How did anti-capitalist internet communities turn so overwhelmingly Marxist-Leninist? A few years ago most of them were still predominantly anarchist, yet today you can hardly find any. Even explicitly anarchist communities are full of Marxists these days. I understand why the Spectacle prefers communists to anarchists, but I have no idea how the dominant ideology shifted. Do you have any ideas?
How did anti-capitalist internet communities turn so overwhelmingly Marxist-Leninist...
Liam Diaz
Benjamin Diaz
Because it's the edgiest, most "shock value" ideology you can get on the left that can still be taken seriously, and allows you to use the excellent aesthetics of 20th century ML states. It's an evolution of the phenomenon where every kid on the internet became an anime nazi back in 2016 - transgressive teenagers and 20-somethings looking to express opposition to the status quo online and latching onto whatever looks and sounds the best.
There is no other 'real movement' or ideological shift behind it; internet 'MLs' are mostly content-less and theory-less; they're in it for the memes and the ability to rag on America and the internet nazis. The idea that disconnected semi-anonymous kids on the internet would adopt a doctrine that calls for a tightly-disciplined, centralized vanguard party comes off as farcical and stupid otherwise.
Zachary Hernandez
Can you be more specific? Only one that comes to mind is Zig Forums and there the BO had to purge the board and imported tankies from outside. Otherwise I'll try to address the "ex-anarchist ML" for you.
The majority of internet anarchists don't read, so when confronted with questions they would have been able to answer if they had bothered to read some relatively short texts they crack. Bad Mouse is an example of this, where he became an anarchist because of youtube videos and stopped being one because of questions regarding anarchist revolution and the glory of free healthcare in cuba. Unlike Anarchists MLs have parties pushing information at a relatively large scale so you'll get the meme of "I was an anarchist until I read State and Revolution" significantly more than you get the converse.
As points out ML is an edgier position than anarchism where most of these people are. This allows them to wrap up themselves in cloth that sends boomers into autistic rage and let them joke about killing their parents for being counter-revolutionary. This is also why depending on where you are you can get called a liberal sjw cuck homosexual by a crypto-fascist ML whose never touched a tit or a white chauvinist heteronormative patriarchial manarchist by a queer non-binary ML who begs for medical help between long-winded threads that say very little.
ML parties are larger than anarchists groups and in addition to propaganda power this means more an appearance of doing something. In practice this means voting, recruiting, or waving signs for a couple of hours. Anarchists rightfully argue this is a waste of time and instead only show up for shit like occupy, which is generally better recieved by people than some annoying fringe party asking them if they've accepted the immortal science of Marxism-Leninism as their saviour and calling them cia agents if they haven't.
From this anarchists need to learn how to get people to read first, organize with fellow workers and use spectacle from occupy or antifa to get new comrades, and ignore the edge because the increased numbers are useless bloat.
Joshua Nguyen
Quads speak the truth.
Grayson Russell
/thread
Zachary Sullivan
These are a major part of it, but don't underestimate the alienated youth's desire for a strong father figure provided by strongmen like Stalin, bucko.
Henry Ross
You're just coming out of your social bubble mate.
Xavier Anderson
Nope in most countries we had indymedia which is mostly anarchist(it was pretty much left(y?)pol before left(y)pol but with less anglo staliNEETs)
Revleft another important foroum had only a minoritie (yet extremly vocalismail is a fag)of mls in general(cause people there actually knew theory)
StaliNEETism spread with americans turning from burniebros(socdems) to tankies(socdics) mostly in reddit and other social media
Some staliNEETs were(i imagine) in "soviet empire"
M-L parties ,while more ,had small influence on the internet mainly trough internet newspapers and historical blogs
More and more stalinist sites spread mainly in facebook ,bur i see s fall lately in my country
Its worth noting that even when liberals had a beef with ☘️skeptics☘️ both were generaly criticized in anglo leftist circles and zizek was well-known
Sry for bad english and knowledge of anglo internet shit
David Jenkins
Nah, more like they are invading my social bubbles.
Gavin Carter
...
