https://raddle.me/wiki/leftunity
Some choice quotes straight from the US state department
The USSR alone was responsible for the de-Tatarization of Crimea, the genocide of the Ingrian Finns, the ethnic cleansing of Poles, the mass gulaging and pogroms of Greeks, the deportation of the Karachays, the deportation of the Kalmyks, the deportation of the Chechens and Ingush (Aardakh), the deportation of the Balkars, the deportation of Azerbaijanis from Armenia, the deportation of the Meskhetian Turks, the deportations of the Chinese and Koreans, the execution and deportation of Latvians, the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe and the Holodomor famine that largely happened due to the USSR’s confiscation and export of all the grain stores in central and eastern Ukraine, and preventing people from acquiring more food by banning free movement. Then there’s communist Czechoslovakia’s Romani sterilizations, the Cambodian genocide, Bulgaria’s “revival process”, Vietnam’s Montagnard persecution, the Isaaq genocide in Somalia, the Hmong genocide in Laos, the Gukurahundi massacres in Zimbabwe and the mass starvation of anywhere between 15 and 55 million people that happened in China during Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”.
LMAO
Marx really made his career shamelessly ripping off Proudhon’s earlier work point by point, but piling on a thick authority sludge before serving it up to the world as if he were presenting something new and not just an authoritarian perversion of Proudhon’s ideas. Once Marx found fame with his plagiarism, he then decried Proudhon as being detestable; a bad economist, a bad philosopher, whose critiques were worthless and unevolved.
MARX STOLE COMMUNISM FROM ANARCHISTS!!! LOL
identifying as a leftist is a statement to the world that you support nationalism, states, borders, a monopoly on violence, being ruled by kings or presidents or central committees. Anarchists aren’t left or right wing, we’re anarchists. We reject the power machinations of both wings of government. We reject all authority.
LITERALLY A LIBERTARIAN
If the concept of community is authority-based e.g. steeped in majoritarianism, then what good is it to anarchists? Since at least 99.9% of all existing self-identifying communities and even theoretical proposals for communities are beholden to states, councils, committees, voter bodies and other forms of rulership, it’s safe to say the community ideal in itself is just another vessel of authority. If all organized communities on the planet can be clearly demonstrated to be authority-based, then it’s a safe bet that the entire concept of community is authority-forming… By simply looking at every example in the world today, you can bet with absolute certainty that any forced grouping of people around the community ideal is going to lead everyone involved through another abusive and torturous adventure in archy.
Anti…COMMUNITY??? Can’t make this shit up omg.
The few remaining free people in the world e.g. the Hadza in east Africa (“Tanzania”) don’t live in anything resembling what we know as a community. They’re nomadic, have no leaders, no gods, no rules, no crops, no property, no marriage, no parents (Hadza children have full autonomy and essentially raise themselves), don’t extract anything from the land other than foraged food and are quick to remove themselves from the presence of anyone who tries to rule them.
PLEASE LET ME GO MONKE, I HATE HUMANS SO MUCH
The original National Bolsheviks in both Russia and Germany had the same idea, believing socialism needed more blatant nationalism and racism than it already had under Lenin and Stalin. In the 1980s, the concept of third positionism was taken up by the far-right, fascist political party National Front in the United Kingdom. Today there has been a resurgence in third positionist fascism under various labels, from modern nazbols to “national anarchism” to neo-Eurasianism to (I argue) Dengism. It’s completely unsurprising that an ideology founded by virulent racist and colonialist paternalists like Marx and Engels would find support with so many racist nationalists.
Fucker is trying to cancel Marx using literal nazi propaganda ROFL
What is it with liberals thinking ideas are possessions? Back in the 2016 election I was told sneeringly more than once that Sanders didn’t even invent medicare for all, ackshully it was some other senator. Who cares where Marx or Sanders got their ideas? This isn’t a science fair, it’s not a homework assignment. Fucking liberals
Imagine being an anarchist and believing in intellectual property lmao
medicare for all is also just a shitty middle ground measure
just do a national health service
Private ownership brainworms
This isn’t a science fair,
Imagine going up to kids at a science fair and giving them Fs for not doing totally independent novel research.
