Anark does (in my view) a well-cited and very polite refutation of Socialism4All’s response to one of his off-the-cuff videos, and a vastly more polite response to BadEmpanada than he deserves.
I have maintained a mostly hands-off approach to moderation in this comm (in true anarchist fashion) but I feel I must remind that this is the anarchism community, not the anarchism ghetto.
Be respectful of one-another and try to act in good faith. The bulk of this site is ML-adjacent, and I do feel that having a space for anarchists to express themselves and to share anarchist media without being dogpiled or insulted is helpful.
It goes both ways of course - I’m also expecting anarchists to follow the rules and to not be argumentative. Learning is an endless process - I advise against absolutism and dogmatism.Who knows, maybe we’re doomed to repeat the antagonism of yore - even Marx and Bakunin couldn’t figure out how to co-exist in the same forum.
Thanks to those who help maintain the comm - we do read the reports, even if it seems to fall on deaf ears. I try to avoid banning people or removing comments if I can help it, because sometimes people just make mistakes and they can’t learn if everything is censored.PS in the poorly organized (lmao) video that goes on way too long (I read the transcript instead), it fails almost immediately by deciding that the metric of whether something is capitalist is whether there are various forms of alienation per Marx, something that they also fail to describe accurately later. Imagine declaring that you read Marx, Lenin, etc, and your summary of what capitalism is, allegedly per Marx, not about the social relations of production and how they are organized, or class conflict, but simply how connected you are to the commodity you produce. But more importantly, it fails to recognize the basic Marxist conception of transformation through contradiction, of the fact that not everything simply changes at once, but builds incrementally even after rupture through opposing forces. In other words, the Marxist conception of immediately post- revolutionary society is not particularly prescriptive, and is definitely not an instantaneous destruction of all wage labor relations or even most aspects of capitalist society - just as capitalism and its conquests revolutions occurred over a period of 500+ years, never fully displacing feudal relations until extremely recently, but instead usually working under/alongside. It was the establishment of capitalists as the major ruling class that led to the more rapid (but still centuries-long!) conquest.
In other words, it is a tellingly ignorant conception of the Marxist description of post-revolutionary society that it would simply shed all aspects of capitalist society, and in fact, it just plainly flies in the face of what Marx actually said about the topic. This is because Marx’s conception is quite a bit more realistic, that what emerges from workers becoming the dominant class will not be a retreat from all of the relations and associated productive capacity they live in, but a reorientation that places actual dominant power in their hands. In fact, Marx specifically predicts that workers will rationalize otherwise capitalist production, slowly freeing it from the anarchy of the market, not throwing out all of the “hitherto” (gotcha!) relations immediately.
Authoritarian Leftism Only Achieves Capitalism: XXX Responds to @YYY and @ZZZ
Maybe it’s not what I’m expecting
[ . . . ] four successes [existing socialist projects] out of 196 failures is still an incredibly good record compared to absolutely anything else
No, it absolutely isn’t. Especially because I’m considering the four currently existing state capitalist nations successes because of the incidental fact that they just so happened to be the ones that still exist. Any of these might fail in the future and all of them appearing to be degenerating into traditional private capitalism as we speak. There is a 0% success rate when it comes to making progress towards socialism using the state and a roughly 2% success rate when it comes to bare survival. That is abysmal.
You support projects which are literally incapable of making progress toward worker control and that have a very high failure rate even though they have an extremely high birth rate. Unlike you, anarchists are honest about our failures. We know that we haven’t survived external pressure. But we know that we can cite the furthest progress towards socialism in human history.
If you’d like to learn more about how anarchists achieved that, you should learn about anarchist Spain during the Spanish Civil War
It’s what I was expecting
This is my big frustration with modern anarchism. I am deeply, deeply sympathetic to anarchism and think that most of the critiques of authority and the corrupting influence of power are valuable and insightful.
But I am also interested in helping people not die and be able to get educated, age gracefully, and live securely.
Modern anarchism doesn’t seem to have moved on in a world where nuclear weapons, digital surveillance, robotics, and electrification has dramatically enhanced the power of the state and arranged societies in ways that are difficult to decentralise. Holding up the same 3 failures with admirable characteristics and handful of small anarchish enclaves is frustrating, there are like 8 billion of us that need liberating dammit and it’s only AES societies that are making meaningful progress.