Dylan Jones
A generalization i am willing to make is that an important reason staliNEEts did not spread was cause we had one blog saying how Stalin did nothing wrong (maoist) and one hoxhaist so they did not work well together
Nolan Nelson
Part3
Anarchist dominated the internet to avoid the "fash pigs" with user shit
So no reason to deny it( i am not an anarchist btw)
Part 4 coming
Juan Richardson
Got interested in Marx etc. within the past few years along with 500,000 other disillusioned millennials and I agree with
That said the few MLs I actually know are among the smartest, most well-read people I know. But then I see these other ones on the internet and I'm not impressed. Well, you can't generalize I suppose.
That really hits the nail on the head I think, and a lot of them still act like anarchists. No offense. Where I get bothered is when they go after the reformo-socialists of the Jacobin/DSA milieu for not being the militant, disciplined vanguard party the "correct" theory calls for. Constructive criticism is one thing, and theory criticism as well (I think the smart MLers are right in their criticisms most of the time!), but I don't have much patience for the kind of naked hostility out there. No matter how correct your theory is, you will lose by default if you're unable to match the reformists in terms of basic consistency and quality in terms of work and output – and that's what they do better than anyone else on the left hands down. They will get most of the eyeballs and traffic and they will win and you (talking to MLs here) will not.
If you're going to dedicate your life to being part of a professional vanguard party, then you need to act like it and treat it like it's your work and not a hobby. Most treat it like a hobby where they have a hammer & sickle gamer channel on YouTube, or whatever you like, which is fine provided you understand that to be just a hobby and not confuse the two.
Oh that too for sure. Here's the thing: Most of the actual job growth in the U.S. at least since the recession has been in independent contract and temp work. Employment is insecure, marriage rates are also falling because people move around too much. Why settle down if you can't settle down in terms of work? So no wonder people are attracted to daddy strongmen and why disciplined socialism is popular on the left. The old structureless Occupy model is dead.
Liam Martinez
A couple other things: you wanna know why the structured, disciplined *and* militant model runs into problems? Liability. It may come as a surprise to some leftists, but you can and will be taken to court for breaking the law. The anarchists figured this out awhile ago and structured – or de-structured – themselves accordingly.
And you know who adopted a structured, disciplined and militant model and got destroyed? The alt-right before Unite the Right in Charlottesville, as afterwards most of the orgs became mired in lawsuits and investigations. These groups were easily characterized as "private military forces" (which is what they were) and thus potentially liable as organizations for any damage or destruction they caused. One of the Nazi groups at that event, the Traditionalist Worker Party, was organized as a disciplined vanguard party and was sued because of that, although of course that group no longer exists because the leader was having an affair with his second-in-command's wife.
Don't do that.
Also – Redneck Revolt, the only left-wing group I know of that tried to do this, had to settle with the city of Charlottesville agreeing to stay out of town and not return in exchange for the city dropping a lawsuit against them. And this is before we get to the issue with the state's expertise in infiltrating and disrupting such groups.
Anyways I don't know where I'm going with this but it feels like the ML model was successful in countries where states were simultaneously weak and highly oppressive. Participating in bourgeois parliaments was prohibited, while vast spaces were effectively ungoverned, and the security services' brutality was only matched by their buffoonery and general incompetence – to the point where the security services would use radical groups to target their own rivals within the security services. Just unbelievable reading about the history of this stuff.
Most of us are not living in that world. So I guess I'm partial to ML in terms of organization-building (I don't like "structurelessness") but the liability issues will screw you if you break the law.
Jayden Martin
Logan Peterson
Part4
In the internet we can see what i think many great leftist forsee
That the dialectics advance even in leftism itself
Here we see an evolution from national to international
Before the internet most m-ls(maoist,hoaxhaist,whateverist trots to some extent) just bought there party paper or check its blog ,most leftcoms stayed in there bookclubs and groups,anarchist on there squats 'nd shit
this structure helped leftist survive some of the hardest hits(fall of ussr,etc.)
