The weird strain of Anti-Authoritarianism present in much of the west is definitely incredibly damaging to organization and left-unity
It's not a belief that's actively conducive to making change, but instead is used to justify everyone turning against one another
The proliferation of the Holy Gospel of the political compass has seriously damaged the ability of the Left to form organizations with more influence than a branch of the DSA
Think of all the people who would otherwise be all for Socialist policy, but get spooked off by the slippery slope argument saying that any attempt at establishing an organization as leading to purges and death squads
We've be told that we're not all struggling together, that the truth is the guy next to us trying to get us cooperating is Hitler Jr.
And yeah, there are assholes that only want to grift, who only want power and will use any method to get it, but that's precisely why we have to be organized and willing to operate as a whole so that we can drive those people out with the rest of the ghouls where they belong
The memes also don't allow for any real discussion of what is authority and what is authoritarianism. I mean for all the people who throw Engels on authority (which imo is not a super useful essay) at people, the underlying point of that essay is that (by modern definitions) Bakunin is being authoritarian and needs to knock it off.
The proliferation of the Holy Gospel of the political compass has seriously damaged the ability of the Left to form organizations with more influence than a branch of the DSA
This is a really good point. In addition to the Political Compass test questions being loaded, the two-dimensional representation of politics obscures and distorts just like the one-dimensional one does, and lumps a lot of things into an axis that are neither interchangeable nor linearly dependent.
Really, even the terminology of Left and Right is something we need to abandon, in favor of something less Euclidean and more descriptive. There are liberals of many different kinds (including the ones who invented the terms of leftist and rightist), there are reactionaries of many different kinds, and there are progressives/egalitarians of many different kinds.
The weird strain of Anti-Authoritarianism present in much of the west is definitely incredibly damaging to organization and left-unity
It's not a belief that's actively conducive to making change, but instead is used to justify everyone turning against one another
The proliferation of the Holy Gospel of the political compass has seriously damaged the ability of the Left to form organizations with more influence than a branch of the DSA
Think of all the people who would otherwise be all for Socialist policy, but get spooked off by the slippery slope argument saying that any attempt at establishing an organization as leading to purges and death squads
We've be told that we're not all struggling together, that the truth is the guy next to us trying to get us cooperating is Hitler Jr.
And yeah, there are assholes that only want to grift, who only want power and will use any method to get it, but that's precisely why we have to be organized and willing to operate as a whole so that we can drive those people out with the rest of the ghouls where they belong
The memes also don't allow for any real discussion of what is authority and what is authoritarianism. I mean for all the people who throw Engels on authority (which imo is not a super useful essay) at people, the underlying point of that essay is that (by modern definitions) Bakunin is being authoritarian and needs to knock it off.
This is a really good point. In addition to the Political Compass test questions being loaded, the two-dimensional representation of politics obscures and distorts just like the one-dimensional one does, and lumps a lot of things into an axis that are neither interchangeable nor linearly dependent.
Really, even the terminology of Left and Right is something we need to abandon, in favor of something less Euclidean and more descriptive. There are liberals of many different kinds (including the ones who invented the terms of leftist and rightist), there are reactionaries of many different kinds, and there are progressives/egalitarians of many different kinds.