You can enumerate flaws with China sure and I’m quiet sceptical they will successfully transition away from any capitalism, but poverty elimination and the construction of a high tech educated state is admirable as fuck. If you want to do better starting with “well how did they do that and not get destroyed by the west?” seems so much more useful than starting from idealistic martyred positions.
I am deeply, deeply sympathetic to anarchism and think that most of the critiques of authority and the corrupting influence of power are valuable and insightful.
Interestingly, I find these the least sympathetic things about anarchism because they are 100% idealist. They don’t get into any of the mechanism, they deal in psychology nor sociology. They essentially assert that the observations are explained by moral failings and then build their entire system design around moral hazard.
I find the most sympathetic part of anarchism their track record of actually organizing projects to deliver direct aid, build dual power, and supplant predatory providers. Like how they literally manufacture modern medicines, or build secure communications infrastructure, or educate people on first aid and routine health monitoring. I wish MLs were doing more of this.
The serious positions that look at how alternative social arrangements have been realised. Often anthropological.
I have found most people doing mutual aid are actually not doing it from some robust position of theory but just because humans are awesome (anarchists often pointing out this quality of ours and aiming to build on it).
I have found most people doing mutual aid are actually not doing it from some robust position of theory but just because humans are awesome (anarchists often pointing out this quality of ours and aiming to build on it).
moreso, if this is the metric of success than most churches and apolitical community organizations are pretty much on par if not at larger scale than anarchists in direct material aid. I live in a city with probably some of the largest anarchist groups doing material aid and one of the dozen local food banks serves more people than all the anarchists here combined. not to mention other organizations or churches. helping people without revolutionary theory doesn’t build socialism, it enables capitalism by cleaning up the messes of capitalism
Yeah, you can see the impact of e.g. black panther lunches vs food not bombs (which I have done a bit and think it’s admirable but without the larger theory and supporting organisation does not accomplish the desired shift in class consciousness).
the feds created the school breakfast programs because they were afraid of BPP recruitment. idk if that was actually founded but it makes for good agitprop regardless.
there’s probably nothing you can do to get large swaths of the public to become principled communists in the timeframes that projects below the nation-state level operate on, shit even AES don’t turn out a population of principled communists and they teach diamat in school.
But I am also interested in helping people not die and be able to get educated, age gracefully, and live securely.
As if we aren’t?
That feels like you’re fishing for some way to be aggreived by me explaining why I don’t find modern anarchism very convincing.
I’m not going to be derailed into arguing about stuff I didn’t write down.
I am unconvinced by anarchism because I don’t see evidence of it helping millions of people in the same way other ideological projects have, nor do I see how praxis anarchists engage in will lead to this outcome in reasonable time frames.
Anarchist praxis has and does help lots of people in smaller local scales and for short times. Stuff like communities organising after disasters is an awesome example of anarchism being successful in crisis and on small scales for small periods of time. Much more successful than other ideologies in these circumstances.
I don’t see where it addresses problems on the scale of millions and billions and centuries.
That feels like you’re fishing for some way to be aggreived by me explaining why I don’t find modern anarchism very convincing.
I’m not going to be derailed into arguing about stuff I didn’t write down.Okay sorry, I misread what you wrote.
I am unconvinced by anarchism because I don’t see evidence of it helping millions of people in the same way other ideological projects have, nor do I see how praxis anarchists engage in will lead to this outcome in reasonable time frames.
The video answers these points in detail, in addition to the sources listed in the video. In particular, anarchist Spain organized on the scale of millions. Even in the very limited time that it was allowed to exist, it managed to do tremendous work implementing communism, and even after the republic fell to Franco, anarchists were resisting into the 60’s, and there are lots of anarchist projects in Spain today. Video has more details.
I do not claim the anarchist society in Spain to be without flaw or even without hierarchy, but I think it’s a demonstration that anarchism has merit.
If you don’t want to watch this whole-ass video I respect your time, it’s a chonky boi, but anarchists absolutely do have detailed answers for these questions.
I am not ignorant I am unconvinced, I have read bookchin, graeber, gelderloos, C Scott, anarchists against the wall, the breadbook, and a few books about the Spanish civil war. You’ve presumably read marx and not found his arguments about historical materialism convincing. You can engage with stuff and not adopt it wholeheartedly or be convinced of the positions.
