How did we get here? (warn: sectarianism, maybe)
How did we get here? (warn: sectarianism, maybe)
So, in my circles of friends, I am the most terminally online person. I remember being a soc-demmy kinda person (who called themselves socialist) when I joined r/cth when it hit 69,420 members.
Now here I am with opinions like "Stalin and the USSR weren't so bad" and "The tanks rolling into Hungary in 1956 were correct, actually". I feel like the community here on hexbear has kinda shifted in the same way. That said, we've steered clear of the patsoc menace, who aesthetically venerate AES while following the most regressive social/nationalist opinions of what they think of as the working class.
This has somewhat put me at odds with a lot of my RL friends, who are anarchists or trots of varying degrees. I'm generally not down with getting into spats with said RL friends, so I keep a lot of my opinions to myself. This is especially onerous with opinions about the Ukraine war.
How did I end up here? How did we..? I remember back on r/cth the line "This is enough to turn me into a tankie", or some such thing, as though being a tankie was just socialism + willingness to use violence to achieve it.
I can remember online anarchists posting fairly high profile Ls that I think split actual anarchists and left-liberals who just liked to call themselves anarchists (and now online anarchists who really like NATO? idk). But those events had a lot of people shy away from the anarchist label and kinda mull about their own beliefs. The main ones off the top of my head were CHAZ, Vaush audience watchers, and the anti-work breakdown. Certainly, I remember r/cth being a lot more awash with anarchist rhetoric and population (claimed or otherwise) than hexbear currently is.
I don't want this to be a sectarian rant session, but more a reflection of political journeys from r/cth's medicare for all socdem position to the current vibes of hexbear, both personal and pontifications of why this shift occurred.
This isn't the be-all and end-all of my thoughts of my own political evolution. I'll comment some more as I think of them (in between cleaning for rent inspection)
Honestly, a lot has happened in the last two years and I think people are getting more accustomed to the idea that you might have to be more tankie in order to get shit done.
Yes, pretty much this. I'm totally willing to organize with people of any leftist tendency that isn't reactionary, but deep inside it just kinda feels like unless you plan to use the state to suppress fascism you're gonna be neck deep in the mud of reaction.
Even within self-described leftist circles there's often at least one or two nazbols that just want to LARP in Soviet uniforms but otherwise violently hate anyone who isn't almost exactly like themselves and have nothing ideologically in common with leftists except wearing the label like a skin-suit. :sus-soviet:
:tankie:
Our position hasn’t shifted that much from the pod’s position.
The pod has a semi-ironic veneration of China, per the Wolf Warrior episode. It hates the entire US establishment. It wants Iran to get a nuke. Much of its stance is based on opposing what the most awful people in Amerikkka support.
That’s not to say we follow the pod’s marching orders. Rather, we get to the same place for much the same reasons.
The Ukrainian issue is probably the best example of this. No one here’s super pro Putin or his brand of Russian nationalism. When the war started, we were deep into ‘lol there’s not gonna be a war’. We had to eat humble pie, hard.
You know what changed?
Ukrainian flag emojis.
The worst people in the world, with the absolute worst takes, went hard on the Ukraine side.
Was the war a bad idea? Quite possibly. It’ll likely settle into a frozen conflict again, much like it was before, with similar territory, at the cost of a lot of lives.
But seeing people go around, pretending there wasn’t Ukrainian shelling of the Donbas? Pretending Putin hadn’t been pushing for Minsk II to be implemented as agreed? Saying that Putin wants to wage a genocide against Ukraine? Seeing everyone bend over backwards to apologise for literal neo-Nazis?
Fuck that.
Ayatollah Khameini: "WMDs are against Islam and Iran will never get a nuke"
A bunch of terminally online anti-imperialist freaks: "GET A NUKE! GET A NUKE!"
yeah I've noticed the NATO-ification and V**sh-ification of online anarchist spaces. Most of the people I know who call themselves anarchists outside of hexbear are run of the mill succdems who just like anarchist aesthetics. They parrot every US State Department talking point on every other country, who haven't read any theory and claim to hate all states equally (thereby siding with the great satan by default) instead of developing more nuanced views of foreign policy here.
My guess is that there's a certain pernicious individualism that they haven't been challenged to shake off because most of the other people in their orbit are also succdems who like anarchist aesthetics.
