Welcome again to everybody. Make yourself at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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My wife and I got into a huge fight over politics. In the fight I learned that she talks about me with her older brother who is a USA Navy vet with a liberal degree in History and Political science by her screaming at me that “my brother is right, you’re just a fucking Stalin worshipping tankie.” Says I’m ignoring history in that “he killed millions.”
I deserved being screamed at. I made a jab at her not doing anything to help the political situation because she refuses to go out with me to DSA or CPUSA, but she just started doing the “red card” thing that she learned from radlibs like this blond white woman who’s a lawyer (I can’t remember the name). Which is not enough and wont work for very long (her brother and I agree on that), but she has massive clinical depression right now, and she needs to find something to make her feel useful.
This is the fourth time we’ve fought over politics. She doesn’t like to talk about politics with me because I always steer it to democrats being fuckers, which “is a very MAGA thing to do.” Then she’ll blame me and “do nothing” Jill Stein voters for making Trump happen. I shit on dems so much to show how complicit they are, but she’s “already aware they are terrible people (except Sanders and AOC) but at least they are trying.”
I am the one who continues to push for us to talk about it, because we are both alone in our reading. It’s something that we need to talk about. She would be an excellent communist as her literal ideal world is communism, but she won’t detach from the liberal safehaven. I’ve said somethings that I believe have made her think for a second. It looked like she was listening when I talked about why I want to get into armed training, but doesn’t understand why I have to be the one. I feel as if she heard me when I said “I don’t want to be violent, I’m a scrawny ass teacher. There were people in the past revolutions who didn’t want to either, but your freedom is not given, it’s fought for.”
She wants to read Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism by Kristen Ghodsee after I’m done with that. I think it would help a bit, but I sometimes feel like I’m reading a radlibs take on the ussr and Stalin, which I think would make my wife double down. Some other comrades have said the author is a communist but advocates for eurocommunism, iirc.
I’m just venting. I don’t really know what I’m gonna do at this point. She doesn’t want me to leave, I don’t want to leave her, so it’s a matter of coming to an agreement and setting boundaries for political talk. I don’t feel like we’re comrades. It’s mostly my fault. I assume that she isn’t aware of how evil dems are, and so I get condescending. I’m not being a good husband and listening to her worries. I’m glad I have therapy soon…
I actually had something like this happen with my gf when I first started organising. I was super passionate about being a communist and I was constantly mad about things that happened around me and in the world. My gf got mad at me because ´communism won´t fix things, it´s scary!!!’ and she felt sort of intimidated to talk to me about politics because she just wasn’t as involved as I was. At first I was mad too but eventually I figured I had to do something to change this argument between us. Because I still liked her very much as a person and I wanted to be with her.
I just started focussing on party work and wanted to lead by example. Communism is still a scary ideolog for many and many people are still brainwashed by decades of propaganda. But it is hard to see the bad sides if you and your party actually achieve postive things. Maintaining a bus line in your city is not scary. Making sure a local park isn’t taken over by some private owner who wants to make a rich people’s resort of it is not scary.
Eventually by doing all this stuff she saw what exactly I was trying to fight for and she turned around. She even goes to party stuff with me now sometimes.
My point is: I think a lot of communists sometimes have this aura of ‘I know how things work so if you just listen to me and let me explain it, then maybe you’ll understand too’ which is no different from the smug liberals we criticize. We are at a disadvantage after decades of anti communist propaganda and we need to be aware that convincing people of communism sometimes takes a very gentle and time consuming approach, and being mad at these people isn’t helping.
I’m not a professional in this stuff or anything, so take this with a grain of salt, but it sounds to me like the two of you need to sit down and have some heart to heart talks about your feelings. Like what you feel about these things, what she feels about them, etc. And I don’t mean “feelings” as in “I think the dems are awful” or “I hate Stalin”; those are more like beliefs/worldview. I mean drilling down to the raw emotion of it, as isolated as possible from judgments/descriptions of the other. For example “I feel scared when I think about communism” or “I feel alone when you say I’m a ‘Stalin worshiping tankie’.”
Communism has a lot of fear-mongering baked into it in the US, so it’s easy to have people who on the one hand feel abandoned by everyone else in their life for believing in it and on the other hand, have people who are terrified of the implications of anyone in their life who does believe in it. Once you know how each other feels, then you can get into dealing with it. For example, if she’s scared of you being communist, you could explain what communism means to you and talk in more detail about what you do in the day to day of volunteering. Or if you feel isolated by her acting this way, she could try to make sure it’s clear that she appreciates you in spite of any fears she might have about your political beliefs.
What the feelings would look like for each of you is something only you know. The examples are just to help illustrate what I mean.
oof. Those two might be left of dems but their track record speaks for itself… :/
I haven’t read the Ghodsee book, but wouldn’t be too surprised if it was eurocom.
Hang in there. I don’t really know what to classify my own partner politically but I at least know theyre somewhere on the left and think liberals suck. And they don’t take the other side when I push back against our more liberal friends when they speak ill of China. Deconstructing atrocity propaganda is an arduous uphill battle, even more so when it’s some else, but you’re right, framing it in condescending or ad hominem/they’re just liars (even if true) rhetoric isn’t very effective.
It’s very frustrating when liberals blame the very small sliver of non-republican opposition as the reason their campaigns failed, because it’s clearly just trying to find scapegoats instead of critically reflecting on why their campaigns were really unpopular, they have proven track records of repeated and repeated failed promises while shaking hands under the table with corporations to pass horrendous stuff… why when Ds are in power they make very minute gestures towards progressive policies and make a fuss that their hands are tied against making anything more concrete like roe v wade, and always make the biggest fuss when Rs actually pass policies that they promised – and this is somehow our fault when we point it out. The cherry on top of this shitty cake is their audience believes in this scapegoating.