The CNTFAI was quite remarkable but it still failed and hasn’t successfully been replicated. It also built extensively on top of catalan identity and practices that aren’t widespread and created a culture of solidarity that is distressingly rare. It was also a very different world.
If I had existed between 1800 and like ww2 I almost certainly would have been entirely convinced of the anarchist position. In the modern world and looking at what has shaken out I am just not.
Fair enough, I feel like I’m becoming the kind of condescending person I despise 💀
Just try keep in mind we’re all here because we’re interested in how to actually accomplish a post capitalist world. We learn by engaging with all information and trying to synthesis a correct way forward. The world keeps changing and ideologies must keep pace.
I think commies who dogmatically reject anarchist ideas and critiques are as foolish as anarchists doing the inverse. Perhaps moreso since anarchist tendancies are demonstrably part of the human condition and history.
It’s easy to get your hackles up when the inbox goes wild, especially when some people are rude. That doesn’t mean everyone disagreeing with you is an ornery wanker though.
You can enumerate flaws with China sure and I’m quite sceptical they will successfully transition away from any capitalism,
we’re far away from the state withering away but i would think that comes about as a series of people standing up and saying we don’t need some state organ anymore until there’s no coercion left.
It could also just whither from a lack of material basis. There’s no need for cops that harass and harm the unhoused if everyone is housed. Remove enough roles from the police via their material underpinnings and policing itself will cease to exist. Of course we rightly hate cops now including the reason I cited and there will be struggle, but the stronger aspect is to completely undo the material forces behind the state.
I hope it works out, I do think there’s going to be issues with the tech sector there. They’re not quite as well leashed as some of the other significant ones. It seems a freer hand has been taken to try rapidly develop to rival the US/Korea/taiwan in software, hardware, and lithography. Winding that back might be difficult but the companies have much less influence over law than in other countries with huge high tech sectors so finger’s crossed.
The current leaders seem more committed to socialism than some recent ones which is cool, although the removal of term limits might backfire when it comes to succession. We shall see.
I’m no scholar of china, I’m open to being corrected on my opinion of some of the risks and looming obstacles.
If the Spanish Civil War is your example of success…
It’s an exemplar communist prototype and I’m tired of pretending it’s not. See the video and its citations for more details.
Sure but why pretend that it was exclusively an anarchist project. There were multiple leftist tendencies involved and it would have fallen sooner if not for direct material support from gasp Stalin and the USSR. The anarchist elements of the Spanish project can not be singled out as uniquely successful compared to the ML and other leftist tendencies
“exemplar communist prototype”
fails
How can the actual outcome of said revolution be praised if it failed? Even by the account of most anarchists, they were quite easily controlled by the Republican state since the May Days onwards. Destabilizing from the inside the war industry of a faction engaged in a civil war against fascism is not a victory in my book. Ffs, even the Nazis were rooting for the Anarchists in Barcelona and infiltrated them to promote a revolution against the Republican Spanish government (see Harro Schulze-Boysen’s execution by Nazi Germany).
My ancestors have had to endure fascism due to the incapability of the Spanish revolution to put a stop to them. My fucking parents were singing Cara al Sol every morning in their summer camps doing the fascist salute. And I’m living the consequences of said system. If the argument is “ML power structures end up reproducing capitalism”, by that logic anarchism is 100 times worse.
This “debate” was settled after WW2 to anyone willing to look at the material reality. “The Anarchists losing to fascists in Spain is actually good, whereas the Bolsheviks saving the entirety of Eastern Europe from extermination at the hands of Nazism is authoritarian” is a particularly disgusting form of historical nihilism.
anarchist Spain during the Spanish Civil War
I like how you went directly to the most contentious part about Bad Empanada and quoted that like it’s indicative of the tone and rigor of the rest of the video. If you don’t wanna watch it that’s fine, I respect your time, but I really don’t appreciate the condescension. Left unity ain’t gonna happen without some respect.
has he read The Jakarta Method?
It wasn’t written by an anarchist convinced of anarchism’s infallibility so probably not
He literally does admit to anarchists’ own lack of success in the video. We know anarchism has a low success rate. Our contention is that it is higher than authoritarian projects, and any success authoritarian projects have had is despite their centralizing authorities, not because of them.
Also he literally quotes Marx and Lenin several times in the video. He definitely has read a great deal of non-anarchist literature, he just didn’t agree with what he read.