It's much harder to find actual anarchists on the internet at large than it is to find MLs, cause basically all revolutionary leftists immediately get called tankies by these larping succdems
I was an anarchist r/cth user.
I am now a tankie hexbear user.
Most leftists in the west simply aren’t exposed to the absolute statistical triumphs of AES states in doing the things leftists want to see happen.
:CommiePOGGERS:
For me, it was two big things in the last couple of years that shifted my politics from a kind of bourgeois-idealist form of Marxism to what I think of as a more properly communist kind. Firstly, seeing how the entire capitalist class mobilised against Corbyn made me realise that a left wing candidate would never be permitted to win an election in the imperial core. For me, it suggested that bourgeois democracy is essentially a scam. The press coverage of that and other things such as the coup in Bolivia brought about a fundamental loss of faith in the underlying 'truths' that structure western narratives about history, politics, society, etc. This led to the second thing: I started to read far more about history (and particularly the history of left wing movements and states) and this gave me a far more nuanced view of AES states. It made me recognise the positive aspects of these states as well as their flaws, and gave me a better understanding of the contexts that they operated in. It made me realise that they (largely - I mean, there's little to redeem, for example, the Khmer Rouge) were far from the monsterous regimes that the dominant histories taught in the liberal democratic 'west' made them out to be. And, in fact, that this monsterous image involved a large amount of projection on the part of the 'west'. This also got me reading the work of communist theorists that I'd not picked up before due to the prejudices of my cultural upbringing. In particular, I started reading Lenin for the first time, in whose work I found a description of liberal (i.e. bourgeois) democracy that felt instinctively true based upon my experiences of the bourgeois state - just as Marx's Capital had felt instinctively true with regards to my experiences of work.
In terms of the site, I'd speculate that the shift from r/cth to here is partly a result of the struggle sessions that took place in the early days of the site and who emerged as the dominant groups, as well as the result of the tendencies of the admins/mods at that time who played a big role in shaping what this site would become. It's probably also a result of the kinds of self-selection that happen when you get banned from a mass media site and start your own small forum. I imagine a lot of the more 'normie' users on r/cth didn't come over in the first place. At this point, I also think this site would be off-putting for a lot of more liberal left types, purely because of the degree to which a lot of people on here stan China. Honestly, I find it a bit much sometimes, even if I welcome China's challenge to US hegemony. In the end, I find those users much less annoying than I would the average liberal with their tacit (often explicit) apologia for imperialism, and I also know I agree with them on more fundamental issues (i.e. we are all on the far left here). However, I think that also has contributed to the radicalisation of the site (or whatever you want to call it), because most of my liberal left friends will immediately dissociate with any movement, group, etc. that doesn't fit within the boundaries of their existing belief system, and they believe that China is undertaking a genocide. Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc. are big enough that those people don't see those sites as monolithic, so even though those sites are filled with actual fascists, and in the case of (at least) Facebook have helped to facilitate actual genocides, they'll use them because they see them as just platforms, while a site like this is seen as tainted by apologia. I'm sure most of you know which of your friends you could show this place and which you couldn't without it being an issue
For me, it suggested that bourgeois democracy is essentially a scam.
The thing about bourgeois democracy is something that libs love pointing out to themselves but don't truly understand. "We're a republic, not a democracy", they say. You don't vote for a peer to represent you, you vote for a member of the bourgeois to represent you, hence "bourgeois democracy" describes it well, it is not democracy for you, it's democracy for them, the dictators over you.
most people are unironic NPCs who literally don't fucking know anything
to people who know basic things, incredibly popular statements like "China is responsible for global warming" is like saying 2 + 2 = -89347
when you realize how utterly depraved, mindless, and reality-denying the average frothing-at-the-mouth english-speaker on the internet is, you naturally begin to question all the other assumptions that you absorbed just by being in their vicinity.
One of the most common traits among those people is an unexamined belief that they are the epic hero in their own story, that everyone else is the "NPC," and that they are too logical and rational to be susceptible to psychological manipulation.
they are too logical and rational to be susceptible to psychological manipulation.
It's much better to know that you're vulnerable to psychological manipulation and curate your intake of propaganda accordingly.