juchebot88

Reminds me of a line in a Soviet comedy (Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath), where the main character, a kind of goofy middle-aged dude who’s somehow made it through medical school, goes with his friends to a sauna on New Year’s Eve. One of them gets drunk on vodka he’s smuggled in and starts pontificating about how private bathrooms are destroying civilization. “At home, this beautiful ritual becomes – a mere washing off of dirt.”

Man, am I... not surprised.

I picture lemmygrad as being the encyclopedic knowledge of Yogthos coupled with the sardonic wisdom of PolandIsAStateOfMind

Capitalist dad

JUCHE DAD

Now you get into some very difficult historical territory. The collapse of socialism in the USSR and Europe is a complicated phenomena, and probably no one fully understands it yet.

But yes, I agree it's generally better to educate people in tandem with raising their living standards. All I want is to point out that there's nuance, and sometimes ugly things have to be done. The situation that Swinging6917 described is not one of those times.

Honestly, they're not totally wrong. The revolution does need to be protected. As I argued above, it's more a matter of emphasis.

Like I said, I don't think you're wrong in principle, more so in application. The maximalist statement "snitching is wrong" is certainly to be condemned, as one can see from the fact that nobody, whatever their ideology, really holds it. There will always be some crime which people think the authorities should be apprised of. And I appreciate you calling out the anarchist/shitlib mentality that "all cops are bastards" and everywhere to be condemned, regardless of whether they serve capital or (in a socialist society) protect the people.

There does, however, have to be a balance struck between going after counterrevolutionaries, wherever they appear, and a sense of social trust. This is because, as history shows, too great a penetration into society of the security apparatus -- and yes, security agencies are a good thing -- also tends to undermine social cohesion, almost as much as too little penetration. The great purges in the USSR were necessary. They are also remembered by average Russians, even those who admire (as a whole lot of them do) Stalin as Russia's greatest leader, as a particularly bad time in Soviet history. You and I and most people on this site are deeply interested in politics, and passionate about fighting injustice, and we like the idea of continued purges, and no counterrevolutionary sentiment being too small to report. Most people, and that includes most workers, are not like that; their interest is mainly in providing for their families, working a fulfilling job, feeling a sense of pride in their country, and having a sense of security in the future. Security agencies not doing their job obviously undermines that sense of security, but so does a situation where everyone feels they can be reported on at any minute. The latter situation does not generally exist in socialist countries, except in times of great crisis (and it is generally better at such times to crack down hard and at once, rather than extending the situation indefinitely as capitalist nations often do); but we always need to beware the ultra-leftist sentiment that could lead us there.

And speaking of avoiding ultra-leftism: national matters should generally stay national. Assume the MSS knows about this person if she is a threat, and that they will take the appropriate action. To say the a westerner should be involved in the situation to the same degree Chinese citizens are is to fall, in a minor way, into the trap of Trotskyism which states that the proletarian revolution is international in both content and form. As we know from Stalin, the revolution is socialist (therefore international) in content, but national in form.

Yeah, I saw that. The sad thing is, the sentiment expressed isn't wrong -- state power does at times need to be deployed against counterrevolutionaries -- it just has no bearing on the present case. Thinking we need to freak out and call the authorities over every single instance of anticommunism is the mentality which produced the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution. And those excesses helped create by reaction some of the liberalism which unfortunately exists in China today.

Or to put it more succinctly: McCarthyism, but in reverse, is Not A Good Idea.

I wouldn't. If she really is that prominent and dangerous within China, the MSS likely already knows about her. If she isn't, you're just wasting their time. (And possibly, if the story breaks in the liberal media, creating a martyr).

Plus, you're gonna have it on your record that you were in contact with a foreign security service. Don't think that won't come back to bite you later on -- the US government has sent communists to jail for less.

I mean, it wouldn't be the first time feudal Tibet ended up featuring in Nazi propaganda.

This reads slightly like concern trolling, but I will respond anyway. The issue is important.

I do not assume that everyone reading my comment is a straight man; rather I assume that most people defending sex work will be straight men. Long experience with The Online Left has made me very cynical in this regard; as Deng Xiaoping said, "seek truth from facts," and a whole lot of pro-prostitution rhetoric is eerily similar to arguments incels make. You cannot seriously tell me you've never run into a straight, cismale "leftist" whose "support" for sex workers was ultimately about getting (as someone else in this thread put) a "Revolutionary People's Prostitution Office;" such individuals are a plague in our circles. Genderwise, this thread may be an exception to the general rule -- it is hardly a total exception -- but it does not disprove said rule. Any experience with the internet or (indeed) real-life left will show you that.

But neither are women and queer people automatically immune to this nonsense. Just as you have right-wing trans people like Blaire White, and other women who support MAGA and "redpill" philosophy, so you get plenty of women and queer people on the left who support sexist positions ultimately not in their interests. (I remember, not too fondly, when Merrick DeVille's reinvention of comfort women was a hotly debated topic in leftist forums). The assumption that identity always equals ideology, and that being part of an oppressed minority leads therefore, always and in every case, to a correct interpretation of material reality, is wrong and ignores the existence of false consciousness. But only Marxists-Leninists seem really to talk about such things.

I am perfectly aware that men can be trafficked as well. However, the vast majority of trafficked people are women and girls. To ignore that, or to say that protections for women and girls should not be the main focus of anti-trafficking policy, is to engage in a sort of leftist reskinning of an infamous right-wing talking point: "You spend all this time talking about how Black people are victims of racism in the US, but did you know that white people can also be victims of racially-motivated crimes?" Certainly they can, but the problem is not anywhere near comparable, or anything like so institutionalized. Similarly, to focus on protections for women and girls, from a problem that they disproportionately face, is not in the least to deny them agency.

Lastly, the institutionalization of sex work is far more characteristic of fascist regimes than socialist ones. Stalin, Mao, and Kim Il-Sung abolished prostitution and pornography. Mussolini's Italy was content to regulate the existing the brothel system. The Nazis similarly had military brothels, from which women of "impure blood" were excluded. We know about Imperial Japan and "comfort women", and there have been reports of similar things happening in today's Ukraine. South Korean "democracy activists" have tried to smuggle porn into the DPRK, apparently under the belief that it is a social rot which will help undermine society from within. Are we to believe that these regimes, regressive in every way, were progressive and better than socialist states on this one issue? That seems dubious, to put it mildly.

People arguing against lemmygrad users in this thread? A mix.

People arguing the pro-sex work position elsewhere on the net, and in real life? In my experience, almost always straight dudes, with an incel mentality and a terminal case of porn brain.

But honestly, I don't know what to tell you. This is a Marxist-Leninist community which supports AES states; you are going to find people supporting the ML line on sex work. That shouldn't be any kind of surprise. Just as it shouldn't surprise you to find that people here support state authority, rapid industrialization, limited role for markets within a centrally-planned economy, and a police force and security apparatus to fight against counterrevolutionaries. The old meme "You mad? Grow a community garden about it" somewhat applies.