Welcome toake it happened here. I am Andrew of Theature channel of Andrewism. Last time I spoke about clonalism's effect on the psyche of the people within it, and today I want to talk about how people under the thumb of clonalism go about deliberation and how that struggle fits within some version of anomic asnalysis. National liberation is a struggle against the relationship of exploitation and domination inflicted upon
a nation. It's a struggle against the domination of one people by another, often centered on questions of language, culture, welfare, equality, and land. It has consequences, and it's not something where you can just stand by mutually and ignore. In fact, ignoring national liberation struggles would been sided with national oppression. There's no centrist tiqu Yeah, there's no both sides to
the oppression of a people by another. Of course, that doesn't mean that national liberation struggles are free of critique or necessarily morally righteous. National liberation struggles are usually quite diverse. Within them, there are many tendencies at play, from the most reactionary to the most revolutionary. I don't have any immediately come to mind forumia.
Oh, God, Yeah, there's.
I mean, you know, I think I always think about right, it's like.
China's a well, it kind of unique. I mean, there's there's a lot of countries that where you get multiple like national liberation movements. China is kind of unique in that we had two nominally left wing national liberation movements and like one of them, one of them is the KMT, who like the the the the the end of their gnatlib arc is like training a bunch of desk squads in El Salvador because they've gotten so good at killing peasants that like, you know, this is what they're doing
with their life. And the other one to CCP and it's like, well, okay, like great, great job, guys like liberated. We've liberated a lot of people. We've like you know, I don't know, it's it's I think I think there's sort of two ways of looking at that, where it's like you have on the one hand, you can look at it from the sort of like worker's perspective, where it's like, well, yeah, okay, so both you have your two national liberation movements and both of them end up
machine gunning about a million workers. Depending on like you know, in offset from each other in about forty years. But you know, you have the Shaghai massacre and you have the Culture Revolution. And then I think the other thing that's important when you're looking at like a gnatlib movement
is like whose nation is being liberated? And this is something you get with like Indonesia, Right, you have the national liberation movement, but then you simultaneously have like the occupation of West Papua.
Yeah, it's almost like a Russia nest egg of of national oppression, like the like Anesia is being oppressed by the Dutch and then Indonesia and supppression if you for the West Papua and East Timor and all those different places.
Yeah, and you see this a lot with like you know, I don't know.
This is why, like I think I keep coming back to like whose nation is being liberated the thing because it's like, you know, you get this with a lot of like the sort of pan Air movements, and it's like, well, okay, we're doing like resistance to sort of like French or British colonialism. And then like, yes, this is this is okay if you are Arab, like God help you, if you're a curred or like CD or like you know, so there's there's always these sort of I don't know.
You have to be careful about who wins the national liberation.
Movement exactly exactly, because.
No matter where a national liberations struggle is happening, they are most likely minorities.
That are not.
Encapsulated in that, you know, they are always going to be populations of people who are not of that nation within the territory of the national liberation struggle, and then beyond that, they're also within national liberation struggles other ongoing struggles,
including class struggle. While the oppressed classes might claim to national liberation struggle in an effort to defend against foreign subjugation exploitation, the capitalist class is using that struggle for national liberation to consolidate their own power and monopolize their own exportation the working class. A lot of capitalists, their whole investment in national liberation boils down to I don't like the fact that I have to compete with foreign capitalists.
I want to compete with local capitalists so I can come out on top. And yeah, that's not cool. Yeah, And then I think another thing that gets conflated when you start talking about national liberation. The liberation of a nation is the concept of nationalism, right. Nationalism is a program that has been proposed, or rather a suite of programs that I've been proposed as a solution to national libation struggles, because I can't even say that nationalism is
a single program. Nationalism itself is quite diverse, as we'll soon see. But nationalism is only one response, one possible response. It may be the most common response, but it's only
one possible response to the national liberation struggle. And then it's also the terminology that gets modeled when you start talking about nationalism, right, Because, as I defined, national liberation is the struggle of exploited people against a dominating group or against their domination, just generally necessarily against one specific group, could be multiple groups, but it's the struggle of a
people against their domination. However, when you get into nationalism, there are forms of nationalism developed by oppressive groups, developed
by the oppressors. Sometimes they developed a nationalism in order to more effectively oppress the people they oppress it and so, and you know, you could even argue that there are cases where oppressed nations adopt nationalism as strategy for their liberation and end up pursuing a form of nationalism that is quite similar to that which they were being oppressed under. There's one immediate example that comes to mind, if you know what I mean.