But it helped sectarianism and make it easyer for leftist to fight eachother in the street(true story)
Now we can share memes,opinions and knowledge while having a sense of community (for example we all cate about lefy(y)pol and unite when replying to bait) but of course we debate with the most retarded so-called leftist while the more we care about liberating the proles of the world the more easily anxious and we become(we want revolution right here right now)
So like every change it has its pros and cons
Thats all folks
Bentley Brooks
That looks written from a US perspective. Almost any region of the world that isn't US or UK, MLs have way more presence.
They are anti-communist students writing "theory" made of incoherent economics (muh calculation problem, muh UBI, muh stakeholder socialism).
Connor Morris
Living in a contry with a large ml tradition
There is a huge difference between the internet staliNEET and actual leninist
Firstly ,while most of them dont give a shit about stalin,even pro stalin m-ls will hardly survive r/fullcommunism
Also most voters of actual ml parties are honest yet theorylet oldfags
But there are still some young and well intenioned members ,but not that many compared to other leftist non-ml parties
Brandon Ward
Maybe so and I am in the U.S. but so are a lot of these new quasi-MLs.
Whether the reformist red-liberals are right or wrong, they're doing a better job communicating their ideas and at least trying (not always that well) to act like professionals. They have an aesthetic and a style and are putting some effort into it while trying to dress and act like everyday people. If there are others out who want something more vanguardist – then do it and do a better job at it but otherwise I don't have much sympathy. A lot of these groups are frankly flat-out undisciplined which is opposite of the whole point? Like I said I know MLs that are smarter than I am but I'm not blown-away by the organizing prowess of these turbo-internet ones.
Jacob Baker
Why can’t the left have a nuanced view of government? Why is it always a choice between omnipresent autocracy and total statelessness?
William Nelson
Communism is stateless and the ML states weren't autocratic, autocratic would be like Howard Scott's autistic fantasy where we're controlled by a godlike machine network. Your "nuanced view" would look like the ML states, and seeing how they've almost all gone capitalist or disappeared that didn't work out so well.
Nicholas Collins
...
Anthony Long
Capitalism is in crisis. Political polarization increases. Identity politics make people fear their outgroup.
Then the pic's contents' kick in.
(Plus, many of them aren't actually leftists, they're U.S. liberals with Trump Derangement Syndrome. They couldn't really go up the compass, so they moved left.)
Nathan White
you're generalizing.
you're generalizing.
shut the fuck up before you both start looking more like morons. unless you like it.
Camden Barnes
damn some chan users are more retarded than whats possible irl. beautiful. what a dumb af image. as if everything had to be global and absolute lol.
nah, all that is your opinion. I always laugh my ass off at the kind of people who take left vs right and do political tests seriously. jesus
Carter Wright
That explains why i no longer see emo girls or anarchist.
Because their ideologically split from one another.
There's a Video of the Occupy Wall Street Protest where you can see the Ideological split in front of your eyes.
reason why i full on support Wall Street till this day.
Hunter Butler
Internet MLs are edgy teens or old. The latter has the best theory and the former the least.
IRL MLs are old, actually organizing or like super hyper fucking edgy revolutionaries that have a few close friends and disappear into the forest for "training exercises".
Blake Carter
On the contrary to all those unedgy, normal anarchos?
Gabriel Phillips
Bunch of edgy feminist faggots that think they are "smashing the system" by embracing tankie horseshit and claiming to be "transgender", when in reality they are just a bunch of little shits with an annoying sense of unwarranted self importance.
Most of them are SJWs. Just look at r/socialism: Full of feminist faggotry.
Hunter Cooper
r/anarchism is just as Idpol as r/socialism and they sure as hell aren't tankies. The Idpol is more of a reddit thing than anything related to being a tankie.
James Young
My bad, I meant r/communism.
Lincoln Ramirez
Because tankies are retarded fags.
Jeremiah Thomas
Please do not conflate Marxists and Leninists with Marxist-Leninists. And it might have something to do with anarkiddies hating reading.
John Lee
Actually existing Leninists are MLs, lelinists either go leftcom like muke or agree with MLs on everything like gingeet.
