You should always have a plan to kill the fucking priests.
So you should lie to religious people to get them on your side during the revolution and then massacre their leaders which they respect afterwards? In the context of this thread of comments, this is what you’re saying - we’re discussing a negative response to the statement “Come on, burn the mosques after the revolution, doing it before is just dumb, you’ll lose the religious supporters”.
You should absolutely let whoever wants to help you tear down the bourgeois state. and then seize on power and solidify a proletarian state. Look to your namesake on this one. Clergy participated in the February revolution, they were allowed in the soviets, and then they were marginalised by force when necessary.
a few more decades of people growing up without religious indoctrination would’ve broken the ideological chain and gone a long way towards keeping it from springing back up.
a few more decades of people growing up without religious indoctrination would’ve broken the ideological chain and gone a long way towards keeping it from springing back up.
What all the proreligious people fail to notice or gloss over is that it did worked. In every former and current socialist country religiousness failed dramatically, and in postsocialist countries resurgence of fascism is closely tied to resurgence of religion being used as a vessel to spread anticommunism.
Yeah dude the thing that created issues for the soviets was opportunism with regards to clergy being allowed in the soviets, not the entire institutional left siding with fascist and the germans invading.
I don’t think it’s good analysis to say that because the USSR marginalized clergy politically and this sometimes required force, “As soon as you seize power you have to think about how to kill the clergy.”
The USSR also wasn’t perfect and sometimes alienated people (especially Muslims) through excessive anti-religiousness. The revolution will look different depending on the conditions of where and when it emerges.
Yes, I think the strategy of “lie to religious people, get into power, and kill the priests” (even if it weren’t a betrayal of the peoples’ trust) would not only fail in the Muslim world, but make it very difficult for another revolution to follow anywhere in the Muslim world for decades afterwards.
the science of marxism is when we look at every revolutionary movement and discard the things that worked, and embrace things that have never worked and will never work
The Afghan government was initially state atheist, swiftly abandoning this at the behest of the soviet union in favor of secualrism, at the behest of the USSR adopted concessions to the religious right on secular reform which never satisfied them (Even after ending compulsory education of children, the largest complaint of the initial religious resistance) and they ended up losing to the Mujahideen who fractured and started a civil war. The Taliban arose during the subsequent civil war as a response to institutionalised pederasty.
The Afghan war is a pretty good case study in the fact that you can’t compromise your way out of a conflict with religious authorities as a left wing project.
So in other words. Anti clericalism must be pursued immediately (Or you get Iran) and must be sustained (Because letting up on it doesn’t work, as per Afghanistan).
Ending compulsory education of children is a failure of one of Marx’s 10 pillars of communism.
We should have compulsory education of children everywhere, but citing a specific platform in the manifesto because Marx wrote it is not a good way to argue that.
Communism in Afghanistan fell apart and contributed to the death of the USSR.
They had a strong anti-religious stance, but they got wrecked by the Taliban.
i blame Carter and the bleeder faction. if the US had been prevented from arming them there would have been no need for the socialist government to invoke their defense pact and there would have been no soviet war because there would have been no war.
Blaming the imperialist is an interesting position.
In order to use that be our model of understanding continuing forward, we would have to presume that there is no imperialist state when we operate in MENA in the future.
This may be a valid track, only if the US falls and another colonial power doesn’t come to fruition.
it’s wrong to boil these things down to single axes but some factors are necessary foundations of events. I don’t think we can depend on there being no imperialist state but the current US or a collapsed US is significantly less effective than it has been in the past.
and i use “we” loosely as fuck here because i can only project power to the neighbors’ property lines.
You’re going from emphatically saying killing clergy is an objective to going “violence will be necessary in some cases to politically marginalize them” like the least convincing attempt at a motte-and-bailey that I’ve ever seen.
Edit: Removed points that I didn’t think were useful
I didnt say killing priests was a goal unto itself. I said you have to plan for it.
Further, the idea that i am the one doing motte and bailey on this one is hypocritical when my interlocutors can seamlessly go from “Repressing the clergy is bad as evidenced by X” to “Okay so X proves that you have to repress the clergy but you have to do it differently” without a mention from you.
