[-] ReadFanon@hexbear.net 47 points 1 week ago

The person who tweeted this, Jake Hanrahan, isn't someone I trust and I'd encourage other people to be cautious about him and his work. He's too cosy with the agents of imperialism, he doesn't strike me as a person who is anything more than aligned with the left (mostly) due to opportunism, and personally I'm kinda waiting on his Tim Pool arc.

[-] ReadFanon@hexbear.net 51 points 3 weeks ago

I'm exhausted but I'll try and take a swing at this, speaking as a long-term ex-anarchist. Note that I can only speak for myself but these are the trends I observed and a lot of this is exactly what I experienced.

So in transitioning from progressive liberal to the radical left, it's basically a rite of passage to identify all the ills and the egregious excesses of the government and corporations. I think this is not only valid but it's also extremely important.

The problem that emerges is that anarchists and LibSocs can fall into a trap of universalising this very valid skepticism to expand to all forms of hierarchy that have existed and will ever exist.

This is going to sound uncharitable but it's really not intended to be this way but I see a deep form of liberal hegemony as being not a positive form of hegemonic ideology but a negative form of it. Let me explain: the USSR established its own cultural hegemony. It was very much a positive cultural hegemony: this is who we are, this is how we act, this is the future we are striving to achieve etc. etc. You absolutely see this in Soviet art and film and propaganda.

The negative form of cultural hegemony that I understand liberalism to mostly rely upon, especially in a post-Gilded Age era or a neoliberal era or wherever you want to draw that line, is epitomised by Francis Fukuyama's pronouncement about arriving at the end of history; this wasn't a positive proclamation but rather it was a negation of the future, of the need to strive for a better world, of the demand to be better. Instead it was essentially an attack on and an erasure of aspirations.

This is also seen on a small scale with people demonstrating antipathy towards unionism; "they're all corrupt", "they used to be important in the past but there's no use for unions anymore", "there's no point joining a union because I'll just get fired or management will close this branch down if we all unionise". That sort of thing. It's also seen in the shadow cast by this plethora of pseudo-choice we are offered and, forgive me for invoking Horkheimer & Adorno but, the pseudo-individuality inherent to this developed form of capitalism we exist under. There's no point boycotting because how do you avoid consooming products from one of the two or three oligopolistic companies that have cornered a market? Why bother attempting to divest from BlackRock when they already own everything? Why bother protesting against war when we know the government is going to ignore us and prosecute it anyway? etc.

So this negative form of ideology or liberal cultural hegemony tends to inculcate the belief in LibSocs and anarchists that the best we can really achieve is abolition of the current state of affairs and not the construction of a positive project to bring about the revolution.

This is where I take issue with Audre Lorde, or at least the way that people quote her and what this is used in service of. She is absolutely right that you cannot dismantle patriarchy with patriarchy or that white supremacy will not be dismantled by a different form of racial supremacy. I think the distortion of Lorde comes with people thinking that this quote is in service of abstaining from using some of the most valuable tools available to us; you cannot hug the violence out of the bourgeois state no matter how hard you try (just ask the hippies). But at the same time I think we need to be cautious about how far we take this message; people can arrive at pacifism simply because the bourgeois state uses war and violence, if you took this to the the point of absurdity you could imagine people rejecting construction itself or maybe even hammers because infrastructure has been used to enact genocide and land theft and vast exploitation through colonialism and imperialism in so, so many countries. Heck, hammers have been used for DV and assault so you wouldn't want to taint yourself by benefitting directly from that instrument of violence, would you?

But it's very easy to slip into a reductive or reflexive rejection of things like the state simply because most states have historically been dogshit. If you look exclusively at the west from the advent of feudalism to today, it's basically all of them.

This is where anarchists tend to develop the basis of a quite bitter ideological distinction from communists, although obviously this varies in degree depending on what sort of anarchist we're talking about here. (I'll try to remember to circle back on this negative urge and how it provides a degree of... I guess ideological comfort or safety for anarchists once I've finished the other parts of this comment.)

The other factors are a disagreement on the pace of the post-revolution construction period (which likewise comes from the difference between materialists orienting themselves to addressing material conditions and working to resolve contradictions and anarchists who mostly prefer abolition as the means to address these issues) and the other one is that anarchists tend to be exposed to convenient historical narratives that are overly reductive if not downright anaemic.

So for the pace of the post-revolution construction, most anarchists expect a very swift transitional phase - the abolition of capitalism, often the abolition of markets themselves, prison abolition, and all sorts of other things to establish a more-or-less horizontal or low/zero hierarchy society. Again this depends on the different types of anarchist in question but to put it simply they tend to believe that post-revolution you knock all or most of it down, then establish a government or council of sorts (which again varies) and you call it good.

So from that perspective, communists get into power and instead of following what anarchists believe to be the correct path, instead communists go completely the wrong way and even start building up more state than existed under the Tsardom, for example. With this in mind I think it's easy enough to understand why they perceive this to be a betrayal of principles and of the revolution.

