this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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Comradeship // Freechat
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Last week someone here called me a 'fucking worm' (repeatedly) and a 'little baby', and told me I should be 'erased from existence', along with a pile of other insults. (Someone else reported and the mods banned them, in addition to deleting the worst of their comments. Thank you.) That outburst was in response to me trying to voice what is, imo, another aspect of this same exact problem. That experience naturally got me thinking even more about this pattern, and my own relationship to it.
I've been cruel and domineering online before, especially in my late teens and early twenties. Honestly, I'm still trying to figure out how to be critical and steadfast in my criticism without ever being vicious.
Finding one's way to communism means, among other things, becoming more intimately aware of horrible, painful facts about imperialism past and present. There's also a real sense of alienation that comes with rejecting the dominant ideologies in one's own culture and society. I think that unfortunately often, among young men especially, 'conversion' to socialism does less to challenge certain patriarchal attitudes to violence and domination than to direct those attitudes to new targets.
It's perhaps an especially difficult thing when learning the real history of socialist revolutions involves coming to understand that revolutionary violence can be truly necessary, that 'terrorism' is a label that has been weaponized against righteous and successful liberation struggles, that failure to suppress counterrevolution has historically meant defeat at the hands of brutal, brutal, reaction, and so on.
Emphasis on the material as a historical force, as something which generates ideology as a kind of rationalization, can also be misused to downplay or turn away from the role of the subjective. If one is already so inclined, it is easy to dismiss any call to introspection as idealism— especially when one sees radlibs make such calls in bad faith and treat them as the limit of politics.
The road to socialist understanding for men and boys raised under patriarchy is riddled with pitfalls. The distance and abstractness of online interaction don't help here, either.