It wasn’t a hostile discussion or anything, i didn’t even go full “the kulaks deserved it” (although the mod that single-handedly banned me did go full “the kulaks did not deserve it”). I just laid out plainly and calmly that revolutions are inherently authoritarian, that Luxemburg said “the revolution will be as violent as the ruling class makes it necessary” and that there’s one Trotzki quote i 100% agree with: “If the October Revolution hadn’t succeeded, the world would have known a Russian word for fascism 10 years before Mussolini’s March on Rome”. Basically the whole “Jakarta Method” train of thought laid out clearly and without calling anybody names.
Note that this was on an explicitly left-leaning server that does not allow cops and troops to join. Also after several days of another poster starting destructive, aggressive bad faith arguments in the politics channel until a number of users went “disengage” on her and the channel had to be frozen until recently, when she immediately started being hostile and arguing in bad faith again, which got her not one, but two warnings from the same mod without further consequences. Meanwhile, when i defend AES without attacking anybody, that’s apparently too much for her to handle. No advance warning, no “sis, you’re talking to me as a mod here”, not even a notification that i got banned.
The best part is that according to screenshots a friend just sent me, she’s now completely going off about “authoritarians”. The nerve some people have.
Sorry for posting pointless internet drama here, i just needed to vent.
this was on an explicitly left-leaning server that does not allow cops and troops to join
she’s now completely going off about “authoritarians”
I think my newest take is that anti-authoritarianism is not left-leaning, it shares the aesthetics of the left but should be seen as a unique ideology in and of itself that ultimately serves the status quo. Efforts should be made to distinguish it as a unique ideology and define it firmly away from the left.
In application anti-authoritarianism opposes all revolution and all construction of anything post-revolution. It opposes authority use within the existing state but it also opposes authority use to end the existing state and in doing so it upholds it and takes a position against any and all people that seek real change.
Anti-authoritarianism is weird because it sees government authority as an ultimate evil but private entities authority as the status quo.
Private banks forcing people out of their homes? Thats a good society. Government doing the same and distributing it? Authoritarian evil.
Then if there is a successful revolution - anything the revolutionaries do is now authoritarian because they took over the government.
The problem is authoritarian doesn’t have a precise mechanical definition at all. Anarchists and liberals don’t use the word in the same way. A lot of my anarchist comrades don’t even use the term because of how imprecise it is. Instead I’ll see anarchists mention lopsided hierarchies in general, imperialism, or how a hierarchy can lead to abuses of power. Or more broadly they might disagree with seizing state power as a tactic, but I think well-read anarchists realize that authoritarian is not a coherent ideological position. No one identifies as an authoritarian, for instance.
Liberals use it as a way to conflate fascists and communists. They use it to mean there’s a lack of representation from groups/interests they believe are inherent to any society. Since all socialist countries exclude or restrain representation of the capitalist class, that makes all socialism authoritarian by a liberal point of view. They see a single party state as tyrannical, because they would prefer to see a state with various competing bourgeois elements rather than the single uniting interest of the working class.
Liberals also use the term (and tankie) in a completely racist way. White countries aren’t authoritarian, that’s reserved for scary foreigners
States are “secure” and “safe” Regimes are “authoritarian” and a “police state”The problem is authoritarian doesn’t have a precise mechanical definition at all. Anarchists and liberals don’t use the word in the same way. A lot of my anarchist comrades don’t even use the term because of how imprecise it is. Instead I’ll see anarchists mention lopsided hierarchies in general, imperialism, or how a hierarchy can lead to abuses of power. Or more broadly they might disagree with seizing state power as a tactic, but I think well-read anarchists realize that authoritarian is not a coherent ideological position. No one identifies as an authoritarian, for instance.
it’s also why, for instance, the political compass is such an awful concept in general
but yeah, I try to be cognizant of how different parts of the Left just have fundamentally different definitions behind the same words, like “authority” for instance, and so bringing up e.g. Engels to somebody who doesn’t think authority means what Engels defines it as is kinda pointless, but the liberals have turned “authority” into such a meaningless term now that I can understand why your anarchist comrades don’t care to use it
There’s a line in the explanation of that compass, I guess written by the authors, saying that Stalin and Hitler could have a cordial discussion about politics so long as economics aren’t mentioned. Which is absurd. Stalin was a Marxist and Hitler believed politics was a matter of skull measurements and racial destinies.
saying that Stalin and Hitler could have a cordial discussion about politics so long as economics aren’t mentioned
what the fuck? did they think WW2 and millions of deaths was just an economics debate that got too far? the only possible way you could think this is true is if you literally didn’t know shit about fuck. “yeah, actually, the guy who liberated the Jews from the concentration camps was actually basically the same politically as the guy who put them in there”
It was written by British libertarians, what do you expect?
I don’t have the time or energy to argue for/against a state at the moment but I’d like to leave some stuff for anyone interested in an actual anarchist analysis of the state over idle speculation from people who have a clear bias against left-libertarian politics. Plenty of anarchists read statist material to gain an understanding of the statist perspective. I’ve personally read enough of Lenin (including the state and revolution), Trotsky and all that to know it isn’t my jam. Not to mention, Marx and Engles were against the state as a revolutionary apparatus (it’s included in the link, don’t @ me).