Adrian Nelson
No, Leninists are not Marxists-Leninists. That would just make them Marxist-Leninists. Stop trying to conflate ideas you don't understand.
Cooper Nelson
because they are all authoritarians deep inside, but they know its wrong so they take the halved way, or either they belive in socialism, but they dont understand how it could work, hell they have no fucking idea, they WANT to belive in socialism, they dont actually do. That is I belive the predominant factor, because they dont understand how the enviroment shapes a man, they are sceptic of their own believes and they have conservative roots deep in their mind whose they are unaware of. They see something that has never done before as impossible, even ridiculous, they deeply fear the unknown. In short words, they are hidden conservative self lying pussies
Justin Gutierrez
Yes the groups that call themselves Leninists, put Lenin's works second to only Marx in their reading lists, and whose praxis draws upon the works of Lenin are all fakes. Clearly the Real Leninists are the internet theory wizards who could convince everyone of the truth that the USSR stopped being real Leninism if those mean anarkiddies would just read the stuff before Stalin, Trotsky, or Mao on the fake Leninists' reading lists. It's not the fault of Real Leninists that fuggen anarkiddies like Pannekoek make the obvious mistake of assuming MLs, Trots, and MLMs are Leninists just because Lenin's works are the basis of their ideology and that said fake Leninists outnumber Real Leninists by a large margin.
Christian Morgan
there are anarchists who embrace edginess, but dont forget the vast amount of intelectual-ish anarchists
Lincoln Ward
what the fuck where's the difference. Lenin considered himself a disciple of big daddy marx
Nicholas Price
Soviet propaganda + internet memes = modern "Marxism-Leninism"
Sadly, "Marxist-Leninists" are the greatest revisionists.
Their entire ideology comes from Stalin-era slogans rather than actual Marxist theory. They also conveniently sidestep the fact that under Stalin's leadership a majority of the Old Bolsheviks (among them some great thinkers and writers) were exterminated. Somehow, in the mind of a "Marxist-Leninist", this wasn't bad since those people were traitors to the Motherland. Nevermind that most of them had given their entire lives to the revolution.
If you criticize the Soviet police-state they call you a liberal or a leftcom. Meanwhile, one after another their glorious "socialist" countries have restored capitalism. But for "Marxist-Leninists" this doesn't even matter so long as the state continues to wave a red flag and call itself socialist. If it claims to be socialist, it is. This is one reason why I find Ismail so infuriating. China is clearly a country in which not only does the law of value still operate but it dominates. This is why there has been a massive construction bubble and asset inflation. Profit and value is the dominating force in the Chinese economy.
North Korea? It's socialist according to MLs. Nevermind that it's a hereditary monarchy.
Again, Marxist-Leninists are the greatest revisionists of all. According to a Marxist-Leninist a state can be socialist if the entire economy is nationalized, if only the commanding heights are nationalized, or if the state is in some stage of implementing either of the above. Socialism to a Marxist-Leninist means everything and nothing.
Camden Reyes
Maybe you should read a book and find out.
Evan Scott
So by that logic, I can keep calling anarkiddies shitbags that don't read, since that seems to be the majority of them.
Zachary Hernandez
You were going to do that anyway, with the humorous lack of self-awareness that you haven't bothered to touch an anarchist text. Just remember you're on a libcom board and it was a Leninist who destroyed Zig Forums.
Ryan Ward
i will assume then that you have no idea of what the fuck is the difference since you cant explain it to me
Blake Martin
Because anarchism is an infantile disorder and marxism-leninism is a fucking scientific outlook of capitalism.
Easton Wright
It certainly excels at establishing capitalism.
Parker Brown
Okay so "Leninists" are like Bordiga, and "Marxist-Leninists" are the Stalinists? Am I getting this right
Grayson Foster
Jesus fucking christ Leninism contains:
#1 "Vladimir Lenin Thought" (,if you may. Quite punny, right?)
