hopefully i don’t get called a lib for this but i have been feeling quite a bit of uncertainty when it comes to Jewish people who have been indoctrinated into Zionism and Americans , and partially people from other western nations , who have either due to economic distress or due to indoctrination joined the military . don’t get me wrong both are absolutely privileged , especially those Jewish people who live in occupied Palestine , however i feel that they aren’t fully responsible for their harmful beliefs . of course this doesn’t excuse acting on their beliefs , but from testimonies of people who have rid themselves of those beliefs its not an easy thing to do (i have been particularly affected by Matt Leib’s , of the BadHasbara podcast , comparison between fighting off his heroin addiction and his Zionism) .

they are of course not the people who are most victimised , however i feel somewhat uneasy about blaming them for not doing the work of deindoctrinating themselves , especially as , especially those who joined the American military , they are really mistreated . a lot of propaganda is explicitly about making those who benefit from the ideology maintained by it to feel unsafe , therefore , in their minds , justifying violent actions .

like this mostly matters for those who are on the path if deindoctrinating themselves , even if they themselves have not realised that yet , for example a ex military member who is struggling with trauma over actions they made in while deployed or someone who has been raised in a Israeli settlement questioning the morality of living there , beyond the usual labor Zionist stuff . i definetly don’t think that , sorry for the extreme example , someone who relives pressing down the trigger of a sniper riffle and the bloody effects of what happened after , especially if they were aware then or were made aware later that the person they killed was a noncombatant , that their actions were wrong . i think that helping them towards the realisation that its a wider issue is the better option .

like this isn’t very well put together but like just wanted to throw this out and have someone say if i’m not insane or just the usual over empathic stuff .

on language

feel free to replace each usage of “person” with “entity” , i wanted to make this more readable to those outside the ΘΔ space

  • Soviet Pigeon@lemmygrad.ml
    3·
    4 days ago

    Let’s take your Australian as example. Let’s make him a white male factory worker. Could he, despite being a proleterian, subjugate women or non-whites?

    Of course. But it doesn’t mean that women and non-whites are suddenly a class. Chauvinism does not equal, that the opressed ones are automatically a class. This is the crucial point of your misunderstanding, what a social class is. When Lenin wrote about the great russian chauvinism, it was never about a “great russian class”, because there was and is not such a thing. What you are trying to imply is, that I think, that the white male factory worker can not express oppression towards women or non-white, because he is immune to it, because he is part of the working class. And this is clearly not the case.

    I can only quote again:

    Classes are large groups of people who differ from one another according to their place in a historically determined system of social production, according to their relationship (largely fixed and formulated in laws) to the means of production, according to their role in the social organization of labour and consequently according to the way in which they acquire and the size of the share of social wealth they possess. Classes are groups of people, one of which can appropriate the labor of another due to the difference in their place in a particular system of the social economy.

    [LW Volume 29 (German, idk where to find “Die große Initiative” online in english), Page 410]

    This is something very concrete. When Lenin writes that “Classes are groups of people, one of which can appropriate the labor of another due to the difference in their place in a particular system of the social economy”, then he does not mean, that the opressed and exploited south is now a class. It is pretty narrowed to the question regarding the relationship towards the means of production. The exploitation of the global south you see now is not rooted in the existence of a “non-white” class, but in capitalism - especially imperialism at its highest stage. A social class is determined by the material relations to the means of production.

    If he were to do so, does he do so as individual or as part of a class with systemic features that allows him to enact his power?

    Which class? I asked you already about which other classes you are talking, but you are simply stating, that they are part of a ominous class. Is it the “man class” or a “non-white class”? The oppression of women roots historically in the existence of privat property, divison of labour and and and, but neither women and men are a own class. The same as nations. Oppressed groups are not automatically a class. Classes are linked to production and change as it develops:

    Now as for myself, I do not claim to have discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle between the classes, as had bourgeois economists their economic anatomy. My own contribution was 1. to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production; 2. that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3. that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.

    source

    What is the relationship of the proleteriat in the imperial cores with those from the peripheries?

    Imperialism has the tendency to segregate privileged categories among the workers as well and to separate them from the great mass of the proletariat. The real situation of working class in the imperial core and the peripherie is not the same. The existence of opportunism in the working class in an imperialist country does not mean, that entirely new social classes exist, which are as many as nations exist. You have the indian, austrian, australian, vietnamese and ukrainian working class in the historical period we actually live now, but not a whole nations as one class.

    And I’m side-stepping your condescension in attempt to answer in good faith but my patience is thin.

    (It’s fine not to know and explore. It is not fine to confidently double down on ignorance, which is the impression you are giving off)

    Nah, stop with that rhetoric. Your patience is really not part of my concerne. Your understanding, what a class is simply contradicts the marxist understanding what a social class is. In the opposite you are trying to draw something quite interesting: If men and women are not a class, then there is somehow not oppression towards women or what are you trying to say? You are calling almost everything a class, as long there is somewhere a form of oppression. Looking at the oppression of homosexuality, do we have a homosexual and heterosexual class? Because only then the white australian factore worker can be homophobic. How does the class war between men and women look like and how is the situation of the non-binary class, if gender is a class how to stated.

    Would you be happy for me to use your responses and turn it into a post? I’m sure you are not the only one who thinks like this.

    I would probably be neither happy or unhappy if you do it. But it would be fine if you find time to answer this comment.