WIthoutFurtherDelay

I stg it was an accident please don't kill me

In case you're confused, check my username on my profile, not my display name

There are a lot of things in life that I love, but those things will always inevitably come into conflict with organizing somehow. So far, the only ways I’ve been able to resolve this have basically come down to bullying myself for caring about anything except socialism, or ignoring the problem. Both seem toxic. How do you deal with it?

In the West, we are constantly bombarded with lies and blatantly incorrect statements about the living conditions of socialist countries. During the original Cold War, depictions of the USSR as a cold, purely utilitarian world with extreme restrictions on any sort of luxury were quite frequent, and though they were blatantly false, it still rubbed off on the West’s impression of socialism in numerous ways that affect even those ideologically committed to socialism subconsciously.

How else to explain the existence of “Nazbol” ideology? People, due to some degree of ignorance about the true nature of the USSR and of socialism in general, but drawn to ascetic, “anti-excessive” (excessive, a term butchered and vulgarized so much I could write an essay about that alone) aesthetics. These people could be drawn to this completely illusory ideology due to bigotry, mere aesthetic appeal, or any number of reasons, but the important thing to remember is that the majority of people are not like this.

The USSR greatly supported “excessive” things that the Nazbol would see as absurd. State-funded movie directors existed. And the USSR pioneered much of modern animation. And what a legacy that is! Not only is animation for the sake of art and self-expression the furthest from cold asceticism I can think of, this deeply important art form has direct ties with numerous current-day queer communities.

Socialism and “excessive” art does not end with the USSR. Anyone who has been in the furry community long enough knows this to be the case. I will not elaborate as to respect the instance’s rules against sexual content (though, arguably, the original content is not sexual, the internet’s general reaction to it definitely was, and the original was by no means drab). The fact I even have to specify that hopefully demonstrates my point.

In this present day, despite all of these obvious examples of rich, romantic and “excessive” art from socialist countries, the Western left still had a somewhat ascetic view of socialism, this could be based on a misguided belief that Lenin’s view of a responsible and likeable revolutionary was proposing excessive self-restraint, but if anyone truly believed that Lenin advocated that, it’s quite sad. Beating yourself up moralistically for enjoying anything is a fairly reliable way to get people to think you’re weird, in a way more unsettling to people than any kind of “excessive” activity the Nazbol would despise.

I propose that we must fight this tendency however we can. But how?

Does anyone else remember when a socialist subreddit banned catgirls for objectifying women?

I’m not going to get into if that was right or wrong here, but it sounds like a pretty good example of something “excessive”, something which, even when having it’s truly problematic character removed from it (possibly especially at that point given how misogynistic Nazbols probably are) scares the aesthetically committed revolutionary.

These days, the catgirl is not exclusively associated with misogyny. Plenty of queer and women-dominated spaces have adopted it as an icon of sorts. We can, then, fight two reactionary tendencies, social conservatism and Nazbol ideology, with one stone.

Let’s post more catgirls. And make them queer feminist ones.

I apologize in advance. This is one of the most badly edited things I have ever posted on the internet. I'm not even sure if I agree with it anymore.

Part 2 (I already have the entire thing written, but it's too big for one post) will be on my community. (yes i am shilling for my community here). Warning about that second part: It may veer into some vaguely "left unity" territory, so if you disagree with that but like this first part... you have been warned. Don't worry, I'm not necessarily going to say anarchists are right or anything like that ~~i don't think they are~~

The approach that the United States, radical left has adapted is fundamentally flawed, as demonstrated by it’s almost complete lack of political power. Numerous explanations have been made for this, many of them rooting in the relative comfort of most United States citizens.

I do think this argument makes some sense, but that it doesn’t hold that much weight when inspected closer. If this were the main roadblock that socialism has encountered in the United States, I speculate that we would have a much higher portion of the less well-off (non-labor-aristocratic) proletariat participating in radically socialist politics. Instead, we see a resurgence of reactionary views, political apathy, and nihilism. While there could be other possible explanations for this, I think the most likely one is that socialist theory has not truly yet been adapted to existence in the imperial core. Indeed, the majority of successful figures and scientific Marxists figures have been in imperialized, and, sometimes, feudal countries.

These are quite noticeably, not in even remotely the same situation as the proletariat in the United States. Exact differences are numerous, but what should be first and foremost acknowledged is that it is fundamentally different. But, of course, this has been acknowledged by quite a few people, many of which are reactionaries pretending to be “socialist”. The laughable “pat-Soc”, or “patriotic socialist”, claims to be adapting a scientific Marxism for the United States, but if they are, they must not have been examining scientific Marxism too closely!

Indeed, the main flaw many of these aspiring revolutionaries share is a complete and total disregard for the findings of previous revolutionaries, a belief that they are irrelevant. But this is non-sensical. Of course they are relevant. If their analysis of the material environment in their imperialized countries was correct (and it most certainly was- A socialist revolution was successfully done to overthrow Tsarist Russia for a reason), then the insights gleamed there are still going to be valuable - Just with the caveat that they were observed from the perspective of an imperialized country, not the one doing the imperializing.

So what can we gleam from this? Well, the mistakes that the Western and especially the United States, socialists have made, is twofold. Not only have some socialists made the grave error of failing to acknowledge the importance of previous revolutionaries, but other socialists have interpreted their writings and experiences as being able to be directly translated to their current situation. An equally massive mistake.

We can take Lenin’s critiques, the internationalist approach to proletarian struggle, Mao’s examples of successful revolutions and conflicts, but we cannot use these people as one to one maps on what to do now. There is still theorizing to be done, desperate work to understand the United States proletariat, and it cannot be simplified to something as trivial and fatalistic (a tendency Lenin himself criticized!) as organization in the imperial core being impossible.

But how to reach the United States proletariat? If they can be reached, then what are we missing? They are not being organized now, and that is not due to lack of trying.

I suggest that most (modern, 2020) United States socialists have completely failed to understand the situation of both themselves and their peers on a fundamental level, in understanding the material conditions of the United States proletariat.

see title

(not radlib, actual left.)

I’m gay and communist, who’s with me?