This might be a silly question, so I want to preface it with an apology in advance and if you think there is a better place to ask please let me know.

I’ve come across a large number of self-described “anarchists” or “non-communist leftists,” or the like, mostly online,thanks to where I live (谢天谢地). But whenever you look a bit closer, the pattern is the same: underneath the aesthetics and language, it’s just liberalism. Pro-NATO positions, contempt toward the global periphery, and extremely reactionary responses when imperialism or capitalism are seriously questioned.

So my question is: Is adopting these leftist identities a kind of defensive mechanism (an attempt to distance themselves from the real-world damage caused by liberal ideology) or am I misunderstanding what’s actually going on?

  • purpleworm [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    23·
    3 months ago

    I think the answer to this depends a lot on the kind of people you are talking about, by which I mean what their social position is. For a lot of people, “anarchist,” “libertarian socialist,” etc. is basically a consumer identity or similar category of personal aesthetic. This is especially true in my experience of young people and academics, though of course it manifests differently in how they discuss the topic in either case. They are still manifestly liberals, they just treat leftism as a matter of fashion.

    Shitty lemmy users are not the first time that I’ve seen self-described “anarchists” do literal Nazi apologia to attack the Soviet Union, people actually say that shit in the real world too, albeit much more rarely. I struggle to care about people attacking Stalin or whatever, but the people I have in mind were all downplaying or expressing “positive aspects” of Operation Barbarossa.

    A lot of people in neoliberal societies are politically defeatist and they are only not-capitalist-realist in terms of utopian fantasies that they can never connect to any sort of real-world politics beyond making cooperatives and giving to charity. And maybe calling for a general strike for which the infrastructure does not remotely exist.

    I agree with what others like Luke said too, this is just something that I’ve personally seen too much.

    Edit: Oh yeah, and like Damascusart says, because liberalism is the only “real” opinion, being a leftish liberal becomes the ultimate Good Person position and people who pride themselves on that sometimes do literally feel threatened by communist criticisms of their professed beliefs. This is again something that I can attest to real world experience with, though I wouldn’t call it ubiquitous in most lib spaces.