| To use the term Comrade at one time was, IMO, the perfect way to refer to someone who you saw as a brother, sister, and fellow revolutionary. It's not gender-specific, which carries a lot of weight in a world where you may not know the gender of the person you are communicating with and where a patriarchal society has worked hard to seperate the sexes into specific roles - something most revolutionaries detest. It also strongly denotes fraternity, solidarity, and a disregard for hierarchy, unlike some terms, such as "sir" and "ma'am" that non-revoulutionaries use and enforce.
Which is unfortunate that now it seems like a joke to refer to someone as your Comrade: it carries the horrors and failures of Stalinism (among other pseud-Communist movements) with it. Now it carries a wiff of authoritarianism and militancy. It's almost as though you are mocking revolutionaries when you refer to them as Comrade. It's like you're saying, "idealistic freak" instead of what it originally meant.
So, I ask you revolutionaries, brothers and sisters, what do you think is the perfect way to refer a follow revolutionary in a friendly way, and why do you think so? A new term we all would use could bring us closer, in the way using the term Comrade would. What do you think?
Just to start it off, I think cousin, or cuz, might be nice. It's not gender specific, it's familial, and it's short and sweet.
"We are convinced that freedom without Socialism is privilege and injustice, and that Socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality." - Mikhail Bakunin |