#what do you think your anti-communist histories are?

[damnesdelamer]

‘Socialism has never worked’?

What do you call Russia, China, and Cuba functionally eradicating homelessness and illiteracy in their respective spheres within a few years of the massive upheaval of revolution, and radically improving the living conditions of millions after generations of poverty? What do you call the Soviet Union bearing the brunt of the greatest military conflict the world has ever seen and emerging victorious? What do you call the Soviet Union holding out for four decades of sustained military and economic warfare against the greatest military and economic superpower the world has ever known? What do you call Vietnam defeating the greatest military empire the world has ever known in its anti-imperialist resistance campaign? What do you call China emerging from the 20th Century as the most populous country on earth with the highest GDP? What do you call China reducing daily covid numbers to double digits in a population of 1.4 billion? What do you call Cuba thriving after six decades of brutal embargoes? What do you call Cuba passing the most progressive and practically protective legislation for family and LGBT rights in a world historical moment marked by increased LGBTphobia among the Western powers? What do you call the people of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe shrugging off the muck of ages to usher in an era of progress, all while Western powers conspire to sabotage them at every turn while growing fat off the earth they’ve scorched?

I’d ask what history books you’re reading, but I know that you’re not reading any, and the only information you have on the subject is spoon-fed into your colonised mind by the people’s enemies, whose vested interest in fabricating events is readily apparent to any who bother to look into these things.

‘Socialism has never worked’? It has been one of the dominant political-economic models of the past century, and has made drastic strides on every front despite its relative infancy and constant opposition from Western superpowers. If you fear socialism, what do you really fear? Socialism is the people. Socialism is me; socialism is you; socialism is all of us, together.

‘Socialism has never worked’? Socialism has always worked. Socialism is working right now. We will see socialism work again, always.

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

.

[specialagentartemis]

I get variations on this comment on my post about history misinformation all the time: "why does it matter?" Why does it matter that people believe falsehoods about history? Why does it matter if people spread history misinformation? Why does it matter if people on tumblr believe that those bronze dodecahedra were used for knitting, or that Persephone had a daughter named Mespyrian? It's not the kind of misinformation that actually hurts people, like anti-vaxx propaganda or climate change denial. It doesn't hurt anyone to believe something false about the past.

Which, one, thanks for letting me know on my post that you think my job doesn't matter and what I do is pointless, if it doesn't really matter if we know the truth or make up lies about history because lies don't hurt anyone. But two, there are lots of reasons that it matters.

It encourages us to distrust historians when they talk about other aspects of history. You might think it's harmless to believe that Pharaoh Hatshepsut was trans. It's less harmless when you're espousing that the Holocaust wasn't really about Jews because the Nazis "came for trans people first." You might think it's harmless to believe that the French royalty of Versailles pooped and urinated on the floor of the palace all the time, because they were asshole rich people anyway, who cares, we hate the rich here; it's rather less harmless when you decide that the USSR was the communist ideal and Good, Actually, and that reports of its genocidal oppression are actually lies.

It encourages anti-intellectualism in other areas of scholarship. Deciding based on your own gut that the experts don't know what they're talking about and are either too stupid to realize the truth, or maliciously hiding the truth, is how you get to anti-vaxxers and climate change denial. It is also how you come to discount housing-first solutions for homelessness or the idea that long-term sustained weight loss is both biologically unlikely and health-wise unnecessary for the majority of fat people - because they conflict with what you feel should be true. Believing what you want to be true about history, because you want to believe it, and discounting fact-based corrections because you don't want them to be true, can then bleed over into how you approach other sociological and scientific topics.

How we think about history informs how we think about the present. A lot of people want certain things to be true - this famous person from history was gay or trans, this sexist story was actually feminist in its origin - because we want proof that gay people, trans people, and women deserve to be respected, and this gives evidence to prove we once were and deserve to be. But let me tell you a different story: on Thanksgiving of 2016, I was at a family friend's house and listening to their drunk conservative relative rant, and he told me, confidently, that the Roman Empire fell because they instituted universal healthcare, which was proof that Obama was destroying America. Of course that's nonsense. But projecting what we think is true about the world back onto history, and then using that as recursive proof that that is how the world is... is shoddy scholarship, and gets used for topics you don't agree with just as much as the ones you do. We should not be encouraging this, because our politics should be informed by the truth and material reality, not how we wish the past proved us right.

It frequently reinforces "Good vs. Bad" dichotomies that are at best unhelpful and at worst victim-blaming. A very common thread of historical misinformation on tumblr is about the innocence or benevolence of oppressed groups, slandered by oppressors who were far worse. This very frequently has truth to it - but makes the lies hard to separate out. It often simplifies the narrative, and implies that the reason that colonialism and oppression were bad was because the victims were Good and didn't deserve it... not because colonialism and oppression are bad. You see this sometimes with radical feminist mother goddess Neolithic feminist utopia stuff, but you also see it a lot regarding Native American and African history. I have seen people earnestly argue that Aztecs did not practice human sacrifice, that that was a lie made up by the Spanish to slander them. That is not true. Human sacrifice was part of Aztec, Maya, and many Central American war/religious practices. They are significantly more complex than often presented, and came from a captive-based system of warfare that significantly reduced the number of people who got killed in war compared to European styles of war that primarily killed people on the battlefield rather than taking them captive for sacrifice... but the human sacrifice was real and did happen. This can often come off with the implications of a 'noble savage' or an 'innocent victim' that implies that the bad things the Spanish conquistadors did were bad because the victims were innocent or good. This is a very easy trap to fall into; if the victims were good, they didn't deserve it. Right? This logic is dangerous when you are presented with a person or group who did something bad... you're caught in a bind. Did they deserve their injustice or oppression because they did something bad? This kind of logic drives a lot of transphobia, homophobia, racism, and defenses of Kyle Rittenhouse today. The answer to a colonialist logic of "The Aztecs deserved to be conquered because they did human sacrifice and that's bad" is not "The Aztecs didn't do human sacrifice actually, that's just Spanish propaganda" (which is a lie) it should be "We Americans do human sacrifice all the god damn time with our forever wars in the Middle East, we just don't call it that. We use bullets and bombs rather than obsidian knives but we kill way, way more people in the name of our country. What does that make us? Maybe genocide is not okay regardless of if you think the people are weird and scary." It becomes hard to square your ethics of the Innocent Victim and Lying Perpetrator when you see real, complicated, individual-level and group-level interactions, where no group is made up of members who are all completely pure and good, and they don't deserve to be oppressed anyway.

It makes you an unwitting tool of the oppressor. The favorite, favorite allegation transphobes level at trans people, and conservatives at queer people, is that we're lying to push the Gay Agenda. We're liars or deluded fools. If you say something about queer or trans history that's easy to debunk as false, you have permanently hurt your credibility - and the cause of queer history. It makes you easy to write off as a liar or a deluded fool who needs misinformation to make your case. If you say Louisa May Alcott was trans, that's easy to counter with "there is literally no evidence of that, and lots of evidence that she was fine being a woman," and instantly tanks your credibility going forward, so when you then say James Barry was trans and push back against a novel or biopic that treats James Barry as a woman, you get "you don't know what you're talking about, didn't you say Louisa May Alcott was trans too?" TERFs love to call trans people liars - do not hand them ammunition, not even a single bullet. Make sure you can back up what you say with facts and evidence. This is true of homophobes, of racists, of sexists. Be confident of your facts, and have facts to give to the hopeful and questioning learners who you are relating this story to, or the bigots who you are telling off, because misinformation can only hurt you and your cause.

It makes the queer, female, POC, or other marginalized listeners hurt, sad, and betrayed when something they thought was a reflection of their own experiences turns out not to be real. This is a good response to a performance art piece purporting to tell a real story of gay WWI soldiers, until the author revealed it as fiction. Why would you want to set yourself up for disappointment like that? Why would you want to risk inflicting that disappointment and betrayal on anyone else?

