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)
My hypothesis: if you're in a western country, then the fact that there is no mass-movement aligned with the left means that your politics are the result of your personal reading, gut feelings and the crowd you fall in with. The place we're all at right now, with the tankies arguing with the radlibs arguing with the anarchists, is the result of everyone breaking off into atomized enclaves and looking for meaning and organization where there is none - it's almost like a holding pattern for leftists until we manage to coalesce something greater that will draw everyone in.
The closest thing we've had to a real social movement to draw everyone together was the Bernie campaign, and I would bet a very shiny nickel that a ton of people currently on this site who would condemn Bernie in an instant for voting to destroy Yugoslavia were saying a lot of extremely SocDem shit when that campaign was at its peak. That's because it felt like the moment we all want to happen, but of course it was defeated by capital and dissolved away instead of sticking around because it didn't have the staying power of a successful mass movement, ie one that can stick around through a nominal defeat and keep growing.
What will actually work? Fuck I don't fukken know. Maybe when the climate apocalypse starts and people are forced to work together for their own survival the kinds of social structures that I'm talking about will be formed, but I really hope something sticks before then. Or maybe all we need is a big injection of Chinese funding, like what the US did for the Taliban.
China is a big part of the reason the Sino-Soviet split happened, breaking the socialist camp and losing most of Asia. It outright sided with the USA. Then it invaded Vietnam to boot.
And yet we Stan China. Because, as the libs like to say, you’ve gotta be realistic.
If a Bernie-esque figure popped up again, I’d give support. I wouldn’t be as hopeful as last time, but shit, it’s not like there’s a whole lot of choice right now.
I would frankly be much more likely to identify as a Marxist Leninist if there was an ML(M) party in my country that was doing fucking of The Anything you hear about them doing in other countries. They literally just suck money and volunteer hours out of the working class and hand nothing back.
i was anti-bernie during the 2016 campaign because i thought he was a running dog for the democrats lol. if anything my views on him and other left-liberal establishment figures have become more pragmatic.
I still think a Bernie win would have been a real victory bc if any of his agenda passed it would give people more breathing room where they could organize, and if it didn't pass people would be radicalized by the obstruction. Also, I secretly write fanfic about Comrade Bernard calling a general strike from the Oval Office.
This is such a huge thing. Historically, small victories pave the way for big ones, every time. It takes a concerted effort or a big shift in conditions to stop the momentum of a progressive movement once that ball gets rolling.