#2 Bordigism
#3 Trotskyism
#4 Marxism-Leninism
Did Reddit make a brainlet drive-by or what the fuck is up with that reply-chain? Anyways you literally get the answer to this by searching for "leninism" and picking the first result (Which through anonymized search engines like Startpage or DDG is Wikipedia). Also this isn't fucking quantum mechanics, but political theory about how to do capitalism but modified to go faester :DD before "withering away" into our beloved bourgeois capitalism™! in region(s) struggling with feudal societal remnants. That's what it was designed for, that's what it still is, even in the most recent major iterations, like ML-M ("Maoism").
To answer OP
Because it's way easier to manipulate back into the status quo valuations from socialism's radical implications as a workers' movement. Introduce sleeper cells to capture representative/indirect/centralized/ positions of power (server-client and admin-poster relations obviously applies here too, as anyone who's frequented a chan semi-frequently for a couple of months will have figured out by themselves) and filter out the people who want the workers to dictate their own path, which is problematic for capital because that actually poses a threat to it's smooth continuation as a totalizing system. So spam soviet aesthetics, defend capitalists because they read a populism 101 book once and are from non-Atlantic regions, commune with fascists and kill actual socialists (i.e. workers implementing rule directly, not as opposed to indirectly) and vehemently repress your own regional working class in defense of capitalist relations whenever things get rowdy to secure your and your lackeys position as 'top dog'. That is and has always been Leninist praxis. When it was as an emerging phenomenon and as we can analyze it today, in its various Marxist-Leninist branches that have over the past decades been withering away good ol' 'mixed economies', as they're called in the "west".
Theoretical and practical revolution: p2p libertarian communist (for ancoms, leftcoms and Communalists) chan; not an imageboard, but a [share-file-here]board leveraging technologies like R e t r o S h a r e or I 2 P for next-level ends
'United front' / 'left unity' is a Leninist con THIS IS NOT A JOKE
Know your enemy, fellow worker(s) - consult history if unsure
Dominic Rodriguez
>i.e. workers implementing rule directly, not as opposed to indirectly
[ ] as opposed to*
>in its various Marxist-Leninist branches that have over the past decades been withering away good ol' 'mixed economies'
been withering away into*
Parker Diaz
Being an ML is edgy now? Okay
Xavier Nguyen
Camden Campbell
It is to your average Western liberal, compared to saying you're an anarchist or a Marxist.
Jeremiah Phillips
Eh, it's a better track record of existing socialism than that of anarchism which is plain zero.
Jordan Murphy
Pretty sure BO is a MTW SJW, but keep calling everyone you don't like a ML/L/M as if all those are interchangeable.
Charles Parker
Capitalism with a red flag isn't socialism, the only ML state that currently exists and hasn't acquiesced to capitalism is the one with sanctions preventing them from doing so.
BO called himself a tankie, is in line with actually existing Leninist parties, and went to /marx/ specifically to ask for help for shoring up ML talking points. If he's just a MTW SJW, most actually existing Leninists are as well.
I'm not calling everyone I don't like a ML, I'm calling self-described Leninists Leninists and asserting that MLs belong to the Leninist diaspora so claiming they're not Leninists is dumb. If "Leninists who hate Stalin but aren't trots" are so triggered by getting associated with MLs, perhaps they should do a better job of differentiating themselves from the majority of self-described Leninists. Sperging out with ad homs and saying to read the same works reccomend by MLs, MLMs, and Trots isn't the way to do this.
Justin Reyes
So not a Leninist.
Nathaniel Morris
...
Luke Reyes
Make an argument any time.
Bordiga a shit, read Pannekoek.
Jack Brown
Again, they don't call themselves that. You call them that. There is a difference, and you refuse to accept it because you're stupid, or because you simply want your meme ideology to mean something.
Ryder Hall
Yes they do, they call themselves Marxists, Leninists, and Marxist-Leninists/Trotskyists/MLMs. They also read Lenin and use his work to inform and justify their praxis. Just because you don't want to admit they are within the diaspora of Leninism doesn't mean that they do not claim to be so and are not Leninists.
