This is similar to Marx’s critique of freedom under liberalism as merely ‘formal’. The problem is the gap between that can exist between a nominal right and practical exercise of that right.

This kind of problem is common with rights-based approaches to justice and can be witnessed with human rights broadly. Its identification isn’t unique to Marxism, either; liberals sometimes get at it with the phrase ‘equality of opportunity’, for example. To say that opportunities can be unequal (and that this is a problem) is to admit that justice requires the guarantee of more than just formal rights. I’d say this a problem that has shaped liberal ‘privilege’ discourse as well: privilege is just such a kind of gap that allows (or constitutes?) the persistence of injustice in the face of nominal/formal/legal equality.

Like in other cases, I’d say that the four fundamental software freedoms get at something genuinely important, and that it’s better to have them, even just formally, than not. But like with other freedoms and rights, it’s easy to conceive of them too ‘thinly’. They need to be fleshed out with a more general awareness of power relations and of the practicality of their own exercise.

To some extent, that awareness of software freedom as situated within power relations is actually already present in free software discourses, which talk often of things like subordination, domination, subjugation, etc., from the start. Unsurprisingly, that dimension is largely absent from the ‘open-source’ perspective.

I think editing the original artist’s signature just like you edit the piece itself, could be a cool touch. That way you indirectly ‘refer’ to the original artist but also make it clear that you’re not them. You can kinda play that artist’s communist alter ego that way.

For the early Christian Zionists who drove the Balfour Declaration forward and repeatedly steered the British Mandate in Palestine back towards Zionism, part of it very seriously was

*Slaps Palestine*

“This bad boy can fit so many Jews I don’t want in my own country in it”

It was a weird mix of yearning for and reaching towards the apocalypse (because many Protestants believe ‘the Jewish people’ must return to ‘the land of Israel’ in order for Christ to return and for the world to end) and at the same time thinking ‘I’d rather not have that domestic Jewish population’.

In that way, Zionism and anti-semitism have really worked hand-in-hand from the very start of the Zionist project.

I’m disinclined to say that Marxism is truly like any religion at all, but I do think it might be productive to compare certain moments, aspects or divisions within Marxism to religious counterparts. I think your example of the search for a moment of ‘the fall’ in Trotskyist histories of the USSR or Maoist histories of China is a good example.

I am skeptical, though, that we should take those patterns of thought within certain schools of Marxism to originate with or be caused by religious belief, and I think one test might be the prominence (or obscurity) of such a narrative in China itself, where there is much less Christian influence, among Maoist dissidents or CPC members who see themselves as pushing a return to Maoist roots. (I don’t know the answer, idk which way it goes.) I’m more inclined to think of the Christian fall from grace as an incidental instance of a more universally accessible archetype of decisive corruption or working, which may take other forms in other societies. But idk; I’m really out of my depth here, and that may be some Christocentrist ignorance on my part.

It does feel like somewhere in the vast world of Marxist writing, there has to be some good faith thought on Marx’s relationship to Judaism and how it might have influenced his thinking and work. Obviously, he was himself pretty hostile to religion and also sometimes wrote (arguably satirically, with a polemical aim against anti-Semitic thinkers) in some anti-Semitic idioms of his time. At the same time, hostility to a religion, or explicit disavowal, doesn’t actually mean being free of its cultural or ideological influence. Lots of atheists, myself included, find themselves nonetheless marked by their relationship to a predominantly Christian culture of origin. Idk why that would be different for other religions.

But yeah, your wariness is warranted given the vicious myth of ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ and the violence it rationalized. And imo there are more obviously worthwhile points of departure to examine as major influences, like the usual big three (German Idealist philosophy, French utopian socialism, and British political economy, all contemporaneous with Marx).

I’m not GP, but:

The idea is that faith is a practice rather than upholding a doctrine, and even that you’re a member of the religion if you do the things (‘keep the faith’) regardless of what you believe.

I think the analogy makes sense, as Christianity placed a new emphasis on belief, which displaced on the one hand membership via kinship and also a whole host of religious practices/rules by declaring them obsolete or void or optional.

There are some major Christian thinkers who retained a partially action-centered notion of belief (Pascal, for instance) and there are some sects that give some primacy to behavior (see various doctrines of ‘sinlessness’, which take very seriously the imperative to ‘go and sin no more’). But I think the analogy still basically makes sense.

I think one could argue that communist internationalism has more in common with Christian universalism than the ethnocentrism of Judaism, but I guess one could draw an analogy between a vanguard and a ‘chosen people’ (though I wouldn’t!).

Imo these religious analogies aren’t central to socialism but they are kinda interesting and a useful way to quickly allude to or illustrate a point for those who have some knowledge of comparative religions/history of Christianity.

I’m a bit curious about what analogies people culturally grounded in other religious traditions would make! Maybe we’ll get lucky and a comrade with knowledge of some other faith traditions will chime in.

Yooooo I have an inherited retinal disease, too

I was just chatting this morning with some family members about dayblindness, which is gradually increasing for a couple of us. Is that also part of your ocular albinism?

This Lemmy instance isn’t huge, so I wasn’t sure if there were any other blind/visually impaired people here!

I kinda see what you mean in that Mao is confrontational and that one of his innovations in dialectics is an emphasis on destruction in the resolution of contradictions (rather than just thinking of sublation almost as a form of incorporation, or perhaps of synthesis as primary/only way for dialectical contradictions to resolve).

But there are a lot of ways to defeat (or even ‘crush’) a collective enemy, including in violent conflict, far short of extermination! I don’t think Mao’s ideological combativeness or record as a military leader should (or can, really) be mistaken for the kind of raw bloodlust we can recognize in a call to ‘exterminate’.

