Of course! We all should! Until we die. We should never stop learning and there is never an end to the things we can learn. Study more theory, but also study more history, and study literary critique and the history of literary critique, and study philosophical theory and history, and study political theory and history, and study economics and the history of economics as a field of study.

Study forever. Your positions will constantly be updating. Eventually you will have a bunch of good evidence for positions that you can rely on and build from, while always recognizing that new evidence could undermine those positions and you should be open to that.

Stop trying to establish what you support and what you oppose and start trying to identify what you are ignorant of and how you can fix that.

I don’t think that question has much meaning without context. There’s no such thing as a hard line ML. Ask specific questions and you’ll get specific answers.

Of course one can be an ML while opposing anything. But you have to oppose it as a process, not as an emotion. What do you specifically oppose? Why do you oppose it? What do you think gave rise to the phenomena to which you are referring? Where is your evidence for your claims? What would make you change your mind? Etc.

There are very few things that MLs just oppose because that’s “the line”. Marx, for all the complexity in his analysis, gives us a very simple framework:

1. Human life requires human society
2. Human society must remain for human life to remain
3. Human society can be organized in such a way that it will end
4. Human society can be organized in such a way that it will continue
5. Determining how to continue human society is a process of theoretical analysis and empirical experimentation

Our job is to assert that we value human life, that we support it. Everything else comes from that. We do not need to support Stalin to be MLs, nor oppose him to be MLs. To be MLs we must engage in the analytical and empirical process of discovering how history has preceded us, how that has produced the present moment, and what we are to do now in our present context to bring about a future state that results in the continuation of human society and avoidance of the foreseeable collapses of that society.

1. You literally opened the thread with a hypothesis about fascism. How am I the one to blame here? You can’t be serious.

2. That’s correct, the US has been spying on its citizens for a long time, just like the fascists did. That would be evidence that the US might be fascist, despite the fact that they don’t punish everyone who speaks out against them, and the reality is that the fascists also did not punish everyone who spoke out against them. This particular line of reasoning was raised when you said that I was in America posting online in critique of my government as potentially evidence for how the US is not yet fascist, but as I said, fascists didn’t punish everyone who critiqued them either but what they did do was spy in everyone so they could figure out who they wanted to punish, which the US is definitely doing

1. Because you told me what you emotionally support. What you support is irrelevant to an analysis of whether the US is fascist.

2. And there you go supporting things. I am happy for you. But it adds nothing to our mutual understanding

3. Poverty alleviation would be a great thing, yes, but it would not make it less fascist if it maintained racial hierarchy, the Indian reservation system, and did not engage in reparations of the harm that the European colonial movement visited upon the continent and its peoples

I said that. I live in the US. I am a settler colonist. What of it?

Yes. Lots of German fascists were allowed to express themselves. You may not realize this but the stories that every single critic was murdered are actually just stories and not true.

What was true was that the government spied on everyone they could. Guess that the US has been doing? Spying on every single digital communication for the last 25 years.

So, yeah, what are you arguing?

Why are you worried about virtue signaling. I don’t care what you support. You might be a little wrapped up in useless frameworks of value and meaning.

What about the civil rights movement? It was because the US was a fascist government that harmed black folk. And then the USA police forces killed the leaders of the movement.

Sure, there were a few laws passed to stop some of the bad things, but they didn’t amount to much - black folk still lived in ghettos, they still lost most of the wealth they managed to build, they still didn’t get reparations.

So, yeah, I mean, the civil rights movement doesn’t disprove the US is a fascist nation

No, the US is a white supremacist settler colony built on genocide and slavery. Socialism is insufficient for reparations. Reparations would require accepting the self determination of the indigenous nations still present, and the self-determination of the African diaspora in the country, as well as the dissolution of the boundaries between the US and Canada and between many of the states, and many other preconditions for reparations to proceed effectively. Then it would take decades, likely a century, of very difficult work advancing a collaborative strategy for thorough decolonization of the continent.

You’ll get no argument from me. I wouldn’t say it’s hypocritical to acknowledge reality. I am a colonizer, I speak one of the colonizers languages. My family brought their language here from Europe. I live on the lands of genocides peoples. I was raised to worship genociders, slavers, rapists, and tyrants as beacons of justice, goodness, and freedom

I never said we can’t use English. What I am saying is that when we speak of fascism, we talk about how brutal, violent, and totalitarian it is, out to including forcing everyone to speak their language.

