If your action is to punch left, your output is to move the current situation rightwards.
This goes for both anarchists and lemmygrad types, who equally harm the collective movement by punching left at one another.
If the marxist brigades, (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine(DFLP), Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC)) in Palestine can prioritise the need for cooperation even with hamas in order to put up a resistance against oppression, we can all do the same when we have fewer reasons to fight.
Sure, but there’s a reason the anarchist presence on Hexbear haa dramatically waned over the years. Like how much is anyone actually valuing left unity while federating with an instance that memes about killing anarchists? A lot of the early drama came out of specifically ML’s harassing people associated with anarchists, like that John Kerry shit, including accusations of an “anarchist cabal” (which to be fair remains extremely funny to this day).
And this exists alongside an attitude that left unity in fact is a waste of time, that communists and anarchists want fundamentally different things. And when you combine that with memes about anarchists being reactionaries and feds (oh, but not our anarchists!) and glorification of figures that killed a lot of anarchists and the occasional “anarchists get the wall” memes, like you can’t be comrades with people who fundamentally see you as a problem to one day violently remove. There cannot be useful criticism without mutual trust, and I don’t think there has been that trust in quite a while.
Every single anarchist community singularly dedicated to anarchism off reddit has waned over the years. Hexbear has retained anarchists better than Raddle for example which has about 20 users left over.
Anarchists seem content to exist in spaces that aren’t dedicated to anarchism, as offshoot spaces on the side of other content that latches onto them. This is a problem honestly because those spaces are almost always controlled by bougies rather than proles, if/when the left becomes a real threat those spaces will be shut down just like the marxist ones have been getting shut down on reddit lately. Antiwork got kneecapped by wreckers and bankers for a reason for example.
that communists and anarchists want fundamentally different things
I don’t believe this. I continue to believe that we want the same thing and disagree on the method of reaching it. I actually think we both fundamentally have the same criticisms of the socialist state even, there’s a reason communists want a stateless society, we know states aren’t good.
Every single anarchist community singularly dedicated to anarchism off reddit has waned over the years.
It’s also my observation that most dedicated anarchist spaces seem gratuitously anti-ML in a way that Hexbear, at least, is not gratuitously anti-Anarchist. Granted, there are also places where MLs are needlessly anti-Anarchist and I’m sure there are anarchist spaces out there who are not as hostile to MLs, but if the comparison is Hexbear specifically then Hexbear is more neutral ground than most other leftist spaces.
That is very strongly evidenced by the OP itself, which only exists so anarcho-bidenists can fear monger to their fellow rubes about how the tankies want to shoot them, which there would be no impetus for if not for MLs in some spaces visibly calling for left unity.
The obvious explanation for this is just the more general observation that most anarchists in the real world despise Marxists. In anarchist circles in private the discourse than ML’s are a bunch of homophobic, transphobic, sex-worker-phobic, misogynistic red fash is very, very present, and honestly pretending otherwise is simply ignoring the obvious truth that becomes evident if you actually spend much time in read-world anarchist and Marxist circles, simply for the sake of preserving the appearance of an artificial, digital ‘left unity’ which neither has any bearing on actual organization nor does it provide a serious basis for any actual platform of organized socialist activity. We can get together for the same marches, social movements, or for forms of local mutual aid and aid for the homeless or refugees, but this does not ever really extend beyond that in my experience, and the reason is that anarchists have a fundamentally different conception of politics and organization to Marxists, and especially to MLs.
Anarchist presence on Mastodon has been fine. Raddle has the issue of Ziq being shitty to people and fostering a space only really welcoming to a specific brand of post-leftist, and so far the fact that Lemmy has been made by ML’s has stifled interedt in a specifically anarchist Lemmy instance. Though even then Raddle still has more visibly active anarchists than Hexbear, and if you go by specifically anarchist discussions the anarchism community on Hexbear has always been anemic.
Having been here from the start and watched people leave, it’s always been the overt sectarianism that gets cited. Hexbear is not a revolutionary movement, it is an internet forum, and while it started out as a space that wanted to specifically be an actual social space for leftists in general it has absolutely become an ML centric soace to the exclusion of pretty much any other tendency. And for all some might say they think we have shared goals, it tends to not mean much when there has always been a contingent that has viewed driving off other tendencies as praxis.
I would agree that it would be better to have an actual anarchist presence on kbin/lemmy and that the objection to using the software is silly, but a lot of anarchist reddit spaces have dealt with specifically ML wreckers trying to to gain control of subreddits for shits and giggles, so I don’t think I can convince anyone this wouldn’t be more of the same.
Mastodon is the kind of place I referred to in my previous comment.
Having been here from the start and watched people leave,
I don’t know who you’re talking about but Hexbear is more active today than it has ever been.
it’s always been the overt sectarianism that gets cited. Hexbear is not a revolutionary movement, it is an internet forum, and while it started out as a space that wanted to specifically be an actual social space for leftists in general it has absolutely become an ML centric soace to the exclusion of pretty much any other tendency.
It used to have a bigger problem with anti-trot sectarianism, far more than anarchism. Anti anarchist sentiment was always explicitly stamped on whereas anti-trot stuff was encouraged, we even have emotes left over from this time like . This changed however at some point and some of the only times I’ve been moderated is because I still make trot jokes. We have trots on the site now too so I’m not really being good to them when I do.
a lot of anarchist reddit spaces have dealt with specifically ML wreckers trying to to gain control of subreddits for shits and giggles
Mastodon is the kind of place I referred to in my previous comment.
Not really sure how that’s particularly waned, relative to anything else. Anarchist instances can be pretty large, and Mastodon (and the other twitter-like federated projects) as a whole is a much larger thing than Lemmy at present. That is where you’ll find actual orgs with their “official” accounts after Twitter started banning them.
