The feds? Liberals trying to cause dissent? Cognitive dissonance of being left while in the west?
Yeah I think this is the best read of what's happening. A bunch of libs and fake anarchists radlibs who thought "left" means "good guys", and are now prickly because it's being asserted in their spaces that they aren't left because they either aren't anti-capitalist (liberals) or that they aren't anti-imperialist (those online pro-state department "anarchists"). I feel like in another day these interventionist anarchists would have been trots, they kind of serve the same political function as certain historical trots that gave trots a bad name.
Full uncrit support for my actual anarchists and trots comrades btw, you guys are cool. Anarchists are sexier and cooler than me, trots read more theory more closely than me.
Some of us himbo anarchists even read a shitload of theory. I'll fight in whatever the next Red Army is but aside from that I just want to grill, I don't want to take part in administrative shit, maybe I'd be a teacher or something afterward.
Same, I'll fight for the revolution but as soon as the violence is over I'm out. I want to set up a community farm, spend the rest of my life playing in the dirt.
How does one be a genuine anarchist? Or rather, how does one avoid the ideological traps which lead to fake anarchism?
:jeff-foxworthy:
If your conception of states not friendly to US empire (including but not limited to AES) seems to mysteriously align perfectly with those of the US State Department, you might be a dronie.
If the only leftist movements you have ever supported are the Zapatistas, the YPG or pre-Franco Spain, you might be a dronie.
If you unironically use the terms "tankie" and "red fash" to cleanse your spaces of the wrong kind of leftists, you might be a dronie.
If your ultimate actions (independent of your precious beliefs) seem to replicate exactly what you'd imagine a fed would do when tasked with trying to destabilize unification among the left, you might be a dronie.
Dont take pontius pilate -"all lives matter" like stances regarding states no matter the circumstances while existing in a world of dozens smaller states dominated and terrorised by the US empire, especially hamstringing the majority of anti-imperialist efforts. Yeah imperialism is gonna be ennacted and facilitated through and against nation states, good luck with "all states bad ,i support no one" approach
Dont do unironic horseshoe theory of "MLs arent left and are right wingers" or even worse "fascists"
Dont base your current perception of who is or isnt your ally around a victim complexe of "X ideology looks to kill me and will snd me to teh Gulag cause stuff that happened 100 years ago in completely different circustances"
Dont belite the experience ,achievements and agency of hundreds of millions of people in modern history that believed and followed "authoritarian" ideologies and make up lies of "the MLs brainwashed and took advantage of them and their struggle to control them "
Dont be a chomsky anarchist with all the weird takes that entails
I think I can avoid those, only the first one is a trap I've ever fallen for.
Motherfuckers didn't listen when Arthur Fleck explicitly said the The Joker has no political motivation and that he was only in it for revenge.
This take gives me the hope I needed to get through this morning. Thank you!
It's worse. That the whole "communism = evil dictators" wasn't only wrong, it was projection.
Imagine thinking your whole life dictatorships are bad, then finding out that your team was the one doing them then blaming their rivals. It creates a TON of cognitive dissonance. It usually resolves in one of two ways: Thinking "Dictatorships are good, actually" which is where your Nazbols come from, then you have those who just give up on leftism and go back to being liberals because they can't resolve the contradiction. Very few come out thinking "Democracy is good, I thought I was fighting for it, but I was fighting against it. I was wrong but I'm going to change that." because you know, toxic masculinity and not being able to admit you're wrong.
You can probably guess which camp I fall into.
I still get the occasional :brainworms: moment. Deprograming by yourself is tough.
One of the best things we can do to promote leftist principles is explain that dictatorships do not always take the form of one single person exercising total rule over a country.
It also helps to point out that this idea is complete ahistorical nonsense in of itself. You can't have a society where one person has unilateral control over everything and everyone else goes along with it or dies, because that person still needs someone to actually pull the trigger at the end of the day, and someone to supply the trigger-puller with guns/ammo/transportation, and the supply chains for all of that, and so on. Pointing out that Stalin could not singlehandedly hold the entire Soviet Union in the grips of terror without the majority of society backing him up quickly makes a lot of anticom propaganda fall apart, because it gives agency to the people in those societies and makes it clear that the majority of them were happy with their regimes.
