Every time we chat, and the discussion turns towards capitalism, she’s the one who without any hesitation just says we should kill them all. Now, though, it’s gone further to torture. And she names names. In addition to people like Bezos and Musk, she includes Ben Shapiro, Andrew Tate and others.
I say we should force them to work and maybe learn the error of their ways (After the revolution of course. During it many of these fucks will die and I’ll be glad).
Her current jobs is extremely horrible. She’s being massively overworked, verbally abused and, of course, underpaid. So I get her frustration. But it’s also scary. I don’t want her to get in any trouble.
I don’t know if I should be gently turning her away from imagining a slow and painful torture of capitalists or not. Am I being a lib or is she too extreme?
Imagining the post your sister is writing right now about their lib sibling
She seems to be caught up in moralistic reasoning. Punishing people can't undo the harm they've done, it can't un-hurt her. Nicholas II was killed for representing a massive liability to the revolution, not because it would bring back the Jews he killed or be of any intrinsic benefit.
There is no use in what she describes, just emotional maladjustment.
also it was more of a 'damn the white army is advancing through this area, tough luck nicky' iirc
bezos and his ilk are also a massive liability, they are too dangerous to be left breathing after a revolution
I disagree, but not enough to be very loud about it. I think they're largely indistinguishable and the way capitalist companies and power structures are organized, with each level of managers deliberately obscuring and diffusing responsibility, means they're much less likely to command the loyalty of partisan fighters. They're not kings or warlords. they're CEOs, part of an entire class of useless MBAs who are almost completely interchangeable. Tsar Nicholaus and his family were powerful symbols of the Russian state and some people really would be willing to take great risks to secure them, even if they only viewed them as a symbol of legitimacy. I don't think America has any partisans who would make a daring raid to rescue Zucc or Bezos (maybe Musk but the antique troll face mask and the convoy of exploding cars would reveal their plan before they could do much harm). In addition American capitalism is so ruthlessly individualistic that it doesn't inspire that kind of selfless, courageous loyalty. Even Trump, the best demagogue America has going, can't bring out any real number of fighters. The proud boys actually engaged in hand to hand street fighting never seem to have amounted to more than a few hundred people, and only seemed more prevalent because of media focus (and our own desire for riot porn). I don't mean to say they're not dangerous - One or two people with guns can cause enormous harm, but they're mostly only dangerous to civilians. Unless the real US army is significantly more ideologically motivated than I think they are there's no equivalent to the white army right now. That could certainly change, but I don't think it exists right now and certainly not for tech billionaires.
But yeah, I don't care about shooting them one way or the other. I'm opposed to torture because I don't think it serves a purpose and because indulging in sadism harms the torturer and wounds the, god help me, purity of our cause. Violence is justifiable but there's never any reason to torture and doing it will demoralize more people than it will inspire. It will also normalize torture. Seeing it done at the highest ranks will tell the rank and file that it is an acceptable behavior, and while we can clearly attribute massive suffering to Bezos or Musk, rank and file troops taking revenge on whoever they perceive to be an enemy will inevitable devolve in to massacres and death squads. Add in crowd psychology - Even a handful of sadists can dominate an entire group of people if they're forceful and charismatic enough, and it often takes an exceptional person, like the Warrant Officer who stopped the killing at Mai Lai and ordered his crew cut down the American troops with miniguns if they tried to hurt the people he was rescuing, to intervene. There were many, many, many Mai Lais, but only at Mai Lai did someone force US troops to stop. Once it starts it's almost impossible to stop. Even if you hang the perpetrators it's just as likely other troops, already traumatized by combat, will blame their leaders and the massacre victims for the hanging of the convicted killers rather than take the lesson.
i'm not talking about them inspiring loyalty, i meant just using their money to fund counter-revolutionaries and other insurgents
they have money and assets all over the world, there is no way we could find it all, and a few million will go a good way into arming terrorist cells and the likeThe issue with that killing them won't kill their money. The individual billionaire isn't special or even important; The reaction will be carried out by a vast array of military and intelligence officers from across the western world and beyond. Jeff Bezos might fund a few private armies, but anything he can do will pale in comparison to the funding and support put forth by the US, NATO, and other capitalist and fascist nations.
And if we kill Bezos his money will simply devolve to the next heir in line, who will share Bezo's class interests. There is certainly propaganda value in killing or humiliating billionaires and oligarchs to shatter the perception that they are invulnerable and beyond harm or consequence, but I believe, and I am fully open to counter-arguments and willing to accept that I am wrong in this, that individual capitalists are not strategically significant. again, I don't care if they get killed, i just don't think it's important one way or another.