I don’t know who you’re talking about but Hexbear is more active today than it has ever been.
ML’s on Hexbear are active, yes. I don’t really see other anarchists very often, we’re more often referred to than actually present. I don’t really think I see much other htan ML’s represented in general, which is absolutely a decline from when the website started and certainly from when the subreddit was still not banned.
It used to have a bigger problem with anti-trot sectarianism, far more than anarchism.
The trot in question got orriginally targetted in part due to their association with anarchists, which again the phrase “anarchist cabal” will always be funny. But part of why there was resistance to that sectarianism was becuase there were anarchists present to push back on it, which over time a lot of us have burned out on the community. And so like 90% of the time it seems like posts are mostly complaining about anarchists, which I imagine is probably exhausting for whatever anarchists remain.
Which ones?
GenZanarchism was probably one of hte more notable ones that got cheered on, though people have been trying to fuck with r/anarchism for a while which had that space paranoid as shit. I remember on the Discord we were looking over some screenshots over some drama about needing to disassociate with a server of Reddit subredit moderators where someone told someone else to kill thesmelves, and part of those screenshots was them with a channel dedicated to fucking with anarchist subreddits.
You can just go to the dunk thread for this thread and see the upvoted replies, like those just plain stating they don’t really advocate for left unity either.
What does that even mean? It runs on elected mods, with a separate subreddit that posts notable mod actions for transparency. Do you think there’s any non-fed anarchist subreddit, or are you just fedjacketing as a bit or because their opnions annoy you? Antiwork actually had Laurelai Bailey, an actual known snitch, we actually do know that there was fed shit going on there - I have never heard an actual serious accusation about r/anarchism of all places.
LIke unless your’e going to hand me actual evidence that morrigan or someone is actually a cop, this is the kind of thing that I’m talking about. That fedjacketing shit is toxic, it gets people paranoid, it’s a traumatic thing to go through, so the general expectation is that you don’t ever call someone a cop or a fed without actual evidence to back that up.
My bad it’s completeanarchy I had in mind, anarchism is safe and in fact it’s the only anarchist subreddit that has good relations with the socialist subreddits.
I’m not giving evidence you’ll just have to take my word for it.
Antiwork actually had Laurelai Bailey, an actual known snitch, we actually do know that there was fed shit going on there
I was active during the antiwork events and we had accounts in the modteam trying to turn it around but we were fucked as soon as the admins stepped in and brought on liberal powermods. Things potentially could have gone differently if that sub hadn’t spent the last 12 months prior purging “tankies”, we tried to stop the wrecker pressures that were occurring in threads but were unable to muster enough people because all the purging had made it considerably harder to get people to help rescue a space they saw as one that had purged them previously. It wasn’t really just “fed shit” though it was an op that involved some sort of financier cabal, we had direct evidence of canadian bankers running the spinoffs at the time but it’d take some time to dig up, the two that were caught faded into the woodwork when called on it but you can bet the power was still in their group. Whole thing was a disaster. A digital colour-revolution in action.
slrpnk.net is an anarchist instance, and this instance is also meant to run on anarchist principles btw. Unfortunately the /r/anarchism people were not willing to consistently push to abandon reddit, and when they did, they were promoting raddle which is very insular, so most of the people who like threaded discussions remain there.
Probably not real anarchists, or they just lack understanding (or are in-denial) about where that platform is headed and don’t realize that Reddit’s enshittified future doesn’t include them whether they choose it or not (Anarchism isn’t seen favorably by many people, execs at Reddit inc. likely feel the same way).
Communists and Anarchists are most certainly not the same. I’m not really sure how anyone can entertain this idea if they have actually spent times in active anarchist and Marxist circles, let alone engaged in militant activity with either where both the need for cooperation and the apparent inevitability of conflict and tension become obvious, and make obvious in turn that these difficulties do not just boil down interpersonal issues or grievances but are political in nature. There are profound conceptual, theoretical, ideological, practical and organization differences, as well as sociological.
It’s all well and good to say that they are ‘fundamentally the same’ (what does ‘fundamentally/essentially the same’ even mean here? It seems vague, ambiguous, or if you are choosing as the criterion for that that we want the same form of society at the end of the day, this amounts actually only to a very weak form of agreement in all honestly. It’s like saying that Communists are the same as Reformists Socialists because the latter also want (sometimes genuinely) a form of socialist economy and are genuinely deluded as to the means to get there (i.e. reformism). The difference is in terms of political method, and the distinction is one of revolution vs reformism. Sure, Communists share a belief in the need for revolution to get there with anarchists, but they have different different concepts, theories, practices, conceptions of organization and politics, which implies deep theoretical and practical-organizational differences.
Furthermore, Communism in this sense remains an ideal (which is fine), towards which we agree on the most general and abstract features and agree further that this is the ideal form of society which we would like, indeed must for the sake of the human species, move towards. The anarchist conception of revolution is very different from the communist conception, and what comes during the revolution, how we get there, what is necessary, how we should actually do all the actual work of organizing the working class (which marxists recognize as necessary but which anarchists have either been unwilling to do the work needed to accomplish or who they neglect as many now see focus of parties on class-based organization to be a form of class-reductionism), disagree on the fundamental questions of revolution, the state, parties, legislation, prisons, and so on.
There are also Christian Communists (non-Marxist) would also want a stateless, classless, moneyless society. I commend them for that, and they are definitely potential allies, but that doesn’t mean they are going to be reliable political allies in the long-term, nor does it imply that their views are fundamentally the same as mine. The fact that they are not going to be ready to do the things necessary to actually construct socialism, let alone communism, means that realistic political unity with them is limited at best. The same goes for anarchism in the minds of Marxists, most obviously MLs.
