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Hi, I'm Jaiden! I'm a trans woman (she/her) from East Germany. I'm studying education in university. I want to change people's lives for the better by teaching my students critical thought, open mindedness, science and empathy. I'm also interested in linguistics, geography (geopolitics and anthropogeography most of all) and music.
I've been a communist since around 2022. I speak german and english fluently and would be happy to do translation work.
Discord: waterlily1234
FIRST SET 1. I stumbled upon it in a comment section on r/TheDeprogram. I've read many articles at this point, but I am always sad when seeing red links or stub pages for topics that I would've been very interested in. I would like to expand on stubs and red links.
2. I like to consider myself a marxist-leninist. Of course I'm always in the process of learning, and, especially when it comes to minorities of which I'm not a part, and the imperial periphery, the labels I indentify with mean little. My actions and my willingness to learn and adapt my opinions, assumptions, and overcome my internalized convictions are the important things.
The path forward is unmistakably socialism. Humanity will always strive towards betterment, as such, it is foolish to believe that capitalism, with all its inherent contradictions, is the best system we can come up with. Socialism is simply the next stept. After that, communism. After that, who knows. That's for smarter people in the far future to decide. Until then, we need to agitate and organize, join unions, protest, go on strikes and form a vanguard party.
3. I also support AES, and critically support anti-imperialist states. The last sentence of the Anti-imperialism topic confuses me, though. Of course communists support workers and oppressed peoples againt their ruling class, in any country. I don't see why that is included in the anti-imperialist section.
That, however, changes nothing about my agreement to the stated principles. I agree with everything in the principles.
4. I am trans (she/her), which was and is definitely part of my radicalization process. My people are oppressed and marginalized to an absurd degree, and it is obvious how my people are exploited as an easy other to rally against. By whom? The ruling class of course: "No it's not capitalism's inherent contradictions making your life miserable, it's the queers!" I will defend my people and fight for our survival, but I also know that the role of the scapegoat is a sort of tabula rasa. After trans people, it's going to be other gays, then black and brown people, then jewish people, and ever so on. This is a trademark of fascism. It is then also evident that facsism is just capitalism in decay. When class struggles rises, capitalism has this neat survival strategy of acknowledging that the working class has got it pretty bad, but then blaming and erasing every minority known to man, just to secure the interests of capital (avoiding socialist revolution). Liberalism is just fascism with a nice façade. The two ideologies are sides of the same coin. All this is to say: yes. Marxists are not Marxists if they don't support the LGBT community.
5. I like Mao Zedong. Generally, the more a leftist is demonized by the West, the greater they are. This is the case with Mao. Stalin is the same in my opinion. Stalin was a great man (although he would humbly disagree). I respect him for leading the USSR, and I very much respect him for defeating the Nazis. I critique him, however, for his immaterialist views on gay people. This is a low-hanging fruit, though, as Stalin was also a product of his time, and was, just like any other human being, shaped by his material reality. Both Stalin and Mao propelled their respective countries forward in terms of industrialization, living standards and overall material conditions, at a rate scarcely seen before or since.
6. Vietnam, Laos, DPRK and Cuba are socialist. China is socialist with chinese characteristics. All those countries bear the hallmarks of socialism: common management of the means of production, worker self-determination, political participation, huge strides in LGBT-rights, good healthcare, almost too many doctors, strides in science and technology, self-reliance, fast building of infrastructure, and, of course, being sanctioned by the imperial core.
7. Settler-colonialism is the process of installing your people in a foreign land and genociding the indigenous peoples away in order to extract resources for profit, and manufacture a new scapegoat population, and perpetuate an idea of new Lebensraum in order to distract from capitalist contradictions. It also seeks to obscure class antagonisms by making every settler technically a part of the land-owning class. It's a form of expansionism that replaces the military with (sometimes) armed civilian settlers, who become the imperialist army by settling. Today's settler colonial states and current settler colonies are: USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Greenland (Denmark) and Israel.
Decolonization should happen by granting the native peoples self determination, so they can decide what should happen with their ancestral lands that have been stolen from them. Realistically, nobody wants to remove jews from occupied Palestine, the ones who were paid by Israel to settle there a decade ago should go back to Europe or America, from where they overwhelmingly came, at least thats what I think. But again, as soon as the Palestenians gain self determination, it's up for them to decide. Migration into my own country is a different story. Black and brown people fleeing to western Europe from the wars we've knowingly caused is NOT colonization. I don't live in a settler colonial state. There is, however, a native non-german ethnic group (the Sorbs in East Germany) and if they wanted self-determination, I would support it, as they are quite obviously oppressed in Germany.