The last thing I want to touch on is the historical narratives. Anarchists have a tendency to share a distorted perspective on historical moments; the communists betrayed the anarchists in the Spanish Civil, the Bolsheviks stabbed the Black Army of Makhnovia in the back, occasionally you'll hear discussion of the KPAM likewise being crushed by the Soviets (although not very often tbh).

All three are actually very complicated topics and there's a lot to cover with them but in broad brushstrokes the narrative is that the communists were the aggressor and that they opted not to leave the anarchists alone to do their thing because they wanted to crush the true revolution. I disagree with this narrative these days, although I didn't always disagree with it.

There's a really good article by Jones Manoel on this sort of preference for martyrdom-over-statecraft mentality here. While he only discusses western Marxists, it definitely applies to a lot of anarchists and LibSocs. I think that Manoel simply doesn't regard the latter two as worth addressing though.

So we've got the martyrdom and purity fetish for the immaculate revolution covered there. Last of all to circle back around to the ideological comfort of the negative, I've seen plenty of anarchists do this and I have definitely been guilty of doing this myself - by not supporting or critically supporting any but the briefest attempts at revolution (and then only maybe 3 or so of those), you can create a rhetorical and ideological detachment from the real world attempts. You don't have to engage or defend anything, you can just reflexively dismiss things as being statist or hierarchical or authoritarian and thus you don't have to grapple with the reality of their circumstances or to consider what would be a better way of resolving the contradictions or moving forwards with the project. "You committed the sin of statism? Then I can wash my hands of you and that's that."

This is alluring because it's a simple rubric and you don't need to wrestle with the reality of things. To put this into an analogy that's probably more relatable, imagine a Marxist who refuses to engage in the ol' agitate/educate/organise because "liberals are social fascists and counterrevolutionary - I'm not gonna waste my time befriending my enemies!"

On the face of it, there's nothing false in that statement. But the application of this line of thinking absolves this Marxist from needing to do any of the hard work because they have created a rhetorical and ideological detachment from the most important task that a revolutionary faces and so by abdicating from this duty they never have to put in any effort and they never have to deal with fuckups and failures and addressing their own inadequacies.

That's a pretty close match to this urge that exists in a lot of anarchists and it's also why they can invest a lot into their grudge against communists, because ultimately the other option is to engage in the hard work of listening and learning and working with/working on the "authoritarians".

Obviously all of this is my vain attempt at brevity so I didn't cover the broad terrain of different ideology tendencies within anarchism and I'm talking specifically about the anarchists who really bear a grudge against communists. Plenty of anarchists do not begrduge communists and are very willing to work with them and to engage with them (or to roll up their sleeves and engage in the difficult work of educating, agitating, organising as well as grappling with the historical realities fafed by revolutions) so I haven't given consideration to this cohort of anarchists because it's beyond the scope of the question, although if I gave the impression that what I've said is true for all anarchists then that's on me.

[-] ReadFanon@hexbear.net 48 points 3 months ago

She rails against the left and rubs shoulders with the DNC elite. Liberalism, not even once.

[-] ReadFanon@hexbear.net 48 points 6 months ago

Withdrawal of Israeli forces from populated areas in Gaza

So the IDF is going to put up a fence around Rafah to turn it into the world's largest cage so they can claim they're adhering to the terms of the proposal?

[-] ReadFanon@hexbear.net 49 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

and see how the teens becoming adults react when shown even the slightest attractive woman. They cry "Coomer" "Gooner" "Porn addict" etc.

  1. Why are you, an adult, carefully observing the reaction of teens, and especially to them being exposed to pictures which make them respond in this way?

  2. I can guarantee you that these teens see an absolute deluge of above-average conventionally attractive women: in ads, in movies and TV, on runways, influencers etc. and they don't respond this way

  3. I can almost guarantee you that this person is posting thinly-veiled softcore porn on the internet somewhere like Facebook, as if it's the bathroom in a mechanic's workshop in the 1980s or it's a music video for a heavy metal band from the same era, and people are so goddamn sick of seeing a constant stream of this shit in their feed from their uncle or sportsball coach that they've given up trying to reason with him in the comments and now they all mock him instead. "Can't even subject unconsenting teenagers to being exposed to softcore porn anymore because of woke!! 😡😡"

Bro you have a veritable Library of Alexandria of porn at your fingertips 24/7 and even that's not good enough for you - you need every game you play absolutely brimming with hypersexualised women and you need to see teenagers telling you that they find this stuff arousing?

You're right in saying that there's something very wrong in the world but it isn't teenagers telling you to use the most miniscule amount of discretion with this shit.

[-] ReadFanon@hexbear.net 52 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Basically every great achievement for the proletarians of the world seemed impossible right up until it was possible and then, in retrospect, it is very easy to lapse into complacency and assume that it was inevitable all along.

Vietnam took on the fucking United States and won.

The Bolsheviks took on the aristocracy and the capitalists of the world and won.