You are asking about the potential for future fascist government in the USA and I am saying the US has been a fascist government since its founding - concentration camps by race, enforced racial hierarchy, enslavement, working slaves to death, profiting off of slaves, stealing children and stripping them of their culture and forcing them to live like us. These are all things the US has done and is doing.

I can’t respond to everything right now. But re: 200 years of fascism, check out Aimé Césaire. Here’s an article about some of the ideas

https://medium.com/@malorynye/the-brutal-friendship-between-colonialism-and-fascism-some-thoughts-from-aimé-césaire-on-9224e90550b5

Essentially think about fascism, imagine what you think it is, then think about the transatlantic slave trade and the genocide of the people of what we now call the Americas (named after an Italian, by the way) and think about how everyone in this hemisphere speaks a European language…

You know how we say shit like “without the allies we’d all be speaking German now”? Yeah. Why is everyone speaking one of the 4 colonizer languages in an entire hemisphere and why are hundreds of languages dead or dying here?

It can be solved with vibes, of course, because that’s the only thing you’ve presented here.

Why do you think a future generation raised by ai slop made by clankers would up supporting a future fascist regime in the US? Why do you think the last 200 years of the US hasn’t already been a fascist regime? How does ai slop interact with the way fascism develops?

Give us some thing, comrade.

Keep commenting, keep getting critique, listen learn and grow

Focus isn’t the thing that helps. It’s iteration.

You are raised in a conceptual framework that predisposes you to think about new things in specific ways. To get a more accurate worldview, you need more iterations, you need to explore new experiences, you need to see the same things presented in slightly different ways.

Above all else, though, you need to make posts and comments like this, and you need to have live conversations where you express your current understanding and you need to receive feedback. Sometimes you’re wrong, sometimes your omitting something, sometimes you have a good grip on it. You can’t just focus and read and hope to have correct understanding. These things are not dead concepts that can pinned to the pages of a book - they are living dynamic understandings generated through dialogue.l

It was an industrial war. Yes, the command was critical. Yes allies were critical. But Stalin directed the economy on the basis of a prediction of the war in a way that I don’t think any other economic thinker at the time would have

Do we think that the level of development of the local Soviets and the higher order Soviets was sufficient enough to coordinate the necessary response to the threat of the Third Reich? As far as I understand it, even with Stalin’s significant control he still had opposition to the idea that Germany would be such a near-term threat and such a massive one. Maybe I am wrong about that.

Suuuuuuper easy to forget

Every single person has something to teach.

Everyone.

Sometimes, that thing is patience. Sometimes it’s compassion. Sometimes it’s how to communicate better. Sometimes it’s when to walk away.

But if you believe every single person has something to teach you, that is a huge hack.

Classic book, very illuminating, but it does contain a warning that MLs need to wrestle with.

If you build the system from the top down, it will fail.

Reactionary forces are the capitalists, the petit bourgeois, the compradors, and the privileged.

People who accuse Marxists of being tankies are not calling anyone out on anyone’s shit. They are moralizing.

You severely missed everything presented to you. Tripled literacy rates. Housing that was 5% of salary or less. Massive life expectancy jumps in the masses.

Direct benefits to the working class.

It’s a farce.

There are never only two choices. It is impossible to actually construct a real world situation where in there are only two choices. Even in an elementary school, given a test with only on question on it and it only has two answers, you can eat the test, scribble on it, punch the computer screen, walk out, etc.

Even in prison with guards pointing guns at you and putting you in a position to do either A or B you have options.

However, the concept of lesser evil is a shallow abstraction of the real world experience of pragmatism. Amongst all of your options, what course of action leads to the most desirable outcomes?

This is a real thing. We do it all the time. People in positions of grave responsibility have to do it with consequences and constraints that are absolutely gutting. Let’s say the war has already started, well, now you have to make decisions about how to avoid losing the most strategically important objectives, even if that means people dying. In fact, the strategies employed in war force decision makers into these sorts of choices as a matter of course - an opponent knows you don’t want to make certain sacrifices and will therefore create pressures that trade off those sacrifices with strategic objectives. Sometimes it’s not even that they believe you’ll give up the strategic objectives but the delay you have when choosing will give them an advantage, or the emotional and psychological toll of being put in such situations repeatedly over a long campaign can create substantial advantages.

Lesser evil is rhetorical sophistry or mildly useful thought experiments when exploring the consequences of ethical frameworks in academia.