Anyone can quote mine, doesn’t mean they’ve actually read the source material. In fact, Anark has been know to cherry pick Communist writers to try and imply they are saying the opposite of what they actually said, here’s an example: https://hexbear.net/post/9113230
I don’t think he can be a trustworthy source if he is willing to stoop to that level of deception.
That quote is absolutely cherry picked and he should have done his due diligence in looking it up before sharing it like that, but I do not think he was trying to deceive anyone. (If anyone is deceiving people, it’s the person he got it from.) And there is a difference between some off-the-cuff Shitter post and a serious work like this video. And yes I’m aware people can quote-mine. I’m asserting, independently, that he’s read some of your books.
Deliberately misrepresenting their opponent’s position in order to make their position look as bad as possible is textbook deception though. If he wasn’t trying to fool others then he was fooled himself, and still clearly not a good source of information if he is so easily fooled by obviously cherry picked quotes.
And him sharing this shows that he is either being deceptive or hasn’t read anything by Lenin, if he had actually read Lenin he wouldn’t be sharing a quote like this, since he would know that it sounds like the exact opposite of anything Lenin actually said and was clearly missing context.
I understand you’re getting dogpiled here, and it is difficult to remain calm in a situation like that, I would recommend coming back to what people are saying in a week or two and really trying to analyse why people are saying things with a clearer head (not saying you’re crashing out right now or anything, you’re actually responding quite calmly and reasonably considering the circumstances, but even then, it’s hard to fully analyse a conversation while you’re in the middle of it, especially when so many people are all talking at you at once).
It’s easy to feel attacked in the moment and have it all feel very personal, but our goal is understanding and sharing knowledge, in particular that “your books” line you gave is a bit worrying to me. Knowledge is knowledge, it has no team. An anarchist should be willing to use ideas that work from MLs just as MLs should be willing to use ideas that work from Anarchists, we both want to abolish capitalism, and declaring an idea to be the domain of the other rather than it just being knowledge or information makes it sound more like a team sport than actual political theory and discussion. Again, I’m assuming that this is more of a point of frustration because you’re feeling attacked due to the dogpile, rather than anything deeply personal. I am not attacking you personally, I just don’t think Anark is a reliable source that you should look to, any alleged “leftist” who insists on more leftist infighting, not less, who thrives on petty internet drama is a waste of time to talk about (and I would absolutely throw Socialism4All and BadEmpanada in that bucket as well, they’re all just social media obsessed losers who care more about getting attention and views than actually trying to properly inform and educate)
The level of errors he makes means he either makes no effort to understand or intentionally misleads and honestly those are equivalent if you’re making a whole video about it and lecturing communists about their projects.
He makes basic errors on Marx within the first few minutes and then makes those errors central to his arguments.
Which errors? (Genuinely curious)
He treats Marx’s theory of alienation as Marx’s definition of capitalism.
He misreads “co-operative property of the workers themselves” as supporting predominantly workplace-level ownership.
The Engels “national capitalist” quotation is badly truncated conceptually. Engels absolutely does say that nationalization by the existing bourgeois state does not magically abolish capitalism. But the same passage proceeds to say that the proletariat seizes political power and initially transforms the means of production into state property.
The Chairman Mao quotation about “not eliminating capitalism” is removed from its stage-specific context. Chairman Mao was describing the New Democratic transition of an overwhelmingly agrarian, semi-feudal and semi-colonial society. In the same 1949 analysis he called for moving from an agricultural to an industrial country and from New Democracy toward socialism, with the state-owned sector as the socialist leading sector.
“If socialism needs capitalist mechanisms to develop productive forces, then capitalism must be superior to socialism” is a non sequitur. Transitional concessions reflect the inherited material structure of society, not the abstract superiority of capitalism.
He compares forms while disregarding class content.
Also several of his arguments are internally inconsistent
He says anarchists do not fetishize cooperatives, then repeatedly uses cooperative workplace control as his principal empirical test of socialism.
He says anarchism is not opposed to transition, but defines the Marxist transition as capitalist because it still contains transitional categories.
He accepts economic and political compromises in Spain but treats comparable compromises in Russia or China as proof of counterrevolution.
He excuses anarchist projects for being defeated externally while using external defeat against ML projects.
He says local institutions must federate into an integrated economy but treats centralized integrated economic decision-making as worker alienation.
He says capitalism can only be overcome through long historical transformation, yet faults the Bolsheviks for not abolishing money, commodity relations and inherited bourgeois norms almost immediately.
