How do people raise their kids communist?
Especially in imperial countries where the kids have to deliberately go along with many wrong history lessons?
I don't have kids, Matt Christman having one just makes me wonder how he and other Communist parents do it.
Teach empathy for people you don't know
That's really all it took for me and my siblings. My parents taught us to treat others how we'd like to be treated, respect people that are different, love nature and such, and to think critically about everything. The only way to stay consistent with what we were taught is to help destroy Amerikkka. They weren't 'political' but somehow we all turned out as commies.
My mom was also just very loving and great, growing up with that helped instill an anti-misogynistic mind set. With less misogyny I think it's harder for someone to be tricked by the usual right-wing propaganda.
With less misogyny I think it's harder for someone to be tricked by the usual right-wing propaganda.
I fully agree. I keep thinking back to my childhood friend. We lived in the same neighbourhood, had the same mutual friends, were in the same classes with the same teachers and same classmates, we had the same hobbies and interests and even went to the same church. But he went right-wing men's-rights insanity and I decidedly did not.
The only major difference was that I have a sister and brother, and he was an only child. He never had to share toys or attention, and he never really interacted (in an age-appropriate way) with girls. Between my sister and her friends, I was interacting (again age-appropriately) with girls all the time. They weren't mysterious and strange creatures to me, they were just other kids. There was one odd moment when my friends was at our house, and some of my sister's friends were over as well to see her. He just had a confused look at seeing me say hi to them, like he was seeing something brand new to science.
Real answer right here. Socialism and communism are natural evolutions of empathetic thought.
I mean even if they don't become commie (which is, realistically, very likely), empathetic socdem, change-from-inside, lib is millions times better than bloodless ghouls like hitchens, applebaum or kamala, who can probably cite something off the dome, and yet are disgusting.
This is kinda nonsense to me, Marxist theory is strictly logical, Marx doesn't make emotional or empathetic pleas in Das Kapital or something. Yes, you can be an empathetic communist to great effect, but I don't think its even close to mandatory (and the proof is in how many shitty communists there have been historically, looking at you Beria). The whole point of Marxism is that its in the best interest of everyone, even the bourgeoisie, to apply Marxist theory. After all, if the bourgeoisie allows society to deteriorate their heads will be on platters.
Idk how more people don’t just naturally turn out leftist.
They do, but they use the label of "moderate" or "center-right" without having any idea what either of those mean and then they stay home on election day.
US polls for individual issues skew very strongly socdem, and polls don't really ask questions about if someone approves of their current economic system and what they would think would be more ideal, so there isn't really any US-centric data that could even theoretically show that people are more left than socdem en masse.
I'd bet if you polled the US population with the question, "Do you support an economic system where you get to elect/fire your superiors in the workplace, decide via vote how much you get paid, you get partial ownership of the company, and outside investments in corporations are illegal and classified as gambling?" without using the words "socialism, communism, Marxism, etc." that a lot more people than expected would be in favor of that.
The Red Scare just made it so the words "communism, socialism, etc." have become taboo to the older generations, and somewhat also to the younger ones, and the right likes to call literally everything they disagree with "socialism" anyway.
The propaganda is omnipresent to help prevent that
I ended up accidentally raising a communist by being poor in the imperial core. And somewhat radical/leftist myself. I did a lot of injustice ranting around him on things like poverty, privilege and why we ourselves were poor. And how people (the masses) did not choose their conditions and such. And was againts stuff like bullying, tried to think with portals when answering his questions and never much gave him a rosy image of what this socdem country is. Always told him to try to see where others are coming from and adcovated for kindness and empathy.
Kid also ended up queer and neurodivergent and eventually helped turn me into a ml-communist. He did find his way to the streams of Hasan and other such things all on his own. He purged me and his dad of the red scare brainworms we had. And made me realize I too am neurodivergent and probably also genderqueer.
Interesting! How did you end up on this site?
