US whiteness is a social construct that serves to justify and reproduce marginalization: white supremacy. It started out excluding the Irish, Italians, the Spanish, Slavs, etc and shifted over time in order to maintain anti-blackness and anti-indigeneity. So it is far from just one thing and is simultaneously very recent. It would be best described as a culture of domination and capitalism, being a product of the US’ industrialization and then economic subjugation of the planet. Whiteness is about who you are better than and how entitled you are to a good life, or at least one better than non-whites. White culture is tolerating and even engaging in genocide so long as it is against non-whites. White culture is trying to pretend oppressions don’t need justice on any timeline that might inconvenience a white person. White culture is jingoist. The image of a warlike America has a white face.

As white people were largely drawn from European immigrants, they sometimes have watered-down elements of culture from “the old country”, Americanized to the point of being unrecognizable. Those elements were usually watered down because their immigrant ancestors were not considered white at the time so they tried to hide or erase identifiable cultural elements. Name changes. Modifications to food. Going to the whiter church. Skipping traditional holidays.

And of course, much is just white supremacy under capitalism. Processed industrialized foods. Commercialized holidays and events. Workaholic myths of paths to success. Everything cheaper or subsidized to their benefit and treated as an entitlement. National chauvinism and racist warmongering. Colonizer mindsets.

Monarchy and fascism share some characteristics but the things that make fascism what it is don’t originate from Monarchism or a revanchism for monarchy in any sense. When fascism qua fascism arose in Europe it was a separate formation from monarchists, for example, who still existed in substantial numbers in those countries back then. Instead, fascism arose from declining material conditions in countries that were losing imperialist status, such as losing colonies or having large foreign debts after World War I, and this situation - and “solution” - were both highly capitalistic. Fascism recruits from the petty bourgeoisie for its foot soldiers at the behest of factions of the haute bourgeoisie.

Capitalism is proto-fascism. Fascism, to the extent that it exists beyond World War II, has often been reinvented for crises of capitalism, whether domestic or imposed through imperialism. And who did the fascists take so much inspuration? For the Nazis, it was the United States, a bourgeoisie democracy (capitalist) premised on genocide and slavery.

Im a migrant to Australia. It’s true Australia has loads of issues involving racism. That said I DO have the right to protest

You are often permitted to stand around ineffectually or be in a parade that has no impact - though not always, of course. Once your action becomes actually disruptive to capital or related institutions, they lean on their own rules and the law to arrest, punish, expel, and/or deport those involved. As a migrant, I recommend that you familiarize yourself with this reality but avoid participation unless you are ready to accept those outcomes (and do not tell anyone your legal status, including me).

The only resistance allowed under liberalism is that which has no real impact on the greater schemes. Capitalist media tells fairy tales about how politics works, but they are falsehoods that whitewash history and try to make us complacent.

and vote towards a better future.

There is rarely much alignment between what you can vote for and what you actually want. Capitalist politics places emphasis on fights and reforms around problems that it itself creates and exacerbates, making you focus on undoing various injustices while doing nothing about the major ones. It provides the illusion of control and bastardizes the term, “democracy”, distilling it down to occasional votes for controlled parties and not rejecting the will and needs of the people. Again, your country is premised on genocide and the theft of the land and practices of indigenous Australians. You are participating in that, you are extolling the virtues of voting for people who engage in that theft and disposession to this day, like making indigenous Australians afraid of speaking to social workers lest the white supremacist institutions take away their children using anti-indigenous bias.

Ask yourself what control you have over various political parties’ positions, how they function, and why some parties enjoy popularity and favorable media coverage and others struggle and are wrongly vilified. Is it democracy in action?

And I can, and do, get involved with my community to do what I can regarding those topics.

It is of course good to be in community.

Importantly though I can live in the country and not face racism daily nor often get treated differently because of the way I look.

I think you are more likely just unfamiliar with what Australian white supremacy looks like because there is absolutely zero chance that you don’t encounter such people on a daily basis. Like I said, try following beauty standards associated with your ethnicity(ies) and engaging in disruptive action and you will immediately and viscerally learn what is often unstated but nevertheless present and impacting interactions. Or do the opposite and model whiteness and see what hapoens. Even just having a white sounding nane will consistently give you an advantage on job applications, including by people who say they are not racist. The racism is deep and pervasive, baked into the everyday.

