cucumovirus
☭
This is no different from “you have agency, you can just not commit crimes” personal responsibility rhetoric we see from the right.
This is the rhetoric on the surface and in form, but in essence it serves to recognize the poor and the racialized as less than fully human, it’s an attempt to paint them as not deserving of the full rights enjoyed mostly only by white cishet men. It infantilizes, pathologizes, or paints the others as barbaric savages, etc.
Either we believe people’s material conditions influence their behavior in a way that at least lessens their responsibility or we don’t.
We (Marxists) don’t. Material conditions influence behavior and ideology, of course, but we don’t justify crime because of that. If we just broadly removed responsibility of individuals because material conditions influence their behavior, we would end up removing responsibility from even the most heinous colonizers and genociders, which we do not do. We do understand how the capitalist system leads to these crimes, but we don’t justify them because of it. There is a lot of difference between a poor person doing crime to help feed their family and a well-off westerner being a racist.
We don’t justify any and all crimes committed by the poor, even if we recognize the role of material conditions. If a poor person steals to feed their family, we justify it because we hold human life above private property, and we support the class struggles that lead to liberation.
From Hegel’s Philosophy of Right quoted in Losurdo:
A man who is starving to death has the absolute right to violate the property of another; he is violating the property of another only in a limited fashion. The right of extreme need (Notrecht) does not imply violating the right of another as such: the interest is directed exclusively to a little piece of bread; one does not treat another as a person without rights.
Us speaking about crime being driven primarily by material conditions is not a justification of it, it’s an explanation, a step towards actually dealing with crime in society by addressing its root causes instead of trying to avenge it (like the current capitalist states do).
People in the west are racist and consume racist propaganda willingly, out of rational self-interest. They benefit from it in several different ways (justification of the global order with the west on top, avoidance of state repression, social acceptance, etc.). Part of the reason why they do so is because they aren’t actually aware how they can benefit from denouncing the propaganda and becoming socialists, they aren’t aware of their class interests and some more long-term, universal ones. This is the point where our counter-propaganda and organizing needs to come in, we cannot just debunk the propaganda, we have to offer a positive alternative that promises people (relatively) immediate material benefits. This article goes into more details.
Similar to how Hegel criticized the christian call to “help the poor” because it presupposes a constant existence of poverty in order to feel good about its (ineffective) charity. A quote from Losurdo’s Class Struggle:
We are reminded of Hegel’s critical remarks on the Gospel commandment to aid the poor. Losing sight of the fact that it is a ‘conditional precept’, and absolutizing it, Christians also wound up absolutizing poverty, which alone could confer meaning on the norm enjoining aid for the poor. The survival of poverty was a precondition for Christians, or at least some of them, enjoying a sense of moral nobility attendant upon their aid for the poor. The seriousness of help for the poor should instead be measured by its contribution to overcoming poverty as such.
Actually, the authors of this are professors from that university, lmao.
They were even given some grants and awards.
Arxiv and similar services are mostly used in actual academic circles to publish pre-prints or just to get articles out there while they’re still being reviewed by actual journals, so it’s possible that this will be published in a journal at some point.
I think it’ll be almost impossible to get right numbers because of the secrecy the USSR had
We have perfectly fine accuracy regarding the numbers for most things in the USSR. In the 90s, the USSR archives were open to researchers from across the world and many propagandized narratives about the USSR were promptly shown to be false, at least in serious academic circles.
I believe we can find better communist leaders that didn’t kill at least 700,000 of his political opponents to maintain power
Firstly, Stalin didn’t do any of this on his own and neither did any other communist leader. Secondly, around 700 000 people were executed in the entire ~30 years Stalin was the leader, not just during the purges. Thirdly, he didn’t “just do this to maintain power”. Our job is not “to find better communist leaders” from the past. It’s to accurately analyze concrete historical situations, the material reality in its social and historical context and learn from that analysis as much as we can - both the good and the bad. However, ceding any ground to baseless anticommunist propaganda does not benefit us at all. No one is going around saying Stalin was flawless but any nuanced discussion is impossible in mainstream spaces.
Jackson School of International Studies
This doesn’t mean much at all. It’s a liberal institution connected to a university in the US. It cites the CIA world fact book as a good source and even mentions The Gulag Archipelago in a positive, uncritical light. Not to mention all your other sources which include wikipedia and the history channel website which cites Business Insider articles and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty all of which serve as explicitly anticommunist propaganda.
