this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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No I'm saying nations under genocidal conditions are going to have kids because they want their society to continue, it's nothing about soldiers and I really don't like that you would reduce the will to survive genocide as "creating soldiers". Should Palestinians give up children not knowing if they'll be bombed tomorrow? Do you shame, pity them for having more kids? Why should they let Israel succeed in killing the idea of Palestinians?
Reproductive labor is necessary labor for society to function. People having less kids because they can focus resources towards fewer children, those conditions only exist for the Imperialist and bourgeois strata. For most of the world having many kids is necessary for the survival of the community.
I wouldn’t urge Palestinians to avoid having children, nor would I encourage them to try to outbreed their captivity. It’s none of my business. It should be exclusively their business. I’ll tell you if I lived in Palestine, there’s no way in hell I’d personally bring a child into those conditions no matter what anybody else thought about it.
My point is that whether or not to reproduce is a deeply personal choice that shouldn’t be viewed as a social responsibility or a political act.
The idea that individuals (by which people always really mean women) have a political responsibility to reproduce and expand their culture is reactionary shit. The only population whose breeding habits I have a political opinion about is white settlers, because I’m a white settler. I’m not having kids, because white genocide is unironically good, Euro-American settler culture is a blight on the world, and our extinction as an artificial racial category is a prerequisite for global decolonization.
and those kids grow up where, under what conditions? My childhood wasn't nearly as shitty as what palestinians are made to endure and decades on I would still have rather been an abortion. it is out of compassion for their suffering that i suggest having kids in dire circumstances is immoral because of what you're knowingly forcing someone to live through.
i feel bad for the people who have to live that life. i feel bad for parents who didn't have the right to choose. i endorse the destruction of the oppressor state and the (trial if you have enough stability to have them) execution of the perpetrators of apartheid and genocide.
why is the idea of some cultural group worth the suffering of my children? Oppressed people have a morally righteous fight against our oppressors, but condemning another person to live under that oppression is not righteous.
people are people and if i can choose not to condemn someone to a life of suffering why should I value a group identity over my child's quality of life? I wouldn't subject a child to life here and we even have running water.
no hedonistic pleasures or satisfaction from achievement could make my torture worthwhile, how the fuck is it OK to subject someone to far worse than what i've had?
This is clearly the words of someone who has no community or culture to cling to, one born nation-less and with a position to lose. For me contributing to my community in what's necessary of me benefits everyone and all children. For colonized peoples there is a collective worth protecting as it protects ourselves as individuals.
It's honestly sounding like you have internalized individualism. Like I said it's fine to not want children and to not have them, but know that people having children is necessary for your survival, and you have a role to play in the survival of their children.
Everyone has a role to play as we are social beings. Our society as structured alienates us from the benefits of socialized production but these conditions are definite and mutable. Have some revolutionary optimism.
I’ll put it bluntly because there’s a lot of assumptions that are easy to make when you’re talking in English on a primarily American platform, and maybe there’s some misunderstanding about the conditions people in this conversation are actually living in:
If you’re a white American, you have no culture or nation worth reproducing or clinging to. If you’re a white American and you believe that you, your children, and your fellow enlightened settler whites will usher in a revolution in the United States of America in your lifetime: that’s not revolutionary optimism, it’s delusional cosplay. The only revolutionary role that a white settler can play on colonized land is to betray his fellow settlers and work toward the destruction of their empire. Communism will be built on the grave of this empire by those who come after.
I've written in my comments that my people are colonized and subject to genocide, I'm not a white settler, I'm Black. I understand the outlook that settlers have a false nation unworthy of upholding, I agree, but I do not think they need to be stripped of living their lives as human beings in the manner they choose as long as it fits the framework of Decolonization.
I comment on my predictions and expectations of settlers a lot, this time I'm on the optimistic side that we'd hope for more settlers to be deeply concerned about the future generations. It's fucked up for settlers to come here, trash the place, and when it comes time to clean up they'd rather die out than join the multi generational effort to fix this place. We don't plan for their help but it would be a quicker process with more hands. 🤷🏽♀️
Decolonization also means restoring the humanity of the colonizers.
