It's all like this. I don't even understand where the stuff in this page is coming from, but "coercion and violence of communist rule" is once again just thrown in there.

Also this book seems to really be looking down on the working class from my reading, although I suppose it tries to highlight some issues. Not to mention all the discourse about social capital or other types of capital, but never actual capital.

This also reads like a weird sort of celebration of neoliberalism as inevitable, but then again I am just so tired of reading stuff like this that I am probably not giving it much credit.

Book is called "masculinity, labor and neoliberalism".

So what are your plans for May Day 2024?

I am thinking we will go visit a Red memorial and watch the ceremony there, then maybe some marching and singing with comrades.

Maybe it isn't about good/bad, maybe consider anti-imperialism?

(An anarchist account from Masto that has quite the following so posting here, but without links.)

Edit. Added a link to the thread because it keeps getting boosted to my timeline by Western "leftists" and I think it deserves to be dunked on.

Yesterday I boosted a post over on Mastodon that was a sort of meme about all the ridiculous ways the US thinks China is spying on it. It was then commented on by a comrade, a Vietnam refugee who has almost died of polio back in the day in a refugee camp. To this then a "Finnish leftist" follower of mine had the nerve to descend and started sealioning and schooling this other person on all the lib talking points about China, like Uyghur genocide. Threw in Russia and "our brave smol bean country struggle" of fighting Russia for centuries.

Then today I got the latest edition of our Left Alliance newspaper. It opens with an editorial headlined: "Russia is still warmongering, alone". This is saying that Russia and Russia alone is and has and will do all the pushing for war. The link is to this, but its paywalled and in Finnish for which I am sorry (can take a pic of the editorial later if someone wants it, will still be in Finnish though and its really not worth anyones time).

Then we have a presidential election here, also strikes going on.

In my uni none of my lecturers took part in the walkout, the only measure the labor aristro union got together, they were all like "can't disrupt a legally chosen government".

The two presidential candidates are both turbo level neolibs. Basically Macron, times two. They perfectly embody our situation here and if you don't vote for either you are a bad person for democracy.

If anyone is familiar with the history of Finland and the very strong fascict project we had and have here it is both scary and depressing to see the level in which this liberal thought and rewriting of history has saturated most minds in my lifetime. I remember as a young adult when the capitalist takes on things like finlandization still got pushback. It feels like it all fell apart as the Soviet fell and neoliberalism was made hegemonic.

The takes I see today about this country and its history and on world politics and history are all ahistorical carbage that is so hegemonic you can't even start to debate on it as what people think they know, is so far removed from what actually happened, the gap would need years of re-education to breach.

I sometimes think about all this and feel like here the fash have already won. They did win originally too, but we had some progressive forces and the Soviet right there that kept them in a sort of leash, but not a day went by without them pushing their right wing anti-communist propaganda on everything. Media, entertainment, arts, public discourse. Everything. Even comics were brought here with the capitalist mission in mind as the capitalist class wanted to re-educate the working class fully after the civil war.

The nationalistic rise in the beginning of the 90s was when they reframed the ww2 war time in its entirety and we all bought the winter war myths and other crap.The nazi soldiers that Germany trained for us were framed 100% as heroes for example. There were an endless parade of teary eyed veterans and Karelian refugees talking about the scary Soviet and the price of our independence. I bought a of it at the time too. There was never a mention of the nazi question. Not in school, not in public discourse. This has sufraced just in the last few years and has mostly been swept under the rug, but there are some good studies and writing by the petty bourge academics on how leftists were treated here during the war. None of this reaches the mainstream though, our media is all controlled by the capitalist class.

I think a part of why making people see the fascism here is that if they did, they would have to admit to themselves that we were and are on the wrond side of history and for all the wrong reasons.

This makes for one lonely place to be a communist. Even though I have my kid and partner who are also comrades, the rest of my social surroundings mostly feels hopeless. I look at the endless liberal whining about this and that on social media or listen to it in real life, and all I want to do is yell to them to read even one book outside the isle of "How to be the most obnoxiously privileged & clueless, but confident Nordic person."

We do have a communist workers party, I get that newspaper too. It's like a handful of peoole who are very stigmatized and shunned by being comrades. This took the capitalist about 100 years to reach, but they got there. There is no Left left here now. How do we come back from this?

Currently have covid, so does my partner, vaccinated and boosted as we can be in the country we are in. My partner is not doing so well. We got covid from my ultralib vaccinated relatives who bullheadedly want to do normal, whatever the cost. They announced the coughs they were sporting at the Christmas table were just "lingering symptoms from past colds".

This as the background to a post I saw on social media today stating that someone had avoided their anti-vaxx relatives for five years and this year went to see them and got covid. Like that is the sole reason they got it. The comment section was full of libs lolling at the stupid anti-vaxxers and wishing well to this vaccinated hero that was sick.

Not one mention of masks, of barriers to vaccination. Of the fact that to visit someone people sit in crowded planes unmasked without a care in the world, risking everyone who is immunocompromized for example. But yes, the anti-vaxxers are the only problem... (not saying it isn't a problem)

All this made me think on how "vaccinated for covid" has turned into a kind of VOTE! Once that bit is done, the liberal mind can turn its attention back to all the important consuming and status maintenance it needs to sustain its relevance. And the blame of everything is handily placed on a new outgroup, one that gets stereotyped and Othered much the same way all forms of perceived deviance have. I mean has anyone been able to aid with the obvious trust issues that people have in institutions by ridiculing them?

I don't know, the anti-vaxxer discourses have started to wear thin on me, just like the endless laughing at Trump supporters did. They seem to repeat a pattern that is just hard to overlook.

