Here is what Simon Bolivar said about the United States of America in 1829: “The United States appear to be destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty.”
Bolivar was prophetic.
Two hundred years later, Bolivar's words can be updated to assert that the United States is destined by Providence to plague the entire world with misery in the name of liberty.
Just to add to my precious comment, I want to say that if Bolivarians supported the American “Revolution”, it is because they were misinformed about its character. And that’s completely fine. Movements, historical figures and states can be wrong sometimes, which is why I support none of them uncritically.
When, as a Marxist, you read something like that, your alarm bells should be ringing. You should recognize it as an L on the part of Bolivarianism. Take the good with the bad. I admire the movement for its achievements, but this was clearly a mistake on their part.
Vietnam made the same mistake, with a key difference. Ho Chi Minh was in fact very inspired by America’s Declaration of Independence. So much so that he reached out to the Americans for help with Vietnam’s revolution, having seen how the founding fathers claimed to support “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.
Needless to say, the U.S. responded by giving military support to France, their colonizer.
Herein lies the difference. Ho Chi Minh immediately changed his mind about the United States, and when Americans came to invade his homeland, he fought back against them and won.
Stalin, too, was wrong about certain things. He used to support Israel, thinking that it had the potential to become socialist at a certain point. He, too, ended up changing his mind later on, even when others in the Communist Party remained misled about Zionism.
If most Marxist were to do what you have done with this post and take his initial support of Israel at face value, saying “look, Stalin supported Israel, we should too”, then we’d be just as reprehensible as fascists.
Additionally, I think comparing the Soviet Union not wanting to balkanize its republics to decolonization in America is pretty nonsensical. They aren’t related at all. The origins of the Russian state can be traced back to the establishment of the Rus’ state in 862 CE.
The average Russian can trace their ancestry back to 15 generations and still find that they lived in the same place. Most Euro-Americans can barely trace their ancestry back 3 generations before the genealogical record inevitably leads them to the British Isles or Germany.
The American “Revolution” is widely regarded by MLs as a bourgeois revolution, but I’d go so far as to contest the idea that it was a revolution at all. Sure it was a conflict between different capitalists, but it did nothing to fundamentally change the structure of society. It simply changed which slave-owning settlers controlled the capitalist state.
You could argue that North America was still feudal in 1776, but that’s another discussion. I personally think it was a mix of both modes of production.
Lastly, Canada, for the very same reasons, is just as synthetic of a nation as the United States. The primary difference between the two is that the latter developed a stronger sense of bourgeois nationalism, while the former never did due to remaining within the British sphere of influence.
Another difference is that, if it can be said that the United States has almost entirely completed its settler colonial project, Canada is still carrying out its own.
The Indigenous population in Canada hovers around 5%, compared to the American 1%. Canadian police carry out crimes against First Nations people more openly for this very reason.
Their society also seems to be more viciously racist against the Indigenous population, partly as a result of having more regular contact with them, unlike in the States where most Americans will never visit a reservation. The most exposure they’ll get to their idea of Indigenous people is through Hollywood depictions or commodities.
I’ve been following Rainer since the beginning. Ever since his first few posts I’ve been a major fan and have been sharing his substacks in my circles. His writing was excellent and his arguments made a lot of sense. Well, they used to, anyway.
The concept of allying with the right and seeing them as anti-imperialist always rubbed me the wrong way, but I could sort of understand the reasoning, even if it was a stretch.
The idea that figures such as Caleb Maupin were demonized too much when they do good work was also a compelling point.
The shit talking of Sakai was deeply disappointing, as Rainer clearly had no clue what the former’s works were actually about, but I tried to take the good with the bad.
All that aside though, this entire post is just going way, way too far. It’s literal American chauvinism dressed in Marxist jargon. It manages to go further right than any PatSoc I’ve seen, which is one hell of a feat.
Patriotism is really only justified for colonized and anti-imperialist nations. The United States is the protector of global capitalism. It is THE world’s colonizer, a settler colonial nation that by its very nature has no right to exist.
Anyone with a cursory understanding of historical materialism would conclude, therefore, that Marxism has no place in a settler nation. The nation’s character will and has to be changed entirely before any attempt at socialism can be made.
Decolonization always will be the first priority of American Marxists, just as it would for Israelis. If Israel managed to complete its genocidal project and expand to cover much more territory, thereby lowering the population of Palestinians in the region to around 1%, it wouldn’t change the fact that liberating that 1% would be the focus of any ML movement worth its salt.
Educate yourself about decolonization, Rainer. It has nothing to do with Indigenous people presiding over the whole of the United States, or even a stare with a majority white population. Not even in the slightest.
As it stands, I’ve determined that this content is just too disturbing for me to continue reading. The author isn’t evolving intellectually at all, and has continued to lean more and more heavily into settler ideology. This post is emblematic of that.
I’m unsubscribing from the Substack and likely won’t be reading another one of these posts.