You’re misrepresenting the position of most of your opponents here when most people agree with the motte in the motte-and-bailey (which is the point), and furthermore even if we assumed that they were entirely hypocritical (which they are not), your appeal to that would be a crass deflection just as it is in our present situation.
from emphatically saying killing clergy is an objective to going “violence will be necessary in some cases to politically marginalize them” like the least convincing attempt at a motte-and-bailey that I’ve ever seen
Thank you for pointing this out. I had the strange feeling of arguing with a shifting target when I was writing some of my replies in this thread. When I read it all again to double-check, I realized that that was what was going on, but it’s nice to see someone else point it out explicitly.
Well, all the militant atheist socialist projects haven’t existed in decades while AES is reconcilitory towards religion. Vietnam and Cuba still exist with Catholics running around while the Soviet Union/Yugoslavia/socialist Albania/socialist Romania are no more.
This is pretty conclusive that state atheism is at best not very important and at worst detrimental to the longevity of the socialist project.
Keld is wrong here, but the Catholics as a political force are definitely a detriment to Cuba currently. There does need to be more of a crackdown on reactionary institutions, just not summary execution of the clergy.
The Orthodox clergy worked with the anti communists, they kept working with anti communists after they were marginalised, they kept doing it after they were let back in, they kept doing it for the entire rest of the lifespan of the soviet union, and they didn’t stop after the union died.
The Catholic church has 100 years siding with fascism on every level on every continent and repaying every single olive branch from the left with betrayal.
And how did working with the religious powers work out for the Ba’athists and Iranian leftists?
You are eager to learn from the mistakes of maybe being a little too eager to pursue secularisation, but the greater mistake here tends more towards not being more anti religious.
I don’t know how you could come up with a general formula like offing all the religious leaders, when the current conditions are that most people in MENA are quite religious.
And religiosity increases under war and poverty, the very conditions wherein the contradictions of capital break and make way for communism.
So your greatest point of opportunity coincides with the highest point of religiousity. And you want to pursue the the most heavy handed route against that population?
And religiosity increases under war and poverty, the very conditions wherein the contradictions of capital break and make way for communism.
So your greatest point of opportunity coincides with the highest point of religiousity. And you want to pursue the the most heavy handed route against that population?
Read Marx. Just fucking read Marx man. The fact that religion is the opiate of the masses does not justify it holding political power nor does it remove the fact that organised religion has always ended up fucking over the left.
Again, how did working with organised religion work out in Iran?
You can fail early by being too weak on religion - as per Iran.
You can fail later by being too hard on religion, drag down your allies with you, and poison-pill the Muslim world - as per Afghanistan.
The death of the USSR is why our world is so miserable and bleak today. And the Afghan failure was a domino in that. I encourage you to learn those lessons as well.
Or you can come up with a more clever, thorough, and calibrated plan than:
If you won’t consider the idea that it’s ever possible for an organization to be too anti-religious for a popular movement when there are many places in the world where the large majority of people are deeply religious, I don’t think this discussion is going anywhere and I’m going to respectfully agree to disagree with you.
Edit: you removed the portion of your comment I actually replied to, and added the last line.
You are eager to learn from the mistakes of maybe being a little too eager to pursue secularisation, but the greater mistake here tends more towards not being more anti religious.
We’re not discussing in a vacuum here, we’re talking about someone asserting that protesters should wait until after the revolution to burn down mosques. Your response to this was that there should always be a plan to kill clergy. These assertions are not compatible with building popular movements in parts of the world where most people are religious.
With all due respect, if you totally refuse to acknowledge that the religious institutions have never worked with the revolutionary left in good faith, and have no material reason to do so, and the examples of every single revolutionary movement since the development of socialist thought aren’t enough to convince you, then the problem may not be with me being too rigid.
Copying (with some edits to clarify) my edit above replying to your edit above.
You are eager to learn from the mistakes of maybe being a little too eager to pursue secularisation, but the greater mistake here tends more towards not being more anti religious.
