I’ve been reading about the development of resistance movements in WWII, and I noticed something that got me thinking.

Resistance in a unified front (i.e. among groups that disagree politically), seems to require some form of shared identity.

  • The fighting front in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (groups including Zionists and Bundists) shared the common identity of being Jewish.

  • The united front in the French resistance (nationalists and communists) shared the common identity of being French1.

I think we can all agree that identifying with American patriotism is entirely reactionary – as a settler colony, there’s basically nothing redeemable there.

Is there an effective shared identity for people in the U$ to resist from?

I feel like the 2020 BLM protests had a shared identity of anti-racism, but it feels like that energy has dissipated.

1: not an identity without controversy, but not as directly reactionary as a full settler colonial national identity.

  • La Dame d'Azur@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    11·
    2 days ago

    I respect what you’re trying to do but I don’t think you realize how closely what culture we do have is tied almost directly to imperialism and colonialism and liberal mythology and the capitalist mode of production and settler ideology.

    Our entire national identity is quite literally surgically linked to being bourgeoisie even though most of us never have been and never will be. Our country was quite literally founded on bourgeois ideology as its culture, emphasizing materialist consumerism and rugged individualism to an almost comical degree. We cannot even conduct a cultural revolution under these conditions because our culture is literally defined by liberalism and capitalism and to reject these things is to essentially be a foreigner.

    So the only path forward I see is to just scrap the entire thing and start over; go back to America’s founding and start the process again, but this time with socialism as the basis for our culture instead of capitalism. That is legit the only thing we can do for a socialist revolution in the USA: dissolve the union, wipe the slate clean, start over fresh.

    • haui@lemmygrad.ml
      23·
      2 days ago

      I think we dont disagree on the entirety of what to do. The US state needs to go, no question. I’m talking about something different. People grow up and learn a language, they develop culture. Same as people from the us or the balkans who live in germany have their own culture which is produced by their multiple different cultures and material circumstances. If someone grows up in a german neighborhood with a basketball court and plays there every day after school, develops their own groups, shares their stories. That is how humanity works. And both can be true: the colonialism, the imperialism and the lives of the people. It is chauvinist to say they dont matter. This means the black slaves and black communities building their own also need to be deleted. I think it is dogmatic to no end and just a continuation of imperialism but against different people. Again, of course the imperialist states need to go and the settler states need to be given back to the people who lived there and things need to restart but denying culture is imperialist in itself.