“syndicalists”, “communists” and “anarchists”,
As Matt said, the only things these terms describe in a country with no left wing is your online posting style. There are no factions to split hairs on because there is no organized left whatsoever in this country.
Yeah one of the reasons among others why I was really off put when interacting IRL with the local Trotskyist group here (whose apparently funded according to one member I was talking to by some local rich Trotskyist) when they kept talking about "stalinist" unironically among the current "left". Like bro we are not at the point were that's relevant at all we need to band together. To be fair though they were much cooler then super online Trotskyist and we had much in agreement and alot of them really do do serious organizing, even if it's within the bounds of western imperialism quite often . One of them worked at a military manufacturer.
When asked in person I just say I'm a "pan leftist" so as to cut through the pointless larping factionalism. Personally my world view is also influenced by many non Marxist writers.
Not to pull an anarkiddies, but I would bet most people who self-id as syndicalists have never had a job
I personally hold the standard that you can call yourself a trade unionist if you're a worker under a union and participate in the union beyond voting for leadership every election, or are working to install a union in your workplace.
Otherwise you're either a union supporter - to which I say there's nothing wrong with being one, fellow travelers are always welcome allies. Or a fucking larper who does more damage to the movement through their performative act as a caricature of everything wrong with the movement.
I call myself an anarchist because I do cool anarchist stuff. Also I got fired in a union busting purge against my organizing committee, I tend to agree that the factionalism present among left politics in the west and especially online is extremely stupid.
Having never understood the role that existing communist powers played in tempering the worst impulses of Western capitalism, and having perceived communism as nothing but an unmitigated evil, the left anticommunists did not anticipate the losses that were to come. Some of them still don’t get it.
:parenti:
westoids when every square inch of american soil was not just stolen, but stolen from the people the colonists begged for help and who were promised the land will stay theirs as long as the grass shall grow :lenin-sleeping:
westoids when the ussr kills people during a successful revolution: :jon-yell:
Anyone who was even halfway decent got purged from :reddit-logo: years ago. The admins have been improving the methods for detecting and deleting dissenters and channeling participants into just doing retail politics and Barstool Sports tier commentary for a while. This shit is just the apotheosis of that.
If you see people who don't suck, tell them about Hexbear so they can gtfo. But everyone else is just trapped in the windowless room of liberal ideology. Nothing we can do for them but pray.
I am so glad I found hexbear by accident a few months ago. I disengaged from reddit years ago because I couldn't stand it anymore and I felt I was missing a space with nonchuds. And I find myself learning here and getting links to theory and history, it's very cozy :comfy-cool:
I think I was at my "what's reddit up to these days" and found GenZedong, then found their lemmy, and someone there namedropped hexbear.
I'm still not sure why they keep me around with the shit I say lol
woah now, think of all the important things the IWW have accomplished in the last 50 years
ah wait youre right nvm
long ago I saw this one joke on socialist reddit about the IWW I still think about sometimes:
"Come join the One Big Union! We have almost 4000 members!
i do sometimes irl and i know others who do too
when people ask about your political beliefs irl, the term 'anarchist' is so thoroughly poisoned now that calling yourself an anarchist (and anarcho-communist is even worse) is the best way to have all your opinions instantly dismissed as nonserious edgy teenager shit by the vast majority of people (and calling yourself a communist makes people assume youre ml and then you get stuck in endless discussions about stalin and shit)
nobody irl knows what syndicalist means, but it sounds more serious (and is not entirely incorrect), and is a way of responding that indicates that you have an actual position, thats not just socdem. so then you can get on with the business of actually talking about political shit without being instantly written-off (especially if its about work/unionism etc)
I'll help derail here by saying that sounds like a bad way to present yourself politically. if we view ourselves as evangelists for radicalism (which we in fact are), then deception is not our ally. if our politics are absurd after the end of history, then we only reinforce this framing by trying to amputate our history just because it aches.
yeah i dont disagree although here i think the issue is less one of hiding radicalism and more of just particular words acquiring so much baggage that theyre perhaps not worth trying to salvage, and i unfortunately think anarchism is one of those words. i think its less a case that the politics are absurd and more just that the word itself is
and i do think its a different issue with the terms anarchism and marxism-leninism (or communism). for the latter, people will think of beardy old political theorists as well as the actual history of ml states, and it will be filtered through a tonne of anticommunist baggage but it will at least generally be thought of as part of a serious historical/political/intellectual tradition. and i think youre right that those terms are worth defending.