I also think, even in the best case scenarios, even if Posada's aliens show up with a communism ray tomorrow, we're still going to face generations of insurgency and resistance from capitalist partisan forces. The USSR faced terrorism, infiltration, and armed threats for it's entire existence and if we manage to subdue major countries we will face the same from within and without for a long, long time. Limiting the scope of reactionary terror is important, but I think a sober analysis suggests that any effort in that direction will be multigenerational.
Well there's some use, not to torture at least but every revolution's first step when they achieve control over the courts or if they overthrow the courts is to purge the ancien regime. If the courts in Burkina Faso and Cuba hadn't authorized the executions of the enforcers of the previous reactionary social order, the people would have gotten mob justice otherwise.
Keep in mind, Cuba only killed a handful of hundred people. Like 300 or 700, I can't remember which. They were Batistas worst guys - The torturers and assassins and death squad guys. When the
West GermansFourth Reich finally got their greedy little hands on the files of the dreaded and omniscient Stasi they apparently only found 7 extrajudicial killings. Not seven thousand. Not seven hundred. Not even seventy. Seven.When the Nazis surrendered at Stalingrad huge numbers of them died. But when their commanding officer was asked about the deaths he insisted that the Soviets treated them as well as they could. Most of the Nazis died because they weren't on the brink of starvation, they were already starving to death when they finally surrendered and there simply wasn't enough food in the region at that time. A lot of Nazis died in captivity, but from what I understand almost all of them died due to the condition they were in when they surrendered, and due to the horrid scarcity of the war years. As far as I know there was no deliberate program on the part of the Soviets to kill Nazi rank and file troops in any numbers. I was kind of aghast at how lenient the Soviets were with Nazi POWs give the horrible acts of mass murder carried out against Soviet POWs and the innumerable Nazi atrocities. I expected retribution on a massive scale, but as far as I'm aware that isn't what happened. Like don't get me wrong, like 300,000 Nazis died in captivity, but as far as I know it was due to scarcity and privation throughout the USSR in the war years, not any deliberate program of killing. And most of them were eventually repatriated after a few years being held for labor.
And this is under Stalin. Stalin the fierce and terrible 100 billion victims of communism guy. If Stalin of all people can recognize the value of limiting acts of retribution against literal Nazis captured in the course of a murderous siege that slaughtered a million civilians we can too. If the Red Army soldiers who had witnessed their homes and friends and comrades slaughtered by the Fascist war machine can stay their hands and refrain from torturing every Nazi they encounter to death we can too. If we can't be as collected and pragmatic as the people who suffered in the worst conditions in the worst war in human history we're doing something very, very wrong.
If I'm wrong about this, if there was some mass program of torturing Nazis, please correct me. But I don't think there was, and I think we have a responsibility to live up to our comrades who lived through the most horrific conditions imaginable without giving in to blood lust and sadism.
It depends [Puyi] but sure, when it has an extrinsic use that is different
Rehabilitating Puyi was just good PR as the rest of the feudal class was being liquidated by the revolutionary masses.
The landlords were killed or driven out by the peasantry for pragmatic reasons (so many people over so much land), but that doesn't represent all of the feudal order. Afaik what remained of the aristocracy, along with many people from the KMT and even some of the Japanese colonial soldiers were reeducated. The CPC took pride in rehabilitating reactionaries where it was viable, though they had no compunctions about consigning them to death where that simply made more sense.
I'm told that in some places where the local lord had genuinely tried to support and aid their peasants the peasants shielded them from violence and they survived the purge. I think that's an important note: The violence wasn't mindless destruction for it's own sake, and there is complexity even in a situation where death was the general rule.
More of a personal catharsis (plain revenge?) thing in my case. I want to turn the collective right’s Turner Diaries bullshit back on them. See how they like being on the wrong end of the industrialized death machine for once
It won't make you happy. It'll just make you in to a traumatized monster. People who engage in mass killing and come out intact were monsters going in. And of the people who weren't monsters going in, they either come out broken in ways that can never be healed, or they come out monsters. Killing people in combat is hard enough and breaks people horribly. Slaughtering helpless captives is corrosive to your psyche in horrible, horrible, horrible ways. And if you do it in the moment, if you do it in a fugue of bloodlust and anger, you'll spend the rest of your life terrified of losing control, of unleashing that same hatred and madness on people you love in a moment of terror or dissociation.