I have like nine so I'm not entirely what you're pointing at.
Nine. Okay, Okay, what do you think en of?
Okay, well, I wanted to talk about this.
I think there's like a very there's like a kind of Chinese nationalism that does this a lot, But this is I think a kind of common thing of like they're one of the sort of responses to colonization that's
pretty common. Is this really really this sort of like like quintupling down on patriarchy where you know, you like, because one of the effects of colonization obviously is like the sort of like one of the sort of psychological things is is this sort of like you know, is this installation of of inferiority into the minds of the people
who being colonized. And so one of the ways people respond to this is by being like, no, like the colonizers are wrong, Like our men are actually really strong, and like our men are actually incredibly manly, and like we have really really like tight powerful controller of women, and you see this fucking everywhere, right, This is why all of like there's so many sort of like Chinese nationalists who are so obsessed with like these videos of
like the like basically indistinguishable from American right wing videos where they're just like walking around with no shirts on and being like, look at how strong I am. It's like you see you see this thing with like HN do for people too, where's like they do like exactly the same ship. Like it's all over the fucking place. You can see you can see the Taliban doing this now too, and it's like it's it's like it's you know, it's it's they very cool.
They're seeing colonization as emasculating.
Yeah yeah, and and and that's you know, and I think there's there's there's this mode of like reactionary anti colonialism where it's like they see it as emasculating and they see the problem with colonization was it stopped them
from being an empire. And you see you see this a lot with Chinese nationalism where it's like you know, like they're they're they're their effective problem with like the century humiliation was that they didn't get to keep being the ching Empire and get to keep colonizing other people.
And that's like a very I don't know, I think that that's a very common sort of like thing that happens when this is a very common sort of like ideological basis for sort of the right wing of anti colonial well, I don't know, even calling the manticolonial movement it's kind of like being a bit generous, but yeah, I think it's a very common form of sort of right wing nationalism that.
Emerges as a reaction to colonization.
What immediately came to mind to me, and what I was thinking of was Zionism. Yeah, that too, not to be fair, it was oh, rather correct me if I'm wrong.
It was a movement that existed prior to World War Two.
No, yeah, yeah, right.
And then you know, the experiences of World War two took place, and there were different paths for the movement could have taken. And I don't want to invalidate the beginnings of the movement considering the experiences of Jewish people for centuries in Europe and the oppression and the programs and so they faced. But what we've seen the fruit of one particular path that that movement undertook, and that path has led to another nation struggling first liberation, and that being the Palestinians.
The common example of distinction.
Used is that of the distinction between white nationalism and black nationalism, white nationalism having a very clear history of violent supremacy and clualism, while black nationalism was established in response to that experience of subjugation and clualism and with the desire for self determination. The program of nationalism specifically among oppressed nations has generally seen the oppressed nation as
a united bloc national liberation movements nationalist movements. Nationalist movements typically ignore class, they ignore gender, they ignore religion, and
they know other divisions for the most part. In favor of the development of an independent state, which is usually some form of capitalist either a state capitalist welfare capitalists or a neoliberal capitalist a nationalism is often weaponized and promoted by the ruined class in orders to unite the oppressed classes with their domestic oppressors, replacing foreign capitalists, foreign generals, local generals, and foreign government officials with local officials, in
a word, to conceal the importance of class struggle. You see often in the cases of newly independent countries, there's almost a brief haze of rather, let me speak not generally but from my own knowledge of my own history. Triand Tobago gained independence in nineteen sixty two from the British. This was after a very brief period where we experimented with a West Indian Federation, West Indies being a designation
of the Caribbean by the British. The federation failed and so Trindad and Tobago struck out on their own, and so Trance Tobago became an independent country in nineteen sixty two, and there was really a sense of.
You know, joy and.