The period of transition from capitalism to communism will likely take hundreds of years. Socialism is a centuries-long project which we have only just begun. Calling the immense, profound differences of opinion between Communists and anarchists over this historical process towards Communism something which does not amount to a fundamental difference seems not only confused, but positively idealistic to me.
Saying that the difference lies simply in the means to get there is ignoring the fact that this is a massive difference with direct implications for the feasibility of long-term, substantial, deep political cooperation. It also reflects that the routes through which Marxists and Anarchists get to the conclusion of the need for revolution for the sake of a classless, stateless, moneyless society are very different.
Just to give a revealing sense of the depth of this divide: There are people in this thread who have cited Murray Bookchin, who towards the end of his life not only explicitly stated that he would rather side with liberal governments against Communists because the former believed in ‘personal freedom’, but then later when on to repudiate anarchism right at the end of his life, calling modern anarchists a form of lifestyle movement with no real political potential, and it’s worthwhile to note that he came to this conclusion during the 90s and 2000s, i.e. when Marxism and Communism were at their lowest ebb and the international leftist movements in the West were being dominated by anarchist and post-left lifestyle movementism, calling for distributed (non-existent) networks of supposedly distributed organization based on ridiculously minute identitarian difference (i.e. identity politics). The period since the 90s have done nothing but refute the idea that the predominance of anarchists on the western left would revitalize the prospects for revolution there. The opposite is the case. The potential for revolution has correlated inversely with anarchist predominance. Frankly this doesn’t surprise me, as the anarchist circles I’ve encountered have almost always been far more bourgeois, less proletarian, than Marxist circles (especially if we are talking about militant circles), though I admit that this is anecdotal.
Yeah mate, no criticism is allowed. If someone says they’re left and do right wing things like exploit the working class, it’s sectarian to call them on it.
You posted a meme, not criticism. Then when anyone charitably assumes you have something of substance to say and responds in kind, you say “whoa it’s just a meme, what are you, a debate bro?”
It’s been very clear that I am not in a mood to debate or argue in the length. I don’t owe you explanations. I’m allowed to just shit post. I call people debate me bros when after I told them multiple times that I don’t want to debate, they insist. It’s not a difficult concept to grasp
I honestly find this behaviour incredibly disrespectful to the people that are currently dying as they do real resistance. Are you opposed to the Palestinians too then? The leftist brigades of Palestine are all “tankies” and Hamas are considerably worse (but resistance is more important than broaching the issues with them). Do you wage sectarian bullshit against them too from your comfortable room while they fight and die for the cause? Serious question.
You think posting on online forums make a lick of a difference for those who “do real resistance”? You’re in the left shitposter heaven and you come here to judge me? Seriously?
The vast majority of the people here found their way into the left through learning in the online posting grounds before eventually joining orgs. Anyone that thinks what we do online doesn’t matter is not really thinking straight.
You didn’t really answer the question though and it concerns me. Are you opposed to the Palestinian resistance currently fighting for freedom?
I also don’t answer because I don’t like to be interrogated like this.
No, it’s because you don’t have a leg to stand on and you’re an intellectually dishonest coward who wants to fling shit and then cry when people push back
It’s just despicable playing these precious little rhetorical games while using historical deaths (and one or two inventions) as props for your atrocity propaganda, all to fear monger about people who generally have a common interest with the rest of the left in a social context where the right wing is overwhelmingly more powerful. Just textbook wrecker behavior.
This space is not “pretend” while the offline world is “real”. The people here are real people (I hope lmao) and the emotions people have here are real.
One day we will all be thrown into our own very real resistance. Are you willing to die for it? I am. I’ve said many times that I will die in bed an old lady in a currently non-existent socialist state or I will die in the fighting to bring it about.
We post here and have some fun and argue and do all sorts of shit in our off time. But in our on time? A lot of us are genuinely active in political orgs. Here in the UK it might be resisting landlord evictions through Acorn, performing party work or shutting down weapons factories through Palestine Action. Do you think sectarianism would benefit orgs like Palestine Action shutting down zionist weapons factories? Whose principle need is BODIES willing to get on rooftops and smash up these buildings and get arrested? Does reducing the pool of people that would join that org benefit them in any way by being sectarians? Does it matter whether someone on the roof of an israeli weapons factory waves a black flag or a red flag? Of course it doesn’t. And the people who try to flare up sectarian bullshit anywhere are rightfully shouted down or expelled because all they are functionally doing by punching left is weakening those orgs and their ability to do praxis.
That doesn’t change online. The number of people who actually transfer from the online space to offline organising is directly tied to the sectarian bullshit that occurs. There are dumbass marxists that refuse to take part at certain orgs because of some anarchist sectarian bullshit and there are dumbass anarchists that refuse to take part in some socialist led things because of sectarian bullshit.
If I saw anyone at the march in London this weekend say a single fucking word about sectarian shit I would have punched them in the face.
This shit hurts the left. There is no case for it benefiting the left in any way.
One day we will all be in an existential armed struggle ourselves. Really consider the priorities. There is no benefit to any of this shit, and in fact it risks harming support for Palestine. I assume you’re not anti-Palestine, even though you won’t state it. If you can support Palestinian resistance despite Hamas, you can support marxist-leninists despite sectarian disagreement, and you already are doing just that by supporting Palestine. Not to mention that almost every single fucking pro Palestine march currently happening is being organised by the “tankies” you’re currently railing against.
Oh and just in case - anyone that doesn’t support Palestine deserves a brick to the back of the head.