Have you heard stories of people who come back from war and their kids know to never, ever, ever wake them up, because their parent will pull a gun or attack them without any awareness that they're not back in the war fighting their enemies? That happens to totally normal people, even when they don't commit atrocities, even when they barely see combat. War is the worst thing that can happen. It destroys people in the most horrible ways. And torture and sadism and mass murder are worse.
Seriously, go read up on PTSD among war veterans. Pick a war, any war. I've seen account of PTSD in warriors from the first world war, from the First Crusade, from the Roman Legions. I've read about knights who spent the rest of their lives waking up screaming, Muslim Faris who never recovered from the battles of the crusades, all kinds of horrible shit.
If you indulge that bloodlust, that desire to inflict pain, you're hurting yourself and achieving nothing. It's going to be hard enough to heal from a revolution. We're going to lose and entire generation to trauma and PTSD and alcohol and despair, no matter what happens. Winning, even under the best case, will be a human tragedy of enormous proportions. We don't want to make that worse than it needs to be.
Thinking on it, wanting to be a worse person is one thing, but actually following through is another. Never did like the limitations of the human psyche much. Never really wanted to live that badly knowing their was no escape from their bullshit anyways, either.
She’s angry, she’s venting, but as with 99% of this sort of rhetoric it’s highly unlikely it escalates past venting. Better to try to redirect her energy towards organizing than chiding her for abstract morality navel gazing.
Just enjoy the time you have left on this world before your sister makes you face the wall for being counter-revolutionary and a lib.
inshalah it will be our fate to be executed for liberalism by children more radical than we ever dreamed.
Torture is a bit reactionary.
Bullet to the head or work camps for the flunkies.
I'll compromise. You can burn effigies, or fill them with candy and beat them with sticks.
Compromise: Shabibo, Walsh and all them go out Dirlewanger-style
Our enemies aren't ontologically evil, they're caught up in systems beyond human control just like the rest of us. Violence against them is justified because it's necessary to change things, but if a peaceful revolution were possible I would advocate for that instead. Torture is unjustifiable because it accomplishes nothing. It's just harm for harm's sake, and as a leftists a core part of my worldview is that we should minimize the harm inflicted on any living being.
I already agreed that self defense is justified. My point is that our enemies weren't born evil, they were shaped by material forces just like everyone else. If they're an obstacle to progress and can't be reformed I'm not against execution, but it should be done for practical reasons, not as punishment. That's christian morality shit.
(Fantasizing about torture is totally fine so if you weren't 100% serious please disregard this)
Just remember the more you torture the less :che-smile: is proud of you. ily comrade :cat-trans:
Revolution has two aspects. Revolution is a revolution against an old order; and it is also a contest for a new order. The Marxist emphasis on the determining force of the material circumstances of life is correct. But I would like also to give great emphasis on the power of ideology. A revolutionary ideology is not merely negative. It is not a mere conceptual refutation of a dying social order, but a positive creative theory, the guiding light of the emerging social order.
Your sister is failing the leftist be normal challenge: impossible. Like very few people are going to embark on the harrowing path of Socialism on simply a desire for violence. If she is freshly radicalized, I think its fine but I think you should emphasize that this rage must simply be just a phase. There are more steps to personal development.
Also, I think you are also being a little to lenient on the idea of violence. Violence is a tool and it is a tool that the revolution should use against the most powerful and oppressive of individuals like the ones you named. Torture, no. Trial with detailed documentation of their crimes and sentencing, yes.
edit: I misread your post. sorry
Like very few people are going to embark on the harrowing path of Socialism on simply a desire for violence
Really? I see a hell of a lot of self described leftists who seem to be in it just out of a desire to hurt their enemies tbh. And it worries me. Because thats not what it should be about.
yeah that doesn't sound healthy. Socialism should be about the people we want to help and how not the people we want to hurt
Comrade Che said it best;
“At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality […] We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity will be transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force.”
Anger is justified and useful, hatred is justified and useful, but violence needs to be a means to an end and not an end unto itself. The point of the terror is to upend bourgeois society and destroy it's ability to coordinate and respond, not to have fun. That always ends up as banditry and death squads.
