politics

Annoying internet arguments aside, the people on the ground in the core also face the most expansive and advanced police state mankind has created yet. This makes doing anything close to truly subversive impossible without extreme precautions. Some Ferguson organizers dying (being murdered imo) comes to mind.

I was extremely polite in that lemm.ee thread, admitted we could stand to tone it down a bit, even called out a rude post from one of our own, and I only got hostility from them in response. There's literally nothing we can do to not be called wreckers

You're not wrong but I'm surprised it was an online forum thing that made you realize this

It hurts me a billion times more hearing absurd anti-communist and reactionary statements irl

It's frustrating, I agree. But "shitposting leftie site interacts with some other echo chambers for a week and has some non-constructive disagreements" is not really a datum from which to draw any wider conclusions.

Personally, I've seen at least five users on separate occasions ask questions in good faith and concede points. If anything I've been surprised by some of the positive responses to our community, rather than being 100% rebuffed from the get-go.

Yeah sometimes I'll see you guys engage with one of these people politely and informatively and they just go "UGH, can we defederate from Hexbear please? This brigading, trolling and propaganda is annoying.😤💅"

But I've also seen a couple come to us because "I wanted to see what you were about and you weren't as bad as people were saying."

Eh, this take is axiomatically unacceptable to me. Regardless of how absurd and hopeless it feels like achieving our aims in Western 'democracies' (and boy howdy does it feel absurd and hopeless), the abandonment of it is a tacit admission that billions of people are gonna need to die in rather catastrophic fashions before we get anywhere. Which, like I said, is a no go for me.

Eh, I heard someone who visited Cuba being told that the US has a lot of revolutionary potential by Cuban communists so

Those people don't really believe in anything, when the US states department dumps Ukraine and moves on to other imperial projects they'll shift their whole "belief system" right along with it

In a years time you'll see these very same people begin concern trolling about the bad behavior of Ukrainian refugees, they'll start using words like "ungrateful", "authoritarian" and "mentally colonized by ruzzia"

But you're right there is no hope in the north until climate change begins wrecking property values in significant numbers

The industrial and revolutionary fulcrum of the world lies in the global south

I agree that the most revolutionary potential lies in the global south. Hopefully, more gains can be made through partnerships with China, particularly as the US position geopolitically seems likely to weaken. Even now the US seems only able to accomplish relatively short term gains while setting themselves up for longterm defeats (the proxy war in Ukraine dwmonstrates this).

Its not surprising that revolutionary potential, and the possibility of real gains is higher on the periphery than within the imperial core. I think a lot of western leftists deal with brainworms (for understandable reasons) the the West is the main character of history, so the revolution must happen here and lead the world. There's over a centuries worth of evidence to the contrary.

I say its understandable because its a less extreme version of the classic "left" liberal brainworm of "the US may be bad, but [target country] is worse." Its also seen throughout left anti-communism's stance and critiscims against AES. The unexamined assumption that the nations of the imperial core will be the leaders of the socialist revolution as opposed ro the last and most dangerous holdouts of a dying imperial order, is, i think, the last vestige of this way of thinking.

This isn't, and I'm not endorsing, a doomerist position for communists in the imperial core. A better world is possible, and we should do what we can to defend our comrades at home from rising fascism and support our comrades abroad on the periphery. Not being the "main character" does mean there is no role to play. Revolution is like an Eisenstein film, the people, the class, are the main character and we are united across boarders

Please do not draw conclusions from how people post on a niche internet forum.

It's fine, I think some comrades here don't remember how long it took for them to snap out of the capitalist worldview. Going through a naive stage of anti-AES pro-West Progressivism/Reformism/Anarchism/Trotskyism/Leftcom is pretty normal for new members of the left, as is a later sudden uncritical swing to being an ML followed by backsliding because it wasn't based on theoretical understanding.

Eventually if we work on them, a lot of the people there will settle into more mature examples of whatever tendency provides the tools they need in their conditions.

You tried to play nice with the fediverse and it blew up in your face. Where did that bring you?

Back to me

you shouldn't want to save the west

Some of the people I've encountered over the past few weeks feel like such relics. I don't mean that they seem old or out of touch, but their politics seem to have ceased moving around 2009. It's the feel good liberalism without specific policy goals. It's so empty that I have to wonder what sort of lives they've had to be so just...liberal.

Like a lot of us were galvanized by the 2008 economic crisis, or perhaps we were part of anti-war movements, or labor movements or maybe we slammed head first into realizing just how anti-LGBTQ everything is.

But for some of the folk I've encountered, you'd think the primary three problems of the world are Russia, China, and liberals being uncomfortable online.

I'm a bit hopeful, but more in the sense of forming dual-power in the face of eventual balkanization. It's why I'm a bit softer on anarchists. I don't necessarily believe in a communistic revolution in the United States, but that this shithole can fall apart well enough for the global South to gain a sigh of relief. And in those ruins we may see a better world many smaller communist and pan-Indigenous movements that warm my heart enough to strive for a better world.