DictatrshipOfTheseus [comrade/them, any]
It is true that there are plenty of people who use reddit that are not racist (setting aside the idea that everyone who lives in a racist society, which we in the west do, has at least some internalized racism). Some people on reddit even actively fight against it, to their credit. That said, as a platform, both in terms of the people who run and administrate it, as well as the larger majority mass of users, definitely tends towards racism. This can be seen in all kinds of ways, from admins always siding with of racists over bipoc to the frothing-at-the-mouth hatred of the “orcish hordes” that dominates in every popular subreddit (and the silencing of those who offer even the mildest criticism of it), to the understandable yet very telling rabid defense of the privilege so many of them insist they earned when it is nothing more than old fashioned white privilege. You seem to agree that reddit is bad for its corporatist bullshit and its laser focus on profit at the expense of people. We agree. But that alone is inherently systemically racist for sociological reasons that I’m assuming you’re aware of, given some of your other comments. For all these reasons, it is hardly an overreaction or unfair to refer to reddit as “a racist website.”
As for “authoritarian” communists, all I’ll say here is that I hope you can learn to seriously, genuinely question a lot of what you have learned from what amounts to an ocean of propaganda deliberately spread for decades (even over a century) to demonize any successful socialist revolution. I’d encourage you to ask some of us “tankies” in good faith about some of that propaganda in other appropriate threads.
Good explanation.
Just last night I also found myself explaining the misunderstanding around the term “liberal” to someone else who was talking as though they thought we were using conservative talking points because we were using anti-liberal language. I would bet we’ll be seeing a lot of that now. Here was my attempt to clear up the misconception:
Just so it’s clear, OP isn’t drawing a distinction here between amerikkkan liberals and conservatives. A lot of times when leftists complain about liberals or liberalism, people who aren’t exposed to leftism will mistakenly take this to mean that we’re pro-conservative. We are NOT pro-conservative.
When we talk about liberals, we mean in the broader sense of people who subscribe to the philosophical tenants of liberalism, or in other words, people who think that capitalism is a good and/or natural thing. To us, conservatives are pretty much just a subset of liberals who have even more reactionary opinions about certain social issues than the standard liberal. This misunderstanding isn’t the fault of the people who misunderstand, mainstream media depicts all politics as being a binary battle between the dems and the GOP, a sport where two teams face off and that’s it. But in much of the world, “liberal” is actually synonymous with right wing and that’s how we use it. In the US, liberal tends to mean “left wing” but only because the overton window is so grotesquely far to the right, and anticapitalism isn’t even a consideration in US politics.
Forgive me if you already know all this, but because we’re seeing new people around here due to federation, I think it’s a good idea to point this out and avoid the possibility of conflating our utter contempt for liberalism with any sort of positive view of conservatism.
Im not liberal, im a socialist.
A “socialist” who believes capitalist propaganda and refers to the largest and most successful actually existing socialist state’s functionality as “antics”? Sounds pretty liberal to me.
And im not American either :)
The person you’re replying to wasn’t suggesting that you were. He signs all his comments with that phrase at the end, and strangely enough, it’s almost always fitting.
Anyway, yes, this instance does tend to try to talk about China accurately, and it does so in the face of overwhelming torrents of western propaganda cultivated by the capitalist’s/imperialist’s demonization of the state that poses the largest contemporary threat to their hegemony.
I just edited my comment to fix my use of “they/their” into “he/him” as per the other commenter’s pronouns. I mention this specifically because you said in another comment for us to “stop being against lgbtq.” This instance is the most lgbtq-positive space I’ve ever encountered on the internet. We frequently get hated on by transphobes because we include pronouns next to usernames. We were, and to my knowledge still are, the only instance to do so.
I’m not the person you’re replying to, but I think you missed the whole point of GarbageShoot asking you specifically about Allende.
just based on a small snippet of reading about them, I think in general […]
I think this is the main problem here: a lack of knowledge about the historical context of “authoritarian” socialist projects, but nevertheless making generalized statements about them without even considering the material reasons why they were by necessity “authoritarian.” Read up more about the history of Chile and consider what happened to Allende and the hope of a socialist Chile. Who came after Allende (and almost as important, who installed that successor)? Why do these events seem so familiar when learning about every other attempt, successful or not, to bring about a communist society? When you’ve done that, you will at the very least have a leg to stand on when criticizing so-called tankie authoritarianism.
I’d also suggest reading The Jakarta Method. Here’s a somewhat relevant quote from it:
This was another very difficult question I had to ask my interview subjects, especially the leftists from Southeast Asia and Latin America. When we would get to discussing the old debates between peaceful and armed revolution; between hardline Marxism and democratic socialism, I would ask: “Who was right?”