I am taking part in a uni course about the Feminist revolution in Iran. The lecturer has been going over the Iranian revolution in 1979 in a very, shall we say, interesting way.

I do not want to discredit their pov on this as I am obviously a Westoid, but the way this is being framed is that before the revolution things were better for women. The lecturer said the revolution happened because people disliked the Shah having more than others, but she did not elaborate this in any way. One would think the complaints of people were pretty big for them to start a revolution? But I know very little about this.

After the revolution women were to have equal rights, but over the next years the dictatorship which is named as Islamic removed them and things like the hijab became mandatory. She stated that people were given false promises and betrayed and this is why the people sided with the revolution. Where does this framing come from? Was it the same people going for revolution that ended up in places of power?

Now my understanding is that the social democratic movement there was destroyed by the West in the 50s and the following twenty+ years under the Shah led to a sort of pseudorevolution that wasn't entirely progressive in nature. Is this correct or wrong?

Also how did the revolutionary force become so deeply conservative? The lecturer told us that before this there was no national religion as such and things like wearing a scarf were personal choices. This was then turned into a mandatory thing starting from workplace dresscode to eventually all public life, however at home people to this day do not follow these norms.

The Women Life Freedom movement is then a result of the way these last decades have eroded all womens rights.

I will include the following questions as well:

If this reactionary tendency in societies is always high, how do we make sure our revolution does not lead to something like this? Or was this all external influence?

If we accept that there always tends to be external influence, what can we do to make sure the reactionary force does not get on top and be in a position to dictate things like womens rights? (I am spesifically thinking of Hamas in Palestine now being the force that is driving change, if they stay in power, won't that easily result in a second Iran when it comes to Islamic nationalism/minority rights?)

How then can we engage in critical support of operators who have a high chance of creating systems of oppression?

Any history on Iran, feminism and ML and other thought very welcome.

So, going to be taking part in a protest next week against the cuts our right wing gov is pushing. This will be a university protest, essentially a campus takeover that doesn't really take over anything.

The organizers want to do it in ways that doesn't really disrupt classes or cause any real disturbance, but is instead a "statement" on how the students are againts the proposed austerity policy.

This feels very in line with the civilized socdem way that changes absolutely nothing. I will go, but am thinking if there are ways to make this be more effective. Maybe use it as a place to spread the ideas of Marxism?

Currently in a country that is working its way into banning communism, not for the first time.

I have spent some days deep in the rabbit hole of reading the stories of the communist in my country from the beginning of the 1900s up to WW2 and the way they were treated. About all the things that actually happened here that I was never taught in school. Horrible violence.

And I am just so angry. And feel deeply betrayed. And somehow soiled. I have cheered on the war veterans and heroes due to my f'n programming in the past. I have shat on those who this fascist regime left behind on purpose after being fed literal lies about my own history. Pretty sure the other half of my family has literally taken part in the fascicst project here and they always played the victim.

And I have lost the opportunity to listen to my other grandfather who was Red, to really talk to him, ask questions and understand. He is long dead now, when he was still here I probably wouldn't have listened and maybe he was too scared to ever really talk about all that really happened in his lifetime.

I am just angry. And sad. We were absolutely on the wrong side of history and turned it into pride, it's disgusting.

And if I try to mention any of this to the brainwormed people around me they look the other way or roll their eyes. And at the same time spend incredible amounts of time and energy at being outraged with the right-wing government while at the same time advancing Othering and cheering on war. It is literally the same path we were on in the 1930s.

How has an entire country been able to whitewash its own history so completely that almost nobody in it no longer understands what is going on? How has the capitalist class been this succesfull at this.

Just a rant, not going to fall into despair, but boy am I just angry.

Yesterday had a long conversation with a labor aristrocratic family member, age millenial and working in tech.

He announced things like: -China is a horrible Orvellian surveillance state, you (talks to me) have no idea how horrible it is there. Haven't you seen the videos?

I try to cautiously reply that surveillance capitalism is pretty intense in the West as well and that we don't really get good or balanced information from China. He goes:

-So you sayig something like Zero Covid was the right choice?

I am hesitant to reply with a yes as this person is clearly already very fired up and confrontational. But I try to point out things about how nobody in 2020 knew how bad it might and how many will die, how people in the West are still dying, how the virus isn't in any way bening even now and how it's pretty dystopian too that here we are just sacrificing people for capitalism now and choose to ignore it.

I did say I think it was better to save people to which he said that I am a nihilist.

I also tried to explain the State outside the capitalist project and protecting multitudes not individuals, individualism and such, but he was not receiving it.

He then told me how bad the country is as he saw in the Grand Tour how they have built a highway over a rainforest that nobody uses.

I asked him where does he think all the roads and buildings in the West are built if not on top of nature. The argument as critizism of China made no sense to me whatsoever.

Later this same person said to me that we as a society have no hope and there is no point in protesting, no point in doing anything but riding out the rest of our time to climate disaster. I tried to point out to him that a socialist state can be born from capitalism, but only if we the people develop initiative for it and understand our current condition.

Same guy also did admit that voting no longer works, the EU was a mistake and it's grim how all our state systems have been privatized and are now in the hands of corpotations like Microsoft.

Now, I don't even know where to start with this one. He very much represents his part of the population here and the deep apathy and negative thought that they harbor.

He still understands and thinks that the regulated capitalism of the 70-80s here (keynesian) was the best part of our history, but when I told him that it still was always going to lead to fascism and monopolies (told him to read Marx) he ignored this. Very much the "it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" mindset.

And my question is, how do we as communists reach these people? These people actually have power (capital), but the petty bourge status has made them like this. However climate chance does not discriminate so I feel this part of society is facing a new conflict from a historical standpoint where nature says no to exploitation. And this seems to lead to apathy.