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Obligatory: 1. LemmyGrad. Username is the same for consistency's sake. 2. Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, Anti-Imperialism, Left Euro-Skepticism. I grew up an Irish-American dual-citizen in an essentially New England Soc-Dem environment, both influenced by the relative progressiveness and the social-fascist aspects of the political culture. Quitely supported the Occupy movement despite being a bit young to fully understand it, and was moved to use words like "socialism" because of Bernie Sanders. I took a class about the HBO show "The Wire" where the only readings we did were from the Communist Manifesto and the 1844 Manuscripts, and after that my fate was sealed. By the time the 2016 election rolled around I had read through both books I mentioned and kept going. I was learning through whatever leftist content I could find on the internet, and eventually landed on fairly orthodox MLism. I was first influenced by Soc-dems, then Trots, then Maoists, then eventually landed in the "critical support for all AES states" camp, and am happy to be there. CPUSA and YCL member, quite familiar with the external criticisms of the party and am doing what I can to help the party recover from the limitations and errors it has encountered/accrued. 3. Yes. I don't see anything objectionable. Only thing I don't completely agree with is critical support of Iran, my position is more one of passive tolerance; I can't support a country that is so deeply opposed to internal democracy, suppresses the Tudeh party, and executes those who advocate communism or atheism, but I recognize being a foreigner it is not my place to be the one to tell them how to run their country or where in the process of class struggle they should be. Sanctions must be ended in their entirety and Iran should be welcomed into the international community with open arms. 4.The position of Marxists should be with science in all ways it can be, which is to say that we should recognize gender as a social construct, and should recognize gender identity and sexual orientation as more or less biological or innate and certainly unchangeable. While it is up to the population of any given country how they will handle these issues, Marxist parties must stand firmly on the side of the oppressed including LGBTQ people.
Optional: 1. The five countries mentioned are all in the socialist process. To my understanding, the country with the strongest DotP and least private property is the DPRK, but I also understand its economy to be deeply sabotaged by sanctions. I don't think there is a "best" socialist country, but I support all of them. I am hoping to visit China in the coming years, and find their successes in combatting poverty and raiseing standards of living and quality of life to be the most inspiring thing to be happening right now. 2. I think Mao's analysis is essentially right: 70% right, 30% wrong. I consider him to be among the most constructive, helpful, and considerate leaders to have ever lead a country, and I believe those are some of the qualities we need to succeed in our goals. 3. I think it is a complicated and multifaceted concept that I don't understand nearly as well as the Marxist philosophers who have dealt with it. In its most practical sense, I understand it to be the application of dialectical thinking and materialist philosophy to historical and political-economic analysis. It means different things in different contexts, but the most central dialectic in Marxist thinking is that of class. It goes that there is an inherent, fundamental contradiction between those who claim the surplus value of others labor through some conceptualization of property and those who are bound to work. The problems caused by this contradiction cannot be solved so long as the material contradiction still exists between those who own and those who work. There are of course other dialectics and dialectical relationships but I am not as well suited to discuss them as others. 4. I'd like to essentially assign myself research projects or books to read that I can draw from to add to articles. There are many articles on here but many are essentially stubs, so I would like to (more so in the off seasons as in my misfortune I am still a college student) fill in some of those articles. 7. Complicated but generally positive. I would disagree with Sakai's argument that there are no white proletarians as this is just obviously not true. At the same time, I recognize his book as being a great chronicle of the ways that minority workers have been betrayed and abused by white workers. I am fully in support of returning land to indigenous groups, and think that settler-colonial states should be disbanded as such and reconstituted along proletarian internationalist lines, meaning the centering of indigenous perspective, experience, culture, and language in the new societies. 9. I don't think it should be a goal as such, I think the dissolution of the family is a distant phenomenon that will only be realized gradually. I don't think we should make a point of trying to end or alter the family unit, we should instead passively facilitate the transition by changing broader social conditions and allow people to associate the ways they see fit.