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| FIRST SET (please answer all 8 questions):
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| 1. I've been active on Reddit for a long time and heard about Prolewiki from an AMA session its staff/adminstrators recently did on the Deprogram subreddit. As to how familiar I am with Prolewiki, I'm not exactly knowledgeable with its individual editors, but I think I'm aware enough about your positions and content to respect it. I'd like to contribute to mostly historical subject which aren't as widely discussed in Leninist circles (the feudal mode of production and other pre-capitalist economic modes, nature of commodity production and currency under pre-industrial society, etc.).
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| 2. Being interested in involving myself with Prolewiki, it's a given that I'm a Marxist-Leninist ideologically. As to my political background, I grew up in a rather conservative and reactionary family, despite being proletarian, and I did little to resist that being such a young age. My perspectives began to shift left-ward after entering secondary education and seeing the classist (I personally dislike that term as everything in capitalism is orientated towards a class prospective, but I still feel it's appropriate in this setting) and generally dysfunctional state of the education system as it existed in my economically poor town: the poor students (including me) were virtually thrown to the way-side into a future life of wage-slavery without the prospect of being able to afford post-secondary education. Meanwhile, the petite-bourgeois "middle-class" students constantly received attention and rewards and were entitled to a life of relative comforts.
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| While I was dismissive of the class divide in my community (and elsewhere) as being just the "natural order", that changed rapidly when I suffered multiple traumatic experiences, some inflicted by petite-bourgeois peers, and the "final straw" which killed to conservatism inside of me was when I was targeted by the police and eventually expelled from my educational institution. I don't want to go into these details here as they are besides the topic, but I would like to say that these events demonstrated that the system only viewed me as a wage-working tool at best and criminal at worst. Knowing this, I later began to study the works of anti-capitalist writers, eventually encountering the books of Marx and others. While I didn't really pay much mind to communism before, their words resonated with me in a very profound way. After months of purging anti-communist programming, I grew politically into a Marxist-Leninist and never looked back.
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| 3. I've been familiarized with them and have no major objections. I'm not sure of if these were actually democratically decided, but I know I have much more to learn about this site's community.
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| 4. I understand gender as a way of expression which a person can find in their life. Marxists should support LGBTQ+ struggles and incorporate it into our political programs.
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| 5. I support Stalin as a student of Leninist and the other Marxists before him and the leader of the world's first socialist project. He definitely made mistakes, but none that would make this support null and void. Mao did lots of great work too, defeating Japanese imperialism in China and liberating his country from the fascist Guomintang. As with Stalin, Mao made mistakes, but in a period of uncertainty of turmoil like China in the 20th century, nobody couldn't have.
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| 6. China, Vietnam, and Laos are undergoing a market socialist phase in the path of their respective revolutions, just like the NEP in the Soviet Union. Socialism can't be built in an atmosphere of semi-feudalism and poverty, and any "Marxist" who says to the contrary is an idealist in rejection of dialectical materialism. Cuba and Socialist Korea have been able to maintain their planned economies with limited compromises, and that's equally well considering their material circumstances. I fully support Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, Juche, and other Leninist trends as creative applications of Marxism to the material conditions of these countries.
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| 7. Settler-colonialism is a type of colonialism which involves the brutal genocide and expulsion of a native population and replacement with overseas colonists. The United States, for one, was created this way and its legacy is still being felt by the indigenous peoples in its borders who are still facing discrimination, being forced onto concentration-camp-like conditions in the form of "reservations". Other countries like "Israel" are fully settler-colonial in that their white Jewish population is bribed with land stolen by the native Palestinian inhabitants along with other factors. Countries which can be considered as being under this label should undergo decolonization and return the land stolen from their native population based on the consensus of said natives.
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| The oppressed peoples of these countries, for example, organize national liberation struggles, like with the one led by Hamas in Palestine. We can look towards the concept to national self-determination too. Besides that, I image that's a question better solved by oppressed nationalities themselves.
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| 8. Palestine has been continually oppressed for almost a hundred years by Zionist settlers and their Western imperialist backers. According to United Nations law, the Palestinians have every right to defend themselves against the terrorist State of "Israel" as even peaceful means have been exhausted with the Zionist colonialists. The Palestinians view and support Hamas as the leading force in their liberation struggle, so even if they aren't communist, we have to critically support Hamas so long as they take this place.
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| The Palestinian (counter-)offensive in early October was fully justified. While some Western media outlets make up stories of supposed atrocities done by the national liberation fighters, these are all generally propaganda to hide the massively largely crimes of the "Israeli" fascist government. Unfortunately, the offensive was used as an excuse by the "Israeli" "Defense" Force to re-escalate their genocidal campaign against the Palestinians at least in the West Bank. I as a communist hope the best for the Palestinians in their struggle against their fascist "Israeli" oppressors. Zionism is antisemitism and modern fascism.
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| SECOND SET (choose 5 questions to answer):
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| 1. Dialectal Materialism is one of the key parts of Marxism. It turns the idealist dialectics of Hegel and turns them on their head into a realistic base for understanding society. Historical materialism is the application of Dialectal Materialism to the study of historical economic development.
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| 2. I think my last answers cleared up my position on national liberation and land back, but to restate it, national liberation struggles are waged against imperialism and generally supported by the people of that oppressed nationality, even if not communist, making them progressive. Land back and associated movements are progressive in that they reverse centuries are oppression and genocide and return land which belongs to the people it was stolen from.
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| 3. The most pressing issue is how to creatively apply Marxism-Leninism to local conditions and create a proper vanguard party from the most advanced members of the working class. My country also needs to address issues of oppression against ethnic groups and the like. I think Mao Zedong and Kim often gives good analysis on the need to clear out dogmatism to apply theory to local conditions.
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| 4. Imperialism can be simply understood as the "final arena" of capitalism, or monopoly capitalism. This is where massive firms extract superprofits from less developed countries (the Global South) and often compete among themselves to divide and redivide the world, like during the First World War. Organizations like the IMF and World Bank assist imperialism by putting countries in mountains of dept in order to force these impoverished countries into economic slavery to the imperialist countries, although the Belt and Road Initiative does essentially the opposite of this: giving countries the resources they need for further development through mutual development, led by the socialist country of China.
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| 5. I've read the "classic" theorists of Marxist states like Vladimir Lenin, Stalin, (USSR) Mao, (PRC) and Kim Il-Sung (DPRK). I found Lenin somewhat hard to understand at first but I think Stalin helped in making it easy to digest, especially in Foundations of Leninism, which laid the "groundwork" for our modern form of Marxism-Leninism. I liked Mao Zedong's works which gave contributions to dialectical materialism, like On Contradiction. I think Kim Il-Sung had interesting ideas on the relation between the nation and socialism, but I find his works to be more restricted to Korea and therefore not as meaningful to Marxism-Leninism in general.
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| OPTIONAL QUESTIONS (not necessary, but it could give you an advantage):
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| 1. I personally think that some of the questions demands that you restate views which you've already expressed, especially with the questions relating to national liberation and land back. I also think that these could be shorter, but I image that this length is needed to deter spammers and vandals.
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| 2. I've done edits on Wikipedia, but only as an IP, not as a registered user. However, I think learning its aspects should be made easier with my understanding of HTML, which seems to be very similar to the hypertext language used to edit wikis. On top of that, I also know Python, Applesoft BASIC, and have studied some amount of C+ and worked with CSS.
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