We’re not discussing in a vacuum here, we’re talking about someone asserting that protesters should wait until after the revolution to burn down mosques because doing so before would alienate supporters. I disagreed with that (to be clear, because I don’t think revolutionaries should lie to people to get their support and then burn down their places of worship) and your response was that there should always be a plan to kill the clergy. These assertions are not compatible with building popular movements in parts of the world where most people are religious.
So you should lie to religious people to get them on your side during the revolution and then massacre their leaders which they respect afterwards? In the context of this thread of comments, this is what you’re saying - we’re discussing a negative response to the statement “Come on, burn the mosques after the revolution, doing it before is just dumb, you’ll lose the religious supporters”.
You should absolutely let whoever wants to help you tear down the bourgeois state. and then seize on power and solidify a proletarian state. Look to your namesake on this one. Clergy participated in the February revolution, they were allowed in the soviets, and then they were marginalised by force when necessary.
A move which, famously, solved religion forever and didn’t create weakpoints ripe for exploitation by their enemies.
Excessive haste in achieving Communism, demanding the masses catch up. This is another type of idealism.
they didn’t purge religion hard enough
a few more decades of people growing up without religious indoctrination would’ve broken the ideological chain and gone a long way towards keeping it from springing back up.
What all the proreligious people fail to notice or gloss over is that it did worked. In every former and current socialist country religiousness failed dramatically, and in postsocialist countries resurgence of fascism is closely tied to resurgence of religion being used as a vessel to spread anticommunism.
Yeah dude the thing that created issues for the soviets was opportunism with regards to clergy being allowed in the soviets, not the entire institutional left siding with fascist and the germans invading.
I don’t think it’s good analysis to say that because the USSR marginalized clergy politically and this sometimes required force, “As soon as you seize power you have to think about how to kill the clergy.”
The USSR also wasn’t perfect and sometimes alienated people (especially Muslims) through excessive anti-religiousness. The revolution will look different depending on the conditions of where and when it emerges.
Exactly, this is the science of Marxism. Analyze the actual conditions and make appropriate prescriptions based on the circumstances.
Yes, I think the strategy of “lie to religious people, get into power, and kill the priests” (even if it weren’t a betrayal of the peoples’ trust) would not only fail in the Muslim world, but make it very difficult for another revolution to follow anywhere in the Muslim world for decades afterwards.
the science of marxism is when we look at every revolutionary movement and discard the things that worked, and embrace things that have never worked and will never work
Communism in Afghanistan fell apart and contributed to the death of the USSR.
They had a strong anti-religious stance, but they got wrecked by the Taliban.
Yes the US participated, but so did the USSR. It wasn’t good enough.
They had the country, then they lost it. Now look at Afghanistan. They sell girls at the market and stone women for religious infractions.
No… part of this is true.
The Afghan government was initially state atheist, swiftly abandoning this at the behest of the soviet union in favor of secualrism, at the behest of the USSR adopted concessions to the religious right on secular reform which never satisfied them (Even after ending compulsory education of children, the largest complaint of the initial religious resistance) and they ended up losing to the Mujahideen who fractured and started a civil war. The Taliban arose during the subsequent civil war as a response to institutionalised pederasty.
The Afghan war is a pretty good case study in the fact that you can’t compromise your way out of a conflict with religious authorities as a left wing project.
Ending compulsory education of children is a failure of one of Marx’s 10 pillars of communism.
I agree. Don’t compromise with them. Deal with them intelligently and systematically.
Chuddic brains don’t respect compromise. It just means you’re weak.
So in other words. Anti clericalism must be pursued immediately (Or you get Iran) and must be sustained (Because letting up on it doesn’t work, as per Afghanistan).
We should have compulsory education of children everywhere, but citing a specific platform in the manifesto because Marx wrote it is not a good way to argue that.
i blame Carter and the bleeder faction. if the US had been prevented from arming them there would have been no need for the socialist government to invoke their defense pact and there would have been no soviet war because there would have been no war.
Blaming the imperialist is an interesting position.
In order to use that be our model of understanding continuing forward, we would have to presume that there is no imperialist state when we operate in MENA in the future.
This may be a valid track, only if the US falls and another colonial power doesn’t come to fruition.
it’s wrong to boil these things down to single axes but some factors are necessary foundations of events. I don’t think we can depend on there being no imperialist state but the current US or a collapsed US is significantly less effective than it has been in the past.
and i use “we” loosely as fuck here because i can only project power to the neighbors’ property lines.
