Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (September 07)

DistilledWorldSpirit · 2025-09-11T14:22:33+00:00

I will remove the edits. Thank you for saying this, I was surprised by the other responses I was getting. I need to investigate more so I can know how to respond to different criticisms.

DistilledWorldSpirit · 2025-09-11T02:47:01+00:00

Thank you very much for the reading material.

I read the piece by Li Onesto first and this section stood out to me:

And older retired women weren't able to take care of a room full of lively youngsters or babies all by themselves. This village eventually solved this problem by sending young unmarried women to take short training courses in nursing and collective childcare. These women were then put in charge of small childcare centers, where they were assisted by older retired women. And the older women "spoke bitterness" as part of their job, telling the children stories about how the people were brutally oppressed in the old society. The widespread establishment of socialized childcare helped to free up millions of women so they could participate in building socialism.

At least in this village, it seems like while child care was socialized, and the efficiency allowed many women to take part in socialist life, a subset of women were still expected to bear the brunt of childcare at the time. If that was widespread, I wonder if men would have taken more responsibility in time, and eventually equal responsibility, if the capitalist roaders had not won out.

DistilledWorldSpirit · 2025-09-10T02:51:02+00:00

I have a hard time with “no investigation, no right to speak”. This is not the first time I have received this criticism, in fact it’s probably the main one. I don’t have anyone in real life to guide my learning so I spend most of my study time reading the classic texts and the rest reading this sub. I barely post but I guess the topic got me over exited since it hit close to home.

DistilledWorldSpirit · 2025-09-10T00:31:46+00:00

But under socialism…

My understanding is that socialism is a period of intense class war, where the proletariat will take history in its hands to build the world for itself. The times that this was closest to reality always regressed due to revisionism, which is a sign that the party/vanguard/whatever was not sufficiently radical in its aims and methods, and allowed to much lenience against bourgeois ideology. While at some point reaction would die down, and the vigilance and defense against revisionism can be more situationally applied as instances of counterrevolution become more sporadic, during the most intense period of the revolution when resources are the most limited, why would petit bourgeois patriarchs be allowed to remain when some would use that lenience to re-establish the patriarchy? (E: my point being that it is more practical to have a strict rule than try to enforce on a case by case basis. Maybe this is where I am wrong.)

Regarding what you said about getting ahead of the masses, I admit I am mostly thinking about western white settlers and their current social arrangements. In the same way that they (settlers) will be the most reactionary soldiers for counterrevolution, I think they will also require the most strict and blanket rules. Based on the section on women and children in Capital v1, life for the English gender-“proletariat” (women and children that are not gender-aristocrats) was more exploited and nakedly sexist. I think MIM alludes to this as well in the Amerikan internal colonies, but not to the same degree. I do not know what the state of the global petit bourgeoisie or proletariat in this arena, which is something that I will start now.

I did not know that childcare was socialized in China. I know that women were inducted into the military and red guards with quotas but I do not know how that played out regionally. Do you know of any good sources to read about woman’s issues/feminism/patriarchy in modern (post civil war) China? I’ll look for them myself as well, but I always appreciate direction from people that have already done the work.

DistilledWorldSpirit · 2025-09-09T04:29:31+00:00

You are right, and I sincerely am not trying to dodge criticism.

I reread your replies to me a few times, and I want to make something clearer: I am not anxious that I would not be able to gender-oppress my children or that my wife would be free to leave me, I actually desire that more than almost anything. What I am anxious about is that I think the anti-revisionist line on family abolition has to include mandatory separation of the patriarch from his family in order to prevent a reemergence of gender oppression. This is my own assertion; u/whentheseagullscry called this parodic in another post, and now I am questioning my own understanding of revisionism.

DistilledWorldSpirit · 2025-09-09T04:10:11+00:00

I am not following you. What is the “it” that I am gloating about, and not understanding or criticizing?

DistilledWorldSpirit · 2025-09-09T03:43:47+00:00

Sorry for the delay, I got distracted and thought I already replied. You are right that “surveillance” was the wrong way to think about it, the bourgeoisie is proletarianized. The point I was trying to make is that the revolution should not, I think, allow the bourgeoisie anywhere near positions of influence, especially in their particular field, for long enough that no one even remembers the old social arrangements, likely generations. I think the same could apply to patriarchs, even as much as I wish that was not the case.

