this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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Leftist Infighting
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This is sort of a "work out your frustrations by letting it all out" community where different leftist tendencies can vent their frustrations with one another and more assertively and directly challenge one another. Heated arguments are OK but pointless hostility is not (see instance rule 3).
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Because we hold out some modicum of respect for actual, real anarchists and not just some teenage-minded shopaholics at the supermarket of ideology who found some loophole to larp as being leftists while having zero skin in the game and a perfect vantage point to support western supremacy while believing they have a unlimited license to feel smug.
I think "teenage-minded" is doing most of the work here. There is no shortage of immature communists out there who also fit the rest of your paragraph as well.
I don’t know if the solution here is agism/childism/whatever. I’ve met some really stupid kids anarchist or reactionary, but I’ve also met good comrades my age both on here and irl. Yes there is an immaturity in ideology that can correlate with immaturity of mind and body but there are also a lot of stupid adults. Some may go through a radlib phase as a kid and some will be an even more insufferable anarkiddie as an adult. https://srslywrong.com/podcast/265-ageism-misopedy-adult-supremacy-child-liberation-childism-adultism-child-rights-etc/
I agree with you. I was just choosing to engage with my best interpretation of OP's statement.
Nonsense, there's a barrier to entry to being a communist. There's a massive shortage of us. Not so with anarcho-x kids.
Because the anarchist symbol is on more merchandise and is represented more in capitalist media as something "cool" and "punk."
Anarchism is very much marketed as an ideology to be consumed to divert the working class from approaching theorists that revolutionary movements have leaned on to actually overthrow capitalist regimes. This isn't to say that there aren't valuable anarchist insights, just that objectively anarchist movements have yet to lead a successful revolution that can sustain itself.
Red scare propaganda obviously. If it’s “common knowledge” “socialism doesn’t work” but you see capitalism sucks you want a third way. That way is to reject all states and authority especially socialist states. A true anarchist distrustful of authority would support socialism as positive step away from capitalism, but many don’t question the authority of the red scarers and thus trust them when they say socialism is even worse.
*palatable, for clarity
But I feel like Gramsci's writing on the relative failure of anarchists in Italy has some sort of relevance here.
https://redsails.org/discorso-agli-anarchici/
The most basic and unreflective impulse of social rebellion has a palpable connection to what anarchism is, even if many anarchist activists and theorists are much more sophisticated in their ideology than that might imply to you. Anarchism in a broad sense is also very compatible with the empty, abstract inferences that people raised in liberalism are used to approaching political ideology with. In juvenile anarchists, you can for example see this in the similarity between their "I oppose all states", even those that are historically progressive, and Ghandi saying "I oppose all violence" even in response to Jews fighting against Nazis!
As I said above, no barrier to entry. You don't have to read a book. You can deflect away any criticism of the west as "Shur all states are bad!" and then focus all your criticism on AES states while appearing to remain ideologically consistent.
There's no barrier to calling yourself anything.
True but you can't credibly do it for long without being found out. I'm actually Xi Jinping.
It's just a slow process of revealing that many are not informed enough, and more importantly, that there are legitimate disagreements to be had that have not been addressed enough beyond discourse and ideological struggle. Most theory is a product of certain perspectives examining specific histories in specific places. But everything is always changing and nothing is truly universal. It's only natural disagreements will be numerous even within perspectives that have similarities. And now days ideology seems reduced down to commodified identities that are developed through outrage and toxic, debatebro discourse so that doesn't really help either.
If you ask me we need better triangulations and to get more comfortable with pluralistic thinking instead of simply purifying and gatekeeping our ideological group. ML thought deserves to not be reduced to something so static, and it needs more opportunities and creative practitioners for it to become more applicable, and thus more credible in more places. In other words we need reciprocity and continuity with other perspectives as much as we need rigor and integrity within our own methods and ideologies.
Most Trots I know are the real deal, not just knowingly spoofing. They're usually well meaning, just misled and unable to get past their western indoctrination.
I don't understand Trots. They don't like the USSR but they seem to be supportive of most other socialist projects other than China.
Its also wierd that many neocons used to be trots. Do they think that globalization is a way for a world government to occur so that one government can be used to build socialism? IDK
It's simple: does the state pose a political threat to the US? Yes? Then believe most of what the State Department says about it, just like they used to with the USSR (and still do retrospectively).
My best interpretation is that they see global hegemony as the solution to conflict by globalizing commerce and industry. Thus, they need a powerful state to wage such hegemony. I mean, GWB is the canonical elected neocon, and look at his not-so-small-gubmint DOHS or the TSA. Or conservatives general obsession with strong military and foreign encroachments. This put the neocons at odds with the libertarians regarding "foreign entanglements" -- instead of entanglement, neocons see hegemony.
While not necessarily canonical, the scene in the movie "W" where Cheney presents his plan for the Iraq War as a domino fall to lead to further expanded dominance in the Middle East, with his prognostication that "nobody will fuck with us then." The notion that Americanism is the world's savior, thus, we must provide Americanism to the world, by trade/legal/military force as necessary.
It's not too often we get mastodon users in lemmy threads.
It's definitely an experience. But hey, it's supposed to work, right? I shouldn't have to have *both* a Mastodon *and* a Lemmy account, if federation means anything.
Can we use these accounts to look at mastodon?
Kinda. I think mastodon hashtags can be used to post from mastodon to lemmy communities.
Same here. I guess it's a confusing place to be, you feel like you're doing well meaning stuff but because you're ideologically brainwashed and prohibited from making logical dialectical conclusions nothing really makes sense.
Most Trots are incredibly well-read and very eloquent, but their conclusions are like incredibly uh “stupid”.