You’re going from emphatically saying killing clergy is an objective to going “violence will be necessary in some cases to politically marginalize them” like the least convincing attempt at a motte-and-bailey that I’ve ever seen.
Edit: Removed points that I didn’t think were useful
I didnt say killing priests was a goal unto itself. I said you have to plan for it. Further, the idea that i am the one doing motte and bailey on this one is hypocritical when my interlocutors can seamlessly go from “Repressing the clergy is bad as evidenced by X” to “Okay so X proves that you have to repress the clergy but you have to do it differently” without a mention from you.
You’re misrepresenting the position of most of your opponents here when most people agree with the motte in the motte-and-bailey (which is the point), and furthermore even if we assumed that they were entirely hypocritical (which they are not), your appeal to that would be a crass deflection just as it is in our present situation.
Thank you for pointing this out. I had the strange feeling of arguing with a shifting target when I was writing some of my replies in this thread. When I read it all again to double-check, I realized that that was what was going on, but it’s nice to see someone else point it out explicitly.
Well, all the militant atheist socialist projects haven’t existed in decades while AES is reconcilitory towards religion. Vietnam and Cuba still exist with Catholics running around while the Soviet Union/Yugoslavia/socialist Albania/socialist Romania are no more.
This is pretty conclusive that state atheism is at best not very important and at worst detrimental to the longevity of the socialist project.
Keld is wrong here, but the Catholics as a political force are definitely a detriment to Cuba currently. There does need to be more of a crackdown on reactionary institutions, just not summary execution of the clergy.
Trying to claim Castro and Mao for your “State atheism is bad actually” argument is farcical.
Noted liches Castro and Mao who still rule their countries from beyond the grave.
The Orthodox clergy worked with the anti communists, they kept working with anti communists after they were marginalised, they kept doing it after they were let back in, they kept doing it for the entire rest of the lifespan of the soviet union, and they didn’t stop after the union died.
The Catholic church has 100 years siding with fascism on every level on every continent and repaying every single olive branch from the left with betrayal.
And how did working with the religious powers work out for the Ba’athists and Iranian leftists?
You are eager to learn from the mistakes of maybe being a little too eager to pursue secularisation, but the greater mistake here tends more towards not being more anti religious.
I don’t know how you could come up with a general formula like offing all the religious leaders, when the current conditions are that most people in MENA are quite religious.
And religiosity increases under war and poverty, the very conditions wherein the contradictions of capital break and make way for communism.
So your greatest point of opportunity coincides with the highest point of religiousity. And you want to pursue the the most heavy handed route against that population?
Read Marx. Just fucking read Marx man. The fact that religion is the opiate of the masses does not justify it holding political power nor does it remove the fact that organised religion has always ended up fucking over the left. Again, how did working with organised religion work out in Iran?
You can fail early by being too weak on religion - as per Iran.
You can fail later by being too hard on religion, drag down your allies with you, and poison-pill the Muslim world - as per Afghanistan.
The death of the USSR is why our world is so miserable and bleak today. And the Afghan failure was a domino in that. I encourage you to learn those lessons as well.
Or you can come up with a more clever, thorough, and calibrated plan than:
If you won’t consider the idea that it’s ever possible for an organization to be too anti-religious for a popular movement when there are many places in the world where the large majority of people are deeply religious, I don’t think this discussion is going anywhere and I’m going to respectfully agree to disagree with you.
Edit: you removed the portion of your comment I actually replied to, and added the last line.
We’re not discussing in a vacuum here, we’re talking about someone asserting that protesters should wait until after the revolution to burn down mosques. Your response to this was that there should always be a plan to kill clergy. These assertions are not compatible with building popular movements in parts of the world where most people are religious.
With all due respect, if you totally refuse to acknowledge that the religious institutions have never worked with the revolutionary left in good faith, and have no material reason to do so, and the examples of every single revolutionary movement since the development of socialist thought aren’t enough to convince you, then the problem may not be with me being too rigid.
Copying (with some edits to clarify) my edit above replying to your edit above.