I always wonder what the political left would look like in different European countries in the 20th century had it not been for the influence of the Soviet Union. Soviet influence ran, in my humble opinion, like poison through the veins of European socialist organisations. It seems to me like successful left wing mobilization is directly correlated with a relative lack of Soviet influence.
Yeah. They executed a lot of leftist thinking and set back progress for decades. And inadvertently were the reason for the red scare still deeply ingrained in many
Even ignoring the executions, they set the party agenda for a lot of European communist parties, struck down independent local organization (which were more in line with traditional communitarian ideas), and made the political left wing something that could more legitimately be written off as a foreign influence rather than a legitimate political movement because to an uncanny degree, that was just what it was.
This reflects my impression in countries like France - in Spain they of course took it to another level.
Stalin was also partially to blame for the rise (and, to give him his due, fall) of Hitler. The recalcitrance of the Communist party in Weimar Germany was a big part of what prevented a left coalition from being able to take power and cut the Nazis off at the root.
To be fair, in the German context the conservatives were also terrified of the socialist democrat party, who were relatively moderate and if I remember correctly did not have too close ties with Soviet. Hindenburg made the fatal mistake of being more afraid of moderate socialists than of radical fascists.
I also wouldn't give Stalin too much credit for defeating Hitler. The Soviet Union only turned on Germany when they were invaded, and Stalin's military strategy was ruthless and incredibly inefficient. When the Red Army freed Europe I'd argue it was in spite of Stalin rather than because of him.
Maybe I'm looking at history with a view to avoid giving Stalin credit for anything, but turning on a fascist country only when they invade you does not impress me much, and ordering your soldiers to march into a meat grinder without weapons is not an efficient military strategy.
Most people nowadays also seem to buy into the idea that anarchists worship chaos and destruction. I'm not sure exactly where that idea comes from, but it's certainly convenient.
It's been propagated by the detractors of anarchism. The same defamation was used towards the republic when monarchies where the rule rather than exception. People often equated the concept of a republic with chaos and disorder, just like they now do with anarchism.
You mean the coup, revisionist, governments of Khrushchev, Brezhnev and the following reactionary anti-communists that destroyed the USSR were actually bad for leftism? Color me shocked.
Even “tankies” would agree that all the anti-communism, anti-Stalinism and anti-Leninism of the USSR after Stalin really fucked communism and leftism all over the world.
Or do you think “tankies” think the USSR after Stalin was “based”? What even is this take?
What even is this indeed. I was talking about the influence of the Comintern, through which the Soviet Union set the agenda of socialist parties all over Europe.
The Comintern ended in '43, but there's a broken part of the European left that never stopped sucking up to Russia. These days they're thankfully just a bunch of weirdos that nobody really gives a shit about, but back in the 30s this stuff mattered.
Your point being the USSR was influential because it was.. what evil?
Doesn’t it make sense they were influential because they were like the only socialist state at the time? And they actually did support many, if not most, anti-colonial and leftist movements all over the world. Like, if you were a leftist in Africa, and needed help fighting against colonialism and stuff, there was only the USSR around to help you. And they did help, a lot.
They had the largest increase in quality of life in history prior to China, they pioneered space exploration and computation. They had the most advanced laws to protect minorities, to guarantee equality for women etc. Their universities were free for people on the 2nd AND 3rd world to attend.
How exactly were they so terrible? And please, don’t list things every country did exactly the same or worse.
Or do you think all the good they did is completely nullified by the bad?
Would it be best for humans to stop trying to do good, never try to learn from the bad, and just give up?
It's a great read and gives a lot of insights into the dynamics I'm describing. The infighting between leftist fractions gets pretty technical, but Orwell does a great job with it.
Orwell is a piece of shit traitor who worked for the UK government to fight communists. AND he was a racist piece of shit. I will never read any books by him, thanks.
I refuse to read explicit anti-communists who worked for fascists states outing communists and disrupting their parties.
Uhum uhum, it’s been “bad”. Like it’s only been one of the best countries in history, if you like, actually materially analyse human history and stuff.
Do people like you think what, Sweden is a good country? Or there has been 0 good attempts at social organization in human history, and we better just kill ourselves and give up?
