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)
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.