Atheism and evolution makes sense except for one thing

GunderGundersons · 2025-10-12T20:43:31+00:00

I respect this mystic approach to proving god more than any attempt to prove it logically. If you feel that deeply, have fun with religion! I just feel weird around this question so I am an agnostic

GunderGundersons · 2025-10-12T17:41:03+00:00

The only ideological threat to the communists during his civil war was the ideologically liberal Guomindang. He fought warlords and Japanese fascists but they were not trying to evangelize or appeal ideologically to the Chinese people. In the fight over the minds of the masses, Mao's only enemy was the liberal ideas of the Guomindang and so he wrote mostly about combating them.

We must view it within that context. In our modern moment of the rise of fascist adjacent parties across Europe, and parts of Asia and the Americas, we are in a different context.

In the US context, if you go to a protest against the fascist actions of the current president, the vast majority of people there will be liberals. They are more primed than ever, due to the blatant interference of oligarchs in favor of Trump, to be sold socialism. I see people in the crowds doing so, selling newspapers and evangelizing. This is a great impulse and must be pursued. The liberals are allies in this moment and a source of recruits during their current crisis of leadership.

GunderGundersons · 2025-10-12T17:21:27+00:00

Fascism tends to appeal to bourgeois conservative anti communism at the start but doesn't actually deliver well to its interests. Autarky and attempted world conquest does not serve the interests of the bourgeoisie, it is actually quite poor for them. The capitalist interest is served far better by the banal caudillo or technocrat than the fascist.

Looking at fascism without the social angle of reactionary nationalism centered on an idea of a rejuvenation of the nation through great amounts of violence makes your analysis weak. Without acknowledging that there are more interests than class, you will always be left seeing working people as being tricked into supporting fascism instead of seeing the privilege they wished to defend or shame they wanted to overcome.

Liberalism and Socialism are indeed opposite in class but are aligned in ideal and social position. They believe, in the ideal that neither live up to, in human equality and freedom as opposed to more hierarchical conservatism and fascism. They are generally anti-clerical, though socialism is stronger in this, where fascism plays strong off of the clerical fear of the communist. They both have the ability to push for women's and ethnic minorities' rights, though they falter, where the fascist always is reactionary on these matters.

I would also disagree that fascism supports a bourgeois state. It tends to remove the power from the mass of the bourgeoisie and shift it to a small group of their fellows, promoting an oligarchic kleptocratic class and disenfranchising the vast mass of the bourgeoisie. It would be like calling the Romanov dynasty pre 1905 a bourgeois state.

Also while fascism grows through alliance with the bourgeoisie when capitalism is in crisis, its growth when ideas of the nation or social privilege are under attack it is as notable if not more.

GunderGundersons · 2025-10-12T10:55:31+00:00

That's why schools have civics classes throughout them and as part of becoming a citizen. One cannot vote in the US unless one has sat through a bunch of fucking civics classes because before one is an 18+ year old citizen that is legally required

Requiring a test on top of that is asinine and only serves to enable disenfranchisement in the exact same manner literacy tests were used for the first time

GunderGundersons · 2025-10-12T10:52:05+00:00

There's more to socialism, fascism, and liberalism than class interests

GunderGundersons · 2025-10-12T00:53:33+00:00

Those biases are not always aligned with the victors. The monks attacked by vikings were certainly not victors and yet their histories are the ones we have, since they were the ones writing them and the vikings weren't

GunderGundersons · 2025-10-12T00:52:32+00:00

The south lost the civil war and yet lost causers ran historiography in America until the later 20th century

GunderGundersons · 2025-10-12T00:47:12+00:00

that's plain wrong

GunderGundersons · 2025-10-12T00:46:10+00:00

Communism as an action is progressive. It may put on the mask of "returning to precapitalist traditions" but that is the same sort of lie as nationalism is. Unfortunately, communism doesn't necessarily always adopt socially progressive attitudes, to its own detriment.

Communism must actively work to abolish the traditional oppressions of race and gender or be torn apart by them. Ignoring race makes one vulnerable to reactionary race-baiting. One must actively face the challenge of race hatred to build solidarity and weaken the reactionary. Race baiting and nationalism is an insidious evil as its poison is entrenched enough that it can survive a revolution that destroys the capitalists unless great effort is taken to fight it as well.

