there is a specific type of politics that i find a lot among artists of colour of my generation living in the west where we talk a lot about war and empire and racism and it's a lot of like decolonization buzzwords and talking about "embodied approaches to collaboration and knowledge production" and bringing science and ecology and historic cultural practices into our art and there is this heavy emphasis on the mutual aid instagram infographics thing and it constantly feels Iike everyone around me is dancing around an understanding that is just outside of their grasp and i think its because everyone is afraid of marxism in an explicit sense, rather than just the vague defanged "leftist" sense, which isn't a coherent ideology at all nor an actual Foundation of tools through which we can seek to understand the world. the scientific method for understanding economics is dialectical materialism, and to truly understand how capitalism and colonialism and patriarchy function you need to be willing to learn materialist analysis. like to actually understand What imperialism is and how it differs from colonialism, the actual material function(s) of capitalism and Why things are the way they are, to see with clear eyes the roles of racism and homophobia and transphobia and ableism, and to write and make art about it in the way I think many people desire to, where you are not dancing around an understanding of the realities of the world but actually biting through the meat of it, you need to understand materialism, you need to understand that imperialism is not the same thing as colonialism it is the highest stage of capitalism, and really dig into that. otherwise my peers will just keep dancing in circles and saying things that not only do not reflect reality but actively benefit the systems that harm us as well as the billions of our people who do not live in the west, and all the jargon like "we are decolonizing our mindsets with multidisciplinary ecologies" or whatever will never actually like... have the impact that is desired because it's not touching the face of reality idk how else to say it. like what are we doing here lol
