em_poc
Official Title of this Community: Ethnic Minorities and People of Color
Why is the title different?
We like to have fun here.
What is this place? A safe space for underrepresented peoples and peoples of color to talk, chill, and vibe.
What are the basic rules of the community?
-
Follow Lemmy TOS and Community Guidelines. Non negotiable. This is the bedrock and mods will make decisions with this always in mind.
-
This community is for ethnic minorities and people of color. This is a safe space where such people can freely discuss their struggles, insight, and thoughts without fear. If you are not, we respectfully ask you do not post or comment here. A future community will be established to allow for racial discussions with a mixed userbase. However, remember, comments here must still respect Lemmy TOS and Community Guidelines.
-
Irony Racism is still racism. Racism is bad m'kay? We will treat irony racism and bad faith racist satire as racism. Will wield the ban hammer accordingly.
-
No sectarianism: This is an identity channel not a channel for you all to complain about why XYZ isn't the "one true leftism". Take that to another place.
-
Stupidpol is not allowed. Stupidpol is class reductionist. We are an identity community. Thinking like stupidpol ignores the struggles of the oppressed, their voices, and their need for unique support. Nothing says oppression more than someone saying that the identity you have is "not real" and that if you only thought like them you'd see what your "real" identity is. Mods reserve the right to ban users and content who promote stupidpol, stupidpol memes, and other class reductionist thinking.
FAQ
I don't look XYZ and/or sometimes I can pass as white so I don't know if I can post here. Can I?
-
This place is for ethnic minorities and people of color. This includes those of mixed heritage and those who may be "white" but are of an ethnicity that is a minority in their area (i.e. Kurds, etc) If you've experienced oppression due to your identity that is not based on sexual / gender identification, you are welcome here.
-
Moreover, for our American audience, we have people from around the world who are "white" but are oppressed due to being a minority in their country. They are and should be welcomed here.
What can I post?
- Anything you think is relevant to the mission of this community. Things will evolve over time.
- Topics and things relevant to EM and POC.
Suggested Posts
- [People of Spice]: Food recipes so others can taste your culture
- [Theory]: Vid/podcasts/websites discussing issues relevant to identity, anti-imperialism, etc
- [News]: Vids/podcasts/websites that talk about current events relevant to EM and POC
view the rest of the comments
All you need to do is to look at KSA or Qatar et al. and if those "guest workers" aren't a vast army of borderline serfs living under social fascist regimes then idk what would be a better example.
Those migrant workers form the backbone of labour upon which the cushy office jobs of the citizens rest in comfort and luxury.
One time, many moons ago, when I was still an anarchist (or at least in my AnCom transit arc) I attended a lecture with some utopian who was shilling UBI. I hadn't really grappled with a UBI seriously until this public lecture because it was very much a fringe idea at the time. At the end of the lecture, I posed a few pointed questions that cut through the core of the lecturer's arguments that I had come up with during the talk and (amusingly, in hindsight – maybe they picked up on something that I had not) the lecturer basically dismissed me as a tankie, except in a more polite manner but without actually addressing any of my concerns.
One of the key points that I made was that right now in the country I am in (and it's probably true for yours too) there's this grey market labour force that does the hard labour that most citizens refuse to do (at least for the going rate of those jobs as they are currently).
What we could expect to see under a UBI would be a hard nationalist turn, with citizenship becoming prohibitively difficult to exclude any prospective citizens from coming in and contributing to the overall costs of the UBI without necessarily contributing back into the system. Australia is a very good example of this, where migrant labour is borderline sharecropping with extra steps, and it's extremely difficult to get citizenship in large part due to whatever vestiges of the welfare state remains unstripped. The same can be said for the US particularly in the informal labour market coming from the southern border especially in agriculture, with companies like Tyson literally busing cheap labour over the Mexican border to exploit (in a liberal sense, not in a Marxist sense).
If we extrapolate this current arrangement out and acknowledge that either all of those shitty jobs at Walmart and McDonalds and so on would have to compete against a UBI to make it worthwhile for people to get out of bed and leave their loved ones and pursuits behind for 8+ hours of a high-stress grind (lol, that ain't happening) or otherwise those gaps in the labour market would need to be plugged immediately elsewhere. And you just know where that country is going to source its labour from and how it's going to do that because it's already doing it right now as we speak.
And then ✨ta-da!✨ you have a Qatar-like economic arrangement, except on steroids. Big fucken yikes from me on that one.
"It seems to me that I am more dialectical materialist than you, Mr Stalin."
— ~~H.G. Wells~~ Me, back when I was still an anarchist
Egh, that's the reserve army of labor
Under the Gulf-state-model, they're majority foreign to the Gulf nation-states, as far as I'm concerned, and {Gulf} Capital directs and controls them, however they please, by their travel documents, to pay and shelters... even if they make up the majority of the state's population (Eg. UAE)
Particularly brutal, but not very unique among many others... (migrant labor in the U.S)
Thinking of Volume 1 again, the exploitation never stopped, it was simply off-shored, and the labor of the Global North made labor aristocrats, settlers, both or, instead placed in dominated Global South conditions...
I mean you're not wrong about this but I also think you're being a bit glib about it.
What goes on in KSA etc. makes visible the mostly-obscured relationship between developed countries and over-exploited countries, that's true. But workers under these conditions are absolutely not protected by the labour laws of the countries they work within and they lack any sort of privileges or rights that are afforded to the KSA reserve army of labour proper. And I think that's the major difference, where you really see the true face of social fascism laid bare; if these workers went on strike the government would crack down on them with impunity. The government where I am in wouldn't go as far as the Qatari government would but they would absolutely punish any troublemaker migrant workers to the full extent of the law and then deport them.
We don't have to imagine what the US would be like because we've seen plenty of historical examples of how the US government has crushed labour movements with military and police brutality, and we already know what CBP/the DHS does to undocumented migrants and refugees.
This is where it's different imo. US citizens on strike aren't likely to be disappeared en masse into CBP blacksites to be detained indefinitely before being booted into Mexico without any concern for their country of official residence.
That's where it truly reveals itself as an arrangement of treats for the citizen and fascism for the rest; that's where it is undeniably social fascism imo.
So, it's the undocumented status and lack of citizenship that distinguishes and makes for the revocation of not only the Gulf reserve army of labor's 'appearance of equality as a seller of labor', but even their liberal U.N given rights, at the impunity of the Gulf state...
Can you elaborate what it's different to? You mean US citizens vs migrant labour?