reallybigleg

bourgeoisie vs proletariat rhetoric

power relations govern society

These ideas had been around a very long time prior to Marxism.

"it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God"

In that bible story, the rich man that had asked Jesus for advice was advised to share his material possessions with the poor. The idea that there is a power imbalance in society that ought to be corrected has been with us for at least 2000 years.

I was wondering whether you'd be GMP! Manc here! Thanks for your service!

🐝In solidarity, my friend🐝

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However, they have one component similar to all of our non-violent relationships - love. The person abused in the relationship loves the abuser.

I just want to pitch in and say I don't know if this really is always the case.

I was in an abusive dynamic for a couple of years when I was a teenager but I do not remember ever loving my partner. I can remember trying to love my partner - or trying to find things about him that were admirable - in order to solve the cognitive dissonance of my staying with someone I did not love.

This must surely also be a pattern among some people, as it's certainly a pattern I have repeated. With a subsequent partner, who was not abusive, I also stayed for years despite not loving them. Again, my focus was on trying to love them, thinking that "if I could just fall in love with this person then there won't be a problem". I would make an effort to try to find good things about them and to convince myself that I could love them if I just tried hard enough,

In my case, I would say what I was experiencing was isolation and loneliness. In the first relationship, as a minor at the time, there were external challenges to my being able to solve my isolation, so I believe I stayed just so that I wouldn't be completely alone. Even with the lack of love from my side. I may not have loved him, or even liked him or admired him as a person, but it was better than nothing at all.

In the second relationship, the isolation was due to internal problems - I 'get by' socially but I have enormous difficulty making new friends, having instead a lot of acquaintances who I never form a bond with - so it was a similar thing. I was terribly lonely, and this was better than nothing.

In both cases, on making a friend outside the relationship or increasing my social contact, I found it very easy to leave.

Just wanted to put this perspective here because again and again I see that it's all about love and I don't believe I can be the only person who stays in harmful relationships out of desperation or believing there is simply no other option. I know of at least two other people who appear to do the same thing. One of them just married someone he doesn't love. I think it comes from a lack of belief in the existence of love and its availability, which then leads you to devalue it and tell yourself "love isn't really that important, it's just a silly idea put out by Hollywood. Real relationships are hard".

This phenomenon is also sort of related to why people who have not spent a lot of time around other races say things like 'x people all look the same'. I don't think this is quite the same as proprognosia but it has a similar outcome. We do 'learn' to some extent how to recognise faces. So if you have grown up around almost entirely white people you may have difficulty telling the difference between different Asian people, black people etc. At the very least, you probably have more difficulty than with white people. (This also works the other way around, obvs - non-white people with little experience of white people think all white people look the same).