Seanchaí (she/her)
A chairdre! I’m Seanchaí (shawn-a-key), a trans lesbian currently living on Turtle Island. (she/her)
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I don’t know anything about the Discord, but I imagine that if there are vetting questions about trans people it is to weed out transphobia.
I’m not here to judge why you failed to pass such vetting. In the interests of a approaching this as a chance for education, I would like to ask you: what was the question? What about trans people are you still struggling to understand that would prevent you from successfully answering the question?
I don’t know why you’re saying this to me. I’m not making an argument one way or the other about Katyn, as I said already.
I was just letting you know how completely and abjectly wrong your statements about that website were. It did cite sources, and one of them being in first person isn’t proof of credibility or lack thereof.
That was the sum total of my comment.
I truly don’t care to read what you wrote about Katyn because I’m not interested in the topic one way or the other. Just thought that you, as a person engaged in the conversation, should know that your dismissal of the website was predicated on a complete misunderstanding of the very website you were dismissing. As someone who does seem to be interested in engaging in this topic, you should at least engage based on the realities of what people are linking to you instead of your ill-informed preconceptions. If you’d like to explore whether the sources linked are accurate or reputable, that’s fine, but you should at least read them before making false claims.
You should also cut the whole “use your brain” and “just think” rhetoric, I promise you you’re not intellectually superior and being condescending in your comments isn’t going to win you anything.
Did you actually read this?
“Sites [sic] no sources”
Davis, Jerome. Behind Soviet Power. New York, N. Y.: The Readers’ Press, Inc., c1946, p. 99
Volkogonov, Dmitri. Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991, p. 360
Nekrich and Heller. Utopia in Power. New York: Summit Books, c1986, p. 404
New York Times, June 29, 1945 p. 2
Lucas and Ukas. Trans. and Ed. Secret Documents. Toronto, Canada: Northstar Compass, 1996, p. 197-198
And there’s more. The page is literally a collection of excerpts, nothing here is written by a single person. It is entirely a compilation of sources.
Only the first one is written in first person, as it is a personal accounting of events. And the fact that something is “written in first person” is not proof that it is inferior, that’s a nonsense western academic convention that ignores lived experience as a credible source of information.
I’m not making a statement about Katyn one way or another, but it’s pretty ridiculous for you to cast away an entire website of sources without having read literally any of it, then claiming that it’s all some personal blog with no sources, thus proving that you haven’t read any of it.
While I agree with Ratette and Kanzler that queer people shouldn’t be expected to argue for their very existence and basic respect, and that this is reason enough to ban someone, I would like to offer you a bit more of a Marxist take on the situation.
This thread was asking about a specific social relation: the oppression of queer people in Russia.
The comments then, were a place for people to discuss the historical and material conditions that led to this social relation.
This particular user’s tantrum showed anger at the very existence of the discussion. If someone is unwilling to engage with (or more, is angry at the very existence of) a discussion about the material and historical conditions that give rise to social relations, I struggle to see what a Marxist-Leninist forum has to offer them, and more, what they have to offer a Marxist-Leninist forum.
Lemmygrad is a confederation of communities bound together by the social contract stipulated in the main site’s rules. In the course of one comment, despite knowing full well it would get them banned, this user engaged in sectarianism, bigotry, disrespect, and promoted and fueled the very division they were railing against.
Such behaviour is a direct contradiction with the social dynamics of the agreed-upon forum rules, and as such, the most prudent course to resolve the contradiction was to ban the user, and thus reinforce the social contract that we all must agree upon when creating accounts here.
If the user were to resolve some of their own internal contradictions (such as promoting division by arguing against division, claiming themself as an ML while refusing discussions about historical and material conditions leading to social relations, promoting capitalist ideals of cisheteronormative family structures in a misguided attempt at subsuming such capitalist structures within communism which could lead only to continued class disparity and thus never true communism) they would be more than welcome to return.