Correct. It's not some nefarious scheme, it's libs wanting to be left but still believing all the propaganda because not doing so makes them feel like they sound crazy. Because Liberal politics is about affirming that you're a good person.
some of that, but mostly their class interests. demographics of people who're more likely to be online
they don't want actual radical change, they want to be able to walk out of the mess with their heads held high
It's 100% this. I get in arguments with my friends (most of whom are middle aged) all the time because they say they want "socialism" but despise the idea of revolution. And as much as I'm personally not into revolution pr0n, it's clear power will have to be wrestled from the bourgeois. And they're not going to give it up easily.
We're not going to be able to vote our way to a better world. And that goes against everything anyone has been taught in the West since Kindergarten. There's still hope among many who buy into this bullshit that the system will somehow allow champagne libs to have their cake (keeping their class privileges in tact) while eating it too (creating some sort of more equitable world).
I think that the nature of violence has changed so dramatically in recent years that a potential revolution is hard for people to imagine, and that makes it a lot scarier - especially as you get older and your youthful anger turns into cynicism.
Not that it excuses this half-hearted approach to socialism... I just get where these people are coming from. Change is always scary, and your average American has never had to fight for their beliefs. We need to find a way to get these people to log off and join an organization in order to gain new experiences and perspectives, but that is obviously much easier said than done.
Since the pandemic I've had way more luck pointing out social murder and the violence inherent in the running of society as it is. People I know are watching their material conditions deteriorating in real time and I am having more luck than ever explaining to them why. Its a shit silver lining, but I think as more people grasp the everyday violence wrought on them by the state, the less people will oppose a 'violent' revolutionary action
Westerners are some of the most heavily propagandized people in the world. It's hard to convince someone that everything they know about Actually Existing Socialism is a lie or a half truth, intended to create and spread a narrative that paints opponents to international capital as evil, mad men, despots, insane leaders with no responsibility to anyone and no wish but to do the "wrong" thing for seemingly no reason. It doesn't stand up to scrutiny but it's painful for people to accept that what they know is a lie.
paints opponents to international capital as evil, mad men, despots, insane leaders with no responsibility to anyone and no wish but to do the “wrong” thing for seemingly no reason
A while back, I crystalized a thought about my lingering brainworms.
We now know the US did Agent Orange and the atomic bomb. We now know about Tuskeegee and MKULTRA. I know the beast is real, but I have an imperfect view of its actions in the moment.
I also know the AES struggle is real. I have an imperfect view of what they're defending themselves from, but the beast is real and defending against it isn't random.
thanks to Americans' incredibly normal politics, there's also the fact that a ton of people claiming to be leftists online really aren't all that far left to begin with. Plenty are succdems at best, and it's perfectly natural and consistent for them to be opposed to any sort of radical revolutionary change.
I know some people like that. These are real people I've met, not posters. People I've met working with foodnotbombs or other aid services. They're nominally leftist in a lot of ways, and nice people, but claim suspicion in any sort of authority larger than a small town, and they throw the word tankie around a lot. I should say that most people offline are a lot more normal than online and aren't usually so weird and aggressive.
Some of the people I know have a lot of aesthetic hang-ups, like they're not cool with secular government and would prefer an overtly Christian state or no state at all, just like farming communities and strong cultural Christianity. In their heads, state is bad, but a tankie state is worse because it oppresses anarchists and Christians specifically rather than in general through capitalism. That's as far as it goes for 90% of folks I know.
A few others have very very obtuse philosophical objections to Marxism that I personally don't really get, but they're cool.
In reality they tend to have the exact same misconceptions about socialist countries that an average liberal would, except they seem to hate socialist countries even more. I guess the criticism of socialist countries is coming from leftists for the same reason it's also increasing among liberals. Contradictions are getting too spicy.