I think they mean one kid plagiarizing the project of another
idea theft is bad because it’s property
no parents (Hadza children have full autonomy and essentially raise themselves)
It is all about bedtimes
dunno, seeing as they made so many references to libertarianism it might be something else…
The anti-community rhetoric screams that they’ve conflated actual community (which the Hadza most certainly have) with the reactionary use of “community” as a veil for insular xenophobia.
If the concept of community is authority-based e.g. steeped in majoritarianism, then what good is it to anarchists? Since at least 99.9% of all existing self-identifying communities and even theoretical proposals for communities are beholden to states, councils, committees, voter bodies and other forms of rulership, it’s safe to say the community ideal in itself is just another vessel of authority. If all organized communities on the planet can be clearly demonstrated to be authority-based, then it’s a safe bet that the entire concept of community is authority-forming… By simply looking at every example in the world today, you can bet with absolute certainty that any forced grouping of people around the community ideal is going to lead everyone involved through another abusive and torturous adventure in archy.
Idiot has failed to understand that anarchism is not anti-authority.
This is what happens when you misinterpret anarchism and turn yourself into a vulgar anti-authoritarian instead of an anarchist. They anti-anarchy in their obsession with anti-authoritarianism. They hate authority so much they want ultra hyper atomisation and ultra individualism to the extent of utter obliteration of all community, social or otherwise. Why? Because you literally can’t have basic human interactions without some sort of expected etiquette, expected norms that people conform to, and expected behaviours that people tell you off for if you break them. It’s how human social relations work. The only way to escape all authority is to not live in groups and the desire this person has to live like that suggests they are a deeply misanthropic person.
The few remaining free people in the world e.g. the Hadza in east Africa (“Tanzania”) don’t live in anything resembling what we know as a community. They’re nomadic, have no leaders, no gods, no rules, no crops, no property, no marriage, no parents (Hadza children have full autonomy and essentially raise themselves), don’t extract anything from the land other than foraged food and are quick to remove themselves from the presence of anyone who tries to rule them.
This is really really not accurate. The social hierarchy among the hadza is age based, like most tribal arrangements, with elders being respected as teachers.
Anyway how exactly is Ziq expecting to get to this kind of lifestyle with the population we currently have other than through mass starvation and/or murder through intentionally breaking down the structures that currently exist for the current population.
the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe
Oh yes. The nazis. Cool. Glad I wasted my time before rereading and catching this fascist supporting shit.
These ultra-individualist types amuse me because they’re more or less tacitly stating to the world that they’re cowards. They exalt the individual over the collective, so the idea that anyone would care about someone or something more than themselves to the point of sacrificing their life for that someone or something is unfathomable. But someone who would never risk their life for the sake of anything other than themselves is nothing more than a self-interested coward. And self-interested cowards aren’t exactly known for being mentally and emotionally resilient who won’t completely cave under the slightest of pressure.
And this isn’t even getting to the sock puppets, an absolutely pathetic but predictable behavior of a emotionally stunted person.
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I will not be charitable to someone who is not equally charitable to us. When they cut the shit out of calling us fascists I might be inclined to interpret this libertarian ultra individualist anti-community nazi defender differently. But quite frankly they don’t act in good faith to us so why the fuck should anyone treat them with any?
One way or another they are very clearly on the yellow side of ““anarchist”” rather than the red.
I think you’re right. Most of the people on Raddle openly ID as either primmies or mutualists (fancy word for capitalism). The rest are just liberals. They even hate ancoms https://raddle.me/wiki/burn_the_bread_book
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Don’t get me started on what kind of lifespan people would have without industrial production of medicines. Notable that health and medicine is not mentioned a single time in this post.