We’ve spoken about this before, you and me, iirc. So long as y’all keep doing anarchist direct action for mutual aid, we can be allies. Once you start trying to seize hierarchical control like some illuminated vanguard, is where it gets difficult.
This meme is about exactly this difficulty.
Let’s be serious for a moment, y’all descended on me shit-posting about well known problems anarchists had with MLs. Y’all don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. You had the counter-arguments ready to post. But I’m not here to debate with you and we won’t solve these disagreements here. You know what you know, I know what I know. We can agree to disagree.
But then y’all got mad that I didn’t debate 12 people at a time, as if I have nothing better to do with my life on the comments of a shitpost. You can’t handle one single anarchist making one single meme in an obscure anarchist sub.
This all has nothing about us being able to collaborate on things that matter. When we do those actions, nobody is going to say “Aha, I remember what you wrote in lemmy.dbzer0.com that one time about leftist unity”. This is all about 1) the ego of those hexbear tankies who couldn’t handle not being debated and 2) The shitposters of hexbear who just came here to have flamewars because the mods of hexbear apparently don’t control anything anymore and your “left unity” only goes so much as someone disagreeing with your takes and then they’re a “liberal” and therefore fair game.
I am honestly not upset. I’m am however just disappointed at the greater hexbear behaviour…
I think the problem here is that this “shitposting” comes off as… Completely anti collaboration?
That’s why it’s a problem. Maybe you’re in favour of collaboration. But do younger anarchists realise that? Does the general bulk of the numbers realise that? Or is this kind of posting actually working entirely against the left overall because it splits us? Because a significant portion of people genuinely take it to heart and believe it. How many spaces actively purge marxists now because of “aaaaaa tankies”? That’s occurring because of this kind of propaganda. Is it helping anyone? Fuck no it’s not. Look at every single lemmy community where we’ve been purged, are they better? They’re far right shit holes even if there’s a handful of people trying to change that, they’re utterly dominated by the worst people.
If the right split like the left does we’d be in power in half of europe.
Once you start trying to seize hierarchical control like some illuminated vanguard
You have a completely distorted view of the historical projects of MLs. The point of a vanguard is not unilateral command, it is to be a body that is entirely concerned with political organization and engagement while other people have other jobs that take up more of their effort. That does not mean the vanguard dictates to everyone else, but rather that it seeks to find ways to put the feedback from everyone else into practical action.
I swear, just read a single fucking book.
the ego of those hexbear tankies who couldn’t handle not being debated and 2) The shitposters of hexbear who just came here to have flamewars because the mods of hexbear apparently don’t control anything anymore and your “left unity” only goes so much as someone disagreeing with your takes and then they’re a “liberal” and therefore fair game.
You’re a two-faced prick, the people trying to engage are bad and the people being lazy like you are are also bad. What is there to do that is good? Oh right, capitulate. Meanwhile you yourself whine about “left unity” and how unfair it is that the mean tankies call you a liberal when you’ve been here sneering the whole fucking time about how “dae tankies don’t fall under left unity because state capitalism is rightist”. Fuck off.
Ah ok, so nothing could possibly go wrong if you keep pushing this. You won’t lose any allies cuz they’re already secret right wingers. Do they know that?
If the marxist brigades, (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine(DFLP), Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC)) in Palestine can prioritise the need for cooperation even with hamas in order to put up a resistance against oppression, we can all do the same when we have fewer reasons to fight.
Sure. But this is, frankly, a pretty idealist take imo that ignores not only the fact that in actual practice there is frequent tension and conflict which has real basis, but real and deeper theoretical differences as well as ones of praxis and organization. We can wish for this form of left unity you are describing all we like, but it doesn’t erase the deal differences between communists and anarchists.
In my personal experience, Communists have been far more eager, happy or willing to work with anarchists when it comes to practice on the ground than vice-versa, and I think it’s important to note that these forums are not representative of the actual relations between Communists and Anarchists on the ground, which are frequently tense because Marxists will often spend months agitating and entering workplaces, doing the grunt work, only for reformists and anarchists to show up at the end at points of more intense political struggle and gain political credibility for their ‘participation’. Another related issue here is that, in practice, anarchist circles are on average more liberal, individualist and identitarian than Marxist orgs interested in forming parties. The emphasis on decentralized, distributed organization, justified by whatever post-structural idealist nonsense is currently in fashion, is not conducive to working with actual Communist (read: Leninist) orgs.
Not to mention that - and this is again to indicate that these forums like Hexbear are in no way indicative of actual relationships between Communists and Anarchists - that most anarchists despise Communists, most obviously Leninists, and would despise Lemmygrad and Hexbear types most of all. Like the view of us as ‘Red Fash’ is close to the mainstream view among most Anarchists, and it’s frankly ridiculous to pretend otherwise.
Marxists will often spend months agitating and entering workplaces, doing the grunt work, only for reformists and anarchists to show up at the end at points of more intense political struggle and gain political credibility for their ‘participation’.
This is why left v. right seems like the wrong dimension to be worrying about IMHO. Up v. down is the only dimension that matters. Is coercion acceptable or not is the question. It doesn’t matter what reasons or methods are used, dominating or attempting to dominate is wrong whether one is capitalist or Marxist.
I don’t think it counts as “punching left” when the one doing the dunking believes the dunkee is to the right of them. The way you’re using that phrase renders it meaningless.
If your action is to punch left, your output is to move the current situation rightwards.
This goes for both anarchists and lemmygrad types, who equally harm the collective movement by punching left at one another.
