My family are mostly Democrat voting liberals and I identified as one for years. When I was in 5th grade I spent more time with my Fox News-watching grandparents and became a Republican for like a year or 2 and became an apolitical lib for a while. From like 2015-2019 I was a Bernie bro who had some objectively shit takes. The biggest 180 I did was probably on the sex trade. I used to be for it as a horny teen like “huh? Did someone say SeX?? Well it’s all ConSeNsUAL so why cockblock someone from getting some PuSsY?” Obviously now I realize that’s a disgusting sentiment and that most people in the industry are not happy and would rather do anything else. Just because a few are happy with their line of work, it doesn’t make it right to force so many others into a position where they feel abused and humiliated or threatened. “Legitimacy of industry” in terms of prostitution always means lining the pockets of abusive pimps (physical or anything else) who will use the opportunity to get rich and usually fund illegal markets (source: Look at Nevada). Enough about me, what topics have become more clear to yall after becoming a communist? I could probably list a few others but I’m interested in seeing what yall say.
Hmm for me a pretty recent 180 i took was on Deng Xiaoping. I was a commie but I really wasn’t super educated on the state of AES(even though i am part of the chinese diaspora) and was always under the impression that it was capitalism. That deng xiaoping turned china capitalist. Probably not really as big of an 180 as some other people here but really learning about china was really inspiring and restored my hope in the world ig. I feel way more patriotic towards china right than amerikkka.
Unworming yourself from the hegemonic propoganda related to AES/NK/China is a difficult one to do comrade, it took me actually meeting people from China to understand this fully.
The European Union. I used to think it was a somewhat flawed but reformable stepping stone to a more just and strong European (liberal) democracy. After becoming a Marxist it seems obvious now it is a neoliberal power structure with some pro’s for the common people (Schengen Area), but so many more ways for the ruling class to get their way (that same Schengen Area facilitating cheap labor and trade).
While a socialist pan-European organization would be amazing, it is laughable to think the EU is just slightly flawed or even reformable into this. Like parliamentary politics itself, the EU has some limited uses as a platform to us socialists and anti imperialists (Clare Daly, Mick Wallace), but limited they truly are due to its inherent neoliberal nature. State and Revolution was a great book that really put me into the ML view on Marxism, and taught me that existing power structures like the EU can not be reformed to serve the working class.
I’d have to say the same. The EU is nothing but an institution by and for capital. Ironically I remember my first real encounter with “EU bad actually” came from a Brexit leaver perspective, but that doesn’t mean they’re not wrong.
Since then I have come to the conclusion that the EU has successfully achieved with the pen what the Nazis failed to achieve with the sword, namely intra-European imperialist relations.
Seeing how the EU handled 2008 really made that last bit clear
Same, i though it’s the run of the mill succdem org but the one that ultimately work for the members benefits and posing some hope for multipolar world, especially when it was closing to Russia and China some years ago. Reading Marx and Lenin make me seriously doubt its purpose. Year 2022 moved me to “EU delenda est”.
Around 2019, on China. I was like “not real socialism and it opress minorities”. Holy shit thanks Chapo.
I used to be a heavy meat eater who said that ‘I could never abandon meat’. Until I actually tried abandoning meat and I haven’t gone back since. It’s easy, cheap, healthy and I learned to cook many different things now.
How do you feel about the Impossible meats and stuff like that?
I don’t eat them that much. Many of the recipes I use don’t include them and they oftentimes are more expensive than lentils, beans, mushrooms, chickpeas, whatever.
They did get better in the past few years though. A lot of them now taste pretty good. I don’t mind them but I always give starting vegans/vegetarians the advice to not buy them too often and instead look for other culture’s recipes. You will save money and it will probably be better quality of food.
Bean substitutes can go a long way, and that’s coming from someone who isn’t even vegan or vegetarian
I respect all sex workers But the economy of sex work is something I’ve had a complete 180 on. It’s not an industry that should be enabled under the current capitalist parameters.