They actually do mention “wheelchair and drug factories” only to completely dismiss it out of hand as just more industrial authoritarianism:
“Anyway, everyone who has spoken to a red anarchist knows primmies are dirty reactionary ableists who want to stop us from building wheelchair and drug factories, right?”
Ok so what happens to the drug factories, clinics and hospitals?
Oh also who is in charge of them? Do they just operate magically without any authority in charge despite medicine very much requiring seniority for the more experienced and more educated at making lifesaving decisions? Do you want someone to treat your life threatening condition who neither has any education nor any experience in it? Do you want nobody else in the hospital to double check their work and decisions before it goes through? Do you want no systems in place that result in consequences for medical professionals that fail in their duties of care through negligence? Who decides who provides good and bad care and who decides whether they’re allowed to continue providing it?
All authority. Medical authority. Authority is essential to the operation of the fucking system.
And authority isn’t born in a vacuum, someone needs to provide that authority to the medical authority. Through some sort of organisation that derives its power to create authority from something… A governing authority. Doesn’t have to be a “state” as such but it does need to have a mandate for its authority, which means elections, polls, councils, etc.
I consider myself pretty anti-authoritarian myself, and thought that’s what anarchism was as well. The whole point in my mind of anarchy is to find small communities that can typically mostly agree on issues, and they then vote democratically (either direct democracy or something like consensus democracy to help against majority rule). So there’s still rules, just no power structure. Is that an accurate representation of anarchism? And how would that compare to anti-authoritarianism?
Well, now you’re running headfirst into what “authority” even is. How would you enact these polices; throughway revolution? That’s the most authoritarian thing there is, it’s inherently a small subset of the population enforcing it’s will on the rest. When you begin to unravel what the idea of “authoritarianism” even is you can see that any wielding of political power, period, can rightfully be called authoritarianism.
That can lead to greater underatsnding about how it’s a term largely used by those in the imperial core to degrade those in the imperial periphery who’ve had the balls to wage any kind of real revolution. Authoritarianism is rarely applied to imperial core nations, no matter how brutal their policies are, and never in a way that dismisses everything about them; but the opposite is true for socialist countries.
I’m not sure how it would happen to an entire country like the US - obviously no amount of “vote harder” will make that happen - but figured it’s already being experimented with on more local levels.
I think theoretically the whole voluntary association part of anarchism would handle the issue of “forcing” (via authority) anarchism on others. Of course, that’s easier said then done in a world where just picking up your life and moving somewhere else is so non trivial.
Side note, but it really feels like online communities can do anarchism much better, since the voluntary association bit is so much more feasible online. I could see a nice lemmy instance or something that’s run by charging each member a tiny amount, enough to pay for hosting (I can’t imagine it’d be more than a few cents per person), and the policies of the instance would be fully democratically decided on. Bans would be decided by the community, etc.
I’m not sure how it would happen to an entire country like the US - obviously no amount of “vote harder” will make that happen - but figured it’s already being experimented with on more local levels.
This disregards the sacrifice and strength that those outside of the US have shown in creating revolutions. There are clear paths to victory for those who are willing to create a revolution and there are no clear paths to victory for those who aren’t.
There’s a reason that the only socialist states to exist are “authoritarian”, it’s because when it comes down to it they are in a war against the imperial core, yt supremacy, and capitalism because capital is willing to slaughter to maintain class supremacy.
Advocating against revolution like this means, at the end of the day, instead of opposing the abuse of the global majority you’ll instead enable and benefit from it as a US citizen. Socialists, and I mean the ones who’ve fought hard and worked hard, have laid down their lives to find whatever system works. I think dismissing them out of hand as “authoritian” not only denies learning the complex and fascinating reality on the ground, but also reveals unchallenged western and white biases.