Jubile and celebration because of that freedom. You know, we finally broke the shackles to the British. However, it was a very recently, a very constitutional independence. You know, it wasn't an independence brought forth by violent struggle. You know,
it wasn't a situation like Algeria. It was more so the British carefully groomed a generation of politicians and political leaders that would and business leaders that would take on the role that they were fulfilling in order to continue that colonial situation in under new management essentially and the more familiar management, and that very quickly became apparent to the population, which is why we had the Black Power
Revolution in nineteen seventy. It was borne on to the frustration that new management where everything was pretty much the same. Many people who experience the successes of independence and of nationalism that often bears out independence, they've actually come to
recognize that nationalism was not enough. Nationalism has repeatedly failed to solve poverty, to solve oppression and exploitation and suffering, or many states have become formally independent from their clum masters thanks nationalist movements, Newcluanism perseveres, and yet in spite of the continuation of oppression and suffering post independence, you end up seeing some people's response to that being greater
nationalism rather than an exploration of other options. So it is this result of nationalism that has led to its criticism and opposition by anarchists. Again, there's a difference between nationalism and national liberation. But in that criticism of nationalism, I see some anarchists, while recognizing that there are class divisions in the nation, end up ignoring national divisions in a class in favor of some ideal and united working class.
The truth is that the oppressed classes of some nations have benefited from the domination of the oppressed classes and other nations, So let's not do class reductionism. Nations that have had constant war waged against them for centuries tend to turn in to nationalism for the national liberation.
That's obvious.
I think you know you cut them some slack for not thinking about the global working class when they are literally under assault for the national identity. When you fighting colonial administrators and foreign armies, you're not studying the class war, which is why historically national liberation struggles use in nationalism have ignored class divisions among the oppressed nation, but not always.
Black nationalism, for example, has always been a very diverse political movement with several currents and opposing perspectives within it. The common threat is, of course, irresistance, the predominance the
white supremacist system and the assertion of lacks sovereignity. Recognizing that we have to free ourselves without waiting for permission, Recognizing that we have to protect ourselves from the continued assault of the empire of the empire, Recognizing that we can be proud of and love, or bodies or minds on our heritage, or rejection of eurocentrism. And yet some manifestations of black nationalism have been reactionary, capitalistic, morphobic, and patriarchal.
Others have student in stock opposition to those currents. In particular, revolutionary black nationalism, unlike other forms of black nationalism, has consistently stood in opposition to all forms of oppression, including imperialism,
white supremacy, and capitalism. In my view, and as many other black anarchists have noted, revolutionary black nationalism has a place in the struggle in conjunction with the struggle against patriarchy, capitalism, and the state, as we aim to prefigure world free of all forms of nomination. In spite of our critiques of how nationalism tends to manifest, it is not the only way to undertake national liberation. We can incorporate other
fights within that struggle. We can recognize the importance of national liberation whilst staying true to our principles. Anarchism is an internationalist movement. It aims for an entirely new world, not just a pocket of change here and there. But we cannot be so focused on that international struggle that we ignore the very vital local and regional struggles taking place. Internationalism and class struggle are not in contradiction to national
liberation struggle. I believe a real internationalism has to stand in solidarity with the working class and peasantry everywhere, including those of oppressed nationalities. However, at the same time, we cannot uncritically support national liberation struggles. We cannot afford to
just write a blank check of support. It is necessary to engage politically national liberation movements and engage in dialogues with all of their complexities and contradictions, engaging with and uplifting the progressive elements within those national libraations ruggles while criticizing the reactionary elements within those struggles.
I think it's it's incredibly important.
I don't know if intervene in them is the correct thing, is the best way to put it, But like you know, from from from the sort of like East Asian perspective, it's like, yeah, so we we had we had three successful national liberation movements like next to each other, and then after they won their national liberation movements, instead of like continuing the war against the US or whatever, they went to war with each.
Other, so.
You know, you have to sort of like something something, something very clearly went wrong with our Natlib movements when well, I mean obviously, like okay, something went very wrong with Kamara Rouge, but.
Like you know, that's that's understates and things.