I think we have different people in history that set a much better example, like Fidel Castro for one.
You cannot just pick and choose who you like and don’t like from history. You have to study all of it fairly. The situation in Cuba from the 50s onward is not the same as in the USSR around WW2. We aren’t looking for good examples to blindly follow form the past. We are looking to learn, based on their specific examples, how to in general better analyze and approach our situation today. We cannot just replicate any past socialist strategy, we have to formulate our own that is specific to our current circumstances.
I would recommend you read Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti or Stalin: History and Critique of A Black Legend by Domenico Losurdo to better understand the history and historiography concerned with past and current socialist states, and Stalin in particular.
Also: https://redsails.org/the-pitfalls-of-liberalism/
The most perturbing question for the liberal is the question of violence. The liberal’s initial reaction to violence is to try to convince the oppressed that violence is an incorrect tactic, that violence will not work, that violence never accomplishes anything.
The liberal is so preoccupied with stopping confrontation that he usually finds himself defending and calling for law and order, the law and order of the oppressor. Confrontation would disrupt the smooth functioning of the society and so the politics of the liberal leads him into a position where he finds himself politically aligned with the oppressor rather than with the oppressed.
The reason the liberal seeks to stop confrontation — and this is the second pitfall of liberalism — is that his role, regardless of what he says, is really to maintain the status quo, rather than to change it.
To add onto this, I really like Losurdo’s analysis:
Immediately after World War I — after the defeat of Tsarist Russia — Russia was in danger of being balkanized, of becoming a colony. Here I quote Stalin, who said that the West saw Russia like they saw Central Africa, that they were trying to drag it into war for the sake of Western capitalism and imperialism.
The end of the Cold War, with the West and the United States triumphant, once again put Russia at risk of becoming a colony. Massive privatization was not only a betrayal of the working classes of the Soviet Union and Russia, it was also a betrayal of the Russian nation itself. The West was trying to take over Russia’s massive energy deposits, and the US came very close to acquiring them. Here Yeltsin played the role of “great champion” for the Western colonization effort. Putin is not a communist, that much is clear, but he wants to stop this colonization, and seeks to reassert Russian power over its energy resources.
Therefore, in this context, we can speak of a struggle against a new colonial counter-revolution. We can speak of a struggle between the imperialist and colonialist powers — principally the United States — on the one side, and on the other we have China and the third world. Russia is an integral part of this greater third world, because it was in danger of becoming a colony of the West.
The Onion has always had good takes on israel.
https://www.theonion.com/the-onion-calls-on-israel-to-bomb-our-offices-in-case-1846912378
Nerd or geek culture was quite reactionary for a long time now. It’s a product of the (predominantly white male) western bourgeoisie and labour aristocrats, and its links to racism and sexism go quite deep.
This 3-page article (page 1, page 2, page 3) does a good job at analyzing these cultural aspects. It’s a very interesting read.
Here’s an excerpt from the introduction:
As geekdom moves from the cultural fringes into the mainstream, it becomes increasingly difficult for the figure of the geek to maintain the outsider victim status that made him such a sympathetic figure in the first place. Confronted with his cultural centrality and white, masculine privilege—geeks are most frequently represented as white males—the geek seeks a simulated victimhood and even simulated ethnicity in order to justify his existence as a protagonist in a world where an unmarked straight white male protagonist is increasingly passé.
Our investigation proceeds through three core concepts / tropes prevalent in geek-centered visual narratives:
- “geek melodrama” as a means of rendering geek protagonists sympathetically,
- white male “geek rage” against women and ethnic minorities for receiving preferential treatment from society, which relates to the geek’s often raced, usually misogynistic implications for contemporary constructions of masculinity, and
- “simulated ethnicity,” our term for how geeks read their sub-cultural identity as a sign of markedness or as a put-upon status equivalent to the markedness of a marginalized identity such as that of a person of color.
We analyze these tropes via an historical survey of some key moments in the rise of geek media dominance: the early-20th century origins of geekdom and its rise as an identifiable subculture in the 1960s, the mainstreaming of geek masculinity in the 1970s and 80s via blockbuster cinema and superhero comics, and the postmodern permutations of geekdom popularized by Generation X cultural producers, including geek/slacker duos in “indie” cinema and alternative comics.