Same. I used to think this is simply, “sex workers are the ones carrying all the risk and harm, so only their opinion matters. sex worker organisations call for full decriminalisation. /thread”
Until I learned decriminalisation of sex work in the first world leads to increased human trafficking from the Global South: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X12001453#s0045
To put it bluntly, brown women who would otherwise lead their normal lives, are kindapped and smuggled to be raped by white men, in large numbers, whenever a first world country decriminalises prostitution.
This works both ways - criminalising prostitution reduces human trafficking, as shown above in the case study.
People trafficked from the Global South are completely marginalised and poweless, they don’t have a voice. The voices we hear, calling for decriminalisation, are mostly from self employed Westerners. And while I genuinely do care about their right to safer work conditions, for me it doesn’t trump the right of brown women to not be kidnapped and raped by white men.
I think the policy under capitalism should be complete decriminalization of the actual workers but harsh punishment for Johns and pimps.
I couldn’t agree more. It reminds me of a liberal take I saw where they suggested making weed fully illegal and prostitution legal. They posited that weed dealers are worse for society because you can just avoid a prostitute but friends may offer to sell weed. The weed dealers certainly aren’t GOOD. But at least they don’t exploit a person for money and they don’t usually siphon that profit into skeevier and more dangerous black markets. Pimps do BOTH of those things and somehow someway libs and even misguided lefties try to make prostitution into a good societal practice. I’ve also heard the argument that “it’s one of the oldest professions on Earth” and so is monarchy, so are mercenaries. That doesn’t make these professions more honorable or less. It’s what the institution stands for as a whole and prostitution takes vulnerable people in any given society, exploits their lack of opportunities and resources and forces them into an environment that is not good for their health in any ways. Sorry for the rant, Ik we’re all on the same side here but the mere EXISTENCE of that industry, let alone the concept of people outside of that industry defending it just enrages me to no end.
They posited that weed dealers are worse for society because you can just avoid a prostitute but friends may offer to sell weed.
With marijuana legalized it won’t be your friend selling it but some massive corporation. My semi-ironic anti legalization take is that legalization takes weed selling from an industry of small business owners that helps them get by to an industry of massive corporations (who tend to have whiter owners). Of course we should legalize so the small sellers don’t go to jail for nothing. The other anti-legalization argument I have is that the legalized industry as it exists is environmentally destructive, though that calls for nationalization and regulation.
One of the worst prostitution takes I’ve seen is that it’s needed to stop incelism. Why do “sexologists” always have to start with half decent takes and take them to the total extreme?
I’ve also heard the argument that “it’s one of the oldest professions on Earth”
It’s not even true though. What about farming or crafting? In many places sex used to be “freer” and uncommodified.
Sorry for the rant, Ik we’re all on the same side here but the mere EXISTENCE of that industry, let alone the concept of people outside of that industry defending it just enrages me to no end.
Totally agree
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Of course! Sex workers should be provided all the care and support they need to get out of the abusive situation.
I dated someone back home in Central America very briefly and she told me about the sex tourism and how they use minors to cater to pedo $.
Most of these man start by offering to fly them back to their country, that’s a pedophile power dynamic, where you take a young child out of their home country and somewhere they don’t know nothing of, they solely have to rely on this pedo.
I do believe sex workers at the end of the day will be the ones to decide what happens outside of capitalist parameters, but the sex work industry right now under capitalism is filled with sex trafficking, because they’re really one in the same.
deleted by creator
Pedophiles get the wall
As for SWers what do you do if they still exist in socialism?
I don’t want SW to exist in any form, btw I hope that’s clear
I admit when it comes to the concept of prostitution in a socialist society, I have more questions than answers. Like what happens if one SWer is more “popular”, for lack of a better term, than others? Do they deserve extra credit for their labor or is it more evenly distributed? If so, what would be the hours? What would be the terms of rejection of a customer? How would customers or “johns” work in this scenario? Who would run the business while simultaneously not being objectively a “pimp”? If it’s an established place that serves food or drinks, is it also just a bar for regular customers or is it ONLY a brothel? It gets confusing to me and obviously if there were enough CONSENTING SWers it would be hypocritical of me to deny them access to an occupation they feel comfortable with, but keeping the industry fair and safe seems like a juggling act that I can’t imagine working well on the first implementation. Maybe after a few tweaks and changes but it seems rather complicated
I am with you 100%. I just want to clarify that
Every time I try to express similar sentiments I’m hit with left book responses
deleted by creator
I agree comrade, I just don’t wanna offend any SWers amongst our ranks. I don’t think there is anything ethical about it.
