The Make-Up of Lib Com

Got caught up in hyperbole there, but I know you can figure out what I was trying to get at. I'm arguing in good faith, won't you?

Well in that case all I ever argued was that in my experience oppressed and marginalized social and ethnic groups tend to be overrepresented rather than underrepresented by the demographics of the libertarian left, not that such groups were the "majority". (I still find it spurious that the majority of libertarian leftists are allegedly male...)

I would be seriously shocked if there were anarchist organisations in Thailand.

Devrim

I think the place where you find most explicitly anarchist organisations outside Europe is South America. I would guess above all Argentina, Brazil and Chile (somebody write in who knows.) If you are talking about grassroots organisations of class struggle then of course this is a completely different story, and, in my opinion, more worth spending time thinking about. For example in a lot of class struggle situations you do get the female base/ male leadership problem.

From my very limited experience in south-east Brazil, the Indymedia group was nearly all white for class reasons- it mostly attracted people who had the money for a camera and acomputer. The MTST (homeless peoples´ movement- a bit like an urban version of the MST, not as big though) wasn´t, also for class reasons obviously. In what little I saw, there were more women than men in the occupations but the men did most of the talking in the meetings and were the ones going round telling people what to do.

Actually, pretty much every Latin American country has some sort of self-proclaimed "anarchist" grouping. There are problems within this, since the term itself tends to limit self-proclaimed "anarchists" to university educated (probably with a Humanities degree) urbanites. There is also an over-representation of academia and civil society, which somewhat blurs the workplace struggle issue. Maybe that's tangential, but I think it implies how discussing race and gender without class is problematic.

I wouldn't

"อนาธิปไตย", the Thai term for "anarchism", gets about 71,000 Google hits.

Judging off of that alone, I would say there are probably a few. As irrelevant and pathetically moribund as in the Anglosphere, I'd imagine.

Yeah true.

Pretty much. I think it is a racist term because it lumps in all non-whites together as a group and I was writing in response to someone who was somehow positing that this was a good thing.

That's of course a genuine and important question - but you'll agree that there are issues that do tend to reinforce the demographics of the organised anarchist scene, and that an internal sorting-out of ourselves is a necessary part of doing things better in a concrete sense?

In terms of more concrete stuff I'd see, for instance, the anarcha-feminist conference as a definite step in the right direction.

I don't at all disagree, but I think some of the same problematic sorts of attitudes come up in each case, which was the point I was making - not that these issues are the same, or that our politics/demographics with regard to them are at the same stage of development.

But...

BigLittleJ stole my reply.

But anyway, racial descriptions in America are never going to be perfect or completely without referring to a relationship with whites, because the racial experience and history has whites as the prime pusher of this relationship.

Still, I'll take the term, people of color, which is saying what one is, rather than non-white, which is saying what one isn't. I think getting into implicit meanings is missing the point.

No one has really made a convincing argument that POC is worse or is as bad as the other terms. Just that there are issues with it.

I think focusing on the term is missing the point: non-whites, people of color, whatever, are not a uniform body with common revolutionary goals. Instead, they are a diverse collection of occasionally highly disparate groups, to each of which one can and should apply class analysis. PoC is a sort of shibboleth for people who hold the former, which is why it raises a red flag for people who hold the latter.

I think racial descriptions are never going to be perfect but I think that they don't need to refer to a relationship with whites because if we are going to use them it should be in a descriptive manner. Also how do we designate 'person of colour'? How about hispanics? Or Russians, or the irish? It turns out that lumping all whites together is as nonsensical as lumping together all the people that aren't.
If you are going to include all 'oppressed races' in Person of colour then it rapidly becomes nonsensical because by opposing it to 'white' you collapse the definition if you include whites on an economic basis. So basically you should use class to describe people rather than race terms that are largely useless and reflect prejudice as they emerge from it.

Once again, the collective American trauma over race overlaps into the anarchist movement.

Just outta interest, have any of you ever discussed race with Latinos? In general terms, a combination of linguistic semantics and general cultural attitudes leads to relaxed, stark terminologies that all you handwringers would find very difficult to stomach.

I don't think pretending that there are no economic, cultural or political differences between different racial groups within the working class in any given country or locality is going to help.

Yes, an Argentinian friend was very confused about why she was being classified as "Hispanic" rather than "white" upon moving to the US...

Yeah, I mentioned that a couple of pages ago about some of my students.

I was more referring to the way they talk about each other and other ethnicities: morenito, negro, chino, guero/catire, etc, etc...

