Hello fellow lenin enjoyers and marx enthusiasts
I am undergoing a deep personal transformation of my worldview. I’ve “transformed” this way once before, going from a deeply religious kid to becoming an atheist when I was 12. It feels that way right now, but I feel like — unlike religion and the Bible, where I smelled BS from the very beginning (how in fuck’s name did Noah fit all those animals in that flimsy ass ark?) — this transformation unroots deep beliefs and intuitions that, frankly, I feel like I gotta pace myself and take things step by step, fact by fact, and undo the propaganda fed to me throughout my entire life. I’m writing today partly as a rant, but mainly for myself to untangle my own beliefs and dogma, as one should do when conflicted by differing world views.
I grew up in the Philippines and immigrated to America, where I went to high school for 2 years (where during my brief years in US high school have internalized a LOT of anti-communist propaganda from history class) and college for 4. The Philippines, as a country in the imperial periphery of the United States, my education is also partly molded by this imperialism. Although I have learned about my country and its history, we also learned about how the Philippines was colonized 3 times: Spain by 333 years, the united states for 33 years, and japan for 3 years during world war 2. As such, the Philippines has only ever really known colonization, and although our national mythology consists of rebels and Jose Rizal who wrote scathing books against the Spaniards which became the foundation for insurgents to come, Filipinos generally regard western culture as superior. And, for a time, I agreed! I thought western society have brought us medicine, industrialization, higher culture, and burgers (i love burgers). Hollywood, western movies and TV shows are way more entertaining than relatively lower budget Filipino movies and shows (which frankly parrot the west, and are walmart versions of them). My brain rot when I was a child even thought that dropping the two Nukes on hiroshima and nagasaki was a good thing because “it helped shorten the war and lessened US casualties in the long run” 🤮.
My glamorization of the west ended, not surprisingly, when I arrived to the west. My rose-tinted glasses for America faded away when I realized what America is. A country built on stolen land by the hands of poorly-paid immigrants, for the express purpose of making the rich richer. For a while I lived in Vallejo and experienced petty crime in numerous occasions. I studied in Berkeley (where the seeds of my leftist beliefs are sown in the culture and in my courses) and saw radical inequality. Beggars and the homeless on the same street where Teslas and Bugattis drive. There were homeless that sat on the steps of my dorm. It’s even worse when sometimes i’d visit San Francisco: beggars and homeless people on the base of multimillion dollar skyscrapers. That’s when I realized that something is fundamentally wrong with the system that can’t just be voted away or reformed. Something deeply wrong with the presuppositions that were used to build Western society.
I studied Mathematics and there are these things called “axioms” that you need to build a mathematical theory. These are the things you need to start with, the atoms of knowledge, to build a coherent theory. Axioms are defined but cannot be proven because they are self-evident. This is the reason why, contrary to popular belief, logic isn’t always right — because if you start from the wrong axioms the entire structure of your theory is built on quicksand. And, as I live in the US and learn about what this country has done and what is continuing to do (funding Israel in a genocide of Palestine), I am more and more certain that the axioms of capitalism are corrupt and false. That contradictions exist in capitalism not because of incorrect applications of logic, but because capitalism started out by building on the wrong foundation.
One of the blatant paradoxes (notice i did not say contradiction) of capitalism is homeless people under capitalism. Because, actually, homelessness under capitalism is not a contradiction of the theory of capitalism! Instead, it is a logical consequence of capitalism; when a ruling class hoards all the wealth, no matter how wealthy the country, some people will be unhoused and unable to afford the basic costs of housing.
I saw homeless people in my home country and I rationalized it by saying “oh, the philippines is a poor country and our government is corrupt”. But in the USA? What was supposed to be the bastion of western civilization and the #1 country in terms of the GDP? There is no rationalizing away homeless people; a country this rich SHOULD NOT have homeless people.
i’ve only ever came to terms with these ideas during a vacation to Europe last month. If you were to ask me before then, I would say I’m left leaning but not communist, north korea bad, china bad, but now I’ve went all the way. Sort of when I had a lot of doubts believing in jesus but would still feel really guilty masturbating to porn; there’s a mental switch one has to flip to be a comrade and be part of a beautiful movement larger than one’s self
In Europe, a place where capitalism supposedly is implemented in a better and fair way, I still saw homeless people! Paris, Germany, Luxembourg, Italy, Belgium. In Germany, some of the homeless adopted full upright kneeling positions as they held out their cups. I always made a point to let go of some spare change to the homeless there, and I hate that the locals would pass by and ignore these people, but maybe it’s because of the popular belief that they’ll just use it for booze and drugs anyways? I don’t know.
It was a long trip throughout Europe and I thought I could read some books and listen to some leftist podcasts (mainly The Deprogram and Blowback). I learned about Unequal Exchange by reading Marx’ account of it in the communist manifesto (his example of the Indian textile industry being taken over by the British market through industrialization), and a more recent treatment of this by Hakim (YouTube channel). And I realized that the relatively decent and comfortable life that people in the west enjoy is directly because of unequal exchange from cheaply exported labor and materials from the imperial periphery, including the Philippines.
That’s when I realized that we’ve been playing the same game throughout history. A history of colonialism and imperialism, but now with more sophisticated tools and people in colonized countries ready to defend their imperial masters because it directly benefits them. That’s when I started to open a pandora’s box for socialist thought: History.