If the marxist brigades, (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine(DFLP), Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC)) in Palestine can prioritise the need for cooperation even with hamas in order to put up a resistance against oppression, we can all do the same when we have fewer reasons to fight.
https://youtu.be/90AAcSvJAl0
Sure, but there’s a reason the anarchist presence on Hexbear haa dramatically waned over the years. Like how much is anyone actually valuing left unity while federating with an instance that memes about killing anarchists? A lot of the early drama came out of specifically ML’s harassing people associated with anarchists, like that John Kerry shit, including accusations of an “anarchist cabal” (which to be fair remains extremely funny to this day).
And this exists alongside an attitude that left unity in fact is a waste of time, that communists and anarchists want fundamentally different things. And when you combine that with memes about anarchists being reactionaries and feds (oh, but not our anarchists!) and glorification of figures that killed a lot of anarchists and the occasional “anarchists get the wall” memes, like you can’t be comrades with people who fundamentally see you as a problem to one day violently remove. There cannot be useful criticism without mutual trust, and I don’t think there has been that trust in quite a while.
I’m not convinced.
Every single anarchist community singularly dedicated to anarchism off reddit has waned over the years. Hexbear has retained anarchists better than Raddle for example which has about 20 users left over.
Anarchists seem content to exist in spaces that aren’t dedicated to anarchism, as offshoot spaces on the side of other content that latches onto them. This is a problem honestly because those spaces are almost always controlled by bougies rather than proles, if/when the left becomes a real threat those spaces will be shut down just like the marxist ones have been getting shut down on reddit lately. Antiwork got kneecapped by wreckers and bankers for a reason for example.
I don’t believe this. I continue to believe that we want the same thing and disagree on the method of reaching it. I actually think we both fundamentally have the same criticisms of the socialist state even, there’s a reason communists want a stateless society, we know states aren’t good.
It’s also my observation that most dedicated anarchist spaces seem gratuitously anti-ML in a way that Hexbear, at least, is not gratuitously anti-Anarchist. Granted, there are also places where MLs are needlessly anti-Anarchist and I’m sure there are anarchist spaces out there who are not as hostile to MLs, but if the comparison is Hexbear specifically then Hexbear is more neutral ground than most other leftist spaces.
That is very strongly evidenced by the OP itself, which only exists so anarcho-bidenists can fear monger to their fellow rubes about how the tankies want to shoot them, which there would be no impetus for if not for MLs in some spaces visibly calling for left unity.
The obvious explanation for this is just the more general observation that most anarchists in the real world despise Marxists. In anarchist circles in private the discourse than ML’s are a bunch of homophobic, transphobic, sex-worker-phobic, misogynistic red fash is very, very present, and honestly pretending otherwise is simply ignoring the obvious truth that becomes evident if you actually spend much time in read-world anarchist and Marxist circles, simply for the sake of preserving the appearance of an artificial, digital ‘left unity’ which neither has any bearing on actual organization nor does it provide a serious basis for any actual platform of organized socialist activity. We can get together for the same marches, social movements, or for forms of local mutual aid and aid for the homeless or refugees, but this does not ever really extend beyond that in my experience, and the reason is that anarchists have a fundamentally different conception of politics and organization to Marxists, and especially to MLs.
Anarchist presence on Mastodon has been fine. Raddle has the issue of Ziq being shitty to people and fostering a space only really welcoming to a specific brand of post-leftist, and so far the fact that Lemmy has been made by ML’s has stifled interedt in a specifically anarchist Lemmy instance. Though even then Raddle still has more visibly active anarchists than Hexbear, and if you go by specifically anarchist discussions the anarchism community on Hexbear has always been anemic.
Having been here from the start and watched people leave, it’s always been the overt sectarianism that gets cited. Hexbear is not a revolutionary movement, it is an internet forum, and while it started out as a space that wanted to specifically be an actual social space for leftists in general it has absolutely become an ML centric soace to the exclusion of pretty much any other tendency. And for all some might say they think we have shared goals, it tends to not mean much when there has always been a contingent that has viewed driving off other tendencies as praxis.
I would agree that it would be better to have an actual anarchist presence on kbin/lemmy and that the objection to using the software is silly, but a lot of anarchist reddit spaces have dealt with specifically ML wreckers trying to to gain control of subreddits for shits and giggles, so I don’t think I can convince anyone this wouldn’t be more of the same.
Mastodon is the kind of place I referred to in my previous comment.
I don’t know who you’re talking about but Hexbear is more active today than it has ever been.
It used to have a bigger problem with anti-trot sectarianism, far more than anarchism. Anti anarchist sentiment was always explicitly stamped on whereas anti-trot stuff was encouraged, we even have emotes left over from this time like
. This changed however at some point and some of the only times I’ve been moderated is because I still make trot jokes. We have trots on the site now too so I’m not really being good to them when I do.
Which ones?
It’s instinctive I swear. It’s really hard to stop.
Not really sure how that’s particularly waned, relative to anything else. Anarchist instances can be pretty large, and Mastodon (and the other twitter-like federated projects) as a whole is a much larger thing than Lemmy at present. That is where you’ll find actual orgs with their “official” accounts after Twitter started banning them.
ML’s on Hexbear are active, yes. I don’t really see other anarchists very often, we’re more often referred to than actually present. I don’t really think I see much other htan ML’s represented in general, which is absolutely a decline from when the website started and certainly from when the subreddit was still not banned.
The trot in question got orriginally targetted in part due to their association with anarchists, which again the phrase “anarchist cabal” will always be funny. But part of why there was resistance to that sectarianism was becuase there were anarchists present to push back on it, which over time a lot of us have burned out on the community. And so like 90% of the time it seems like posts are mostly complaining about anarchists, which I imagine is probably exhausting for whatever anarchists remain.
