vegan-commie

[vegan-commie]

I'm far from the first person to say this but there is a lot of overcompensating that goes on when communists oppose criticisms of specific communist figureheads. Stalin did not personally order the genocide of millions of people but he also wasn't the sole builder of socialism, nor was he the source of every good policy the USSR implemented. Same goes for Mao, Honecker, Lenin, Castro, etc. I don't think I need to harp on about why it's a remain of liberal historiography and ideology, although that should be acknowledged. Following in the same vein as this other post of mine, it constitutes a conscious and prolongued effort as a communist to adopt class, and more generally, a focus on the collective and processes instead of individual actions as the vehicle of your discourse. The better perspective with which to approach criticisms of a single transistor is to recontextualize it within the whole CPU that it's a part of, if you allow me the metaphor. You hinder yourself when you stoop down to the level of great man theory.

Lenin is a particular example because he tends to be great-manned both from the perspective of people criticizing and defending Stalin. He was neither a pure-hearted libertarian who was betrayed after his death by a conniving Stalin who hid Lenin's thought on him and who arrested/killed every other opponent, nor was Stalin a 1:1 replica of Lenin's positions but in a different stage of socialism. In both of these positions the role of the Bolshevik's party mechanisms and channels are completely ignored, as if it was a simple hereditary mechanism. In a democratic centralist organization, the Congress is the supreme organ of decision, and every office, from General Secretary to the base militant, is beholden to its decisions and has the duty to carry them out, as well as to contribute in its democratic process. Lenin was the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissar, sure, and the de facto "leader". The CPC was a mostly executive office, but like any other organ in the CP, it had a decided political role. The Congress is still the highest organ.

In the 13th Congress, when Stalin was elected to the position of General Secretary, there were 748 voting delegates. It is a misrepresentation of democratic-centralist principles to discount or ignore the vote of these 748 delegates. Lenin, as much as he was an important figure, was not the only politically competent communist, nor the only influential one. Never, even during the tensest months of the civil war or the underground work, was Lenin's criteria followed without criticism or input. He wasn't infallible or without fault, anyone can make mistakes or forget to consider some angles. This is also why Lenin was such a respected leader, because he did not govern alone. Stalin also governed like that, quite famously being skilled at listening to a discussion and being able to synthesize everyone's positions into a logical common ground. I am less concerned with what Lenin, at the end of his life, after two gunshots and a few strokes, personally thought of Stalin's aptness for the position, and more concerned with the opinions of those 748 delegates, all taking into account the discussions that took place in every lower organ of the party. What matters is that the party, democratically, elected Stalin to the position multiple times, and that his responsibility in leading cooperatively were proven competent throughout his tenure. Lenin was not an angel, nor the embodied spirit of revolutionary marxism. He was a very skilled and knowledgeable revolutionary whose words are not the gospel. The achievements made by Stalin's collective leadership (plus the entire party!) and the effective advancement of socialism are much more important than Lenin's opinion, as much as we can respect him. He wasn't clairvoyant

[vegan-commie]

CONNIE PANZARINO at a pride march in Boston circa 1990

the cyborg & the crip by Alison Kafer

[vegan-commie]

"Your enemy travels by private jet, not migrants dingy"

Poster seen in London

[vegan-commie]

Liberalism claims to champion universal rights, equality, and environmentalism, but it also clings to a model of production dominated by capital and profit maximization. Every time those two commitments clash, liberal leaders choose capital — and everyone sees the hypocrisy. That’s why liberalism is losing legitimacy. The danger is that, in the absence of a compelling left alternative, disaffected workers gravitate toward right-wing narratives — xenophobic conspiracy theories, scapegoating immigrants, and so on. Fascists don’t offer real solutions, but they’re filling a void left by liberal and even social democratic parties, which have abandoned any structural critique of capitalism. We need a democratic socialist alternative that addresses the root contradictions of capitalism, including its ecological irrationality. But building that alternative will require real political vehicles — not just protest movements, but mass-based parties with deep roots in the working class.

Jason Hickel, Reorganizing Production to Serve Life, Not Profit

[vegan-commie]

I think if you as a German say anything remotely like this you should be shot immediately

[vegan-commie]

liberals will be like the optics of this protest are awful and it's dudes on motorcycles waving Mexican flags in front of burning cars. the optics are pretty sick

[vegan-commie]

gavin newsom is only mad at trump bc you’re only supposed to deploy the national guard to sweep homeless encampments & not on real people

[vegan-commie]

As you see, the point is not which class today constitutes the majority, or which class is poorer, but which class is gaining strength and which is decaying.

And as the proletariat is the only class which is steadily growing and gaining strength, which is pushing social life forward and rallying all the revolutionary elements around itself, our duty is to regard it as the main force in the present-day movement, join its ranks and make its progressive strivings our strivings.