I learned about Cuba and how they were able to effectively resist US hegemony and are able to build a stable communist society without the need for the global economy (end cuban embargo tho). I learned about the Korean War and how the US has bombed North Korea until no targets were left. I learned that when North Korea ”invaded” South Korea that they were met with celebration, because the puppet government that the US installed in South Korea was corrupt and impoverished the population. I learned about the global communist movement and how it was stifled by the US because it did not want to lose potential markets to expand to (a communist state with nationalized industry is harder to exploit by outside capitalists). That’s when I realized that after the fall of the US empire it will be regarded as a force for evil rather than good, that the US categorically will be ranked worse than than the Nazis just because of how much damage, destabilization and terror it has conducted throughout the globe for its own benefit. And it’s a tragic irony that a country so wealthy from the blood of conquest can still have homeless people!
I realized that I need to learn more history. Current events do not happen in a vacuum; they can only be understood not in an ideological lens but a historical lens. Any recommendations on books on history btw?
And as I unravel history, I keep hearing differing accounts of the same thing. That’s when I experienced Cognitive dissonance. Was the fall of the USSR legitimate, or was it a crime against humanity? What about Stalin’s crimes that I keep hearing about? China’s “concentration camps” of the Uighurs? Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, how can this be justified?
Are there any war crimes or humanitarian crimes that communists have committed that we need to apologize for? As Mao said, “no investigation, no right to speak” and I have only just begun investigating. So, I must only ask questions. What about “x, y z, this is why communism is evil”.
I am now in the stage of cognitive dissonance as I unroot what has been taught to me and delve deep into an ideology that is foreign to me but which resonates deeply in my soul. As I plant the seed I notice dry, blackened husks, references of crimes committed in the name of the ideology, which prevent the seeds of comraderie from taking root and sprouting into something beautiful. As such, I ask the community, let us explore these husks from an unbiased perspective, and apologize to the greater world when we have to, or defend ourselves when it is our right.
what it do baby
Thank you for the excellent post! I won't do it justice but I can point at something to get started with.
The Shining Path fucked up a lot, the biggest fuckup being to start a terror campaign in the countryside despite supposedly trying to implement Mao's line of building from the country to take the cities. It also managed to also start an entire strain of communists that is just popular enough that you'll find them in every major US city: Gonzalite Maoists.
This one is an interesting example because it touches on many of the issues related to "apologizing" for a political neighbor.
There is an almost immediate reaction to distance oneself from that neighbor, as unless you are personally a huge fan of Gonzalo and his communist strain (a particular kind of Maoist), you will probably disavow before apologizing. They're not "your communists", after all! Those are the "bad communists" and actually they're ultras and maybe they don't even count as communist - or so the line might go. We definitely do that for the Khmer Rouge, who adopted such a ridiculous idea of socialist thinking that we can easily reject them and their murders.
At the same time, there are a ton of cool Maoists and contributions to communist thought that are Maoist. We include them in our left unity, only picking at the ones that display such ultra behavior that they've lost the plot and have begun (1) losing a sense of priority re: the enemy and (2) doing the work of empire by spending more time and effort fighting other communists than actually building communism.
I do think that The Shining Path and their chairman were communists and that they fucked up. They organized incorrectly, they jumped the gun on armed resistance, they overinvested in one charismatic leader, and ended up scuttling the overall project while killing far too many people for things that didn't earn it, even battling with an ML group.
In thinking about how to apologize, though, I return to the idea of disavowing. I don't personally belong to a Maoist group that claims any association with Gonzalo or The Shining Path, so what would it mean for me to apologize? I had no involvement in those actions and neither did my org. I don't support their actions, though I do support an armed resistance as a viable tactic relative to local conditions. If I do apologize, does it imply that I do take ownership over it? Is it a false apology?
To tie things back to religion, apologetics was an attempt to defend an overall idea (e.g. the existence of the Christian God) from criticisms by providing explanations. Those explanations might be some kind of attempt at a logical argument for the existence of God or a way to carefully (re)define God such that the criticisms cannot apply. They took ownership over the concept of God to defend it but threw out (often popular) aspects of God in order to save it from criticism by nerds. To apologize for The Shining Path, does that mean we're taking ownership, discarding pieces, etc? And if so, ownership of what and what is discarded?
Maybe it would be more useful to attempt to recognize mistakes and do our best to elucidate their causes - and to be self-critical so that we don't only repeat dogmas of camps but ground the criticisms in realities, including how wide of a view we take. Overinvesting in one weird dude is obviously a mistake, but isn't it also a consequence of earlier mistakes? Doesn't it mean a failure in political education? etc etc.
Anyways nice thread! Hope you've found some cool commies in your area! There are a lot of cool Filipino- commies, including Filipino Americans.
Thanks, I love the discussions on this community and lemmy in general 💕 i feel like lemmy is a catalyst for leftist thought.
Maybe “apologize” wasn’t the right word. Maybe “recognize” or even “acknowledge”. It’s true that you are not part of those groups that failed in the mission, but also it is valuable to learn where they went wrong relative to their conditions and how future comrades can do better. Certainly, ignoring and moving on isn’t the way to go; successes and failures must be analyzed and assimilated to the growing wisdom of the movement. So in a way yes, we need to discard and take ownership, but also since we’re not a religion, the core movement can change and evolve along with it. Almost as if we’re redefining God itself by changing core tenets of belief, like the holy trinity (like adding another mofo in the trinity, the quadrity?)
The communist movement in the Philippines is also another item in my list of cognitive dissonance. The NPA, new people’s army, the armed communist movement of the Philippines, was founded by Jose Maria Sison who, in podcasts, I’ve listened to and agreed with, although he talks about marxist theory in a way that flies above my head. But when I talk to my mom, who is very open minded politically, has noted that the NPA uses child soldiers. There’s definitely a lot of anti-communist propaganda in the Philippines, so this is another area investigation I need to explore.