Welcome again to everybody. Make yourself at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
☭ Matrix homeserver and space
☭ Theory reading group on hiatus, will move to Lemmygrad later this year
☭ Find theory on ProleWiki, marxists.org, Anna’s Archive, libgen
Completely forgot to actually read Varoufakis’s “technofeudalism” and now I’m struck by Marxists starting to fall for that obvious bit of Eurocommunist revisionism too (I refer specifically to RevLeft Radio). Disappointing but not unexpected from the North.
Breht has always been a bit revisionist, I think mostly because of the big tent nature of RevLeft
Liberal “democracy” requires a constant forgetfulness and inability to maintain and collect data in order to portray itself as “effective”. From the nonsense “lifted out of poverty” myth, to nonsense measures such as the dollar-based poverty line, one is often restrained from wondering why isn’t the data better, like how many people have access to food, shelter and work.
How many homeless people are there in the city? The competent authorities certainly have enough of a budget to identify and catalogue almost every person living on the street. And it’s clearly in the best interests of all (except landlords) that every homeless person is known, their conditions understood. Yet that data is unknowable because, as Mao once put it, to investigate a problem is to solve it.
My wife and I got into a huge fight over politics. In the fight I learned that she talks about me with her older brother who is a USA Navy vet with a liberal degree in History and Political science by her screaming at me that “my brother is right, you’re just a fucking Stalin worshipping tankie.” Says I’m ignoring history in that “he killed millions.”
I deserved being screamed at. I made a jab at her not doing anything to help the political situation because she refuses to go out with me to DSA or CPUSA, but she just started doing the “red card” thing that she learned from radlibs like this blond white woman who’s a lawyer (I can’t remember the name). Which is not enough and wont work for very long (her brother and I agree on that), but she has massive clinical depression right now, and she needs to find something to make her feel useful.
This is the fourth time we’ve fought over politics. She doesn’t like to talk about politics with me because I always steer it to democrats being fuckers, which “is a very MAGA thing to do.” Then she’ll blame me and “do nothing” Jill Stein voters for making Trump happen. I shit on dems so much to show how complicit they are, but she’s “already aware they are terrible people (except Sanders and AOC) but at least they are trying.”
I am the one who continues to push for us to talk about it, because we are both alone in our reading. It’s something that we need to talk about. She would be an excellent communist as her literal ideal world is communism, but she won’t detach from the liberal safehaven. I’ve said somethings that I believe have made her think for a second. It looked like she was listening when I talked about why I want to get into armed training, but doesn’t understand why I have to be the one. I feel as if she heard me when I said “I don’t want to be violent, I’m a scrawny ass teacher. There were people in the past revolutions who didn’t want to either, but your freedom is not given, it’s fought for.”
She wants to read Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism by Kristen Ghodsee after I’m done with that. I think it would help a bit, but I sometimes feel like I’m reading a radlibs take on the ussr and Stalin, which I think would make my wife double down. Some other comrades have said the author is a communist but advocates for eurocommunism, iirc.
I’m just venting. I don’t really know what I’m gonna do at this point. She doesn’t want me to leave, I don’t want to leave her, so it’s a matter of coming to an agreement and setting boundaries for political talk. I don’t feel like we’re comrades. It’s mostly my fault. I assume that she isn’t aware of how evil dems are, and so I get condescending. I’m not being a good husband and listening to her worries. I’m glad I have therapy soon…
I actually had something like this happen with my gf when I first started organising. I was super passionate about being a communist and I was constantly mad about things that happened around me and in the world. My gf got mad at me because ´communism won´t fix things, it´s scary!!!’ and she felt sort of intimidated to talk to me about politics because she just wasn’t as involved as I was. At first I was mad too but eventually I figured I had to do something to change this argument between us. Because I still liked her very much as a person and I wanted to be with her.
I just started focussing on party work and wanted to lead by example. Communism is still a scary ideolog for many and many people are still brainwashed by decades of propaganda. But it is hard to see the bad sides if you and your party actually achieve postive things. Maintaining a bus line in your city is not scary. Making sure a local park isn’t taken over by some private owner who wants to make a rich people’s resort of it is not scary.
Eventually by doing all this stuff she saw what exactly I was trying to fight for and she turned around. She even goes to party stuff with me now sometimes.
My point is: I think a lot of communists sometimes have this aura of ‘I know how things work so if you just listen to me and let me explain it, then maybe you’ll understand too’ which is no different from the smug liberals we criticize. We are at a disadvantage after decades of anti communist propaganda and we need to be aware that convincing people of communism sometimes takes a very gentle and time consuming approach, and being mad at these people isn’t helping.
