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When I first started hearing whispers of anyone under 50 actually defending Lenin it was newly minted trans girls in abusive cult collective houses. They weren’t like getting this shit from contact w/ actual leninists, they were inventing a new social milieu from whole cloth.
what the hell is this guy talking about lol
I honestly think there are a bunch more MLs (and MLMs, Trots, etc.) because there are just way more leftists in general, including anarchists. Odds are most anarchists here became anarchists in the last 5 years; I know I did. The proliferation of socialist thought in the West is a rising tide that lifted all boats in a way. I take issue with his analysis that tries to dismiss it as a kind of pathological, character-flaw thing because I don't think that actually explains much.
because there are just way more leftists in general, including anarchists.
Maybe it also has something to do with the generation that wasn't raised during Cold War growing up. It's easier to become an ML when you don't associate hammer and sickle with the people who are going to evaporate you and everyone you've even know any moment now.
Ironically I think this reasoning is exactly why anarchism is the main sect of leftists in the west (America specifically)
or maybe it has something to do with the fact that every institution has failed and betrayed us, every assurance of a future has been thrown in our faces, and we know that capitalism is the enemy, because there is no other excuse?
I know I've been an anarchist (or something like it and far less articulate) since before I knew arithmetic.
I um... ive seen that. it was really strange. and culty. its a real thing that happens. no fucking clue why these things so often appear together.
I would consider myself more ML but I see a lot of what anarchists do and say and agree with it, but not gonna lie, stuff like this very much looks like some insane ramblings.
(This is also related to why breadtube types tend to be so open to tankies and/or slip further and further from anarchist mainstream shit and towards tankie shit.)
:thonk:
tends to split everything/everyone into those on the inside or outside of the gate.
I think this is related to the affinity group/web of trust that anarchists tend to use, and ties into his larger point: "Anarchist recruitment for decades had been primarily social / subcultural". It's always been gatekeepy and personal, and therefore people who just google "democratic socialism" because Bernie aren't going to find any welcoming anarchists because there's not going to be an "anarchist worker's party" recruiting members.
"For all of recorded history tankies were like three old creepy white dudes no one cared about at the back of an IWW meeting."
lmao the majority of communist movements in the US have been ML
Those three old creepy white dudes must have been stressed doing most of the resistance to nazi occupation in WWII.
Yeah any definition that includes Caesar Chavez is bunk. Guy was never an ML, he advocated for some sort of co-op system and derided state socialism in the USSR iirc.
What tankie would even go to an IWW meeting? The IWW had a major falling out with American communists in like the 30s and IWW style industrial unionism is pretty hostile to ML style parties.
Leftism is complicated and multifaceted, and when you start down that road suddenly everything is unfamiliar and almost the complete opposite of what you've been taught to believe all your life. And everyone is using weird overcomplicated terms to describe everything. And if any non-leftists find out, you need to be an encyclopaedia of history and philosophy and economics or else be instantly dismissed. It's a bit exhausting.
So it's very seductive to have someone come and tell you "here comrade, here's the Right Way to think about everything. Don't worry yourself about making up your own mind about it". The ML side of things does a much better job of presenting itself as a coherent whole with Correct Answers you can easily draw on for everything. In my baby leftist days it was all university Trots, and they were very very good at recruiting, primarily because they were good at presenting themselves like a nice cohesive package, I think. But most people didn't last long there because longer reflection maybe made them disagree with some aspect or other of the dogma, and then they were Wrong. I guess there's a similar phenomenon going on, just with tankies instead of trots?
I really like a lot of ML thought (and ML comrades) and I don't want to shit on it at all, but I do question the idea that absolutely every one of their conclusions on everything can be drawn logically and unequivocally from Dialectical Materialism like some Unified Field Theory of leftism, and I think it does really feed into this idea of putting us into neat boxes where our thoughts on everything are determined by what "stream" we're from (and in turn giving us that warm "knowledgeable ingroup" status). I'm confused as shit, I dunno what I think from one day to the next on half this stuff. I don't even know what the hell I'm trying to say here. Perhaps just that there's less perception of a Correct Anarchist Take on everything (perhaps in part because everyone thinks anarchists don't read any theory), which perhaps hinders recruitment but maybe that's not entirely a bad thing?
This is just labeling anyone not an anarchist tankies. The actual number of new MLs is still tiny compared to non aligned Socialists. Like none of the people I know IRL who have spent the time reading Lenin (including myself) identify as MLs or as tankies in the OG sense in any way whatsoever. If anything the biggest camp is vague unaligned heterodox Marxists. I mean even some of the famous American MLs like Angela Davis have not identified as such for decades at this point and have very intentionally stopped doing so.
"Stalin did nothing wrong" teens are virtually non existent offline.
Not entirely sure but they may thinking of John Paul Cupp, Joshua Caleb Sutter, and some others in that little network of groups. Never done a deep dive into them to personally verify things, but from what little I've read it's a pretty strange saga.
I think a lot of the information comes from this article: White Power and apocalyptic cults: Pro-DPRK Americans revealed.
Take that website with an appropriate amount of salt though. I don't have time to dig through it in depth but the CEO, Mr. O'Carroll, was apparently a former Director of Communications for the "Korea Economic Institute" which seems like some spooky think tank shit. It's also hard for me to believe a mf named Chad O'Carroll is some authority on geopolitics in the Korean Peninsula. Sounds like what the city of Boston would be named if it were a person.
Sounds like what the city of Boston would be named if it were a person.
ML popping in to say that was the best anecdote I've seen all day.
...that is a thing though, it is literally a dictatorship of the proletariat controlled by a vanguard
William Gillis be like: Christmas is un anarchist Willy Gillis be like I'm an anarchist not a communist Cracker ass motherfucker
I remember reading this before and thinking that this person has literally not engaged with any leftism outside of the U.S.
imagine being narcissistic enough to put your fucking twitter thread on the anarchist library
