Watching young people trying to be Socialists nowadays is painful.
Most of them are still in that awkward stage where your radical views are being assiduously interrogated by people around you ("what about Stalin? what about Pol Pot? what about the Soviet Union collapsing? what about north Korea? what about what about what about???") and because they lack the theory, the historical insight and the data to properly understand and explain what Socialist experiments in the XX century tried to do and where and why they were derailed, they usually seek refuge in utopianism.
They start describing themselves as libertarian socialists, left-communists, anarchists, and try to out-do their critics by being the harshest critics of the actually existing Socialism themselves, because they think they're being perceived by others as such rebellious spirits so eager for liberty that they criticize Left and Right with the same relentless fire!! While in reality they're being perceived for what they are: confused young people too chickenshit to be associated with failure, and finding refuge in fantasy as response.
How, in God's name, do we fix this? The right theory and the right teaching of history can give people the foundations to process a thousand Stalins or Venezuelas without losing conviction or entering in panic "Quick! Find ideology that rejects all of those experiments in principle to avoid shame!" mode. But few people learn that by themselves, and we don't have solid organizations where more experienced/educated members can educate newcomers.
people aren't incentivized to become socialists solely through reading "theory, the historical insight and the data." they are incentivized to do so when their current political and economic system is failing. if they have nothing left to lose, then even the worst exaggerations of stalin and pol pot would be preferable to their current conditions.
Carson Harris
I went through that stage but instead of going "oh yeah im a lib socialist" I WENT FULL FUCKING ☭TANKIE☭ The secret lies in the fact that I had entierly convinced myself that communism = good guys and any opposition = bad guys and that anyone who badmouthed the USSR or made ant anti-communist statement was lying. Good thing I grew out of that thinking, read and got myself a more nuanced view (Still a ☭TANKIE☭, less overly zealous)
You ground this in the narrative you formed based on very limited experience. In my experience those who describe themselves as anarchists, libsocs, etc. definitely do not criticise the left and right to the same degree.
You also assume that people decide on their ideology by reading history and theory. Most people are shaped first by and in response to their material conditions, upbringing, surroundings. Only later do they find labels for their beliefs and start reading history/theory (which will be biased).
When people start jumping into ideologies without thinking for themselves we get the kekistanis on the right and the nabols on the left, to whom politics is about the memes, the lulz, and the triggered opposition. Twitter, for fuck sakes, is the battle ground of these kids.
And you know, you just know these overzealous M-Ls are just high schoolers that will abandon leftism as soon as school starts getting hard, or they find a job, or a gf. That's why I'm so against indulging these glorifications of any socialist leader, against the memes and against the shitposting. I've been a leftist all my life and my life is defined by the struggle, because the struggle is all there is. I hate it when kids come and think of leftism, communism, anarchism, socialism as a hobby. They're an M-L just like someone is a model airplane builder.
Grayson Allen
Fucking cringe shit man. Shitty cunts like them are more harmful than any right winger.
Xavier Johnson
Retarded ☭TANKIE☭.
James Gutierrez
Why do you blame the young people that just became communist instead of the assholes shaming them for their beliefs? I mean, if you are in your early twenties it's impossible to have read so fucking much and are this well-versed in history and economic theory that you can properly respond to things like the calculation problem with peer-reviewed data, especially if you are not interested in that kind of stuff. These fucking boomers that gish-gallop young communists with the muh gorillions muh free market bullshit are in most cases much dumber than the young communist they are attacking, because becoming a communist in a society which constantly pumps out institutional evidence of how great neoliberalism requires a lot of critical thinking and deliberate search for alternative explanation, which is what the anti-communist normie never did in 90% of the cases, they just read Steven Pinker and watch Bill Nye the science guy and thought of it as some epitome of critical thinking.
In fact, young people having political ideologies is already looked down upon, and most boomers unironically believe that the youth is worse off because they spend too much time on their smartphone, not that the upcoming generation will be significantly poorer than their parents. These boomers assholes are bullshitters who take out their inferiority complex on young people actually thinking about political ideas and call them utopians or dangerous radicals. Shaming young people for being socialists is scraping the bottom of the barrel, because the media and the rest of society backs you up here and you are never the underdog. So don't blame some young people who just became politically conscious for not able to perfectly deter a barrage of bullshit fired at them everytime they even slightly reveal their beliefs.
Julian Morales
That being said, I think it would be a worthwhile project to design some manual how to argue with conservatives and liberals, sort of like the leftist version of Shapiro's "How to argue with leftists and how to destroy them". It should address the most common accusations, like the gorillions, "that wasnt real socialism, right??", le basic economics meme, "capitalism has listen millions out of poverty", etc. and provides answers to that in a concise way with footnotes for further references. The masterpost in r/communism about debunking anti-communist rhetoric is already a good start but it should be improved a lot. As someone who enjoy autistically debating with anti-communists, I've learned a few arguments that they come back from.
