Patsocs Ls: you have to show solidarity to racists
I wonder whats Stalin's take on how to deal with people with "conservative values"
In the U.S.S.R. anti-semitism is punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet system. Under U.S.S.R. law active anti-semites are liable to the death penalty.
This dumbass was arguing a month or two ago that modern communists are too woke to have worked with the Black Hundreds, a proto-fascist group of anti-semitic genocidal lunatics from the end stage of Russian tsardom. But, as it turned out, long before the October Revolution Lenin was advocating for communists to literally train themselves by getting weapons and killing the Black Hundreds. Almost the moment the Soviets took control of Russia, they shut down Black Hundred newspapers and arrested their leaders. Death to patriotic socialism.
Imagine if our social concerns are so intertwined with our economic concerns we regard them as inseparable and problems in one often cause problems in the other
Imagine using dialectical materialism
there's no such thing as the segregation of economic and social values because of the relationship between base and superstructure
People who share our "base" economic ideals but do not share our "superstructural" social ideals are basically admitting that they want a reactionary superstructure that modifies the economic base. Ergo, they do not share our economic values either, they are merely pretending to. If society is downstream from economics, then social values are downstream from economic values. Racism came about to justify colonialism and slavery, but racism remained in place even after the classical forms of colonialism and chattel slavery died, and were replaced by neocolonialism and prison slavery. The superstructure of racism remaining in place meant that the economic base of slavery and colonialism could never come to a proper end, but merely continued in a new form.
This reminds me of the Boots Riley interview where he talks about how capitalism needed racism to operate: https://youtu.be/JmyWvjszBOw
Before seeing this, I'd read about intersectionalism but this is one of the things that really made the concept click in my head. In the case of the video of course racism is being discussed, but transphobia, homophobia, sexism are all intertwined with the capitalism and used to manipulate and/or exploit various groups. I'm still not well-versed on the topic by any means, but it now seems bizarre to me that people like this don't see those links between social and economic justice.
I see Boots Riley, I upbear.
Edbie
is this MidwesternMarx or not? suspicious misspelling
https://twitter.com/EdbieLigerSmith
If you look it's definitely him, he posted a shirtless picture of himself today "trying to be the first communist to represent America in the olympics" I think he also does the socials for the midwesternmarx twitter account
would link nitter, but I think they're broken today
The first "communist" to represent America in the olympics being a patsoc is so on-brand for this nation that I'm going to cry.
look man, i agree with you and all but did stalin not criminalize homophobia in the ussr? a better pick for a quote like that would be Lenin who created the most LGBT friendly nation in the world after the revolution
From what I remember, the loosening of laws about homosexuality were part of a broad repeal of Tsarist laws in general. It was something of an accident or oversight that homosexuality was legalized. But it should be mentioned a there were Bolsheviks into free love, and I think Kollontai wrote something endorsing gay people in the party?
And the one implemented under Stalin was more of an anti-pedophilia law, but in a time where gay people were assumed to also be pedophiles. And yeah that's unfortunate and the world has been unkind to queer people.
I do remember someone here mentioning that the anti-pedastry law was only ever used one time against an otherwise typical gay person and it was after Stalin was dead. I never looked into it though.
In the U.S.S.R. anti-semitism is punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet system. Under U.S.S.R. law active anti-semites are liable to the death penalty.
Easy for Stalin to say that. The actual experience for Jews in the USSR was considerably less great. The USSR supported the creation of Israel early on as a way to put political pressure on western countries, but:
when it became evident that many Soviet Jews expected the revival of Zionism to enhance their own aspirations for separate cultural and religious development in the Soviet Union, a wave of repression was unleashed.
On August 12, 1952, in the event known as the Night of the Murdered Poets, thirteen of the most prominent Yiddish writers, poets, actors and other intellectuals were executed on the orders of Joseph Stalin
quotes without citations are great, am I right folks
I tried looking for it. The first quote is getting a book by R. J. Overy called "The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia". The quote itself is not cited in the book but following it is a claim about thousands of jewish folks being arrested which is cited from a work called "The USSR, Zionism and Jews" (paraohrasing the name since I don't remember it exactly nor the author's) but I couldn't find it.
Edit: unsurprisingly the comment author cribbed the quote straight from a Wikipedia article about Soviet anti-Semitism.
How surprising that this is left at the bottom of the thread
Yeah turns out claims like "a wave of repression was unleashed" are not exactly straightforward to dispute.
Imagine thinking "the social" and "the economic" are two magically separate realms that don't intersect and about which you can have totally different beliefs, lol. Not just liberalism, but this sort of thinking goes back even deeper into "Western" thinking. This is the consequence of the "Western" metaphysical tradition. This is what understanding dialectics cures you of, but the hegemony of metaphysics that produces shit like this is what makes dialectics hard for people to understand.
Looking at society through a scientific lens, one would come to the conclusion that social values are a reflection of material conditions. Nobody just magically becomes a transphobic asshole, it's a successful redirection of anger towards fellow workers by the ruling class.
True. But that doesn't mean we should show any tolerance towards transphobia, racism, etc. Actual solidarity and support for total liberation for all is the only way to combat the divide and conquer strategy. All this patsoc shit has been tried before; I'd recommend reading Settlers, Black Bolshevik, George Jackson, and shit like that for good explanations of why it's a dead end.
Economics departments in shambles
Agree on the philosophical point, Western metaphysics is rooted in a dead and non-dynamic worldview.
It's also fascinating to me that "Eastern" metaphysics still does get recognized by Westerners when it comes up, but only as an exotic curiosity. Even though it's based on a pretty normal and fundamental observation that things can be relative or change over time.
For example the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy pages on topics like human nature and free will are just categorizations of Western philosophers' positions. They even say they ignore other traditions on purpose lmao (how can you describe humanity without consulting humanity itself?). A naive young mind reads these things and assumes they need to pick one of the categories they're presented with, and that's the end of that
Something that always infuriates me is when philosophy from other parts of the world gets dismissed as being just religion and not "properly philosophical." Like, thank god "Western" philosophy was always totally non-religious, amirite?