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)
Honestly, looking into Soviet history with JoeySteel as abit of a guide (R.I.P. a sectarian legend) helped a lot. I don't agree with everything he said and believed but he really got me to rexamine where I was getting my historical information on AES states from and what their actual history, organizational methods and popularity comes from.
That and really coming around the the fact that people in the U.S. just don't remember anything about what happened 2 years ago (especially the professional class) so why would I expect them to know anything about a country they have been told was evil since they were born.
I think one of the big things for me was that a lot of anarchists were willing to believe every lie about the soviet union and propagate those lies, acting as though the US was somehow closer to anarchism or socialism than the USSR was. That turned me off at least identifying with any online anarchist label. Blackshirts and Reds was a part of debunking a lot of cultural beliefs about the USSR.
Looking down at places like Cuba because they didn't fit your ideal revolutionary model also didn't help (trots and anarchists).
For my part, I've just been turned off by too many scene 'anarchists' to really find any use in the label. I have my own quandaries about the ideology, and good organizing anarchists are worth their weight in gold, but I've met too many rich kids who revel in... Idk what to call it, "artistic poverty", without any ideas for a system to be self replicating. Basically, no different systemically than any non-political punk flop house, which are notoriously unstable.
As for the trots, the fact that they are so fractious and many of the early adopters transitioned so seamlessly into being neo-cons always has turned me off to the ideology. Again, a good organizing trot is worth their weight in gold, but if they ever got into power I firmly feel like their foreign policy would differ very little from the status quo, which essentially makes them esoteric soc-dems by my estimation.
I do not understand PatSoc's obsession with regressive idpol and find there to be no inherent systemic reasons for LGBTQ causes not to be a solid plinth on which a modern communist party can help support itself. Just because other Communist parties were or became reactionary about those ideas doesn't mean we need to, especially now that we have entire histories of sexuality to study from and understand this phenomena (much of which was pioneered by East Germany, R.I.P.).
That being said, I really hesitate to call myself a 'communist' because I do not have a party with mass line or dem-central organizing principles that I adhere to. I would like to find such an organization, but the ones I do find that have that such struggle maintaining presence outside of their enclaves (looking at you PSL and DSA). That and being openly communist around here is a good way to put a target on your back.
Idk, I would say that I'm basically a syndicalist with incredibly pro-ML and AES opinions these days. So, you know, a liberal.
The biggest thing that's put me off of Anarchism has been trying to run meetings and finding out that most people have no idea how to do that, and no interest in learning. I'm sure that's largely just the group I was with, but trying to get people to even commit to discussing an issue was like pulling teeth and herding cats at the same time. I still think Anarchist modes of organizing can work but I now recognize that it requires a lot of education to get people ideologically committed to the idea of a flat democracy or consensus organizing structure. You can't just do it with randos, people need to read theory and make a commitment.
Yeah people really hate the meta conversation of organization. Having to talk about how to talk about stuff really bores people, but it's impossible to get stuff done without it. That said, Roberts Rules of Order or whatever the DSA uses is absolutely rife with student body nerds who just bog down the proceedings. Always hated dealing with those people in admin in college and they are no less insufferable outside of it.
Word. Robert's Rules are more of a weapon for taking over and dominating an organization than a map for actually making meetings work. I've used it, but only in small groups where there was a lot of good faith.