Meh, maybe outside the US. Much of my family's mexican, what you're saying doesn't apply to anyone I can think of. A lot of my family are quite concerned with race (and some are pretty appallingly racist, unfortunately), not least because looking brown here means they get hassled by cops and treated badly by bosses a lot of the time. What I think's really interesting is how attitudes toward race differ over generations in the family, and I'd guess for a lot of latinos, and depending on where they live.

I also want to say, I can't tell if "collective American trauma" was meant flippantly or not. I think trauma is a somewhat accurate word for it, it's genuinely hard for people to talk about this stuff, both in terms of having adequate vocabulary and emotionally. My dad's told me stories about getting beaten a lot as a kid for being mexican, reactions of my mom's family when she married a mexican guy, etc, etc he clearly still gets pretty worked up about this, and from talking with my brothers he talks differently and about more stuff with them because they're latinos and I'm not (sparked in part by bad shit that's happened to my brothers due to race), so this difficulty of talking about race comes up in pretty intense and personal ways - the 'collective trauma' is pretty real for a lot of people. (Even though race can't be understood without a class analysis, as people have rightly pointed out.) And before someone points it out, yes, I know that mexican is not a race, but for my family as for a lot of people they experience this stuff as coming from racial matters, not as anti-immigrant sentiment, and it's pretty hard to not follow their lead with terminology and stuff, to say "no, this isn't about race" or something.

There's no maybe about it...skin colour is just one of the various physical attributes - as well as age, weight, gender, etc - Latinos pick up on in order to distinguish between folk. It's not considered at all inappropriate to shout "oye, negro!" as a means of attracting the attention of a dark-skinned stranger. I spent a whole year in Mexico being called "guero" by EVERYONE I met.

It just seems ironic to me, they call you lot "los gringos eses" (at best ) and you spend your whole lives bending over backwards to find a term that suitably masks their sense of identity. So, no deliberate flippance...there is a very confused, backward, counter-productive approach towards race within the American left.

EDIT: at least you accept the high level of racism amongst chicanos though (which I agree is very regrettable). Did noone get the nuances within the incredibly high Latino support for Hilary? Ditto the popularity of conspiracy theories vis a vis the Illuminati et al in Latin America?

Where I grew up there's no avoiding that lots of latinos are racist too. (In the US chicano I think refers to people who lived in what used to be mexico but was then annexed by the US, I could be wrong about that, I don't think anyone really uses the term excepted people tied to older US chicano cultural pride/nationalist stuff.) Hell, my dad is often pretty racist unfortunately, and has really reactionary ideas about other latinos and about undocumented immigrants. He thinks that immigrants need to shut up and take what they can get quietly, and if they stir up public sentiment then they deserve the trouble that falls out, despite the fact that his ex-wife got deported over immigration status. Ugh.

I'd be interested to hear how this stuff plays out in Brazil and the Carribbean. I know next to nothing about Latin America but my hunch is that the dynamics are really different between former slave societies and other societies. I know in Haiti they used to make a lot out of categories like quadroon, octaroon, etc, to talk about how much 'white blood' and 'black blood' people had. Those categories got some play in the US but largely fell out as the legal definition of blackness (tied to enslavability and then to segregation after legal slavery ended) became the 'one drop rule'. I'd be interested to hear about Brazil and other Caribbean countries because they were the main slave importing countries in the US - the US was a major slave society but its rate of importation was much lower in part because slaves in the US became a self-reproducing population (as awful as US slavery was, it wasn't nearly as lethal as Caribbean slavery, I don't know about Brazil(.

Just one other thing, about the difficulties of talking about race in the American left, I agree with you that this stuff is a big mess but what I tried to say in my last comment is that this stuff is a mess on the left because it's a mess in american society and a highly charged one. One of the things that's still really unclear is how to talk about race beyond the black/white framework. There are a lot of reasons, and some of them really good ones, why that framework took hold as the main way to talk about race for a lot of people but it's never really been adequate (even though it did map onto the most central contradictions in the US for a long time) and it's totally inadequate now.

(By chicano, I meant a Mexican-American...it's quite common to hear it in Mexico.)

Yeah this is well-documented in Mexico, even families have fallen out over going to "el otro lado". Also, supposedly many of the law enforcement officers policing the borders are actually of Mexican extraction themselves.

