askchapo

Teach empathy for people you don't know

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.

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.

Definitely don't ask the allegedly Marxist parents of or

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?

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.

How does anyone even find a communist partner tbh :agony:

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.

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.

Well, it starts with a really large spoon

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.