It makes it harder to learn the actual truth.

Historical misinformation has consequences, and those consequences are best avoided - by checking your facts, citing your sources, and taking the time and effort to make sure you are actually telling the truth.

[999-roses]

The political speech of the Chinese diaspora has a long history as a site of critique and co-optation by U.S empire and its enabling discourses. Amidst a new apex in Cold War Sinophobia, we trace the revolutionary and reactionary framings of “overseas Chinese” as a political category, from Qing-era anti-colonialism to 20th century Cold War liberalism and beyond.

I think I just gotta straight up post this article more frequently whenever anti-China diaspora like to do the whole song and dance. Point being, "take it from me, that's where I'm from, China is bad!" isn't new at all, and it's part of the long and extended project of assimilation of diaspora into the empire. And it's not just some process that happens passively, many diaspora groups, both historically and presently, are active participants.

Just because you're of X heritage doesn't mean you actually know your history, at least without the filter of the liberal and anti-communist epistemology. I grew up in Texas so what little I was formally taught or gleaned from adults, I spackled in the holes with assumptions formed out of the liberal of the society I lived in. For diaspora in the west, this is the default, and it develops into a sort of background radiation of sinophobia: authoritarianism just like my heavy-handed parents sucks! confucianism is anti-feminist! communist brainwashing etc etc. But why buy into "oh the people back in the mainland are brainwashed" (and therefore untrustworthy sources) narrative? Why would your distance and unfamiliarity grant you more credence as a Knower of History and Truth? Why does "authoritarianism" only ever apply to the accused but never even considered for the accuser? And funniest of all, applying dynastic era history to modern China as a whole - as if that means that the present day systems after more recent history aren't relevant - acting like the "backwards" people back in the motherland would be happy to go back to that era.

[autolenaphilia]

If your main argument against any proposal is “it’s bad because it will destroy existing culture, tradition and religion”, you are not a leftist, you are a conservative. The very definition of a conservative, in fact. And yet I see people who self-identiy as left-wing radicals who get angry whenever an actual communist criticizes religion or proposes family abolition. Even something as minor as suggesting abolishing circumcision, you know the radical idea that we shouldn’t literally cut off parts of the genitals on babies, is enough to bring them out.

Frankly if I were asked to define conservatism, “Preserving tradition, culture and religion is more important than the welfare of the people who are oppressed by such instittuions (such as women, queer people and children)” is as succinct and accurate a definition of its main value I can make. And like if you hear a proposal of family abolition for example, and react with what’s essentially a screed about how evil soulless leftist communist queer feminist globohomo are trying to destroy sacred culture, religion, family and traditions, I’ll view you as a reactionary.

Reactionary anti-imperialism

And I don’t care if you are trying to put such reactionary opinions in “anti-imperialist” terms, and calling actual communists “cultural imperialists” and “cultural christians.” All such accusations reveal is just a deeply idealistic understanding of what imperialism is on the side of accuser, a lack of understanding of the material basis of actual imperialism. Imperialism for these people is not caused by capitalism, but by ideology, and apparently the imperialist ideology is people thinking some things are good (like socialism) and other things are bad (like misogyny).

This “anti-imperialism of fools” is not based on the theory of imperialism made by Rosa Luxemburg, or even Lenin, Mao or Hobson for all their faults, but Henning Eichberg’s neo-fascist concept of ethnopluralism. The central value of such anti-imperialism is the ethnonationalist creed that “Every ethnic group has the right to preserve its traditional culture in its own territory.” I’ve complained about this before. This kind of anti-imperialism is what happens when you just don’t defend “the nationalism of the oppressed” in the name of anti-imperialism but “the conservative ethno-nationalism of the oppressed”.

Why conservatism is wrong

The problem is that any kind of conservative values about preserving traditional culture is that it’s impossible. And it’s even more impossible to want to do that while being a communist or a socialist. You can’t want to preserve traditional culture and also call for socialist revolution. Not without abandoning communism.

This is obvious to anyone who, in the vein of Marx, has a materialist understanding of how history and society works. As Marx put it, “The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” This means culture and religion are based on a certain mode of production, the economic structure of the society in which it is based, such as capitalism or feudalism. And what communist revolution is, is a revolutionary change in this economic structure. “The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. “ This means a socialist revolution will inevitably destroy existing culture, transforming into something new, more fitting to a socialist society.

You can’t call for a radical change in economic foundation of a society, and also want to preserve existing culture, because the latter is very much dependent on the former. This is why conservatives are violently opposed to any idea of socialism, or any kind of radical economic or political change. The traditional culture they want to preserve is dependent on the economic system it is based on.

And the problem with this is that the status quo, capitalism, is itself constantly in flux, and destroys and transforms culture as itself transforms. As Marx put it in a famous passage from the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto. “Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. “

The reactionary political forces are of course to some degree aware of this, it’s obvious. And from this comes criticism and opposition of capitalism from the right. This is what Marx calls “feudal socialism” in the third chapter of the Communist manifesto. This right-wing anti-capitalism arose from the feudal and religious elites whose power were usurped by capitalist forces. This is a criticism of capitalism that is devoid of any liberatory qualities and is a reactionary call for a “retvrn” to the class society and hierarchies of pre-capitalist societies. It’s frequently openly anti-feminist and anti-queer, seeing feminism and queerness as creations of capitalism.

Fascism’s anti-capitalism is of this nature. This is also why the pope sometimes criticizes capitalism, because he like any catholic reactionary longs for a return of the feudal medieval pre-reformation europe where the Catholic Church was at the peak of its power and influence. And the central folly of the anti-imperialism of fools is to defend this kind of reactionary anti-capitalism when it comes from outside the western world.

Why communists criticize religion

Now let’s talk about what communists believe instead, what we think will happen to religion, family and nations.

Let’s talk about religion first. Engels’ the principles of communismexplains it succintly “All religions so far have been the expression of historical stages of development of individual peoples or groups of peoples. But communism is the stage of historical development which makes all existing religions superfluous and brings about their disappearance“

This is maybe explained best in Marx’s famous lines in A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. “The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man.” Religion is not some expression of some mystical supernatural truth, instead “This state and this society produce religion.” Religion does not just explain the world, but is the “moral sanction” of class society, “its universal basis of consolation and justification.” And why do regular people believe in religion? It’s because religion is a coping mechanism for the sufferings of class society. This is what Marx meant when he wrote that religion “is the opium of the people.”

This is why religion will disappear in a communist society, there is no need for religion in a class-less society. We won’t need to ban it using state violence, it will disappear on its own. This is also why communists criticize religion: “The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion…. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo. “

The abolition of the family.

As Marx put it, “Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.”

But it’s actually fairly simple, as Engels explained in The Principles of Communism: “It will transform the relations between the sexes into a purely private matter which concerns only the persons involved and into which society has no occasion to intervene. It can do this since it does away with private property and educates children on a communal basis, and in this way removes the two bases of traditional marriage – the dependence rooted in private property, of the women on the man, and of the children on the parents. "

The final line perfectly explains why communists oppose the family, it’s hierarchical. It’s an institution based the patriarchal rule of men over women, and of the adultist rule of parents over children, and it’s based on private property.

To any objections, I can just quote Marx’s wordsd in the Communist Manifesto, “the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production“ and more caustically: “Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty. “

Communism and national/ethnic differences

Again Marx put it perfectly in chapter 2 of the Communist Manifesto. I have really nothing to add here, it explains pretty much everything:

“The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality.

The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.

National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.

The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.

In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another will also be put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.”

Final notes

I’ve been relying a lot here on rather basic texts, like the Manifesto, The Principles of Communism, and the introductions to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.But that’s because this is rather basic communist theory.

For some heavier reading to actually understand imperialism, i suggest The Accumulation of Capital by Rosa Luxemburg and her “anti-critique”

And in conclusion, yes I am a transfeminist queer radical communist who wants to abolish capitalism, patriarchy, the family and religion and all traditional culture. “Everything you say we are, we are. And we are very proud of ourselves.”