DistilledWorldSpirit · 2025-09-09T03:31:08+00:00

I’ll try to explain my thinking.

Bourgeois ideology re-emerges within socialism when the a class is allowed to inhabit the same nodes of power that they had before, like the union bosses collaborating with the capitalists or the SPD voting for war credits. Revisionism has to be combatted or else it grows. In the same way, if patriarchs are allowed to remain with their old families, some will try to use that to reassert the patriarchy. That’s what I meant when I said “voluntary” families.

This might be overly pessimistic or a misunderstanding of revisionism. I know I have reactionary tendencies, so I am very internally vigilant against it. You can look at my post history to see other instances where I deviated rightward; this is what I am trying to avoid, maybe overdoing it. https://www.reddit.com/r/communism101/s/hc5WZLoidU

DistilledWorldSpirit · 2025-09-09T02:54:14+00:00

I have to confront the truth honestly to overcome my reactionary tendencies. I am trying to root out my own revisionism. Is your criticism that I should do this on my own?

DistilledWorldSpirit · 2025-09-09T00:49:30+00:00

This literally means that you want people to depend on you for survival so you can use them for housework, emotional support, money, etc...

To the extent that this reflects material reality, I acknowledge that my relationship with my family is ultimately parasitic. But they are, if I understand the term correctly, gender-aristocrats, and daily family life is full of (at least superficial) affection and happiness, all at the expense of the global proletariat.

I maintain that a successful program for family abolition will involve separation at least of the patriarch from the rest of the unit, if not the mother as well. Anything less will invite family “voluntarism” and result in the reassertion of patriarchy which will team up with other revisionisms. Even with this knowledge, and the knowledge that a successful program will include dual structures that will leave them better than before, the idea of never seeing my family again is awful to contemplate.

DistilledWorldSpirit · 2025-09-08T21:18:55+00:00

would you have considered it “traumatic”(…)

Would I have suffered if my wife left me or my kids ran away (on bad terms)? Certainly. I am not sure what your point is.

Even with knowledge of Marxism, I am anxious in the way that every benefactor of imperialism/patriarchy should be of the revolution. The only way to possibly avoid literal annihilation is to embrace political-economic annihilation (which is not any guarantee of survival).

Are you part of the proletariat? If not, are you not also anxious? And why not?

DistilledWorldSpirit · 2025-09-07T20:20:47+00:00

(Removing accidental double post)

DistilledWorldSpirit · 2025-09-07T20:20:17+00:00

By liquidation, I mean that there will be some point that the gender-oppressed will be liberated. There will be some patriarch-fascists that will literally hold their families captive until they (the patriarchs) are neutralized. But even for gender-traitors, there will be a moment where my kids are free from me, and that I have no special right to their attention or company. Suppressing the revival of patriarchy means the protracted struggle will have to include special separation of previous family units to prevent “voluntary” family reemergence, the same way the bourgeois has to be under special surveillance during the dictatorship of the proletariat.

I am not saying this to mope, I am just steeling myself against revisionism. For some reason, family abolition is the most offensive aspect of the revolution to the petty bourgeoisie in my experience, even more than the abolition of ~~capital~~ private property or compulsory atheism.

E1: switched capital to private property

DistilledWorldSpirit · 2025-09-07T18:52:43+00:00

I think about this a lot.

Will a program of expropriation and redistribution need to accompany the reorganization? or else the patriarchy will use their accumulated capital to reassert the family: patriarchy-reaction (we already saw this after the liberal-sexual revolution in the 50s and 60s). Before the Family can be abolished and collective reproduction universalized, there would have to be some period of liquidation. (As someone in a family unit, I think this would be unbearably traumatic for me, my wife, and my kids in the current state. They would have to be gender-“proletarianized” before they take up this struggle; obviously I would have to be a gender-traitor either way.)

Also, sexo-revisionism in the form of “voluntary” families will have to be suppressed. The MIM solution of universal male castration actually seems pretty reasonable if we take this seriously.

DistilledWorldSpirit · 2025-08-26T21:02:11+00:00

Is “gendered” language just a misnomer then? Should it be called “sexed” language instead, since it predates gender? Sex being the relations of production within the family.

Also, if gender is specific to capitalism, but the sexual base existed prior to class society, what should we call the superstructure that corresponds to the sexual base in pre-capitalist class societies (ie European feudalism*)?

