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GenZedong @lemmygrad.ml JucheBot1988 @lemmygrad.ml

PSA: it's about the time when US election hysteria kicks into high gear.

Happens about February-March of every election year (the, ahem, independent media goes out of its way to induce it). Get ready for the next lib wave, and a bunch of iterations of the following script, which they've been practicing since like 1999:

    1. "Eh, I disagree with [Democrat candidate] on a lot of things, but to pretend he's not better than [Republican candidate] is just delusional."
    1. "Yeah, I know [Democratic candidate] is a war criminal and complicit in a genocide, but have you considered that [Republican candidate] is a war criminal as well, plus he said rude things about [minority group]? In the interest of harm reduction for Americans only, I have a duty to vote Democrat."
    1. "Your vote actually does matter."
    1. "The only reason the Democrats aren't Wholesome Progressive Scandinavian Model Chungus is because they have to play politics with the Republicans. You have to recognize the reality of a two-party system."
    1. "We can push the Democrats left."
    1. "Such-and-such Democratic policy (usually the Affordable Care Act) was actually really progressive."
    1. "My [minority group] partner, whom I've never mentioned up to this point and very possibly just made up, is voting Democrat." (This tactic also gets used by libs defending porn and/or prostitution, e.g. "my totally-real girlfriend loves it when I post videos of us having sex online").
    1. "If even one less person dies because [Democratic candidate] is in office, it's my moral duty to vote for [Democratic candidate]. I am a mature, compassionate person who absolutely understands socialism."
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42 comments

  • Been plenty of these showing up in a bunch of threads already. One even had a lemmygrad account!

  • We can push the Democrats left.

    To quote the Seppo Declaration of Independence, "all experience hath shewn"

  • I fucking hate living in this shithole man every fucking two years it's like this. TWO YEARS.

  • We're def gonna need to shut down anyone who wanders in here on a 'lesser evilism' kick, while educating them about the complete sham / theatre piece that is bourgeois democracy.

  • I'm just so checked out of American party politics at this point I don't even notice it. It's like full circle - you start as an "apolitical" lib from indoctrination, go through the radlib phase, and end up an "apolitical" Marxist.

  • So you don’t wanna support a genocide? Well that’s cute sweetie, but the alternative is Orange Man, so perhaps when the alternative is not a LITERAL FASCIST we can talk then ok kiddo? maybe-later-kiddo

    • And then you get to watch them sputter and turn every color of the rainbow when you (correctly) tell them Biden's just as much of a fascist, referencing the still-open border camps, the fact that he oversaw the single largest RICO prosecution in Amerikan history over the Cop City protestors being locked up, and the fact that he's reneged on every progressive platform plank he had to cozy up to genocidal Israelis.

  • Remember, the answer to nearly all these is "if my vote matters so much, you should be calling these Democrats and telling them to move toward my positions."

  • I love the illusion of choice, don't you?

  • I'm assuming this is supposed to be for mostly online interactions, but I have unironically heard a few of these when discussing politics irl with some of the Americans that happen to live in my town. It takes a lot of self control to maintain civility and not call them out on how idiotic they are to their faces.

  • Not a bad post except for that you just had to throw in some sexist SWERF garbage in #7. margot-disgust

    • Not a bad response, except you had to throw in some western liberal garbage about SWERFS and SWERFiness. Opposition to the sex trade is the standard line of every Marxist-Leninist country; perhaps anarchists have a different perspective, but since their most successful revolutionary efforts to date have been CHAZ and that one commune in Catalonia that lasted all of two weeks, we can safely disregard their opinion as irrelevant. We Marxists support sex workers, in that we see them as hyper-exploited by capitalism and wish to remove their exploitation. We do not support sex work as such. We aim to do for sex workers what the CPC has done: namely, give them jobs and vocational training, and extend to them the opportunity for a dignified, human life. Orgasms do not increase the productive forces.

      The disingenuousness of the liberal defense of sex work lies in the fact that the average woman involved in the trade is not a middle-class kinkster selling videos on OnlyFans. The average sex worker is much more likely to have been trafficked, to have been raped, and if she has actually taken up prostitution of her own free will, to have done so because she had (or felt she had) no other options. Working-class people know the reality of the sex trade, that it is an ugly, horrible thing. I challenge you to defend prostitution to the typical worker. You will not get very far. Liberals know this, which is why they don't even try; rather, they are content to smugly call the average worker "patriarchal," "sexist," "traitor to women," and so on, when all that worker wants is not to be trafficked, or to keep their wife, girlfriend, mother, sister, friend, out of the clutches of a predatory industry.

      But seriously, I thought we had left this debate behind on reddit? Fix your attitude toward women, and get a girlfriend, ya horny losers.

      • their wife, girlfriend, mother, sister

        get a girlfriend, ya horny losers

        Orgasms do not increase the productive forces.