I dated an ex SW… And it was around the time I was very pro sex work because of the leftbook environment that I was in at the time. But she opened my eyes, the topic requires a lot more nuance, and we can’t fall victim to romanticizing the economy of SW. Really one can argue that whether voluntary or not the industry of SW preys on young people, especially minors.
The girl I dated said, it happened so fast, she thought it was all on her terms, until years later when she realized how powerless she was. She was into deep, and unfortunately the experience had a very negative effect on her mental health. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
Most people (not customers obviously) that are for legal sex work don’t think it’s good. They (myself included) think it would make it not as bad as it is now.
It’s the same as legalizing drugs. People don’t use them much more, they just do it with less shit and less violence on average.
I’m new to learning about a loooot of stuff. I used to support Ukraine’s side at the beginning of the war
Good for you for getting out of that. Not a lot of people are capable.
The idea that the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a horrific but sadly necessary evil to end the war. Endless propaganda got to me and I never put to much thought into it.
I learned the history and found out that it was all a lie. Japan was ready to surrender, they were finished, the attack was senseless evil power projection.
That story about building the torture nexus, theres no way they’re going to let anyone stop them from using it on innocent people
Fucking everything lately. I understand now most of the people we call leftists online are historically-illiterate historical extremists speedrunning the 2nd International in the midst of a golden opportunity to live new history lol
I don’t leave my house anymore ever since cops tried sneaking me with weapons drawn for going for a jog in the springtime. That day, I went from “reform the police” to "fuck the police, I will shoot back."
LAPD shot someone on my block two weekends ago, he was asking to die (he was saying he wanted to be shot by witness accounts), and was flaunting something at them. But he was clearly distressed and to see one of my people laid out bleeding under their truck with their working supplies piled on the back… Well its an image in my brain reminding me that I’m one mental breakdown from the same fate
That’s very troubling to experience, I can’t imagine seeing something like that. Stay safe out there comrade, and keep your eyes peeled
Thank you, comrade
I’m trying to find the ways to channel that anger and distraught
That the Holocaust was an aberration. If anything it was a continuation of what came before.
Maybe this has long been clear to some of you but it’s been interesting for me coming to this conclusion. I went to school in Canada, where we of course learned about the settlement and colonization of Canada, but in a “oh this was bad but it was a long time ago and for the most part the white people didn’t know any better.” It was also always the British or French colonists doing these horrible things, once Canada requested independence a few unimportant treaties may have been broken but all in all everything’s fine now. Well except for residential schools, but that was an honest mistake. And except for unbelievably awful living conditions on native reserves, that’s their own fault. So goes the state written and approved school curriculum, of course they can’t admit to their generations long history of crimes.
Of course the colonists and later the US and Canadian governments knew exactly what they were doing. They killed about a hundred million people on purpose.
Around the same time during high school I took a course that focused on the Holocaust, with material written by a Zionist NGO, basically placing the Holocaust as the pinnacle of crime against humanity to which nothing can compare.
And that’s all while ignoring colonial atrocities in the global south, as I’ve only really started learning about those as a part of my journey into ML.
AI. even as a communist, i thought that we could just make minor progress in AI research and then overthrow capitalism and have socialist AI which will be awesome. but after seeing the internet polluted with AI-created drivel (that “internet is mostly bots” theory might be true in all honesty…the capitalists would absolutely do something like that to make the internet look more populated because a lot of industries now rely on the internet) and ben shapiro using AI generated fake images to fuel hate against palestine, i want to see AI completely gone. i despise it. if i had the choice to destroy AI and LLMs and all that shit, i would. and i say this as someone in a field that is currently seeing some fledgling AI implementation. i despise it.