Or rather, my personal position is that indeed the USSR sucked (likely in different ways than you think), and it was still one the best nations ever. We should learn from what it did right, but also what it did wrong.
Hexbear comes here to be the debate bros they try so hard to dunk on. They are dying looking for just one little morsel of dunk. Not a good showing, not a leftist unity moment lmao
The quality of their arguments doesn't really matter though, nor does it matter whether they're able to convince a majority of people. What matters is that they can reach the few people that will find their overall presentation intriguing enough to merit further investigation, and then pull those people down the rabbit hole. It's the same strategy that fascists use, just red-flavored instead of brown.
It also makes the space overall less appealing to your actual target audience, which is a cardinal sin of online community management.
...gonna pop in and agree, dbzer0 may have got carried away with engaging with them.
Hexbear also doesn't have downvotes, their instance heavily emphasizes commenting to show the quality of a post, rather than vote, in most cases anyways.
But they do definitely rally behind their own and do both, as seen in this thread. It's like kicking a hornets nest.
Meme has been ammended to not be racist. Sorry about not paying close enough attention to it. I've been having issues with my object storage and I've been trying to fix it. In the end I decided to rehost on imgur.
What an impressive turn out. Looks like they're all using the exact same "arguments" (a combination of manipulation techniques and logical fallicies) that they use every single time.
It's worrying how much of a presence these people create in online discourse because they come out in full force, dominating and suppressing anyone or thing that challenges them. There is no healthy debate.
But i suppose it all makes perfect sense; these people glorify the state, single party rule and dictatorship. Their behavior is a logical result of these beliefs
We need to connect, which then leaves us open to cointelpro. The problem of cointelpro has not been resolved, questioning our capabilities to organize ourselves.
We need a code of honor that makes cointelpro tactics a waste of time.
One upside is that the flaming comments is less lethal than bullets. Of course if they start kicking in doors because of comments we have a different problem.
Actually anarchy is not chaos or a state of everybody vs everybody. Anarchy is greek for without rulers. It is basically synonymous with democracy in it's original sense.
Anarchy is a organized(even industrialized and modern) society but without powers concentrated in the hands of a few.
Anarchists like myself believe that power corrupts, and even if you joined government as an angle in due time you might fall to the temptation and divert the power granted you by the massed for your own ends, in turn betraying your mandate. I believe this to be the fatal flaw of both systems like USSR and the one we live in, both are state-capitalism.
Anarchists believe that you cannot part with your freedom and then ever expect it back...
God and state is a great book to interest you further or the conquest of bread there is also lucy gonzales parsons and others like proudhon.
I hope you enjoyed this little write up and become an anarchist. 😘
Thusly, any violent revolution stands a STRONG chance of being shunned by those who do not want a government with sanctioned violence.
I disagree with this part. Violent revolution—violent opposition to our oppression—is absolutely necessary. However, turning it on ourselves—that is, in any direction other than that which opposes authority—is a recipe for disaster as you say.
It's not violence itself that is the problem. There are literally always forms of violence sanctioned by every single political philosophy (including absolute pacifism/non-violence, which sanctions violence performed by the state even if its subscribers often don't realize this). The question is how and when that violence is performed and by whom, and the anarchist/non-authoritarian answer is that it must only be in the struggle for liberation, not the fight to gain and maintain power over others.
I absolutely agree. Peaceful protest has never brought meaningful or lasting change. Violent uprisings are the only way to reduce unjust hierarchy, because those in power have never given it up willingly.
pacifism/non-violence, which sanctions violence performed by the state
Maybe this is a silly nitpick, but: you can say it unintentionally empowers or enables state violence, but it doesn't sanction state violence. (FWIW I'm not a pacifist)
It doesn't really. Just keep doing anarchist things and don't allow ML entry-ism and agitate for direct action moves instead of top down decision making.
Hmmmm I kinda get that and actually agree. Buuuuut I feel like actually doing this might be hard and sometimes one might have to disengage because the ML entry-ism actually succeeded.
I see what you are saying, but we should not refer to communists as tankies. Instead of alienating others, we should try to win them over.
Hearts and minds.
one up man ship and gotcha type discourse won't help our cause. We want people to turn to anarchism and for that we need to convince though rational arguments.
We should also appeal to people's emotions.
