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@rah@rah@feddit.uk said in a cross-post:
"How do you feel about the Russian Federation's treatment of them?
How do you feel about The Plastic People of the Universe? How do you feel about the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic's treatment of them?"
Anyone have an answer? I'm not that well-read on this subject.
them
who is them tho
I am pretty solidly a communist but still pretty hung up on general leftist aversion to freedom of expression.
I've read a little bit about the Paradox of Intolerance and it does make sense (as much as a paradox can I guess), but it just bugs me that at the end of the day, whoever is in power gets to define "intolerance" and their definition might not match the majority's. And the majority might not be right either...
Some people would consider me intolerant for being against circumcision and piercing of infants' ears, because those are deeply-held cultural traditions for some people.
Reactionary and hate speech makes me fuckin sick. Yet I'm terrified that attempts to officially ban it just fuel persecution fetishes in people who practice it, and cause them to go further down their rabbit holes and drag more uncertain people with them.
I'm at least not crazy for worrying, right?
Why do Hexbear socialists look at everything as all or nothing? It's like any movement towards the left that isn't an actual revolution is unacceptable. Personally I want to have more rights day to day even if it can't go all the way.
Because without the threat of revolution you'll never get those rights in the first place and as soon as the threat is removed the rights you have or won will be rolled back at the earliest convenience
Without revolution the capitalist class will call your bluff each time, and if you get mad at them what're you going to do? You already took revolution off the table
As a result Liberal radicalism can best be described as a snake eating it own ass
you'll have to be more specific. Are you talking about how people here dismiss Democrats or western liberals in general? Because we don't trust them. It's true that communists have a history of making coalitions with their liberals. Like the current dominant party in Mexico, MORENA, is a coalition between communists, liberals, social democrats, etc. Lenin's party would also make concessions with their liberals when it came to making electoral advancements.
But that's not our situation at all and we're distrustful of liberals. Most of us are from western countries where liberal parties exist to betray us or do nothing, that's really it. We haven't experienced much solidarity at all with the liberals in our countries/areas, we've only experienced betrayal and failure. We have no built up trust. I've personally worked with some liberals in my area, namely the Sierra Club and AFL-CIO. But it was just that. Work, stay on task, because I know once the task drifts from our common goals, they'll go back to being useless liberals. I'm still really salty about how the 2020 anti-cop protests fizzled out.
How can I get better at understanding contradiction? Specifically identifying contradictions, I'm still struggling a bit with the dialectical part of dialectical materialism.
Contradiction is the inability of a complex system to internalize new data and new conditions
For example the labor vs employer conflict and capital expansion vs the natural world are the two biggest contradictions inherent to capitalism
Liberals maintain that the acquisition of new data can somehow offset the new conditions and resolve the contradiction, always, no more matter what, like magic
While materialists argue the system can't internalize data that contradicts the interests and incentives that animate the system entire (because that would negate the point of the system), which is Capital Accumulation
Basically if any new data that offsets capital accumulation is introduced to a system that is fueled by capital accumulation, far from what the liberals claim the contradiction is not resolved, it's in fact heightened
To understand and spot contradictions you have to understand the nature of the specific system at play and what primary mechanism animates it. For capitalism that is profitability, everything in the system revolves like planets around that dark bronze heart
So contradictions and the orientation of the system can be spotted when you see something that either services profitability or opposes/limits it
What will defend socialism from the oligarchs?
The elimination of the social relations and structural incentives that create oligarchs
Oligarchs always emerge in the wake of vast privatization campaigns and often require the backing of a liberal wing of government, whether it's foreign liberals or an internal liberal clique that works with foreign capital to subvert socialist development in a given country
Looking at socialist history, the maoists and their horizontal decentralized approach to governing while maintaining powerful centralized regimental armies seems to be best formula developed so far to counter the liberal obsession with privatization
