Bolivia has some really promising young women in politics. You love to see it.
Why is that existing socialist countries (Cuba, China, ven) seem to be somewhat conservative on issues like this, gay marriage, etc even when compared to right wing shitholes like the US? I don’t see how you could have a left wing ideology and still think this type of shit is ok. I’m genuinely curious about the cause of this
I'm simultaneously thrilled and overwhelmed that I have another book I really need to read
Pretty much every socialist state with weird LGBT laws seems to have an active LGBT caucus that's welcomed by the party (or at least tolerated and given representation to prevent the appearance of dissent). That's how you end up with all these reversed things like banned marriage, but free surgery or therapy or propaganda initiatives to destigmatize HIV and help prevent spread.
They usually treat these things as matters of public health instead of moralizing them.
In South America I think colonialism (esp. catholic missionaries) is a major root cause. It's a pretty complicated issue though and this just scratches the surface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machismo#Cuban_Machismo_and_its_Effect_on_Women_and_LGBT_Community.
why its still around? plenty of class conscious men worldwide want to gain power from the ruling class but not make power concessions in their community or domestic situation.
I'd also add that the right recognized the importance of tha patriarchal family in maintaining capitalism long before the left did (as a whole. Obvs Marx and Engels approached it, but it didn't get a ton of attention until the 70s). We've been seen as a threat to the nuclear family because we tend to have more partners, lack the resources to settle down, and are more likely to have STDs and do drugs. These are of course not our fault, but public health issues, but they contribute to how straight people imagine us.
Legalizing gay marriage is a good way to stabilize the crisis of our existence. It concededs a little to us without ever posing a danger to the nuclear family, just genderswapping it. Public health battles are harder, because we're calling for a real redistribution of wealth. That's why the bourgeois gave us marriage but not needle exchanges or health clinics (which we've made ourselves and which operate under varying degrees of legality and funding).
The explanation I was told is that all of these countries have large rural populations that work in agriculture and that's an industry that having more upper body strength is advantageous in, which means men typically do farm work and women do housework and other fields more, which makes cultural views of gender roles more rigid and conservative, on top of these countries being pretty religious in the case of Latin America
that sounds like one of those academic sociological hypotheses that hasn't been tested or studied in the real world, but it seems plausible enough to accept
USA urban population - 82%
Cuba urban population - 77%
Venezuela urban population - 88%
This hypothesis doesn't seem likely to me
For the same reason you can have Proud Boys shouting "Fuck the Police" after getting pepper sprayed.
Mass Line movements don't exist to take the vanguard on culture issues. They're there to move the ball on economic issues, while letting culture chug along at its own speed. This is one of the first things guys like Lenin and Mao ran into when revolutionizing their own countries. There's simply no nut in trying to tell Catholics to stop being Catholic or Buddhists to stop being Buddhist for the sake of ideology. Far better to incorporate vanguard leaders into the church and turn the institution into another organ of the Proletarian Dictatorship.
Cuba and China and Venezuela aren't moving along much slower than Texas or Florida or South Dakota, when it comes to questions of social conservatism. And the countries aren't being shredded by culture-warrior feuds, either. The state bureaucracy is moving at the speed of public enthusiasm for reforms. You know, kinda like a democracy is supposed to operate.
Tfw you have a depatriarchalization department, but no legal abortion.
Totally agree, it's fucking awesome that that have power there. Bolivia's about to get real cool
