[-] [email protected] 18 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Add "no bosses" to that list too.

Y'all think that any sort of construction or manufacturing is going to run in a self-organised fashion without foremen? Lol, good luck.

If you've never worked in a factory before, that's cool but there are much better ways of announcing this fact and I think that it's important to remember the old "No investigation, no right to speak" or, in their terms "In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker".

I try not to focus too much on these types because I'm convinced that a couple of years of touching grass, working for a living, and spending time doing on the ground organising will bring these infantile urges in people to a conclusion in all but the most stubborn-minded. Although you can cut through these naive ideological positions by tracing out how there was (vulgar) vanguardism in their favourite historical socialist projects and how leadership was crucial to their functioning. That being said I have more important things to do with my time than engaging people with discussions on that stuff tbh.

[-] [email protected] 25 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

When your ideology is primarily individualist and largely aesthetic, you end up with a ton of people who treat their political orientation as a fashion statement.

Speaking as an ex-anarchist, there's a massive trend in anarchism to not be focused on the ideological distinctions between the plethora of anarchist subtypes but instead to align oneself to a flavour of anarchism which is most appealing.

In communist thought you have very clear distinctions which are based on theoretical and practical disagreements (practical in the sense of socialism being put into practice); you have leftcoms and Trotskyists and council communists and MLs and MLMs etc. All of whom you can trace out their positions and their ideological stances from.

In anarchism it's much more about what the individual is most attracted to as a cause than this. Sure there are platformists, DeLeonists, and egoists, for example, which fit what I've mentioned above about disagreements on theory and practice but you're more likely to find an anarcha-feminist or an eco-anarchist than you will a DeLeonist or a platformist imo.

With that in mind it should come as no surprise that so much of anarchism is focused on fashion.

[-] [email protected] 17 points 2 years ago

Disclaimer that I am too young to have experienced the hippie era and we never really had a coherent hippie movement like in the US however I have encountered enough hippie adjacent people here to have formed an opinion.

There's so much about the hippie movement that should make me sympathetic towards it: valuing peace, vegetarianism/veganism, queer-friendliness, being countercultural etc. etc.

Despite this fact, I really really dislike the hippie movement.

It's idealistic, utopian, individualistic, naive, anti-scientific, orientalist, Walden-esque transcendentalist nonsense, and it tends to encourage really arrogant, sanctimonious attitudes.

The movement had an opportunity to work towards achieving societal change and, at one point, I believe that they could have really made an impact but they were so steeped in individualism that they never really got their shit together and organised because they were too busy pursuing their own individual goals or gratification.

I think that the hippie movement is a really good example of how liberation has to come from a material basis first or otherwise, as with ancapism, if you allow for certain freedoms then you risk increasing the oppressive elements that are pre-existing in society. In the case of hippies, amongst other things it was free love before the liberation of women which I suspect led to many opportunistic men exploiting women and potentially even abusing them.

It's absolutely no coincidence that a lot of cults, small and large, sprang up within or alongside the hippie movement. Charles Manson's was probably the most notorious example here but all of the seeds of Manson's exploitation of vulnerable people were sown by the hippie movement.

Hippies are generally a classic case of what MLK posited as the "white liberal" (in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail) who values a negative peace over a positive presence of justice; they'll end up opposing righteous anger and violence against the system in favour of maintaining the status quo and the precious negative peace which is characterised by the absence of justice.

They also grossly fetishised eastern and indigenous cultures.

I could go on but I'll spare you.

Hippie/hippie adjacent music had some really shocking ties to military establishment families and I do wonder if there was more behind the hippie movement than just a grassroots culture that developed organically.

Honestly, I have no time for most hippies. I don't trust them, I don't like them, they are insufferably preachy and arrogant. Of course there are some good people who are hippies but I treat them with a ton of well-deserved skepticism. Usually the good hippies are good in spite of being hippies rather than being good because they are hippies, in my experience.

