purpleworm [none/use name]

Israel is Hamas

The issue is that’s not really an argument against Islamism being a valid term, it’s just saying that it gets weaponized by Islamophobes.

I also think it’s strange to say that “jihad” is not ideologically distinct from the generic concept of “struggle” because the word can be translated to “struggle”. That’s not how language works either, it’s a specific term with theological meaning. It would likewise be totally valid to use, to pick an arbitrary, the Mandarin word for “struggle” to connote the meaning of the term as Mao used it (which is not entirely different from jihad but clearly distinct from the generic term “struggle”).

To be clear, i wasnt trying to disparage anarchists in general.

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.

I don’t see what the actual argument is. Either you want religious law to be the law of the land or you don’t. Either you aren’t secularist or you are. Are you upset about “Islamism” being the word instead of “theocrat”?

2020 was the one time her “They’re jealous of my big tits and Achkenazi IQ” pick up line finally worked on one of the teenage fascists she was hitting on.

It’s a one time expense that isn’t even that huge in order to meaningfully shift at least a facet of the relations of production. Expropriation is cool but it’s not worth it here if you can afford to buy the plots.

It’s sort of an example of the fetishism of commodities, assuming that those private grocery stores are the reason food is available at all. Dawg, there’s still the government stores and the local vendors who were selling to the private stores who now can only really sell to the state, in this catastrophization. You are literally just making an argument that government stores are at least marginally better in this case.

That case is nonsensical, because the idea of there being a food black market that is encouraged rather than discouraged by the stores selling at lower prices is ridiculous. If the prices are lower and the thieves need to undercut the lower prices, all you’ve done is argue that stealing is less profitable, but also who is selling stolen food in NYC at such a scale that it makes an economic impact? None of this makes sense.

There are many people who devote their entire lives and work to anarchy, but there are a lot of people who get into it because it’s the “safest” radicalism because only rightist boomers bother to stigmatize it (via “antifa thugs” or whatever), though I honestly have a little more respect for them than the other “safe” radicalism of more precisely what I was talking about where you’re an anarcho-neoliberal-socdem who just says “radical” things but opposes any radical practice, who will attack Mao for not being left enough and then concern troll that some Berniecrat is unrealistic, which is extremely typical among certain kinds of academics. Like, they will simultaneously say “Oh, Stalin says that those who do not work, neither shall they eat. So much for ‘to each according to their needs!’ Also, collectivization stifles innovation.”

But talking to you rather than myself, what you are saying reminds me a little of the better parts of that essay “Why Marxism?” where faux-radicals in the west will denounce anything and everything, seeming to be the most radical of all but really supporting the status quo in the west by denying that there’s ever been anything better than it anywhere while certainly (and partially correctly) asserting that many things are worse than it. This lets them be at the apex, at a vast frontier where they have basically no one and nothing to learn from beyond liberal commentators and sometimes the most co-opted faux-left trash like Chomsky. The closest thing you’ll see to decency in these people is some default socdemist fetishization of the New Deal and of Nordic “socialism,” and that’s still a far cry from actual decency.

But yeah, if someone admits that they’re just running on vibes (and the people I’m talking about are mainly pretentious academics who could never), then I don’t see what could be better for them than to learn to exercise some epistemic humility until they have a framework by means of which to judge things that they can actually defend. If you aren’t acting on behalf of your own ideology, you’re uncritically acting on behalf of someone else’s.

Obligatory edit:

If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.

Personally, if I wanted to be a powerful fascist in a place like the US, I’d just be a fucking fascist because it seems to be working out great for them. Being a communist in order to be a fascist later just means the other fascists will seize on you and every faction of corporate media will be your enemy, and even once you achieve the fascist turn (assuming you aren’t jailed, killed, or otherwise crushed), your past is a liability that other rightists are liable to exploit and a huge segment of your original base of power will want to kill you almost as much as the fascists did. Being a secret rightist only makes sense in a communist status quo, like what Khrushchev did.

That’s not what entryism means, but it’s similar in its pathological aversion to confrontation. Why not just suggest Parenti? He’s got some nice, accessible polemics, and also a lot of his material is in talks, so you’re more likely to get a young person to engage with it (though I guess you didn’t mention the demo).

Are you going to get killed or fired if the person you are talking to discovers you to be a communist? If not, then hiding it is probably counter-productive if you’re still advocating for your positions. You don’t need to shout in people’s faces demanding that they acknowledge the efficacy of Mao’s land reform, but actively hiding behind lib academics is just silly.

I don’t think this is very different from radlibs in general. By some defintions of communist, you can easily get most of them to agree to the label, but they still behave how you say. I think it’s question-begging to call most of the states you have in mind “AES,” but the lines of objection radlibs raise to such states are usually incoherent (and at best deeply hypocritical), and they will oscillate between talking like an anarchist and a neoliberal point to point based on rhetorical convenience, because they love the language and aesthetic of radicalism but all they believe in is the lifestyle of being a person who knows better while protecting their own comfort. At least, that’s my experience.