In fact, nothing stops them from making a new account right now, and engaging once more, provided they have, at the least, resolved enough of their internal contradictions to have learned to keep such thoughts to themself or else face a repeat ban.
I won’t speak of the eugenics angle, though I think there is a reason to feel uncomfortable for that, as its usage in eugenics stems from a dismissing of the humanity of various ethnic groups and the establishment of several “humanoid” species.
From a linguistic perspective, using “oid” is actually a negation of the author’s intent in most use cases here on lemmygrad.
“Oid” is used to describe a semblance. An android is like a man (andro), but is not one. A factoid is presented as a fact, but is not true (as per the term coined by Norman Mailer). A spheroid, as you mentioned, is like a sphere, but is not actually spherical. An asteroid is star-like, but is not a star.
The most common use cases of “oid” on the site are “westoid” and “angloid.”
Linguistically, calling someone a “westoid” would mean like a westerner, but not from the west.
An “angloid” would be like an anglo, but not actually anglo.
And in this case, a “crackeroid” would be like a cracker, but not a cracker.
However, when people say “angloid,” “westoid,” and now “crackeroid,” they mean, in fact, an actual westerner, anglo, and cracker. So the “oid” suffix is an incorrect addition to the term.
This is a bit of a misunderstanding of the sovereignty movement. Quebec does have a constitution (though it is comprised of several sets of regulatory legislation rather than one specific document, largely because the consolidation of the Quebec provisions of the Constitution Act, the Charter of the French Language, the National Assembly Act, the Executive Act and the fundamental Quebecois rights Act would be done only in the event of actual secession).
The part about the currency: not so important, plenty of territories have seceded while using the currency of their former nations, and they could easily switch to a franco-dollar. They also have the resources necessary for being an independent nation.
The sovereignty movement is not right-wing (though plenty of anti-fed, anti-immigration right-wing nationalists do support sovereignty. The Communist Party of Canada, the Marxist-Leninist Party of Quebec, the Parti Quebecois (socdem) and Quebec solidaire (socdem) all support Quebecois sovereignty.
The FLQ was a Marxist-Leninist organisation that attempted to spur Quebec into revolutionary secession, and was met with military crackdown. This would happen in any secession, even electoral, as Quebec is integral to energy (hydro-Quebec sells energy to other provinces and is second only to Ontario for energy production), fresh water, and forestry (second only to BC) for the entire country. The St Lawrence is also a key transportation corridor.
Canada has a long history of military intervention at home, and uses the RCMP to violently stamp out any form of anti-fed or anti-corporate protesting or land defense. It’s normalised in this country for the liberals (NDP, Conservative or Liberal, doesn’t matter) to support violent military raids on Indigenous land defenders on their own unceded territories, and to this day there is a general sentiment that the imposition of martial law in the face of the FLQ was a reasonable and necessary step. Canadians are fiercely “proud” of their massive landmass and believe that (even in territory that their own laws claim they have no jurisdiction over) they have every right to violently enforce their laws. They would never peacefully accept a secession of such a large and central landmass.
The only reason not to support the Quebec sovereignty movement is because, as you said, there is a strong lack of involving Indigenous landback and sovereignty. The Bloc is the largest pro-sovereign party and would be vehemently opposed to working alongside Indigenous people to secure independence.
Unfortunately, right-wing nationalists have a large amount of political sway in Quebec, and have done a good job of convincing people that racist anti-immigration policies are in the best interests of securing a French bulwark against the federal “melting pot” that they see as a tactic to stamp out Quebecois culture. In no surprise to anyone who knows French history, Islamaphobia and anti-Muslim legislation are at a peak in Quebec, which is, I think, why the sovereign movement as a whole gets painted as reactionary.
However, it’s important to note that most of the right-wing parties in Quebec (and the ones who most support the racist legislation) are not in favour of sovereignty, but rather the support the “nation within a nation” model that currently exists. This allows them to continue to operate their corporations with special exemptions while not dealing with internal tariffs from participating in the larger Canadian economy.