The State is Counterrevolutionary
And for an anarchist analysis on revolution, complex systems analysis, etc. The Revolution Series
Marx Against the State (article)
I’m only linking the one channel because it’s relevant. Anarchism, as an inherently decentralized ideology and movement has a wide variety of theorists, analysis and opinions. Anarks material is well imformed and comprehensive. I’m not looking to convince anyone to “switch teams” but if we’re going to criticize one another it would help to know what we all actually believe and stand for
I’ve literally read all of these before.
Nothing I said is a critique of anarchism.
Not to mention, Marx and Engles were against the state as a revolutionary apparatus
No. This is definitely nonsense, I don’t want to get into sectarian bollocks but you deserve correcting. Marx is completely explicit about it here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1874/04/bakunin-notes.htm
But again. Nothing I fucking said was a criticism of anarchism. This isn’t about anarchism this is about something explicitly different to it, anti-authoritarianism is not the same thing as anarchism, anarchists are not universally anti-authority.
Stop trying to turn this into sectarianism. Nothing I said was about anarchism. Fuck off. Wrecker somewhere else.
Pretty much every anarchist I know would be okay with suppressing the rights of capitalists, as well as their ability to use the state to enforce private property. That would be pretty “authoritarian” from the perspective of a capitalist, but fuck them, they do the same to us.
I think it’s strident individualism masquerading as anarchism.
Both anarchism and socialism heavily center community. They put slightly different emphasis on different parts of community and anarchism is more decentralized but anarchism still places community and a persons place and rights vis a vis their community as well as the expectations a community can have of its members at the center.
It’s less obvious with anarchism since anarchism is less proscriptive about what form community should take and usually it’s some vision of a decentralized variety of voluntarist communes or something like that, but it always has the idea of a person as a part of their community at the center.
Strident individualism, the idea that the individual is more important than the collective, is antithetical to both anarchism and socialism and this is what really separates right-libertarianism from anarchism.
The person complaining about authoritarians is a petty discord tyrant
no surprise she’s also pro-kulak
social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism
I feel like the kind of shit marginalized people go through in the imperial core tends to be inherently radicalizing in an anti-capitalist direction without necessarily being radicalizing in a pro-communist and anti-west direction.
That makes a lot of sense considering even the most marginalized people in the imperial core have the privilege of not having to worry about bombs being dropped on their homes, CIA backed coups deposing their democratically elected leaders, nor the general all encompassing horror of imperial resource extraction. The result is that western marginalized and privileged citizens alike will both readily accept the never ending deluge of atrocity propaganda against AES emanating out of essentially all western media outlets.
If you believed in literally everything the CIA said about AES, how would you feel about countries like the USSR or PRC? At that point, the red fascist rhetoric actually makes sense. How many fascists should you allow to sit at your table? 0. It’s insidious, and it has broken the brains of too many otherwise decent people. For that reason I try not to judge people like your discord moderator (other than for unironically being a discord moderator) too harshly for things like this.
I don’t think people within the imperial core in general will soften up on AES until real communist organizations can build up local mutual aid networks to support the most precarious of us in their communities. Ideally they’d provide necessary social services running parallel to the rotting remains of the social safety nets once maintained by western governments until the fall of the USSR. That would lend to us the necessary position of public trust to displace the misinformation put out by corporate media by providing relevant education on communism, specifically AES, where the public education system has purposefully failed. Deliberate agitation on this front is very necessary in that there is no horrible experience one can endure in the imperial core that would result in intuitively figuring out we need to organize society in a similar way to AES countries.
If you believed in literally everything the CIA said about AES, how would you feel about countries like the USSR or PRC? At that point, the red fascist rhetoric actually makes sense. How many fascists should you allow to sit at your table? 0. It’s insidious, and it has broken the brains of too many otherwise decent people. For that reason I try not to judge people like your discord moderator (other than for unironically being a discord moderator) too harshly for things like this.
I’m glad someone mentions this. We’re constantly being bombarded by propaganda and there’s very little pushback, I can’t really blame people for believing that the USSR was a cruel, genocidal regime and I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they are acting in “good faith” when they do shit like this. If I believed that Stalin deliberately engineered the Holodomor etc., I would ban people from my discord too if they said the USSR was cool.
That really sucks.
Whenever I bring up commie shit in real life, people are generally just really surprised because they haven’t ever heard those ideas or perspectives before. Sure they argue sometimes, but they can’t just kick you out of a place.
Online though? You get the boot real fast. None of these people would have the guts to treat you that way in real life.
Online though? You get the boot real fast. None of these people would have the guts to treat you that way in real life.
Sounds like this is a result of the rapidly increasing prevalence of liberal solipsism originating from the massively overblown obsession with the few 2016 election ads Russia bought. Now liberals have an easy get out of being flanked from the left card by always accusing anti-western communists of being either literal chat bots or paid shills. That’s much harder for a lib to do offline while the conversation is literally face to face.
Although, I do remember a few years ago a comrade on this site made a vent post about how they were literally called a bot in an offline argument with a coworker. That one absolutely boggles the mind.
I thought the obsession over the advertisements were deflection from the Wikileaks e-mail dumps (DNC & Podesta leaks) about the Clinton campaign and the confirmation of the open secrets within those e-mails. (e.g: incestuous relationship between the campaign and the media, the Clinton campaign preemptively taking control of the DNC, and the Pied Piper strategy to set up radicals like Trump to enable Clinton to have an easier time getting elected.)
Those leaks created a crisis of legitimacy, which has only been resolved artificially through self-delusion, and has only served to institutionalize learned helplessness and alienation from power.
We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas.