[tom-hossain-minis]

Holy shit politics tumblr what the fuck. Are there no communists on this site? Or people with memory greater than that of dory from finding nemo ? Does nobody recall every promise Biden not only broke but actively did the opposite of what he said he was gonna do? And I also have to ask, and I’m sorry to do so, but I think it’s important, are you all white? Cause I seen yall saying “your pic friends will suffer” and the way it’s phrased makes me think perhaps yall are not yourselves poc, for the most part. Furthermore, all *my* poc friends are well fucking aware that Joe “I’m against desegregation” Biden is a fucking racist POS, as is his entire administration. Let’s not even get into increased climate destruction, his support for trans people being barred from sports, his general apathy towards lgbt people, his really fucking vile southern border behaviour and policy, his explicit fucking islamaphobia, anti black racism, and anti-Asian racism, his supreme belief in police barbarism, his total economic shitshow these last four years, and finally, something I suspect non Americans literally are unable to fathom, his vitriolic hatred of the rest of the world, and the danger he poses to humanity’s continued survival as a result. It’s true, your political system sucks fucking balls, I pity you for having only one party and not being able to remove your head of state, but don’t you dare tell me that you think Joe Biden is a “good president in most regards except Palestine”. And guess what, “trump is worse” is something I wholeheartedly agree with. But for some reason you Americans have no concept of “saying no”. You don’t have a permanent minimum standard. I can’t understand it, is there some weird part of American culture that says you can’t have a sense of personal dignity, or, dare I say it, a spine? It’s inconciliables to me that every person in the most well off, powerful, heavily defended nation on earth would not only allow themselves to be, in the most shakespearien sense, raped by their political system every four years, but that *some* would revel in it. I genuinely mean it when I say I cannot understand this behaviour. Aren’t you outraged at this treatment? Where is your fury against such degradation? Wouldn’t you fight and work and claw at everything against you until your bones were raw and white and broken rather than settle for this most violating and humiliating of lifestyles, in the hope of something better? Don’t get me wrong, I come from the cesspool that is Britain, and that’s its own thing, but I know why and how the British spirit was so thoroughly crushed so I know why people have given up there, and even then, we not only still have some resemblance of fight, but also a system that at least in theory can allow for some better representation than the American one. Britain has a proud history of rioting when things get too bad, we stole the idea from the French, just like everything in our history and culture, but America never seemed to have the same; is it just too vast a country? I just, really need someone to explain it. When and how were the American people politically lobotomised? And I’m sorry if this is rude or confusing but I really am at a loss. As a scientist I really am dedicated to and obsessed with making the world a better place for everyone, but America, the biggest problem by a landslide so massive it could be its own planet, completely and totally baffles me.

Tl;dr: fuck Joe Biden, I have a sneaking suspicion tumblr is mostly racist white people, America’s very existence can drive a man insane like the visage of Cthulhu

[titusandronicusonice]

What I read in 2024

Non-Fiction

History and Class Consciousness (1923) by Georg Lukács – okay, I didn't finish this book. BUT, I'm still mentioning it because the 80-ish pages I did read were so terribly influential on me that I couldn't not include it. Considered one of the foundational texts of 'Western Marxism', the first three essays (especially the one on 'Class Consciousness') show just how dynamic historical materialism can be.

'Theses on the Philosophy of History' (1940), and 'The Author as Producer' (1934) by Walter Benjamin – I read in a John Berger piece that Benjamin wanted to compose a book made up entirely of quotations. I think about that a lot.

Marxism and Form (1971) by Fredric Jameson – Jameson's account of the aesthetic theories of Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Bloch, Lukács, and Sartre, plus an extended account of what dialectical criticism is and can be. (That last chapter is an expansion of his excellent 'Metacommentary' essay which you should read right now.)

Marxist Modernism (2024) by Gillian Rose – A transcript of Rose's 1979 lectures on Frankfurt School critical theory from Lukács to Adorno by way of Benjamin, Bloch, and Brecht. The lecture format makes it far more approachable than Marxism and Form but necessarily more simplistic. Regardless, Rose does a phenomenal job contextualising every theory discussed, outlining the unifying threads that might not be evident when approaching each thinker individually.

The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism by Rodney Hilton and others – Collecting the 1950s transition debate and complementary material. All your favourites are here: Sweezy, Dobb, Hilton, Hill, Lefebvre, Hobsbawm. I particularly loved the essay by Kohachiro Takahashi.

A Singular Modernity (2002) by Fredric Jameson – A rigorous theorisation of 'modernity' and 'modernism'. All your favourites are closet dialecticians. I devoured this in a week, so good.

Fiction

Guards! Guards! (1989) by Terry Pratchett – My second Discworld novel after having read The Colour of Magic 5 years ago. A joy to read.

Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939) by Aimé Césaire – A long poem tracing the coming-into-consciousness of an anti-colonial subject. Rich with history and anger. 'I would go to this land of mine and I would say to it: "Embrace me without fear ... And if all I can do is speak, it is for you I shall speak."'

Hard to Be a God (1964) by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky – Future communist spacemen observe a planet whose civilisation is stuck in its Middle Ages (or, more accurately, backsliding into quasi-fascist reaction). A favourite, feels like it was written specifically for me.

The Tombs of Atuan (1971), The Farthest Shore (1972) by Ursula K. Le Guin – The second and third books of Earthsea. Tombs was excellent, probably the high point of the trilogy, or at least the only novel I felt was truly subversive of contemporary fantasy. The Farthest Shore I very much liked, but the narrative was far more conventional, if not conservative.

Mother Courage and Her Children (1939) by Bertolt Brecht – No one does it like him. I would do anything to be able to see the 2006 Meryl Streep production.

The City and the City (2009) by China Miéville – My first Miéville. This scratched a very specific itch for me, looking forward to when I have the time to start his New Crobuzon series.

Shadow & Claw (1980, 1981) by Gene Wolfe – The first half of the Book of the New Sun. A favourite, if not the favourite.

Melville (1941) by Jean Giono – Something between an essay and novella: a fictionalised account of Melville's time in London in 1849 and his decision to write Moby-Dick. I had very high hopes coming into this but it was not very great. Too hetero.

Heart of Darkness (1899) by Joseph Conrad – I quite enjoyed reading this so I say in the most neutral way possible that this was the longest hundred pages I've ever read.

Gardens of the Moon (1999) by Steven Erikson – The first book in the Malazan Book of the Fallen series. I wanted a huge fantasy world to get invested in (googled 'books like Elden Ring') and this one stood out to me. Erikson's prose left a lot to be desired, but the worldbuilding and plot construction were great. I'll probably read one of these books a year; will provide a series overview in 2034.

Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) (2019) by Hazel Jane Plante – An elegy for a trans woman by a trans woman, told through encyclopaedia entries about her favourite (fictional) show. So much life packed into this short book.

To the Lighthouse (1927) by Virginia Woolf – A favourite. From this novel alone Woolf ranks among the best prose stylists I've read.

Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853) by Herman Melville – [edit, forgot to mention this one]

[eldritchdyke]

The recent Signalis anticommunism discussion on here made me stumble onto your take about it from last month, and while I do believe that Signalis is very... normie anticommunist (you seem to disagree), your post made me really curious, but at the same time it was very vague, and a lot of people interpreted it as "Signalis isn't anti-communist, it's anti-authoritarian". Would you be willing to elaborate?

Oof didn't realize there was more discussion to it than I thought so I won't wade into the whole of that cuz that wasn't what I was responding to at the time. Also just to preface two things; for one I am a communist myself and that did effect my reading of the text a great deal and for two I didn't say anything about the "Signalis isn't anti-communist, it's anti-authoritarian" thing myself that was a later addition from other people (personally I don't like the term "authoritarian" as a way to analyze the faults of certain socialist states but that's neither here nor there).