GenZanarchism was probably one of hte more notable ones that got cheered on, though people have been trying to fuck with r/anarchism for a while which had that space paranoid as shit. I remember on the Discord we were looking over some screenshots over some drama about needing to disassociate with a server of Reddit subredit moderators where someone told someone else to kill thesmelves, and part of those screenshots was them with a channel dedicated to fucking with anarchist subreddits.
You can just go to the dunk thread for this thread and see the upvoted replies, like those just plain stating they don’t really advocate for left unity either.
Literally run by feds. Anyone fucking with that sub is wasting their time it will never fall out of their hands.
What does that even mean? It runs on elected mods, with a separate subreddit that posts notable mod actions for transparency. Do you think there’s any non-fed anarchist subreddit, or are you just fedjacketing as a bit or because their opnions annoy you? Antiwork actually had Laurelai Bailey, an actual known snitch, we actually do know that there was fed shit going on there - I have never heard an actual serious accusation about r/anarchism of all places.
LIke unless your’e going to hand me actual evidence that morrigan or someone is actually a cop, this is the kind of thing that I’m talking about. That fedjacketing shit is toxic, it gets people paranoid, it’s a traumatic thing to go through, so the general expectation is that you don’t ever call someone a cop or a fed without actual evidence to back that up.
My bad it’s completeanarchy I had in mind, anarchism is safe and in fact it’s the only anarchist subreddit that has good relations with the socialist subreddits.
I’m not giving evidence you’ll just have to take my word for it.
I was active during the antiwork events and we had accounts in the modteam trying to turn it around but we were fucked as soon as the admins stepped in and brought on liberal powermods. Things potentially could have gone differently if that sub hadn’t spent the last 12 months prior purging “tankies”, we tried to stop the wrecker pressures that were occurring in threads but were unable to muster enough people because all the purging had made it considerably harder to get people to help rescue a space they saw as one that had purged them previously. It wasn’t really just “fed shit” though it was an op that involved some sort of financier cabal, we had direct evidence of canadian bankers running the spinoffs at the time but it’d take some time to dig up, the two that were caught faded into the woodwork when called on it but you can bet the power was still in their group. Whole thing was a disaster. A digital colour-revolution in action.
slrpnk.net is an anarchist instance, and this instance is also meant to run on anarchist principles btw. Unfortunately the /r/anarchism people were not willing to consistently push to abandon reddit, and when they did, they were promoting raddle which is very insular, so most of the people who like threaded discussions remain there.
I don’t get anarchists that insists in stay on reddit.
Probably not real anarchists, or they just lack understanding (or are in-denial) about where that platform is headed and don’t realize that Reddit’s enshittified future doesn’t include them whether they choose it or not (Anarchism isn’t seen favorably by many people, execs at Reddit inc. likely feel the same way).
Good to know and glad we’re federated with ya!
Edit: Ahh geez this is OP didn’t realize that. this comic is really racist towards Mao :(
Communists and Anarchists are most certainly not the same. I’m not really sure how anyone can entertain this idea if they have actually spent times in active anarchist and Marxist circles, let alone engaged in militant activity with either where both the need for cooperation and the apparent inevitability of conflict and tension become obvious, and make obvious in turn that these difficulties do not just boil down interpersonal issues or grievances but are political in nature. There are profound conceptual, theoretical, ideological, practical and organization differences, as well as sociological.
It’s all well and good to say that they are ‘fundamentally the same’ (what does ‘fundamentally/essentially the same’ even mean here? It seems vague, ambiguous, or if you are choosing as the criterion for that that we want the same form of society at the end of the day, this amounts actually only to a very weak form of agreement in all honestly. It’s like saying that Communists are the same as Reformists Socialists because the latter also want (sometimes genuinely) a form of socialist economy and are genuinely deluded as to the means to get there (i.e. reformism). The difference is in terms of political method, and the distinction is one of revolution vs reformism. Sure, Communists share a belief in the need for revolution to get there with anarchists, but they have different different concepts, theories, practices, conceptions of organization and politics, which implies deep theoretical and practical-organizational differences.
Furthermore, Communism in this sense remains an ideal (which is fine), towards which we agree on the most general and abstract features and agree further that this is the ideal form of society which we would like, indeed must for the sake of the human species, move towards. The anarchist conception of revolution is very different from the communist conception, and what comes during the revolution, how we get there, what is necessary, how we should actually do all the actual work of organizing the working class (which marxists recognize as necessary but which anarchists have either been unwilling to do the work needed to accomplish or who they neglect as many now see focus of parties on class-based organization to be a form of class-reductionism), disagree on the fundamental questions of revolution, the state, parties, legislation, prisons, and so on.
There are also Christian Communists (non-Marxist) would also want a stateless, classless, moneyless society. I commend them for that, and they are definitely potential allies, but that doesn’t mean they are going to be reliable political allies in the long-term, nor does it imply that their views are fundamentally the same as mine. The fact that they are not going to be ready to do the things necessary to actually construct socialism, let alone communism, means that realistic political unity with them is limited at best. The same goes for anarchism in the minds of Marxists, most obviously MLs.
The period of transition from capitalism to communism will likely take hundreds of years. Socialism is a centuries-long project which we have only just begun. Calling the immense, profound differences of opinion between Communists and anarchists over this historical process towards Communism something which does not amount to a fundamental difference seems not only confused, but positively idealistic to me.
Saying that the difference lies simply in the means to get there is ignoring the fact that this is a massive difference with direct implications for the feasibility of long-term, substantial, deep political cooperation. It also reflects that the routes through which Marxists and Anarchists get to the conclusion of the need for revolution for the sake of a classless, stateless, moneyless society are very different.