We should speak to their sense of freedom and individuality. We should show them how we are all wage-slaves and that once we abolish property all the people who have been poor will over night be rich. All of a sudden the bread that rotted off limits can now be eaten by those who were condemned to look at it from afar before.
The thing is, anarchists and MLs tend to agree pretty much all the criticism of the current system.
We, however, disagree greatly on how to progress to the next system. And this is where our disagreements become practical and not easily solvable by polite arguments.
communists and anarchists agree in everything but communists want to get to stateless communism by having a state-capitalist dictatorship first. Anarchists believe that once you give away your power you never get it back, and thus we hold on to our power throughout the revolution.
I'm not sure if you are defederated with like everyone or just too lazy to scroll the comments before asking a question that's answered several times already
Lemmy.world is defederated from hexbear so they don't see the comments by Hexbear users here (which is most of them), but they probably are also the lazy type because they could just look it up if they can't find it in the thread, or view the post from another instance to see the missing comments.
'Tankies' (for the lack of a better word) have been against communism throughout history. It's disingenuous to assume they could be capable of unity
I always wonder what the political left would look like in different European countries in the 20th century had it not been for the influence of the Soviet Union. Soviet influence ran, in my humble opinion, like poison through the veins of European socialist organisations. It seems to me like successful left wing mobilization is directly correlated with a relative lack of Soviet influence.
Yeah. They executed a lot of leftist thinking and set back progress for decades. And inadvertently were the reason for the red scare still deeply ingrained in many
Even ignoring the executions, they set the party agenda for a lot of European communist parties, struck down independent local organization (which were more in line with traditional communitarian ideas), and made the political left wing something that could more legitimately be written off as a foreign influence rather than a legitimate political movement because to an uncanny degree, that was just what it was.
This reflects my impression in countries like France - in Spain they of course took it to another level.
Stalin was also partially to blame for the rise (and, to give him his due, fall) of Hitler. The recalcitrance of the Communist party in Weimar Germany was a big part of what prevented a left coalition from being able to take power and cut the Nazis off at the root.
To be fair, in the German context the conservatives were also terrified of the socialist democrat party, who were relatively moderate and if I remember correctly did not have too close ties with Soviet. Hindenburg made the fatal mistake of being more afraid of moderate socialists than of radical fascists.
I also wouldn't give Stalin too much credit for defeating Hitler. The Soviet Union only turned on Germany when they were invaded, and Stalin's military strategy was ruthless and incredibly inefficient. When the Red Army freed Europe I'd argue it was in spite of Stalin rather than because of him.
Maybe I'm looking at history with a view to avoid giving Stalin credit for anything, but turning on a fascist country only when they invade you does not impress me much, and ordering your soldiers to march into a meat grinder without weapons is not an efficient military strategy.
Many anarchists were simply murdered:
that is the reason why there is no anarchist movement in europe today. Before these events Anarchists were a major part of the workers movement.
Most people nowadays also seem to buy into the idea that anarchists worship chaos and destruction. I'm not sure exactly where that idea comes from, but it's certainly convenient.
It's been propagated by the detractors of anarchism. The same defamation was used towards the republic when monarchies where the rule rather than exception. People often equated the concept of a republic with chaos and disorder, just like they now do with anarchism.
You mean the coup, revisionist, governments of Khrushchev, Brezhnev and the following reactionary anti-communists that destroyed the USSR were actually bad for leftism? Color me shocked.
Even “tankies” would agree that all the anti-communism, anti-Stalinism and anti-Leninism of the USSR after Stalin really fucked communism and leftism all over the world.
Or do you think “tankies” think the USSR after Stalin was “based”? What even is this take?
What even is this indeed. I was talking about the influence of the Comintern, through which the Soviet Union set the agenda of socialist parties all over Europe.
The Comintern ended in '43, but there's a broken part of the European left that never stopped sucking up to Russia. These days they're thankfully just a bunch of weirdos that nobody really gives a shit about, but back in the 30s this stuff mattered.
Your point being the USSR was influential because it was.. what evil?
Doesn’t it make sense they were influential because they were like the only socialist state at the time? And they actually did support many, if not most, anti-colonial and leftist movements all over the world. Like, if you were a leftist in Africa, and needed help fighting against colonialism and stuff, there was only the USSR around to help you. And they did help, a lot.
