askchapo

What seemed to be thoroughly established in the last thread about this is that leftist fame -> suspicious murders. However, the one thing the men mentioned had in common is that they were all peacemakers, even if they fought cops, carried a rifle, or knocked other guys out in a ring. They sought first to unite people and provide for people, only resorting to violence when something got in the way of unity and feeding the hungry.

From my perspective, transitioning, I think that what most men need (and what most great communist leaders have) is a kind of peace within themselves. A lot of the issues I had with my own masculinity, cis men also have with their masculinity and public impotence (but they actually want to perform it better instead of exiting entirely). If you solve this with a power fantasy and romanticize projections of power then you get empty patsoc hero worship which, as we have seen the past few years, is no better than alt-right hero worship. A person who can be at peace with themselves and their community will naturally come to the conclusion that they have something worth fighting for when their peace comes under threat. This is very obvious when you read the works of Palestinians, Zapatistas, and other revolutionaries. The love they have for their community and their humanity precedes the desire they have to destroy threats to the way they live and their pathways to unalienation.

I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. It exists when people liberate themselves.

• Che Guevara: Statement in Mexico (1958)

This is what will happen; whomever sees us, we will be seen by those above, and we won’t appear in the newspapers or in the television and radio news, because La Otra Campaña does not exist for those above, or rather they wish it did not exist. They see, filled with fear, that despite all the silence they’ve directed at us, and despite all the money they are directing towards the funding for their electoral campaigns, despite all of that, more and more people from below, without names and without faces, are taking the name and the face of those of us in La Otra Campaña.

• Subcomandante Marcos: Until Death if it is Needed (2013)

Sun Ch'uan-fang of course obeyed the order of the landlords. Last November, he dissolved the 'Tenant Farmers' Cooperative Self-help Society' and arrested Chou Shui-ping, who was executed in January of this year. It seemed that the movement for rent reduction had been suppressed for a time. But when Chou Shui-p'ing's coffin was returned to Kushan to be exhibited in his house, the farmers went up to the coffin daily in crowds and kowtowed before it, saying, 'Mr. Chou died for us, we will avenge his death.' This year there was a big drought, and the harvest was poor; the farmers again thought of rising up to demand rent reduction. This shows that they are not in the least afraid to die. They know that a united struggle to reduce the exploitation of the avaricious and cruel landlords is their only way out.

• Mao Zedong: THE BITTER SUFFERINGS OF THE PEASANTS IN KIANGSU AND CHEKIANG, AND THEIR MOVEMENT OF RESISTANCE (1926)

However, when we look at oppressor nations in the west, whose entire culture is built upon exploitation, we arrive at the situation where asking the workers of the global north to give up something of themselves for the good of community and of all communities leaves a bad taste in their mouth. They flock to influencers who tell them there's something in it for them, that they, too, can climb the rungs of power to finally feel in control of their own lives (of which they feel almost no control at all). They don't realize that this is a lie, because society will continuously tell them their entire lives that they just need to try a little harder to get there. Just one more chance and they'll make their big break (after all, others have succeeded, why shouldn't you?). To see through the lie, you have to shut out all these voices, all the propaganda, the constant unending exposure from birth to death. They won't do so willingly until you propose that you have something better. Which I think is why Patsoc rhetoric is more enticing. Patsocs do copy the self-help grift but on a national scope: "Look at these successful socialist countries. Wouldn't it be great if you could also benefit from this kind of power?"

Is the actual condition of the workers in the oppressor and in the oppressed nations the same, from the standpoint of the national question? No, it is not the same. (1) Economically, the difference is that sections of the working class in the oppressor nations receive crumbs from the superprofits the bourgeoisie of these nations obtains by extra exploitation of the workers of the oppressed nations... To a certain degree the workers of the oppressor nations are partners of their own bourgeoisie in plundering, the workers (and the mass of the population) of the oppressed nations. (2) Politically, the difference is that, compared with the workers of the oppressed nations, they occupy a privileged position in many spheres of political life. (3) Ideologically, or spiritually, the difference is that they are taught, at school and in life, disdain and contempt for the workers of the oppressed nations. This has been experienced, for example, by every Great Russian who has been brought up or who has lived among Great Russians.

• V. Lenin: A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism (1924)

[A]ll sections of white settler society — even the artisan, worker, and farmer — were totally dependent upon Afrikan slave labor: the fisherman whose low-grade, "refuse fish" was dried and sold as slave meal in the Indies; the New York farmer who found his market for surpluses in the Southern plantations; the forester whose timber was used by shipyard workers rapidly turning out slave ships; the clerk in the New York City export house checking bales of tobacco awaiting shipment to London; the master cooper in the Boston rum distillery; the young Virginia overseer building up his "stake" to try and start his own plantation; the immigrant German farmer renting a team of five slaves to get his farm started; and on and on. While the cream of the profits went to the planter and merchant capitalists, the entire settler economy was raised up on a foundation of slave labor, slave products, and the slave trade.

• J. Sakai: Settlers (1983)

But even when the contradiction is resolved authentically by a new situation established by the liberated laborers, the former oppressors do not feel liberated. On the contrary, they genuinely consider themselves to be oppressed. Conditioned by the experience of oppressing others, any situation other than their former seems to them like oppression.

• Paulo Freire: Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970)

When I've debated with men hopeless about their position in society, they tend to fall back on this; "How is communism going to take care of shut-ins like me?" "Will communism do something useful like get me a girlfriend?" and other similar questions (don't even get me started on guys I've known irl who think it's their moral duty to control women). They are so used to viewing things through a lens of exploitation that they can't fathom an equality where they don't receive a greater share of crumbs from global superprofits. So while we preach "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need," in practice, the path of liberation requires a great deal of self-sacrifice. Being concerned with the well-being of the masses comes at a cost when fighting the unconcerned exploiters who will grind us to dust for trying to be good people.

In the cruel days to come, I failed to project myself as the courageous hero the doctor intended. I felt that the small details which make up life had lost their importance to me, and that the future would be barren. I failed in my attempts at heroism; exhausted and depleted, life once again raised a tower in front of me like a huge wall of despair.

I am walking, in spite of myself, in my own funeral. All the hollow advice administered to me over the past years seems to have vaporized like soap bubbles. A person is courageous so long as he has no need for courage, but he collapses when the issue becomes real, and he is forced to understand courage as an act of “surrender,” a detachment from human involvement, and is content himself with being a spectator rather than a participant in life.

• Ghassan Kanafani: All That's Left to You (1966)

So how do we give western men a community worth fighting for when they don't even have the psychological toolset to appreciate such a community? Some of the worst chuds will profess loving and being willing to fight for their nuclear family (even fighting imperialist wars or becoming police officers to do so), but the nuclear family, especially as they envision it, is designed for their own ego and is constructed in service to them. What they have to come to understand is the necessity to serve others — not for recognition, fame, or an esteemed post in the social order — but because to serve in-itself will make them happy. Some men do take that leap, even in the face of further poverty, imprisonment, or death. It's worth it to them. Some of them are even posters here. But it's not a particularly popular proposition, especially with the frequency western leftist movements are crushed. For that, I don't have a good answer.