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)
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Yep. I was a "socialism from below" Trot until I saw how China handled Covid.
This was the thing that comforted me in this quite a bit as well. The usual liberal response - or even sometimes the one from people I consider leftists - is "they must hide their numbers". Thing is, even if China's deaths were like 20 times worse than the official numbers (which I highly doubt at this point), in terms of death per population it would still be an incredible win comparatively with the west.
And if the numbers were even higher, you just couldn't hide them. Chinese people are on fucking reddit, twitter, and the like (admittedly as a minority, but they're there). You just know every mainstream news source in the West would've jumped at any evidence of China hiding million-strong casualties from the pandemic (for that would be the number, if their handling of this crisis had been even half as bad as the West's - we're at 1+M dead in the US with like 20% the population of China).
There still are a lot of problems with China (like the death penalty for one), but mostly the existence of such a state brings hope - hope that's swiftly crushed by the ongoing mass extinction and climate apocalypse, but still. And yeah, Cuba is also a blatant example IMO.