I love this site and I'm gonna keep using it, but I feel your frustration. Even though Hexbear is supposed to be a left unity site it's really not, it's an ML site. Anarchists are tolerated here but they're not really respected. As far as a lot of posters on this site are concerned anarchists are just baby leftists who need to be "educated" until they see the light and become MLs. The replies in this very thread prove my point. This attitude bothers me because I find it to be intellectually arrogant. Yes, it's true that those of us in the West were raised on a steady diet of anti-Communist propaganda and that AES states were/aren't as bad as we've been told.
But this doesn't mean that Marxism-Leninism is the proven path to Communism. The Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc collapsed and fell to counter-revolution. The socialist states that remained have had to make concessions to capital and liberalize their economies to some extent. As far as I'm concerned the jury is still out on which leftist ideology is the "correct" one. There's nothing wrong with having beliefs and being Anarchist or ML or whatever but we all need to be humble and be willing to be educated as well as educate.
This reads like an honest statement of a belief for the purposes of examination to me, but it’s still an “anarchists are baby MLs” take on an !anarchism thread about how the site isn’t friendly for anarchists. So with that context, I say this is inappropriate
While you're not wrong, I'm pretty sure I like avant garde music because I played an instrument when I was a kid but it would be a little bit overbearing if I assumed every single kid that learned music will end up liking the avant garde music I like.
Cool, maybe it was a bad example but it seems incredibly plain to me. Then again, asking MLs to understand that their beliefs aren't actually a necessary result of "going left" is always going to be an uphill battle.
I love this site and I'm gonna keep using it, but I feel your frustration. Even though Hexbear is supposed to be a left unity site it's really not, it's an ML site. Anarchists are tolerated here but they're not really respected. As far as a lot of posters on this site are concerned anarchists are just baby leftists who need to be "educated" until they see the light and become MLs. The replies in this very thread prove my point. This attitude bothers me because I find it to be intellectually arrogant. Yes, it's true that those of us in the West were raised on a steady diet of anti-Communist propaganda and that AES states were/aren't as bad as we've been told.
But this doesn't mean that Marxism-Leninism is the proven path to Communism. The Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc collapsed and fell to counter-revolution. The socialist states that remained have had to make concessions to capital and liberalize their economies to some extent. As far as I'm concerned the jury is still out on which leftist ideology is the "correct" one. There's nothing wrong with having beliefs and being Anarchist or ML or whatever but we all need to be humble and be willing to be educated as well as educate.
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Reminder that this is !anarchism@hexbear.net
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My modlog comment for removing your comment:
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While you're not wrong, I'm pretty sure I like avant garde music because I played an instrument when I was a kid but it would be a little bit overbearing if I assumed every single kid that learned music will end up liking the avant garde music I like.
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So my comparison didn't illustrate anything to you at all?
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Cool, maybe it was a bad example but it seems incredibly plain to me. Then again, asking MLs to understand that their beliefs aren't actually a necessary result of "going left" is always going to be an uphill battle.
Well said and great name, btw