Here is what Simon Bolivar said about the United States of America in 1829: “The United States appear to be destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty.”
Bolivar was prophetic.
Two hundred years later, Bolivar's words can be updated to assert that the United States is destined by Providence to plague the entire world with misery in the name of liberty.
Just to add to my precious comment, I want to say that if Bolivarians supported the American “Revolution”, it is because they were misinformed about its character. And that’s completely fine. Movements, historical figures and states can be wrong sometimes, which is why I support none of them uncritically.
When, as a Marxist, you read something like that, your alarm bells should be ringing. You should recognize it as an L on the part of Bolivarianism. Take the good with the bad. I admire the movement for its achievements, but this was clearly a mistake on their part.
Vietnam made the same mistake, with a key difference. Ho Chi Minh was in fact very inspired by America’s Declaration of Independence. So much so that he reached out to the Americans for help with Vietnam’s revolution, having seen how the founding fathers claimed to support “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.
Needless to say, the U.S. responded by giving military support to France, their colonizer.
Herein lies the difference. Ho Chi Minh immediately changed his mind about the United States, and when Americans came to invade his homeland, he fought back against them and won.
Stalin, too, was wrong about certain things. He used to support Israel, thinking that it had the potential to become socialist at a certain point. He, too, ended up changing his mind later on, even when others in the Communist Party remained misled about Zionism.
If most Marxist were to do what you have done with this post and take his initial support of Israel at face value, saying “look, Stalin supported Israel, we should too”, then we’d be just as reprehensible as fascists.
Additionally, I think comparing the Soviet Union not wanting to balkanize its republics to decolonization in America is pretty nonsensical. They aren’t related at all. The origins of the Russian state can be traced back to the establishment of the Rus’ state in 862 CE.
The average Russian can trace their ancestry back to 15 generations and still find that they lived in the same place. Most Euro-Americans can barely trace their ancestry back 3 generations before the genealogical record inevitably leads them to the British Isles or Germany.
The American “Revolution” is widely regarded by MLs as a bourgeois revolution, but I’d go so far as to contest the idea that it was a revolution at all. Sure it was a conflict between different capitalists, but it did nothing to fundamentally change the structure of society. It simply changed which slave-owning settlers controlled the capitalist state.
You could argue that North America was still feudal in 1776, but that’s another discussion. I personally think it was a mix of both modes of production.
Lastly, Canada, for the very same reasons, is just as synthetic of a nation as the United States. The primary difference between the two is that the latter developed a stronger sense of bourgeois nationalism, while the former never did due to remaining within the British sphere of influence.
Another difference is that, if it can be said that the United States has almost entirely completed its settler colonial project, Canada is still carrying out its own.
The Indigenous population in Canada hovers around 5%, compared to the American 1%. Canadian police carry out crimes against First Nations people more openly for this very reason.
Their society also seems to be more viciously racist against the Indigenous population, partly as a result of having more regular contact with them, unlike in the States where most Americans will never visit a reservation. The most exposure they’ll get to their idea of Indigenous people is through Hollywood depictions or commodities.
This guy has officially fucking lost it.
I’ve been following Rainer since the beginning. Ever since his first few posts I’ve been a major fan and have been sharing his substacks in my circles. His writing was excellent and his arguments made a lot of sense. Well, they used to, anyway.
The concept of allying with the right and seeing them as anti-imperialist always rubbed me the wrong way, but I could sort of understand the reasoning, even if it was a stretch.
The idea that figures such as Caleb Maupin were demonized too much when they do good work was also a compelling point.
The shit talking of Sakai was deeply disappointing, as Rainer clearly had no clue what the former’s works were actually about, but I tried to take the good with the bad.
All that aside though, this entire post is just going way, way too far. It’s literal American chauvinism dressed in Marxist jargon. It manages to go further right than any PatSoc I’ve seen, which is one hell of a feat.
Patriotism is really only justified for colonized and anti-imperialist nations. The United States is the protector of global capitalism. It is THE world’s colonizer, a settler colonial nation that by its very nature has no right to exist.
Anyone with a cursory understanding of historical materialism would conclude, therefore, that Marxism has no place in a settler nation. The nation’s character will and has to be changed entirely before any attempt at socialism can be made.
Decolonization always will be the first priority of American Marxists, just as it would for Israelis. If Israel managed to complete its genocidal project and expand to cover much more territory, thereby lowering the population of Palestinians in the region to around 1%, it wouldn’t change the fact that liberating that 1% would be the focus of any ML movement worth its salt.
Educate yourself about decolonization, Rainer. It has nothing to do with Indigenous people presiding over the whole of the United States, or even a stare with a majority white population. Not even in the slightest.
As it stands, I’ve determined that this content is just too disturbing for me to continue reading. The author isn’t evolving intellectually at all, and has continued to lean more and more heavily into settler ideology. This post is emblematic of that.
I’m unsubscribing from the Substack and likely won’t be reading another one of these posts.