What I was driving at is the idea that the DDR imagery (and beyond that, as others have pointed out it isn't solely pulling from that) is doing a lot more than simple condemnation or any sort of post-war triumphalism over "dystopian" socialism. We can read a lot based on what was given attention in the text, and I think the ways that DDR imagery show up in the game are shown with a rather loving, even reverent light at times (you don't create a bunch of intricately designed DDR robot girl ocs and name some of them after historical DDR special forces units because you totally despise everything the DDR stood for). This is intentionally contrasted with the rotting and decayed state we actively find a great deal of these things in, which provides a great deal of contrast between the lowercase i ideal and the reality of an execution which was tainted by the literal bleeding psychology of collective trauma and the attempts at domination of individuals.

What results is less a coherent world as such that can be dissected as one might dissect typical worldbuilding lore and more an emotional portrait which depicts a sense of portrayal at the way the history of the DDR played out, and you may disagree with parts of that (I do with certain parts as well) but it isn't intended to reflect a dissertation on the flaws of the DDR. It's an emotion first conceptualization of tainted Ostalgie and the hauntological traces of a future which was not allowed to be for reasons internal and external, through that lens it is, to me, quite ambiguous over whether or not the source object was a negative or a positive. Instead its a truly conflicted portrayal of the emotional state one is left in after both the (again lowercase i) ideals of that revolutionary state and its practical execution, warts and all, have passed into the realm of cultural memory.

(I'm sorry that's probably a whole lot of words to not fully answer your question but tldr I don't think Signalis is as anticommunist as a lot of people think it is, I think people are generally reading the diegesis too literally and not really delving into the full emotional depth going on with how communist imagery is used in the game)

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Ruth Ben-Ghiat at Lucid:

"Should I leave the country now for somewhere safer?” “How do you know when it's time to move?" “Where should I go?” Almost every day now, as the inauguration of Donald Trump approaches, I receive queries like these from fellow Americans. The personalized nature of the decision to go into exile means that it is very difficult to counsel people. However, we can learn from the history of such fateful choices, which also teaches us that exile is not a linear path, nor an irreversible one. I have been engaging with the history of émigrés from dictatorships for decades. My interest in studying Fascism was sparked by growing up in Pacific Palisades, California, where the writer Thomas Mann and other famous exiles had sought refuge from Nazism. Over the next century, America became a destination for so many others fleeing dictatorship. Now it may be our turn to experience some form of autocracy. The title of this essay sums up the eternal dilemma of the anti-authoritarian: do I stay and resist, or go into exile? In reality, there is a third option, and as everywhere in the world, it is likely to be the most popular one. You stay put, and keep your head down and your criticism of the government private. That way you and your loved ones can minimize any adverse consequences while you “wait it out.” Only a small percentage of the population leaves the country, or stays and actively resists, not least because these choices pose financial, legal, physical, and other challenges. And yet it is often these minorities who make history, whether by leading the opposition from abroad (as Belarusian politician Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya is doing from Lithuania) or from inside the country, organizing protests or other resistance actions. And in our age of transnational repression, being abroad can still be dangerous for dissidents who persist with political activities.

Yet the questions that the politically active have grappled with have changed little since the dawn of authoritarianism. If all the resisters leave, who is left to fight for freedom? How can I turn my back on my country? “Guilt is exile’s eternal companion,” reflects the writer Hisham Matar, who, as the son of Jaballa Matar, an opponent of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, was forced to follow his compatriots’ fates from abroad and had no information about his imprisoned relatives back home. And if the resisters who stay are silenced, who is left to lead the struggle, document the abuses, and counter the propaganda? Isn’t it more pragmatic to leave and be able to work for freedom rather than sit in jail? Alexi Navalny’s death in a Siberian lager is an example of what can happen to high-profile opponents of the dictator when they do not leave. Navalny could have easily remained abroad after his stay in Germany to recover from a Kremlin poisoning, but he refused to remove himself voluntarily and make it easier for the “thieving little man in his bunker,” as he memorably referred to Vladimir Putin during his 2021 Moscow sentencing, to claim victory over him and his anti-corruption work.

Some people escape one dictatorship by going to another. That might seem strange, and yet geographical proximity or the ability to get residence papers make it a not uncommon choice. Chileans who fled Augusto Pinochet’s military regime after the 1973 coup settled in Brazil’s military regime, or (if they were Communists) in East Germany. Germans found refuge from Nazism in Fascist Italy, and Syrians crossed the border to Turkey as they fled the Assad regime. Some exiles also return home, thinking maybe it won’t be that bad, before leaving again for good. Many people want to know the right time to leave, and history is full of stories of people who did not leave their countries in time to escape persecution. There are good reasons for this. Dictators are impulsive, and love “shock events,” as I refer to them in Strongmen (which has exile as a theme). What is fine today may be grounds for persecution tomorrow, and all bets are off if a state of emergency is declared.

Going into exile also requires money and other things that many individuals do not have: a job offer, the right connections, entry papers, a way to care for loved ones who cannot leave, or a place to stay in another country. Those at elite institutions or multinational/global companies might have more possibilities to move abroad than activists or politicians rooted in local contexts. That’s why we should not assume that those who stay in dictatorships are in denial. The Jewish linguist Viktor Klemperer is a case in point. He remained in Nazi Germany because he could not find a university position abroad (unlike his famous conductor cousin, Otto Klemperer, who moved to Los Angeles). “Don’t think about it, live one’s life, bury oneself in the most private matters!" he wrote in late September 1938, hoping, like other Jews who stayed in Germany, that each new round of persecution would be the last. "Fine resolution, but so difficult to keep.”

As we prepare for some form of autocracy in America, it is no comfort to know that Trump and his zealous and unscrupulous associates have advertised their desire to go after groups of people perennially targeted by authoritarians: immigrants, Muslims, Jews, opposition politicians, the unhoused, LGBTQ+ people, activists, journalists, scientists, and educators. It will be especially dangerous to be a transgender person in America, or anyone involved with reproductive and immigrant rights. American movements in response to autocracy may differ from those of other populations due to the strength of states’ rights here. We are likely to see internal migration instead of exile, with people leaving states where voting, reproductive, LGBTQ+ and other rights are being extinguished.

There's also a history of regional movement in search of freedom in our country that we can build on. The Jim Crow South was a regional authoritarianism in many respects. That’s why the former CEO and President of the NAACP, Cornell William Brooks, states in our 2021 Lucid interview that we might begin to see “Black Southerners who came to New York and Chicago and Detroit” as “refugees; they were fleeing terrorism. And so Black folk are the descendants of these refugees, as well as of enslaved people." While every person contemplating exile has their own unique situation and resources, there is one constant among such departures: when you exit your homeland, you enter into a state of waiting. Waiting for things to get better; waiting for the tyrant to die or, if elections still exist, be voted out; waiting for freedom to arrive so you can return to beloved places and people.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote a solid piece on the tough decision for those opposed to tyrannical regimes as to whether to stay and fight back or leave for exile.

[mesetacadre]

do you think religion and communism are compatible?

I'd say it depends on the maturity of the social relations and the starting point of socialism. Religion was identified by Marx as the opium of the masses not because he was a radical anti-theist bent on the immediate destruction of any semblance of religiosity, rather because religion, as it accompanies the evolution of the economy, serves to alleviate the alienation caused the the exploitative nature of work ever since labor was organized. It acts like an anesthetic, or rather, an opiate.

Therefore if religion began to take form in this way, and considering its pervasiveness across most aspects of almost all societies, its removal will have to be slow, much like the family. Take Spain, where a little over half of the population considers themselves to be catholic, along with the comfortable place the church has within society and most people's minds. If the communist revolution were to happen tomorrow, and assuming its continuance, it would take a multi-generational effort for the dismantling of all causes of alienation along with the appropiate education to make religion wither out, or perhaps mutate into something completely new. For me this is at the same level of speculation as the conclusion of family abolition.

