It wasn't a hostile discussion or anything, i didn't even go full "the kulaks deserved it" (although the mod that single-handedly banned me did go full "the kulaks did not deserve it"). I just laid out plainly and calmly that revolutions are inherently authoritarian, that Luxemburg said "the revolution will be as violent as the ruling class makes it necessary" and that there's one Trotzki quote i 100% agree with: "If the October Revolution hadn't succeeded, the world would have known a Russian word for fascism 10 years before Mussolini's March on Rome". Basically the whole "Jakarta Method" train of thought laid out clearly and without calling anybody names.

Note that this was on an explicitly left-leaning server that does not allow cops and troops to join. Also after several days of another poster starting destructive, aggressive bad faith arguments in the politics channel until a number of users went "disengage" on her and the channel had to be frozen until recently, when she immediately started being hostile and arguing in bad faith again, which got her not one, but two warnings from the same mod without further consequences. Meanwhile, when i defend AES without attacking anybody, that's apparently too much for her to handle. No advance warning, no "sis, you're talking to me as a mod here", not even a notification that i got banned.

The best part is that according to screenshots a friend just sent me, she's now completely going off about "authoritarians". The nerve some people have.

Sorry for posting pointless internet drama here, i just needed to vent.

  • mimichuu_@lemm.ee
    ·
    1 year ago

    Our posts are getting longer and longer, and more and more unrelated to this thread. Would you be interested in having this conversation in DMs maybe?

    1/2

    There was a prick in this thread doing just that

    I assume you mean the person who posted "Marx against the state"? I assume what they were trying to do is to say that he wouldn't have been in favour of the methods of the bolsheviks, not that he simply would have fully agreed with anarchists. I don't know, I haven't read that essay, I'm not very interested in it. I genuinely think anarchism and marxism are very separate. I concede this person is wrong and shouldn't be trying to do that.

    I’m not an especially nice guy in these discussions, at best I’m just the type of stubborn where I’ll be damned if I give you something you can use against me beyond “he’s rude”. I can see how you’d get dogpiled because maybe 10% of the things you have said here are astronomically dumb, but if you get better at recognizing this and try to have a personable conversation on c/askchapo or whatever, I think you’d have an alright time.

    You're genuinely one of the calmest and most reasonable people I've argued with on this site. At least despite everything it seems like we are having a fruitful conversation and even reaching agreements on some parts. The worst thing you've said is "get a grip" which is really nothing. I have to remark that I appreciate it because every other time I try to reach out and show my perspective to online ML places I just get viciously mocked, belittled and talked down to in an extremely smug way. Honestly I think the reason I'm not getting dogpiled is that we're very deep into the reply thread and people don't bother reading it.

    It's very rare that anarchists and MLs treat each other as equals in an online conversation, I do agree that sometimes anarchists are the ones at fault in this, but it sucks that it's hard for me to reach out and have like, you know, an actual exchange where I'm not being belittled every two sentences. And don't let me even get started on Discord, oh my god it's a million times worse.

    When I say someone isn’t in a minority by virtue of calling themselves an anarchist online and “believing” anarchist things, but many people play at it, what I mean is that you are not, by virtue of those traits, a social minority.

    I mean minority in the objective sense, as in, we're a lot less than you all in virtually all spaces that aren't anarchist focused or anarchist exclusive. And that does lead to us being considered less, treated as less important and disregarded. I illustrated this with an example, even in this instance which makes a point about unity and anti-sectarianism, an anarchist felt the need to make a post basically begging to not be disregarded and demeaned because everyone was doing it anyway.

    I agree that this is nowhere near the things that historically happened, it's an online forum, and in my experience with real life MLs they're a lot better. I mean, I did make a point that using these events to refuse working with other leftists is very dumb. I just don't think we should go to the other extreme and completely disregard them either. Once again it's important to understand why it happened and reach an agreement. If you stick to your guts and just keep believing that the anarchists we're talking about were all maniacs and bandits and didn't do anything good and none of their actions were justified and the crushing was a 100% the right thing to do, then of course anarchists aren't going to listen to you. We definitely are guilty of idealizing Makhnovshchina and excusing or ignoring the very awful things and grave mistakes they did, but it's not like MLs are any better. It's more of a general problem of worshipping the past instead of focusing on the present, in my opinion.

    I’m not saying you should want to be there [in lemmygrad], but it’s not like they are frothing at the mouth for “anarkiddy” blood. Mainly I think they are just sick of red scare shit and really spurious accusations.

    I haven't dug as deep into lemmygrad as I have into hexbear, but every time I've visited and read on what its members think about anarchism it's been something extremely hostile and insulting, and everytime an anarchist has decided to come reply to them, I see them get dogpiled and replied to in the usual leninist extreme smug by two, three, sometimes four people. I don't think it matters if you think they're wrong or said something "astronomically dumb", the bullying is something I just don't support. Bully liberals, if you really want to bully people online.

    Anyway my point is that despite hexbear being "strictly left unity" they have zero issues federating, supporting and endorsing lemmygrad which is very hostile to anarchists. There is no anarchist Lemmy instance, but I can only hope that if it forms, the same accomodations are given to them - seeing what they think of and post about Raddle, I doubt it though.