Shits fucked, I am searching for a software engineer job and I stumbled upon a job listing that offered 50k USD a year. The job wasn’t about actually coding, but about overseeing the training process of an AI that generates code. They will pay you more that x5 of what my teacher parents make in order to train your replacement, it makes me fucking mad
Honestly I’m not really sure. Most of my “stances” before I became a communist were uninformed because like every other person living in Amerikkka, we’re indoctrinated to believe the lies of the empire.
As a kid up till I got into college I was mostly apolitical (as much as a Black person can be) aside from thinking Bush Jr was a fucking idiot and that Amerikkka shouldn’t be acting like the world’s policeman and telling others what to do. When Obama became president I (like other uninformed Black folks) celebrated cause we finally had someone that looked like us in the White House so no more racism (lmao)!
Wasn’t until the BLM protests that started in 2014 (ironically during the Obama administration) that I became woke (the REAL, OG woke) and realized that this country was not built for people who look like me. Also around that time I was on my own in the world of capitalist Amerikkka and the struggles I went through made me question why things like food, housing and education can’t be free.
It wasn’t until 2016 that I actually became active on social media during Bernie’s campaign, and I was hooked by the idea of free education and a higher minimum wage, etc. When he got fucked by the Democratic Party I was so pissed, I voted Green Party that year cause I really believed in Jill Stein (the only fucking party that had reparations as a part of their platform) and ended up rubbing shoulders with actual communists (they called themselves “watermelons”, green on the outside but red on the inside). This was when I discovered leftbook…I could write an entire post about my experience with leftbook…ugh.
That aside, I was a anarcho-communist cause I thought anarchism was cool but after learning more about the Black Panthers I dropped the anarcho and just became an ML and pretty much never looked back.
I voted Green Party that year cause I really believed in Jill Stein
Stein is more of a comrade of mine than many so-called communists who call her a quack or a fraud.
How many of us have been kidnapped and interrogated by the fucking FBI for posing a threat to the oil industry?
I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Baraka as well. If Stein is a comrade, he’s a goddamn comrade. I will never forget shaking that man’s hand.
Of course they had no chance cause of how bourgeois elections work but it was the first time I was really excited about politics cause I actually knew what was going on.
Never voted again after that lol.
I thought anarchism was cool but after learning more about the Black Panthers I dropped the anarcho and just became an ML and pretty much never looked back.
“If it was good enough for Bobby Seale, it’s good enough for me” became mantra.
Lol hell yeah that’s based
I know a lot of sex workers and the “abusive pimps” narrative doesn’t ring true to me. They’re doing it coz it beats driving Uber.
They’re doing it coz it beats driving Uber.
Uber is abusive as fuck and the gig economy shouldn’t exist either.
I think it’s problematic when the hate is directed at sex workers. They’re doing something for money, just like a brick layer, because they’re desperate to eat and find shelter just like all of us but the sex industry is abusive and extremely exploitative and it shouldn’t exist. Meanwhile the brick laying industry definitely should exist which is an important distinction that gets lost.
If Uber and onlyfans cease to exist then the world is a better place, and using the humanity of sex workers as a human shield to defend their existence isn’t right.
The distinction one should make when analyzing these things are the relationships between the workers and employers; some pimps look after there workers and provide fair compensation, others go to impoverished 3rd world countries, go to the villages with suitcases of money and buy women for 500 dollars a person paid to the family and come back every year, then keep them as slaves.
Ubereats and other associated apps all pay people below min wage and rely on a similar model of importing slavery to the 1st world; they are essentially sanatized servant apps.
If Uber and onlyfans cease to exist then the world is a better place, and using the humanity of sex workers as a human shield to defend their existence isn’t right.
What’s your objection to OnlyFans? I mean, apart from objection we can make to anything under capitalism.
It’s safer and more lucrative than most sex work. I know a lot of people who’ve switched from other kinds of sex work to Only Fans.
OnlyFans is the pimp. They take a cut out of earnings and yeah, that makes them pimps.