They had the largest increase in quality of life in history prior to China, they pioneered space exploration and computation. They had the most advanced laws to protect minorities, to guarantee equality for women etc. Their universities were free for people on the 2nd AND 3rd world to attend.
How exactly were they so terrible? And please, don’t list things every country did exactly the same or worse.
Or do you think all the good they did is completely nullified by the bad?
Would it be best for humans to stop trying to do good, never try to learn from the bad, and just give up?
I recommend reading Orwell's Homage to Catalonia!
It's a great read and gives a lot of insights into the dynamics I'm describing. The infighting between leftist fractions gets pretty technical, but Orwell does a great job with it.
Orwell is a piece of shit traitor who worked for the UK government to fight communists. AND he was a racist piece of shit. I will never read any books by him, thanks.
I refuse to read explicit anti-communists who worked for fascists states outing communists and disrupting their parties.
Chef's kiss
@novibe @sab
Orwell fought in Spain against Franco. You have some odd definitions of "Anti_Communist."
He hated Stalin? So did everyone who could read and write.
The USSR has been bad since the USSR existed
Uhum uhum, it’s been “bad”. Like it’s only been one of the best countries in history, if you like, actually materially analyse human history and stuff.
Do people like you think what, Sweden is a good country? Or there has been 0 good attempts at social organization in human history, and we better just kill ourselves and give up?
Or rather, my personal position is that indeed the USSR sucked (likely in different ways than you think), and it was still one the best nations ever. We should learn from what it did right, but also what it did wrong.
Brother u on some liberalism
Brother YOU are on some liberalism lmao what are you talking about?
anarchism is when people are doing kinda sorta okay sometimes please ignore the genocides
Just call em authoritarians. That's what they are
Hexbear comes here to be the debate bros they try so hard to dunk on. They are dying looking for just one little morsel of dunk. Not a good showing, not a leftist unity moment lmao
They're starving, man
You know, there'd be a whole lot less gish-galloping propaganda in the comments here if you were to defederate hexbear. Just sayin. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Hexbears don't bother me, but I seem to be bothering them quite a lot
Just like with fascists though, it's better not to let them propagandize, even if you aren't personally triggered by it.
Eh half of them are just making asses out of themselves by going full mask off. I don't think they've had a great showing.
The quality of their arguments doesn't really matter though, nor does it matter whether they're able to convince a majority of people. What matters is that they can reach the few people that will find their overall presentation intriguing enough to merit further investigation, and then pull those people down the rabbit hole. It's the same strategy that fascists use, just red-flavored instead of brown.
It also makes the space overall less appealing to your actual target audience, which is a cardinal sin of online community management.
...gonna pop in and agree, dbzer0 may have got carried away with engaging with them.
Hexbear also doesn't have downvotes, their instance heavily emphasizes commenting to show the quality of a post, rather than vote, in most cases anyways.
But they do definitely rally behind their own and do both, as seen in this thread. It's like kicking a hornets nest.
Meme has been ammended to not be racist. Sorry about not paying close enough attention to it. I've been having issues with my object storage and I've been trying to fix it. In the end I decided to rehost on imgur.
Neat, now we can see how long before/if federated instances update that.
What an impressive turn out. Looks like they're all using the exact same "arguments" (a combination of manipulation techniques and logical fallicies) that they use every single time.
It's worrying how much of a presence these people create in online discourse because they come out in full force, dominating and suppressing anyone or thing that challenges them. There is no healthy debate.
But i suppose it all makes perfect sense; these people glorify the state, single party rule and dictatorship. Their behavior is a logical result of these beliefs
We need to connect, which then leaves us open to cointelpro. The problem of cointelpro has not been resolved, questioning our capabilities to organize ourselves.
We need a code of honor that makes cointelpro tactics a waste of time.
holy shit
One upside is that the flaming comments is less lethal than bullets. Of course if they start kicking in doors because of comments we have a different problem.
What in the actual fuck is going on in here?
I guess you could say it's...
Anarchy?
Actually anarchy is not chaos or a state of everybody vs everybody. Anarchy is greek for without rulers. It is basically synonymous with democracy in it's original sense.