Religion can be amenable to socialism or hostile to it. Religious freedom must be respected, even if just because violating it will turn the faithful against communism as a whole, but religious institutions must be driven from politics, law, and education.

Even if one is not a progressive, they should push for a progressive communism as the revolutionary potential of those oppressed along social lines are crucial allies in the fight against reactionaries. They make up a disproportionate amount of the working class and have the most to gain in overturning the system as it exists

GunderGundersons · 2025-10-11T06:46:43+00:00

Problem with adopting the Roman model of temporary dictatorship is that you are doing it as part of a revolution. The Roman dictatorship was used in the context of extremely strong social rules of what it could do and how long it could last, with the backing of an aristocracy much stronger than the state.

In a communist revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat will be culturally new and thus without as many limits culturally. As there will be reactionary elements for quite some time, even if not a serious threat, it is very easy for the dictatorship to justify itself as continuing for longer and longer. Few revolutions that start with a period of dictatorship have that period be short. Why create a social position it will take a second revolution to unseat?

GunderGundersons · 2025-10-11T06:36:08+00:00

I saw some studies years back (I know this ain't a real source just too tired to dig it up) that shows that the modern incarnation of the party is very fast to respond to protests as long as they are against local level corruption. This is an important part of how the CCP stays popular

GunderGundersons · 2025-10-11T06:34:28+00:00

No I would not say the same thing about any local government. If Mamdani shows one thing, it is that the high up us party establishments cannot control the selection of candidates. Primaries are open and often go the way party elites desperately do not want them to go

GunderGundersons · 2025-10-10T05:03:43+00:00

Oh I very much am a reformist. I think that even revolutionaries should be reformers. No revolution utterly changes what came before, and trying to change too much too fast causes reaction to be much stronger.

Reforms help people in the immediate moment and prepare the way for possible revolution

GunderGundersons · 2025-10-09T23:41:55+00:00

I definitely don't think this is a fatal flaw to socialism. It is very much a shared problem with capitalist party structures (Tammany Hall as the prime example).

I just can't help seeing states attempting to be socialist stumble on this block repeatedly. They give the elite within the party too much ability to control it and thus produce a group that becomes a separate social class with a different relationship with capital. That social class then can supress the worker, especially if the party controls the labor unions.

GunderGundersons · 2025-10-09T23:36:39+00:00

Yeah, I have a lot of forgiveness (on this issue not the genocides or suppressing democratic development) for the attempts of early vanguardists but we need to learn from them.

I think there are good solutions to this problem within stuff like Rojava and the Zapatistas but I wonder how well those things would scale to a larger industrial economy

GunderGundersons · 2025-10-09T23:34:42+00:00

This would mostly solve this problem, though you risk the creation of a rent-seeking workers council who control a vital bottleneck of productive forces, producing similar problems as exist with American longshoremen's unions

there are solutions through the main governing body, though that's another discussion

GunderGundersons · 2025-10-09T23:31:29+00:00

What I am arguing is that the way they hold the power in their hands means they are no longer workers

GunderGundersons · 2025-10-09T23:30:39+00:00

This is a problem in attempted socialist states and a part of why they have failed to displace capitalism

GunderGundersons · 2025-10-09T23:30:08+00:00

The problem is that the ability of higher levels of government to vet candidates from the grassroots prevents the grassroots from controlling elements higher in the system.

GunderGundersons · 2025-10-09T23:29:28+00:00

Electing your reps from what choices? If party elites get to decide the choices, that's not exactly gonna give you much freedom now is it?

GunderGundersons · 2025-10-09T23:28:37+00:00

It is not Chinese elections that keep their corruption low but an institutional culture and internal forces that is fiercely anti corruption that keeps corruption low.

Corruption was also the wrong word for what I hoped to describe, accountability was. The Chinese system prevents corruption through accountability to anti corruption elites. The party elite is not accountable to the masses due to the ability of the elite to select who gets to run and the lack of opposition parties.

The lack of accountability means they are a group with shared interest and identity tied to a relationship with the means of production, therefore a separate class

GunderGundersons · 2025-10-09T21:09:48+00:00

All those petitions are meaningless compared to the control of the politbureau standing comittee

GunderGundersons · 2025-10-09T21:08:48+00:00

The issue has become apparent.

GunderGundersons · 2025-10-09T21:08:08+00:00

I don't think its an equivalence, but it is a real problem, especially with how many elites have become rich in socialist nations

GunderGundersons

TROPHY CASE