Outright Lie
NSFWPrior context: bad-faith-acting anarchist سایهسار🏴 (@idkijustthibk) accused another person ( (• ˕ •マ.ᐟ ★ @Y40IFRQTTING ) of having “racist white savior mentality” because they had stated that “Most of the third world would likely still be colonies if not for the Soviet Union” [1] (even tho’ the usage of “likely” clearly indicates that they had acknowledged the possibility 3rd worlders could have liberated themselves without the USSR’s help).
Maluses:
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Today I learned the USSR arming the resistance against the white ethnostate in Rhodesia was actually a 4D play to protect whiteness.
These people are just mad that the USSR was one of the largest decolonization projects in history.
Or maybe they are mad that I cannot list a single successful anarchist project that actually turned out to be anarchist.
wdym, Argentina’s right there, so anarchist even the economy is anarchy
What is Argentina actually like? I know very little about the political situation there (beyond the fact that they had nazis flee to that place after WW2? Did I get that right?).
This has to be the most 🤡💩 i’ve read this year. Ridiculous to the point of absurdity.
Anarchists be anarchisting, yo (all authority is bad, even anticolonial authorities apparently).
Seriously, I do not understand the aversion to authority that anarchists have. Do they honestly think that they will survive the murderous nature of Western capitalism if anarchism actually becomes a threat to capitalism? How will they survive if they do not have a state or a vanguard party to concentrate their will into a potent weapon?
Anarchist thought on the state is a direct consequence of having no experience with a state that is honest and fair. Their only experience with states are capitalist states and so they wrongly conclude that any state must behave in an identical fashion. They aren’t wrong to be skeptical of the state given that it is a system built on coercion & domination but their proposed solution to simply abolish it immediately is naive and ineffectual. Makhno tried this in Ukraine and Trotsky crushed him without effort. If it hadn’t been the Bolsheviks it would’ve been somebody else. A stateless society cannot coexist with state societies; ergo a state must exist to safeguard the revolution until such time when it is no longer needed. Anarchists reject this reasoning and it’s why they keep failing. You can’t compete with state levels of power projection and organization without having a state. This is the explicit advantage of a state society: it can mobilize large numbers of people in a way that a stateless society simply cannot. This is why the U.S. abandoned the militia model for a standing army. It’s why feudal states, after centralizing, abandoned levies in favor of a standing army. It’s why Rome was able to conquer so much so quickly. It’s why the USSR lasted as long as it did and it’s why the PRC & DPRK still exist. It’s why the Zionist Entity is still around and why Iran hasn’t folded to U.S. aggression. Only a state can compete with another state.
Do they honestly think that…
It’s tempting to say that they don’t think at all, but really the problem is that they engage in magical thinking.
They think that they can organize a defense against reactionaries on some kind of purely voluntary and individual free association basis, which is the same plan they have for how to run an economy. This is because anarchism comes from a place of liberal, individualist thinking. It is a petty bourgeois ideology at its core that puts individual freedom at the center of the ideology, and any objective reality that is incompatible with that ideal has to be somehow handwaved or rationalized away. And part of it is just childish – in the literal sense, like children who don’t like being told to go to bed, do their homework or eat their vegetables.
You get into a lot of problems when you put ideology ahead of reality, and you start having to make up ever more convoluted cope in an attempt to try and reconcile the contradiction between the two. And this is the case with anarchists’ dogmatic hatred of authority and the state. It leads to some very strange conclusions when taken to the extreme, as we can see above. That’s why it’s important to take a step back sometimes and question your fundamental assumptions if stubbornly clinging to those assumptions has led you to adopting absurd and indefensible positions.
(Also, many anarchists you encounter online are just privileged white western teenagers, it’s not really worth it getting too upset about them; they are pretty irrelevant.)
Yeah, I do feel like anarchism is very utopian in its way of thinking (fighting a state through non-state means is a recipe for murdered flour, yet they expect to be making a cake?), but I wonder where the usage of “petty-bourgeois” in the sense of individualistic came from… I guess it comes from petty-bourgeoisie being characterized by individualism (I know from experience)?