If I remember correctly (this is not my first account here) I found lemmygrad first and then this, lurked around reading for months and then joined. It was after I had deleted all my big socials and had been on mastodon for some time, but not on lemmy. Might be I searched for it or maybe just ran into it, can't remember anymore.
tried to think with portals when answering his questions
What does "think with portals" mean?
It sounds like you made an empathic kid who has some tendency to put shame back in the correct place. Nice job on you, and also them too for helping you get to know yourself better. Your relationship has had great exchanges that seem to make you all freer people.
It's a reference to a game, but what I mean by it is being critical and considering different sides on an issue / not just accepting a ready given answer. Thinking out of the box as well.
We might have for example discussed something like personal responsibility and I likely would have asked him to consider the structural reasons someone might behave a certain way and question how much choice there actually is in it. Like hating ones bullies is easy, but understanding why they do it is harder. Not saying anger isn't ok, but I would typically talk with him about the possible whys of things as well. We did talk a lot and do.
I agree it has made us all freer, I owe a lot to him on how much better I personally cope with the world now. Not to mention his dad who has been able to purge himself from a lot of gender spesific toxicity as our son has modelled a better way to be to him with confidence. We also have a trans kid (stepkid to me) and have to say that these people have made us two gen X wrecks so much better and freer.
Children often naturally gravitate towards egalitarianism and recognizing injustice. You just encourage when they do so. As they grow up, you ask them what they think about things going on in the world and in their lives. Encourage them to use their imaginations to solve problems.
My comment isn't advice so much as maybe reassurance: I was raised by my parents to be some sort of weird libertarian racist guy, and by the public school system to be a liberal douche. My entire life was steering me towards capitalist ideologies, and compared with all that, it took so little to move me towards communism.
The main thing now seems to be keeping kids (particularly boys) from getting sucked into right-wing bullshit that responds to the world getting worse by telling people it's dog-eat-dog and encouraging social-darwinist attitudes.
My son has told me that during his teens there was a short period in his internet life and friend circle life that was pulling him towards right-wing bullshit, certain YT influencers and such that were problematic that "everybody was watching". A few of his friends did end up becoming racist right wingers and he cut contact to them. These were kids I remember from his birthday parties that did have chuddier families and racist distant fathers. His dad has always been not so traditionally masculine (nonviolent, caring, care worker, does housework more than I) which I think did also help, but the pull still happened so it's far more complicated than just raising or not rasing a kid as communist.
The right wing content is there, all the time, for all kids. Most of everything for kids is conservative or nationalistic bs, even school. So I think that peers also can dictate a lot of where people end up. My son was lucky in having enough friends who were kind and also experienced in how nothing is ever so black and white. And his friends were marginalized themselves.
Definitely don't ask the allegedly Marxist parents of
orI don't know about mayo's parents but Kamala's def isn't a marxist
I keep trying to explain dialectical materialism to our 2 year old and she seems to be paying complete attention, but then like 20 minutes later she'll try and steal your food or scratch at the sofa like nothing got through at all.
How do you instill Communist values in a cat?
All cats are communists. You should be the one learning from her.
You clearly didn't feed her. As a fellow cat I am reporting you to the NKKVD
Sobbing as I pour out kilograms of food, with no end in sight.
How does anyone even find a communist partner tbh :agony:
I do a lot of ranting in front of my kids, and when we're confronted with obvious bullshit like a bunch of people having to live under a bridge, I make sure to conclude the rant by telling them Stalin would've dealt with the people responsible for this.
I also tell them that in this family we talk to strangers, and then model that behavior. We spend a lot of time learning about the lives of people around the world and the collective accomplishments of the people in maligned places like Appalachia or China. We study foreign languages and speak to people in their native languages. As a general guiding principle my wife and I have agreed that we want our kids to grow up with self awareness that they are part of the workers of the world.
You act "normal" until you can start hitting them with the cosmic horror when they are around 13, so far has been easy with a daughter
My kids are 10 and 13. I homeschooled them for the first three years of the pandemic and during this time brainwashed them (and myself) with communist propaganda. They wanted to go back to school last fall so my spouse (a left liberal) and I let them. My spouse had also been strongly pressuring me to send them back for months beforehand.
