This is a Dengist community in favor of Bashar al-Assad with no information that can lead to the arrest of Hillary Clinton, our fellow liberal and queen. This community is not ironic. We are Marxists-Leninists.
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Welcome again to everybody. Make yourself at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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Is it common (I don't know if weird is a good word to use) to be much more zen as a communist? I feel like ever since becoming an ML, I'm more relaxed and peaceful, and I'm a bit torn what that indicates.
When you're a liberal you have no idea how anything works because you have no system of analysis. You might have a vague idea for why things are the way they are but you have no idea how to fix the problem because you don't understand what causes it. This can be pretty stressful, particularly when you get to try your "solutions" and they don't pan out. Also because you're an individualist participating in bourgeois democracy will make you feel powerless when you fight hard for something but still lose because you didn't have the pull you thought you did.
When you become a Marxist everything starts to click and make sense. You see the structures you couldn't see before, understand why things are the way they are, and have a general idea of how to keep out of the situation because you can properly analyze what is happening. It also doesn't feel like everything rests on you, specifically, because you're no longer an individualist operating on Great Man Theory with a delusion that you'll be one of those Great Men (the liberal fetishism for voting is basically Great Man Theory). This relieves a lot of burdens on your psyche and make you more relaxed. If you're still stressed it's probably due to something else like having no revolutionary movement to join, being poor and struggling, etc.
Whenever someone says that "becoming a leftist" made them more freaked out that's a non-bookreader right there & if you have the energy, give them alms, o give them alms
When you realize nearly all the ills of the world boil down to one thing it really does take a lot of pressure off.
Yankee here. I wouldn't say it makes me more calm, but I also have chronic anxiety and had that before becoming ML. Being ML sharpens the clarity of where the real threats are, but it doesn't make them any less real on its own. I think I was actually less anxious in a political capacity when I was liberal because I sort of trusted the system to work things out. Now I look at things like the mass murder done by it, the targeted assassinations, the slander, and so on, and it's like, okay that's a new kind of scary. It's a bit like a Matrix type of thing in a place like the US. Waking up can make you seem like a threat to the system in ways that you weren't before.
On the less fearful side, diamat is more grounding. It's not all on you, it's a fight that's been going on for a long time, you don't have to "just guess" and instead can look at the tactics and science others have used, etc.
But for me, that's not enough to smooth over the understanding of how deeply depraved the empire is. It means unlearning a lot about how to deal with people and systems. There's a Kwame Ture quote that goes something like, "In order for non-violence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The US has none." It's an unnerving thing to grapple with coming from a worldview that was something in the realm of liberal pacifism; that it's basically junk and I have to learn a more militant way of being, along with the consequences that come from that.