Except that libs are talking about mutual aid, solidarity, state power, and the prison industrial complex so anarchists have ended up going full circle and sounding normal.
It seems to just be like a general mutation of western Maoism after the death of Mao and the resulting political developments in China, Im sure if you spent enough time the lineage of this kind of rhetoric could be traced.
Its sort of like how western Trotskyism has its own weird lingo and rhetoric that has mutated forth from all the splits and internal conflicts here. Plus both Trots and Maoists generally have their own minor theorists and leaders for each specific tendency that interpret and add onto each respective core theorist.
Theres also weird western MLs and other tendencies of course, the common characteristic appears to be trying to run socialist revolutionary movements in the West, somewhere in that fucked up existence all of this weird shit springs forth.
It's because they're all divorced from the living experiences of workers (ie normal people) as well as being ultra sectarian. And since they're completely divorced from normal people as well as similar people of their subculture (because let's face it, that what politics degrades to without being connected to normal people), they start talking like cultist weirdos. The same process has also occurred to a lesser extent in academia. The only difference is that academia at least has a fresh wave of underclassmen and graduate students every semester and fosters some form of interdisciplinary collaboration through conferences.
Imagine if researchers in early medieval poetry only socialize with other researchers in early medieval poetry and do nothing but write polemics directed at researchers in late medieval poetry. They'll sound like fucking weirdos real quick.
The oldest place I've seen Maoist Vernacular English is in Assata's memoir
I actually want to chalk it up to how many Maoists set up bookstores and independent publishing houses in the 80s. You know how Trots do newspapers? MLM types did underground magazines, pamphlets, books, posters, they had a full media rollout. It could also be how those first MLMs were a confusing mixture of crust punks, black liberation orgs, leftist college professors, and bookstore operators. And I guess any insular political group will develop their own terminology, especially if the only people reading their literature are...themselves.
I have to wonder how much Bob Avakian himself is responsible for so much of American MLM tactics, because the RCP was the biggest Maoist name in town for decades. Could also be how much of Maoists used to be connected to things like the west coast punk scene? A lot of their tactics always seemed about making as huge of a shock as possible, like that one guy who got arrested in the flag burning court case, he'd always show up at protests with a severed pig's head on a leash.
Putting a pig on a leash is hard enough, how can you put a severed head on a leash?
I mean I didn't want to get into the details since it was kind of gruesome already
Americans in 2002: "Pakistan! Our ally! Our loyal friend! Help us in our glorious War on Terror!"
Americans in 2008: "Why won't the Pakistanis stand up so that we can stand down? They need to Do Their Part. Don't they realize that Service Guarantees Citizenship?!"
Americans in 2012: "Um, akutly crashing a couple of helicopters into a major Pakistani city in the middle of a botched raid on a house we think might maybe have Osama bin Laden in it is cool af and why would you suggest otherwise?"
Americans in 2018: "The Pakistani people are stupid diseased evil foreigners who won't accept our generous offer for
CIA field officesvaccine drives. Also, stop hanging out with China. Just stop it. Uighur genocide. Uighur genocide! UIGHUR GENOCIDE!!!"Americans in 2022: "Pakistan has always been a leading exporter of anti-semitism. I hear everyone in that country is literally Hitler."
Gee, I wonder what changed...
communists owned