Anarchy is a organized(even industrialized and modern) society but without powers concentrated in the hands of a few. Anarchists like myself believe that power corrupts, and even if you joined government as an angle in due time you might fall to the temptation and divert the power granted you by the massed for your own ends, in turn betraying your mandate. I believe this to be the fatal flaw of both systems like USSR and the one we live in, both are state-capitalism.
Anarchists believe that you cannot part with your freedom and then ever expect it back...
God and state is a great book to interest you further or the conquest of bread there is also lucy gonzales parsons and others like proudhon.
I hope you enjoyed this little write up and become an anarchist. 😘
Just wanted to come in and say good job op, you managed to make a very entertaining thread. Big ups
This will stand as a great monument to Hexbear
What's a Tankie?
EDIT: The range of definitions below is interesting
A slang term for authoritarian communists.
A white kid from North America who simps for Russia and China despite never having set foot in either
Tankies are not at all a uniquely US phenomenon
When it describes 95% of the ones I've come into contact with, that's what I'll describe them as
Outstanding comments as always, Waluigis_Talking_Buttplug.
I disagree with this part. Violent revolution—violent opposition to our oppression—is absolutely necessary. However, turning it on ourselves—that is, in any direction other than that which opposes authority—is a recipe for disaster as you say.
It's not violence itself that is the problem. There are literally always forms of violence sanctioned by every single political philosophy (including absolute pacifism/non-violence, which sanctions violence performed by the state even if its subscribers often don't realize this). The question is how and when that violence is performed and by whom, and the anarchist/non-authoritarian answer is that it must only be in the struggle for liberation, not the fight to gain and maintain power over others.
I absolutely agree. Peaceful protest has never brought meaningful or lasting change. Violent uprisings are the only way to reduce unjust hierarchy, because those in power have never given it up willingly.
Unending storms of propaganda do a lot to influence how ignorant people react in a situation. And it serves to keep them ignorant as well.
(Not the person you were responding to, but that's my take on how people often react regarding Palestine.)
Yeah. Totally fair.
Maybe this is a silly nitpick, but: you can say it unintentionally empowers or enables state violence, but it doesn't sanction state violence. (FWIW I'm not a pacifist)
I'd say that's a meaningless distinction, and that actions speak louder than words. But as you will.
Someone that thinks people are cool but states are cooler
A liberal who waves a red flag and pretends they aren't liberal. Often they call everyone else (including us) liberal. 😂 😉
"Tanks"
So we dont trust authoritarian communists/socialists. How does this influence our praxis?
It doesn't really. Just keep doing anarchist things and don't allow ML entry-ism and agitate for direct action moves instead of top down decision making.
Hmmmm I kinda get that and actually agree. Buuuuut I feel like actually doing this might be hard and sometimes one might have to disengage because the ML entry-ism actually succeeded.
I see what you are saying, but we should not refer to communists as tankies. Instead of alienating others, we should try to win them over.
Hearts and minds.
one up man ship and gotcha type discourse won't help our cause. We want people to turn to anarchism and for that we need to convince though rational arguments.
We should also appeal to people's emotions.
We should speak to their sense of freedom and individuality. We should show them how we are all wage-slaves and that once we abolish property all the people who have been poor will over night be rich. All of a sudden the bread that rotted off limits can now be eaten by those who were condemned to look at it from afar before.
The thing is, anarchists and MLs tend to agree pretty much all the criticism of the current system.
We, however, disagree greatly on how to progress to the next system. And this is where our disagreements become practical and not easily solvable by polite arguments.
communists and anarchists agree in everything but communists want to get to stateless communism by having a state-capitalist dictatorship first. Anarchists believe that once you give away your power you never get it back, and thus we hold on to our power throughout the revolution.
What exactly is a tankie?
an idiot.
Thanks for nothing, seeing as that comment fits you into your own definition.
TIL.
I'm not sure if you are defederated with like everyone or just too lazy to scroll the comments before asking a question that's answered several times already
Lemmy.world is defederated from hexbear so they don't see the comments by Hexbear users here (which is most of them), but they probably are also the lazy type because they could just look it up if they can't find it in the thread, or view the post from another instance to see the missing comments.
Those who defend the atrocities committed by historical communist movements, or deny them against overwhelming contrary evidence
Okay thanks makes it much clearer, thank you my friend!
Authoritarian leftist, or a fan of such.
Thank you.