer can type whatever the blue fuck he wants on that substack of his, he’ll likely never know federal harassment over it. Meanwhile, the Uhuru movement questions the narrative, their shit gets raided, their hard drives stole, and a bunch of its people thrown in the pen(and I hope, since you read BAR, you at least broke a lil change for the bail fund. Them, or the Cop City lockups, rly). Hell, I’ve been harassed by both uniformed pigs and plain-clothes FBI before just for being close to people who challenge the narrative. So when I see the likes of BAR having to code-switch, I understand that this is necessity for survival, because there’s no instance of code-switching that isn’t.
This is not a purity thing. This is a “you’ve got me fucked upside-down and sideways if you think I’m going to sit there and regard someone who coalition-builds with phobics and not come to see them as just another opp” thing. The Mises Caucus is literally running out oldhead libertarians with their manifold hatreds. I see a Kristallnacht II happening in the next ten years, and mark my words, it’ll be Rainer’s new buddies holding the knives at the end of the day. If it was like-- those oldhead, Ron Paul libertarians circa 2007, I’d have less dragging to do about the matter, but these new libertarians are literally the type that want to exterminate LGBT folk and their ‘ideology’. These are literally hard-right MAGAts that Rainer thinks he can somehow civilize; and… No.
I’m not doing that. No one I know is doing that-- and I genuinely feel like my intelligence is being insulted when people try to tell me that what I’m seeing isn’t real, or isn’t an issue at this point. These are literal brownshirts; and those who play with them will pay for it.
cfgaussian was saying that BAR repeats a lot of NATO talking points about Ukraine and you’re saying that repeating NATO talking points is actually “code-switching” for survival. Ok, then what’s the point? What’s the point of having a leftist org that repeats imperialist talking points?
What part of “they essentially have to to keep a platform and keep from getting funneled into carceral slavery, considering the settler-left will conveniently overlook as much of our shit as they feel they can get away with” did you not read out of that? What would you have? That the colonized subjects of empire just submit themselves to the death squads doing shit to appease your desire for internal purity-of-thought? I already know to disregard their geopolitical takes regarding NATO in favor of their coverage of movements in the New Afrikan community, and that of the global south, so… What is your point here? This isn’t something that can be warrant canary’d, you actually have to read between the lines here. Shocking, I know.
You make a very good point that BAR should not be discarded just because they have some bad takes on the Ukraine conflict. We need them for all the good work that they do in so many other respects, we simply support the good positions that they take and reject the bad ones. But by the same logic however, could you not simply disregard the reactionary positions of those involved in the RAWM protests and just focus on supporting their anti-NATO and anti-war activism? Is that not something that is inherently valuable for the communist movement regardless which ideological direction that it comes from? As communists we should have enough confidence in our own convictions that we don’t need fear being subsumed and losing our identity just because we work together on occasion with people and groups from different ideological camps. After all, we also have no problem working with anarchists and even socdems when it comes to things like labor organizing, tenant unions, prisoner advocacy, etc. So long as the practical results are positive isn’t that what really matters?