Im not going to pull punches on this rant. I am so exhausted by this rhetoric and unfortunately it is pervasive in my personal life and online. I spend most of my productive time reviewing literature on various global issues. Namely land grab discourse, genocide studies, conservation efforts, state development policy, IFI reports etc etc.
Let me tell you something about the lives of rural and Indigenous people in the global south. They get their homes burned down and murdered in their sleep. Their lands are stolen from them with techniques perfected by colonial powers, especially from US settler colonialism.
The state will steal their lands and “preserve it” for use of private capital, for white settlers, or to create a national park or preserves that wealthy foriegners can hunt game and so they can parade to the world how “modern” they are becoming.
If they cannot steal land outright they will use other more complicated manners to incentivise rural people to be tied into market relations, such as dependence on ecotourism or even biochar and other technologies presented as liberatory or as needed due to damages colonialism has done. “A bit of colonialism will help your colonialism problem,” if you will.
These relations will contradict and then corrode their lifeways and distracted from effective traditional methods because white tourists don’t want to see the cattle of pastoralists when on vacation. They are also shamed by the excess wealth of tourists, and the settlers that facilitate tourism, encouraging them to become more enfranchised into modernity so their lands will either become vulnerable to direct theft or the market relations will mold them into what settlers want them to do for the benifit of their estates.
These extreme minority settlers often own like half of an entire county, while the county next door is over half conservation area. This means fewer lands for grazing and fewer water sources available for rural people. It leads to starvation and death, especially during dry periods such as the current drought in east Africa, all while the state concern trolls about food security and executes the development dance to attract aid and FDI. It also means that lands are degraded by over use because these people are being choked out of their ancestral lands. The state and white settlers then blame the pastoralists and forest dwellers and weaponize Human Rights against them, saying the rural peoples are preventing the states quest for water security as they redirect all waters to metro areas and settler estates.
All of this is the genocidal process of primative accumulation or accumulation by dispossession. It is a privilege I am able to research these situations. It is a privilege that I am able to work with organizations that work with local Tribes on the issues they are concerned about. It is a privilege I am a grad student that is paid to do this, although our union has to fight the university for a fraction of a living wage.
I am not privileged to not vote Blue. It is more like a curse of understanding. Who do you think backs these violent efforts of dispossession? USAID is never far away. The EU is never far away. The IFI are always right there. Conservation as we know it was created in North America to conquer the continent and take the land from Indigenous peoples and it has exported these methods abroad. All of this is supported by institutions and policies that democrats and republicans alike believe in and enable globally. It is supported by finance capital which is the foundation of the present democratic party
Let me tell you what people who vote blue do about this. Kenya or some other post colonial state will massacre people and burn down their homes and create a national park. Netflix will then hire Obama to narrate a docuseriese on the glorious national parks of the world. Blue voters will then consume the erasure and genocide of rural people as feel-good, green™ content with satisfaction that the world is becoming a better place. That’s it. Then they go vote blue.
Anyone who says I am privileged to not vote blue has no clue or no care regarding how the world works and is a combination being hopelessly US centric, too focused on bourgeoisie partisanship and embarrassingly naive about the world. Voting blue is the opposite of solidarity. The people who say they are not privileged enough to not vote Blue fail to see their own privilege of living in the Disney land of the global north. What ever gains they think Democrats will give them will either never happen or will be cut from the flesh of people they are happy to sacrifice.
I will not be extorted by bourgeoisie partisans. My moral worth and political identify is mine to create, not theirs to demand. My concern is with the fundamental machinations of capital and the devestating impact it has on people while it reproduces itself, and it is most destructive in places far from the minds of democrats regardless of issues in the US. I’m not going to be tricked into supporting a party that enables the process of accumulation by dispossession, and that stands on a foundation of genocide. They only have moral arguments but they do not have moral standing.
People say that when non-democrats don’t vote blue we are enabling republicans. Nothing more.
Then they go and say stuff like this.
Well what is the problem then? Are we wrong for somehow enabling Republicans or are Democrats the ones enabling Republicans through not acting and then justifying not acting to save face?
Your commitment to democrats and to the US electoral game is what legitimizes and enables the political world we live in. But nothing that exists must exist as it is. Things could be different but when someone suggests abandoning democrats to build a new coalition it is shot down as unrealistic and enabling Republicans by splitting the vote or letting Republicans win by not voting. But yet even when Democrats win the Republicans win too because “what were Democrats supposed to do???”
What if bourgeoisie partisanism is just a scam? What if focusing on concrete social or material issues of our communities through organization and solidarity gives us a better shot at a better quality of life and you are wasting the opportunity by defending a party that stands on genocide, and that cannot even achieve a fraction of what people want without taking from someone else.
What if a dialectical understanding of US partisanism reveals that the Republicans and democrats rely on each other for the development American politics and its discourse? One could not stand without the other.
What use is it to even ask what Biden should do? I have no recommendation for Biden, tho it’s true I think he has the ability to take a much harder stance but chose not to.
But I dont want Biden to succeed because it legitimizes a genocidal party that relies on primative accumulation to enrich it’s financiers. It relies on massive exploitation of miners and factory workers. It relies on the erasure of peoples, cultures, languages. It relies on the complacence of the privileged and the oppressed. It relies on planned obsolescence, waste, pollution, the warming of the planet, and the destruction of life. It relies on a narrative of developmentalism that forces the world into a wealth arms race that will kill us all. It relies on the destruction of humanities future.
Why would I support the destruction of all human futures just to defend someone that wont even raise his hand high enough to ruffle some feathers?
What I want is for the people of this land to figure out how to achieve solidarity with people around the world to build their own sovereignty so they can build a future that is fully disconnected from American politics and that directly challenges imperialism, indeed the very imperialism democrats support and require. I want people that can be critical of the status quo and critical of their own interests so that the social virus known as capital can be dethroned and we can begin to heal.