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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: March 24th, 2022

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  • Ironically, it was growing up in a petite-bourgeois family in a country with massive inequality and receiving a Catholic education. I was very religious as a child, but became an atheist in my early teenage years. Still, lots of what I came in contact during my Religion classes stuck with me: the talk of how rich people won’t get to heaven, Jesus beating the shit out of merchants who were defiling the temple and hanging out with the marginalised, it struck a chord with me. Even as I distanced myself from the church, than the Bible, then religion altogether, I think those ideas influenced where I ended up.













  • Lenin’s The State and Revolution. Right into chapter one he brings up Engels’ analysis of the formation of the state:

    “The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without; just as little is it ’the reality of the ethical idea’, ’the image and reality of reason’, as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms, these classes with conflicting economic interests, might not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it became necessary to have a power, seemingly standing above society, that would alleviate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of ’order’; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state.”

    This was extremely useful in my radicalization process, as it explained states have class characters and thus why we need a dictatorship of the proletariat.



  • Well, yes, but also, no. Personalities do indeed exist. They are shaped by the material environment around us, especially during our infancy. But the fact that they are shaped by material conditions doesn’t mean they no longer exist. You won’t magically change your behaviours just by changing environments. That’s a mechanist view of the relationship between person and environment. You can see, for example, how siblings, despite being raised in much the same environment, are different in personalities.