    • mimichuu_@lemm.ee
      ·
      1 year ago

      2/2

      The October Revolution was the Bolshevik revolution, so I must assume you mean the February Revolution

      No. The October Revolution was much more than the bolsheviks taking power. I don't really think it's relevant to this discussion so if you're interested in the perspective we generally hold about it I will once again point to Anark:

      https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=uwU3STgBknQ

      Not true! My accusation against Makhno was 100% what he admitted to while he was defending himself when he lived in exile in France.

      I've looked this up and you're right, my apologies.

      Perhaps in some respects he did learn from his failures, though it seems he mostly doubled down from what I’ve read.

      Reading post-exile Makhno is kinda depressing so I haven't dug very deep into it. As far as I know, he deeply regretted a lot of things he did.

      Again with the “us” business. Neither of us were in Korea, comrade. You were not personally aggrieved by this, your identifying with it is a matter of your personal psychology.

      I can see what you mean? I don't really see how it makes my point any different though. Once again all I'm saying is that there is a big history of ML betrayal of anarchists and I don't think it should serve as an excuse to not work together but I also don't think it should be discarded or it's okay to believe it was all always purely and 100% the anarchist's fault and everything that happened was justified, much less that anarchists should accept that narrative from y'all.

      but I struggle to imagine that in Cuba or Korea it was all that different from the people crying for Makhno, just more counterrevolutionaries and maniacs causing problems and probably also some good anarchists and honest rubes getting caught in the crossfire.

      In Cuba and Korea, the anarchists were there before the marxists came. If anything, your narrative is backwards, you just don't see it as counterrevolution because the usurpation succeeded, and thus became the revolution instead.

      I don't think it's productive to engage with this, because we're just gonna keep pointing the finger at each other and refusing to budge. If you want to listen to an anarchist perspective on these events there are plenty of places to, if you're not interested and just want to keep believing in the same nothing I say will change your mind.

      Ideology is not religion, you don’t get to just put up a flag and make demands, your input is fundamentally the same as that of any other person in a proletarian democracy.

      That's the thing, often anarchist input isn't "fundamentally the same". It's not fundamentally the same if we are never listened to, much less if our input is met with bullets or jail cells. It's not fundamentally the same if there isn't even a discussion and everything we say is just discarded. Working together is actually working together, reaching a consensus and a compromise between each other. Anarchists who support left unity try to do this, but obviously, in exchange, they expect the MLs do the same. Otherwise, they're just being useful idiots.

      If you stick 100% to your guts, then objectively speaking there is absolutely no benefit in working together. Demanding that we ally but refusing to listen to our input on things is basically just wanting to use us. That's what most anarchists are afraid of when talking about left unity.

      Do you want “Wins for anarchism” or better conditions for the actual human beings whose lives are at stake?

      You're talking like if it's an exclusively binary choice of completely separate things. Anarchists want anarchy because they believe it is what will bring the best conditions for the actual human beings whose lives are at stake. I am sure that most, even despite what they write online, would be willing to sacrifice their anarchism to an extent if they see that conditions are being genuinely improved, but they have to see that, and it's obvious that if what happens is a fully by-the-book ML model, they wont see that. Because they're anarchists.

      I mean, MLs are the same too. No one can escape bias. So the only reasonable thing that can happen is a compromise. If MLs are not willing to compromise, why should anarchists work with them if they're so different? This goes both ways. Everyone needs to be held to the same standard, the complaint is that most of the time it's the anarchist that has to sacrifice and the ML sticks to their guts. Either both sacrifice and compromise, or both don't and work separately. This in-between MLs want where anarchists work with them but they also don't have to listen to them in any way is just not going to happen.

      encouraging people to, for example, hate the PRC is a perfect example. Look at any of the threads on this shitty network of websites where the liberals are louder and you will see in their discussions of any AES project the “anarchists” and neoliberals arguing side by side without even batting an eye at this fact.

      This is exactly what I said. The problem is not the critique but when it's completely stripped of context. When anti-PRC statements are just parroted with no real alternative proposed or philosophy behind them. It's not a problem with anarchist critique per se. By your logic literally any anti-PRC statement is helping the US, even ones made by marxists. Rather than "just stop talking bad about socialist states!" I think it's better to make sure you're doing it in proper context and making sure you're not going to be misinterpreted. Shutting down critiques alltogether is not useful. We should always have conversations about these things, to learn and improve and change.

      Do you know how many smug liberals I’ve seen quote Bakunin’s “The People’s Stick” line? It doesn’t fucking matter that he’s an anarchist and believed himself to be speaking from a certain ideologically coherent position

      Sure, but give those liberals just the essay where that line was written and they will despise Bakunin. This is what I mean, what matters is the context, that's not just the ideology behind the person who said the thing.

      Even if you quite understandably don’t like me on a personal level and disagree with a lot of what I have to say, I hope there’s something here that you find informative in the way that I intended it to be.

      As I said before you've given me no reasons to dislike you. But this illustrates what I've been talking about all this time. The fact that you view me as someone you need/want to "inform", and not someone you're having an honest exchange with. Most MLs do this, they see us as misguided, silly weirdos, and simply assume there's nothing they can learn from us. They do not view us as equals even when we try to reach out. This creates a power imbalance in the "unity" that a lot of anarchists just don't want to deal with.