Though like others have said, if she's just now realized the whole huge enormous deception and the incredible violence of capitalism she's got every right to be pissed. Give her some theory to read, Maybe George Jackson's "Blood in my Eye". He was angry as hell, and writing from prison, but he was also clear about goals and what we're trying to achieve, and why we use the tools we use.
justified maybe but I don't see how hatred is useful
I don't hate Bezos in the same way I don't hate a storm that destroyed a house. Capital is too impersonal a force for me to have such a relationship with it
Oh I don't hate Bezos. He's just some dweeb elevated by forces beyond his understanding. I hate capitalism itself, the real god emerging from the complex behaviors of billions of human beings until it attains something like sentience and something like malice. All that rhetoric I throw around about killing god isn't just talk. As soon as I fix my brain I am going to make a knife so sharp it can cut emergent processes.
The essence of money is … the mediating activity or movement, the human, social act by which man’s products mutually complement one another, is estranged from man and becomes the attribute of money, a material thing outside man. Since man alienates this mediating activity itself, he is active here only as a man who has lost himself and is dehumanised; the relation itself between things, man’s operation with them, becomes the operation of an entity outside man and above man. Owing to this alien mediator – instead of man himself being the mediator for man – man regards his will, his activity and his relation to other men as a power independent of him and them. His slavery, therefore, reaches its peak. It is clear that this mediator now becomes a real God, for the mediator is the real power over what it mediates to me. Its cult becomes an end in itself.
Marx, in a letter to James Mill, 1844
I have to say it was both reassuring and horrifying to find that other people, not just Marx, believed that Capitalism had become an emergent system of sufficient complexity that it has attributes and behaviors comparable to thought processes and malice. I'm not even sure when the concept of an emergent system was developed, I think very recently, but I think it's useful in conceptualizing how capitalism behaves as an entity unto itself that seeks to constantly grow, expand, and change, while also healing wounds and compensating for novel situations, all at a degree of complexity that is difficult for theorists to fully explain and largely impossible to predict
I don't mean to be all mystical, this is an extension of how things like culture or language exist not in any one person, but in the social interactions of many people. Likewise capital isn't in any person, it exists between us in the way we act, making otherwise absurd concepts in to real phenomena with real observable behaviors and results.
The take away being we're gonna need a really handsome person with a sword made out of some really cool meteor if we're ever gonna win this thing.
As for the utility of hatred - I think hatred is a very pure and elevated understanding that a thing is utterly incompatible with your way of life. When you encounter something so utterly alien and inimical to your existence that no course of action exists but to undertake its complete destruction hatred is the motivating emotion that you embody. Hatred absolves you of mercy and nuance. It cleanses your doubts and uncertainties. It is terrible and awesome, a force for enormous change, for good or ill. Hate gives you license to kill a thing so completely that it's memory vanishes from the earth as though it never existed.
I don't want to reform people like Musk and Bezos out of love. I want to reform them for hate's sake (CW: mention of pornography, liberalism). Simply killing them achieves nothing. They remain intact to the end. But for hate's sake I would see them made in to good communists, in to trusted and dedicated comrades. This would be not mere transformation, but their utter annihilation. The most complete and total destruction possible. Not the mere destruction of the body, but the destruction of the person enacted by the person themselves. The refutation of everything they were and everything they believed in. A dagger thrust in to their own soul, wielded by their own hand. It is the ultimate victory, the ultimate expression of bloody lust and savagery, to conquer your enemy so completely that they unmake themselves to become you. When we achieve such a thing, when we can reform such cruel and terrible people, then we can truly say that we have slain a god.
I'm picking up exactly what you're putting down, I've realized in the last year or so that Capital is an actual dark god, the literal Azathoth, and it feels good to be able to say that without having to qualify it.
Lovecraft is what got me thinking in that direction, too. A completely alien, indifferent, unfathomable horror that drives humans to madness and self destruction, nearly beyond our conception.
Capital is no more a god than Baal was. it is an impersonal force in this case made up of socially organised processes rather than the sea as Baal represented. Grapes of wrath has a good chapter on this. If it is a god then it is a false god for they worship the work of their own hands
I agree the wish to free people of this false god is a good one.
I think we're mainly on the same page
Fair nough, but if we win I'm still gonna claim we stormed the gates of heaven and put god to the sword.