Keeping all of this in mind, and getting at your question, communism is, nowadays, compatible with religion insofar as the objective conditions demand it to be. If religion is important to the working class in your region of intervention, it would be an immediatist error to viciously attack that religion and demand people stop believing in it. It is one thing to remove the financial and political privileges some religious institutions might have, which should be done albeit avoiding excessive antagonization, and another to go after people's faith.

To give a couple of examples, the USSR's policy on religion was to remove the power that the religious institutions and leaders had achieved by allowing workers to stop being reliant on them, emphasizing science and technology. The first chapter of Anna Louise Strong's The Soviets Expected gives a good example of what this looked like at the beginning of industrialization. In Cuba, on the other hand, christianity was, to an extent, included in the narrative created around their national liberation struggle and revolution, it had a part in the creation of that revolutionary patriotism that's characteristic of communist national liberation. The difference in the preconditions for Cuba and the USSR is that the USSR was a mosaic of tens of religions, if not hundreds, with contrasting levels of reactionary tendencies and influence, whereas in Cuba the population was pretty monolithically christian. There is no single recipe for the policies to take regarding religion in socialism.

When it comes to currents like christian socialism or liberation theology, I personally think that mixing theology with marxism should be avoided at all costs. Philosophically speaking there are very little similarities when you go beyond the surface, the scientific approach to analizing history and society that marxism takes has nothing to do with the irrational or spiritual explanations theology gives. I don't really care if people choose to go that way, I just think it's a waste of time because if you ever wish to go deeper so to speak, there will be a time, sooner rather than later, when you'll have to choose one over the other. I consider the approach I explained earlier to be a sufficiently close relationship to religion and that, strategically speaking, it is also unnecessary to intertwine the two.

In East Asia, especially China, the label of religion and its difference with spirituality and philosophy is less clear than in the west as far as I'm aware, but I don't know anything beyond that so maybe someone can expand on it, though I assume the approach is similar.

[hereforthelizardsex]

You mentioned about different analyses of 1984 in a post that you reblogged from me, and now I’m interested. I haven’t read 1984 for a while (I’m thinking of rereading it soon), but I’d be interested in any of your opinions / other people’s analyses if you want to share! :)

Omg yay 1984 is my favorite book and I always want to talk about it.

Of course the well known thing about the book is the issue of censorship, but the censorship in the novel does not exist in isolation, rather it is influenced by other political and economic forces.

1984 is a story of a society where, as a result of an end to scarcity (which would otherwise require a transition away from capitalism), those in power have created an economic system where war is used to manufacture scarcity, thereby ensuring the continued existence of hierarchy and power. It is important to note that hierarchy is also the problematized issue in Animal Farm, another book my George Orwell that is often misinterpreted as anti-communist while in actuality being anti-capitalist. The censorship in 1984 is done not only in the service of preserving the state but specifically for the purpose of preserving hierarchy as a concept. This is stated outright in the theory section in the middle of the book, when Winston is reading The Book. When I logged on to tumblr after finishing 1984 to look for meta posts and analyses, I was shocked to find people saying that they had skipped that entire section of the novel. I exclaimed out loud about this and my mother who was in the room at the time said she’d done the same thing. While people are entitled to consume media in whatever fashion they like and 1984 itself promotes this idea, I find it deeply concerning that many people skip what was to me the most interesting and important section of the book due to finding it to be a difficult read. The book states outright that the preservation of the power of the capitalist class and the subjugation of the working class is the entire reason that the government does everything it does, and people just don’t read that part of the book.

The censorship in the book is also not only censorship by elimination but censorship by the rewriting of history. This is important because it happens all the time in real life. For example, Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis wishes for it to be taught in schools that slavery helped Black people. This is the same kind of censorship that happens in 1984. In the field of political science this is called the “usable past” - versions of rewritten history used to uphold a nation’s identity.

Another political science concept that 1984 takes to an extreme is that if war abroad being used to put an end to social movements at home. This has happened throughout history as wars are used to make patriotism the norm, thereby marginalizing “unpatriotic” political movements such as labor or racial or gender equality that are seen as not in line with the aforementioned national identity that has been constructed. In 1984 the wars do this quite literally by manufacturing scarcity and thereby preventing the rise of communism.

I could go on forever, but instead I’ll conclude with an anecdote from when I was in high school. In my English class senior year of high school we were split into groups and assigned various novels to read instead of reading one as a class. The group that was assigned 1984 (not my group, I read The Color Purple which is another favorite that I could go on about forever) decided they wouldn’t read it because “the main character wants to rape someone.” I found this disturbing immediately because the novel is about censorship being a bad thing and here my classmates were not wanting to read it because it depicts sensitive subject matter. Their behavior was disturbingly indicative of the self censoring mindset of so many young people on the internet today. When I myself read the novel a few years later I discovered that it deals with rape in a few different ways. The first is that the main character was himself raped by his wife before the story takes place, not for sexual gratification but for reproductive purposes. The second is that he does indeed fantasize about raping someone who he is under the impression wants to get him killed. He later has sex with this person after finding out that she does not in fact want to get him killed, and it is the sex scene in a novel with the best negotiation of consent I have ever read. After the characters have sex Winston muses on the political power of sex in ways that I recognize more from queer activists who post on tumblr than from any other novel. All of the novel’s dealings with sensitive topics around sex are well done. The ones that are disturbing are intended to be disturbing - the book ends darkly; nothing in it is intended to make the reader feel good.

I could go on and I have - I wrote one of my papers in undergrad on 1984 and would be willing to share that too, if I could find a way to link it without my full name attached - but I’ll leave this as is for now.

[grandhotelabyss]

Any thoughts on nick land / mark fisher?

I've encountered both of them essentially as bloggers—I don't think I've ever read a word of either on paper—so I can't say I've studied them formally or mastered their thinking.

Land's concept of capital as autonomous alien intelligence assembling itself through retroaction on human agents—do I have this right?—is fun science fiction. I accept that as a theory of cultural temporality in general but not necessarily as a theory of technology or capitalism in particular. As for his more (shall we say) "ethnic" idea about "exit" and the Anglo character—maybe there's something to that. Modern history as the struggle between decentralized commercial sea empires (UK, US) and despotic communist land empires (Germany, Russia, China). And his new thing about Anglo-Zionism—I believe he's read Milton deeply—is right on time. All his Compact pieces on the English canon are paywalled, so I haven't read them, but it seems like he's approaching the idea that the God of the Bible is the force he previously identified as capital. (I think this is similar to what Mitchell Heisman outlined in his Suicide Note, but I only read some of that, and only once, on one sleepless night over 10 years ago, and doubt I'll revisit it. Does Heisman cite Land? I don't recall.) Hyperstition is real, as any manifestation girl on here or on TikTok or on YouTube will tell you.

Now Fisher was a sad case. I think all that anti-humanist theory did him no favors, personally. I'm not sure he could stand in that desolate place, the way Land could. I don't believe I ever directly interacted with him online when we both were bloggers in the same milieu circa 2005 or so. Maybe once or twice. He had a positive Marxist take on Batman Begins, and I had a negative one, and I think somebody sent him mine when he had comments open. (He had a whole thing, which anticipated the "vampire's castle" image, about "gray vampires" who stalk the comments section and suck the life out of your imaginative assertions with their point-missing nitpickery. He wasn't wrong!) I'm sure he thought I was hideously naive if he ever thought about me at all, and I was naive, I was essentially a Stalinist, an obvious example of humanist theory gone wrong, but there are limits, too, to that gothic style he picked up from Land and the CCRU.

