was discussing this with a friend of mine (she’s an anarchist but she actually organizes and shit). she was saying there can be no such thing as revolutionary masculinity because the two things are contradictory. but i’m a marxist so contradictions really butter my bread.
i think in a utopian, communist world gender identity would be completely different, to the point where it might not even be legible to us today, but my question is more about how we get from here to there. basically, can we men find a way to not be shitheads in such a way as to bring about communism, or does that not even make sense
feel free to dunk on me if this is a dumb question
Death to America
Comrades, a fucking podcaster or twitch streamer isn’t going to deradicalize young men. We need Marxist theory in childhood education, we need a zero tolerance policy towards rape, we have to rid our culture of all traces of masculinity from gender reveals, gender orientated marketing, any kind of gender segregated sport or workplace, and a heavy promotion of femininity to make up for the millennia of masculinity that dominated our society. I think not naming children would be a first step, so would be abolishing the cishet nuclear family. The current generation will never meet the ideological standards we want so fuck them lets move onto the next one, if they feel alienated or society isn’t working for them fuck them. Equality feels like oppression to the privileged. Maybe we should try to demoralize these young white men from taking any reactionary action instead of listening to every single grievance they have, our politics simply isn’t for them.
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We cannot pity men who lost the social benefits of being a man because every loss to them is a gain for everyone else. Are we persecuting them? No, we are saying they have no inherent right to sex, we are saying that no form of masculinity good, we are not saying that femininity is bad, we are no longer okay with men treating women as sex objects, as house slaves, as property, as someone less than equal. We cannot view men as soldiers to fight the class war that we dispose of later because men will not fight the class war, workers will fight the class war. Men are the reactionary force against it because we live in a patriarchal society and that means men control the means of production and they will offer up women as property when there’s no more land, wages, or social mobility to be taken. And do you know why this is predominantly white men? Because black men never had the privileges of the white man in the first place. They were denied the institution of marriage, of the nuclear family, of even participating in capitalism, the black bourgeoisie never had the chance to develop sexism, they had all those moral values placed upon them by their colonizers. Sexism as we know it is a white construct. So maybe instead of trying to get the oppressor seeing OUR humanity through some twitch streamer, it’s THEIR moral imperative to become an ally and recognize without our help. And that’s a very hard thing to do, i know that a lot of the baizuos on the internet doing ecommunism or whatever you want to call to it through prolonged radicalization from different propagandists, and they are fucking rare. Most leftists are not them, and the only way we can make the average young man a leftist is through early education when they are a child, so that’s why I think their a lost cause, I think it would be better to target the right wing propagandists and make it harder for them to speak rather than trying to debate bro them to make the left look cool to their audience.
Im just trying to advocate for cutting losses where they exist.
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No, they are very slightly under half, not that it matters to the rest of your comment.
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I don’t give a shit about aesthetics, but I think it’s good to remember that MLs, too, believe in the saying that “So long as there is a state, there is no freedom, and we can only talk about ‘freedom’ existing insofar as there is no state” and yet also advocate for the creation of new states at the same time as seeking the liberation of the human race. Statehood cannot simply be abolished in one stroke, it must be systematically destroyed, and the system doing the destruction is itself a state, and that state tends towards its last action being the completion its own destruction.
Something similar can be said for gender. There is no contradiction between holding gender as being fundamentally backwards and yet acknowledging that we live in a gendered world where people – for reasons other than having an inborn gender, as gender is socially constructed – need to cope in different ways, cis and trans identities included. Eventually, there should be no gender and therefore no cis or trans people, but that doesn’t mean telling all of humanity right now to cleanse the entirety of gender from their minds or die.
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It might be worth interrogating the connection between aesthetic values and other values, as in Society of the Spectacle in its real meaning and not the flanderized “wot if e’erywun wah jus’ wa’chin’ the telly?” version. Gender is overwhelmingly what makes what we view as gendered presentations appealing, and this is demonstrated by the way that it varies across cultural differences in what gendered presentation is. To use a very obvious example, I would fully expect wearing a skirt to make a transmasc person here and now feel potentially dysphoric, but in medieval Scotland transmasc people were generally probably quite happy to wear kilts in the situations they could get away with doing so. Why? It’s just a slightly different arrangement of cloth! Because it is a signifier for a certain position in a certain framework of social values, not just aesthetic ones.
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I sympathize with what you’re saying and agree with some of it, but it’s a bit idealistic. People’s ideologies are molded by how they interact with the world. Ideas do not sprout from nowhere, so I completely disagree that “conservative generations” must be abandoned for younger ones. Unless you get to the roots of what’s causing reactionary ideology, the younger generation will just be as conservative. Other than that, I firmly believe both the nuclear family and the gender binary will wither away and be sublated, but there’s no swift abolition especially in a pre-revolutionary or mid-revolutionary situation. We’re already seeing the beginning of withering away of these things due to the contradictions of capitalism, and they’ll be completed as communism is built. Besides radical support for queer issues I’m not sure what the strategy here should be.
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Communists and refusing to learn from their historical counterparts, name a better duo. In Iraq, the communists wanted to decree away Islam. Instead, they created pockets of resistance because leading with “We will take away your closely held beliefs by force.” fucking sucks as an opener. Learn from Modern China, who used actual Islamic teachings to explain why ISIS was incorrect. You literally want to be a frothing liberal’s dream of a communist government.
You don’t want results, you want purity. You’d rather have a state fail for the right reasons than succeed on a compromise. Your policy is literally to create disaffected billions because the idea of presenting an healthy masculinity is morally repugnant to you. You are a liberal in all but your goal.
You and what army?
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