Just to give a revealing sense of the depth of this divide: There are people in this thread who have cited Murray Bookchin, who towards the end of his life not only explicitly stated that he would rather side with liberal governments against Communists because the former believed in ‘personal freedom’, but then later when on to repudiate anarchism right at the end of his life, calling modern anarchists a form of lifestyle movement with no real political potential, and it’s worthwhile to note that he came to this conclusion during the 90s and 2000s, i.e. when Marxism and Communism were at their lowest ebb and the international leftist movements in the West were being dominated by anarchist and post-left lifestyle movementism, calling for distributed (non-existent) networks of supposedly distributed organization based on ridiculously minute identitarian difference (i.e. identity politics). The period since the 90s have done nothing but refute the idea that the predominance of anarchists on the western left would revitalize the prospects for revolution there. The opposite is the case. The potential for revolution has correlated inversely with anarchist predominance. Frankly this doesn’t surprise me, as the anarchist circles I’ve encountered have almost always been far more bourgeois, less proletarian, than Marxist circles (especially if we are talking about militant circles), though I admit that this is anecdotal.
Good thing that State Capitalism isn’t “left”
Poster gives very reasonable and logical arguments for avoiding left infighting;
Debate pervert OP: “I’m the one true leftist”
“I’m not punching left, I’m just drawing the borders of the left to neatly exclude you”
Yeah mate, no criticism is allowed. If someone says they’re left and do right wing things like exploit the working class, it’s sectarian to call them on it.
You posted a meme, not criticism. Then when anyone charitably assumes you have something of substance to say and responds in kind, you say “whoa it’s just a meme, what are you, a debate bro?”
It’s been very clear that I am not in a mood to debate or argue in the length. I don’t owe you explanations. I’m allowed to just shit post. I call people debate me bros when after I told them multiple times that I don’t want to debate, they insist. It’s not a difficult concept to grasp
You’ve made about 30 comments in this thread
I know, It’s glorious how mad y’all are because I won’t debate you.
I’m not mad! You’re the ones who are mad!
Tell us about the emotional labor of arguing next, you radlib piece of shit
Sorry I don’t speak tankie
I speak liberal because being ignorant of your opposition is only viable for the establishment
You know, I didn’t know why this instance was federated with hexbear, but now I do and I’m good with it 🫡
Lol get bent you do-nothing trickster imp. Begone
But but… I live here!
Your thread has been seized for re-distribution
It’s ok, so long as y’all have fun. I don’t believe in private property
just because you don’t believe in it doesn’t mean it just goes away
I honestly find this behaviour incredibly disrespectful to the people that are currently dying as they do real resistance. Are you opposed to the Palestinians too then? The leftist brigades of Palestine are all “tankies” and Hamas are considerably worse (but resistance is more important than broaching the issues with them). Do you wage sectarian bullshit against them too from your comfortable room while they fight and die for the cause? Serious question.
You think posting on online forums make a lick of a difference for those who “do real resistance”? You’re in the left shitposter heaven and you come here to judge me? Seriously?
The vast majority of the people here found their way into the left through learning in the online posting grounds before eventually joining orgs. Anyone that thinks what we do online doesn’t matter is not really thinking straight.
You didn’t really answer the question though and it concerns me. Are you opposed to the Palestinian resistance currently fighting for freedom?
Oh come off of it. There’s a pretty big difference between such struggles and the impact of arguing online.
I also don’t answer because I don’t like to be interrogated like this.
You fucking liberals make anarchists look bad.
No, it’s because you don’t have a leg to stand on and you’re an intellectually dishonest coward who wants to fling shit and then cry when people push back
I didn’t fling anything, y’all came to my place, remember? Also stop acting like a “debate me, bro” already! You won’t goad me 😁
you realize you posted an anti-communist meme while federated with the largest marxist communities on the lemmyverse?
You were asking for a fight, don’t try to play coy you illiterate toddler.
It’s just despicable playing these precious little rhetorical games while using historical deaths (and one or two inventions) as props for your atrocity propaganda, all to fear monger about people who generally have a common interest with the rest of the left in a social context where the right wing is overwhelmingly more powerful. Just textbook wrecker behavior.
No. There fundamentally is not.
This space is not “pretend” while the offline world is “real”. The people here are real people (I hope lmao) and the emotions people have here are real.
One day we will all be thrown into our own very real resistance. Are you willing to die for it? I am. I’ve said many times that I will die in bed an old lady in a currently non-existent socialist state or I will die in the fighting to bring it about.
We post here and have some fun and argue and do all sorts of shit in our off time. But in our on time? A lot of us are genuinely active in political orgs. Here in the UK it might be resisting landlord evictions through Acorn, performing party work or shutting down weapons factories through Palestine Action. Do you think sectarianism would benefit orgs like Palestine Action shutting down zionist weapons factories? Whose principle need is BODIES willing to get on rooftops and smash up these buildings and get arrested? Does reducing the pool of people that would join that org benefit them in any way by being sectarians? Does it matter whether someone on the roof of an israeli weapons factory waves a black flag or a red flag? Of course it doesn’t. And the people who try to flare up sectarian bullshit anywhere are rightfully shouted down or expelled because all they are functionally doing by punching left is weakening those orgs and their ability to do praxis.
That doesn’t change online. The number of people who actually transfer from the online space to offline organising is directly tied to the sectarian bullshit that occurs. There are dumbass marxists that refuse to take part at certain orgs because of some anarchist sectarian bullshit and there are dumbass anarchists that refuse to take part in some socialist led things because of sectarian bullshit.
If I saw anyone at the march in London this weekend say a single fucking word about sectarian shit I would have punched them in the face.