I have not argued that all Leninists are the same you assravaged retard, even looking at the splits between ML parties you can see that. The point that you have continually been unable to argue is that MLs are within the Leninist tradition as they use his theory. Either make an argument why MLs are not in fact Leninists despite reading Lenin, partaking in praxis influenced by Lenin's theory and actions, and calling themselves Leninists or fuck off this libcom board.
My meme ideology has more orgs and people than your marxist-snowflakist ideology, which seems to only exist for those embarassed by the USSR but too brainlet to read anything but State and Revolution.
Ian Rivera
Here's a counter-ML meme for next time someone shoves a ML meme down your throat
Andrew Collins
authoritarianism is an infantile disorder lol. "muh daddy state deserves to control the way we live life because I can't do it myself!! I'm a baby waaah!".
Get a grip pusspuss lol. Work for youself and those you care about without an authority binding you like a man. A man ends his misery he doesn't not wallow.
Colton Richardson
RIP this thread
Joshua Green
Can confirm. I know one IRL, and he might just be the most interesting person I've ever met. And he's the son of a cold war defector, no less.
Internet MLs on the other hand…
Ethan Taylor
because you're comparing people who read marx with people who learn about marx through the few shit lenin has or worse they don't read and like Zig Forumstards they just fall to aesthetics "le amazing le strong leader soviet aesthetics n shit"
Jack Williams
We need more leftists King of the Hill memes.
Jack Cooper
…because shill orgs had leftover sabotage books from the cold war.
Liam Myers
Maybe these anarchists have read Marx?
Gavin Scott
Historically, ML stands for Stalinist, which is anti-Marxist as well as anti-Leninist.
Christopher James
We already had, you just have to crash on our couch because tankies fucked up your place. That's the case with this board anyway.
I'm aware of what ML means, my point is that if we were to group people who would claim the title "Leninist" it would mostly be ML or ML adjacent. I can see the argument to why it would be anti-Marxist, but not anti-Leninist. To be anti-Leninist I'd say you'd have to go with what I'd consider an unorthodox understanding of Leninism like Bordiga, but for all intents and purposes MLs opertare similarly to Lenin.
Jose Martinez
Fixed.
Jose Sanders
Bordiga certainly isn't orthodox and Lenin's critiques about participation certainly apply to him in the infamous and unread by tankies Left-Wing Communism.
Matthew Lee
Marxists-Leninists have always been bigger on numbers than every other tendency, even in the 90s, unless you count SocDems or radlibs. However most ML parties were extremely traumatized and stale in the 90s due to the fall of the USSR, there was no influx of young people which led to complete apathy which can still be seen in ML party websites that look like they are from 90s, etc. - however, things a slowly changing. ML parties are growing everywhere and you can see young people joining them a lot more, which seems like a reaction to the increasing right-wing presence in youth culture. Let's be honest, in 2000, you'd be laughed out of every youth club with your views about muh fun and muh Christian values. Paradigm has shifted a lot since then, and consequently, the radical left is growing as well.
Why MLs instead of anarchists or Leftcoms? Well, the l latter does not exist outside of WordPress blogs and undergraduate philosophy students. The former has direct action targeted very locally, which I think is outdated. I'm talking about stuff like squatting, creating "autonomous spaces" etc. is literally a joke in the face of modern capital that does nothing. MLs due to their classical political stratification often try to approach the thing on a more "national" or "international" scale. ML align with factions in geopolitics and aim for larger-scale power grabs, which make them look significantly more equipped to bring about actual change, the biggest anarchist experiments in Spain and Ukraine were very regional and born out of a civil war both times, so is Rojava. It's hard to imagine anarchists managing to to organize a large-scale insurrection, and most anarchists I meet have given up on that goal - they are content with roadblocking fascists, protesting Le Drumpf and protecting marginalized groups: Honestly that makes you more of a social worker than a revolutionary. Despite what's being said here, MLs still manage to be relevant, as we can see in Nepal for example.
