[I’m in a bit of a rush so it may be a bit disorganized and miss some points]

But rather because the class someone is born into shouldn’t determine whether they live or die. The Romanov kids didn’t deserve to be killed. They had no choice as to what family they were born into. They could have been extremely useful to the cause if we could have reeducated them.

I agree with re-education when appropriate, in fact that’s pragmatic! Making use of the bourgeois’ class traitors is very useful and has proven so in the past. The idealist approach is the dumb one of killing them without exception just because of a class identification instead of deciding if they can be appropriated. Again, I don’t think merely being a part of a class is immutable, so I don’t support killing all people who were ever a landlord.

Hereditary monarchy is hereditary, but even then they can renounce their royalty (a recent example would be former Prince Harry). The Romanov situation was unfortunate, but in the middle of a war with the White Army who were possibly about to capture the Romanov family and re-establish a monarchy with them, I can see why they chose that option. The kids were in a horrible situation outside of their control.

Landlordism is a (shitty, but nonetheless) job. You don’t have to do it because your parents did it. It’s not an immutable thing, it’s an active decision, and one which they can stop at any time.

One critique of the re-education approach is: that’s probably not going to be a viable option during a revolutionary uprising (e.g. Chinese Civil War). If they didn’t stop being a landlord once the revolution began, it will probably take more than a few conversations or lessons to flip them once we seize their livelihood, and we probably won’t have the educational resources needed to attempt to educate them in the middle of the state and counter-revolutionaries trying to kill us. In the middle of a revolution, we probably won’t have the available resources to “put forth the effort of changing their minds”.

Marxism’s worldview doesn’t posit that the bourgeois are bad because they’re evil and mentally-ill sociopaths. It proposes they act against us because it’s within their material interest, and that historical movements are typically driven by material interests more than ideals. Most people won’t fight the ruling class just because “they’re evil and it’s our moral duty”, we tend to fight them because we are literally starving and being worked to death and alienated. To be able to care if they’re evil or not is a liberty that comes after we secure our means of survival. The ruling class don’t fight us because they’re evil and just decided they hate poor people, they fight us because we are a direct threat to their comfortable life.

This is a challenge for re-education. How do you convince someone who used to be lazy and rich that they should join our dangerous cause instead of hate us and seek revenge for ruining their convenient exploitation of us? This can work on occasion, if the landlord has more important values than their way of life, but always? No way.

I also vehemently disagree that they place little value on ideological purity.

I mean purity in a more moral sense. If material conditions force them into an unfortunate decision between compromising their values (e.g. censoring the press, or repressing political opponents) or allowing the revolution to fail through foreign exploitation of the freedoms they give, they will pick the first. This is why we see Lenin and various Chinese leaders openly saying “we need to allow capitalists in so we can learn their techniques and build our material resources”. An agricultural country can’t just fight the interference of the USA and its allies who had material interests in keeping the USSR and PRC as exploitable. If they didn’t compromise their values, they wouldn’t have been able to rapidly develop and fight off World War invasions.

If you’re more remote or protected like Zapatista-controlled territories or Cheran, and not fighting a ton of CIA+ interference, then you can afford more of those liberties and create a much, much, much better transition away from capitalism. And in these situations, I lean far more towards libertarian-socialist ideology. We know it can work there! But most countries, as important subjects of international asymmetric imperialism, don’t have that luxury and I see libertarian-socialism as unfortunately inapplicable to their situation. The Nicaraguans and other socialist countries often found this out the hard way, Parenti summarises it pretty well. - 2:20 onwards

redfash

That’s completely ignorant of what fascism is, how it occurs, and how we can stop it. If tankies are horrible, then just call them tankies! If capitalism is horrible, just call it capitalism! I’m sick of this silly idea that everything has to be called ‘fascist’ or ‘nazi’ or ‘liberal’ or ‘crony’ to make it seem bad. Why pretend it needs (inappropriately applied) qualifiers when it already speaks for itself?

I have a lot of problems with a lot of types of M-Ls, and I would even fight against some of them the same way I would fight fascists, but they are not fascists. Pretending they are is anti-constructive to understanding, modelling and predicting politics. Fascists and M-Ls are driven by different ideas and rationalizations and goals, even when their actions can be compared.