Uniting landback with a Quebecois sovereignty movement largely favoured by the left-wing would serve a dual-purpose of weakening the Canadian superstructure, and allowing a meaningful step towards Indigenous sovereignty as well. Under the federal government, landback will continue to be nothing more than meaningless platitudes, yearly apologies, and colonisers giving land acknowledgements about how grateful they are to continue to exploit their genocidal acquisitions. A smaller, separate government in Quebec would be easier for Indigenous people to contend with.
This raises, of course, the issue of further borderisation, which is an anti-Indigenous and racist practise that separates Indigenous people from their families, their traditions, and their lands, by imposing colonial borders between Mexico, the US, and Canada. All this to say, is that a sovereign Quebec would only be a stop-gap measure in what needs to be a widespread dismantling of colonial federal governments and a true landback.
But we already have a word for traitors: traitor.
Our goal is always and above everything else to foster class consciousness through education. When our rhetoric is not precise, when it is riddled with insults and slurs and dehumanising language, we threaten our own grounding in reaching the workers who would otherwise join us.
We must seek at all times to explain, in precise and honest language, why the people we oppose are in the wrong, and why we are the ones who offer reprieve and solidarity to the masses. Hostility and vitriol will not win hearts. There’s no need to seek out some label to paint our opposition as less-than. A thorough explaining of the cruelty and violence of the system they uphold is condemnation enough.
That is not to say that anger is wrong, or that pacifism in the face of violent repression is the answer. But to gain the trust of the people, to present ourselves as the human option, it is essential to remember how deeply communism relies on a principle of love for others. There is righteousness in fighting for love. There is contemptibility in fighting for hatred.
Yes! This is why I suggested Border and Rule, it is an exploration of that very idea you’re coming to.
Migration is not about movement, it is inherently about immobility, about creating a class of super-exploited workers in the Global South that have no ability to leave. It’s the direct successor to land bondage.
Border policing is an imperial war tactic.
“War veterans, in fact, comprise one-third of Border Patrol agents. This is not a coincidence; there is a homology to domestic and foreign conquest. The formation of the US–Mexico border and immigration as a race-making regime cannot be analyzed outside the reciprocal processes of empire building and genocidal violence.”
This is most keenly felt through leveraging IMF and World Bank debt traps to enforce the creation of EPZs in exploited nations. EPZs are Export Processing Zones, extranational areas that are exempt from the local labour laws (and local ecological protection laws), allowing capitalist hyperexploitation to flourish. On top of abysmal working conditions, EPZs are notorious for union-busting and anti-organisation tactics including literally murdering people or burning down entire factories of workers.
To top it all off, this is a form of racialised gender violence, as “Women make up 90 percent of the millions of exploited workers in these zones worldwide” and “for every new male worker arriving, there are three times as many new women workers, their unfree labor solidifying capitalism”.
That’s the point I’m making. You theoretically could. But no one does. And because it is only used for a specific racialised group, it is therefor a racialised term.
There’s something to be said about a bunch of people (very few of them latinx themselves) arguing online for why they should be allowed to call some latinx people worms.
It’s a problem with the theme.
Solar (the theme you’re using) and vapor-wave dark (the theme I’m using) are the only two with this issue. The font is there, it’s just barely lighter than the drop-down box so it’s hard to see. You can still click them though. On vapor-wave dark there’s the added bonus that a highlight makes them readable if you hover over them. Solar doesn’t have that.
Thank you, I’m a writer and educator so being able to explain myself is something I work quite a lot on.
It’s difficult, especially for second-language English speakers, to be taken in good faith online, where people are already looking for the worst possible interpretation of what you’re saying.
For instance, I can tell from the point you made (and while I agree they aren’t particularly comparable situations) that you were saying what a woman wears is not a factor in whether or not she will be assaulted. You’re correct on that, and it is, in fact, the opposite of assault apologia.
People are looking for excuses to misinterpret each other and create breakdowns in communication. It can be incredibly overwhelming to try to communicate in such a situation, and often it leaves you needing to expend extra energy in checking and double-checking what you’ve said in the hopes you’ll be able to notice the ways it may be misunderstood and fix them before you send it.