The Christian imagry is a little out of place as Capital is a god in the way of the old pagan gods of Rome rather than in the Abrahamic way
Guilty. I grew up in a Christian context and the bible is far and away the religious text with which I am most familiar with. And the whole "Kill god and overthrow his Kingdom" thing is hard to apply to like, a hindu or buddhist or taoist paradigm. It works better for the Christian god because Christianity is so patriarchical and hierarchical, and because they have a singular god that they assert is responsible for and aware of everything that happens, including the evil stuff. I guess a Manichean or Zoroastrain adjacent thing could apply, since as far as i can remember they assert that there is a great evil god locked in combat with a great good god, with the outcome uncertain.
She needs to speak to some liberals. Has she tried hexbear.net?
No but for real tho, your sister sounds cool. I hope she finds a less soul-crushing job. If you think she'd ever actually do an adventurism, consider deleting this post.
Unless you seriously think she's going to do stochastic terrorism, you have nothing to worry about. In that case you need to intervene and stop her, but who cares if she wants the worst people on earth to suffer horribly?
It's not really about that I think. As Mandela said, “Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.”. At the end of the day the only person being harmed by her revenge fantasies is herself and her mind. The chances that any of these people will actually face any consequencs at this moment in time is very slim. It is just a big waste of energy to construct these kinds of thoughts when 1% of communism hasn't even been built yet.
I understand fully why people want to hurt those who have hurt them and others, and my people have those feelings. But you can't live life angry at the world 24/7, that is its own mental prison.
I also struggled with this a lot and am trying to follow my own advice here. I also get really pissed at the state of the world and have dark thoughts. When I first heard about Mandela's speeches and thoughts on resentment and bitterness as a young kid/teenager, I thought he was talking crap to be quite honest. But as I've gotten a little older, I find what he said to me more and more true.
Agreed. What some people don't seem to recognize is that it's not about empathy for them. You're not letting go of the resentment out of compassion - it just isn't sustainable to be this angry all the time. It eats into other parts of your life and hinders your ability to take care of yourself, which in turn makes you less effective in your activism and less prepared should a serious movement ever develop.
Maybe this isn't true for everyone, but I'm angry about this sort of thing all the time and that is what has happened. I'm working on it, too.
So much this. I don't want to spare them because I love them. I'm not a Christian. I don't want them tortured because I have compassion for those who wish to see them tortured, because I think they would only be harmed by seeing that desire realized.
i guess it depends on your personality
spite is a powerful motivator for me"From hell's heart I stab at thee. For hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee" is my favorite quotation from literature and keeps me going when everything inside me wants to curl up and die. Obviously Ahab shouldn't have devoted his life to punishing a whale, but I appreciate his commitment to the bit.
I should note that I have never read Moby Dick and always picture Ricardo Montablan reciting it as Khan lays dying at the end of that Star trek movie.
Mandela is a good example. He walked the walk, engaged in a violent struggle, was captured and subjected to horrible imprisonment, but emerged to become the leader of a peaceful draw down of the conflict. Thank you for bringing him up, I never would have thought of that.
Yeah a lot of what he said is very insightful. Reading "a long walk to freedom" from a socialist perspective is eye opening.
I'm South African, so it's the first thing that came to mind actually. As I said I used to disagree with what he said on certain topics, but I recognise the value of what he was trying to say now.
Yeah it's his autobiography. A lot of libs and conservatives read it and completely miss the point.
It's not theory or anything, but it's a good book.
she sounds rad but she should switch jobs before it drives her nuts
I don't think saying you want to kill rich people means you're radicalized tbh (i've heard conservatives and liberals say things like this) but i also don't think you're actually radicalized unless you're in an org or attempting to do something material to advance left wing politics. if you're worried about her, maybe try to get her to focus on something more material, like possibly unionizing her workplace (easier said than done, i know) or some type of mutual aid.
She may just be letting off steam since her job sucks. Its normal to be extreme at first, especially in the US with conditions being what they are, ideally the workers would either become acquainted with theory to not to make errors out of rage, anger like this is self-defeating, some is good since it helps drive you to improve things, a lot blinds you and can make you a useful tool of the bourgeois in their painting all the left as mere adventurist terrorists hurting the proletariat instead of liberating them. Also have to note conditions, why violence was necessary, sometimes you do need it, torture is a hard no, its one thing to kill someone its another thing to objectify them as a spectacle and drag out their death. We are trying to move toward more humanized interactions, returning again to coercive human-object relations (like under capitalism) in order to do something as idealistic as 'make a point' is self-defeating here. No one but the bourgeois and silly libs care for 'preachers and high-flung ideas' they want praxis, what can you do to make things better tangibly?