[vegan-commie]

You know, here was a solid bit of time where you couldn’t post “The Average person is bothered by the sight of Innocent men, women, and children, being butchered and bombed on our tax dollars. this will cost Kamala Harris the election.” Without some Joe Biden/Kamala Harris Stan saying “Source?” and then immediately ignore the polling you show them that a majority of people have some modicum of empathy. Or call you a trump supporter. Or-

Those same stans, who do not mention or talk any politics when an election is coming up, would then accuse Palestine supporters of being russian plants who would stop posting.

The Joe Biden and Kamala Harris stans stopped posting or are just overtly racist on main now.

[vegan-commie]

God, I love Zionist in-fighting

[vegan-commie]

[vegan-commie]

many families in gaza have neurodivergent family members. from the people i know in gaza one of their biggest challenges is the difficulty of living in a tent or being displaced with disabled family members whose routines have been disrupted. neurodivergent adults, especially men, are also targeted by the israeli occupation forces, the most notable case being that of mohammed bhar, who had down's syndrome and was mauled to death by israeli military dogs after his family was forced to leave him at gunpoint.

but what this also obscures is how much of gaza's disabled population was the result of israel's continuous occupation, which gave so many children PTSD that in 2021 Save the Children found that 80% of children in their study showed symptoms of emotional distress. About half of them there reported having contemplated suicide, and three out of five kids were self-harming. Four in five children reported they were living with depression, grief and fear.

this is aside from physical disabilities which meant gaza already had an unusually high proportion of amputees from previous wars, whose conditions were exacerbated by the lack of medical equipment (including wheelchairs) and permits to travel abroad for treatment.

what i'm trying to say is for nineteen months you've heard about people miserably trekking from one "safety zone" to another to be concentrated into tents, a supposedly humanitarian tactic from israel (even though they also bombed the humanitarian zones, even though forced displacement is indeed a war crime) but the people being displaced are not able-bodied young people who can easily travel on foot from one area to the next. they're people who are actually the least able to travel easily; families full of elderly and disabled members, young children, and in some cases mothers who have just given birth. the reason hind rajab's mother survived is because she decided to walk while her children took the car to spare them the difficulty of that journey on foot in cold weather. 19 year old lara sayegh died of exhaustion on the journey from north to south. in some cases israel has forced entire hospitals to evacuate, leading to scenes of patients standing on amputated legs or walking out with their IVs still attached. can you imagine being displaced in these conditions? that's not movement. that's torture. it's a death march.

now imagine making this journey knowing your home will be destroyed, and everything you leave behind no longer exists. imagine making this journey after losing your children, or making this journey as a lost child with no parents. imagine making this journey and encountering corpses along the entire route (it is almost impossible not to). imagine making this journey while stiff with fear that you could be attacked at any point or stopped at a checkpoint and arrested at any point because the young able-bodied men are the ones most likely to be disappeared or targeted during these journeys (which is what happened to mosab abu toha) leaving their families not only terrified for their safety, but also without their strongest family members to rely on. this also happened to family friends of mine, whose two year old was left with his grandmother after his parents were killed by airstrike on their route south. he only survived because they shielded him with their bodies.

that is not an exception for palestinians in gaza right now; that's the majority. because everything above is not incidental, it is israeli policy intended to bring about these exact circumstances.

[vegan-commie]

waiting for the vegan liberals to abandon the idealist notion that people simply make the right decisions on their own in response to rational arguments. completely ignoring the material basis of behavior. most people will require significant material and cultural support to reduce their exploitation of nonhuman animals (and needing support is not a bad thing re disability studies). a vegan future is only possible via a socialist revolution. but instead of building coalitions with socialists, liberal vegans would rather continue pointing out the logical inconsistencies in others behaviors and trying to convince people to change their lifestyle

[vegan-commie]

Genuinely asking, how can you be a Marxist and a trans woman? it doesn’t logically compute for me. If you believe misogyny is real, and you can adapt dialectical materialism to the feminist framework (as you know, misogyny as opression of women by men) then can’t you notice women are being oppressed on the basis of the material reality (their genitals)? And that you can’t identify out of the opression - identify as the opressor.

So on one hand my gut reaction to this deeply disrespectful and transmisogynist ask is to respond very shortly with reference to bathtubs and car batteries and what I personally think you should do with those two items, but on the other hand this kinda vulgar materialism is unfortunately Very Common amongst marxist circles here in the US, as is your idealist conceptions of the social categories of gender and sex and your chauvinism. Only difference is that usually people aren't as needlessly inflamitory as you are. Cuz of all that I'll respond seriously, if you are genuinely genuine in your genuineness maybe it'll be of some help in clarifying your understanding of the topic and will clear up misconceptions in others who read the post. Because I'm just so niceys :D.