Most “creators” (that’s what the platform calls them) make 10 bucks a year. Only a few ever make enough money to live on it. It’s like that on most of these platforms, we see the top creators but most people toil forever without seeing any revenue.
The high-end, top earning “creators” are also no different from petty bourgeois earners. Those don’t want onlyfans or our attitude to porn to change bc their entire livelihood is based on the revenue they make there. To which I say, welp, tough luck when the revolution comes. The brick and mortar petty bourgeois will see his store seized and so will the onlyfans account.
Creators also make custom content (maybe not all of them do idk) for clients. They become prostitutes by proxy of a phone screen, but still prostitutes.
The screen proxy kind of obfuscates the nature of onlyfans but it’s still prostitution, albeit perhaps a bit safer because it happens on the internet.
We’ve seen also with the Amouranth situation (though I only heard about it when it came out, idk what came of it) that some “creators” are trafficked into doing this. I assume there are many, many more trafficked “models” on onlyfans than the platform lets on.
Creators also make custom content (maybe not all of them do idk) for clients. They become prostitutes by proxy of a phone screen, but still prostitutes.
A lot of Instagram ‘models’ or whatever are escorting on the side, using their social media to promote their work.
I actually looked that up for this comment, but not for Instagram specifically, and it seems most were escorrs/prostitutes before doing it on social. However it seems they also switch to OF if they can make enough money on it and ditch the escorts once that happens.
This isn’t emphasized nearly enough. Again, when people talk about sex work they gotta be more clear about who they’re talking about.
We gotta make the distinction between sex workers and sex bourgeoisie in these conversations because mainstream liberal society just casually lumps the latter into some big tent where both the views of the pimp and their sex-slave are held on equal footing.
Like I said in another comment here, there are some grey areas that add nuance to the discussions around this, but when it comes to who is exploiting and who is being exploited – that part is pretty damn clear.
What percentage of OnlyFans models receive 100% of their profit?
Sex trafficker and rapist Andrew Tate forced his victims to perform on his OnlyFans. How many similar stories are there? Is OnlyFans really a crowdsourcing platform for self-employed sex workers, or is it a pimp’s paradise hiding behind the facade of the former?
I found a Google AMP link in your comment! I’ve removed Google’s spyware for you! :3
The way i see it OnlyFans is basically crowdfunding for porn, predating on lonely people. OnlyFans creators are hustling lonely people out of their money, and the platform encourages them to do it by taking a cut.
Personally I dont have an objection with OnlyFans in concept or execution, aside from it doing that predatory youtube thing where it sells an idea of material abundance that is only actually avilable to 0.01% of users on the app; most onlyfans creators (90%+) make less than 700 dollars a month.
Its the same issue with the music industry, it only rewards a tiny few people and gives scraps to the rest while selling a false idea of social mobility and monetary abundance.
Basically onlyfans needs to unionize
More power to em, I’m genuinely glad that they enjoy that line of work, in a perfect world ONLY people that consent to that occupation would have that job but unfortunately that isn’t the case nearly enough. I just feel that too many are forced into it and the perpetrators of the industry are too disgustingly exploitative to justify the industry’s existence. Not doubting your personal experiences with talking to these people, just giving you my 2 cents on the issue.
I can’t help but feel that too many communists don’t actually listen to sex workers and base a lot of their misgivings on some moral, conservative, patriarchal attitude towards sex, women and culture.
Not everything under the umbrella of “sex work” is prostitution or porn. In general (and I say in general, because I’m aware that this is a complex issue) we should be letting sex workers guide this conversation.
This is it.
None of the SWERF takes on here are listening to the relevant stakeholders.
Personally, I don’t take people who use “SWERF” in these conversations seriously, let alone someone who accuses an ML instance of harboring those ideals… whatever those ideals are.
Thinking of? I’ve never seen a genuine “SWERF”. Every take I’ve seen here has been rather adamant regarding the necessity for those in the sex trade to be at the forefront of these conversations.
We’ve had this struggle session before. Financial extortion for sex = rape. The anecdote of your friendships is well and grand. It doesn’t ring true for 99% of all victims of the sex trade.
