Basically, there was a discussion about how instances have rules and Feddit also needs to abide by local (Austrian) law to not get in legal trouble. And I get called a Zionazi for saying that you cant just up and call for the massacre of civilians, regardless of which side you are on. It’s also ironic for Dessalines to mock me for sticking to rules and laws to protect our instance.
I also got recently permabanned (reason: Golden Rule #8) from Ye Power Trippin Bastards after I posted Dessalines banning me on .ml despite not having posted anything there in three weeks.
Emopunker's post on YPTB: https://lemmy.world/post/42787278
It's so fuckin funny that db0 is being roped into the "tankie" accusations. It's sad that the feds and radlibs have completely poisoned the well for anarchists. I still remain an anarchist at heart but it's too much to keep trying to distinguish my personal flavor of anarchism from the sea of pretenders I just don't bother anymore. Sure I read a lot of ML literature and agree on pretty much all of it, but never really identified as such since I am not in a vanguard party. I share the same stance as the late David Graeber: Anarchism/Anarchist isn't what I am it's what I do.
Building dual power within the US through mutual aid and frustrating the police and other authorities is about the extent of my praxis. If a vanguard is forming in the imperial core I have no interest in leading it but nor do I have interest in opposing it because our goals are the same. We can rehash old sectarian beefs after we deal with the largest threat to us all which is the current imperial state. And if a new red army does arise (it won't) I'll be the first to sign the fuck up.
Back when tankie got popularized as a term outside of the radical left it was equal parts hilarious and painful seeing libs deploy it against oldhead anarchists that I knew of online. It must have been infuriating for them to have it turned on them like that.
These days when I'm outside of explicitly radical spaces online and I see a progressive advocating for anything beyond peaceful assemblies and performance, when they start advocating for actual activism that can achieve things, sometimes I larp as a turbolib and I try policing them by calling them a tankie and telling them shit like "We can't just physically oppose law enforcement agents because that will make our side look bad by not following procedure within the democratic system" and "we have to wait this out until the next election but when it does come around in 3 years we can use all the energy we have built up to campaign hard but in the meantime we should call and write to our representatives to ask them politely if there's anything that we can do".
This might seem odd but it's me doing wrecker shit within progressive lib spaces by shifting the leftmost acceptable boundary of politics within that space slightly so that the people who are advocating for things that work will stop trying to appeal to the impassive, performative progressives they are surrounded with and start feeling like an outsider to those spaces by causing an artificial faultline within the group, so that the furthest left of them feel alienated and politically adrift from those spaces because suddenly I'm getting support for saying "Um, yikes! Settle down there, tankie. We just have to ride this out and do nothing or otherwise the optics will be bad, okay?" and meanwhile they are screaming out that something has to be done urgently. Aggravating that tension within different factions of the space and crystallizing it by putting it to words while encouraging people to rally on either side of it means that those furthest left will be more inclined to start breaking free of the anti-tankie programming ("I'm not a big bad evil tankie by arguing that we need to get armed and resist ICE and start a general strike so why are people agreeing that I'm acting like a tankie??") and they get firsthand experience at how that term is used to police the left. With a little luck they will become desensitized to it and to learn to hate the libs who deploy it because... libs care more about optics than they do about what's being done right in front of them
I've used exaggerated terms here to illustrate the point but I know how to use pitch-perfect wording and terms from their own political discourse to get them to believe I'm genuinely one of them since they listen to phrasing and the cheap "x is like voldemort" superficial political analysis (using the term analysis very loosely here) instead of thinking in terms of genuine political principles. Because they're libs.
At worst it causes the libs to fight amongst themselves but, ideally, it makes the furthest left of their numbers start peeling themselves away from liberalism and toothless progressive politics.
I feel like that's less productive than many alternative approaches. If they aren't already receiving that pushback from genuine libs in their space, then it could mean they have a chance to pull their fellows (or even the branch or whatever) left. I think it's much better to support them and argue for what you actually believe, and if you all get ousted then hey, some people who have at least the beginning of the right idea now have a much firmer common cause with you because you backed them up and understand the severity of the situation, and maybe you can do something positive.
This is a good take and I should have said that I do this in spaces that are quite hostile to radical politics, in particular the ones that spring up around "thought leader" content creators who speak out against the radical left at least as often as they do the far right while funnelling people into the democratic party and shit.
I don't do it in progressive community spaces, I leave them be or very occasionally I will occasionally chip in with something that contributes to the discourse while shifting it leftwards but not in an obnoxios "Read theory, you libs!!" way.
It's only the spaces that are culty and terminally lib which are led by progressive grifters posing as leftists that I do wrecker shit like I described above because it's impossible to actually do genuine work in those contexts (you get banned or shouted down immediately) so the only way I have come up with working within that context is by using an accelerationist approach and putting too fine a point on the sort of discourse that would typically be deployed against people who stray too far from the internal orthodoxy. I'm not gonna name names but I'm sure you know the pseudo-radical content creators who immediately fall in line with that vote blue no matter who shit when the election rolls around but who are otherwise mostly focused on punching left (against anarchists and communists alike) while grifting their audience for donations and patreon memberships. The ones who function as smaller spinoff grifts which mirror those larger DNC astroturfed "movements" and "activist groups" that are just fronts to wring people for donations, except with content creators they use the same sort of model to create a personalized brand out of themselves in the process.
It still just doesn't seem like a good strategy to me. If they are already getting banned/shouted-down, then there's no need to present this way and if they aren't, that means you must have at least some room to talk, and even if you aren't out there declaring the need for class war, you can still encourage them in a more progressive direction and, if they end up getting banned, you can potentially still talk with them independently and either way at least it'll help prevent blueanon from gaslighting them that they have completely unreasonable stances that everyone rejects, instead of contributing to their isolation.
But of course, since there is some room to talk or else you wouldn't be able to do this to begin with, I still think it's probably a better use of time to try to pull people left even if you need to resort to something like the Socratic method. If these are patreon hive type places, then I think the accelerationist approach is just going to help them cultivate a centrist orthodoxy in their audience, enabling them to do slopaganda with zero internal pushback and having a more consolidated "culture" with which to enculturate new people into their reactionary stances.
Also, if you took the extremely reasonable stance that this seems like too much work or stress for something that isn't very important (there's a reason I've never even looked at the contrapoints subreddit myself), then I probably would just say to avoid this shit instead of functionally contributing to the hegemony of the liberal orthodoxy.
something something communists disdain to hide our views and aims
I agree and I view a commitment to honesty as being easily among the most powerful tools a communist can use, but I felt it was beneath ReadFanon, who I have a great deal of respect for, to address him with that type of argument.
Yeah I do too. He's up there with Cowbee as one of my fav effort posters, which is why it was surprising to hear that from him.
I get why you might try that in maybe some certain circumstances, but I certainly wouldn't and it doesn't feel like it would help our cause overall.
It would be funnier if it didn't seem to cause db0 to pinball between doing the right thing and doing what keeps db0 in good graces of goat