Albeit not peacefully 😏
My apologies then, for approaching your comments without the appropriate context in mind. I don’t mean to suggest that I think settlers have no responsibility to the future (I haven’t killed myself after all). I hope to do everything I can to leave a better world for other people’s kids than my parents left for me. Without getting too deep into personal detail, my parents come from generations of white American evangelicals. My parents’ decision to have kids was not a net positive for the world or for their kids. If I ever unexpectedly find myself with the means to provide a decent life for someone beyond my own immediate survival, I’ll consider adopting.
if other people putting children in harm's way is necessary for my survival then i would prefer not to survive and for the cycle of suffering to end with me. there's no social unit worth damning generations of children to lifetimes of suffering and bitter struggle.
fight now and maybe having a kid later won't be equivalent to putting them through hell, but in the meantime we have no moral standing for conscription.
“Just give up to genocide already, it will hurt less in the long term.”
refusing to conscript children isn't "giving up".
So you just think colonized colonized people should just collectively choose to end their own cultures and stop existing?
i think that oppressed people should fight back against their oppression but we do not have the right to bring children into dire circumstances and conscript them into a fight they did not and could not consent to.
If a monster is beating down your door and you can't defeat it on your own you shouldn't push a kid into its jaws. The monster should stop, but it won't. The other villages should come make the monster stop but they won't. Feeding more children to the monster is not in line with any of our other morals.
So if a genocide can’t be stopped in a generation give up?
why are you so set on defending the conscription of children?
I’m not defending conscription of children. I’m defending colonized people’s right to continue having children as both an act of resistance and a way to further your own culture rather than giving up to the genociders. Your argument implies Palestinians and First Nations people are morally wrong for having children as they are actively genocided.
what right does someone have to make someone else's life their act of resistance? how is that not literally conscription?
The problem here is that you are using a individualist idealist perspective. We Marxists do not follow moralistic lines of reasoning. Morals are arbitrary and idealistic while we live in a material world. Marx didn’t say taking surplus value was immoral, he knew no matter what he thought that socialism was inevitable because of objective material class struggle. You are using the morals of a sad westerner with no apparent culture, influenced by individualistic thought to condemn oppressed peoples who care about the their own culture that is under attack.
If it is immoral to have children that will live poorly then shouldn’t the whole global south be sterilized? This is a generic Malthusian position, but instead of being racist or thinking humans are themselves totally bad, you just think having children who will suffer is immoral. Shouldn’t this lead to the entire proletariat committing collective suicide, no, rich people aren’t happy other, maybe they shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce either. How about humanity just commits collective suicide because life inevitably includes some sort of suffering no matter the material conditions? Are you going to condemn the prey animals for having kids that will be eaten, next? Maybe the universe should just be dead considering every living being suffers.
I doubt you’d take your argument to that extreme so let’s examine why. Essential in the Malthusian view is the illusion that humanity and nature are separate. Many think people should stop having kids or simply die because they “care about the environment.” However, we are a part of nature. Pure unchanging nature is a myth. We emerged from nature and remain natural beings. We are no different in essence than something like a rabbit. We should seek balance with it as a part of it.
I hope you understand the absurdity of your argument now.
no and i have never suggested such a thing. There is plenty to go around if it were distributed equitably and i don't dispute that. Local scarcity might be an immediate cause of suffering but there are plenty of way to suffer incredibly that don't go away even in the lap of luxury.
what is so valuable about the idea of us that some nebulous group is worth the suffering of billions? If you mean mass suicide, no, ending a life is quite different from not beginning one and is quite difficult to weigh the dramatically increased suffering of a botch against the relatively known quantity of continuing to live despite the intractable misery. If you're hyperbolizing a dwindling population as "suicide" i'm not sure what the problem is, the last few folks might get bored but they definitely don't have the right to force others to suffer for their benefit.
i don't think there's much evidence for the suggestion that non-human animals make that sort of complex moral analysis or have any sort of metacognitive introspection. Survival "strategies" come in a huge variety and while there are some species who refuse to breed in captivity but I don't think that stress response is done with any moral calculus. I'm sure there are 2nd generation animals in terrible zoo conditions that would prefer to have never been born, if they were in fact capable of having any preference on the matter.
I don't really know what a "dead universe" is or how you're valuing something about the mere existence of living beings so much that it is worth causing literally all of the suffering that ever happens.
i don't know where this "not be allowed" is coming from, there's no possible legitimate authority that could enforce that and there's certainly no ethical way to criminalize having children. It's unethical and/or harmful to do all sorts of relatively mundane things like drink to excess, be rude to wage workers, cheat on a closed partnership, cut in line etc and yet these things are rarely made illegal and it doesn't go well when states try to.
i don't understand what's so valuable about a group identity that it excuses conscription and nobody has even tried to address that. It's a choice for the living to fight oppression, and i think fighting is the right choice, but forcing someone into a war against their will is a terrible thing to do. we recognize that when it's conscription of young men, we even recognize it in science fiction with critical takes on clone armies, why is it any different for making new living beings the old fashioned way?