It's amazing the influence their lib school and lib friends have on them. My kids are also super into Harry Potter. My 10-year-old listens to the audiobooks (from the library) constantly. We also just got through re-watching and discussing LOTR, which my older kid is now re-reading. A few nights ago my older kid and I got into a heated argument about whether the orcs in LOTR are basically a Nazi vision of Judeo-Bolshevik-Africans. He admitted the next morning that they are. He also seemed disturbed when I kept referring to Tolkien as a Catholic monarchist (which he was).
They also play video games, chat with their friends a lot, and do all kinds of after-school activities. They're good if not great students (I suspect the teachers are just softballing everyone?) and are happy with their social lives. If not for covid and the general horror of amerikkkan imperialism and colonialism and capitalism and patriarchy and climate change and school shootings, there wouldn't be much to complain about. I also didn't really start to think about politics until I was 12 or 13.
So there's strong liberal influences everywhere. Sometimes my kids push back if they see me shouting "Free Palestine" out the car window at people. They don't like that. (I haven't done it with them since the summer when there were more people around; I do sometimes do things like this on my own, picking fights with liberals over Palestine in person in public—especially when I know that I can easily get away—because I have no respect for the indifferent and these fucking pieces of shit should have no peace wherever they go.) But I asked the older one today: "does 'israel' have a right to exist?" He immediately answered no. I then asked: "where should the Jews in 'israel' go once the country no longer exists?" "They can go back to Europe where they came from," he said. (We also have Jewish ancestry.) We talked about how Hamas has said that anyone can live in Palestine so long as they follow the rules. Was he just humoring me? I don't think so. Both of my kids also tell me repeatedly that they are contemptuous of the liberal nonsense their teachers tell them. My older son had to complete a project on the constitution recently. I told him he could mention that the constitution had been written by slave owners. He said that he just wanted to get a passing grade, so he ended up writing what the lib teacher wanted to hear. I have lost all respect for local schools, institutions, teachers, etc., because none of them give a fuck about masking, I've seen them lie to my face, and there have been issues with weird sexual abuse at the school. I also can't stand being anywhere near any of the other parents. I also strongly insist on my kids masking at school, and I know that they don't always do so (all of us have "colds" right now), but I also know that they do it at least sometimes.
Raising communist kids isn't just about forcing them to read communist texts. Communists aim to build a democratic society, which means making things as democratic as possible at home: listening to kids and allowing them to make some decisions at least, even if they conflict with your own desires. And also just loving your kids, encouraging their strengths, being there for them, giving a damn about them.
Feel free to critique me but I'm doing the best that I can. I don't know how they're going to turn out because millions of things could happen from millions of different directions and I can't keep them locked in their rooms forever reading communist texts. (The older one definitely seems to remember all the dialectical materialism I drilled into him years ago.) I have kind of wondered about how communists ended up raising monsters like Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris—were their parents really communists to begin with? Were they too nice, or were they abusive or neglectful? Did their kids become liberals because for some reason they associated their nice communist parents with the nice liberal government? Reich says it's all about sex—that people turn into fascists because their parents physically abuse them into having a really strange relationship with sex (the petite bourgeoisie, the main supporters of fascism, are hostile to extramarital sex because they don't have the resources to support all those kids and don't want to deal with more proletarians). Interestingly, I managed to get my spouse, who comes from a PB family, to watch Starship Troopers with us a year or two ago. She didn't have a problem with all of the gruesome violence in that movie, but she walked out during the shower scene and refused to finish the movie with us.
Feel free to critique me but I'm doing the best that I can.
Okay, I will. I think you're guiding your kids down the wrong path making them think orcs are Judeo-Bolshevik-Africans, that's a stretch.