[-] [email protected] 19 points 2 years ago

Israel has the right to exist...in the dustbin of history

[-] [email protected] 16 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I am of the opinion that the US is jockeying for a limited naval conflict with China in the South China Sea in order to disrupt the shipping lanes to which the Chinese economy is (currently) dependent upon.

I think the US is remilitarising its Allies in the Pacific in order to stack the odds in its favour.

I am waiting for the moment when the US manufactures a Gulf of Tokin incident as a pretext. But with that being said, the Century of Humiliation and its lessons are etched into the consciousness of modern Chinese politics so in many respects I would expect China to seek deescalation where possible. Although the US is like a rabid dog so who knows if deescalation would be a viable strategy once there's blood in the water, so to speak.

Here's a comment thread where I go into further detail and provide evidence for my position. Note that this comment was written a few days before the news of Huawei's new chip being used in their latest phone so, although the Chinese semiconductor industry is still lagging behind, China is making strides to catching up on cutting edge chips. Whether this will provide deterrence for China or whether this will cause the US to accelerate its designs for war I do not know.

[-] [email protected] 26 points 2 years ago

It's strange that this concern for context only ever goes in one direction. Symbolism, like words, develop meaning through their usage.

If I were to say that I ejaculated during intercourse with your wife last night, would you take that to be an insult or would you be dying on that same context hill that the verb to ejaculate used to refer to suddenly making a statement and that intercourse used to refer to having a discussion with someone?

Probably not.

Would you say that the swastika isn't a Nazi symbol because it originated in Indo-European religious and cultural symbology?

Maybe. I can't speak for you.

The origin of something doesn't determine its usage.

[-] [email protected] 21 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

>mrw

(That's Jin Xing btw)

[-] [email protected] 16 points 2 years ago

It's according to Molotov's recollection. From Сто сорок бесед с Молотовым by Felix Chuev:

Stalin himself, I remember, said during the war: “I know that after my death, my grave will be piled with rubbish. But the winds of history will ruthlessly dispel it!

[-] [email protected] 22 points 2 years ago

Did you notice how, time and again, the narrative emerges that the anarchists were too disorganised and that they kept on stepping on their own dicks to disastrous outcomes?

Instead of organising, they set up a squat and started doing mutual aid in a warzone which, unsurprisingly, didn't last.

And then, at the end of the article which was written in 2022, they finally state:

Anarchists are now trying to create horizontal grassroots ties in society, based on common interests, so that communities can address their own needs, including self-defense. This differs significantly from ordinary Ukrainian political practice, in which it is often proposed to unite around organizations, representatives, or the police. Organizations and representatives are often bribed and the people who have gathered around them remain deceived. The police may, for example, defend LGBT events but get mad if these activists join a riot against police brutality. Actually, this is why we see potential in our ideas—but if a war breaks out, the main thing will again be the ability to participate in armed conflict.

This article was released at the time of the Russian special military operation commencing.

The war was already at their doorstep in 2014 and it took them 8 years to pull themselves together and to decide that they should start laying foundations within the community to prepare for war, all the while fascist paramilitaries are crawling all over Eastern Ukraine.

Given that I've heard literally zero about any anarchist militias in the Ukraine since this article, I can only assume that the weeks of preparation they must have put into developing links into the broader community never ended up bearing fruit.

[-] [email protected] 18 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Alliance with Nazi Germany

War with Nazi Germany

Well, shit. How come both of these things are listed as a problem? Feels like if one was bad then the other wouldn't be?

Maybe they're upset about the order in which they happened?

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[-] [email protected] 21 points 2 years ago

This is even funnier if you assume that those messages were sent at 3am

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This is a persistent myth that is shared amongst anarchists and RadLibs alike that the Soviets betrayed the Makhnovists by reneging on their so-called alliance with the Black Army, turning on them immediately after the defeat of the White Army.

This furnishes the anarchist persecution fetish and common narratives about how communists will always betray "the true revolution" and how Lenin was a tyrant.

