I've met a lot of people who've been really into one ideology before moving towards the other, and a Maoist friend was recently telling me that even Mao used to be libertarian socialist. What's been your personal experience and journey with socialism?
We need the right combo of bottom-up and top-down dynamics. Like, the human body does a pretty good job managing the chaos of all its zillions of proteins and sugars and other molecules by combining bottom-up and top-down dynamics.
Related, I listened to a podcast recently about Stafford Beer's Designing Freedom, and at one point they talked about how he rejects the usual framing of centralized vs. decentralized, and instead viewed the real conflict as autonomy vs. cohesion, which I thought was interesting in terms of how organizations need the right mix of those. Really makes me want to read his work. This is the podcast: https://youtu.be/Qm1W29Ryc2U
I started organising in horizontal orgs and that didn't go very well and I observed a lot of inherent problems with constantly trying to avoid "hierarchy" as an end in itself. That was the fundamental shift that over the course of a year or two lead me to Marxist-Leninism, because then I joined a more centralised org and started doing political education around anti-imperialism. The crisis of the pandemic, the supression of the Bernie campaign by the Democratic party, and the BLM protests also showed me the limits of the politics I had up until that point.
Yep, I have a similar post in the anarchism subreddit asking the reverse question. How did it end up that way for you?
Anarchism has many merits but it's dangerous to be decentralized when we the working class have the entire world to organize against. Likewise ML has many merits but can be easily appropriated and mishandled. I read ML theory because I know it's important knowledge, just as I read anarchist theory. Whatever gets us to a classless, moneyless society is good news to me. I'm young and have my whole life to take a hard turn into one or the other