I’m not sure how it would happen to an entire country like the US
For a long time the going theory was parallel power - building community structures that would provide services for the community entirely outside the control of the state. Ie set up your own trash collection network, set up local childcare systems, free clinics, free libraries, tool libraries, bike shops, mutual aid for food and medicine. Whatever the community needs. Then you eat up the state from within as people increasingly recognize that they can provide their own damn services and don’t actually need the state for a lot of things. Combine that with the tendency towards regular crises in capitalism, and for example the US’s “No one is coming to save us” policy regarding disasters of all kinds, and you can, in theory, weaken the state until everyone just stops paying attention to it and it doesn’t have enough soldiers to maintain control.
I have no idea what internet anarchists are doing these days. i really haven’t met any with any real theory in a while.
The way I tend to think of it, is how authority is managed. In a vertically-oriented power system it is managed through layers of hierarchy.
What many anarchists aim for, including anarcho-communists, is a horizontal power system that doesn’t have hierarchies to be exploited.
If there are rules, there is a power structure, but it can be organized through vertical and horizontal implementations. Authority in the former would be handed down, while authority in the latter would be participatory and derived through mutual agreement.
Because you literally can’t have basic human interactions without some sort of expected etiquette, expected norms that people conform to, and expected behaviours that people tell you off for if you break them. It’s how human social relations work. The only way to escape all authority is to not live in groups and the desire this person has to live like that suggests they are a deeply misanthropic person.
What you described here has nothing to do with authority at all tho.
If you think none of that has anything to do with authority then your definition of authority has absolutely no social content
The universal definition of authority has no social content then, since the universal definition of authority is having power over others and what Awoo described is simple self-assertion, not practicing power over someone else.
Most “universal” definitions are useless or colloquial expressions of bourgeois ideology that have filtered downstream, and power is inherently relational which makes it a form of self-assertion
That might be true but if you think asking someone to wash their teeth is 100% the same category as what white cops do to black people at traffic stops, we definitely won’t agree on this issue.
I don’t think anyone claimed all expressions of authority are the same
One of these isn’t an expression of authority.
Oh wow I didn’t know this kind of hunting-and-gathering fetishist still existed outside private collections. Also, Ziq seems to be confusing a low complexity society, ie one without many fixed or formal social or political roles, with not having any rules or norms.
Ziq seems to be confusing a low complexity society, ie one without many fixed or formal social or political roles, with not having any rules or norms.
It makes me question whether there might be neurodiversity in play here and a problem with recognising or fitting into social rules and norms. I don’t generally like making that assessment but in searching for a “why are they like this?” it’s difficult to completely ignore it. There’s a problem there though because generally speaking small communities cast out members that don’t conform to them more than larger societies where we build protections into law for people that are slightly outside of the norms.
Word. I hate to armchair diagnose, but then you run in to perspectives that are so bizarre there isn’t another lens to really analyze them through. On the other hand, I do often say “being an asshole is not a mental illness”. Idk, I think we’re at a point in culture where there aren’t really good ways to discuss someone who is very strange without at least straying in to mental health language and patholigizitng… pathologizing… shit, umm. straying in to language that accuses them of being sick. It’s less of a problem with someone you have no interest in understanding. You can just say they’re an asshole and move on. But when you’re trying to wrap your head around someone who is very strange “neurodiverse” or “mental illness” is going to pop up as a potential explanation for their beliefs.
I don’t think neurodiversity is mental illness is it? It’s one thing to say “this person has x illness” and totally another to wonder whether there is non-debilitating neurodiversity at play. I don’t necessarily think being different in terms of how things are processed should be considered an illness.
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doesn’t believe in community because the only one they’re involved in is just their own sockpuppets
The proud libertarian who can’t read, gets aggressive with mirrors, and fucks family members.
Claims to be an egoist, but functions entirely on id
Ah, I’m very familiar with the return to monke crowd I think.
I used to listen to a pretty good podcast, Ashes Ashes (https://ashesashes.org/). Episodes would cover some aspect of modern life and, while citing quality sources, detail how that aspect of modern life is unsustainable, dependent on fragile supply chaings, and/or unable to survive climate change. It’s a good pod, 107 episodes, worth listening to, but pretty fucking grim at times.