The Latin Americans I've met - especially here in Venezuela, in Mexico, folk were a bit less...judgemental - hold very strong stereotypes of different nationalities, ethnicities, skin colours, etc which fluidly oscillate between innocent recognition of diversity and unbridled racism. An example of the former would be addressing strangers as per their skin colour, whereas, an example of the latter would be a private student of mine (daughter of a prechavista politician, for context) warning me off going to a town cos "it's dangerous, full of ugly, horrible people...I went once and everyone was black". Most commentaries are somewhere in between and it's somewhat tricky to negotiate as a non-native speaker. Another example is the uproar caused over a Chinese restuarant in central Caracas which was raided by an animal welfare organisation, who accused it of keeping cats in horrific conditions in order to eat them (and possibly serve as pork or chicken or whatever). Friends of mine expressed disgust, claiming that "those Chinese should fuckin well respect the norms of Venezuela and if they can't, they should fuck off home". Others claimed that they knew all along that "those Chinese weren't to be trusted", etc, etc.

There's not really much of a discourse on this kinda stuff, and most Venezuelans pride themselves on their rather joky tactlessness and sincerity. A large part of Chavez' popularity could be put down to his oratory style and eyebrow-raising comments, which amuse and baffle the world but are utterly typical for a Venezuelan man of his age. Like in most situations of strangers discussing social issues - this forum being no different - there's no clear distinction between banter and venom, and the former will often be used as a mask for the latter, albeit not always.

talking of there being

why are you working for the enemy?

Don't you think wealth distribution still goes along race lines in latin america. I.e the more white/european you are the more likely you are going to be higher up the ladder econonomically? I know chavez is a mezcla of different races, but in Colombia(been ages since ive been) the television presenters/most of the elite landowners were of white european extraction. To me I saw these people as the descendents of the spanish and other europeans but maybe that is abit simplistic.

I also think that their is still a caste system in alot of south america. Although not as bad as south asian cultures it is still seen better to be white than of indigenious or black stock (certainly the impression I felt about peru). So nate yeah I do think its all tied to the past, slave trade etc and is a certainly sickening place to be at times. I know of some family I have over there who think its bad to date/marry outside your race. Although if its a 'gringo' they think they are stepping up in the world.

why are you working for the enemy?

Unless you're in middle/high level management, you're always working for the class enemy.

About racism/race in Brazil... some key differences I noticed, as you would expect black and darker people are poorer than white and paler people. Job discrimination was obviously real as in my town, where white people were a minority everyone who worked behind the counter in the bank was white, which you would never see in my neighbourhood in London for example. However you didn't get the same degree of social separation around music, friendships etc. that is typical here eg. you wouldn't find a black nightclub playing jungle across the road from a mainly white nightclub playing trance. Black people in Brazil are less likely to listen to metal and more likely to listen to hiphop but it wasn't nearly as clearcut as in the UK. When I waited at bus stops I used to count things, sometimes I counted mixed race families and I reckon about a third of people were in mixed race families. On the level of socialising it is a much more mixed society. I wouldn't be worried about safety walking around in a mixed race couple which I would sometimes in London. On the question of poverty, black people were very obviously in general poor, homeless people, people in favelas etc were mainly black.
People's attitudes to race... a lot of people definitely think it is better if their kids or grandkids turn out light skinned, and a lot of people who aren't black say that any black student in medical school etc is "only there on a quota". Black people used to say to me that they thought racism was a big problem in Brazil but that no one would acknowledge it. One thing I noticed was that it was very easy to talk to black people about it, more so than at home.
The history of slavery and resistance to slavery is really interesting, in a couple of days maybe I will put something up about it.

yeah, that would be interesting. How long were you in Brazil for?

Just to add, echoing what others have said

I would say there is a lot of racism in Latin America particularly against black and idegenous people

also race and class (wealth) are ridiculoussly connected. The wealthier the area the whiter it is

I would also say their is a strong presence of the idea that whites/ europeans are 'better' - more intelligent, better looking, have better cultural values etc which is even often held by non whites

so you get things like people shopping at supermarkets instead of the local markets (even though they cost more) because thats what westerners do

There's an article (I think) on either an IWW site or other syndicalist website that gives 'pointers' for white male worker participants in revolutionary meetings where there are women and non-whites. White male workers are to pay attention to how much they speak, lest they be subconsciously taking time away from the women and non-white participants, they are to be more positive/softer when disagreeing with female and non-white participants so as not to be paternalistic and racist, etc.

Why don't we all simply treat people the same? Why does it matter who posts on Libcom? Does there have to be a specific ratio of different gender-identities, sexual preferences, races, mixed-races, nationalities, etc before those involved can discuss revolutionary politics? It shouldn't matter if theres a white male majority, or a majority of any other race, nationality, gender, etc.

And being 'less negative' when it comes to national liberation movements because they are made up of non-whites and therefore any criticism of them is racist?