Also just to be clear, the people I've mentioned are beautiful, cool people who sacrifice a lot of their time and energy to feed and shelter the homeless. I don't know much about what left posters get up to.
A few others have very very obtuse philosophical objections to Marxism that I personally don’t really get
:amerikkka: :brainworms: courtesy of our education system. Marx is built up as the literal antichrist, and the USSR were an evil dictatorship who were very bad and also evil.
I mean the people I'm talking about identify as socialists, anarchists, anti-war, any number of things. They've definitely broken out of a lot of American social conditioning to get that far at least. Sometimes they're quite American when the subject of Islam comes up or if you ask them what everyday life is like in Iran or the DPRK. They're leagues ahead of most Americans by simple virtue of recognizing that the homeless are intrinsically valuable human beings deserving of care.
A lot of them hate America but have somehow internalized that communist countries are just worse. Like they hate capitalism and governments and they can only see socialist countries as a fiercely capitalist government, a combination of the two things they hate. I think it's a kind of goofy stance but they don't bring it up a lot and it doesn't interfere with handing out food, so whatever. They're ok.
They've also read a lot of books I haven't so I really don't know how to criticize their stances on Marxism. Some are coming at it from a religious angle. Some are utopian hippy type folk. Some are hard to pin down anarchists who are on board with Marxism up to a certain point, like one guy I know says his main problem is that Marxism is incomplete. Like we also need to incorporate philosophers like Kant and John Stuart Mill and a bunch of other people I'm not familiar with.
Death to America though, of course
I also know these people. They're ultras or radlib anarchists who can do local praxis but know jack shit about the world outside of their country.
Philos guy is a weenie. Marx isn't incomplete without reading those lib weirdos. Feel free to if you want but to say Marx is somehow 'incomplete' (whatever that's supposed to even mean) without those losers is just someone who has nothing to stand behind but books. Absolute philosophy Ultra. Marxism has lifted millions out of poverty and eroded colonial exploitation, what the fuck has the philosophy of Kant and Mill done?
If I can speak a little disparagingly I think the philosophy guy just likes to sound smart in front of girls and part of that involves saying as many dead philosophers as possible. Also being contrarian. I don't think he's actually read much of that stuff. Like one time he didn't know what I meant by lumpen prole.
Yup. That's a Kind of Guy. It's masturbating in front of people Louis CK style and expecting to impress people but intellectually
Oh, totally. I just meant that, even with the little bit of self-deprogramming that we are able to do, the internalized anti-AES/Marxism sentiments are still insidious. Anarchism is socially acceptable in left-ish circles in the US (and I guess the "West" at large), because there was never really a Lenin/Stalin/Mao figurehead for red scare propaganda to latch onto, and way too many people took Orwell's garbage seriously. I think that's part of it, at least. Parenti gets into some background of the "left"-anticommunist movement in Blackshirts and Reds, but I think he gets more laser-focused on the people who straight-up parrot fash talking points, rather than analyzing grievances of egoists, post-leftists, communalists, etc., since leftist infighting wasn't really within the scope of the book.
I think you're right that it's mostly a utopian mindset, though. Regardless, comrades are comrades; labels are just a damned spook at this stage.
the people I’ve mentioned are beautiful, cool people who sacrifice a lot of their time and energy to feed and shelter the homeless.
This is what really matters anyway, your IRL colleagues are doing the actual work, unlike 98% of "online leftists".
The ones I know doing this will feed and shelter the homeless but do nothing to pressure the fover to do it's fucking job and feed and house the homeless because they're anti state ideals lead them to doing the states job for them. So yeah, feed and home people, but these shotgun shacks they put up in parks aren't a long term solution and they aren't seeking anything long term.
Cognitive dissonance for one. They understand their own condition as a poor and exploited person living in America, but they hear sensational tales of child labor, gulags, lack of free speech, lack of religious freedom, etc. They hear all of that and conclude for as bad as it is in America, at least they can go to church on Sunday or openly talk about being an anarchist on their blog.
