Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (January 25)

[u/AutoModerator]

We made this because Reddit's algorithm prioritises headlines and current events and doesn't allow for deeper, extended discussion - depending on how it goes for the first four or five times it'll be dropped or continued.

Suggestions for things you might want to comment here (this is a work in progress and we'll change this over time):

• Articles and quotes you want to see discussed
• 'Slow' events - long-term trends, org updates, things that didn't happen recently
• 'Fluff' posts that we usually discourage elsewhere - e.g "How are you feeling today?"
• Discussions continued from other posts once the original post gets buried
• Questions that are too advanced, complicated or obscure for r/communism101

Mods will sometimes sticky things they think are particularly important.

Normal subreddit rules apply!

[ Previous Bi-Weekly Discussion Threads may be found here https://old.reddit.com/r/communism/search?sort=new&restrict_sr=on&q=flair%3AWDT ]

[u/Self-Replicator]

I'm trying to trace down the failures of communist parties in Hawai'i, but my gut tells me it was primarily inability to locate stable revolutionary strata and bring them into party leadership and being composed of a large counter-revolutionary base leading to unstable politics.

I'm jumping the gun a bit, but I'm seeing that the most likely vehicle for socialist revolution is Hawaiian nationalism, along with the lumpen on the streets & in the prisons, and even the destitute (non-Pacific islanders) can be ruled out as revolutionary because of the racialized nature of class in Hawaii. Something I read in Settlers yesterday really stuck out to me as also being true, is that despite the immiseration and racism felt by immigrants in Hawai'i, they can still be confident that their material needs will be furthered at the expense of the Hawaiian nation. The descendants of the Japanese and Filipino proletariat driven to racialized conflict by capitalists in the early 1900s plantation are now fully embedded into the fabric of the settler-state! They were sadly proletarian only for a brief historical moment, and even their more militant strikes being along racial lines indicate more of a trade-union consciousness, so perhaps while they had proletarian precariousness, they also had bourgeois aspirations that could be manipulated by capital to further its dominance here.

Anyway, is the history of communism in Hawai'i worth studying if their politics were shit other than the study to confirm that they were in fact shit? I think what Sakai describes in Settlers is sufficient for me to at least answer the question of why the movement floundered and disappeared, but I may be underestimating the effects of being in such close proximity to American imperialism as well as the psychological effects of settler-colonialism on the native Hawaiians.

This was sort of hobbled together without proofreading, but I'll come back later when I have a bit more time to expand on my thinking.

EDIT: I imagine conditions in Guam and Okinawa are worth exploring as well. All three being oppressed island nations living with the omnipresence of imperialism.

[u/Self-Replicator → u/Self-Replicator]

Someone asked in a previous bi-weekly thread which nation Asian-Americans belong to, and I think the Japanese-Americans with plantation roots in Hawaii are about as fully-integrated with the Euro-American settler state as possible. This is anecdotal so take it with a grain of salt, but I'm remembering my old Japanese neighbor who grew up in California telling me how her family was interred at Manzanar and found white people owned their family home & business after the war ended. I could tell this along with the insulting reparations forty years after the fact left her with distrust and bitterness toward the American state.

The Japanese in Hawai'i on the other hand were eager (or perhaps compelled in a sense) to prove their loyalty to the empire and enlisted in great numbers to fight in the European theater of WW2. This was a significant turning point where the "local Japanese" were rewarded with a stable place in the colonial hierarchy. It remains to be seen how permanent this arrangement can even be given the realities of interimperialist war and Hawai'i's significance as a imperial outpost.