But, no, seriously, it sounds like you're doing a great job. I think many of us would've been lucky to have a dad like you. Just curious what you meant with "it's all about sex"? In the preceding sentences you were wondering why Communist/Left-raised kids end up being fascists, but in the following sentence you discuss fascist-sympathizing petite bourgeoisie abusing their kids leading to them having weird relationships with sex. Was the "it's all about sex" related to Communists raising kids to become fascists or petite bourgeois fascists abusing their kids? Or were you imagining petite bourgeois "communists" doing this? I don't think people like Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg were actually raised by Communists but maybe that's just a No True Scotsman thing on my part.
Thanks. I meant that it’s all about sex. Having a more open attitude toward safe consensual sex among adults will probably help in making people more leftwing. Having a weird attitude about it (saying that women who sleep with men outside of marriage are sluts, for instance) increases the chances of turning your kids into groypers. It’s not difficult to find the sexual element in politics, regardless of a given person’s ideology.
Pete and Kamala both had communist academic parents AFAIK.
I wish I could be so agro in person, but I would 100% lose my job the second they figure out I work in schools (IT work mind you. Reminder: gotta check that prolewiki isnt blocked at work). That will make the school process interesting since my kids will be in the system I work in.
Among family we don't mince words though. Our MIL has the "some people want to be homeless" brain worms, and my wife shoots that idea out of the sky whenever she brings it up. Happened just this week on vacation while her and my daughter and grandma were driving to a thing. Granted my daughter is 4.
My kids are young enough that you can't tell them nothing really. Though I think that changes at 4. Its wild what the 4yo picks up just from daycare. She gets most of her ideas about Santa from daycare, she "likes" Paw Patrol even though we do not allow it in the house. I know one of the kids are daycare of obsessed with Paw Patrol.
Never let your daughter forget that Chase is a class traitor.
I was already blacklisted around here for political reasons so I don’t have much to lose.
They fucking don't, that's the problem.
I left the hospital in a wheelchair and then I spent the next four/five months rehabbing to be able to stand and walk. And I went from having braces on both of my legs to just one, and I went from a wheelchair to the braces, to crutches, to a cane, within six months. Had to do a bunch of horrible, really grody stuff to my body. And at the end of it, I kind of hit a plateau where I now have a limp, still, because I have something called Browns-Sequard syndrome [sic], which is where the damage to your spine affects two halves differently. So my right leg is normal in terms of strength but it's completely numb all the time, like it's asleep. And then my left leg is very weak, and I drag it. It's been that way since this happened. Amber's theory is you see white males who are committed Leftists, and if they're serious about it, there’s something that happened that gave them a sense of real vulnerability. They don't take for granted their position anymore. I never thought about it that way. It was never a conscious thing. But when I look at my interests and my milieu, I think that theory is kind of persuasive. I just kind of laid low and felt vulnerable.
My parents just didn't try to instill any values at all and I just became a useless online commie by chance, but there are definitely kids around who actually do praxis from a fairly young age. No idea how they do it though.
you ever read Jakarta Method?
edit: follow-up on the "make sure they don't understand basic economics", if you can read through section 1 of this Communist Economics book and explain to me how it's not basic economics with some effort that doesn't rely on buzzwords or insults, I'll consider not banning you. You'll have... lets say until around 9AM EST to figure out something before I get out the
What “actual history books” are you talking about?
A lot of mainstream history books overlook deeper economic and class conflicts. The Korean War is called 'the forgotten war' because many history books skip over it and the U.S. support for oppressive regimes, as well as the class struggles involved. Similarly, the fast transformation of the Soviet Union from a near feudal society into an industrial powerhouse that played a crucial role in WWII is often downplayed, reflecting selective storytelling in history education. We should teach kids to view history through the lens of class struggles and economic forces, helping them understand that history isn’t just about leaders like Churchill - it’s really a result everyday people, their collective actions, and their material conditions.
Bro just repeated
talking points verbatim, and has the gall to say we're lying.eat shit
When it comes to economics, it's worth mentioning that China has abolished extreme poverty. The US has always had extreme poverty which is only getting worse.
If you haven't heard of this you are missing phenomenal pieces of history in the making. The world's current superpower doesn't understand economics. Go jack off somewhere else.
Wow that's some funny projection you've got going there