He correctly insists that socialism cannot merely mean better welfare, but then fails to seriously analyze the abolition of private capitalist ownership and planned social investment because his definition already excludes state-socialist ownership.
He rejects state ownership because ownership must belong to society itself, but never adequately solves how “society itself” makes binding macroeconomic decisions except through federated institutions, which are themselves organized political power under another name.
There are too many to be worth time fully recounting but his entire premise is using Marx’s descriptions of some qualities of capitalism as making a society either simply capitalist or not. This is the exact antithesis of what Marx is doing in defining or highlighting those terms and phenomena and not at all in line with what he was doing, e.g. saying, “you’re only abolishing capitalism if all these things are gone!” It just makes no sense at all if you have actually read Capital, and I am confident Anark is either lying about having done so or is intentionally misleading.
Let’s take alienation from the commodities one produces. Would you like to tell me where Marx says, “under socialism this will just be gone”? Marx is actually describing his conception of the development of capitalism from precursor relations and how its dominance appears, hidden in society. There is absolutely nothing in it that says, “every aspect of capitalist society will go away once we have a real socialist revolution”. That is actually the exact opposite of what Marx predicts, which is that the working class will simply take the society they have and begin it’s transformation in their interests, oppressing the bourgeoisie in the process. And the full culmination of the working class being the final oppressing class will be communism, achieved via an extended struggle within a worker-run society. He describes capitalism as developing over hundreds of years to do similar things, albeit while maintaining class conflict with an exploiter class above (unlike the dictatorship of the proletariat concept).
I don’t even remember exactly what Anark says about alienation from the product of one’s labor but it’s such a commonly misunderstood idea that I would bet that is also deeply flawed. Just mentioning this because it’s my specific example, but the point I am making is about the larger idea exemplified in it.
Does it matter? I haven’t personally read The Jakarta Method, but it’s on my reading list and I am vaguely aware of its contents and yeah, it’s beyond fucked up what Washington does to communist regimes around the world. Doesn’t change any of the critique leveled here.
The Jakarta Method mostly interviews SocDems and DemSocs, the people who tried to organize more horizontally and believing in the capacity of nonviolent institutional work to bring about their political aims. The communists organized and tried to get these groups to arm, and they did not, and over a million people were murdered because of it, mostly those on the left. Spreading idealism can itself be dangerous to us and ours, it does not prepare us or our neighbors for the fight, it gets people on lists for no reason, it gets them jailed or injured for no reason, etc etc. The default is a tyranny of leaderlessness and disorganization, it must be combatted.
Bevins’ follow-up book, If We Burn, is a much mnore scathing review of Western horizontalism, which I won’t even call anarchism (I respect anarchists!), since it is really not very principled and has no interest in education or organization, instead embracing the antithesis to arrive at personal self-soothing. In a way it is just Bevins’ reflecting on his own personal growth as well, since the Jakarta Method is actually pretty idealist and naive on its attempt to understand the topic and the history before and around it, whereas If We Burn is almost a rediscovery of the basic methods of organizing lost to decades of red scare anticommunism (which works like those posted up top end up trying to affirm).
I’ll put it on my reading list. I appreciate the critique of our movements, and I want to stress that my view is that they are worthy of consideration, not complete agreement with every choice they made.
Well, I will say that I am interested in some of the arguments Anark was bringing, particularly the unity of ends and means. But I’m not a big fan of the case he brings against the USSR, China, etc. I think there’s a theoretical disconnect there, which I suspect centers around whether or not you accept / utilize the dialectic. Anark, actually very much like S4A who he is criticizing here who also does not think China is socialist, does not utilize the dialectic when analyzing whether or not something is socialist. Can’t fault him for it since the dialectic isn’t part of anarchism (right?) but if you are going to somehow be attempting to refute Marxism, you’re going to need to touch on the dialectic otherwise the Marxist analysis is going to sound like gibberish. Instead, he just kind of responds to that gibberish strawman instead of taking on the dialectical form of the argument.