I think he said Kafka was his first major author. There's a case to be made that you should read Kafka only after Dickens. (I don't mean literally but metonymically. Nor do I mean the 19th century vs. the 20th or even realism vs. modernism. Replace Kafka with Baudelaire and Dickens with Joyce and it'll mean the same.) And I'm not talking about politics here or even ethics. No panacea for politics and ethics can be found in books. Kafka, for that matter, was probably a nicer guy qua guy than Dickens was. But, just as someone who has to live in the world in your skin, it can't hurt to read a non-anti-humanist book from time to time if you're a bookish person. To not always try to conceptually outflank as a ruse of power every obvious humane sentiment. And to try not to need your humane sentiments to be conveyed only by the most alienating stimulus, to need them to come in the form of their opposite. I never got over his review of The Passion of the Christ:

What, from one perspective, is the utter humiliation and degradation of Jesus's body is on the other a coldly ruthless vision of the body liberated from the 'wisdom and limits of the organism'.

Masochristianity.

Christ's Example is simply this: it is better to die than to pass on abuse virus or to in any way vindicate the idiot vacuity and stupidity of the World of authority.

Power depends upon the weakness of the organism. When authority is seriously challenged, when its tolerance is tested to the limit, it has the ultimate recourse of torture. The slow, graphic scenes of mindless physical degradation in The Passion of the Christ are necessary for revealing the horrors to which Jesus' organism was subject. It is made clear that he could have escaped the excruciating agony simply by renouncing his Truth and by assenting to the Authority of the World. Christ's Example insists: better to let the organism be tortured to death ('If thine own eye offend thee, pluck it out') than to bow, bent-headed, to Authority.

This is what is perhaps most astonishing about Gibson's film. Far from being a statement of Catholic bigotry, it can only be read as an anti-authoritarian AND THEREFORE anti-Catholic film. For the Pharisees of two millennia ago, puffed up in their absurd finery, substitute the child-abuser apologists of today's gilt-laden, guilt-ridden Vatican. Against all the odds, against two thousand years of cover-ups and dissimulation, The Passion of the Christ recovers the original Christ, the anti-Wordly but not otherwordly Christ of Liberation Theology: the Gnostic herald of Apocalypse Now.

This is why I found him frustrating when I read him as a daily blogger almost 20 years ago. Plus the over-solemnity about pop-culture ephemera. I found him a bit naive, too, in the end, though he was almost 15 years my senior. I also sometimes just didn't and don't know what he was talking about, because I sort of hated and hate theory.

In his purely political commentary, he was right, however, to focus on bureaucratization as an effect of neoliberalism—the way capitalism and communism converge in the present for the worst of both worlds, everything is at once a competition and frozen in a statist hierarchy. I'm not sure I'm persuaded by the "hauntology" thesis. I've thought through that issue in a different way and am not convinced the end of the myth of the revolution or the myth of the avant-garde has to mean that we have no future. In fact it might mean the opposite. But good for him for putting into public consciousness an interesting and melancholically beautiful idea that would otherwise have remained confined to smug Derrida-readers.

He is fun to read. That's the highest compliment I can pay. I'm sure the big K-Punk book is a wonderful thing to own and to browse through: to watch a movie or read a book or listen to an album and then see what he had to say about it. He was one model of the blogger as true essayist.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Skeptic

Published: Oct 4, 2024

Christopher Rufo

Skeptic: You are a controversial figure for your work in the area of Critical Race Theory (CRT). What led you to this subject?

Rufo: My professional background is in documentary filmmaking. The book writing process was totally different. I hope what I was able to do with the book is bring my narrative training to telling stories that engage people and move them at an emotional level.

Skeptic: Well, you did that. It’s a highly readable book in which you present a history of ideas. One of the difficulties is drawing causal connections between thinkers across generations. How do you address that problem?

Rufo: There was a lot of looking for explicit connections. For example, I profile Angela Davis, who I think is really kind of the godmother of CRT. She tied the original critical theory from the early part of the 20th century to American race politics in a deliberate way. Her thesis advisor was the critical theorist Herbert Marcuse, who is also profiled in the book. Then I connect Davis to the modern Black Lives Matter movement; she is the personal mentor to a number of BLM leaders. I tried not to make any specious connections, and I wanted to be charitable to my subjects, to see the world first through their eyes and treat them fairly. Only then did I layer on my criticism or my critique.

Skeptic: On that political front, how do you distinguish between old-school liberals, such as Steven Pinker, and the more radical progressive thinkers of today?

Rufo: The critical theorists I profile in my book are explicitly anti-liberal, such as Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and Derek Bell, the father of CRT. Their whole movement is explicitly and deeply anti-liberal. It’s against the concept of individual rights, private property, and Enlightenment values. So, I hope that I can also speak to some of those estranged liberals and explain how the movement that has really taken over the institutional left in the United States has deviated from that small ‘l’ liberal tradition and really originates from something much more radical, revolutionary, and Marxist in nature.

Skeptic: Walk us through these influences, starting with Marx.

Rufo: Over the course of the 20th century, there was a deviation from orthodox Marxism as people became more infatuated with the new left, the more activist 1960s youth movement, and racial unrest. Angela Davis was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party USA, and she ran for vice president of the United States on the Communist Party ticket. She was deeply influenced by Marx (although she had written her graduate thesis on Kant) and was also well-versed in the Western philosophical tradition. Paulo Freire—the same. He was working with Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries in the Third World, and his idea of critical consciousness originates in Marxist concepts that he had learned when he was a student in Brazil.

However, the most interesting case is Derek Bell, who was a Harvard Law professor, and in many ways the founding figure of CRT. His students at Harvard Law and other elite law schools around the country, inspired by Bell, established the discipline of critical race theory in the late 1980s. Bell grew up in the Pittsburgh area, served in the U.S. Air Force, went to law school, and was a very successful—even brilliant—student. Then he became a lawyer for the NAACP, handling cases in the Deep South desegregating schools in places such as Mississippi. I think he oversaw something like 300 school desegregation cases. He was a civil rights advocate and activist, a small ‘l’ liberal at the time.

However, Bell became disillusioned with the Civil Rights Movement and utterly disillusioned with Martin Luther King-style civil rights activism that turned to the Constitution, focusing especially on the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. He thought these were all illusions in that they provided the appearance of freedom but were actually used to reinforce secretly and covertly the structures of racial domination. It is this aspect of Bell’s work that survives and is really the foundation of what we now see as critical race theory.

Skeptic: There’s this push to find deep root causes of specific events among politicians. Is this a useful approach?

Rufo: It’s amazing because it’s totally backwards. Politicians say, “Well, no, we’re not going to do the thing that actually could have a significant and immediate impact, and instead we’re going to implement the 1619 Project and focus on the first arrival of African slaves in North America.” That certainly is something of historical importance and scholarly relevance, and should even be part of the public debate, but what do you do with that? Short of having a time travel machine, you can’t change the past 400 years of history. Nor can you show any real relevance to today beyond a very broad and metaphorical interpretation of current events.

When you go back and look at the civil rights movement, against which Derrick Bell rebelled later in his life, you had, for the most part, people who wanted to cash in the promissory note of the Declaration of Independence. They wanted to conform to not only the system of individual rights in the United States as a form of law, but also conform to middle class or bourgeois values as a matter of culture. Look at these great civil rights marches in the 1960s. Men were dressed in suits and ties and the women in dresses. And these weren’t necessarily wealthy people. They were mostly working-class African Americans. However, the image that they wanted to convey was one of dignity, self-respect, and an immense hope for equal participation in American society. I’m still really moved and struck by some of those images.

Compare those images to the kind you see of Antifa or BLM activists in 2020. You have deranged-looking mugshots of people. You have people that visually look quite disordered, committing sprees of violence. And in the name of what? It was never quite clear what they wanted beyond defunding the police or just having a justification for violence. Those two images, if you look at them side by side, reveal the kind of fundamental change in the modern left.

Skeptic: What do you think is the right approach to social change?