but when you say 'anarchism', absolutely nobody will be thinking of kropotkin or catalonia or makhno or propaganda of the deed or 'anarchist bombthrowers' (or even antifa), theyre gonna think of sex pistols and teenagers in black clothes aimlessly rebelling against bedtimes and dont even have the foggiest idea that theres an actual serious history or intellectual tradition behind it at all. so amputating the term anarchism really isnt amputating that history (which i agree is worth preserving) because absolutely nobody except leftists associates it with that history in the first place. it just means you can have a discussion of actual radical views without first sucking all the oxygen out of the discussion by immediately going on the backfoot to defend a label that people think of as more of a joke than an ideology. it just feels like a trap to me. and i dont even like the label of anarchist (or prescriptive political labels in general for that matter) much anyway, it doesnt fully represent my political views in any case (which are more marxist than the label implies)
whereas syndicalist allows you to sidestep the 'whats your label' question and maintain your very-serious-person bonafides, and pivot straight to talking about militant bottom-up industrial unionism and mass withdrawal of labour etc as a key source of workers power towards the ends of radical and even revolutionary change, and the history of how that power has been wielded quite successfully by workers in the past - talking about actual anarchist views without the label getting in the way. and i have these discussions mostly in a work context trying to unionise more of my workplace and radicalise people already in the union, and i really do think labels particularly hinder more than help in that context
im very aware that calling myself syndicalist is a very suboptimal solution, and i dont know what the real answer is. maybe just socialist, but thats so vague and has been co-opted by socdems and even the fucking labor party. maybe just leftist and leave it at that is better, i dunno
I think the lesson here is that it's better to be hated but respected than liked but disrespected. For all the anticommunist bullshit, there's still a degree of respect that liberal society has towards MLs, even if it's filtered through contempt. Liberal society reserves no such respect for anarchism and it's not like liberal society particularly likes anarchism either outside of very surface adoption of its aesthetics.
It's incredibly precarious for a political ideology to be seen as a joke because it's going to attract dead beats and losers who will hold that political ideology back.
Syndicalist was the first leftist label i used for myself when I went down the socialism rabbit hole, and for me it was just because I wasn't comfortable calling myself a communist yet even though I could feel myself being pulled in that direction every time I engaged with theory. But yeah it definitely has the air of a position you get at through Very Serious Thinking, even if you just kind of picked it randomly out of a bin.
it's a tendency in search of a movement, like most labels contemporary western leftos give ourselves
tbh it's branding, because ideology for some people is just a product to consume to have personality. Leftist label is just red astrology
Also we get it you are a syndicalist, i also like Heart of Iron 4: Kaiserreich
"syndicalist" just sounds like a faction from a 80s/90s sci-fi book. Nothing more.
and the exercising of power isn’t going to look like riot pornography or the ending for V for Vendetta
We can't know this for certain and I for one am holding out hope.
i mean there will probably (hopefully) be a stage like that. but history shows us that successful revolutions are more about meetings and organization- that eventually turn into riots lol
Also except the idea that that will almost certainly never happen and the true nightmare in the west is the "cognitive dissonance" that one must maintain to stay sane with the belief in a just existence as ecologically collapsing society's raped by western imperialism continue to cause mass migration . As the walls come up and the gears of the empire grind with less grease your going to have to except the fact that you(and me) will essentially become apathetic Nazis unless real collective action is taken. There is no finding meaning in the true sense of the soul while living relatively pampered in the west as long as this is the state of the world.
My reddit meltdown today was over a /r/p*litics comment section about Biden sending another billion to Ukraine. The top comment is "healthcare please" followed by people smugly saying "then vote for more democrats"
https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/vdqnv5/comment/iclq2jd/
:liberalism: :stalin-gun-1:
there is some random girl in the trotskyist group telling me how USSR and China are stalinist hell (i'm chinese) and asking me if i know the difference btw Stalinism and Trotskyism. I literally told her, people who are anti-communist doesn't care about the petty leftist infightings because at the end of the day we are all filthy red. TBH people really need to touch grass
Most Americans: "Communism is when the government does stuff."
Radlibs: "Fascism is when non-NATO governments do stuff."
I've said this before but the most principled leftist I've met in the US tend to be immigrants, have family overseas, are indigenous, or have always had the personality to questions things. Those are more of a minority and the majority focus a lot on social justice and hate every single socialist state in existence.
Is that why anarchism is so popular in the US and other NATO countries? They barely have a presence here but they seem to make up the majority if active leftists in the US.
yeah, i agree with you. terminally online reddit "communists" are the worst
The comments are making me crave violence, this is not a joke.
Everyone who has ever used reddit or 4chan should be redacted from earth and I'm honestly willing to take one for the team as long as it doesn't hurt too much
