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1. Where did you find ProleWiki from? How familiar are you with it? Comment what made you want to join ProleWiki and what areas you are interested in contributing to.
I knew about prolewiki just from googling and things like that in my research, but in my search for an online community after the degradation of twitter, I came upon it through Lemmygrad as I am a part of the community & contribute. I've always wanted a place where I can contribute through research & past skills (I was a front-end engineer), so I figured this could be it.
I would love to help with the things I know - queerness, contributing my knowledge of JavaScript, & other things that I probably can add.
2. What current of Marxist thought do you uphold? Describe as thoroughly as needed your path towards your current political perspective.
I am a Marxist-Leninist - I was radicalized in 2020 after a long disillusionment process from the mid 2010s. There was a wealth of information & I fell in with a lot of ultra-lefts on Twitter, & dealt with a lot of anarchists in organizing which ultimately just made me more angry at the world. After a while I finally started reading Lenin & came across Lemmygrad, after which I've been consistently reading theory. I would say I'm still in my beginning stages of understanding dialectical & historical materialism, but I do know a lot about history in general.
2. Have you read our principles? Comment your agreements or objections to their points.
Yes, in particular I agree with crit & self crit, open repression of reactionary language & chauvinism. Along with the explicit support of queer people.
3. Should Marxists in your country support transgender people, if so then how? Explain gender identity and sexual orientation using dialectical materialism.
Yes, they should. Gender identity & sexual orientation are two ways that the bourgeois class are able to dehumanize people as a deviation from the uniform economic unit of capitalism (the nuclear family). It uses sexism in order to erase the sexual reproductive work of women, & pathologizes deviations from a woman who is obedient to men, working for free.
As the means of production is collectivized through the concentration of capital, the workforce expands to include people of all sexual orientations & gender identities, while the capitalist continues to dehumanize them to increase exploitation of their respective workers. This heightens the contradiction between private & public ownership of the means of production, & as class consciousness rises & capital concentration increases, people are able to overthrow capital.
4. What is your position on Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong? How would you describe their historical role? Share any comments or critiques you have regarding them.
Both were revolutionaries & were subsequently demonized by the West after their deaths. They were the leaders of the movement at completely different times with little overlap, but they both oversaw a large shift to industrialization of their respective productive forces & collectivization of the means of production. They both had different material conditions to work with, but Stalin expanded on Marxism-Leninism through his theory as a great writer & teacher, & Mao did the same.
5. What are your thoughts on China, Vietnam, Cuba, DPRK and Laos? Do you believe any of these countries is socialist? Why or why not?
They are all socialist, as they currently govern through a dictatorship of the proletariat.
6. What is settler-colonialism, are there any countries that still fit that description and what should be done regarding them? Further, what is to be done about the decolonization and liberation of indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities, and immigrant groups in your country?
Settler colonialism is a means through which an imperialist country is able to violently expropriate land from an indigenous population, imposing not only land reforms but imposing their own superstructure upon them, destroying their productive forces & building new ones (or taking them for their own uses).
Most countries in the West still fit the description - the US still continuously does this to their Indigenous population, along with Israel, England, France, Germany, & other members of NATO.
7. What is your analysis of the situation in Palestine? What do you think of the 2023 October 7 events and the groups involved from both sides of the conflict?
Hamas dealt a serious blow to the Israeli state on 10/7, showing that they can circumvent their security apparatus. Since then, Israel has conducted a genocide upon the Palestinian people in Gaza while also increasing the rate of pogroms & military raids in the West Bank, accelerating the development of new settlements.
Hamas has since conducted a guerilla war against the IOF, & has not allowed them to achieve any military objectives. As a result, the IOF command structure is deteriorating & the reserve army is increasing the frequency of refusals. The Israeli government is currently sharpening their own internal contradictions as they carry out an expensive & costly genocide while ignoring their own financial & infrastructural woes (for example reserves leaving their jobs to fight in the war, therefore reducing Israel's productive capacity).
The Palestinian people deserve an end to the occupation of the Zionist government & the Right of Return, along with their own popular government replacing the comprador government of the Palestinian Authority.
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1. In your own words, how would you describe dialectical materialism?