Hit me back when you talk to some emaciated 14 year old Peruvian girls trapped within it, offering sexual favors for 5, 10, 15 USD. Hit me back when you talk to some 60, 70, 80 year old Korean women, who also work 50+ hour jobs, trapped within it. Hit me back when your partner is being assaulted almost daily, and she agrees that she is, yet says “we need the money” anyway. Empowering. Ha.
Perhaps it is puritanism, perhaps it is moralistic argumentation, idk. I do know that every successful socialist revolution eliminated prostitution. It is, 99 times out of 100, one of the most exploitative financial relationships that can exist. Good for you if you wind up a top 10% OnlyFans creator by your bootstraps or whatever. That doesn’t matter much to the thousands of people being trafficked and raped every goddamn day.
“SWERF”. Where are the voices of those aforementioned Peruvian youth? Those elder Koreans? The 6.3 million people trafficked for sexual exploitation in 2021 alone? I don’t care about the feelings and opinions of sexual hobbyists nearly as much as I care about victims, and I don’t think anyone should. 🤷♂️
I just view it the same way as any type of injurious manual labor. They are workers who are in part selling their bodily well-being for money, so the goals should be harm reduction, alternative employment, and demand reduction. I’m not sure if it is possible to eliminate completely at this stage of development, but carceral policies should not be used. Also, there are plenty of trafficked sex workers who aren’t doing it consensually.
This only means that sex workers you know are Westerners like you, and had the option to drive Uber or do any other legal work instead. This is not true for people illegally trafficked into your country. I’ll just paste the comment I wrote elsewhere in this thread:
I used to think this is simply, “sex workers are the ones carrying all the risk and harm, so only their opinion matters. sex worker organisations call for full decriminalisation. /thread”
Until I learned decriminalisation of sex work in the first world leads to increased human trafficking from the Global South: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X12001453#s0045
To put it bluntly, brown women who would otherwise lead their normal lives, are kindapped and smuggled to be raped by white men, in large numbers, whenever a first world country decriminalises prostitution.
This works both ways - criminalising prostitution reduces human trafficking, as shown above in the case study.
People trafficked from the Global South are completely marginalised and poweless, they don’t have a voice. The voices we hear, calling for decriminalisation, are mostly from self employed Westerners. And while I genuinely do care about their right to safer work conditions, for me it doesn’t trump the right of brown women to not be kidnapped and raped by white men.
Any positive opinion of USA if I even had one before.
I was a teenage anarchist. You can imagine I’ve changed my mind on a lot of things 😂
My brother legit has an A tattoo on his arm and now he’s a chud libertarian/fascist.
Oof. I just got the Disco Elysium Communard symbol tattooed on me, but I definitely considered getting the A when I was younger. Thankfully I’m terrified of needles and couldn’t get over it until I started doing martial arts recently, or I probably would have gone through with the A.
I def still need to play Disco Elysium.
I only have one tattoo and it’s Hunter Thompson’s initials on my wrist. I’m a fan of his work and it’s sort of a reminder to me to stay weird.
It hurt and I was like “never getting one again” but now I’m considering getting an ASD infinity symbol somewhere noticable but out of the way. I don’t know if I’d ever get anything that showed my political affiliations but I guess to be fair. To my edgy ass brother, at the time anarchy meant something not related to actual theory. I doubt he even knows that there is anarchist theory.
I used to think that all ideas, even potentially harmful ones, should be free to spread so they could be defeated in the “marketplace of ideas.”
Me too.
I later learned that was a mistake because the best ideas don’t usually win, only the ideas with the most immediate appeal for the audience, no matter how short-sighted or destructive. I’d be like a supermarket expecting vegetables to be its biggest sellers instead of candy, energy drinks, and junk food.
That’s a good analogy.
Also, me too. I was the libbest of JS Mill-Keynesian libs and thought that if only we could secure liberal values/rights, we could instigate a welfare state for all and keep it, this time. What a muppet. My 180° shift began when a Marxist friend said, but redtea, how will you convince everyone else to voluntarily pay high taxes to pay for it all?
I learned that no one actually believes this
I used to believe that
