I hate to be rude to these people, but you start talking about Actually Existing Socialist Countries and all of sudden you feel like you’re talking to a libertarian who hates prisons. And I’m like have you read any of these… and its like nah.
That’s why I often don’t really suggest Naomi Klein and Bullshit Jobs because they are great points of entryism, but they just give permission for westerners to still have no historical understanding of the world around them. Spouting off about Totalitarianism.
To be clear, i wasnt trying to disparage anarchists in general. The anarchists in my life are generally some of the people who have the best grasp on group dynamics, effective mobilization, and how to show up and build community.
There is so much of this around me and its exhausting. I dont even know how to counter it, not because i dont have the information but just because the pure time and energy and effort is so much.
Also re nordic countries, if i have to explain to someone one more goddamn time how the nordic model is fucked, doctors with 1000 patient caseloads, denial of trans healthcare, internment schools for sami people that shut down not all that long ago, continuing destruction of sami rights and way of life (looking at you fosen), rampant liberalism and neoliberalism, the way various parties are trying to destroy the healthcare system a la nhs in the uk, etc etc etc… Well my head might just pop. Not to mention the horrible racism. The amount of people ive heard argue that their version of the n word isnt actually the english n word and is unrelated and therefore ok to say is just so depressing.
Im not a maoist but the phrase “no investigation no right to speak” should be used way fucking more istg
You’re good, I was just trying to be clear about where I was coming from.
I think the thing to do in these situations is to start with first principles, probably supplied by them with gentle nudging, and then simply drawing conclusions from those principles more coherently than they’ve been inclined to so far.
We seem to be speaking from experiences with somewhat different types of people despite the overlap you noted, but if it’s even slightly helpful, I wrote about the ideological tendencies of liberal academics and how it relates to people at other levels of education here: https://hexbear.net/post/5277098/6249585 . That probably doesn’t help, but I don’t think I have adequate experience to address the sort of people that you are discussing because I have had much more trouble understanding how to communicate with them.
I tend to just avoid overly-specific discussions about Nordic “socialism” by explaining that those states function as the crown jewel of a blood-soaked beast that only exists on the basis of brutal imperialism (even if it still fails to live up to what it could do domestically to boot!). And I agree on Mao, of course. idk what you mean by “maoist” in this context, but he wrote many helpful texts and honestly you would probably find several of them more helpful than talking to me, like the Peasant Movement in Hunan, etc.