What's been complained about on here are mostly the Twitter tankies. Honestly, they are their own breed and are very different from MLs you'll meet in real life. However I'll say one thing: Since a few years, historical revisionism (I don't mean that as a bad thing) about the former or current socialist states has opened the mind of a lot of people to actual existing alternatives (i.e. planned economy). The information was always kinda out there, and people like Michael Parenti have done a lot of groundwork in this regard, and once the whole "Stalin killed 100 people" bullshit gets questioned more and more and the less serious historians believe that, fear of contact with Marxism-Leninism decreases as well.
Jackson Nelson
There's a difference between IRL 'Marxist-Leninists' and people who call themselves 'MLs' online. We're talking about people like Zig Forums's BO and the people who mod most leftist subreddits, i.e. poorly-read brainlet 'tankies' who ban people for using the wrong pronouns or not hating America enough. These guys are the problem because they keep worming themselves into positions of authority online and wrecking what could be useful discussion spaces. Two years ago it was really obvious on the english-speaking internet that the majority of people were relatively reasonable if uninformed demsocs and anarchists; now that's harder to see because all these crazies are moderating the web.
Levi Ortiz
How many of these "Twitter tankies" exist? I'd say not more than thousand which is the size of a single average European ML party. They are not a majority. Then on the other hand, if you talk about stereotypes about anarchists, I've met plenty of these IRL. When people complain about MLs getting bigger try to clean your own house.
Reddit is cancerous in general, every political ideology is a parody of itself there, you get banned from libshit subreddits for not buying into Russiagate enough and it so happens you get banned on socialist subreddits for calling Trump an idiot.
These people that "worm themselves into positions of authority" and create cults are not majority ML. Have a look at the cult around Contrapoints. These radlib cults are bigger than your average trans Jucheist (she/they) with 1k followers. Please always remember the scale of influence these people actually have.
And what about the vegan black flags who believe that Stalin killed 500 gorillions and that you're a fash if you didn't vote for Hillary? What about the animal avater Leftcoms who defend necrophila and write a Zizekian analysis of Cowboy Bebop? Shit goes both ways. You don't need to psychoanalyze MLs for their supposed daddy complex or whatever when it's really just narcissistic social media culture that rewards retarded behaviour once it becomes a platform for political ideologies.
Austin Nguyen
anime avater Leftcoms*
Mason Nguyen
I get why defending necrophilia is…weird
But everything else sounds cool
Also isnt it weird that all those types of leftists sound a little anglo
Hmmmm
Robert Morris
In 1934 the CNT-FAI had members in the double digits and before 1917 the Bolsheviks were a small group compared to the size of Russia. The numbers of any socialist group are going surge more if we get close to a revolution so predicting power based on current tendency size introduces major sources of error.
That assumes these factions are going to avoid splitting in the long-term and are capable of bringing about change. Given what I see from them where I am, I seriously doubt the ability of the WWP or PSL to do so.
See pic related, even after the recent merger between the biggest two there is still conflict between the various ML and MLM parties. The splitting and infighting is a major blow to effective relevancy, which for whatever reason is less prevalent in anarchist groups.
The biggest ML experiment arose out a civil war as did the remaining ML(M) states (or close enough) and I'm willing to bet the next socialist uprising we see is going to be part of a civil war as well. Civil war is the best opportunity to seize power and if power is seized before a civil war the likelihood of civil war starting soon after is good enough to bet on given that reactionaries aren't going to go down quietly.
Twitter tankies are the MLs I've met irl(PSL and WWP) and I live in a major city in burgerland. Perhaps it's different in yuropoor, but that's what a lot of them are like overhere and the rest are grandparents. I would go as far to say between being twitter weirdos and grandpas MLs are more off-putting to normies than anarchists, who are also largely twitter weirdos that freak people out.
I have noticed this as well, and it's been a boon to all tendencies. I wouldn't credit Parenti so much as I'd credit the loss in faith or capitalism and the consistent revelations that the US did most of the same shit the USSR was accused of.
Thomas Sullivan
Anarchists don't do anything but bitch on the internet or work at hipster coffee shops & call it revolutionary
Josiah Collins