Anyway, they had a discord server and I hung out a lot there while leaving reddit & twitter but before finding chapo.chat. It was full of terminally online “anarchists” and one occaisional visitor who would always stir shit up & definitely belongs here (Enoch, where are you?).
“Return to monke” memes were really popular there.
UlyssesT actually REALLY reminds me of the most active user on that server, in style not in content. The guy was really into Max Stirner and Egoism. He was an egoist anarchist. very weird. The only reason he wasn’t anprim was because he needed insulin and knew that primitivism would hurt him, personally.
Thank Marx you found hexbear before they indoctrinated you into their death cult <3
the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe
Muh poor innocent nazis lol
I must assume they mean the ethnic Germans of the Volga region, which Lenin established and Stalin dissolved on the advice of Beria and Molotov, relocating many of its inhabitants eastward.
Which was honestly for their own good.
ziq deserves no attention
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Exactly why we need to form a tankie / ancom alliance to noplatform primmies, lifestylists and libertarians.
I am an alt-civ communalist with a heavy emphasis on degrowth, appropriate technology, and resolving alienation by keeping most energy production on a human scale. Basically as close as you can get to anprim without saying “actually put everything back at a previous level of development”.
I still hate ziq. The strictest anti-revisionists are still more of my comrades than ziq is.
I love that even other primmies hate that lunatic, rofl.
Ziq has a lot to say about genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Let’s hear what they have to say about ethnic Germans in the Ukraine, especially Mennonites, and how they were treated by anarchists.
Let’s hear what they have to say about the genocidal actions against Catholics in Catalonia.
Let’s hear what they have to say about the Spanish anarchists who supported the Spanish colonial holdings in Morocco and the genocidal actions that were necessary to suppress Moroccan uprisings that threatened the colonial domination?
What’s that? They’re all out of breath from denouncing what the tankies did in history that they didn’t manage to get around to denouncing what anarchists did in history? Goodness gracious!
There’s three ways that this always proceeds, in my experience:
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Open genocide denialism
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Rules-lawyering genocide
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“Actually I denounce all of those examples of genocide carried out by anarchists (it’s just that I don’t ever talk about it, strangely enough) but you are making an unfair generalisation by holding me personally accountable for the actions of historical anarchism which I do not support”-style hypocritical anarchistier-than-thou nuance-cuck nonsense
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Hodza children have full autonomy
this literally all is just “Ugh, Mom!!! I don’t want to go to bed at 10:30!!! YOU’RE THE WORST!!!”
It doesn’t understand culture, either. Hadza kids might not have individual adults yelling at them (I have no idea how Hadza people raise kids) but those kids still live in a society where the people around them are modelling behavior, teaching skills, showing them good and bad conduct and what is and isn’t approved of by society. “No one tells them to eat their vegetables” doesn’t mean they’re not part of a society and by necessity have to operate within the norms and rules that society establishes for itself. One of the theories for why a lot of hunting and gathering societies seem pretty easy going is that if you don’t get along with your community your community will stop helping you, and then you’ll die pretty quickly the next time you get sick or break a bone, or just have no one to watch for predators while you take a shit.
Vietnam’s Montagnard persecution
I’m sure the person using the archaic French colonial label for them cares very much about the persecution of the đồng bào.
I really truly believe reducing a political sect to “they just silly naive kids who believe in a utopia” is very short sighted. It’s done to us communist as well literally all of the time so why would you think it’s a smart idea to reduce some other sect to the same label?
It’s a stretch calling primitivism a utopia. They want to kill almost everyone so they can forage for berries where our cities used to be.
The sense of utopia as “a place that does not and probably could not exist” probably applies. Their paradise is the mass grave of everyone else, something that isn’t likely to happen under any circumstances at all.
There are a whole lot of people who claim the title “anarchist” and have nothing meaningfully in common. The “We’re going to build parallel power in order to devour the state from within until the withered husk collapses” people aren’t really the same kind of animal as the “I want to live in a cave and eat bugs and sticks and I am very mad that other people think this is weird” people or the "BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD LET THE UNIVERSE BURN DEATH TO THE FALSE EMPEROR “anarcho-nihilists”.