I think you’re doing well, though <3
Lotta people on here have no problem using the term, because they consider it to be a political slur and not a racial one. However, if a white person is a traitor to the revolution, that term is not used. It’s only ever leveraged against a specific ethnic group (latinx people who are anti-revolutionary). Considering there is a specific racialised component to the slur, whether its origins are political or not, it is a racial slur.
White people especially should not be using a slur that has a racialised component; there is something incredibly distasteful about calling latinx people “worms.” It’s dehumanising and it brings to mind that, due to the fact the slur is only leveraged against latinx people (Cuban people especially), it is synonymous, in a way, with calling someone a “race traitor” for not being revolutionary.
Attacking someone’s class character is one thing; using a slur that has a very specific racialised origin (especially when you’re not of that origin yourself) has, whether intended or not, a racist subtext.
Okay I’ll be sure to tell the Palestinian Society at our next rally that they’re delusional and not real Marxists, but that Shrimpy on the Internet says they get a pass because they were raised that way and presumably that means they’re too stupid to know better.
Get the fuck over yourself, Marxism is not when you alienate every fucking worker who has religion, whether they converted or not. And it’s pretty disgusting to act like converting to Islam is bad because Islam is bad, but somehow being raised in it you get a “pass” because I guess people raised Islam are just not expected to know better? Fuck off with that.
There’s nothing inherently incompatible with Marxism and religion, so long as the religion isn’t used to oppress others or as an escape from seeking worldly resolutions to worldly contradictions.
And yeah, being from outside the imperial core does not give you a pass on perpetuating imperialist bullshit like blanket statements about how Muslim people can’t be real Marxists or that someone is fucking delusional for believing in Allah. Fuck outta here with that oppressive bullshit, do some reading.
Can you see the inconsistency in claiming you are anti-imperialist and desire a classless society (communism) but then you perpetuate the imperial racist class discrimination of faith practitioners (particularly Muslims)?
China? has Marxist religious practitioners. Cuba? Marxist religious practitioners. The USSR? Marxist religious practitioners.
Marx himself called religion a reflection of the conditions of society, and his criticism for it was when focus on the otherworldly led to ignoring the conditions of the worldly.
If you think that Marxism requires a complete discrimination against the spirituality and faith of others then you’re just a different flavour of oppressor.
No one is trivialising anyone else’s struggles here. The marginalisation and oppression people face is varied and many-faceted. However, turning a neurodivergent teenage girl into an object of scorn and mockery is not, in fact, liberatory praxis.
Especially when she trying to learn and grow and come to anti-imperialist conclusions. This is how you get people in the imperial core to actually rebel against imperialism, by the way. By embracing anti-racist, anti-imperialist rhetoric. The empire will not be defeated externally, so why spend your energy trying to undermine burgeoning class-consciousness when there are literal capitalists and fascists to focus on?
As far as Greta specifically, again, I will remind you, this is a neurodivergent, teenage girl that has been ruthlessly mocked by the right wing while at the very least attempting to give a shit about the environment in a society that still treats fossil fuels as lifeblood. As she becomes an adult she is learning the correct direction to aim her vitriol: racist imperialism. So why attack her from the left? Why not encourage her and people like her to read our literature and further radicalise?
And finally, why the fuck would it ever be acceptable to take pictures of children and turn them into jokes under the guise of “it’s just a meme?” Should we take photos of you as a teenager, photoshop them to make you look callous and cruel, and then attack everything you say with those images? That is a sickening way to interact with other human beings and their growth.
So in an imperialist ecoterrorist society, a neurodivergent teenage girl who speaks out against the destruction of the environment and points the finger at the imperialist exploitation perpetrated by the Global North should be mocked by leftists and alt-right climate deniers alike? What are you trying to say here?
I clicked over to lemmy.ml for a minute and it was a mistake, just some weirdo we banned forever ago posting bigoted memes.