We must guard against cynicism foreclosing on the opportunities that may be presented to us in the present and in the future. If the Viet Minh allowed this to happen, Vietnam would still be a colony. If the Bolsheviks allowed this to happen, Russia would still be a Tsardom.

Here's a quote from Mike Davis in an interview to chew on:

‘Hope’ is not a scientific category. Nor is it a necessary obligation... I manifestly do believe that we have arrived at a ‘final conflict’ that will decide the survival of a large part of poor humanity over the next half century. Against this future we must fight like the Red Army in the rubble of Stalingrad. Fight with hope, fight without hope, but fight absolutely.

[-] ReadFanon@hexbear.net 53 points 1 year ago

One thing this post doesn't go into is the fact that a Blue Ocean Event signals a dramatic loss of albedo, meaning that a significant amount of heat (~90%) which would have been reflected back will instead be directly absorbed into the ocean and surrounding atmosphere.

So not only will it be the end of the thermal buffer that the ice caps afford us but it will turn that buffer into a heatsink.

Couple this with the disruption to the polar vortex and shit's gonna be a catastrophic climate event.

[-] ReadFanon@hexbear.net 47 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

More can be read about this event here:

https://acotoronto.ca/building.php?ID=12835

If a Canadian feels like it, they can use their library card to gain access to the Globe and Mail's newspaper archive via the library service to pull up the original article.

[-] ReadFanon@hexbear.net 53 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think that the US government must be freaking out right now because I suspect they had a strategy to hamper the Chinese military tech development by cutting off their supply of cutting-edge semiconductors, and it looks like their plan may be starting to fall apart.

I'm trying to figure out whether this is a good thing because it will provide China with more deterrence, should it be a mass produced domestic semiconductor which is catching up on the best semiconductors that Taiwan and the west can produce, or if it's bad news because it will encourage the US to accelerate their plans for war with China.

I guess I just hope that China can break ahead and reach escape velocity before the US can advance to the point where it feels ready to execute its plans for war.

[-] ReadFanon@hexbear.net 47 points 1 year ago

Legit had a liberal, when presented with the fact that the RAND corporation (the organisation that blurs the line between a US government agency and a private organisation which essentially set war policy in the Vietnam war for having kill counts as a metric for determining "success" in Vietnam, amongst other things) had released a paper that basically said that if the US wants to cripple the Chinese economy then what they'd need to do is to initiate a limited military conflict in the South China Sea within the next few years to disrupt the shipping lanes which China is largely dependent upon for foreign trade (before the Belt & Road Initiative gets away from the US and closes this window.)

The outcome, they determined, would be significantly more damaging to the Chinese economy than it would be to the US economy.

I stated that this has been around for some time now and it's not a coincidence that the US is clamouring for war in the SCS and escalating in that region as much as possible without actually firing shots (yet).

What did the lib do?

You guessed it! It was obviously Sissypee tankie propaganda. From the RAND corporation.

I wish I had a fraction of the confidence of these shit-tier libs on the internet have because goddamn, the absolute balls to make the bald-faced claim that a corporation which would have extremely high US security clearance requirements and which has been directly influential over US policy for three quarters of a century is somehow now churning out pro-Chinese propaganda without anyone noticing or making a fuss over it.

It's absolutely ridiculous the degree of information and knowledge that we are expected to bring to bear in a discussion and, upon presenting this info, the libs can summarily dismiss it for going against their narrative as Chinese propaganda (or tankie propaganda etc.) and they do it with zero evidence and zero familiarity with something like the RAND corporation's history and function.

You'd legit get a military officer to burst out in laughter if you claimed that the RAND corporation was an arm of the CPC in front of them. And that's a bad thing because I wish all US military a very unpleasant experience.

[-] ReadFanon@hexbear.net 50 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

So I used to spend a lot of time on R*ddit and I was an anarchist for a long time, so because of that you'd just get familiarised with the usernames of more active anarchists over time.

(This was to the point where one user, u/fuckeverythingever, who was a fairly prolific poster on that account [and prior ones that got banned but they had a distinct disposition and writing style so it was easy enough to recognise when one of his accounts would get banned and then a new account would spring up talking about the same things with the same mannerisms and I'd be like - oh hey, he's back!], went dark and then not long after news travelled around about the death of a young Portland anarchist named Sean Kealiher and while he never gave out his real name or his age online, it lined up well enough that I'm pretty well sure that was his account and that we knew each other online.)

It was a bitterly funny thing to me, when the term tankie started to enter mainstream discourse around the same time I became an ML, that I would see these slapfights break out in more mainstream subs and there'd be an anarchist account which I'd be able to recognise and some lib would be accusing them of being a tankie for being too far to the left of them.

Often I'd see it and be like "Hang on, I'm pretty sure I recognise that username..." so I'd check their posting history and sure enough it'd be yet-another instance of an anarchist being called "tankie" by a liberal.

The tankie-as-political-slur revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for human discourse.

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