So yeah, this is probably for some people going to be (pun intended) full of red flags, I’m not going to sugarcoat stuff, but try to write a bit about politics again. It’s something that is kind of interesting to me, but also at the same time, something that often is draining for a socially awkward guy on the spectrum like me. Social settings and bigger groupings tend to drain me a lot, and I’m in general maybe not as well read and enlightened as many, but I just wanted to write down some cornerstones of things that are important to me anyway, so here we go, you probably already guessed it

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Communism

Yeah, I’m a filthy commie, and pretty unapolagetic about it, at least in my mind, outward in a normal setting you’d probably never get something that strong out of me, I’d mostly just joke it off, while still keeping the label as much as possible.

I’m not that deep into theory, I kind of find it hard to read much of it, since they use so many abstract big words that just makes me start skimming and wondering why I’m doing this to myself, but the core ideas are really landing with me, and the principles of dialectics, historical materialism, worker exploitation etc really strikes a chord with me.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not a tankie, I hate authocracies and strong-man politics as much as the next guy, but I also don’t think that this is something that is a communist thing, it’s more a thing that also happens in communist contexts, and then for me feels just like a bad ending to something that migh have started with good ideals, but got coopted by someone to gain power for themselves, rather than letting us decide over our own situation, and is just as unwanted in this context as in another. I’m not quite sure why it’s such a polarizing standpoint to have, but I guess it has a lot to do with the whole cold war thing, and how much of it’s soft power the US spent on maligning it as being the “ideology of the enemy”

So sitting here in Europe, we’re bombarded with propaganda from both sides, both sides spending so much time and effort onto trying to make the other look bad, or themselves good, and you kind of stand there not as a part of a superpower, and try to sift through everything and find out what is true and what isn’t.

On one side americans get annoying with their naïve belief in their own exeptionalism, which often makes them come across as patronising and rather obnoxious, on the other you have tankies defending everything china does, and you just have to try and pick out the true things, what is really happening, and what isn’t how is the situation really on the floor for a normal person.

Those difficult words, what are they?

So I mentioned Dialectics, Historical Materialism and Worker exploitation, now I don’t claim to be the best in theory, but I’ll try to at least write down what I feel they are, more than a set in stone set of beliefs, they are tools, lenses to see the world, how we got there, and where we can go in the future.

So starting out with dialectics, which says that contradictions shapes the outcome of things that happens, workers fight for workers right, while the owners fight for profit, which often is a contradiction, which creates movement, the compromises and results of this will make a new situation with new contradictions and so on, it creates constant motion in our situation, and it’s a way to see the sides of an issue, and how they shape and influence the result. Because it’s important to know the situation, important to know how comerades that came before us have helped us getting the things we have, like worker protection, shorter workweeks, and so on. It often also helps clearify what is going on in a situation, as with everything else though, it’s important to not blindly paint everything as black and white, that’s not what its for. It’s more something that we can use to get a better hang on something, helps us choose where to stand and who we want to support.

Historical Materialism are another set of big words that like most things boil down to a simple picture, how we produce things shapes the shapes the society we’re in, so a change in economic structure leads to changes in laws, morals and powr relations. it shapes the contradictions that happens in society, it changes laws, morals and aspirations. Who gets to decide, who gets to benefit and so on.

And then you have class, that whole thing that is so tightly bound to communism, this is not a caste system it’s basically different strata of situations in our community, the two main classes are the capitalists and the workers, where the capitalists own the means of production, and get their money through that ownership, and you have the workers, people who use the means to produce goods, but have to sell their labour to survive. Of course you can start to subdivide and mix and match to get different subgroups, like always in politics, and you probably have heard the more fancy words for the classes, the Burgouisse and the Proletariat, but that’s the gist of it at least as far as I think.

And then we have worker exploitation, this is the whole idea behind “nobody has earned being a millionaire”. This is based on the fact that a worker will produce way more than they actually do earn, and a millionaire gets richer by the arbitrage between the sum that they pay their workers, and the value that they get from their labour. Of course as you get higher and higher on this ladder things gets more and more abstract, you get to the funders, who play arbitrage on the people playing arbitrage on the labour and so on, but in the end, the labourers are the ones who do the work, while getting back only a part, and then often spending it on buying back the fruits of their own labour, it’s a weird system, but it’s what we’re under.

I probably ballsed this up a couple of places, but it’s the basics as far as my maybe faulty understanding go, I probably should read up more about theory, but often it’s just very abstract and dry to get through, and so often having to parse through abstract notions that some times feels like they are there to just make it sound more fancy that it really is.

But I want to own my own toothbrush

Yeah, and nobody wants to take your stuff away, what communism wants is to collectivise the means of production, so that we can better steer things in a way that rather than putting power and means in the pocket of single people, we make a society that is better for us all. Rather than chasing profit we can make sure that we have what we need, and we can help the rising tide lifting all the ships. Help the workers actually feel that their work is worth more, because rather than just putting more coins in the pocket of their boss, they are helping other comerades to a better life.

I don’t know, I could probably go on about this for a while, but I’m just trying to demystify the whole communism thing a bit, try to help it not feel like this murky scary thing that you’ve been told is dangerous and scary, it really is not, it’s just people trying to help each other to better their own life, rather than working away giving more coin and power to the people already having more than they could ever spend.