Zachary Clark
*learned a few arguments that they never come back from
Sorry for spelling mistakes, I'm typing with my phone. Duh, my home internet is down till tomorrow.
John Johnson
We're in a stage of rapidly accelerating alienation and atomization in the context of a declining American empire. One result is that young people working in shitty jobs and living in shitty apartments are now even more frantically searching around for some kind of identity and some semblance of psychological security, and their ideas about doing revolutionary politics doesn't extend beyond arguing with people on Facebook. They tend to do this on their own, cobbling together some extremely online mish-mash of an identity, because as workers they have no identity or culture they can call their own – and collective organization on the left is weak.
The parties that do exist also tend to function somewhat like cults, with high barriers to entry, and they burn their people out. You're a newly-radicalized communist and you see the enormous weight of the world and … then what? I've seen anarchist groups go from zero to 100 very quickly – like a tea kettle with steam shooting out the top – and then the thing implodes. I think there should be more ways for people to participate in a kind of low-pressure way where people can find little tasks that you plug away at in little bits over time. You know, start out by saying this is a 20-year project, not a next-month project, or (directed at the socdems) a two-year project to elect Bernie Sanders or whoever.
Anyways, what we're seeing is still probably encouraging in its way, as the young people called themselves Juche-Gucci Gang Marxists are trying things out and seeing what works and what doesn't. I don't have all the answers. You maybe shouldn't be too hard on them because if you're a communist then odds are you're probably fucked up in some way too. I don't mean this in a pejorative sense, you've just been fucked up by capitalism so it's totally understandable. I know I'm fucked up.
In my experience with socialist groups they will often do "how to talk about socialism" sessions. I've found it helpful.
Nobody is blaming young people, just saying that there's not enough socialist material out there for newcomers to refine their views so they often fall for traps. Spare us your normie millennial vs boomers rant.
Don't agree with all of it but it's worth reading nonetheless – very critical of the PSL and a kind of burnout culture within it. The part about newly-radicalized leftists hyperventilating about the latest imperialist outrage (and the socialist movement's inability to both calm this down and direct this in a productive way) rings very true to me.
Christian Johnson
Dumb determinism. People don't automatically turn left-wing when the system fails, because without the necessary education they're just as likely to blame proletariant institutions for such failure. In fact attacking unions and social programs for the flaws of capitalism is one of the oldest trick in the book. The biggest period in growth of left-wing class consciousness occurred during the relatively stable and peaceful days of the Second International, because a lot of effort went on educating and spreading propaganda. Since then we've had several episodes of economic and political crisis that failed to shift mainstream political sentiments at all. You have a bad understanding of the concept of base and superstructure.
Lucas Nelson
There is a lot of material out there but you have to actively look for it. This is why you certainly have to rely on your peers and maybe even reddit to point you in the right direction because all this stuff is pretty buried.
Samuel Sullivan
You can't invalidate someone's generalization based on personal experience just because it doesn't match yours, and sure, people often internalize whatever political philosophies are accepted in the mainstream and thus diffused in society and its institutions, so their political development is more left to circumstances than individual agency, but a "radical" turn by definition implies a break with this, and how to develop this sentiment, not its origin, is what's being discussed here.
Noah Wright
jesus christ rhizzone still exists?
Liam Morales
Now imagine if that guy falling apart over Syria happened to be the board owner of a certain left-leaning Zig Forums board Hmm might explain some things, wouldn't it
Henry Johnson
I don't know how you can stand reading this shit m8. I hate the way these people write
Ayden Morgan
Young people are either sucdems or larpy occupy wallstreet types
Brody Green
I don't really care what way people position themselves towards previous socialist experiments. What matters is their theory going forward.
Giving all those details doesn't help in a conversation with non-socialists. You have to signal that there's some fundamental ideological difference between what you're doing and what was done in the past. Bringing up endless data points here is just as unconvincing as Nazis trying to prove racial differences with the same method.
Then they'll hit you with the "NO TRU SOCIALISM" fallacy and call you an utopian dreamer.
Whatever way you do it, you're fucked. Either you are called a Holocaust denier for defending the USSR or you'll be treated like an infantile.
Asher Hernandez
Butthurt ☭TANKIE☭ thread
Jason Jackson
I just use socialist examples that I actually agree with, like Yugoslavia, Anarchist Catalonia, Burkina Faso, Chile, one big US military base in Syria, etc. You don't always have to bring out your ☭TANKIE☭ card and start sucking comrade Stalin's dick.
But it’s true – the USSR never developed a genuine form of proletarian democracy. It had some democratic elements but it fell pretty short. That’s not to say the USSR was all bad,m
Logan Garcia
and never in your life doing any real life action, that's what socialism is all about
Easton Morris
If you're dealing with people like that you better just push through it. Point out that you aren't making any judgement on whether the USSR was socialism, and that people who care about dumb semantics like that are infantile.
Easton Edwards
Or edgy jucheists
Connor Diaz
Well now you're just broad accusations without substance.