All of non-hobbyist Reddit (and a lot of hobbyist Reddit) is a struggle to make your preferred political view apolitical and ban the other ones for being political

I only caught that one because a certain “not a Republican” MAGA rapper made a whole song called “Daddy’s Home.” I went and rewatched it and remembered why I hadn’t done so before, which is that it’s just unbelievably lame but not even in an interesting way. There’s an industry of Republican media people whose whole schtick is going “nyeh!” at a camera attacking libs, but it’s not for liberals to watch, it’s for reactionaries to fantasize about shit talking liberals, like a post-hoc shower argument but someone else is doing the arguing for you to the liberal who isn’t there. There’s no point in seeing it more than once because it’s all just this weird pathology of affecting not caring what anyone thinks while being extremely concerned with people thinking that you don’t care what anyone thinks.

I suppose that a lot of media is like that, to be fair, but at least chapo makes some effort to come up with jokes or draw broader conclusions instead of just talking about le tears.

Either this is a lie or Colbert’s brain is fried, because he was wording it in the same loaded “does the state of Israel have a right to exist?” with zero critical engagement. Colbert was indistinguishable from whatever typical zio could ask that question except for his affectation of empathy to Mamdani. If that’s what being an ally is, then it’s indistinguishable from being an enemy who has a trace of good faith.

Don’t you see? His speech there lives on!

But, listen, let’s review the rules. Here’s how it works. The President makes decisions. He’s the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration? You know, fiction!

He’s just relaying its content by way of demonstration now.

You can see people use the term that way if you put it into a search engine. I was just noting that specific word because the person I was responding to proposed it as a hypothetical nonsense word while they were misunderstanding what Islamism was.

This person is a horrible, orientalizing racist, but “Islamism” in this context is basically a shorthand for “Islamic theocracy,” isn’t not just a confused way of saying “Muslim.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamism

So ISIS, for example, are extremely Islamist, and the Taliban are as well. That is much less true of the overall factions opposing Israel in relation to the genocide, though they will inevitably have members and segments who are straightforwardly Islamist (as you have in most militant movements with mostly-very-religious membership).

(“Christianism” is sometimes used in the corresponding way, though it has other terms like christo-fascism or Catholicism to refer to it by depending on the specifics).

Yeah, there used to be tons of videos circulating around of resistance fighters running up on foot and sticking bombs to IOF tanks and things like that. It’s really incredible.

The symmetry of conspiracy theories is always really interesting to me, like how both Western and Russian conservatives say that queerness existing in society is basically a psychological warfare weapon being inflicted upon them by the other side. Whether the Brits control China or China controls the Brits is just a matter of which group your audience hates more.

It’s almost refreshing to see them suggest that communism is mostly not racist.

What I mentioned is not an exhaustive list, but in terms of specific political movements, those are the two stories that I see most often, the “betrayal” of the Spanish anarchists (and Trots) who thought that a civil war with fascists was a good time for a revolution and therefore sabotaged their liberal allies (the Spanish Republicans, who the Communists were working with), and the betrayal of the Makhnovists who had genuinely been engaging in banditry on Bolshevik-controlled cities because, despite being very militarily effective, they (the Makhnovists) were not economically self-sufficient or really productive at all, and that’s before you factor in having maybe their whimsical monetary policy, because the root issue had more to do with relations of production.

I’m not going to pretend to you that anarchists have never been wronged by communists, whether in Spain, Russia, or elsewhere, but the specific examples that I usually see are instances where it would be more accurate to call the anarchists the “traitors,” but the communist retaliation is framed as the first shot. I am quite confident that you can go through the history of the Red Terror, of the post-Cultural Revolution crackdowns (and I mean under both Mao and Deng) and find much more genuine misdeeds, I’m just less familiar with these because they aren’t thrown in front of my face all the time like the stories I mentioned.

It should also be mentioned that even though I think Mao ended his career with some of the gravest betrayals of a political project that I have ever heard of, he and the CPC had facilitated various anarchist and anarchist-like projects from the interwar period until the unofficial end of the Cultural Revolution, and there wasn’t zero communist interference, but generally they had neutral or supportive relationships (with some communist factions being much more hostile, one going as far as assassinating a KPAM leader) until various factors (Japanese aggression, poor construction, etc.) caused them to fail. That and Mao’s crackdown ending the CR was mainly to stop country-wide gang violence, meanwhile the more substantial anarchist-like projects like the Shanghai People’s Commune were dissolved in a more orderly fashion as they didn’t perform as well as hoped and were deemed effectively to be left-deviationist.

Anyway, I wouldn’t ascribe a “level of historical knowledge” to myself, I just know some stories, and the accusations led me to read a bunch of different anarchist (and Trot) accounts until eventually I found bitter anarchists who nonetheless admitted to things like the Spanish anarchists sabotaging the Republicans. I encourage you to look up things on your own and treat what I have to say like a Wikipedia article, as mainly being a basis for further research at most. If someone would like to offer corrections, I am happy to hear them.

My real thesis is that these myths of aggrievement are just the Red Scare as processed by, well, another group of people who don’t seem to have more nuance in their accounts than the neoliberals and are therefore happy to have the same boogeymen following roughly the same logic. Besides the blatant revisionism, I’d respect it a lot more if the people in question were just more upfront about the fact that the substantial divide (where there is one, and that really depends on the anarchist) is about democracy vs autonomy, where the communists demand the continuous advancement of the former and anarchists the latter, and these two things are inevitably at odds.