Rufo: When you ask people in surveys, “Do you support affirmative action? Do you support race-conscious college admissions? Do you support mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion training?” They overwhelmingly say “No.” This is true for people of all political affiliations and all racial backgrounds. And yet, all of those things are now required in nearly all of our major institutions. So, you have this mismatch problem where public sentiment is against something, but all of our institutions and even our public policies are for it. Why is that? If we live in a democracy, shouldn’t majority sentiment eventually translate into public policy?

The answer is that, in my view, there are concentric rings of influence on these issues. You have the tightest ring, which consists of the fanatics, the people who are deeply committed to it. They work in it. These are the DEI administrators. These are the critical race theorists. These are the BLM activists. Then you have another concentric ring of people that say, “Well, you know, I more or less buy into the premise of this. I want more diversity.” That’s roughly 30 percent of the public, maybe a little bit more depending on the issue. Then you have an even larger concentric ring of people who are neutral, slightly opposed, or even quite opposed to it, but they don’t speak out because they fear the consequences. This creates an opinion environment in which those very committed activists can really run up the score and impose their point of view as the de facto policy.

That’s the environment we live in. The people who care most about it have figured out where the levers of power are. They’ve gone, in most cases, around the democratic process to impose their will. And they essentially say—as we’ve seen recently with Harvard and the University of North Carolina [the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that race-based affirmative action programs in college admissions processes violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment]—“We know what we’re doing is unpopular. We know what we’re doing is likely illegal and unconstitutional. But we’re going to do it anyway.”

Skeptic: Erika Chenoweth and Maria Steffen’s research on political violence demonstrates that since 1900, nonviolent campaigns worldwide were twice as likely to succeed outright as violent insurgencies. This trend has been increasing over time. In the last 50 years, civil resistance has become increasingly frequent and effective, whereas violent insurgencies have become increasingly rare and unsuccessful. No campaigns failed once they achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5 percent of the population, and lots of them succeeded with far less than that.

Rufo: That’s right. I think academic critique is still valuable. However, what we really need is political opposition because this issue has moved from the realm of academia to the realm of politics. So, it also has to be fought politically. That’s what I’ve done, and I’ve gotten an unbelievable amount of criticism for this approach.

I’ve taken the battle out of the realm of academic discourse and into the realm of practical politics. I’ve been very explicit about that. I said I want to change public perception; I want to turn critical race theory into a brand, and I want to destroy it not just in the realm of public opinion, but also in the realm of public policy.

If it’s in the K–12 school curriculum, it’s a policy question. If it’s in a public university DEI bureaucracy, it’s a policy question. If it’s in our criminal justice system, it’s a policy question. These are political questions, and those who think that we can resolve them through discourse are really doing a disservice. They’re not grappling with the actual difficult nature of statesmanship and political activism that’s required.

If we want to have a society that says, “No, we’re not going to engage in racial scapegoating. We’re not going to judge individuals based on a racial category. We’re not going to imbibe in notions of hereditary blood guilt,” the only way, I think, is through political pressure, by changing the laws by which our institutions are governed.

Skeptic: What are your thoughts on systemic racism? What is your explanation for racial group differences in income, wealth, home ownership, representation in Congress and the corporate C-suite?

Rufo: What is the standard by which we measure systemic racism? How do we define systemic racism? There’s an interesting bait and switch here, because they say, “Well, all of this is systemic racism, from chattel slavery to the fact that a Lakeisha Smith is less likely to get called back than a Lisa Smith.” [“Call back” studies submit the same resumés to businesses and compare the response to identifiably Black versus White names]. You have this transition in the mid-20th century from explicit, formal, and legal racist policies to what amounts to implicit racist policies. Well, what do they mean by that?

They mean that when you measure things statistically, that there is a disparate impact on outcomes. Lisa versus Lakeisha Smith is just one such example. You can say that there are no outright racist policies in policing or housing or geographical distribution, but there are still disparate outcomes. Is it because people are secretly and subconsciously racist? That’s the unconscious bias theory, which has been debunked. [It has been demonstrated that The Implicit Association Test, often cited as confirming evidence, does not measure racial bias but rather reaction time to familiar versus unfamiliar terms.] Are police more likely to shoot a Black suspect than a White suspect? Roland Fryer at Harvard showed that this is not the case. [Although he did find that White police rough up Black people they pull over more than White people.]

Then you have to ask some uncomfortable questions. If, for example, there are more African American men in jail than Asian American men, is it because our society is systemically racist against African American men and systemically giving privileges to Asian American men?

You could make that argument, but I think that on the face of it most people realize that it’s not true. Then you ask about the rate of criminality—do African American males on average commit more crimes than Asian American males? You might find that it’s not racism that is operative. It’s another set of background variables. Robert Rector published some papers on this subject 20 years ago that are still foundational to my thinking. He showed that if you control for those background variables, you find that the argument for active systemic racism vanishes across a whole range of things, not just Lakeisha versus Lisa Smith, but for things that are especially meaningful. For example, if you control for the mother’s academic achievement, the mother’s participation in state welfare programs, and household family structure, the gap between White and Black childhood poverty disappears. It’s zero.

If we aim our public policy towards fixing those variables, we’d be much better served and we’d be much more likely to reduce overall inequalities.

Skeptic: Those causal variables are largely left out of the conversation. Maybe it’s taboo to talk about them right now?

Rufo: I think it is, because it’s a very inconvenient disrupting narrative when you have minority groups that are enormously successful in the United States. The most successful ethnic groups in the United States today are majority non-White ethnic groups, including some Black ethnic groups, particularly Nigerian Americans. Part of that may be due to a selection process—immigrants from Nigeria are disproportionately better educated, have more resources, etc. So, it’s not quite a one-to-one measurement.

Nonetheless, there’s a huge range in success among ethnic groups in the United States. The ones that have stable family structure, commitment to education, a strong work ethic, mutual support within a community, etc., are very successful. Those ethnic groups that do not have those attributes do very poorly on many measures, including income. Appalachian Whites do very poorly while Nigerian Americans or other recent immigrants are doing extraordinarily well.

Skeptic: Are you optimistic we can achieve a colorblind society?

Rufo: There are reasons for optimism and for pessimism. The reason for optimism is that the American people really despise the DEI affirmative action principles of governance. Even in California and Washington state, where I live, voters have rejected affirmative action policies when they’ve been put to a ballot initiative. And the majority of racial groups also oppose these kinds of policies. Despite all of the media dominance, academic dominance, and bureaucratic dominance of the DEI movement—the American people want equal treatment for each individual, regardless of group category. They want colorblind equality, not racial favoritism and enforced equity.

The case for pessimism is that it’s going to be difficult. The problem of racial equality is a thorny one. It is one that has vexed the United States for its whole history and is, frankly, likely to continue. As long as there is visible inequality—statistically measurable inequality—the narrative of critical race theory will have a base of support. It will have the political, emotional, and intellectual grounds that can feed that narrative. This puts us in a bit of a conundrum because paradoxically, the remedies of critical race theory are actually likely to make inequality worse. And for the people who are running a critical race theory style regime, inequality justifies their claims to power. So, they have no incentive to make things better in the real world. If we go in that direction, we face a very long, very brutal, and very disillusioning politics in our future.

Skeptic: Do you see any role for any kind of reparations for formerly oppressed peoples or even currently oppressed people?

Rufo: I have certainly opposed any kind of race-based reparations payments. I think it’s absolutely the wrong direction to go for a host of reasons. Historically, if you look at Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society anti-poverty programs, these were to a large extent a kind of race-based reparations policy that was—they thought—backed up by the latest discoveries in social science, deployed at federal mass scale. These programs now are spending about a trillion dollars a year, disproportionately to African Americans, especially descendants of slaves.

These are policies that sound great, and that’s why they’re often passed in legislation. But we have to be sober and level-headed in analyzing whether they actually work. Do they help us achieve the stated intentions? The evidence that it has helped in any way is lacking. In fact, the most persuasive evidence, in my view, shows that it has had negative, though unintended, consequences. In my reading of it, both statistically and as someone who spent three years researching and documenting public housing projects in Memphis, Tennessee, and getting a first-hand look at their impact, I just don’t think that reparations would work.