It's why you'll sometimes hear the term red fascism thrown around, the concept being socialist countries are just a trick and actually a worse form of capitalism than normal liberal capitalism.
I think it's kind of like how we sometimes hate the democrats more than the Republicans, because at least conservatives are honest about how evil they are. The democrats are posing as being more progressive than the alternative. For the folk I know, socialist countries are just posing as socialist, which is dishonest to them so that's somehow worse.
I think another aspect I haven't seen anyone mention is that people tend to fall into communities wherein they base their views on social consensus, and you don't have to change literally anything you believe when you go from a Liberal to a RadLib. Communism bad, authoritarianism bad, Stalin bad, all of America's enemies bad... but you want free healthcare.
Another aspect is, I think, a huge portion (possibly even a majority) of Anglophone "Leftists" see Socialism as entertainment. Socialism is when you watch Hasan/Vaush streams, post epic memes with your friends, and dream up a bunch of stupid, impossible bullshit instead of having a real reckoning with history and theory.
And after a couple decades of conservative smears, a lot of people on the Left in the US genuinely believe that "socialism is when government does a thing", or even worse "socialism is when government spends money". So instead of reading any theory, they just redefine progressive liberalism as "socialism" because that's what their opponents called them. And even worse, they think the US is a good guy, or at least has good intentions as long as those evil QOPers aren't in power!, because "big government" is what the right wing says we are, I love the big government!
Yeah and then you have people being led astray by genuine morons like Vaush, and they think that sloganeering is a replacement for theory. Ask them what Socialism is and they'll smugly tell you it's when workers control the means of production. You ask them what the means of production are and what control would look like and you get either a blank stare or "it's when everyone's in a union"
Defaulting to entertainment instead of worrying about reality is a standard course of action for alienated people who live in hell. I don't think Anglophone leftists have a lot of hope. Pretend bullshit is more real to them.
Posters. Posters post about tankies. Streamers, who are posters, talk about tankies. Posters, who watch streamers, post about tankies. They feed each other until it seems to be everywhere. It's just online people. Except for when those online people join an org and then start getting mad at tankies. Or some larger commentator at a news corporation pays too much attention to online stuff.
What typically happens when one of those posters gets mad at tankies IRL at an org, because I've never seen that?
pre-existing org: laughed out of the org probably
one they form themselves (lol): laughed at by everyone else
I'd probably get clocked as an anarchist and organize with anarchists irl doing mutual aid, and literally all of us would get called tankies online by liberals
When I make the mistake of commenting on reddit, a solid 70% of the time I'm gonna be called a tankie for not believing state dept / cia propaganda. I too am generally an anarchist.
You can be the most lefty anti-authority anarchist to ever exist, but if you don't hate all of our cold war enemies, that makes you a tankie.
Basically:
Baby leftists think communism is good
But they’ve been conditioned to believe that all previous communist states were “dictatorships”; most of them genuinely believe that they just went “let’s decide to give absolute power over everything to one person”
Knowing nothing about actual democratic processes in these states they think that communism would have been good if it wasn’t “totalitarian”.
I think a lot of anti-tankies would be a lot more comfortable supporting AES if they actually knew anything about how they worked. ask them what the Soviet in Soviet Union actually meant and their brains will break
I think the conditioning is more like a story that previous attempts at communism were devious tricks played on the population by power hungry opportunists. The people wanted a more egalitarian society, then a small band of grinning Marxists promised to make such a society, but it involved relinquishing free speech and gun ownership like an infernal Faustian bargain. Then the dictators had power and the everyday population either couldn't stop it or was too brainwashed to care. It's the plot of Animal Farm.
It's a story I hear over and over among people taking first steps into leftist theory and history. The story has no reflection in reality at all but that doesn't stop a lot of people from internalizing it, even if they're otherwise on our side.