As succinctly as I can: Anark is taking a snapshot view of China and asking whether or not X or Y trait associated with capitalism is present. If those traits are still present, it’s capitalist. This is a very common take even among Marxists, but not a dialectical one. Think about it this way. Imagine looking at a still picture of a car driving down a road. You can look at all the features of the car, all the traits of the car in that snapshot, the engine, tires, interior, but it’s not going to tell you the direction it’s headed, the road it’s on, whether there is a cliff 500 meters in front of the car, etc. The internal traits of the vehicle itself don’t necessarily dictate a specific direction that it can be driven in, or a past direction that it came from. The Marxist argument is that taking a snapshot of China right now doesn’t tell you about whether it’s on the road to socialism or not, because you have to zoom out and look at the history of the country, the material conditions over time and the general tendency of those conditions to see the road the vehicle is on, the surrounding environment that the vehicle exists in. Anark didn’t respond to this point, probably because S4A himself doesn’t understand it.
But this is where the disconnect on ends-means unity comes in because my understanding is that Anark believes that the internal traits of the social machine do necessarily dictate a direction. So that by looking at its current traits you can determine something about a future state, e.g. liberatory means result in liberatory ends. The problem I’m having with that argument though is, how did Anark come to that conclusion? What gets you to ends-means unity as something that is valid and sound? What would make a Marxist accept that claim?
This is a good explanation but I’m also gonna criticize it. Not because it’s wrong in its general explanation of what is wrong with the things you point out that Anark said, but because the way in which Anark is wrong and chooses to be publicly wrong comes down to something much simpler: a basic incuriosity and a self-serving arrogance.
Your (and similarly my) critique of “let’s pick out some aspects of capitalism that Marx pointed out” as disqualifying of these projects as anything other than capitalism points out that this misses what Marx was saying, sure. But more important is the thought process itself, that you can summarize entire societies as capitalist by running through a short and lazy checklist having never declared what other qualities they should have instead. This video is not an analysis. it is not a critique. It lacks the most basic rigor or attempt to try that it would take to pretend to be a serious person, let alone put your face on the video and talk yourself up. It wasn’t even planned or edited to a reasonable size, nor organized. But it does seek attention, and views, and self-promotion.
So what is the point of the video? It is just to become an aesthetically left influencer. The rest is just a bad faith vehicle by which to achieve this.
This is a very nice and concise analogy for dialectics, I am going to add it my toolbox
Lol I got banned in the db0 anarchist sub over refuting this garbage. A white guy filming himself sitting in a big chair in front of a giant lawn in a giant house dares to claim that the non white revolutionaries who liberated their nations from colonialism and imperialism are actually just capitalists
You did not meaningfully refute this “garbage”. You merely screamed that it was garbage and got yourself thrown out of an anarchist space for being toxic and anti-anarchist.
not true in the slightest, but just like the other anarchists you can refuse to acknowledge the things that I said from the jump. it is the only way to meaningfully reject what I said since if you were to engage with my points you would have to acknowledge they are correct. this is why idealism is worthless, being dogmatically attached to an ideology instead of what actually helps the most people the quickest is essentially bourgeois individualism
edit: just to make it easy for everyone to see how wrong you are, here are my first three comments in chronological order:
Capitalism is an advancement from feudal, colonial and slave economies, and will continue advancing into socialism and then global communism, which is what so called “non authoritarian” leftists claim to desire but have no roadmap to get there nor any achievements of their own to claim
There have been many communist revolutions utilizing dialectical materialist analysis to manufacture an overthrow of the ruling class and build new societies.
Communists are the only ones to have modern revolutions which have successfully overthrown colonizers and ruling classes and immediately ushered in societies that materially improved the lives of the masses. Infant mortality rates down, life expectancy up, literacy rates up, access to food and medicine up, etc etc. You can deny history and statistics all day but no one else has turned an illiterate backwater where people live an average of 35 years into the most advanced societies on the planet except for communists. The only “roadmap” anarchists have is being hedonists until capitalism makes most of the earth unlivable, which will certainly bring a type of anarchism to the last survivors of the earth, but will unfortunately be the mad max kind
as you can see, your interpretation is completely wrong and reveals you have no integrity.
