Lovely metaphor, never thought of it that way

Socialism betrayed is a good book, sometimes falls into “Great Man Theory”, but it’s overall a good analysis

vagueposting

Hahaha never heard that before. I loved it

not allowing obvious liberals to run rampant in lemmygrad is easily recognized as a political outcome focus

I don’t know what you mean by this paragraph comrade, and I have trouble following your reasoning. But I’ll comment about this. The liberal propagandists should definitely be extracted from our community, but the honest liberals should definitely be heard and honestly debated. On our part, trying as much as possible to ignore provocations and try our best to dismantle their arguments in few words. I see a few reasons why:

1. liberals have common misunderstandings which are useful to debunk. Some of us are well read (most of us aren’t), so the thinking you had when you were a conservative, liberal or “apolitical” has been lost. You cannot empathize to how liberals think now. Alas, comes a liberal, with doubts, silly mistakes, but they are prevalent in political discourse and thinking. A lurker on the website may be presented with arguments dismantling the same silly mistakes they may have. So in terms of political education this is useful;
2. we learn to deal with those who think differently. We need to learn to treat a right-winger well and learn how to defuse a tense situation IRL. Not always we manage to do this, often we manage to hurt others from our own camp, but we aspire to do it. We need to learn how to deal with Nazi provocations both online and personally, physically. We need to learn how to deal emotionally with the situation, train ourselves to not be affected by this interaction. You do this by understanding how your opponents think, and respecting as much as possible their identity. So you do not focus on their religion, their political affiliations, their moral stances on subjects, etc. These are divisive points which separates us from these politically alienated people. We cannot change a person’s identity through force or imposition, it only changes socially and historically.

We need to learn to treat a right-winger well and learn how to defuse a tense situation IRL.

A comment on this, about treating well right-wing colleagues, etc. (unless they are awful people of course, besides their shitty foolish worldview). Of course a Nazi provocateur should be harassed or physically assaulted until they stop their provocation, because it is ethical to do so. It is ethical to repress genocidal ideologies because you’re saving lives by punishing some. But notice a liberal surely would equate us with genociders! They are indoctrinated by bourgeois ideology. Bourgeois ideology needs to accuse communists of what they do so that they feel at least “equal” in comparison, and thus, shielded from criticism. At least you’re doing genocide for a just cause! Not the communists, they genocide for evil!

Bourgeois ideology is hegemonic. You should already expect people to be right-wing. You need to learn to accept this fact so that you’re able to be friendly with right-wingers and not be affected by their provocations. Because you understand their worldview is not their fault, they are too distracted to realize the facts, and we need to reach them somehow. How would you achieve this person to eventually learn the facts if you’re provoking the person, teasing them, insulting them, questioning their sanity, their ability to think, mocking them, etc. Practice shows us that these behaviors tend to alienate these people even further, and even worse, alienate yourself from others.

Left-wingers tend to be more critical of certain expressions of authority, whereas sometimes this in excess can be destructive.

Side note on this.

Many leaders and progressive thinkers were awful in their personal lives, especially with relatives or spouses, like comrade Stalin, Martin Luther King, Albert Einstein, etc. This is because humans make grave mistakes all the time, irrespective of how correct they are. Except Lenin, perhaps, he was both an impeccable human being and very often correct. Look at your own lives, have you not hurt someone? Were you never selfish, arrogant, insensible? People make those mistakes all the time, to a greater or lesser extent. Why should our leaderships be different? Should we disregard historical figures in the past because of their personal mistakes? Should we disregard current leaderships for that?

I think this is a case by case thing, but sometimes we simply cannot afford to be too much critical. Think of an actual communist, politically isolated, representing a small city in the bourgeois state, or something. If the opposition found out bad stuff about that guy’s past, of course the bourgeois media would create a campaign to hunt them down. In such cases should we join the hunt? This is the challenge of having the correct historical understanding of your time and place, so these choices become clearer. Over the time you start acting based on the political outcome, instead of an abstract moral value which you do not adopt yourself in your life. Then you criticize any mistake in private if possible, outside the eyes of the opposition.

No need to anonymize them, we need to know their names, and who they are. We need to recognize our class traitors.

If you’re doing propaganda for a TV show, at least describe it further and why it’s good 🙂

Capitalism creates or “prepares” the material conditions for revolution.

Each revolution will be colored by its specific material conditions

We do not set the conditions for revolution. We identify those conditions, through application of theory

It’s true that we do not set the conditions for the revolution. But only a half-truth. There are material, but also subjective conditions. If the people disapproves the revolutionary movement, it won’t ever succeed. And even some material conditions are in our control, the extent of the organization of the revolutionary movement is a material thing. There are people involved.

Every revolutionary movement in the past featured intellectual, military leadership of groups of people or organizations. It’s our responsibility to prepare these conditions for revolution. But the revolution itself won’t happen by our choice.

If Marxism-Leninism is a science, there must be some technical aspect. What are we supposed to do in the world? How do we do it? And how do we know if it’s working?