Dialectical materialism is a form of analysis that combines and refines the philosophical idea that was popularized in the early 1800s by Hegel in Germany (dialectics) and materialism. This was developed as a way for the working class to understand their own struggle against the private property owning class of the bourgeoisie. Dialectics entails the ever-present contradictions of things that is the source of motion to matter. Materialism is the understanding that instead of resorting to the clerical nature of idealism, leaving the ability of fully "knowing" up to people who will always "know better", it postulates that we can always know through science, and the things we don't know have simply not been discovered. This allows the working class, developing class consciousness, to shrug off the idealism of previous ruling classes & instead take control of the knowledge of society itself through an analytical & scientific framework instead of relying on other classes to explain the world to us.
2. What are your thoughts on national liberation or the concept of land back (either one)?
It is an integral part of the movement for communism - land back is needed to take back control of the land from the bourgeois system of private ownership, instead instituting a form of collective ownership.
3. Have you read anything on Marxist feminism? What are your perspectives on it?
Some. I'm still in the beginning stages of a more systematic learning of Marxism, but I just read Red Valkyries (which was very critical of Stalin & Lenin) & am familiar with Leslie Feinberg, among others. I think it's a very important part of understanding class struggle, as reproductive work is something that sustains society & develops the productive forces. I also read Silvia Federici's "Caliban & the Witch" but would like to re-read as I didn't have a strong understanding of Marxism when I did.
4. Do you think abolishing the nuclear family should be a goal of the communist movement? If so, how would it be abolished?
Yes. The ability to form different types of family units would create more stability in reproduction. Cuba just passed a family code that gives much more sovereignty to children & the ability for queer families to form in the ways they see fit. This is a big part of giving more stability to marginalized people & contribute to society in new ways.
The nuclear family should be abolished by socializing reproductive care & housework, giving more power to non-patriarchal forms of economic units, & through the collectivization of the productive forces, creating more social relations that will change the way humans see each other sexually & through gender.
5. What do you think is the most pressing issue for communists in your country? What is your opinion of communist parties there?
In the US, it's developing consciousness. There are tons of anarchists in the US & also many Trotskyist orgs along with DSA. The current communist parties must take these newly radicalized people & find a way to reach them. I also think that many of them don't have cadres in smaller cities which makes it hard for them to reach people. The people are currently going through a huge acceleration of fascism, & there is a lot of energy for working class organizing, but it seems to me that they are not yet at a point where they feel a centralized vanguard party would benefit them
6. What do you believe to be the main difference between Marxism and other anti-capitalist movements?
Centralization of the vanguard party - DSA focuses almost exclusively on an electoralism (with few exceptions) & leaves other organizing efforts out to dry, & anarchist groups practice adventurism which risks the energy & lives of people while strengthening the reasoning for repression of the working class.
7. What is Imperialism and how do institutions and programs like the IMF, Belt and Road Initiative, and the World Bank relate to it?
Imperialism is the stage of capitalism where monopolies have expanded into foreign countries, subjugating them in order to take control of & profit from their resources & cheap labor. The IMF & the World Bank provide a centralized system for the West to support them by offering loans to countries who are in dire straits financially, giving them conditions in order to receive the loans, namely neoliberal reforms that destroy the social safety net of the nation & loosen labor laws, allowing foreign capital to come in & exploit resources. They give them a high interest rate as well, to create a compounding inability to pay back the loan.
The BRI was created by China as an alternative to that, giving countries no conditions on what they could spend it on & mostly being spent on public infrastructure that increases country's economic independence. China has also forgiven billions of dollars in loans for poorer countries. The "debt trap" idea that China is trapping countries in debt is a projection of bourgeois intellectuals in the West.
8. Have you read works from Marxists, pertaining but not limited to those from historical or existing socialist states? Please note some that stood out to you and what contributions to Marxist thought that they added and why you liked them.
I was always surprised by how reasonable Stalin & Mao were when I finally read them. On Contradiction by Mao finally made contradictions click for me. I also have read Luna Oi's translation of ML theory from Vietnam that is provided in high school/early college in their education system. I read Adoratsky whose book "The Theoretical Foundation of Marxism-Leninism" was integral to understanding it.
OPTIONAL QUESTIONS (not necessary, but it could give you an advantage):
2. Do you have familiarity or skill with any programming languages or MediaWiki?
I was a front-end engineer in a past life & am happy contributing my knowledge. No experience w/ MediaWiki