It's also a kind of narcissism I feel, like saying those previous attempts at communism were clearly tricks, but me as an educated westerner am immune to such deceptions. I clearly have a much better plan to bring about communism. Just stop doing capitalism, how hard can that be?
I also have a feeling it's just a straight up antisemitic narrative.
Oh yeah Animal Farm is absolutely a massive part of the propaganda. We were essentially taught in school that Stalin just kind of tricked everyone into giving him absolute power and then they couldn’t do anything when he turned evil. It’s actually insulting how Orwell portrays the non westerners as stupid animals who can’t realise when they are being exploited.
After reading it people either think “fighting for a better world always leads to things getting worse” (ie becoming liberal), or they don’t resolve the contradiction and think “I can make true communism because I would make sure there’s no evil dictator running things”
Some leftists and others fall back on the old stereotype of power- hungry Reds who pursue power for powers sake without regard for actual social goals. If true, one wonders why, in country after coun- try, these Reds side with the poor and powerless often at great risk and sacrifice to themselves, rather than reaping the rewards that come with serving the well-placed.
:parenti:
I love Parenti and he's correct here, but this wouldn't get through to liberals or most ultras. They have a warped conception of socialism in practice. They often believe Fidel Castro and company lived in opulent wealth. A guy I know will bring up how Cuba isn't socialist because National Assembly members drive in fancy cars that most people couldn't afford.
I remember during the Bolivian coup a while ago there was a bunch of footage of people who broke into Evo Morales' house. There were a bunch of people saying they were disgusted he lived in such wealth when so much of Bolivia was poor, even through from what I could see it was just a kind of normal two story house.
It reminds me of that one lady in Disco Elysium who won't believe the union president is a leftist because he's fat.
They're not satisfied unless communist leaders live in absolute destitute poverty except they're not even satisfied about that because it's just a bad faith rhetorical tactic.
I think a lot of anti-tankies would be a lot more comfortable supporting AES if they actually knew anything about how they worked. ask them what the Soviet in Soviet Union actually meant and their brains will break
I wasn't a viril "anti-tankie" but learning about Soviet, Chinese, and Cuban organization pulled me away from anarchist tendencies.
Anarchism would be fine if Americans would just learn how to run meetings and compromise. You can't even get people to budge on what to put on a pizza half the time, and people who can't put aside their own ego to settle on sausage or mushrooms are never going to build a stateless society.
one sentence:
"There is actually no difference between good things and bad things."
I used to be someone who thought "if you accept violence as ok in some cases, who gets to decide which cases are 'ok'?
Then, thanks to some encouragement and bullying from leftists, I came to accept that bad people don't adhere to principles anyway, and also that objectivism--essentially--fails miserably as a moral philosophy. It's ok to punch Nazis because Nazis are bad people. It's not ok to punch good people. Who decides what's bad or good? Everyone does, constantly. That's already how it works. We are never going to live in a punch-free society. So we should stop with the "violence is bad" bullshit and focus on trying to get the power to ensure that WE have a monopoly on violence. because we're good and they're not. why? because we fuckin are. no point in trying to debate whether, say, trans rights are good or not. I say they are, and if you disagree, then be ready to fight.
I love how liberals believe you need a carefully curated mind palace of ethical takes and explanations for every single situation that could ever happen. Except you don't need that and no one had ever had that, including liberals because even they don't believe it.
It's somehow a virtue to be completely consistent and pretend there's some kind of third-party standard to compare our behavior to.
Who decides what’s bad or good? Everyone does, constantly. That’s already how it works.
I love this and I'm going to steal it. I'm tired of being asked to have morals based on pretend utopia.
I love this and I'm going to steal it
But stealing is WRONG
:heart-sickle:
Note, of course, that all the "violence" being discussed is hypothetical because The Left doesn't actually have the capacity for organized violence. So it's libs getting extremely mad at a communist they made up in their head.