The whole point of Marxism-Leninism is not to ‘make’ a revolution, but to prepare the conditions for revolution. We shouldn’t expect everyone to read theory, theory is just for the vanguard. But Marxists-Leninists should focus on improving mass consciousness before anything else. Every action should be subordinated to this particular task. An organization should exist solely for that purpose, until the task is achieved

I never read it, but how about Inventing Reality by Parenti?

Luntz acknowledges Israel’s mounting PR problems in a slide identifying the most powerful tactics employed by Palestine solidarity activists. “Israelis attacking Israel is the second most potent weapon against Israel,” the visual display reads beside a photo of a protest by Jewish Voices for Peace, a US-based Jewish organization dedicated to ending Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

“The most potent” tactic in mobilizing opposition to Israel’s assault on Gaza, according to Luntz, “is the visual destruction of Gaza and the human toll.” The slide inadvertently acknowledges the cruelty of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, displaying a bombed out apartment building with clearly anguished women and children fleeing in the foreground.

Hmm. Good to know.

It almost sounds like satire that the guy accused of sexual harassment is called “Woodcock”

Excellent work, thanks for sharing your readings with us, comrade

Excellent, I’ve relayed this to the editors, we’ll see if there’s anything worth adding into

Who knew racist pieces of shit would be racist pieces of shit

Have any of you had luck with breaking down preconceived notions others may have?

I did, and I have many ideas for anyone wanting to better prepare themselves for these discussions.

I’d just like to be better prepared since apparently this is just something that happens to me.

Most people use [bourgeois] social media, ask them “out of curiosity”, if they use any social media. This will give you two valuable insights:

• first, the main source of propaganda which instructs their worldview. We can easily identify propagandistic discourse by noticing how common it is, sometimes even word for word repeated by numerous people.
• second, the place where you will engage with content related to their grievances, and debate with people in the comments. The comment sections of Facebook and Instagram, for instance, are very lively and from there you can engage with multiple people with access to online research for you to back your own views

It was there that I was able to master my debate bro skills

The article was written by Timofei Sergeitsev, a Russian “philosopher” with no direct link to the government. The article in the website you linked was written in early April 2022, very early after the war, when no one knew what to expect. It was claimed it was “proof” the Russians was intending to genocide Ukrainians.

More than a year later, have we seen anything like it? Have we seen active actions from the Russians to consistently destroy civilian buildings and systematically cause civilian casualties on purpose? I at least haven’t, unless we are talking about a completely different war which I’m not aware. I don’t excuse the Russians of anything, I’m sticking with the facts. The Russians have been very careful not to cause non-military casualties, which is extremely odd for a genocidal regime.

So, in short, it’s your article written by a guy with no links to the government vs. what the actual war itself shows in practice. I prefer to see what practice shows us.

Yes, Marxism is based on a scientific methodology called historical materialism. It’s too complex to be explained in a single comment, but it has an internal logic and methodology which proposes to analyze social systems in general, but especially capitalist societies in particular.

You can’t use the scientific method used in the natural sciences because you can’t put a society in a lab to study it. Social sciences require a methodology apart from the natural sciences, and Marxism has proposed historical materialism, which is very consistent and coherent approach, based on the Hegelian dialectical logic with materialism as a principle.

How ironic! Let’s see if it fits for the “genocide” position:

• Closed Ideological Systems: Whether those who defend the idea of “genocide” in Xinjiang are aware or not, the sources used to claim there is a genocide in Xinjiang is usually Adrian Zenz, a German white supremacist and Christian fundamentalist who claimed in his book Worthy to Escape that “other belief systems are ultimately inspired by Satan” and justifies “eternal punishment” for those who refuse to believe in Jesus.

• Immunity to Facts: Every time one tries to argue that Xinjiang faced a policy of de-radicalization of terrorists who led many attacks against the province, those who claim there is a genocide there say they are “genocide deniers.” I’ve even seen people saying those who don’t agree with the “genocide” position are paid by the Chinese.

• Enemy Construction: I can’t even count the number of times people have called those who don’t promote the “genocide” propaganda “tankies” and dismissing them instead of engaging with arguments.

• Adaptability: The “genocide” propaganda claims there is a genocide there, and then when presented with the fact that even those who were put in the re-education facilities were allowed to express their culture with dances and art on video, the “genocide” conspiracy theorists say that it was a fake, an act, that it was a spectacle organized by the Chinese to hide the genocide. Just to give you an example.

It does match the “genocide” position very well. I’ve yet to see a genocide which preserves the language, the culture, the customs and the places of worship of a people. Another thing, notice the reaction of Muslim countries to the actual genocide being perpetrated by Israel. They are firmly condemning it through all channels. In contrast, the policies of de-radicalization by the Chinese were unanimously well-received by Muslim countries.

The West ≠ Western citizens

North Atlantic imperialist countries is what we refer as “the West”. They have shared interests and in terms of foreign policy act almost in unison, so much so that a single term to describe North American and Western European countries is not a generalization, it’s quite appropriate actually.

Israel has killed more civilians (mostly children and women) in a month of war than Russia has killed in almost two years. The Russians actually target almost exclusively military infrastructure, they have preserved electrical grids, water stations, communications infrastructure, etc… Not because they are “good guys”, obviously, but it’s a part of their strategy. But it shows genocide is not a part of this strategy.