In Guatemala, was it Árbenz or Che who had the right approach? Or in Indonesia, when Mao warned Aidit that the PKI should arm themselves, and they did not? In Chile, was it the young revolutionaries in the MIR who were right in those college debates, or the more disciplined, moderate Chilean Communist Party?
Most of the people I spoke with who were politically involved back then believed fervently in a nonviolent approach, in gradual, peaceful, democratic change. They often had no love for the systems set up by people like Mao. But they knew that their side had lost the debate, because so many of their friends were dead. They often admitted, without hesitation or pleasure, that the hardliners had been right. Aidit’s unarmed party didn’t survive. Allende’s democratic socialism was not allowed, regardless of the détente between the Soviets and Washington.
Looking at it this way, the major losers of the twentieth century were those who believed too sincerely in the existence of a liberal international order, those who trusted too much in democracy, or too much in what the United States said it supported, rather than what it really supported – what the rich countries said, rather than what they did.
That group was annihilated.
I guess I’m trying to understand what makes this a liberal viewpoint or why do you classify it as such?
I guess I am just trying to understand the viewpoints of my communist fellow humans
I’m not the person you’re responding to, but… A liberal viewpoint (in this context) is one that is idealist, not materialist. A liberal will point at a policy ostensibly drawn up to address some given issue, and whether that policy is effective or not, or even whether the policy is enforced, will claim that “something is being done” to address that issue. In a liberal framework, it is the policy itself that satisfies the condition that the issue has been addressed, not any actual action that makes a real material difference to solve or change the issue. Again, it’s just idealism vs materialism. Liberalism is a philosophy based on the former, communism is (among other things) a philosophy based on the latter.
“Elevatorgate” and especially Dawkins’ “Dear Muslima” letter made me step away from atheism as any organized movement.
the idea of standing with that bunch of euphoric reactionaries was unbearable by that point.
Exactly the same for me. Well, I would say I stuck with the movement a little longer, but only as part of the sliver that had no choice but to shift the focus of criticism towards our former atheist “allies,” the reactionaries and sex pests, which in turn made us the evil enemy SJWs, the fanatic feminists, the beta cucks, and the cringe white knights. While it was shocking how elevatorgate suddenly revealed this giant gaping rift in the community, and how full the entire atheist movement had been with the most disgusting of reactionaries, it was one of those things where in hindsight, all the misogyny, racism, white supremacy, etc. had been visible just beneath the surface all along, but had been easy to overlook as just a nasty patina sticking to the broader movement. Nah, turns out it was actually deeply intertwined with it.
I still think Rebecca Watson is cool (for anyone who doesn’t know but is interested, “elevatorgate” centered on her because she dared to say “guys, don’t do that” when referencing being hit on by a stranger very creepily when alone in an elevator at a convention, and was subsequently hounded, harassed, ridiculed, and derided even by the famous Dickie Dawkins). She still to this day puts out some banger videos sometimes. I will always have a soft spot for PZ Myers and his Pharyngula blog that I spent so much time on, finding community there because even then it was clear how ugly and toxic so much of reddit was. Pharyngula was like the last bastion where social justice was recognized as good and necessary, rather than demonized as something that needed to be snuffed out.
I’m also still an atheist. But that movement is dead, just as it fucking should be. Amusingly, but also sickeningly, the larger fascist-adjacent majority of it kind of morphed over time into things like Jordan Peterson’s cult, at least the parts that didn’t just fizzle out into the background noise islamaphobia and generic chuddery.
I should confess too, reading Christopher Hitchens (one of the “four horsemen”) was definitely a big stepping stone on the path towards my own radicalization. Though I wince to say it now, I did admire him back then and he wrote about being, or having been a Trotskyist, which was one of those little epiphanies that showed there were actually political positions to the left of “as left as it gets” liberal. Wanting to find out more about that is eventually what lead me to Lenin.
To be clear, I’m not saying that’s what radicalized me, though it was a small part of it. I’m mostly just commenting to respond to the New Atheist part of the discussion.
I am actually tempted to put some feelers out for the starting of a community researching project. I think we have a varied knowledge base and if we could put our collective minds to use in mapping the history of a country/region/issue in a similar way to the Ukraine stuff.
I think this is an excellent idea and believe that @SeventyTwoTrillion@hexbear.net has said something very similar. It was the major impetus behind the COTW thing that was started a few weeks back. It might be worth hitting him up to discuss further.