:parenti:
Many on the U.S. Left have exhibited a Soviet bashing and Red baiting that matches anything on the Right in its enmity and crudity. Listen to Noam Chomsky holding forth about “left intellectuals” who try to “rise to power on the backs of mass popular movements” and “then beat the people into submission. . . . You start off as basically a Leninist who is going to be part of the Red bureaucracy. You see later that power doesn’t lie that way, and you very quickly become an ideologist of the right. . . . We’re seeing it right now in the [former] Soviet Union. The same guys who were communist thugs two years back, are now running banks and [are] enthusiastic free marketeers and praising Americans” (Z Magazine, 10/95).
Chomsky’s imagery is heavily indebted to the same U.S. corporate political culture he so frequently criticizes on other issues. In his mind, the revolution was betrayed by a coterie of “communist thugs” who merely hunger for power rather than wanting the power to end hunger. In fact, the communists did not “very quickly” switch to the Right but struggled in the face of a momentous onslaught to keep Soviet socialism alive for more than seventy years. To be sure, in the Soviet Union’s waning days some, like Boris Yeltsin, crossed over to capitalist ranks, but others continued to resist free-market incursions at great cost to themselves, many meeting their deaths during Yeltsin’s violent repression of the Russian parliament in 1993.
Some leftists and others fall back on the old stereotype of power-hungry Reds who pursue power for power’s sake without regard for actual social goals. If true, one wonders why, in country after country, these Reds side with the poor and powerless often at great risk and sacrifice to themselves, rather than reaping the rewards that come with serving the well-placed.
For decades, many left-leaning writers and speakers in the United States have felt obliged to establish their credibility by indulging in anticommunist and anti-Soviet genuflection, seemingly unable to give a talk or write an article or book review on whatever political subject without injecting some anti-Red sideswipe. The intent was, and still is, to distance themselves from the Marxist-Leninist Left.
Adam Hochschild: Keeping his distance from the “Stalinist Left” and recommending same posture to fellow progressives.
Adam Hochschild, a liberal writer and publisher, warned those on the Left who might be lackadaisical about condemning existing communist societies that they “weaken their credibility” (Guardian, 5/23/84). In other words, to be credible opponents of the cold war, we first had to join in the Cold-War condemnations of communist societies. Ronald Radosh urged that the peace movement purge itself of communists so that it not be accused of being communist (Guardian, 3/16/83). If I understand Radosh: To save ourselves from anticommunist witchhunts, we should ourselves become witchhunters. Purging the Left of communists became a longstanding practice, having injurious effects on various progressive causes. For instance, in 1949 some twelve unions were ousted from the CIO because they had Reds in their leadership. The purge reduced CIO membership by some 1.7 million and seriously weakened its recruitment drives and political clout. In the late 1940s, to avoid being “smeared” as Reds, Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a supposedly progressive group, became one of the most vocally anticommunist organizations.
The strategy did not work. ADA and others on the Left were still attacked for being communist or soft on communism by those on the Right. Then and now, many on the Left have failed to realize that those who fight for social change on behalf of the less privileged elements of society will be Red-baited by conservative elites whether they are communists or not. For ruling interests, it makes little difference whether their wealth and power is challenged by “communist subversives” or “loyal American liberals.” All are lumped together as more or less equally abhorrent.
Even when attacking the Right, the left critics cannot pass up an opportunity to flash their anticommunist credentials. So Mark Green writes in a criticism of President Ronald Reagan that “when presented with a situation that challenges his conservative catechism, like an unyielding Marxist-Leninist, [Reagan] will change not his mind but the facts.” While professing a dedication to fighting dogmatism “both of the Right and Left,” individuals who perform such de rigueur genuflections reinforce the anticommunist dogma. Red-baiting leftists contributed their share to the climate of hostility that has given U.S. leaders such a free hand in waging hot and cold wars against communist countries and which even today makes a progressive or even liberal agenda difficult to promote.
i think similar terms have always kinda existed in some ways, "Stalinists" is one that immediately comes to mind.
in (non-socialist) countries where MLism is the dominant left ideology, "Stalinist" is used as an insult for the "official" left. Though "tankie" hasn't picked up steam outside the internet.
