“A man’s ability may be great or small, but if he has this spirit [of selflessness], he is already noble-minded and pure, a man of moral integrity and above vulgar interests, a man who is of value to the people.”

Profile picture: Norman Bethune.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: May 4th, 2023

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  • Wouldn’t communism not have a worker’s state anymore? Isn’t productivity kind of just a toxic hold over to be excised once the dictatorship of the proletariat is no longer necessary?

    People still need to eat, drink and fulfill their other basic needs. “Productive” here does not mean to produce much of something with the least amount of resources possible, but to contribute to the fulfillment of society’s needs.

    Also, what counts as production? Isn’t something produced just anything with a use-value? Isn’t sex technically a thing with a use-value?

    No. The commodification of human relationships is one of the worst blights that exists in this world, and whoever aims to prolongue it is an enemy of socialism. As long as one sees human interactions as something to bbe bought and sold, they will be unable to understand what the liberation of the working people entails.

    (also, where’s the line between social parasitism and just being disabled? If someone can’t work, wouldn’t that mean that by this framework they deserve to either live without anything except bare necessities, or die from starvation?)

    From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs. You are comparing (in a frankly offensive manner) those who cannot work to those who are not willing to work.


  • I am not defending prostitution as an act of liberation?

    Added parenthesis to clarify.

    I was defending the abstract idea of someone having sex for reasons besides direct sexual attraction to their partner, not prostitution as we know or in any form our current definition would work with. Like, I don’t think prostitution would even be possible in a communist society, there wouldn’t be any goods or services to really bargain with if everything, including luxuries, was collectively owned

    Even if it was possible, it would still imply a form of labor desertion (in other words, social parasitism) by performing and obtaining benefit from an act that brings no productivity to the worker’s state, not to mention that it is still an act of objectification. More on that text of Kollontai that I have linked before.


  • In response to the edited message: I have not downvoted you, nor have I done so in any message of yours other than the first one.

    The belief is that this women is an idiot, or some sort of brainwashed fool for deciding to… well, they’re not even selling their body for sex in this case, they’re just having a lot of sex “for free” as far as I can tell.

    I can assure you, this woman didn’t go from Texas to Kiev and got her own apartment plus a covering of its maintenance and of her own life needs with money that appeared out of thin air, with savings or by somehow landing a job as an accountant in warn-torn Ukraine: she is with no doubt charging soldiers for sex.

    This woman saw a humanitarian crisis developing and her first choice to help was offering sexual services to soldiers in exchange of money. Yes, that someone develops this way of thinking is absolutely brainwashing done by liberalism.


  • Are we immune to brainworms? No. Are there low chances that the three people that you have replied to were all suffering from such, when the only thing you had against them was the gut feeling devoid of analysis that you had because of “the wording being a little weird”?

    I’m not immune to propaganda, but you aren’t, either.

    I do not think I am exposed in my day-to-day life to a substantial amount of propaganda pushing for a marxist perspective of the exploitation of women and its abolition. Both of us are, however, exposed to a fairly large amount of propaganda that attempts to promote the prostitution (that you defend) as an act of liberation. These two are not the same.


  • context that was missing from previous comments (which read more like “how dare this woman not be traditional” to me)

    We are in a communist space. You have plenty context to work with: the last thing you have to expect of a critique of prostitution in a place like this is to be done from a point of view of religious puritanism and not from a perspective of principled marxist feminism, which is where @KommandoGZD 's comment and those following them came from.

    The bourgeois state promotes the idea that all critiques to the existence of prostitution itself comes from conservative or reactionary perspectives. You are not immune to propaganda: before attempting to write a critique basing on the gut feeling that you get from reading something, try to read what is it that it is actually being said.

    I agree that prostitution is coercive and wrong in every current implementation.

    Current or otherwise. Prostitution is not defensible under socialism or communism either, and to know why I once again redirect you to Kollontai. I was writing here the bullet points of the text, but I have decided not to as no summary can substitute the proper reading of an original theory text.

    As it says in the text, and as it was said in the first All-Russian Congress of Working Women: “A woman of the Soviet labour republic is a free citizen with equal rights, and cannot and must not be the object of buying and selling", and to this day we should still strive to build a proletarian society where this remains true.


  • but if removed from that context it’s pretty reasonable

    Good grief. I am sorry, but that stances like this one come from the mouths of comrades is the reason why I always object when a communism study guide for beginners does not include texts from Alexandra Kollontai.

    Sex under coercion is rape. Work under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is done by proletarians under economic coercion as they have to work to be able to fulfill their basic needs. Therefore, sex as a means of living, or in other words, prostitution, is rape.

    You have four options at this point: you can either accept this fact and move on; you can deny that work under a bourgeois dictatorship functions by placing working class people under economic coercion, a point at which you should consider why call yourself a communist anymore; or you could either deny that sex under coercion is rape or, heavens forbid it, that rape is acceptable under any economic system, both actions that would get yourself immediately kicked from any minimally respectable communist party. The choice is yours.


  • but because it’s weird to imply that wanting to be a prostitute instead of a medic or a cook is some kind of mental degradation

    …Is it? I do not think it is a stretch to say that the despersonalization of a human being into a sexual object is indeed pretty degrading.

    and all three of those things being assumed as the only roles a woman would play in a war is just gross

    Helping the wounded and the starved are the main tasks that volunteering organizations play in any warzone, be it either men or women. It is the kind of thing one volunteers for unless they are in the very small minority of people who are either dense enough or who have enough of a death wish to go there to fight and get blown up by an Iskander missile (RIP Reddit battalion).



  • Thank you.

    I know this all sounds like Mandarin to most of the userbase of this place (which I suppose to be mainly from the US and alien to the politics of places where big regional languages exist in the same space than even larger national languages), but it’s not only the attitude of some regular people but also of some major political forces. Just a few months ago, a far-right party in Spain vowed to shut down the Academy of Valencian Language if they ever reached power (something I suppose a linguist like you would never approve), under the excuse of its existence being “a threat to national unity”.

    Nationalism: not even once.


  • “i ain’t reading all that tankie shit”

    “The joke is on you, as you see, I am illiterate”.

    Just do not bother getting angry over this type of stuff. Post it nonetheless because someone may stumble upon it and actually read it or engage in a meaningful (even if not always well-intended) conversation about it, but the snarky replies are best ignored as they add nothing of value.


  • I think you misunderstand what I am referring to. I am not talking about a wish to learn a language, but to consider languages as useful or useless in regards to their entire existence.

    This is unfortunately not very uncommon in people of European countries who look down upon regional languages, stating that their existence or that learning them is useless (not for them only, but for anyone) just because you can already do the task of communicating with others through the national language (per example, considering the existance of the Occitan language useless because the people of everywhere where it is spoken can already understand French). This is done by people who not understand (or even worse, who don’t care about) the value that exists in language from a cultural perspective.


  • Thinking about different languages in the terms of “useful” or “useless” according to the number of speakers they have.

    Edit: What I mean specifically is not for someone to want or not to personally learn a language, but if the existance in itself of a language is more or less valuable according to how many people speak it (per example and as I explained below, believing that Occitan’s existance is useless because there’s already French to talk to Occitan people with, who already understand it). Yes, this happens.