Regardless I’m obviously going to take the word of the actual Chinese migrants I know of, and the people I know living in China, over strangers on the internet

You don’t have to take my word. Just go to China yourself. Assuming any amount of your stories are true, you should remember that you are negatively stereotyping 1.4 billion people based on a handful of accounts of people of unstated age who decided to leave the country. As an immigrant you should be familiar with the pressure to praise the country you move to and denigrate the one you came from. Immigrants in my country say absolute 100% bullshit things about the countries they came from. It seems to help them fit in. Particularly with white people. Also do not forget that immigrants are often a highly biased sample of the people from a given country. For example, in OECD countries, Indian immigrants are disproportionately upper caste and professionals forwarding petty bourgeois ideals. They will tell you absolute bullshit about conditions in India, they will be disproportionately Hindu supremacists, islamophobic, casteist, and praise light skin. You must dig deepee to understand a large and multifaceted country.

You’re allowed to have your own opinions on it, I just don’t think it’s a great idea to hand wave the racism issues in China, particularly for people who are black or brown.

I haven’t hand-waved any racism, full stop.

The way you speak of these things is so vague and unqualified that you yourself are basically dancing around the fringes of racism. Do you not know what racist logic looks like, e.g. denigrating entire ethnic groups or nationalities based on rumors, anecdotes from “a friend”, and half-remembered guesswork?

As I have consistently stated, racism exists in China but it is a low racism country overall. As you have admitted, the racism you will tend to encounter in China is naivete and not something deeper and malicious, which is what Anglos project from the white supremacy they are familiar with and help maintain in the countries they live in. You are in Australia. Australia is an Anglo settler colonial project premised on the genocide of indigenous Australians. You say you prefer to live there rather than experience rumored racism in China from a vague host of Han people (Han Chinese can refer to people from many countries, regions, ages, etc). Presumably you don’t really care about indigenous Australians and are somewhat naive about what most white Australians think of you, and you are trying to get by as “one of the good ones”, i.e. the subtly white supremacist liberal approach to race and ethnic background. If not, I’d be curious about your perception of how you are treated when adopting beauty standards drawn from your ethnic background(s) and when you politically challenge the violent liberal status quo. When the cops come to break up your direct action on Palestine (do you do anything remotely challenging white supremacy?), who stands with you?

But contrary to what you’re thinking, you can get by just fine in China and advance. But you might not be in a society propped up by imperialism and genocide and therefore need to work longer hours on top of learning a new culture.

Re: my familiarity with China, I am completely confident in what I’m saying and don’t need to tell internet stories about friends or rumors I heard to pretend at knowledge to broad brush countries and ethnic groups. If you don’t believe me, just go yourself. It is very inexpensive for Australians and you can spend a week or two in advance finding people who actually integrated locally and traveled to show you the ropes.

Cool you have a friend and used it to broad brush 1.4 billion people.

Anglo settler ass logic.

Well you obviously haven’t been to or lived in China for any period of time and most likely have an idealistic view of the countr

Please do yourself a favor and depend a bit less on making things up about other people.

Chinas a great place but being ignorant to its rampant racism is just silly.

I am not ignorant of racism in China, I have already described what form it comes in. You have a chauvinistic view based on a lack of understanding and investigation.

Because you’re certainly wrong. Waste of time comment.

I am correct, actually. But you are behaving quite childishly, letting anyone still reading clock the insecurity.

That’s correct, it is effectively nonexistent. You’re projecting the pattern of white supremacy onto a culture you know nothing about.

Sounds good!

That it, generally speaking, false.

China is low racism, particularly compared to other options. The racism experienced by black people in China is more that of unfamiliarity than bigotry. It does not come from the same place as white supremacy and does not have the same meaning or function.

I suggest developing a plan that is not just about building a better lifenfor yourself, but for others and community. For example, China ticks all of your boxes (yes, even privacy in comparison to the US), but it is also important to consider how you would personally make China better in the process, as you are, by moving, saying that your current conditions are pushing you to want to leave. So what about your current place of living was driven to that and how can this be made the case the world over?

Ultimately, capitalism is the underlying force of reaction, conservatism, and deprivation. It sets the guard rails of social policy, funds and purges the thought-moving forces of society. It creates homelessness. It destroys countries and societies, forcing them to adopy defensive and antagonistic positions to be viable and not only dominated. So I would recommend also thinking of this question in terms of how you might build your life as well as do well in fighting capitalism. As, ultimately, if this force is not recognized, you might find a place that ticka your boxes but is ultimately a forcr for capitalist expansion, e.g. most OECD countries. This wouldn’t make you a bad person but it is a major wrinkle in the idea of building a good life by finding a place based on these (all very reasonable) boxes to tick off.

