Found some discussion on hexbear where dbzer0 was once more found to be living rent-free in their heads, but it got me thinking:
I find it telling that tankies will constantly prattle about “critical-support” of fascist chuds like Asad, and red-fash regimes like North Korea, or more often, just unironically bring up bog-standard SocDem capitalism like China as “Actually Existing Socialism” (AES), but will immediately marginalize, dehumanize or expel from their spaces anarchists who don’t support AES, or who support market-based forms of socialism (such as mutualism).
Likewise, why not give “critical support” to other SocDems for their good policies? (note, I don’t support socdems in either liberal-capitalist of state-capitalist form, I’m just asking questions, philosophically)
I can’t quite put into words why this bothers me, but I suspect it’s due to the usual hypocrisy I see from them. What do you think of this phenomenon?
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Online “Marxists” licking the boots of fascist and somehow acting like that it will help the working class smh
It so often feels like its more important to them to win every online argument than actual liberation.
The problem pretty consistently is they have simple solutions to complex problems and refuse to use nuance in anything.
They’ve reduced the problem space to one they can comprehend, have come to a conclusion about it, and now refuse to ever bend or change opinion.
If your regime is vocally on their side they’ll defend it unironically and ardently. If your regime has ever shown any pushback you’re a Western pig with shitballs.
It’s a very comforting worldview honestly. Having come from a radical religious upbringing I know how nice it is to just take a razor and slice the world in 2. Good guys on one side, bad guys on the other and never the twain shall meet. Bad people are eternally bad and the only way for them to not be bad is for them to look, talk and act like us because we’re good.
The problem of course is that it is exceptionally rare that you find someone who believes what they’re doing is wrong and continually fights for it because they enjoy being wrong. Everyone lands on continuous spectrums of belief and action and they’re usually doing what they think is right/good.
To be clear: I’m not saying I understand the entire problem space. I’ve read Marx and Gramsci. I’m not uninformed: I just know that the complexity of human systems are nigh on incomprehensible when attempting to solve them in their entirety. I don’t think the problem of government and economic organization is solvable so much as it is something we can do better than we currently do. It will never be perfect, but we can aim for good enough.
For what it’s worth I’m definitely in the big government camp rather than the anarchism camp: and yes I’m aware which community this is. Just calling out my own biases here.
I’m mostly on your side of the fence in the matter. For many accepting that reality is more complicated that they can handle or that has part they will never fully understand is too much to handle. They will reduce the problem to whatever they can handle. More often we’ll se that authoritarian solution are based in the hypocrisy of “everything will be alright for the majority of the people” or some thing of the likes. Some anarchistic and/or liberal solutions rely on believing that no bad apples will exist, is a never ending argument. But I prefer to dream that to oppress I guess i better to see tolerance as a social contract.
I can’t quite put into words why this bothers me, but I suspect it’s due to the usual hypocrisy I see from them. What do you think of this phenomenon?
I think if we where to address the question directly it would be the blatant denial of the problems they generate and enable with their behavior? This can land as hypocrisy yes but the core is the reduction that leads to a denial IMO.
BTW I’m not pro big government per se but I believe that many part of our society do not need private interest involved at all and that many aspects of the private endeavor need regulation, we’re playing whack a mole for many things.
It is just campism. It doesn’t matter what these countries actually do, as long as they are against “the west”.
Since I have you here, what do you think about them calling slkpnk “just aesthetics”? 🙃
I don’t really care what they think of it 🤷♂️
I would suspect they wouldn’t say the same about Soviet Futurism Art.
That old Soviet art was designed to inspire, to get people excited for what their world and society could be, to become a scientist or an engineer so you could be a part of making that reality! It was, critically, a goal, something to strive toward. Unfortunately, their ideology and government would keep them from ever realizing what their artists dreamt up.
Solarpunk is, in some ways, acting in a similar vein: giving us a goal to orient toward. But our tools, anarchism, eco-socialism, appropriate technology; they can actually enable and empower us, to make good on their promise.
That’s just my two cents, anyway :)
A large part of it is that they are simply not as well read on political science as they believe. They have an ideological pen which exists at the intersection of Marxist.org and their favorite Lenin pamphlet and that’s the entire political world to them. That’s also why they seem obsessed with cold war dogma - because a lot of that era’s leftist thought was constructed through that lens.
Honestly I take the other view here though. Social Democrat liberalism shares a lot of values with libertarian socialist ideals, and the whole attachment of capitalism to liberalism is misunderstood. Harm reduction isn’t a naughty word, because every leftist idea is harm reduction until we have post-scarcity materialism.
Well, surprisingly a lot of of them tend to be very well read, and demand that anyone engaging with them has similar literary consumption.
Eh, most of them haven’t actually read the source material they claim. I have run into a bunch of cases where they seem to have not even read the entire essay they are citing and are only familiar with a particular passage (the one with the best fan service.)
And even the ones who do read more than that, often fail to connect and contextualize the philosophy in the broader sphere of political science. It’s a big reason why they seem so absolutist about this or that - they have a poor grasp of basic first principles of government, economics, sociology and politics. They can parrot some writer as a “gotcha” but they don’t actually understand how that person got to their ideas, or the broader context of that argument.
Eh, most of them haven’t actually read the source material they claim. I have run into a bunch of cases where they seem to have not even read the entire essay they are citing and are only familiar with a particular passage (the one with the best fan service.)
This becomes hilariously obvious when they straight up bring up “On Authority” as an argument, one of the worst socialist essays ever written.
Right, I have seen MLs quote Chomsky to defend Chinese media censorship. I have seen people quote a Lenin essay which glibly states “civil war gives the peasantry practice at arms” when arguing that “dictatorship” doesn’t imply violence. They barely manage a wikipedia-level understanding of these issues.
Hilariously there is already an ML sea lion in here demanding I “prove” this. What, exactly, I am supposed to prove is unclear, since I am effectively distilling a handful of personal anecdotes into a few bullet points. But the aggressive framing and vagueness of the request really does kind of illustrate part of what I’m talking about here. MLs have people convinced that they are thoughtful, when in really they are just aggressive and confrontational.
Interesting. There’s a reply from mastodon.social which went to piefed.social but didn’t reach this instance so it’s not not visible anywhere except your instance.
I remember there was one recently written Chinese political opinion piece that openly stated that China’s government was not democratic. That claim is consistent with China’s self view, but you see a lot of tankies get tripped up on that claim.
They’re the sovcits of politics.
