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luminique · 6 days ago

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if i may... late night bike rides with lighter 🫶

whether you know how to ride a bike or not, most of the late night bike rides are on his bike. he makes sure that everyone is asleep before heading out with you. this way, he could have your arms wrapped around his waist as he drives out of blazewood. the road is pretty smooth for the most part so he takes this as a chance to sneak his hand onto yours, as if to fix your hand placement. in reality, it’s his way of knowing that you’re there, holding onto him.

it gets colder during the night in the outer ring. no blazing sun, the skies are clear, the iridescent edges of multiple hollows. he knows the perfect spot to stop at that had the best views. he clumsily removes his gloves off before putting a hand out for you to hold as you got off the bike. he has all these sharp parts on his gloves and he does not want you getting poked by it.

the stars twinkled across the night sky, it was breathtaking. with the outer ring depending on oil rigs, carbon emissions were high and yet it seemed like this was the only area untouched by it. your eyes may have been on the stars but his eyes were on you. you’d tell him to take his shades off because what’s the point of wearing them at night but he doesn’t want you to see how smitten he is.

it started off with just sitting on the ground. then it progressed to laying down side by side while talking. after a while, he’d notice your change in speech. how you’re talking slower and quieter. that was when he knew that you were getting a little tired. so as usual, he makes sure you’ve got something comfy under your head.

using his arm, he’d guide you to place your head on it. he’s definitely going insane at this moment but you were too busy trying to fight off your sleepiness to even notice his flushed face. you were practically talking nonsense now at this point and then a sudden silence mid sentence.

he doesn’t dare wake you up, instead choosing to watch you sleep. the way your chest goes up and down with every breath, your body unconsciously moving closer to his, searching for some sort of warmth. with his scarf, he’s slowly wrapping it around your neck instead. it’s not that big but it’s enough for the time being. the sound of your breathing and the sounds of wind in the outer ring, he finds it serene enough to rest his eyes, falling asleep right next to you.

you’re woken up by the soft light of the sunrise, eyelids fluttering open. you don’t see lighter next to you but his scarf is still wrapped around you. his voice calls out to you, casually leaning against his bike. he’s facing the sunrise but his eyes are on you. he wouldn’t mind doing this again, as long as it means he gets to spend time like this with you.

#lumiresponds ˚✧₊⁎☆#lighter zzz #lighter lorenz #zzz lighter #sorry i think i underperformed with this one #i took a while to answer this one #mainly because i had to restart it multiple times #NOT ANON’S FAULT OR ANYTHING I REALLY WANTED TO WRITE THIS #but this one had me stopping and restarting a lot ? idk why #and i’m still quite dissatisfied with it #i love the idea though #also cuz its lighter #and i like thinking about him hehe #ITS SO LONG WTF #i just looked at it again now and DAMN #okay yeah eat up lighter enjoyers i hope you enjoy mhm

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mesetacadre · 3 months ago

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Half-doubting if this anon was even a good idea to begin with but, am I a bad communist for being actively hostile against any form of authoritarian concentration of power?

I just don't think any single person could embody the revolution much less serve it on a system built entirely on personalism where we worship the leader instead of the workers themselves. The only role individual people should have on communism is that of thinkers and philosophers, not of absolute rulers.

This may be drawn from a personal bias though, my country was destroyed by a dictatorship that would have gladly shot me and hid my body for being a lesbian and I have developed animosity towards authoritarians that is perhaps unhealthy.

Where do we draw the line to avoid becoming a red painted tyranny? Or am I just not a good communist for my intransigence?