Big artists are performing clowns for monopoly capitalists.

No

Biden and Dems pushed hard against immigrants and beefed up ICE.

OWS and BLM did not fail due to not having a concrete and focused list of demands. That was media spin intended to undermine the movements. There was a widely circulated list (or really very similar lists) of BLM demands, around 5. In cities, a given BLM group would have very specific and actionable demands and would attempt to leverage their occupations and other disruptions to achieve them. Nobody in City Hall would have any difficulty understanding them nor the general public when reading the ubiquitous pamphlets at marches.

But this idea is almost true, because the actual reason for failure was a lack of experience in organizing effectively. Both movements were reactive and massively decentralized. They wasted huge amounts of time and energy trying to figure out what to do via large, open debate spaces without particularly good political education, agreement, nor effective means of organizing like committees and commitments to act on committees’ recommendations. And because their spaces had a low average level of political education, they were easy to coopt by any savvy group of liberals with a bullhorn, e.g. the people that told BLM protesters to talk to cops or get themselves arrested for literally no reason.

They were also vulnerable to tokenization, e.g., “listen to what the black people tell you”. Which ones? Black people aren’t a monolith! The actual reality in these spaces is, again, whoever happens to be present at the time and has a bullhorn. They might have great ideas built on life experience, planning actions, and political education, or they might be someone with a cop uncle saying it’s time to debate whether ACAB is racist or something. White liberals are particularly vulnerable to tokenizing arguments and will listen when told to go home using such arguments, which has been the death of many an occupation. Behind the scenes, POC organizers are pissed and trying to figure out who the person with the bullhorn was and how they can stop that next time - 5-10 years down the road, i.e. there is a feeling that it is essentially too late to “fix” the situation, and those organizers feel bitter.

So if we step back and ask what the core challenges were, they amount to having far too little in the way of mature organizers and other politically educated groups to lead and educate during these kinds of events. The ratio between members of mature organizations, politically educated general public, and non-politically educated general public is incompatible with effective organizing. So all that happens is ad hoc re-learning of the same lessons every organizer has learned for centuries, just too late to be used for the current event. Or worse, most people not even understanding what went wrong or that thete was a failure in the first place.

So, the solution is to build mature left organizations that use effective methodologies and prevent liberal cooption. And to do it now, not just as a reaction to every new major event. This is not an easy task but it is one with historical precedent and a half-decent roadmap. A list of demands is not really directly relevant, it is just a tool for organizers to use and must always be crafted for the conditions and political questions of the moment by such the ground groups.

Vance would be more effective in carrying out the right wing agenda.

To quibble, housing isn’t just treated as a commodity, it is treated as a financial asset that will accrue value. This nearly always leads to a massive price spiral. The same applies to university loans, for example. Once financialized, pricing spiraled even faster than the cuts to funding that were passed on to students as tuition. Health insurance and healthcare have a similar dynamic because the insurance industry is similarly non-productive and can only make larger and larger profits by basically scamming: paying out less than they promised and investing their cash reserves.

Re: a successful strike, this requires having your workers on board and ready to hold a line for each other. They have to be ready for a fight and not backstab, undercut, or balk because they are afraid. And they need to be at the table in the first place, coordinated and ready to go. This would amount to a level of organization that is currently unimaginable in the US, where false consciousness is dominant. Most importantly, whichever material forces drive people to organize will shape their demands. When forming a union, you do research first to see which workplaces are good prospects and what they care about most, then roll that into a campaign. We don’t really know what forces may build to drive people to be ready to take some kind of action, nor do we know that left organizational capacity will be what that energy ends up feeding. The false consciousness in the US that has been so effective is marginalization. Chattel slavery, genocide of indigenous people, a temporary exploitation and then rejection of Mexicans and Chinese people. A temporary exploitation and then white-ification of Irish, Eastern Europeans, Greeks, Italians. Scapegoating women, black people, gay people, trans people, and do on. This is currently a stronger tradition in the US than left organizing and it is the society the Nazis took notes from when designing their racial conquest and empire plans (though they thought the US’ racial rules were too extreme to work in their region).

The real question is not what is an idealistic list of demands to address the contradictions of US capitalism, but how we could organize from the left to win out over these fascistic tendencies (really just the dark side of liberalism qua the political ideology of capital). The path taken to organize and the historical events surrounding it will determine any hypothetical demands of a hypothetical general strike.