I’m not a professional in this stuff or anything, so take this with a grain of salt, but it sounds to me like the two of you need to sit down and have some heart to heart talks about your feelings. Like what you feel about these things, what she feels about them, etc. And I don’t mean “feelings” as in “I think the dems are awful” or “I hate Stalin”; those are more like beliefs/worldview. I mean drilling down to the raw emotion of it, as isolated as possible from judgments/descriptions of the other. For example “I feel scared when I think about communism” or “I feel alone when you say I’m a ‘Stalin worshiping tankie’.”
Communism has a lot of fear-mongering baked into it in the US, so it’s easy to have people who on the one hand feel abandoned by everyone else in their life for believing in it and on the other hand, have people who are terrified of the implications of anyone in their life who does believe in it. Once you know how each other feels, then you can get into dealing with it. For example, if she’s scared of you being communist, you could explain what communism means to you and talk in more detail about what you do in the day to day of volunteering. Or if you feel isolated by her acting this way, she could try to make sure it’s clear that she appreciates you in spite of any fears she might have about your political beliefs.
What the feelings would look like for each of you is something only you know. The examples are just to help illustrate what I mean.
but she’s “already aware they are terrible people (except Sanders and AOC) but at least they are trying.”
oof. Those two might be left of dems but their track record speaks for itself… :/
I haven’t read the Ghodsee book, but wouldn’t be too surprised if it was eurocom.
Hang in there. I don’t really know what to classify my own partner politically but I at least know theyre somewhere on the left and think liberals suck. And they don’t take the other side when I push back against our more liberal friends when they speak ill of China. Deconstructing atrocity propaganda is an arduous uphill battle, even more so when it’s some else, but you’re right, framing it in condescending or ad hominem/they’re just liars (even if true) rhetoric isn’t very effective.
It’s very frustrating when liberals blame the very small sliver of non-republican opposition as the reason their campaigns failed, because it’s clearly just trying to find scapegoats instead of critically reflecting on why their campaigns were really unpopular, they have proven track records of repeated and repeated failed promises while shaking hands under the table with corporations to pass horrendous stuff… why when Ds are in power they make very minute gestures towards progressive policies and make a fuss that their hands are tied against making anything more concrete like roe v wade, and always make the biggest fuss when Rs actually pass policies that they promised – and this is somehow our fault when we point it out. The cherry on top of this shitty cake is their audience believes in this scapegoating.
In the gym, headphones on, playing Irish rebel songs 💪🏼
A thought I had for dealing with liberals who are butt hurt over the closure of USAID: “USAID is the geopolitical equivalent of a person who volunteers at a soup kitchen to find victims for sexual assault”
Michael Parenti said it beautifully: Any aid from a capitalist country is when money is taken from the poor people of a rich country and given to the rich people of a poor country
There’s this Dutch internet marxist called Left Laser who visited a podcast made by some douchy right wing news outlet and he got ambushed about October 7th but still managed to come out on top. He’s now doing a reaction type of stream on youtube about it.
Sometimes leftist activism feels so terminally online lol. Like, I always imagine myself trying to show it to my dad who has been working in a warehouse for 30 years and I just know he wouldn’t even care about it in the slightest. Like how are obscure internet beefs going to build class consciousness.
True, but it’s good for moving PowNews fans away, and towards LeftLaser
Whenever I fall ill with something, and get my treatment and meds for completely free and in a reasonable timeframe, I think of all the idiots (USians or not) who worship the US as some sort of great country. Fuckers ain’t even got no Sistema Único de Saúde.
lemmygrad devs, i once again ask for your support implementing catppuccin mocha theme in lemmygrad
if you’re using a browser based on Firefox or Chromium, there’s an official Catpuccino user style for Lemmy with instructions
Our party leader gave a webinar today about the new government’s plans and what they will mean for the population. I thought it was very informative and I admired how he gave it himself. Imagine Joe fucking Biden giving a webinar to Democrat members himself. On a Tuesday evening.
CW: suicide
Sadly a very active member of our party took her own life. Even though I did not know her very wel personally I am very shocked. We chatted a few times during party actions. Keep checking on each other, comrades.___
Their post presidency memoirs versus our four volume Governance of China.
The classic Chinese strategy: “do nothing, keeping winning”
I have a kinda heartbreak for my academic minor I’ve finished. I loved it so much. I miss my classmates and teachers and the lessons. It genuinely feels like I have to refind my purpose again. I have to try to socialize more now, since so much of my social life happened with that class. Sucks that I didn’t get a long term friendship out of it.
The new government has been formed and the plans are coming out slowly. The unions have already called for a big general strike soon, so fun times ahead.
how are you all doing? i got my korean resident card today
Some socialist infographics I’ve collected.
Oh thanks!