I hear some anarchism-adjacent comments sometimes among non-anarchists, like conservatives being “against the state” (they are not really against it, but they argue like they are against it) in all aspects unless it benefits them; a consistent position of theirs would involve essentially arguing for anarchism out of logical necessity, but of course, since they do not actually criticize the state in any meaningful sense (just a state that actually provides services to the workers), they are not actually consistent, and are therefore not anarchists. I can definitely see the individualism present here being an expression of anarchism too (is it right to say it is an expression of anarchism, or a fundamental part of anarchism?).
I wonder where the usage of “petty-bourgeois” in the sense of individualistic came from
Individualism is a very petty bourgeois value because of how the petty bourgeoisie as a class operate. They are small producers whose interest lies in essentially having complete freedom to operate as they wish. “Every man a king”/“small business tyrant” type of mentality. Which happens to align with anarchists’ disdain of authority and organization. The proletarian mindset on the other hand is much more focused on collective and organized labor. And the big bourgeois of course also clash with the petty bourgeois, because to them free competition by small producers is not in their benefit. They are interested in monopolistic consolidation and using the state to enforce their interests. So you see how the values of a class reflect the material interests of that class.
Dang, I saw that attitude in my dad already, but knowing about this honestly validates my idea that petty-bourgeois defenders of capitalism are focused on the individualism capitalism can bring them ;<.
How would liberalism bexome a threat to capitalism?
…? I typed anarchism.
“to defend white ethnopurity of the imperial core”
Checks notes: over a hundred ethnic groups. No western concept of race. Neutral descriptive use of the term as regional-historical groups with relatively close ancestry.
Yeap.
A proxy war against Nicaragua?
To affect the racial demographics in Russia?
Conscription?
It’s takes like these that are important to critique from within the worldview of the people who hold it in order to expose how utterly shoddy their ideas are.
For example: let’s accept that the USSR was an imperialist project. Does this mean that the natlib movements they backed were conscripted for their “proxy wars”? Absolutely not. Such a take requires the complete suspension of the autonomy of the national liberation movements in question. It implicitly suggests that these groups had no agency and were subject entirely to the whims of White Soviets. This is condescending, chauvinist language that erases the indigenous heart of their struggle - which often began before the Soviets even got involved. If Soviet imperialism was a real, tangible thing that physically existed these people were very much not victims of it and it’s an insult to them and their struggle to suggest that they were. This is depriving indigenous people of their own authentic resistance movements to Western imperialism by infantilizing them as subjects of a broader Soviet Empire. Even within the framework of their own worldview this analysis completely fails to hold up to scrutiny. It is belittling, racist, and paternalistic.
There is also no explanation for how supporting anti-imperialist movements protects the Imperial Core’s racial homogeneity, but that doesn’t matter since we know that wasn’t the Soviet rationale behind supporting anti-imperialism globally anyway. I’m assuming they’re taking the stance that since imperialism drives Global South populations to immigrate to the Global North that ending Western imperialism would stop this migration and thus make the Global North “whiter” but this motive doesn’t work for the USSR when maybe 20-25% of their population (depending on how you classify Caucasians) weren’t even white to begin with. This is besides the fact that, again, we know this wasn’t the Soviet rationale in the first place.
Semi-related but I do think it’s fair to critique the claim that “Most of the third world would likely still be colonies if not for the Soviet Union”. This does read like a White Savior narrative. It would be better to simply highlight how much the USSR invested in supporting decolonial movements without trying to make it look like these movements owe their success to the USSR.
it’s fair to critique the claim that “Most of the third world would likely still be colonies if not for the Soviet Union”. This does read like a White Savior narrative. It would be better to simply highlight how much the USSR invested in supporting decolonial movements without trying to make it look like these movements owe their success to the USSR.
(• ˕ •マ.ᐟ ★ @Y40IFRQTTING’s clumsy wording no doubt left them vulnerable to the bad-faith-acting anarchist’s denunciation. Yet as a Vietnam-born, Vietnam-raised, and Vietnam-taught person, I judge the chance of Vietnamese liberating ourselves without the USSR’s help to be infinitesimally slim.
And it’s entirely your right as a Vietnamese person to make that claim!
I hate myself for thinking about an ableist slur first when I read the lib gibberish.
Anyways, ⬆️➡️⬇️⬇️⬇️ the X, Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon data centers.