Thank you for your time

I'll break this down into two parts, authority and idolatry

Authority is a value-neutral, metaphysical concept. It is the use of some kind of force to impose a will on others. If you consider yourself a communist, then how do you intend to overthrow capitalism without exerting authority? Engels said it best: «A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all». We must come to terms with this, as revolutionary marxists. If we refuse the concept of authority all-together, then all that can happen is that authority is applied against our entire class, for the rest of time. I also live in a first-world country that used to have a fascist dictatorship, and the ~150,000 thousand killed for political reasons, 30,000 disappeared, 500,000 interned in concentration camps, more than 100,000 summary trials, tens of thousands of slaves and the thousands tortured up to the very end can speak to its destructiveness. But it wasn't as simple as "they used authority, therefore all authority (abstractly) is bad". Franco's dictatorship responded to a series of needs that the Spanish and European bourgeoisie had, by the time of their sponsored coup d'etat in 1936, Spain was at the forefront of organization of the working class in Europe, the communist party had hundreds of thousand members if you include their youth wing, and the biggest unions reached the millions, in a country of just under 25 million. Italy, Germany, Austria and Portugal found themselves in a similar resurgence when their fascists took power, in every case financed by their biggest capitalists, national and foreign.

The point I'm getting at is that, if you want to understand class society, you have to go beyond the black-and-white, metaphysical liberal philosophy. Violence can be exerted by multiple classes through their own class organizations, and the character, context and sense of that violence changes accordingly. I'm not saying that all violence committed by workers without exception is wholly good. I'm saying that the relationship each class has with class society modifies the very reasoning and effect of that violence. And no example of violence in history can be really described as senseless. My country's dictatorship did not kill, torture and repress that many people for no reason, the holocaust did not happen because Hitler was an evil entity, and the various proletarian states, past and present, have not exerted their authority senselessly.

In marxist theory there are two very important concepts: the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (DotB), and the dictatorship of the proletariat (DotP). The DotB is a catch-all term for any state of any form that serves capitalist interests. This is useful because, whether it's a liberal democracy with a strong welfare system, or Pinochet's Chile, they both ultimately serve to protect and expand the interest of the capitalist class. Put another way, the capitalist economy sustains the state and other entities like the media, the military, the government (what we call the suprastructure), while the capitalist economy underneath it all (what we call the infrastructure) maintains its existence. It is a dictatorship because it is one class enacting their own will in their own interests. The DotP is the same concept, but turned on its head. After our class has taken power and has began to build socialism-communism, it is actively enacting their sole will in their own interests. Why would the formerly exploited listen to what their former exploiters want? The proletariat must be able to repress the extant capitalist elements within and the permanently hostile capitalist class without. Dwell on this for a moment. While a DotP fosters democratic mechanisms for its class, the social majority (as all DotP in history have done), it simultaneously exerts its authority on those extraneous to the working class. If you live in a capitalist state, the very same thing is happening, just reversed. The managers of capitalism, i.e. the representatives in liberal democracy, govern for the capitalist class, even representing various sections of that class, while simultaneously repressing or preventing any organization of the working class.

I did not mention Chile as an example for no reason beforehand. When the working class of Chile attempted to build socialism through non-violent means, after the election of Allende (there were many tendencies within Allende's party and among his entire support base but that's beyond this post), they were met with an intervention that did not have any qualms about using violence, kickstarting Pinochet's 17 year long dictatorship, backed by Chilean and USAmerican capitalists, atop the corpses of at least 40,000 executed and/or tortured. Look up the massacre of Estadio Nacional if you're interested, it's where Victor Jara was murdered.

"Authority" in DotP is never as widespread nor as violent, firstly because it doesn't aim to repress the social majority, but rather the small but resourceful capitalist class, and secondly because its "repression" more often than not manifests in our actual goals, which is to build a socialist economy, which would necessarily eliminate the social basis for a capitalist class to exist in the first place. In the USSR, for example, the rich landowner peasants disappeared first an foremost because the structure of land ownership was completely changed, eliminating the source of their power. Any instances of actual violence were mostly against saboteurs during collectivization or during the grain seizures to curb the mass starvation that happened in the cities during the civil war, since no grain made it there. Capitalist authority is meant to keep the mass of working people subservient and exploited, proletarian authority is meant to protect the project of socialism-communism against attacks. It has never been about killing all the rich people, it has been about abolishing the capitalist mode of production and building a new one, one which does not need the oppression of any kind of people to keep functioning.