8. It's not a conflict. It is an active genocide and ethnic cleansing of the native palestinian people by the settler colonial entity of Israel. You and 2 million of your people live crammed in an open air concentration camp, isolated from the outside world, and you dare to try to escape this oppression, only for them to do what they did before but a thousand times worse. I (critically) support Hamas. I support Palestininian resistance and freedom.
SECOND SET 4. Similar to religion and interpersonal bigotry, the nuclear family will naturally fade and step down from being the dominant family structure and other structures will gain in popularity. There's no need to prematurely force an end to nuclear family as a viable family structure in my opinion, though a bit of propaganda in favor of alternative family structures is probably a good thing.
3. I haven't read anything specifically about Marxist feminism, but I do support feminism if it is class conscious, materialist and intersectional. I can't imagine that I would disagree with Marxist feminism.
5. The most pressing issue for communists in Germany is definitely the decay of capitalism into fascism. The DDR was fairly wealthy but after the annexation all that capital was funneled to the BRD, leaving East Germany in the perfect conditions for fascist sentiment to fester and spread. Now, western Germany has also reached a sufficient stage of decay. Sadly, I do not think the leftist parties are prepared (or willing) to face that. Die Linke is reformist and revisionist at best. Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht is dogmatic and a vaguely center-left populist cult of personality. MLPD are larpers and antirevisionist. I tried to join der Funke once but it turned out they were trotskyists and all they did was organize book clubs, which was not really what I was looking for. (I don't know if this applies to der Funke in other parts of Germany and Austria aswell, I only can speak for the local offshoot in my city.) Lastly, DKP, which is probably the most competent communist party. They are principled marxist-leninists, but they're also very old-timey and struggle to adapt to how agitation work is done nowadays. I don't consider then anywhere near communist, they're definitely a reactionary force, but, of course there's the infamous Antideutsch movement, which spews zionist propaganda and licks the book of western imperialism, even though the name "antideutsch" had so much polemic potential. Antideutsche coopted the aesthetics of the real Antifa and they call themselves antifascist, antiracist and so on, but of course, this just mimics Hitler's usage of the color red, or the word socialism in national socialism. The real Antifa has it's own problems aswell. It is much too focused on spontaneity instead of actually organizing. That's because they're largely anarchists. As far as I know, there is no relevant Maoist group in Germany. It goes without saying, though, that most of these groups are not really relevant right now. Not quite enough at least. I know Luxemburg said that revolution becomes inevidable after it happened, but in Germany's case, I just don't see it happening.
6. Anarchism, for example, focuses too much on the spontaneous, which is idealistic in my opinion. It also has a problem with the glorification of great induvidual acts of resistance. Anarchists believe that some guy will shoot a nobleman and then because of that there will be a surge of spontaneous rebellion all over the country. This has proven false historically, but even if it were to be true, with no organization or vanguard movement, how can you do anything with random revolts and random acts of martyrdom in random places at random times? Also, there's the problem of the state. Anarchists are strictly anti-hierarchy and see the state as the worst offender of authoritarianism and want to abolish it right away. This is idealist. You need authority to protect your revolution. Proletarians can use the state under their terms, so that it benefits the working class. Only of a socialist revolution is unthreatened by reaction and meddling can and will the state wither away.
7. Imperialism, according to Lenin is mainly 5 things: monopolies, the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, the export of capital, capitalist associations that share the world between themselves, the division of the world among capitalist powers is completed. The IMF and World Bank give loans to overexploited countries in the imperial periphery with interest. Through these uneven loans, wealth from the periphery gets funneled to the imperial core, making said country even more dependent on even more loans. If they refuse to take a loan or elect a progressive leader, the imperial core (mostly the US) sends death squads, assassins, bombs, and installs a fascist puppet regime that will do their bidding. The Belt and Road Initiative is very different, however. It is an infrastructure project by China, in which China gets to use a harbour for example and builds roads, hospitals etc. in return. This has helped de-dollarizarion and is as such an anti-hegemonic strategy. There is a night and day difference between US-imperialism and the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, which seeks to spread wealth and power rather than to consolidate it.
I hope I didn't like write too much, I'm sorry if I did. I am hoping for good feedback!!