Edit2: and just to be clear the fucking title of the video is inflammatory and condescending to MLs and communists. so the initial premise itself is doing exactly what you are clutching pearls at. I responded to the title and the premise of the video with less vitriol than the title itself, which erases and white washes billions of people’s lives, almost all of which are non white. this is white supremacy, straight up, that you are promoting with this video. it is colonialist, imperialist propaganda made to erase the successes of billions of non white people who would likely be dead without communism and steer ignorant, budding leftists back into bourgeois individualism and DEATH
We’re not gonna engage with you if you’re condescending to us. Lose the attitude and then we’ll talk. I’ve been willing to talk to others in this thread and MLs in the large, so it’s you, not us.
check my edit of the previous comment, I didn’t have an attitude, they did. you are all as worthless as your ideology, lying and victimizing yourselves when you can’t refute material reality
I think you forgot some stuff:
https://hexbear.net/comment/7367354
I don’t need to watch a 2 hr video of a white man with a trust fund filming himself talk from his estate to refute the blatantly false title that appeared on my timeline. Ive already spent years working with anarchists so I am intimately familiar with white people with trust funds making stupid arguments to justify doing nothing to stop the system them benefit from
Yet somehow if it was a white man in a nice house (which btw he lives in a polycule IIRC, i.e. he’s not that well off and he’s sharing his house with a few people) telling you things you wanted to hear about socialism, you’d eat it right up. I somehow believe you object to the message and not the messenger.
https://hexbear.net/comment/7367348
Yet you have nothing to refute it besides a dogmatic commitment to an ideology. My commitment is to liberation of all people and the earth and I understand that the only way to get there is through evidence based and material analysis. If you could provide that I would be forced to update my analysis but all you can do is deny deny deny
Because by that point you had already been super rude and they had given up on convincing you.
https://hexbear.net/comment/7367483
No you are just here to perpetuate reactionary ideologies that are inherently bourgeois
I could say the same thing about you. I’m not gonna say those things because I know you’re fighting for liberation in the best way you know how, but I could say that.
Also from what you posted:
The only “roadmap” anarchists have is being hedonists until capitalism makes most of the earth unlivable, which will certainly bring a type of anarchism to the last survivors of the earth, but will unfortunately be the mad max kind
An uncharitable person would say that this is anti-anarchist slander. A charitable person would say you’re uninformed.
you are all as worthless as your ideology, lying and victimizing yourselves when you can’t refute material reality
Yeah that’s really gonna help patch things up.
Were my comrades over on db0 all super supportive and free from attitude? Absolutely not. Understandable that you’d yell at them. But to then bring that attitude over here? Not cool.
Wait what does living in a polycule have to do with not being a trust fund kid. I know some disorganized tech- and academia-adjascent leftists that all live in a “commune” (a very expensive Craftsman house in that they bought in a hip neighborhood) do I need to consider them to be poor now?
Wait what does living in a polycule have to do with not being a trust fund kid
I was arguing against Anark being a rich kid solely from his demeanor and the part of his home you could see from his camera, which I think Jabril is pulling from. Like he probably lives in a decent house because he’s in a polycule, i.e. lots of people living together in a shared space, so the whole polycule can afford a bigger house by pooling their resources.
He could very well be a trust fund kid, I dunno 🤷
I know some disorganized tech- and academia-adjascent leftists that all live in a “commune” (a very expensive Craftsman house in that they bought in a hip neighborhood) do I need to consider them to be poor now?
No lol polycules and roommates can be poor, but they’re probably saving some money over living in separate houses, so they might not individually be as wealthy as their house otherwise implies.
Removed by mod
Because it’s cheaper to live in bigger groups, so he doesn’t necessarily make as much money as his house implies? Like this isn’t rocket science.
I didn’t forget those things, I didn’t include them because they weren’t relevant. You accused me of
You merely screamed that it was garbage and got yourself thrown out of an anarchist space for being toxic and anti-anarchist.
and I showed how my initial approach was indeed not anything close to that. you made something up to justify your preconceived opinion because you have to do so in order to stick to your ideological convictions. this is liberalism, based in idealistic nonsense. how I behaved beyond those points felt like an appropriate shift in demeanor in response to the way the other posters responded to me
btw he lives in a polycule IIRC, i.e. he’s not that well off
But to then bring that attitude over here? Not cool.
sorry it wasn’t cool man, you know what also isn’t cool? being a willing participant in an ideological lineage that completely rejects the evidence based path of struggle towards actual liberation of humanity and a future free from class structures and money. being more dedicated to stopping the people who are accomplishing that on every metric that can be measured, than to stopping the evil pedophiles who are destroying the planet and everyone on it. being so steeped in fascist anti-communist rhetoric that you can cognitively dissonance yourself into thinking you are actually a leftist instead of a tool of imperialism
and I showed how my initial approach was indeed not anything close to that.