So, framed another way: a more appropriate question is what will those reading this thread be doing to learn how to organize, to understand capitalism and historical currents, and to join, enlarge, and improve principled anticapitalist parties and organizations that can survive and win out over left liberal cooption (like many unions suffer fron today) and right liberal reactionary violence?

Check your local anti-capitalist actions and see if anyone needs help. Trust your gut or ask here if a given organization you’re thinking of joining seems off. But get involved! May Day, as in May 1, the true day of labor, will be here soon and is a good event for seeing what anti-capitalist organizations are in your area. The lead orgs doing the work for the events of the day are a good bet.

Start with a non-job so you can study while working. Then get internships relevant to your major once you know your direction.

A non-job is one with a lot of downtime and where they don’t care if you read. Parking attendant, small movie theater worker, custodian at a place that is well-staffed.

The conditions under which the US could carry out a coordinated general strike would not look like the current US. And the demands would be subject to those conditions. US organized labor is largely beholden to capital and has no principled sense of solidarity, certainly beyond US borders, but often even within them. That would need to be developed through struggle and creating organization where there is little. See the federal workers getting screwed with by the administration? A very large percentage are unionized but their union is weak and poorly organized. They have simply accepted the dictates of their employer that they are not allowed to strike and therefore they have no basic infrastructure with which to organize actions or even think of themselves as workers that need to be militant and fight for one another.

Under current conditions the closest thing you will get to a general strike is popular riots. Those are expressions of social pain and frustration and they require no organizing.

It might sound like I’m not really answering the question, but that’s because the question itself is wrong. It has flipped the problem on its head, which is to say, is too focused on what ideas would be good to demand under a general strike rather than how would you ever build the conditions for a general strike? Demands must be historically embedded, they must be relevant to the groups coordinating a strike, and they need to be clear-eyed about the capital strike that would occur adjacent to it. We cannot say what those demands would be other than they would not be about this administration. The US working class will lose fights over and over again under all administrations until it can be organized and directed with concrete and correct political analysis.

Re: “restore” the United States, why? The US is a genocidal empire currently help genocide Palestinians and enabling the prelude to the Armenian Genocide 2.0. We should seek justice, not a “return”. The past and the status quo of the US are not goid things, the narrative that they were/are requires white supremacist thinking.

I’ll add two points that may be somewhat redundant but I think are key to understanding this logic.

The first is that Americans (this is in the context of the US) are politicalky incoherent and, generally, politically illiterate. This is exaggerated in polling, as the ways in which questions are framed can drastically change the results, even if the policies are identical. If you say, transphobically, “should we protect women by ensuring biological men [sic] cannot participate in women’s sports?” they will frequently agree. If you say, “should we allow trans teenagers to participate in sports aligning with their gender?” the results might flip. And when you focus in on individuals and the impact, even more people suddenly have a pro-trans position, like when someone is banned from participation and explains how it impacted them. If we understand that Americans have basically zero political understanding and are not in the habit of critically examining their own ideas, then we can really think about what these liberals are doing when they begin suggesting triangulating to the right: rather than coherently organize for liberation, to take the politically incoherent and educate them, they are saying to cede this to the right, to allow transphobes to build transphobic consciousness instead. The polling and results mean nothing on this topic, as the public has little to no understanding and can be swayed.

The second point is to focus on tailism. In short, tailism is an epithet from the left (early uses from Lenin) that allege the left should emerge from the tail end of political economic development, which ends up meaning the movement itself should follow what is popular qua some (usually unstated) definition. Tailism is an advocacy against agitation and forming coherent lines that may seem unpopular at first, and therefore amounts to an advocacy for absorbing reactionary thoughy into your organization, as you are, per tailist thinking, merely meant to be a reflection of the working class rather than thoughtnct and strategic political tendency advancing a cause. While the Democratic Party is thoroughly capitalist, imperialist, and primarily reactionary, these “centrists” (embarrassed reactionaries) are engaging in tailism in their own liberal microcosm. In this view, politics is not a struggle for a political project, like trans liberation, but an attempt to “win” to fight “the enemy” by adopting supposedly right wing “popular” views that are often not even popular. This may seem inconsistent, because on one hand the tailist is trying to triangulate what is popular but on the other is often very wrong about what is popular, but this is because they are fundamentally just looking to rationalize their push for reactionary positions, in this case transphobia. They are reacting to the left and their advocacy for trans rights and attempting to pin blame for “centrists”’ failures onto the marginalized and their advocates. Put simply, they want to punch left and move right. Not coincidentally, their material interests align rightward with capital.