[ This interview was edited from a longer conversation that took place on The Michael Shermer Show, which you can watch online. ]

[the-frosty-mac]

idk if this is a hot take but one of the most important things the communist movement needs right now is political commentators with shows. people who are well-versed in theory, both the fundamentals and more modern, who can tell you breaking news WITH a proper material analysis of that news to the best of their abilities. we have a few kinda-sorta-almost-not-really socialist pundits out there but even they will often fall for, and subsequently spout, anti-communist propaganda

it’s the modern equivalent of a communist newspaper in terms of reach, and we so desperately need something like that because even progressive commentators and news outlets often fail to apply proper analysis, which can give false impressions that lead people down the path of liberalism. im talking your TYTs and your David Pakmans of the world. Just look how much dumb shit they’ve done and said

we do have podcasts, and those are pretty great and useful, but i’ve noticed they TEND to be focused on history and/or theory, not usually current events, with the odd exception here or there. maybe i’m missing a whole trove of awesome podcasts that do exactly what i want, but i’ve been unable to find them. i think some shows ON YOUTUBE that cover current events and breaking news would be immensely helpful for our cause

[selamat-linting]

related to last rb but a few years ago i was reading a book about an indonesian anarchist's analysis on indigenous cultures here and there is this bit of a thread that interests me.

its about how ethnic groupings and cultural traditions slowly become incorporated with the capitalist state the moment people and the communities pursue friendly relations or try to live with the government to the point that their identity is eventually homogenized and reduced to be synonymous with the state with a bunch of sanitized and hollow cultural signifiers of their ancestors' ethnic group.

to tell you the truth, i actually have a little issue with this. a lot of ethnic identities are tied to the monarchies that stood before colonization. theyre already friendly with the state. not every ethnic groups are like dayak where you can argue they're principally anarchist (plus it kind of has the unfortunate implications that there is no way to preserve your culture in a way that matters if you intermix and mingle with people outside of your ethnicity). but also, as a disparate bunch of islands and regions, it was dutch colonialism that forcibly tied everything together to give it a national identity.

but i don't think the concerns were stupid. its true that the indonesian state as it is now, uses indigenous cultural symbols and do token lip service about diversity between ethnic and religious groups while oppressing and stealing lands to be used as projects like food estate or mining sites or palm oil plantations. and its not just a matter of corruption, food estate farms usually plant rice in places where the climates are bad for it and where the people living around it doesn't even consume rice as their primary staple foods. and when the projects fail, the farmers sometimes default on palm oil because there is a national and international market for it, then indigenous communities suffer because their source of livelihood and food are gone. and in the case of mining sites, most of the goods and profits aren't even landing to the pockets to the national bourgeoise lol. yes theyre still rich beyond imagining and oppress people but its the people (and i mean people as a whole, including the poor ones) of the imperial core that gets cheap phones and electronics and building materials.

there's also certain regions where the relationship to the indonesian state are downright colonial. like west papua, horribly militarized and exploited for resources with barely any government spending given for the people and "transmigration" programs sending non-papuans to live in the "unused lands" there (fyi transmigration programs isnt a new thing).

interestingly, i also read in another book about the history of communist movements here that notes that we were actually developing a shared national identity organically during 1945-1955, as we were fresh off independence and were spearheading non-block movements and there was widespread literacy programs and multiple party-affiliated recreation clubs. there was an anecdote that a lot of people were given "revolutionary" sounding names, and when people do small talk, they asked of your party affiliation instead of whats your ethnic group. it wasnt until suharto rose to power that he began the campaign of rewriting a revisionist history where the anti colonial movement was mostly a win from military defense with barely any political or ideological battles occuring, and somewhat reviving the concept of ethnic groups being important to the national identity of indonesians (see the troubled development of taman mini indonesia), even though said concept is horrifically outdated since it was mostly politically relevant before dutch colonialism. and of course we have to mention that suharto's time as president is noted even in civics class textbooks as "java-centric", which probably explains why some javanese people are Weird™ about other ethnic groups, if you know what i mean?

but eh, whatever, im just yapping. im tired man i have to like, write this article to my org about the election and it has to be done soon and i had to explain for the 90th time to people who is not even a good prospect for the org about how uu perampasan aset is just a stupid distraction to make ppl believe prabowo is handling corruption but those damn pesky legislative government bodies are just too damn corrupt (implying that the president should have more power here with no checks and balances)

[honeyriot]

You're a woman hater! You're pro rape if you think women aren't allowed to have boundaries from men, especially lesbians who are not sexually attracted to male bodies, whether they're in a skirt or not. You have the audacity to suggest the only people standing up for women are Nazis???? So you love rush Limbaugh and male supremacy and hate women. Got it. Loud and clear, bigot

Yeah, pretty much. Who comes to the #letwomenspeak rallies? Who fawns at Tucker Carlson and Fox News? You have no idea you are even indulging it because you have turned feminism into a single issue: trans. As if that were the crux and final coffin in feminism and then sneak around and condone or tolerate LITERAL FASCISTS like Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Mr. "What is a Woman" Matt Walsh, organizations like Libs of Tik Tok, Reduxx, Gays Against Groomers, who are racist, nationalist organizations funded by right wing investors. We never question that nature of the prison system or how sports have historically been a means of demonstrating male superiority and a means of perpetuating capitalist competition and we need an entire revamping of bathroom privacy but no let's burn the gays and the trans (because these fascists want you dead as much as they want trans people. to them a feminist is a witch the same as a trans person. they only accept you because you glorify them. you don't want to look at nationalism and capitalism as the machinations of men. You have never come in contact with any trans person you are just a paranoid person who fell for the propaganda from fascists. It was considered crossdressing for a woman to wear pants. Gender essentialism ties in nicely with eugenics and ethnonationalism. Why are so many prominent terfs complete nazis?

Anna Slatz cofounder of Reduxx, a vastly huge and respected GC TERF company, is a absolute fascist collaborating with white nationalist Lauren Southern, who preaches Great Replacement theory is under investigation for receiving Russian funds to spread white supremacist propaganda. Who's that on the left?

That's what reactionaries do in Terf communities. You will all write it off and call me the evil one for pointing it out. To you, feminism is a big joke. You don't study feminist theory and history, you spend more time on trans issues because they seem like a bigger deal and leave the rest of the issues on the back burner because they are tougher and would require real change.

You will never talk about it. It will never be addressed although you will be promoting neonazis and by you tacit refusal to investigate this very real reality, you become an accomplice to it. Many "feminists" spend more time attacking trans people than talking about any real feminist issue, of which there are many that need much more attention than these people are giving at the same time as them NEVER being around trans people.

In fact you probably do not see fascism as a very real thing. Your political science may not be very scientific or historical. If you are so mad, prove me wrong rather than saying I hate women and condone rape when that is obviously not true. I get called the same when I call out racist anti immigration speech. Nationalism and racism are diseases to community.

Do we have to answer the "trans question"? We all know there is a final solution to all the undesirables of society: communists, feminists, gay/lesbian and gender nonconforming/trans. But the questionan is that the systems need to be imagined from the ground up. We cannot build the future on yesterday's institutions.

So yes, it is possibly flattening reality to just randomly call a "trans excluding radical feminist" a nazi. But you have got to know you are flattening reality as well with a skewed understanding of history and political movements (including feminism). I will be posting a link to a bunch of feminist pdfs in a few days so check back!

If that's an ad hominem I hope it forces you to study harder and be a better feminist and, ya know, maybe pick up on doing actual feminist activism instead mischaracterizing the fight for women's liberation.

if you shrug this off as crazy ramblings and cease to understand the political aligning with fascism that trans (and gay and lesbian and gender nonconforming) hate groups have, you will unkowingly perpetuate the very structures and conditions that we are fighting against.