FIRST SET:
1. I found ProleWiki from posts on lemmygrad.ml and lurked a bit initially to educate myself on theory I was interested in (e.g. Maoism). Requesting an account now after responding to CriticalResist's post looking for PHP devs, since I have experience. I'm interested in helping maintain the codebase and add already requested features, as well as add some functionality I've beem dreaming about myself. For example, I really like the essays space and think it would be really cool if one day it could get federated with ActivityPub, at least in one direction, so that people on federated Mastodon/Lemmy/etc instances could comment on and engage with the content. Additionally, I think some blend between Medium-style comments (where you can highlight a specific section of a blogpost and comment on it, with the most commented on areas staying highlighted to newcomers so they can see the discussion) and https://github.com/edemaine/coauthor where discussion can be expanded in-line after a paragraph could be useful for both the Essays section and the Library, where these comments could be used as a way to engage in reading groups. These comment threads could also be federated one day. Ultimately, I think ProleWiki could be a serious tool not only for educating oneself but also for novel socialist thought and development.
2. I am a Marxist-Leninist (and possibly Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, though I will have to learn more). I have always considered myself a radical and thought that only radical change would be enough to truly make positive change. Ultimately, engaging with Soviet history was what finally radicalized me to Marxism-Leninism, as layers of anti-Soviet strawman propaganda was peeled away and revealed to me what is to be done.
3. I agree with the principles and agree broadly, especially with the distribution of copyrighted material. One part of this I am worried about from a purely ProleWiki-survival standpoint is the effect of intellectual property lawyers sending bourgeois legal trouble ProleWiki's way if specific files are crawled and match some copyrighted material search they run (I'm not sure if they actually do this but I think it's probable). For this reason, I think we should encourage distributing copyrighted material in the ProleWiki-native format, that is, wiki pages. So instead of hosting lots of PDFs, I think we should make an effort to OCR or otherwise retype the material and host the derivative material on the wiki, both to make it easier to engage with and to deter these kinds of scraping attacks.
4. Gender is constructed and on a spectrum, and Marxists must support the LGBT community. I hope to learn more about gender from LGBT comrades, and am particularly interested in an understanding of it based in dialectics.
5. Stalin and Mao were great philosophers and leaders, and they founded two of the greatest socialist states in history. Without Stalin, there would be no USSR as he helped gain funds in the early days through any means necessary, and successfully ended the NEP to transform the USSR into a truly socialist state under his leadership. Without Mao, there would be no PRC and On Contradiction remains one of the foremost works in dialectical materialism. I am also very interested in the Maoist understanding of the relationship between the peasantry, the proletariat, the petit bourgeoisie, the liberals, and generally the dialectic substructure underneath the overall proletariat-bourgeoisie contradiction. I believe any errors they made were understandable, far outweighed by the grueling horror of semi-feudal capitalism, and even necessary in their respective historical contexts.
6. I believe China, Vietnam, the DPRK and Laos are socialist, and are at various stages in their dialectical evolution. Though reforms have been made which are pro-capitalist, I think it is anti-Marxist to believe that their existence admits a permanent concession to capitalism rather than an intermediate stage in the course of history. These countries are materially socialist in that they will prefer help the working class over the bourgeoisie during periods of turmoil rather than the other way around.
7. Settler-colonialism is a form of imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, that not only extracts labor coercively from the indigenous population, but also forcibly displaces and enslaves them. The United States and Israel are settler-colonial nations, and I think it is even helpful to view the United States through the lens of Israel (as in, seeing the parallels in their development, their national propaganda, and mythology) to understand its genocidal and still-settler core, especially given their longstanding international alignment. Land repatriation is a must of both of these countries, in addition to national sovereignty and communist cooperation. Ethnic minorities and immigrants must be protected and their cultures maintained and celebrated as part of a multicultural communist society, and we must also understand the materialist factors that are forcing them to emigrate so that an immigrant underclass does not form out of exploitation, and so immigration is out of liberated movement and not economic coercion.
8. I think the resolve of the Palestinean people is inspiring, especially their tactics in overwhelming the over-engineered and extravagant Iron Dome oppression system in a decidedly proletarian fashion on October 7. As Fanon said, "for us who are determined to break the back of colonialism, our historic mission is to authorize every revolt, every desperate act, and every attack aborted or drowned in blood." Israel is a parasitic settler nation that simply would not exist without the thousands of Palestinian wage-slaves (their current extreme labor shortage reveals as much) and the continuous weapons and cash infusions from the United States, much like how the United States is a parasitic settler-state that would not have existed without the enslavement of indigenous and African peoples and cash infusions from Europe. The Palestinian struggle is a righteous one, and I wish their coalition the best in overcoming one of the most horrific and genocidal states.
SECOND SET:
1. Dialectical materialism is the dialectical thought of Hegel as applied by Marx, who understood that material labor is the base of society and how it reproduces itself. It understands history as a series of contradictions between the haves and have-nots, each contradiction being sublated through revolution to give rise to the next mode of production. Even though details may vary from society to society, similar stages will be identifiable. The classical presentation is from primitive-communism to slavery to feudalism to capitalism, and eventually, communism in the future. I am eager to learn more Hegel, Marx and other dialectical philosophers so that I may understand more fine-grained subcontradictions better, their causes, and actions in a dialectical fashion.
2. I believe that national liberation is important, though it sometimes becomes twisted in imperalist countries to become a kind of bourgeois/facist nationalism rooted in racism. National liberation is crucial for the oppressed nations of the world and is nonsense when applied to imperialist powers. Land back is a must for oppressed nations to gain true liberation from settler-colonial imperialist states.
4. The nuclear family should be abolished as it is purely a tool of surplus value extraction: from the children as obedient workhorses; from the traditional wife as an unpaid and unfree housekeeper and child-rearer; and from the husband as the traditional "provider" which is nothing more than an opiate to distract from the the true economic value that the family should be receiving. The family unit should be abolished like the Communist Manifesto notes, and replaced by a communal system with heteronormativity abolished, sexual liberation among adults, and children raised communally (though not necessarily always together) like in pre-capitalist societies.
6. The main difference between Marxism and other anti-capitalist movements is its grounding in strong theory and ability to power miracles like the USSR and the PRC. While I critically support any anti-capitalist movement, Marxism-Leninism provides a more thorough understanding of economic forces and how they evolve as opposed to any dogmatic idea which can easily be co-opted by the bourgeois state (e.g. the anti-Marxist idea of degrowth which has been spun as anti-capitalist, even though it only serves to weaken the working class and impoverish the poor firther).
8. I have read the Communist Manifesto, Anti-Dühring, and On Contradiction. Though I have much more to learn, even from these texts themselves, I liked their ability to provide a consistent understanding that matches material reality, leaving no stone unturned. There are an infinity of lies, but only one truth, and these works' dialectical materialism stood out as being able to explain as well as predict history through a rigorous application of dialectics which simultaneously rules out an infinity of false ideas and also provides a consistent correct interpretation, which is a marker of truth in my view.
OPTIONAL QUESTIONS (not necessary, but it could give you an advantage):
1. I think the application could be made so that there is a text box after every question instead of a big one at the end. If this was done for purely technical reasons, I can try and help implement this myself. I also would appreciate a way to request an account without providing an email, just a username and password like on lemmygrad.
2. I have experience with many programming languages, including PHP, which is the main area I am hoping to contribute in for ProleWiki. I am also interested in using functional languages that still compile or interop with PHP to work on more advance ProleWiki features, like phel-lang.org