I’ll preface with saying that I’m only a random Communist. Please take what I say with a grain of salt, even if I come off as confident.
Regardless of your opinion on the war, it is not going to affect its course unless you go fight there, with a few exceptions.
Unless you live in Russia or Ukraine, your priorities should be:
- pressuring your country’s government for non-interventionism, including sanctions. Capitalist States have only the interest of capital in mind, and their intervention will hurt the people further
- fighting racism in your communities, especially the new wave of anti-Russian hate.
If you live in Poland or Romania, you should also be fighting the racism against non-Ukrainians (mostly foreign students) seeking refuge. Most of them just want to go home. The fact that the police are attacking them is extremely ridiculous.
That’s their business. Most of the world working class has homophobic tendencies. This was true in the West as well until just a few years ago. In Germany, gay marriage was only legal in 2017. As far as I know, Cuba is the only AES country that is progressive with LGBT rights. This type of social acceptance takes time.
If they are a popular leftist front then why are the so socially regressive? Lenin, mao, Marx were all very clearly in favor of social progress. The bolsheviks legalized homosexuality when they came to power. Mao spoke in favor of recognizing diverse ethnic identities within China and wrote forcefully against Han supremacy.
This idea that progressive social values, like acceptance of LGBT people or anti racist stuff is “liberal social justice wars” is fucking fashy bullshit. It’s ahistorical. It’s dressed up strasserism.
Why are you using quotes for “liberal social justice wars” when that’s not what I said? And you say I argue in bad faith. As an American, I do support LGBT rights. I have lots of friends and family who are LGBT and I care about them deeply. How can you call me a strasserist? Is this your idea of a joke?
Homosexuality and transidentity is nothing new, and it would require some serious source to assert that working peoples are more reactionary than the intellectual elites: in the history of the western world it’s always been the other way around with a working class queer underground taking years/decades to become socially accepted by the higher classes.
Also worth noting, the USSR has a strong history of fighting for women/LGBT rights, right until Stalin reinstated the old moral order and banned homosexuality again. I don’t know in English but in french a few years back i read a good book about the history of “sexual deviancy” in the USSR and the evolving political context around it.
I know if you look at pre-modern cultures from around the world you will see homosexuality and transgender people. However, the proletariat is a modern phenomenon of capitalism, and somehow, the modernization of the world has erased many natural aspects of our humanity. And I think that’s tragic.
It’s just common sense. LGBT rights are at their strongest in western countries, the countries where the labor aristocratic tendency is working its hardest, where the intelligentsia is most numerous, where the world imperialist ruling class actually resides. It’s the richest cities and states within the US that are the most socially progressive like San Francisco and California, and it is the poorest that are the most reactionary, like West Virginia or Alabama.
There is a tendency of reactionary behavior because, well, these working people didn’t go to college like we did. I think this onion video really hits the nail on the head of how absurd the contrapositive is. It’s not a good thing, but it’s just the truth. And it’s a truth that communists have been and should be prepared for. In 1917 the working people and peasants of the Russian empire were not waving rainbow flags or learning each others pronouns. What did it matter in the end?