We should make life as equitable as possible for the people condemned to it but you don't need to force more people to live and suffer to build communism.
You didn’t get my point about moralism did you.
I was simply extending your logic to its logical conclusion. Sure you didn’t say you supported real policy to sterilize people but you did condemn people for having children, thus suggesting it would be preferable had they not had children and sterilization is a way to make that happen. You are trying to make a difference between having children during wartime and having children that suffer as is inherent to the human condition, but who are you to make that distinction. You are a moral relativist, some suffering is worse than other suffering and actions can have different moral implications depending on circumstance. Where is the threshold between suffering being too bad to reproduce and not? What would you say to someone who considers all suffering equally bad or all child having to be equally bad, let alone thinking there is a moral imperative to reproduce when under genocidal attack? This is the problem with moralistic thinking, it’s all subjective and not based in material reality. How do you know Palestinians would regret being born? I’m sure a lot of them find meaning in keeping their culture alive and fighting for what is right. It’s not conscription because they don’t have to fight, they may choose to fight for what’s right tho. You don’t know if the child you have will regret being born or not. Why let the possible negative stop you from doing something? If we do that we’ll never do anything.
By “collective suicide” I do not mean necessarily everyone actually kill’s themselves, I mean everyone chooses for their group to stop existing by not reproducing. If you’re not going to make more people to live to produce communism then you’re never going to have communism. I don’t mean one should impose their ideology on to their kids, but struggles don’t end in a generation. People aren’t going to stop having kids whatever you want.
Once again, you are coming from a western individualist perspective without recognizing it. It’s different for the people you are condemning. Their morals are not the morals your specific context gave you.
Your response does not adequately address the questions I pose in the previous comment at all. All you’re saying is “I didn’t say what my statement’s logical conclusion that you are criticizing was.” Please reread it.
are you so relativist when it comes to child abuse? there are cultures where it's normal to pierce the ears of infants, or worse. If we cannot say that violating the bodily autonomy of a child is bad then what the fuck are you even doing?
this is conscription
i have no illusion about that and we should pursue the best possible world for those of us with the misfortune of being condemned to live in it.
obviously I don't agree with your "logical conclusion". i'm sure there are debatelord terms for the specific way of making shit up that you committed but I'll just reiterate that there are loads of "wrong" things where trying to use the state to enforce morality would incur a greater harm. It being legal to cheat on a partner isn't an endorsement of cheating or a denial of the harm caused, but there's no way morality police wouldn't be worse. The most we could or should do about natal conscription is cultivate mores against it.
You still don’t get my point about moralistic arguments. You are still using idealist reasoning, and others using similar reasoning might come to different conclusions. You’re imposing your own assumptions on others in a different context. Marxists are supposed to be materialists not idealists. We do not debate in the realm of morals.
i find it very difficult to believe that someone with queer in their name would be a staunch moral relativist.
what's the non-idealist argument against harming another person for no reason? you've almost certainly read more marx than i have.
Pointing out the dominant moral paradigm does not make me have no opinions. My opinion on this issue comes first from the facts that patriarchy is justified with idealist logic, while if you do much beyond surface level analysis it’s clear there are not true binaryness in sex or ascribed gender characteristics and historically there have been different gender systems, and that gender oppression is materially tied with class oppression, and secondarily because I believe that oppression is bad thanks to many material affects on my consciousness I do not fully understand.
Morality and emotions are historically constructed, so idk exactly, but as empathetic beings we generally don’t like to see people hurt. One Randian semi-materialist argument that comes to mind is that one wouldn’t hurt people randomly because that will generally have negative social implications for thonself, and harm them in the long run.
Hurting someone for no reason is very different from birthing someone who might suffer if that’s what you’re pointing to. If anything the average psychological pain might be less than an alienated westerner like you, considering the benefits of solidarity and documented improvements in mental health during war.
I’m flattered, though I’ve only read like two OG Marx works. I’ve read more Engels and Mao along with listening to RevLeft and people on here.
So you are still sticking with saying Palestinians should not be allowed to reproduce. You are calling for submission to genocide. If no Palestinians had children there would be no Palestine fighting today.