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when you are being 'cognizant and honest', it is not about labels anymore. sticking with labels is exactly what 'politicking' is all about. 'Communist' is a lab

when you are being 'cognizant and honest', it is not about labels anymore. sticking with labels is exactly what 'politicking' is all about. 'Communist' is a label. Belief in voluntary mutual help, freedom of thought (i.e. right to know, to have free access to full information), freedom from coercion and manipulation (by deceptive misreporting, or forbidding access to some info, etc.) actually clashes with accepted practices by political communism as observed in recent history, but is goal- and values- oriented. So my thing is, let it be not about labels but about values - specific values, about sum total of our stances on specific issues. "To be" a "Communist" is thus a self-deception, substituting labels of political party affiliation for the true and real values. We as people often mix the two - we search for groups of people sharing our values to join in with them, and use labels as approximants, but this vague thinking usually / always leads to confusion and self-delusion. Same with religions. We sink into the details of a particular myth and forget that it was the shared values we were after, in the first place.

pasabagi 9y ago
I think the point about identifying as a communist, or socialist, or a catholic, for example, is you accept a tradition with its warts. If you wanted to just affiliate with the values, you could say you were an anarchist, or a non-denominational christian, or indeed, just explain what you believe in. As I see it, the latter is a cowardly choice. To affirm you're a catholic, or a communist, despite the often barbaric history of really-existing-X, is to accept that politics is hard, and that even beliefs that are gentle to the point of being asinine have their dark shadows, and that the only way to counter this is to be aware of them. To say you're a believer in the values, but not to identify yourself with those values as a tradition or history, is to ignore the danger of those values - and to risk re-enacting their failures.

pasabagi 9y ago

I think the point about identifying as a communist, or socialist, or a catholic, for example, is you accept a tradition with its warts. If you wanted to just affiliate with the values, you could say you were an anarchist, or a non-denominational christian, or indeed, just explain what you believe in. As I see it, the latter is a cowardly choice. To affirm you're a catholic, or a communist, despite the often barbaric history of really-existing-X, is to accept that politics is hard, and that even beliefs that are gentle to the point of being asinine have their dark shadows, and that the only way to counter this is to be aware of them. To say you're a believer in the values, but not to identify yourself with those values as a tradition or history, is to ignore the danger of those values - and to risk re-enacting their failures.