Re: <nettime> Not One

[Ryan Griffis <ryan.griffis@gmail.com>]

Hi Keith and all,
I’m confused as to why you’d interpret my comment as an *appeal to the history of settler colonialism and the continued history of slavery* as *a reductio ad absurdum*. Just to be clear, this isn’t some kind of academic discussion to me.

I certainly never suggested that voting for Biden/Harris (or any number of other electoral decisions against the GOP and fascists) was somehow antithetical to long-term struggles for liberation. Nor did I minimize the enacted and potential violences of the Trump regime.
(I mean, are any US voters on nettime *not* voting against Trump? Does that even need to be asked here?)

My specific reference to the election of 1920 in Florida, for example, is not one that easily lends itself to a falsely simplistic binary pitting revolution against a compromised bourgeois democracy. Nor is it some distant, irrelevant historical story in the current moment. The Proud Boys (and all their white nationalist friends) are not historical outliers, after all. You know, the “again” in MAGA and all.

If anything, I figured my comments would encourage situating electoral politics more completely into struggles for liberation. To do otherwise would be to completely disregard that history and those that fought (and died) to simply exercise the most basic rights that supposedly define democracy, in 1920 and before/after.

To try to restate the main reasons I responded in the first place: for many in this country, even the *semblance* of democracy has been a fraught (at best) lived experience and recognizing that is part of the struggle for those of us who have a normalized experience of bourgeois democracy (that’s why I responded to Frederic’s post). I guess what I’m saying is that this is not a new fight for many, and I think it’s important to keep that front-and-center. If that seems somehow reductive, well, I’m not sure what else to say.

Maybe I’d say to ask those leading the fight in the US right now, with BLM and the Poor People’s Campaign (for example), whether they think this is about *preserving* democracy or *creating* democracy for their constituencies. I think it’s possible to recognize the difference and it matters in understanding what you are fighting for and with whom.

Apologies for any crossed-wires, misunderstandings.

best,
Ryan

> On Oct 6, 2020, at 6:00 PM, Keith Sanborn <mrzero@panix.com> wrote:
> 
> Dear Nettimers,
> 
> An appeal to the history of settler colonialism and the continued history of slavery is appropriate and accurate but at this moment used as a reductio ad absurdum is just dangerous. I am not a believer in justice through bourgeois democracy but the violence promoted and actualized under the Trump regime must be stopped. Think of Biden/Harris as a tourniquet applied to staunch fatal bleeding. 
> 
> Let me end with this: the day after Trump was elected, my students at the New School, most of them women, were in a state of shock and for good reason: one shared with the class that after Trump’s win had been announced she was walking down the street near the “campus” in New York City and a young guy walked up to her and said, “Now I can grab your pussy whenever I want.” And disease entity called Trump was not even inaugurated yet. The irresponsible minimization of covid which has lead directly to deaths and the work of the “Proud Boys” as agents provocateurs, which again lead to deaths. 
> 
> We are talking about the death of even the semblance of bourgeois democracy. And in its place not revolutionary socialism, or an anarchist utopia, but death-dealing fascism. Given the choice, I will vote for bourgeois democracy any time. 
> 
> Keith Sanborn

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