No you didn’t
You brought up the drama. I would’ve kept my mouth shut if you just dunked on the video and left it there. You decided to tie it back to the drama on db0. I even waited a few days to post it here in the hopes that the drama would die down.
being a willing participant in an ideological lineage that completely rejects the evidence based path of struggle towards actual liberation of humanity and a future free from class structures and money. being more dedicated to stopping the people who are accomplishing that on every metric that can be measured, than to stopping the evil pedophiles who are destroying the planet and everyone on it. being so steeped in fascist anti-communist rhetoric that you can cognitively dissonance yourself into thinking you are actually a leftist instead of a tool of imperialism
🧱 Not gonna budge until you stop being shitty to anarchists. Literally not even a single inch.
Edit2: and just to be clear the fucking title of the video is inflammatory and condescending to MLs and communists.
That is genuinely wild
I responded to the title and the premise of the video with less vitriol than the title itself
No you didn’t, you have been way more vicious since minute one, and the actual video is extremely gentle, even to a snake like Bad Empanada
it is colonialist, imperialist propaganda made to erase the successes of billions of non white people who would likely be dead without communism and steer ignorant, budding leftists back into bourgeois individualism and DEATH
That’s a stretch
That is genuinely wild
I’m sure many things really blow your mind
No you didn’t, you have been way more vicious since minute one, and the actual video is extremely gentle, even to a snake like Bad Empanada
BE is a piece of shit and deserves vitriol, just like every other counter revolutionary who parades around trying to build an audience on miseducating people who are sincerely trying to find a path towards a better tomorrow
That’s a stretch
it isn’t a stretch for your to double down on your commitment to perpetuating anti-communism, you are certainly right in the same lane as all the other anti-communists
Here’s the thread in question beginning where Jabril starts quoting: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/73627349/27500114
Given the showing of those responding to Jabril I’m gonna say nobody that responded to them is even remotely serious about this topic. Like, at all. I don’t think refutation is the right term, there would have to be some kind of contest in the first place.
That includes db0, who never actually engages in these topics except to fling dismissals and ban. So much for the anti-authoritarian left lmao.
Given the showing of those responding to Jabril I’m gonna say nobody that responded to them is even remotely serious about this topic.
db0’s conduct on a separate thread is irrelevant to the content of the video. It was irrelevant when Jabril brought it up unprompted, and it’s irrelevant now. If Jabril doesn’t want to discuss the video then that’s fine, I respect that user’s time, but Jabril could have simply left it alone without bringing the drama over here.
db0’s conduct on a separate thread is irrelevant to the content of the video.
It is obviously relevant to Jabril getting banned and to any refuting happening in that thread.
It was irrelevant when Jabril brought it up unprompted, and it’s irrelevant now.
Same user posting the same video counts as a prompt I think.
If Jabril doesn’t want to discuss the video then that’s fine, I respect that user’s time, but Jabril could have simply left it alone without bringing the drama over here.
Jabril did discuss the video.
Same user posting the same video counts as a prompt I think.
I didn’t post the video on db0? Do you think I’m someone else? This and its identically named alts are the only Fediverse accounts I have.
Oh yeah I must’ve looked at a link to this thread when I thought I was checking the dbzer0 one for the poster.
White trust fundies have sent in a silly letter.
We shall neither print it nor reply.
k
If you ask a person like this to describe nonauthoritarian socialism they will describe projects that failed in the scale of days or months and projects that can only exist, and have ever existed, as pockets within “authoritarian” states. The term authoritarian doesn’t seem to actually mean much at all, it is a reaction to a level of organization (mystified by the term “hierarchy”) that they disagree with, and because it is so poorly thought about so often, it can be part of strong critiques of organizing failures grounded in real action and history or it can be a 20-something in 2026 in Maine getting angry because of their very personal grievance in the 1930s in Spain or it can be a lofty theoretical book by someone whose main understanding of anarchism is that community gardens are cool and their work in protecting one from real estate interests is definitely comparable and superior to nation-level revolution and construction. Unfortunately this falls somewhere between the latter two.
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He absolutely did not attack Socialism 4 All. He didn’t even attack Bad Empanada, which Bad Empanada would have deserved. Did you watch the video even slightly? He was extremely respectful to Socialism 4 All all throughout. Anark did read the theory and he didn’t like what he read.
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