I made a comment about this on another post that’s now unlinkable because the post has been deleted.

I suspect the quote is not just misattributed, but maliciously so, given its sudden appearance with a purportedly anti-Zionist framing, thus associating anti-Zionism with ‘extermination’.

While Che never said that, the speech mentioned in the image here is real (though not given at the date mentioned in the image), and it does address colonialism. It even mentions Palestine! You can find the full text of it online.

You can find some PFLP literature on the website of Foreign Languages Press.

Thanks very much for fleshing out my half-thought and also for complicating the picture a bit. :)

I’m reading though Gerald Horne’s book on US settler colonialism soon, so hopefully that will help me internalize some of these details!

I’d question the nature of that support. I’m sure nearly every Israeli wants the military to step up their game in protecting them, however support for the recent bombings and ground assaults is significantly lower.

Well, a large supermajority of Israelis support continuing the current campaign, which is inarguably characterized by indiscriminate carpet bombing of Gaza, ‘until Hamas is completely eliminated’. This is a clear statement of support not just for the bombing which has so far taken place, but a claim that it must continue (indefinitely— until reaching a goal that is arguably impossible).

I’m sure nearly every Israeli wants the military to step up their game

Are you familiar with the concept of strategic depth? Given Israel’s limited size and accessible terrain, its geography profoundly lacks this feature. This means Israel’s defensive capabilities have a virtual ceiling, and the ability to make strategic retreats against an invasion is very limited.

For this reason, Israel has a long history of preferring offensive action over defensive action. And indeed, a large plurality of those polled by IVP, as reported on in the article cited above, have come out and said that Israel’s biggest mistake leading up to October 7 was failing to carry out more offensive operations in Gaza prior to the attack.

Calls for Israel to ‘step up its military game’ are intimately tied to offensive action in Israel, and the pretense that they could conceivably relate only to defensive measures for ‘protection’ or ‘safety’ is unsustainable under any historical scrutiny.

there are many in Israeli leadership roles behaving that way. It’s hard to say whether they genuinely feel that way themselves or if they’re just encouraging it for their own benefit - Netanyahu is probably the latter, in my opinion

Why such interest in the rhetoric when there is a growing pile of civilian corpses behind it? Who cares what is in Netanyahu’s heart when the evident fact is that his finger is pulling the trigger?

Most people in any nation just want peace and prosperity for themselves, rather than the destruction of others to expand political borders.

The demand for peace without justice is a demand to normalize violence. Are you familiar with the concept of ‘normalization’ in the fight against apartheid in South Africa, or in the BDS movement? If you aren’t, regardless of the outcome of this discussion, I urge you to take the time to review and at least consider this recent lecture on the concept. Peace is indeed vital for all human beings, but how peace is demanded is equally vital.

rather than the destruction of others to expand political borders.

And yet Israel, a country in which conscription is mandatory for both sexes, military training typically begins at age 14, a large supermajority of the population serves in the military, and whose military and intelligence agencies are rooted in paramilitaries that antedate the formal state by decades, has been engaged continuously in exactly such a project of forceful expulsion for more than a hundred years, without pause.

If this history is unfamiliar to you, or Palestinian displacement has been presented to you primarily as very recent or unintentional, you may find some deeper engagement with the topic enlightening, if challenging (and you may not agree with all the analysis you read, of course).

There are a large number of books, including books by Jewish Israeli scholars, currently available for free on this topic.

If you’re interested in diving deeper, outside the context of this argument, please let me know. If you have preferences for audiobooks, videos, or other formats, I can help you find something that works for you.

I’m also willing to do a ‘reading exchange’ with you if you’re open to that— I’ll read one related book of your choosing if, after you give me a sense of what texts most interest you, you agree to read one book I recommend, and we can discuss both books together.

I understand that the latter is a big time commitment, so no big deal if you can’t do it.

This kind of functional role of ‘bad settlers’ is well-documented in settler-colonialism, and there are even instances of leaders and government officials in the United States case admitting the necessity of ‘unofficial’ settler violence, from paramilitaries to illegal settlements and more.

Can any comrades with more recent contact with this material than I’ve had help me out with a citation on this, ideally ‘from the horse’s mouth’?

Thanks for writing out your thinking on this explicitly, and for inviting discussion in that way.

Public support in Israel for Israeli military operations is typically very high (70% or more, often even above 80%). The only sense in which those supporting massively disproportionate violence and indiscriminate killing of civilians are a minority is in terms of rhetorical style— not the substance of supporting the actual operations that kill people.

Moreover, many of the Israelis on TV ‘frothing at the mouth’ are current or former government officials. To characterize them as a ‘tiny minority’ is extremely misleading about their role in effecting this violence.

The AANES started with the PYD, the Syrian offshoot of the PKK, a Kurdish nationalist party fighting for some form of national rights (the right to speak their own native languages, the right to celebrate holidays associated with their culture, and in some cases against displacement) with offshoots in every country that includes part of ‘Kurdistan’ (Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran, IIRC).

The Assad government has been involved in repression of its Kurdish population including everything mentioned parenthetically above as well as efforts to displace Kurdish populations and replace them with Arab ones.

The AANES has other ethnic constituencies but many of them are also minorities in Syria. Minority rights, and in particular cultural rights and self-determination is a big deal in their philosophy and governance structure.

I guess the Assad government neither wants to cede that level of control, of devolution of power to local entities, nor that approach to the various ‘national questions’ for ethnic minorities in Syria.