        This is the crux of my problem with the language around this topic on this site. I don't think you'll find anyone here that disagrees with empowering workers and fighting workplace exploitation. I do disagree with the idea that women's "sexual purity" is something to be owned and protected by men, and it's very easy to infer that motivation from some of the emphasis often used around this topic.

        I'm not accusing you of that motivation, but I think people are right to be sensitive to it. You can very easily find "real workers" and "real Marxists" whose hatred of "prostitution and pornography" specifically manifests as a hatred of women that have sex outside of a heterosexual monogamous relationship for the purpose of procreation. From there, it's a pretty short jump to "the LGBTQ movement is Western liberal bourgeois decadence", "abortion is antinatalism depriving the Party of future revolutionaries", and other reskinned conservative opinions.

        Just as it wouldn't be fair of me to assume the worst of you, I don't think it's fair of you to assume that anyone sensitive to language that most often precedes a call for more police are straight men that want a Revolutionary People's Prostitution office.

      • I'm not trying to argue or anything here

        But I'd like to say that I do enjoy the part of like Giving a person an orgasm or like, getting to know their body

        And I know that it doesn't actually produce anything

        But I'd like to feel like ive done something more helpful for the world than survive a little longer I guess

        And I guess I didn't realize that some people dont mean what I mean when I say legalize the sex industry which is that the individual women should be making decisions about it and protected by law or like, safe houses, whereas any pimping is imprisonable. That being said though, I do want the industry to dwindle, cuz like just having enough money and doing orgies would obvs be much better than this.

        I wanna give people love and pleasure, and some part of me feels like that has value, but it feels like the money truncates those feelings for them. I guess the best way to give back physically would be like a sex-worker only hotel they could live in semi-permanently. I tend to help people with sexual trauma, so it would be nice if I could still do that.

        I suppose that would suggest I might make a good therapist, so that would be a nice career path outside of the industry if I didn't have so much tech education already.

        Sorry for the ramble, I just felt like a bad leftist for doing this kind of work

      • But seriously, I thought we had left this debate behind on reddit? Fix your attitude toward women, and get a girlfriend, ya horny losers.

        Have you seriously not noticed that most of the people arguing against lemmygrad users on this are fem or fem-presenting people? I even know some who quit the site over it because they became disillusioned with the masculine chauvinism and prefer hexbear's pro-feminist pro-queer stance instead.

      • I've been marinating on your response here. There's something off about it that I'm having trouble putting words to. I think maybe the "offness" that I'm sensing is that your comment sort of treats men as humans and everyone else as potential trafficking victims. I don't think you meant to do this, I suspect (hope) you don't actually believe that non-men are not human in the same way men are, but this comment of yours still kind of reads like that.

        For instance, you end it with the following line:

        Fix your attitude toward women, and get a girlfriend, ya horny losers.

        This line really rankles, for two reasons. One, there are women who have read your comment and it just feels weird to tell a woman, especially a marxist woman, to fix her views toward women. Two, there are people who have read your comment who don't want a girlfriend, because they're not into women, because they have a long-term partner already and are monogamous, or because they're ace or aromantic. (Probably other reasons too.) And yet, here you are, implicitly acting like everyone reading your comment is a straight man. But we aren't. I'm not. The people arguing with you in this thread about sex work aren't. You've made an incorrect (and sexist) assumption about the people reading your comment.

    • Conflating criticism or dislike of the sex industry with "sexist SWERF garbage" is a little silly... Are we really meant to suppose that pornography and prostitution is helping women and feminism? Or anyone, for that matter?

      • I think Gaia answered that question pretty well in the affirmative, as have countless communist sex workers before her, that yes, it absolutely can and does help people, including women. Anyone who says otherwise is discounting the voices of women and comrades. That doesn't mean there aren't terrible examples of exploitation in the sex industry and that it isn't dominated by power imbalance. But so too are there terrible examples of exploitation and abuse in most other low wage work. From miners to service industry workers. Sex work is work, and it doesn't deserve scorn or disdain any more than any other form of work. As communists, this should not be a difficult concept to grasp, but unfortunately patriarchal, reactionary brainworms still infect a not insubstantial subset in some leftist spaces.

      • I would feel pretty shitty and would kinda come off as a "pretty woman" fan if I tried to hit one of my girlfriends with that angle. I think Dirt_Possum is coming in hot but they're echoing the sentiment that I get from these ladies that they prefer to work than sleep in the open. A lot of them recognize that it is capitalism that is their enemy, and explicitly state this.

        Huge disclaimer, however, is that direct ownership of billing, protection, housing, and selection is the only thing I support. I hate pimps, and I hate pornography "producers" that aren't the actors themselves. I don't think taking a cut from people's sex work should be legal, considering the coercive conditions that tend to lead a person down that path.

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