The Official Socialism/Democratic Socialism/Communism/Marxism Thread

JahFocus CS

JahFocus CS

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Republic of New Afrika
Welfare reform aggressively stigmatized and criminalized child support payments. In 1996 Bill Clinton boasted the welfare reform bill was “the most sweeping crackdown on deadbeat parents in history.” He argued, “With this bill, we say to parents, if you don’t pay the child support you owe, we will garnish your wages, take away your driver’s license, track you across state lines and, if necessary, make you work off what you owe.” Welfare reform was presented as a race-neutral policy. Yet race had long been a practical tool in the concerted ruling class effort to destroy welfare, a class-based remedy to poverty.

Martin Gillens’s book, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy, details the dismantling of the system. According to Gillens, until 1964, mainstream media outlets offered sympathetic portrayals of welfare policy which primarily used images of the white poor in their coverage. Beginning in 1965, not only did media portrayals of welfare become much more negative, but the images used in these stories became overwhelmingly black as well. Despite black people making up about 29 percent of the nation’s poor from 1967–1992, black images were used in 57 percent of the media stories about welfare during this time. In 1972–73 media portrayals were overwhelmingly negative. That year images of black people accounted for over 75 percent of media stories on welfare. Clinton’s attacks on the welfare state in 1996 used this well-worn playbook.

True to form, Lillie Harden, a poor black woman from Bill Clinton’s home state Arkansas, was a public face of welfare reform policy in 1996. Harden was invited to stand over President Clinton’s shoulder as he signed the bill. She spoke of her excitement about moving off welfare and into a low-wage job. Six years later she had a stroke. Though she had received Medicaid while on welfare, her low-wage work made her ineligible for the program. Worse yet, the job provided no health care.

Harden could not afford the $450 per month cost of her medicine. In a final bit of desperation, she asked a journalist, Jason DeParle, to “ferry a message back to Clinton, asking if he could help her get on Medicaid.” Harden would report that her transition from welfare to low-wage work “didn’t pay off in the end.” She died at fifty-nine.

Hillary Clinton, not one to be relegated to the sideline, took an active role in the defense of President Clinton’s disastrous policy, doubling down on the “deadbeat” rhetoric. In 2002, the same year Lillie Harden had her stroke and was drowning in medical bills, then-Senator Hillary Clinton remarked, “these people are no longer deadbeats.”

Stuart Hall warns, due to its function in class relations, that race has “consequences for the whole class, not simply its ‘racially defined.’” There are more white welfare recipients than any other racial group. Race-specific rhetoric targeted at black people gutted white folk’s benefits too. This tactic is not just limited to welfare, it’s now extended to public-sector workers as well. A story for Pacific Standard concluded that the characterization of public-sector workers as “lazy, government-supported do-nothings” is a near seamless transition from the racist stereotypes long-employed against welfare recipients. As was the case with welfare, and now even public-sector employment, race is a practical threat to race-neutral class-based remedies. The class struggle must be deepened in response.
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Racism is systemic, and the system itself is defined by the relations of production, that is — class politics. :ohlawd:
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from No More Walter Scotts
 
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afterlife2009

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Podcast on the purging of socialists of color from history.


On Episode 5, we explore the history of the media erasing socialists of color from the history books and present day discourse––a tactic that serves to both commodity and water-down black radicalism and pawn off leftwing politics as a uniquely white or middle class enterprise.
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Ya' Cousin Cleon

Ya' Cousin Cleon

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Harvey World to Dallas, TX
A different kind of politics for a new kind of society—beyond work, scarcity and capitalism

“But what if everything could change? What if, more than simply meeting the great challenges of our time—from climate change to inequality and ageing—we went far beyond them, leaving them in our past. What if, rather than having no sense of the future, history hadn’t really begun?”

The first decades of the twenty-first century marked the demise of the current world order. Despite widespread acknowledgement of a series of disruptive crises, the proposed response from the mainstream has been to stick with the status quo. Against the confines of this increasingly limited politics a new paradigm has emerged. Fully Automated Luxury Communism claims that new technologies will liberate us from work, providing the opportunity to build a society beyond both capitalism and scarcity. Automation, rather than undermining an economy built on full employment, is instead the path to a world of liberty, luxury and happiness. For everyone.

In his first book, leading political commentator Aaron Bastani conjures a new politics: a vision of a world of unimaginable hope, highlighting how we might move to energy abundance, feed a world of 9 billion, overcome work, transcend the limits of biology and build meaningful freedom for everyone. Rather than a final destination, such a society heralds the beginning of history.

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not a marxist by any means but my god do you people have such a way with words :mjpls:
 
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