The historical facts, however, paint a significantly different picture.

For one, you do not sign pacts with your allies. There was a military pact that was signed but, like the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, this is something that occurred between two parties that were constantly at odds with each other and the pact was signed out of conditions where the interests of both parties were temporarily aligned. This simple fact escapes the historical revisionists constantly but, unsurprisingly, only when it serves their arguments.

Secondly, Makhno himself knew that this pact was only temporary. Upon the signing of the pact he had this to say in The Road to Freedom, the Makhnovists' mouthpiece, in October 13, 1920:

"Military hostilities between the Makhnovist revolutionary insurgents and the Red Army have ceased. Misunderstandings, vagueness and inaccuracies have grown up around this truce: it is said that Makhno has repented of his anti-Bolshevik acts, that he has recognized the soviet authorities, etc. How are we to understand, what construction are we to place upon this peace agreement?

What is very clear already is that no intercourse of ideas, and no collaboration with the soviet authorities and no formal recognition of these has been or can be possible. We have always been irreconcilable enemies, at the level of ideas, of the party of the Bolshevik-communists.

We have never acknowledged any authorities and in the present instance we cannot acknowledge the soviet authorities. So again we remind and yet again we emphasize that, whether deliberately or through misapprehension, there must be no confusion of military intercourse in the wake of the danger threatening the revolution with any crossing-over, 'fusion' or recognition of the soviet authorities, which cannot have been and cannot ever be the case."
[Source: Nestor Makhno: Anarchy's Cossack by Skirda and Sharkey, pp. 200-201]

Clearly these are not the words that allies speak about one another.

At the successful Seige of Perekop, whereby the Red and Black Armies successfully broke the back of Wrangel's White Army forces and brought the Southern front to a conclusion, Makhno's aide-de-camp Grigori Vassilevsky, pronounced the end of the pact, proclaiming:

"That's the end for the agreement! Take my word for it, within one week the Bolsheviks are going to come down on us like a ton of bricks!"
[Source: Nestor Makhno: Anarchy's Cossack by Skirda and Sharkey, p.238]

The fact is that USSR furnished the Black Army with much-needed military supplies without which they would have been unable to continue fighting and Makhno was no pluralistic leader who was open to Bolsheviks; in fact, his army incorporated Bolshevik forces which defected to the Black Army and Makhno set his military secret police force, the Kontrrazvedka, to at first surveil the former Bolshevik military leaders along with the rising Bolshevik influence that had developed particularly around Yekaterinoslav, and then later summarily executed the Bolshevik leaders when they posed too much of a threat to his power due to commanding some of the strongest units in his army.

But that's a topic which deserves its own post...

[-] [email protected] 21 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Oh that's really weird, it's not showing up for me when I go into that thread? (Hence why I had to paste a screenshot of my comment and edit it into the image.)

Looks like you're in a dum millenial contest but your opponent is me 💀

Edit: If I type the hyperlink in your screenshot into my browser, I can access the comment - but it looks like it's only visible from the lemmygrad end or something? I wonder if federation works bi-directionally and one side has defederated but lemmygrad hasn't or something like that? Weird.

Edit 2: Damn, this gets weirder. Different instances show different comments — some comments are consistently shown across instances, some comments only appear on certain instances, and the up/downvote counts are wildly different across the instances too. One comment will be at -5 on one instance and yet it will be at +7 on another.

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I'm astonished at how sensitive the mods must be over there.

Apparently you're allowed to say whatever baseless slander you like about the eeeeevil tankies but the minute someone says "Hold up a sec, you claim to be anti-authoritarian and yet you support authoritarianism either explicitly or implicitly?" and they have to shut it down immediately.

Regardless, I think I made a pretty solid counterargument to the typical complaint about communism being authoritarian.

Mfers skim read the Wikipedia entry on Hannah Arendt and start thinking they're justified in slinging accusations about "muh authoritarianism" smh.

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