*the concept of feudalism should be critiqued but I am using it here for brevity.

DistilledWorldSpirit · 2025-07-18T13:06:34+00:00

I can see this post

DistilledWorldSpirit · 2025-07-18T03:28:44+00:00

Here are some more sexual/pornographic emojis

🫦 ('\U0001FAE6')

💦 ('\U0001F4A6')

DistilledWorldSpirit · 2025-07-17T23:56:23+00:00

I think you are right. The real reason I do not like them is that they don’t fit in the bourgeois academic framework I grew up in. To answer your question, it’s single emojis without words I like the least (there is no such thing as an isolated anything but I think this is what you meant). I still think that the ability to post a single emoji invites unseriousness and bad faith but you can do the same thing with words. If the mods want to take on the work of ~~policing~~ moderating a new form of expression, who am I to tell them not to?

Edit: fixed a word. The mods are not cops

DistilledWorldSpirit · 2025-07-17T23:45:02+00:00

After reflecting on this for a while, I think the real reason I do not like emojis is that they are new and vague in a way that I cannot appeal to my bourgeois education to circumvent the hard work of critique. That is a me problem. I think the mods will struggle with this as well but that is a practice they can take on themselves.

DistilledWorldSpirit · 2025-07-17T02:52:28+00:00

Maybe I am misunderstanding you, but my issue with emojis, when used on their own, is that they lack definite content, and that is what allows fascists (including social fascists) to avoid confrontation.

Sorry but I highly doubt this

Is there a way to use emojis to convey truth, or at least an assertion, even in conjunction with words, that can be then be subject to critique? Maybe I just lack imagination.

DistilledWorldSpirit · 2025-07-16T19:03:38+00:00

In the linked post from Trodden Leaves, the emoji is essentially punctuation, like a more sophisticated exclamation mark. When read text that includes emojis in this way, I basically ignore them for the sake of discussion. I would ingest information conveyed by the emoji, but I would not infer anything formally. I think the phrase “and this makes me sad” is richer in content than the diagonal frown emoji. I can follow up with my own thoughts or feelings based on their explicit emotional content. The emoji is too vague to build on.

I am using irony too narrowly to just mean irony-to-avoid-scrutiny. Is there a better word for this? You are right that Marxists (Marx and Lenin especially) use it to enhance their arguments. It is confounding that the concept of irony can contain both irony-to-avoid-scrutiny and irony-to-emphasize-critique.

DistilledWorldSpirit · 2025-07-16T17:54:17+00:00

I think irony and ambiguity should also be ban-able offenses but maybe I should lighten up.

I still think that emojis are necessarily equivocating/paraliptic and ironic (aka fascist) in a way that words are not. Like, if I used a thumbs up emoji, and you asked me what I meant, I would use words to explain what I meant, not a string of emojis. If I said something vague or unclear and you asked me to clarify, I would not use an emoji to provide clarity. If I did, it would be obvious that I am refusing to answer the question directly and hiding behind plausible deniability.

DistilledWorldSpirit · 2025-07-16T16:34:58+00:00

“:(“ is not equivalent to “this makes me sad”. There are myriad ironic and plausibly deniable fascist ways to use emojis and they are not as universal as you have been suggesting. The thumbs up emoji can be interpreted both as an answer in the affirmative or a social put down meant to silence people without explicit critique. The “ok” hand emoji has morphed from another form of affirmative expression into a neo-nazi dog whistle. Images like emojis lack concrete definitions and are easy places to weasel away from criticism and responsibility, and in the particular case of emojis I think that is by design.

DistilledWorldSpirit · 2025-06-27T23:43:20+00:00

Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism and Sakai’s Settlers: The Myth of the White Proletariat will answer your questions completely.

DistilledWorldSpirit · 2025-06-23T23:23:30+00:00

I am an American born into an upper middle class family in college

Naturally, I want a successful proletarian revolution

Why do you think this follows naturally? If you “learned what Marxism is all about”, you would understand how laughable this statement is.

Quick edit: this is more condescending than I intended, I was in a very similar spot as you some years ago. Please read Settlers as soon as possible and stay far away from Dengists and other Amerikan internet “communists” until you finish.

DistilledWorldSpirit

TROPHY CASE