So lets start with that definition of misogyny/patriarchy, that it's "oppression of women by men". This is a fantastic starting definition and I would not hesitate to use this phrasing were I explaining the topic for the first time to a child in the fourth grade. Unfortunately as marxists it's our duty to be a little more rigerous about this! It takes for granted that your definition of gender (man and woman)-- humans differentiated based on genetalia (and lets include all sexual dimorphism in this just to be generous), is a reflection of material reality in any way. In actuality it is deeply idealist, proposing that there are innate Man Particles within Penises and Woman Particles within Vaginas, and even were that the case then we have to contend with the fact that categorization is entirely a human-made social technology. This definition of gender as something innate makes your definition of misogyny/patriarchy as a mode of structural oppression deeply fraught!!! No wonder you cannot conceptialize the existance of trans people if you conceptualize forces of gendered oppression fighting those of liberation as a battle for supremacy between two subspecies of humans. Such a conflict is irreconsileable. We start to see why TERFism so easily fits in with other forms of reaction if we use your faulty definition as an example. Lets get a better one then shall we?

First thing I wanna do before I write up my definition is that I reject the common division of sex and gender as seperate categories of biology and social relations respectively, I think it runs into the exact problem I have criticized you for by just offloading the biological aspects onto the concept of "sex" as a false binary. So I will do none of that-- primary and secondary sex characteristics instead act as the *percieved* (extra extra extra emphasis on that word!!!) historical basis of my definition of gender.

Gender is a form of social division of labor that arose with the advent of class society from the material basis of percieved sex characteristics that has changed and adapted through the epochs as the economic mode of production has changed and adapted to the material conditions of any given society in any given time and is enforced through class domination via gendering violence. This explains a lot more about gender than any "man=penis woman=vagina", "woman=nuturing man=strong" nonsense! Suddenly the phenomenon of trans people and intersex people existing are things we can make sense of and analyze even if we dont fully understand the science of it all! Suddenly it makes sense why our entire social definitions of gender are entirely based on the division of domestic and external labor, because historically, these divisions were needed for development of class society!

This also means we have to redo your definition of misogyny/patriarchy not as simply men dominating women, but as the system of violent enfocement of this labor division to thereby uphold the functioning of the class society that has created the current itteration of the gender division. This is done both by the domination of the "subservient" gender, by the violent weeding out of those who reguardless of intention challenge the current order of power (trans people, gay people, intersex people, polyamorous people, etc.), or by incorperating those challengers into the heirarchy (gay marriage/general "inclusive" concepts of the family, trans MRAs, etc.).

Now to get to the actual interesting part! How can I as a trans woman be a marxist is what you asked, and I think I proved the how, but what about the why? Well, because marxists should all be gender and family abolotionists is the short answer, but I have other thoughts as well.

Something very interesting has happened in the last century as we sit stewing in the epoch of the end of capitalism/rise of socialism that I believe is one of the reasons us as trans people have become more and more prevelant of an issue within society as threats to bourgeois society. Angela Davis wrote a very interesting article on it in the 80s called "The Approaching Obsolecense of Housework" which I highly reccomend reading, which highlights that the need for the division of domestic and external labor divisions is withering with the advent of new household technology and the subsuming of domestic tasks into the wider external economy (cleaning services, industrial production of clothing and furniture, industrialization of food preperation, infantcare, full day education of children, etc.). This combined with the proletarianization of women under capitalism has created a major contradiction within capitalist society: the need for the existance of the family and gender systems to uphold bourgeois rule and reproduce bourgeois society on one side and the slow withering of domestic labor divisions on the other. One of the many results, I personally believe, is the rise in societal acceptence of trans and queer identites- a glimpse of the next epoch after we collectively do away with bourgeois property relations and the need to define gender through labor division fully disappates. I fully predict that, like Cuba now, we will see existing socialist and dotp nations go through these changes significantly faster and make leaps and bounds into the future as beacons of queer rights. This is also why bourgeois society and the forces of reaction and fascism as a movement see trans people as a threat just one level down to that of communists! This is also why I fully reject any attempts to incorperate queerness into bourgeois society (that arent historically progressive of course!) and always call for a uniting of queer politics under marxism.

So yes, I am a transfem and a marxist, I was one before the other for some reason I cant really fully understand, but over time I came to realize I cannot fully be one without the other.

[vegan-commie]

today we remember the dumb fucks who got themselves killed to advance the perverse cruelty of american imperialism, and mourn their countless victims the world over. death to the usa

[vegan-commie]

may 22 article in haaretz covering the ‘gaza humanitarian foundation’ established under the trump admin, which is staffed by armed private military contractors who are charged with distributing aid through a network of hubs with perimeters monitored by the idf in gaza. journalist bisan owda posted about the chaos that ensued during the opening of one such hub in gaza today:

[vegan-commie]

Dehumanization and using food as a weapon to ethnically cleanse the North.