I don’t care if this doxes me, it’s still wild. One of my prominent, public facing social media accounts used to have a profile picture of me laying flowers at Marx and Jenny’s grave. It’s very obvious from the picture what I’m doing and who’s grave I’m at since the tombstone is shaped like Marx’s head and there’s a big engraving saying “Workers of all lands unite.” Family members used to come to my account too to reminisce or catch up or whatever.
This was my picture for years. I’ve also been pretty vocal for over a decade now. My own mother didn’t realize I’m a communist until this last Christmas where I said hope the next time Jeff Bezos gets in a rocketship that it blows up on the launch pad. Like she audibly gasped and I guess the two cogs in her head finally turned. Straight up, “Wait, are you a communist?!” in a shocked voice
That’s honestly hilarious
ur mom thought you were a radlib, owned
I had sort of the reverse with a co-worker recently where I told him he sounded like a communist because all his beliefs were basically that and he was shocked to find that out
I think she was into his communism until it challenged her. Liberals are so comfortable expressing views they would never act on.
Or the guy was never a communist and they were just fishing for clicks/dopamine.
My Fox News in-laws “revealed” to my wife that I have evil books (I don’t hide them, they’re on the bookshelf) and that I’m probably a communist. She asked “what even is that?” and they didn’t know how to answer.
they’re on the bookshelf
Hilarious, revealing something prominently displayed in your house.
My first long term gf was/is a proud lib. I think we were watching Saving Private Ryan and somehow the conversation got to her asking if I’d have volunteered to serve in Vietnam. I think everyone knows my answer. She goes on this diatribe about the horror of the Soviet Union and communism, the KGB, and the dominoe theory. I pointed out that Vietnam won, and that was the last time we watched a war movie together.
When you say liberal i at least assume democrat. Which democrat thinks about volunteering for Vietnam, thats insane.
There are even republicans who are against that war since the only “reedeming Quality” of that war makes sense If you are a rabid dog that still believes the Red scare.
Idk im european so maybe im overreacting but isnt the Vietnam unpopular for the majority in the US?
It’s kind of a mix. The Vietnam War is mostly unpopular now, but at the time there were plenty of liberals foaming at the mouth to “stop communism”. They may dislike the conservatives, but they’re still nationalists, and being called communists by the republicans all the time has put a chip on their shoulder where they want to prove that they’re both patriotic and smarter than them. The Iraq War is a good example: the liberals saw the massive genocidal war crime unfolding in front of them, and their response was “this is so awful and sloppy and senseless, Bush is uniquely stupid, vote for us and we’ll do this war of occupation in a smart, sensible way.”
They’re mostly just as bloodthirsty as the overt right wingers, but they have some kind of decorum/denial fetish that compels them to do little procedural, bureaucratic and semantic dances around their bigotries and libidinal urges, rather than just admit them, even to themselves
Oh, she probably knew from the beginning but once he set out on a 5-year plan, there was no backing out
My wife’s a hopeless radlib, maybe demsoc. I am very open about my politics and she doesn’t care for the most part. I have tried to convert her but she’s got somelib hangups and can’t accept the historical necessity of violence. so we mostly agree until i say some
shit, then she just sighs and calls me crazy. love herThis is almost identical to my own relationship lol. I feel this combination of people is quite common for commies
How do people live without being political? Everything is political. How do you live with someone who doesn’t in fact know much about you if they don’t know this?
A lot of people are weirdly comfortable with their lives and don’t feel like anything is structurally wrong. If they have issues they blame themselves or fate. You’ll hear a common refrain from them like, “I just want to focus on my own life.” They’re completely atomized and yet prefer it that way.
This is the majority of white Americans, by the way.
Okay so don’t take this in any way than me just relating my personal experience, but while I agree with what you are saying from the position of someone who sees the depoliticization of the working class as disastrous and idealistic, and who does organizing in their community with other commies and socialists, I can’t stand politics. I organize with people who are good at it, and several people who like it and went to school for it; but while I can “play the game” as a matter of pure necessity, it is such a source of burn out and negativity. And I honestly don’t know what to do about it anymore, because powering through it has stopped working
I get it. But at the same time I don’t. I’ll try to explain.
I don’t know if it’s my neurodiversity or what, but I have never been able to separate my personality from politics in any way or politics from everyday life for that matter. Might also be cultural, I don’t think these are separated as strongly where I live. I visited the US once and had a partner there for a short while and the difference in this was a revelation to me and I didn’t like it. This was the one time I tried to pair up with my literal political opposite and it was a bad time, those shitty politics show up in everyday life: in the way people treat others, think about things, relate to the world, talk about other people, see history, see current affairs etc. I didn’t feel we could have a lot in common when this was a guy who started forming an aneurysm if you said “Obama”.
I can small talk and work with people who have bad politics (to me), but I won’t seek co-operation or closeness with them because I see life as political and don’t think the relationship can really be all that great with anyone who for example is very neolib in their thinking. I mean my grocery store choices are political and I will make choices based on that all the time. If that makes sense.
Pretty sure my profession highlights this too as working in welfare is always political, the decisions made always have room for consideration and the direction those decisions go tends to be dictated by the politics of the worker.
It might be that defining politics as a profession, as something external with some special sort of expertise and separating it from the people is actually the issue? The professional politician is definitely a disgusting representation of representative capitalist politics, but to me that isn’t what being political means, it’s a bastardization of it.
Okay so there’s some differences between what I’m talking about and what you are talking about. Everything you are saying is reflective of my experience as well, except I’d drill down more on your last paragraph or two.
Like you make good points that I agree with wrt dealing with people who you have nothing in common with concerning their individual political opinions. With this much difference, especially concerning what you said about dating someone with drastically different politics, the politics indicate deeper held values that made you romantically or socially incompatible. That is Fairly normal and unsurprising, and my experience is largely similar.
But what if you’re in an org that actually has somewhat strict rules about who can join: what political opinions they have, and what priorities they fight for? What if you agree with 95% of what an org participates in, but you see that they are wrong about 5%? And that is creating bad reads of current events, etc? Like for example, you join a group of explicitly Marxist communists, but they just aren’t that great about colonialism and decolonial struggles, despite being well read, well connected, relevant, and offer tons of amazing resources to its members. The people who have been dedicating their personal time and energy and money to educating you and trying to grow the org are now wrong about something crucial to the orgs ability to take on impactful work. A group within the org develops a critique that addresses the problems, and you find yourself aligning with them, but this puts you at odds with others who are struggling against those criticisms, people who you personally care about but seem to be somewhat hurt by your support of the critique?
Or you find yourself a leader of a few local working groups in a large national org, but other leaders, whose politics you find acceptable, due to their affiliation with factions that don’t like whatever faction you belong to, like not even actively vindictively opposing you, tend to go out of their way to distinguish themselves from you, at any conspicuous opportunity. They don’t like Marxism, or they think that “communism” is a synonym for “authoritarian”, or they are just kinda opportunist cuz they are young and not as well established. But yet they are in charge of work that you know is important and you need to participate in.
Even working in cadre is exhausting when I learn that someone I work with who I really admire and helped to get me established is like really into UFOs and alien conspiracy theories. Other than that you agree on everything else, but yet every once in a while discussions veer into this positively absurd territory.
And all of these are real examples from my perspective. If I imagine how I must seem to the other people referenced here, my actions become just as exhausting and frustrating.
In my experience a lot of leftists agree that everything is political, but then don’t really participate in politics outside of individual political opinions. There is a realm of the expressly political that exists not apart from but still distinguishable from the realm of the “everything is politics.” If you wanna say that is a bastardization that’s fine but what’s the alternative??
