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 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.