This shit hurts the left. There is no case for it benefiting the left in any way.
One day we will all be in an existential armed struggle ourselves. Really consider the priorities. There is no benefit to any of this shit, and in fact it risks harming support for Palestine. I assume you’re not anti-Palestine, even though you won’t state it. If you can support Palestinian resistance despite Hamas, you can support marxist-leninists despite sectarian disagreement, and you already are doing just that by supporting Palestine. Not to mention that almost every single fucking pro Palestine march currently happening is being organised by the “tankies” you’re currently railing against.
Oh and just in case - anyone that doesn’t support Palestine deserves a brick to the back of the head.
We’ve spoken about this before, you and me, iirc. So long as y’all keep doing anarchist direct action for mutual aid, we can be allies. Once you start trying to seize hierarchical control like some illuminated vanguard, is where it gets difficult.
This meme is about exactly this difficulty.
Let’s be serious for a moment, y’all descended on me shit-posting about well known problems anarchists had with MLs. Y’all don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. You had the counter-arguments ready to post. But I’m not here to debate with you and we won’t solve these disagreements here. You know what you know, I know what I know. We can agree to disagree.
But then y’all got mad that I didn’t debate 12 people at a time, as if I have nothing better to do with my life on the comments of a shitpost. You can’t handle one single anarchist making one single meme in an obscure anarchist sub.
This all has nothing about us being able to collaborate on things that matter. When we do those actions, nobody is going to say “Aha, I remember what you wrote in lemmy.dbzer0.com that one time about leftist unity”. This is all about 1) the ego of those hexbear tankies who couldn’t handle not being debated and 2) The shitposters of hexbear who just came here to have flamewars because the mods of hexbear apparently don’t control anything anymore and your “left unity” only goes so much as someone disagreeing with your takes and then they’re a “liberal” and therefore fair game.
I am honestly not upset. I’m am however just disappointed at the greater hexbear behaviour…
I think the problem here is that this “shitposting” comes off as… Completely anti collaboration?
That’s why it’s a problem. Maybe you’re in favour of collaboration. But do younger anarchists realise that? Does the general bulk of the numbers realise that? Or is this kind of posting actually working entirely against the left overall because it splits us? Because a significant portion of people genuinely take it to heart and believe it. How many spaces actively purge marxists now because of “aaaaaa tankies”? That’s occurring because of this kind of propaganda. Is it helping anyone? Fuck no it’s not. Look at every single lemmy community where we’ve been purged, are they better? They’re far right shit holes even if there’s a handful of people trying to change that, they’re utterly dominated by the worst people.
If the right split like the left does we’d be in power in half of europe.
You have a completely distorted view of the historical projects of MLs. The point of a vanguard is not unilateral command, it is to be a body that is entirely concerned with political organization and engagement while other people have other jobs that take up more of their effort. That does not mean the vanguard dictates to everyone else, but rather that it seeks to find ways to put the feedback from everyone else into practical action.
I swear, just read a single fucking book.
You’re a two-faced prick, the people trying to engage are bad and the people being lazy like you are are also bad. What is there to do that is good? Oh right, capitulate. Meanwhile you yourself whine about “left unity” and how unfair it is that the mean tankies call you a liberal when you’ve been here sneering the whole fucking time about how “dae tankies don’t fall under left unity because state capitalism is rightist”. Fuck off.
are you going to do self criticism or just keep shitting your brain and posting ass memes
Ah ok, so nothing could possibly go wrong if you keep pushing this. You won’t lose any allies cuz they’re already secret right wingers. Do they know that?
🙄
In my experience the hexbears are the most aggressive sectarians on lemmy. They also openly simp for autocrats and make tyrants into folk heroes.
in my experience you never post anything leftist on lemmy and your political comments are all about tankies or US electoral politics
I just don’t bother arguing with the campists anymore
or posting anything anti-capitalist, as far as I’ve seen
Sure. But this is, frankly, a pretty idealist take imo that ignores not only the fact that in actual practice there is frequent tension and conflict which has real basis, but real and deeper theoretical differences as well as ones of praxis and organization. We can wish for this form of left unity you are describing all we like, but it doesn’t erase the deal differences between communists and anarchists.
In my personal experience, Communists have been far more eager, happy or willing to work with anarchists when it comes to practice on the ground than vice-versa, and I think it’s important to note that these forums are not representative of the actual relations between Communists and Anarchists on the ground, which are frequently tense because Marxists will often spend months agitating and entering workplaces, doing the grunt work, only for reformists and anarchists to show up at the end at points of more intense political struggle and gain political credibility for their ‘participation’. Another related issue here is that, in practice, anarchist circles are on average more liberal, individualist and identitarian than Marxist orgs interested in forming parties. The emphasis on decentralized, distributed organization, justified by whatever post-structural idealist nonsense is currently in fashion, is not conducive to working with actual Communist (read: Leninist) orgs.
Not to mention that - and this is again to indicate that these forums like Hexbear are in no way indicative of actual relationships between Communists and Anarchists - that most anarchists despise Communists, most obviously Leninists, and would despise Lemmygrad and Hexbear types most of all. Like the view of us as ‘Red Fash’ is close to the mainstream view among most Anarchists, and it’s frankly ridiculous to pretend otherwise.
happened to you a lot?
This is why left v. right seems like the wrong dimension to be worrying about IMHO. Up v. down is the only dimension that matters. Is coercion acceptable or not is the question. It doesn’t matter what reasons or methods are used, dominating or attempting to dominate is wrong whether one is capitalist or Marxist.
I don’t think it counts as “punching left” when the one doing the dunking believes the dunkee is to the right of them. The way you’re using that phrase renders it meaningless.