At this point I think the term obscures far, far more than it enlightens. Someone saying “I’m an anarchist” tells you nothing meaningful about their beliefs, their goals, or their theory.
Don’t the Hazda people that still live exclusively through foraging and hunting have a life expectancy in the mid 30s, and an infant mortality rate above 20 percent? And don’t the majority of Hazda people live with some forms of modern lifestyle? Last I read, of the 1300 Hazda people in Tanzania, only 300-400 are exclusively hunter gatherers.
Of course, ecofascists want everyone to die in their 30s. They literally write fanfic where 99% of humanity dies and the survivors live in caves lol.
I don’t know, but mortality rates are tricky at the best of times. High infant mortality is a given without modern vaccinations and medicines, but depending on how you count mortality then those infant deaths might be draggin the life expectancy of the overall population way down. This is what’s usually going on when Medieval Europe is said to have a life expectancy of 30 years. Folks routinely lived in to their 40s, 50s, or even 70s, but the huge rate of mortality in infancy and childhood brought the overall life expectancy way down.
The other thing is; There aren’t very many Hadza people, and iirc they’re surrounded on all sides by agriculturalists and have been subject to violence from both expanding agriculturists and pastoralists seeking new land for crops and livestock, and from European colonialists, for as long as anyone right now can remember. The 19th and early 20th century notion that folks like the Hadza and the San are ancestral primitive cave people living the same way people did a million years ago is basically just racist claptrap at this point. All these small hunting and gathering groups have been in contact with their neighbors the whole time. Like, for all of human history. Their cultures aren’t “primitive” or “ancient”, these people are adapting to changing and modern circumstances just like everyone else. If they’re still building tools and housing the same way people in the region were a thousand years ago that’s because people think those techniques are good and are well suited to the environment and the resources and tools that are available in the region.
But they’re also in contact with other people. Like Hadza people have been dealing with Bantu speaking people for a long, long time. So Hadza culture doesn’t just exist in this mystical ancient vacuum, it also exists in relation to and in response to Bantu culture. There’s some thought that some current hunting and gathering cultures might have been pastoralist (herders) or even agricultural cultures many centuries ago but adopted hunting and gathering as they were forced in to more and more marginal lands by the expansion of other peoples. You can kind of see this on the periphery of the expansion of empires all over the place - Eventually you hit a point where you can’t grow wheat or corn, and you can’t ranch goats or cattle, and much of the time the agriculturalists and pastoralists stop and given up because they cannot practice their economy further out in to the bush or the desert or whatever. But the indigenous people of the region, usually greatly reduced in numbers by violence, do often know how to live in those conditions and continue to do so. They often become mysticized and quasi-legendary to the settlers when mostly they just know where to find water and good things to eat, and how to avoid the really dangerous snakes.
The idea that if Ziq could just kill enough people then everyone would live like Hadza people is very silly. Folks adapt to their environments and the resources available to them. Hadza people live in small mobile groups, at least in part, because that structural organization is very suitable to the world they live in. Without herds and crops they don’t have much need for complex government or military structures. Without any fixed resources to defend they can use what is probably the most efficient military strategy in terms of conserving resources and lives; If someone is bothering you, leave.
If the population was very suddenly reduced to 20 million we wouldn’t get some utopian hunting and gathering an-prim paradise. people would set right about to re-inventing herding and agriculture and water mills and all the rest of it. It might take another 400,000 years (though even if all the institutional knowledge was lost we’d still have domesticated animals and crops and people would figure out that cultivating those is useful in, I figure, about 20 years tops) but we’d get back to building cities and shit. It’s what we do. If all the people around the Hadza up and decided to move to Missouri one day the Hadza would probably expand in to the land they left behind and their economy and culture would begin adapting to the new situation, too.
