GenZedong

because liberal indoctrination trains people to see the world through the lens of individualism: "I'm white, and I don't think of myself as privileged, so white people as a group must not be privileged"; "Sure I own a few rental properties, but I don't think of myself as exploitative, so landlords as a group must not be exploiters."; "My friend's a cop, and I've never heard him say anything I thought was racist, so it's wrong to say that US policing is institutionally racist!"; "I worked hard enough to own my own small business (I earned it with nothing but determination and a loan from my parents), but don't you dare tell me that means I'm not working class! you're basically telling all of us (me and my friends) to not even bother doing revolution (posting!)"

some people can only understand class struggle through a moral lens. they see a class contradiction, recognize a "good" group and a "bad" group, then conclude that if they're not on the "good" side, then the taxonomy needs to change to accommodate that. it's difficult for some people to reconcile how they can belong to groups with "bad" class characteristics and personally do good in spite of that. I don't feel "bad" or "good" about being born white or having a settler background, but I know that any good I aim to do in this life will disempower those groups as a necessary prerequisite to empowering the vast majority of the world. I also know that the people leading those struggles must necessarily come from the other side of those class contradictions. education and expertise are invaluable assets to revolutionary struggle, but there's a reason that successful socialist revolutions haven't come from the most comfortable, educated elites using their superior knowledge, expertise, and influence convince everyone to give them power so they can benevolently distribute it to the grateful serfs.

But how is the ideology prerequisite to taking those actions going to form if all white workers are principally settlers? The point in the FRSO article isn't that racism doesn't exist or that racially/nationally oppressed people aren't exploited at a higher rate. It's that settler-colonialism is a specific stage of development where the dominant force in the economy is the primitive accumulation of indigenous wealth. Whereas now the "USA" is mainly an imperial power characterized by the export of capital. Calling the main economic paradigm of the "US" settler-colonialism is not an accurate or useful characterization.

I was writing this at like, 3 in the morning dude cut me some slack.

What I mean is that, essentially, class divides are lessened between the classes of settler colonialists. You can see this in Israel, for instance, in that white Israelis get to live in "socialist" kittibutzes (however you spell that infernal thing) while underpaid migrant workers and such do much of the work. Ergo it gives white Israelis much more economic and consequently political and social freedom compared to those oppressed people's.

In the same way imperialism uses super exploitation to create a labor aristocracy. Settler colonialism does something similar with land. If you were a poor prole in America, an option you had was to "go west young man." Land monopolization could be delayed in the western terroritories with the expulsion of natives, while the labor power could be bought cheaper from the waves of immigrants from Ireland, Italy, etc.

This isn't to say that it was "good" or avtually slowed down capitalism at all, in fact I'd argue, concurrently with you, that it did indeed speed up the adoption of capitalism. Its a complete mischaricterization of my response. Class conflict and monopolization still occurred, and mainly occurred in the states settled earliest that weren't dominated by slave owning plantations (like new York, Philadelphia, Ohio, Michigan, etc.) However i argue that it occurred to a lesser extent because of the lack of resource competition on the continent, along with the aforementioned boons of settlement and such. This is my general explanation for the lack of class consciousness for much of American history (combined with other factors of course). I use "reset" as a term in comparison to other states on the two continents. In Mexico and other Spanish colonized states, the encomienda system made lesser even the people considered Spanish who did not come from Spain. Of course they held a higher position than slaves and indigenous peoples, but the land owning class was quickly centralized (at least in comparison to the United states). And so class conflict was accelerated in these nations. I'd argue that you can even see this in the American south, where instead of Yeoman farmers you had the slave ran plantations which stifled the growth of capitalism in these areas.

Ergo, what I was arguing in my comment is that, while the legacy still exists, the American proletariat no longer profits primarily from settler colonialism. Rather I say they benefit mainly from imperialism, same as in Europe (i.e, France and Britain). So while I do think that white Americans definitely benefit from the latent boons, it is just as possible for white Americans to be as revolutionary as white Brits or French people in comparison to Israelis because the class contradictions between them and the Bourgeoisie are greater than the material differences between the white proletariat and the black, Latino, etc. population.

This is of course not ignoring the labor aristocracy created by imperialist super profits and such, and so them being revolutionary is unlikely, but not as impossible as, say, a 1900s Boer or modern Israeli.