Permanently Deleted
OP this reads like my 20s so let me tell you what I’ve seen of that experience in hindsight:
Bitterness comes easy when you’re young, especially if you’ve managed to develop a class conciousness. But as you get older and your body gets shittier and maybe you start a family, you realize that you’re not gonna see the end of this thing. That you won’t be the one standing over capitalism’s grave, you’re just another body in the pile our descendants will have to climb to get there.
Realizing that turns all your resentment and spite to ash. Anger’s still there, sure, but less at individuals and more at the system itself. You start to see people as products of their environment, whose individual experience of privilege is out of your control and usually not worth the high blood pressure getting angry about.
By all means take your time felling resentful, if that’s what you need right now. But those feelings may just fade on their own if you let them.
I think of this as crude class consciousness. The ability to see the injustices of class but the inability to see that the people without class consciousness are being influenced by the system and need to be broken out of it. It’s not their fault that they’re influenced by the system, their attitudes are a product of being a victim of the system and environment in a different way.
Crude class consciousness grants people the ability to see various injustices and perform class analysis while a true class consciousness grants an absolute love for the class and everyone in it. Fred Hampton’s speech here is a pretty good example of this, where he talks about it being a mistake to think you’re better than “the people”, and how important it is for everything to be based in an absolute love for them.
I think the difference is looking at things from the individual perspective vs the collective perspective.
I don’t disagree with some of this, but think I do on a couple parts. I don’t want this to come off as a dismissal though, I do agree with a good amount of it.
I think, from my perspective, I’ve spent a number of decades creating all kinds of different communities, online and offline and also as a job for companies. An aspect of community building is liking the people including the bad ones, in part because there’s not a whole lot you can do about them unless you purge them (not always the best approach) and in part because the drama certain elements bring is entertaining, and another part being that over time you can watch these people grow and change too.
I apply this same experience to spreading the red, to lifting more and more people out of ignorance and into consciousness. Yes this sounds very pretentious and you’re absolutely right to take a stab at that because describing it that way sounds like dogshit but I do not have a better way to describe it. Education is the only tool we have and education creates consciousness and I have personally watched it create an unbelievable number of reds. Will those reds be revolutionaries? Not right now, I agree. But we have zero ability to affect the material conditions. We can only spread the red until the material conditions are right and then watch and hope that we have spread enough red that flips revolutionary under the deteriorating conditions.
I like the shits in the communities I build, communities are sort of like weird ant farms and I enjoy sitting back and watching them after putting work in to build and foster them. I also like the people, including the shit ones, the ones who haven’t yet flipped, etc etc.
As an aside to this – I really think that the trans community using “egg” has parallels to radicalisation. There is a socialist red egg-cracking that occurs.
So Mao’s advice here is directed at Communist party members in a military organization actively engaged in a war of national liberation (CPC members at the outset of the Second Sino-Japanese War). I doubt Mao intended for party members to waste their breath debating politics with their national and class enemies (in this case Imperial Japan and the KMT, respectively). If a person is a comrade, then it is worth taking time to argue about ideology and strategy in a respectful manner in appropriate venues. If a person is not a comrade this effort can be wasteful or counterproductive.
The alternative is to leave people alone if they have no material interest in changing society in the way you want to see it changed. Find your allies and do politics with them. I have known several people who rent out rooms in houses they own. I don’t seek out opportunities to inform them that as a class landlords oppress and immiserate renters as a class. If someone I know is a member of a reactionary labor union I don’t tell them how much I prefer the politics of more left-wing unions. People generally know what side their bread is buttered on. It’s just way more sensible to discuss politics with members of your own class in the context of political projects. I’m taking the time to express my conflicting interpretation of Mao here because I think our politics are more or less aligned and we both have a genuine interest in understanding the passage. In my reading Mao is advising on personal conduct within a revolutionary collective, not within the society as a whole. It’s an important distinction.
uh actually mao didnt order anything of the sort, he just didnt prosecute people that did :mao-wave:
I’m just going to assume this isn’t a bit, so if this is :bait: congrats you got me. I can’t speak with authority on the entire history of the CPC’s land reform efforts, but I can point to a relevant section of an English language book on Chinese history that deals with this very topic during the period of time when Mao was writing and distributing “Combat Liberalism”. From “In Search of Modern China” by Jonathan Spence (1991), chapter 14, subhead “Wuhan Summer, Canton Winter”:
In late 1926 and early 1927 there had been notable signs of peasant unrest in China. In some areas the peasants had seized the land for themselves, formed “poor peasants associations” to run their communities, and publicly paraded, humiliated, and in many cases killed the more hated of the local landlords. Peng Pai had had dramatic success in forming radical peasant associations near Canton, until they were counterattacked by landlord forces. Mao Zedong, who had risen while in Canton to become director of the Guomindang’s Peasant Movement Training Institute, also had several opportunities in 1925 and 1926 to propagandize CCP views in the Hunan countryside, especially around Changsha. In February 1927, after the Northern Expedition had passed through the region, he took the time to study what was happening and wrote an excited report for a local CCP journal.
Mao was particularly impressed by the power of the poor peasants and their political consciousness. “They raise their rough, blackened hands and lay them on the heads of the gentry,” he wrote. “They alone are the deadliest enemies of the local bullies and evil gentry and attack their strongholds without the slightest hesitation; they alone are able to carry out the work of destruction.” The CCP, he noted, could take the initiative with these peasant stalwarts if it chose: “To march at their head and lead them? To follow in the rear, gesticulating at them and criticizing them? To face them as opponents? Every Chinese is free to choose among the three.” But Mao implied that it would be folly to ignore this immense potential force. If one assessed the 1926-1927 “democratic revolution” on a ten-point scale, he observed, then the “urban dwellers and the military rate only three points, while the remaining seven points should go to the peasants in their rural revolution.”
Also it may be helpful to review Mao’s “How to Differentiate the Classes in the Rural Areas”, written a few years later in 1933. Here he describes in plain language rural class distinctions as he understood them at the time.
WTF is a peasant landlord? No. Mao didn’t kill any of those because they don’t exist. A peasant by definition owns little to no land.
I’m fucking dying I called them the kumbaya contingent and that was a bridge too far. Middle class people, lmao
I’m gonna dissent from the majority opinion here and say: fuck them, you don’t owe them shit just because they’ve begun to exhibit some baseline sympathy for the less fortunate that should be expected of any human being.
Being a good leftist doesn’t require you to engage with people who have traumatized you, especially if they haven’t taken any steps to make amends.
I learned from a young age that I should assume that every Cracker is a racist until proven otherwise. I think that coming to that realization was harder on me than living with that realization.
you don’t want to feel bad, and you recognize that the reason you feel bad is because of your past.
this doesn’t seem like a theory problem. chase down a therapist and talk to them about it.