I’m currently reading:
Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia, which is an examination of the migrant and refugee crisis and the leveraging of borders as a tool for labour exploitation.
How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, which is a series of interviews with Black feminists and founders of the Combahee River Collective.
We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice by Miriame Kaba, which is a collection of interviews and essays about community organising for abolition and transformative justice beyond policing.
And finally, The Essential Rosa Luxemburg which was a gift, and includes two of her essays, Reform or Revolution and The Mass Strike.
I highly recommend Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body, and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici. The trans community on here also has an ongoing discussion series regarding a collection of essays entitled Transgender Marxism. If you would like further recommendations, feel free to reach out, I am always happy to help. I lead discussions on these topics in real life as my work.
If you need help finding PDFs, again, please reach out. Part of my stance on grassroots education is active dispersal of accessible literature, and as such I never recommend anything without first making sure I have access to a share-able PDF/link.
On the off-chance that you actually care to learn about why you’re wrong rather than just “dunk” on literal children, I’d like to take the time to write this.
Gender is a class hierarchy violently enforced by capitalism in order to hasten wealth accumulation by means of exploitation of vast pools of unpaid reproductive labour in a wage economy. Reproductive labour isn’t merely birth-giving: it is the sum total of labour required to reproduce and maintain the populace. Caregiving, nursing, cooking, cleaning, education, etc. This labour is feminised; during the transition to capitalism, through violent, deadly and assaultive coercion, women were segregated from the wage labour economy and relegated to unpaid reproductive labour.
This gendering of labour has allowed untold amounts of workers to have their labour exploited while simultaneously being told that their labour is not labour at all, it is “an act of love.” This allows the working class to be maintained and to grow, providing further labourers for the capitalist class to exploit.
The most overrepresented group of labourers worldwide are women, primarily from the Global South, who are exploited en masse.
Queer people are inherently subversive to this gendered class hierarchy. By divorcing our sexuality from our relations to the means of reproduction, we threaten to disrupt the rigidly enforced gender hierarchy. It is for this reason that homosexuality was criminalised by the capitalist class: queer people experience relationships and sexuality that is independent from the reproduction of workers for capitalist exploitation.
Gender creative children are, contrary to your assertion, not “harming” the credibility of assimilative trans people. Assimilative trans people are in the process of being enfolded by the very capitalist state apparatus that creates the conditions of our exploitation and oppression. By presenting a facade of tolerance and acceptance, and by coercing trans people to buy into that tokenisation, the state seeks to deradicalise the subversive nature of queer identity and also create new markets of exploitation (“pink money”).
Gender creative children, meanwhile, are crafting gender performances so far beyond the assimilative narrative of the state capitalist system that they cannot be easily enfolded into acceptable exploitation. Gender creative children are exposing, by their very existence, the reality of gender as a mere fabrication meant to aid in the expropriation of feminised labour.
By their complete rejection of the gendered class hierarchy, gender creative children are radically disrupting and undermining the social reproduction of the gender binary that is so necessary for capitalism to continue its mass marginalisation of women.
In this way, not only are gender creative children not in fact harming assimilative trans people, they are revolutionising understanding of gender relations, paving the way for ungendered class consciousness to permeate the wider conversation, and radically altering the landscape of gendered class struggle.
By “co-operating with the US” they mean that after the Korean War, Mao Zedong invited President Nixon to China (1972) to negotiate a peaceful co-existence. This came on the heels of literal decades of sanctions and market isolation, and hundreds of thousands of deaths of Chinese people fighting against US troops and their proxies.
It was literally the first diplomatic visit in 25 years, and even then people in the West were shocked by the changes they saw in China under the CPC (schools, factories, hospitals). It was widely covered in media.
This was the start of China’s “opening,” (which we see a renewal of right now with Xi Jinping). For communist purists, this is considered a revisionist betrayal of the socialist project (and a lot of the US’s leverage against the USSR in the following years is blamed on China’s opening).
