Anarchism

bro I wish The Deprogram (Yugopnik, Hakim and Second Thought) and even Spooky Scary Socialist was available when I was a teen

I became a Marxist in like 2003. I wish there had been podcasts and stuff back then. The best we had were just IRC channels full of very elderly Trots calling one another revisionists.

The audience of the online shows you mentioned skews millennial, and millennials are in their 30s and 40s. Teens aren't listening to political podcasts and watching video essays, they're on streams and short form video platforms.

This is just funny. There are so so many more western anarchist teens (and people in their early 20s) than there are western Marxist-Leninist teens in no small part because it is so much more socially acceptable to label oneself an anarchist than a communist. And you're saying these ML channels which only very recently got any traction at all, and are still dwarfed by the anarchist-acceptable Breadtube channels, are what all the anticapitalist cool kids are flocking to? The first one, I've never even heard of, wow_mao. Then you list Hakim and Yugopnik, and say "most notably thedeprogram" - Yugopnik and Hakim, along with one other, are The Deprogram podcast - you're bulking out your list by naming the same people multiple times. And Bad Empanada?? Does he even consider himself an ML? Doesn't matter, he is notoriously anti-AES which is the biggest point of disagreement here, as seen by 90% of the comments in this very thread and OP's initial framing of their issues with "tankies." Bad Empanada is on your side when it comes to China, DPRK, etc.

I haven't paid attention to any of the youtube channels or podcasts for a couple years, but if Marxist-Leninist channels like The Deprogram are now gaining real popularity among the western leftist youth, then that is actually awesome, but I just cannot believe that they have anywhere near the same scale of viewers or listeners as the Breadtube crowd did who nearly all called themselves anarchist. I should also say I'm in my 40's and went through the young anarchism phase for years before learning more through much reading, study, experience, and organizing, arriving at Marxism-Leninism all long before any of these people uploaded their first video.

Coming back to the popularity of anarchism vs Marxism-Leninism among the youth, I'm just going to paste something I wrote months ago in a thread that was concerned about the failure of MLism to match the popularity of anarchism for young people in the west:

I wouldn't say that the anarchists are succeeding where ML's are failing, rather it takes more steps to deprogram oneself and end up at Marxism-Leninism than it does to end up at an immature version of anarchism. So it is almost an inevitability that there will be more young anarchists, since our material circumstances in the west make it easier to start a leftward political journey from a place where you still hate the west's enemies.

To put it another way, in my experience there is a typical and understandable order to the brainworm de-worming process. Some propaganda goes deeper and is more tenacious due to it's prevalence even as "common knowledge." For example, it is easy to hate the government since that is acceptable and normalized across the political spectrum (see the old rightists and their railing against big gubmint). So it's also an easy and still socially acceptable step to then say "I hate all governments; governments are bad in principle!" Even libs love the "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely" canard.

For a budding western leftist who is beginning to see the horrors and atrocities of their own ruling class, usually via the power of the state (the government), it only takes a relatively small step to apply their criticisms across the board to say that all states are bad, and voila, then label themselves anarchist. They are encouraged to do that sometimes even by their enemies, people with power for obvious reasons: "Yeah, the US sucks and is evil, but so is China. In fact China is even worse because it holds all the power of their corporations too!" And that's what I mean by the more tenacious propaganda that they aren't educated or experienced enough yet to deprogram themselves from. It's very similar to why anti-imperialism in particular is such a huge stumbling block for so many too. "Everyone knows Stalin was evil. It's common knowledge and denying that he killed a bajillion people is just as bad as the neo-Nazis who downplay Hitler's atrocities! Everyone knows the Soviet Union was cruel totalitarian dictatorship where all the people were just as bad as before their revolution. Communism always leads to those kind of dictatorships. It's been tried and we always see the horrible results! We don't want any part of that!"

In this weird ass fucking societal milieu that includes such ridiculous ideologies as right-libertarianism aka "anarcho-capitalists" it is still a relatively socially safe position to take an anarchist stance. And they still don't have to deeply analyze the proverbial water they're swimming in as fish.

A couple things I do want to note here... Firstly, I don't want this to come across as sectarian. In what I've been saying about anarchists in this comment, I'm talking about the young, still politically underdeveloped people who are in the early stages of their exposure to leftism and who glom onto anarchism without having really delved into its theory, or have done so very selectively. Secondly, I phrased it up above as "in my experience" because this is what I've seen happen with other, younger people, so I know what you are talking about. But I also mean it in that it's the kind of progression I went through myself, only it was further back because I'm older. I don't think this more-young-anarchists-than-ML's situation is completely new to this most recent generation, as there were similar or at least analogous processes that older leftists had to go through as well before arriving at a genuinely Leninist political ideology.

Either way, we do have work to do as ML's to help guide younger generations of leftists towards deeper, more materialist and more dialectically sound analyses and understanding of the mechanisms of capital and the world.

The majority of the theory I read is Marx, Engels, Lenin, and modern theorists. I do read Mao and Stalin too, of course, but the groundwork for Marxism-Leninism is in Marx, Engels, and Lenin, of course. The fact that I have read Marx, Engels, and Lenin is why I support socialist states, rather than do everything in my power to cherry pick quotes to avoid supporting existing socialism and make a mockery of Marxism. I recommend Roland Boer's Socialism in Power: On the Theory and History of Socialist Governance.

If my tone sounds a bit harsh, it's because the goal is to understand the world so as to change it, not just doompost.

A lot of Marxist-Leninists after like 2018 have a strong focus on anti-imperialism as the primary goal. You have strong support for geopolitical adversaries of the United States and if you observe what ML parties do, that is a huge % of their activities. Be it "AES" states, sometimes Russia or some Islamist nationalist movements. In the worst cases, outright a support for "their country" itself. Like Stalin wrote, even "the King of Afghanistan" should be supported against imperialism, and MLs do so consequently.

Memery aids to shape a lot of what comes with it. Be it staunch support of cults of personality past and present, supporting things without investigating at all or of course the moralism.

We'd all be better off if there was more familiarity with what the things that influence us actually say.

Saying that Hakim is almost exclusively Stalin/Mao is actually an impressively uneducated take. I'd say half of Hakim's videos are atrocity propaganda of western imperialism, which is absolutely necessary, and I've learnt more about the horrors of capitalism through him than through anyone else.

Yugopnik is a tankie? I don't listen to deprogram, just his channel

precisely this, I would say with a touch of "just wanting to belong". I think a lot of people who end up in tankie circles are chronically online, and have a hard time socializing. echo chambers don't really care, and will treat anyone who regurgitates the same talking points as an equal. maybe that's just around here though, there's plenty of leftists around but I have yet to see specifically ML/maoist groups that aren't just more than reading theory. I imagine it's easy to fall into that kinda "western country bad" thought pattern when the only people who you interact with tell you it's righteous and justified with zero nuance.

I'm a socialist and am lucky enough to meet a lot of leftists irl, and I get along with all of them regardless of specific viewpoints. unfortunately, the people who are the loudest on lemmy aren't the kind of people you meet walking down the street, so they end up lacking the "challenging your own ideals" bit of developing rational and sane viewpoints.

aren't those groups funded by China?