I recommend the following books if you're interested in sources about "authority" and democracy in DotPs:

The Soviets Expected It, Anna Louise Strong (1941). It is focused on the USSR's lead-up to the fascist invasion, but it contains a few examples from ALS' own, unsupervised, experience with soviet democracy and the general attitude of working people

In North Korea: First Eyewitness Reports, Anna Louise Strong (1949). Same as the previous one, it has a few examples of ALS' unsupervised travels through North Korea before the Korean War that talk about how democracy was set up.

The Triumph of Evil, Austin Murphy (2002). I've said a lot how this author is very annoying about keeping to this useless good vs evil dichotomy when talking about socialism and capitalism, but apart from those sporadic remarks, it's incredibly well researched. It focuses on economic aspects, but chapters 1, 2, especially 3, and 7 all contain analyses on the actual mechanisms of authority that DotP use, taking East Germany as an example. Again though, the author is very annoying as soon as he begins to give his personal opinions on morality.

Stasi State or Socialist Paradise? The German Democratic Republic and What Became of It, Bruni de la Motte and John Green (2015). Pretty self explanatory title, this one goes into more detail about the security apparatus of East Germany. I haven't read this one in full, but it has a dedicated chapter on democracy and the state security service.

Onto idolatry. I promise this part will be shorter.

I've written more in detail about this, but while personality worship is a problem, I don't agree that it leads to the problems you outline. It's undeniable that there have been elements of individual idolatry, but that's neither a reflection of actual power concentration or ever a substitution for the elevation of workers. Leadership in any communist party is always collective, and if it follows Leninist principles of organization even partially, then internal democracy is always guaranteed save for the most extreme of situations. Stalin might have been a popular figure, but the Central Committee he was a part of was not below him, and the periodical Congresses had more authority than the CC or any individual person. ALS mentions how, for example, the 1936 constitution was made. It was a wholly democratic process, more than a hundred thousand suggestions were all recieved and considered by the organs in charge. It was the most progressive constitution in its time, it guaranteed rights many of us still do not have. And that process supposedly happened while the "worship" of Stalin was in full force. Every position in DotPs has some mechanism of recall and accountability, everything is elected and ratified. Can you start a process of recall for any specific member of the state administration in your DotB? In one instance, as ALS says, in the region of Crimea up to half of the elected officials were all recalled in one year.

I keep using the USSR as an example because it's the system I'm most familiar with, but any other DotP you can think of has similar mechanisms and limitations to power. Once again, was there a certain amount of idolatry towards a few individuals? Yes. Was this a harmful vice which created unchecked concentration of power and undue oppression? Most certainly not. Besides this, we're materialists, and we understand that human psychology is largely molded by the underlying material conditions. Focusing on individuals when it comes to these sorts of things is almost inevitable for large groups of people because of how the exploitative economic conditions modify psychological tendencies. It is a remain of liberal ideology for the most part, and it should be fought against. But you can't expect millions of people to change how they view certain processes, changes like those take a lot of time, generations, and education.

I've spent essentially all of my political life within a party structure not very dissimilar from that of Cuba's, the USSR's, China's, the DPRK's, etc, and I can say with full confidence that it is the most democratic and simultaneously productive set of principles you can have in political activity. Compared to liberal democracy, and compared to horizontalist/non-centralized structures, even those employed by anarchists, which I have also experienced, it is still far more democratic and effective at taking into account all input without devolving into a glorified debate club.

I don't think you're a bad communist, having these doubts and talking to other people about it is a very good habit to have. If you still have doubts or want to keep talking about this, feel free to shoot me another ask or a private message :)

#ask #anon #seriousposting #this took quite long to write #I hope you take the time to read it in full anon

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