But yeah, yeah, you know that that's city. But like you know, the they're like obviously that like that the
Khmara rus was fucked from the start. But you know the fact that like the US and Vietnam, like the Vietnamese like army finally defeats the American colonizers and then basically immediately or invaded by China is a sign that like something went terribly terribly wrong in the process of these struggles, and that like I don't know, if you're we're going to do this properly, you have to make sure that like this shit doesn't happen, because you know, it's it's a just the product of this is just
sort of unfathomable human tragedy of a bunch of colonized people fucking murdering each other for like nothing, or you know, I guess like China's obediate I don't know, geopolitical realignment with the US and in exchange for like industrial capital goods or some shit.
So you know, you gotta you gotta make sure that doesn't happen.
Yeah.
Yeah, and that means intervening, Okay, like you said, you don't want to say intervening necessarily, but it does require having these discussions rely on, Like you don't wait until after a preventable tragedy takes place to try and prevent a tragedy. You know, if you're seeing signs of that the potential for that, you know, probably do something about it.
If a movement is so fragile that a criticism of the way that it's structured, or a criticism of an aspect of its ideology is enough to prevent it from succeeding, or prevent it from collapsing into internal divisions, whatever the case may be, then I don't think that it is robust enough to handle.
The struggle for a liberation.
Yeah, that's that's like they're definitely you're definitely going to lose.
Yeah, Like, if it's easy for an ally to criticize and you know, maybe call something out and that's enough for everything to crumble, how easy do you think it's going to be for like your actual enemy is to like come in and shake things up and like dismantle the organization from the inside. You know, if you if you don't have room for dissent from you know, your allies, from your compatriots.
Then what about your enemies.
What do you think your enemies are going to try and capitalize on They're going to try and fuel and empower that descent and push it in different directions to even further splinter the movement. You know, it's it's complicated, it's difficult. It's not something that I ever wanted to present myself as having all the answers for. But you know,
I feel like certain things should be clear. You know, maybe we should try and preventednessues from getting worse if you see, like, for example, a cult of personality develop, and maybe do something about it before that culture personality has you know, guns on their side and the full power of the state apparatus behind them.
I mean, that's just me though.
A truly internationalist position, in my view, recognizes that human unity can only be achieved through mutual respect, solidarity, alliance, and discourse among people's International revolution would require participation in national struggle for self determination and human dignity against computers domination. It will require shift, as I always say, in our powers, in our drives, in our consciousness. I think you want to have sort of our tooth national liberation struggles. It
really starts in that realm. And then also I think there are ways that we can, as allies, intervene in certain aspect of that process, you know, in confrontation, lending you know, material support to protests or occupations, in non cooperation, supporting strike funds, in prefiguration, providing resources. You don't want these acts of solidarity to get lost in NGOs or and eat organizations, whatever you're trying to get things. Actually,
that's a whole tangent. Let me just scratch that entirely. I'm going to go off. I'll leave off by saying that if we oppose male supremacy, the patriarchy, we must support women's fight against it. That does mean blandly supporting, you know, bourgeois liberal boss feminism. It means listening to, learning from and collaboratively developing the revolutionary feminist project to liberate all women for patriarchal domination and ultimately all people.
If workers decide to former union in many cases and existing union is pro capitalist and hierarchical. I had despite the structural issues with many unions, we still stand with the workers against the bosses, even as we try to convince them of the need for a transformation of those unions of union militancy, for position to bureaucracy in order to fully liberate them from class domination. Instead of merely engaged in dialogue with the oppressors, we can walk on
true them. At the same time as what I'm trying to say, we can act in solidarity without being subsut end to what we may perceive to be something that goes against our values. Solidarity, as I like to view it, is a discourse between people's about how we desamine our own freedom. We may disagree with certain things. We can critique certain things we've seen again and again, certain mistakes being made over and over again and move once, and we can call them out. But you know, you can
have your principles. You can engage, and you should engage in the complexity and contradictions and national liberation struggles, offering critique where needs to be, resistant reactionary, capitalist, patriarchal and status elements when they manifest, and providing support in any way that you are able in any way that they request that you be. People aren't a monoliths. Think for yourself, All power to all the people usual things. That's it for me, and support me on peatre dot com slash
Saint Drew and follow me on YouTube at andrewism. This has been here with myself and Mia be South.
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