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)
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
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.
Politicians are often not bourgeois, and act more as labor-aristocratic agents of the bourgeois much like corporate lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, financial analysts, police, etc.
It’s definitely a liberal axiom that the people actually making decisions are the same ones as the ones giving speeches on TV, but this is just false. They actually believe US politicians wield any power at all, and thus they can make reforms within the political apparatus using their “representatives” as a tool.
The cold hard fact of the matter is that individual US politicians only stay in their positions as long as they are serving the interests of the actual monied decision makers, otherwise they get the boot. Thus it is actually impossible to reform a Liberal bourgeois system from within short of a highly organized mass movement that entirely changes the composition of the political classes and wields labor power as a cudgel (such as we saw in Venezuela and Bolivia). The actual system of power does not have inputs from the political theater, it has inputs from capital.
I would argue the Venezuelan/Bolivian strategy is only viable for a nation that is on the receiving end of imperialist attacks, as it requires a coalition with national bourgeois. Within an imperialist nation the national bourgeois’s interests are aligned with the international bourgeoise so it won’t get very far at all.