For people who understand material realities and have actually read Marx and Lenin, this was China’s way to foster economic growth to support their booming population (Mao Zedong, contrary to what the West likes to say, did not continue the enforcement of draconian population control laws).
As expressed by Lenin and Marx, the point was to gain economic strength by exploiting the capitalists even as they attempted to exploit China. By growing their industry and economy, they have been able to integrate technology developed by the West and surpass it. They have been able to appropriate funds from the West in order to strengthen their position and thus extend their influence to helping nations over-exploited by the West in Africa and the Global South.
Edit: you can make your own decisions about how good an idea this is, but I think there is a large amount of idealism in the belief that China could have achieved what it has while trying to remain entirely isolated from the rest of the world, especially as it attempted to shift from a largely agrarian feudal society to a fully industrialised one. Given the US’s destructive hunger for exploitation, and given that under Kruschev China was already distanced from its only economically powerful ally, the West would have likely quickly outstripped them and then who knows how much suffering the people of China would have been subject to. That’s all conjecture though, this is the way history played out.
Sun Chunlan is vice-premier of the State Council, so what in particular do you mean by “highest instance?” This was also an election within the CPC, not the PRC itself, which, contrary to what the West says, has more than one party, so the makeup of the CPC proper isn’t inherently the makeup of the PRC as a whole.
For instance, the State Council Minister of Ecology isn’t a CPC member, though he’s currently the only non-CPC member holding a rank as high as State Council Minister.
As far as the recent CPC elections, there weren’t many women placed in high position, however you can’t say none. The CCDI (Central Commission for Discipline Inspection) is the part of the party tasked with dealing with corruption and malfeasance. Yu Hongqiu was elected a deputy secretary (1 of 8), and Wang Xiaoping and Mu Hongyu are with her in the CCDI’s Standing Committee.
It’s a record low, true, but given the prevalence of women in the CPC since 1949 and the adoption of the Resolution on Women as far back as 1922 (more than twenty years before the party gained power), using representative metrics is a pointless task that capitulates to the West’s neoliberal narrative that assimilating token representatives of oppressed minorities into the power structure has any sort of reflection of the real conditions they face.
The fact is, that with the rise of “traditional values,” the clawing back of reproductive autonomy in the US, and the across the board vilification of queer people (while simultaneously China is taking strides to dissolve barriers and improve access to care for queer people), the West is truly in no position to talk about what constitutes women’s equality. It certainly isn’t girlbosses perpetuating imperialism.
People on here will call for the balkanization of the US every day but then you’ll get downvoted for saying that there is no socialist future for the US. Wild.
The US is a capitalist, colonial project that exists solely to prop up the wealth accumulation of the bourgeoisie. Of course it needs to be dismantled. Landback is an essential part of a socialist project on Turtle Island, otherwise all you’ll end up with is settler socialism. That is to say, the same colonial hierarchies, but with (white) workers in charge.
yeah, exactly! this is a hard thing for a lot of people to get, but uhh, you can’t just demonise an entire nation. The Ukrainian people are largely being fucked over by NATO, and the ones who fled the war are not the ones in the army killing people?? They’re just regular people who are starting their lives over.
And yeah, the far right here is the same way. Like, you can talk about how NATO are monsters and they agree but it’s because the West is run by liberal commie queers???
yeah I read this and I think:
In what way is a man kicking two women out of a restaurant a good thing? How does this support anyone? What is positive about discriminating against women based on where they are from?
There’s literally nothing to suggest that they did anything aside from be Ukrainian. So what about this is praiseworthy? What about this helps the people of Donetsk and Luhansk, or harms the NATO military apparatus?
And then I looked and found that he was fined twice for violating COVID social distancing curfews, so I’m gonna guess far right weirdo.
I can’t agree that there is anything “good” about deportation, nor do I agree that forcing people through a draft into war is somehow a good thing. That’s a very narrow framework that ignores the very real misery, pain and death that people face both in migrant detention, and on the frontlines of a war that they have no ideological commitment to.