ReadFanon [any, any]

@ ReadFanon @hexbear.net

Posts

22
Comments

234
Joined

2 yr. ago

If I don't reply I'm probably struggling with basic communication or my health. Don't take it personally.
Multiple award-winning Hexbear effortposter
Webfishing yapper

Moderating

neurodiverse hexbear.net

disabled hexbear.net

Book Requests hexbear.net

10h ago

Deleted

Sooo... Friends?
Jump
ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 10h ago

Have you seen the regular watch sessions that get posted here in Hexbear? Users here hang out virtually and watch all sorts of things while chatting. It might be something to consider.
If you read this message soon after I've posted it, they're actually in the middle of the watch session right now. Check out the movies comm to keep an eye on when the next screening comes up if you're interested.

17h ago

I guess being anti-hate speech and anti-fascist are mutually exclusive on Reddit

ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 17h ago

I'm hard pressed to think of a country where language-policing was an effective tool in restoring democracy.

And I'm hard pressed to think of a time when a comment on Redd*t was an effective tool in restoring democracy, yet you're commenting anyway.

This is such a reductionist take. No, making rules against oppressive language isn't going to "restore democracy". Did anyone claim that it was ever going to? This betrays the lack of political development of the commenter.

I know this is nitpicking but I really hate this haughty Redd*tor posturing. They could have just said "This won't fix the problem" but instead it has to be wrapped up in all this smug wording - "Well, according to my extensive study of history it appears to me that in no case which I'm able to identify would banning me from saying the N-word would have ever advanced the interests of democracy 😏"

If banning those words doesn't matter for restoring your precious bourgeois, settler-colonial democracy then it doesn't matter if you don't use those words either.

21h ago

User banned from lefty memes for being too good at memes

Jump

ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 21h ago

Definitely. I know that likewise, personally, if shit was kicking off and it was being led by anarchists while the communist movements were languishing or being counterrevolutionary then I wouldn't hesitate to throw my support behind the anarchists.

I don't care about my position being vindicated or having "my team" win; stopping the rising tide of fascism and overthrowing capitalism are so much more important to me than ideological distinctions.

21h ago

User banned from lefty memes for being too good at memes

Jump

ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 21h ago

That's a really interesting perspective and it's a very dialectical take on something that I haven't considered before. I'm gonna need to turn this over in my mind.

22h ago

User banned from lefty memes for being too good at memes

Jump

ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 22h ago

Hook me up to a blood pressure monitor and then claim that MAREZ is anarchist and refer to it as "Chiapas" or "The Zapatistas" and watch those numbers climb lol. There's something about referring to a primarily indigenous political movement by their location rather than their chosen name that really gives the same vibes as a colonial era Brit on safari referring to "the natives" or some subspecies of animal; it's almost like invalidating the legitimacy of their polity by not respecting it enough to call it by its name.

I think you and I are working along similar lines here. In many respects I'd love to still be an anarchist but your political position isn't a sports team where you can just pick out the one you favor the most. This isn't intended to sound facetious but I'd genuinely love for anarchism to prove me wrong but, until that day comes, I think there are fundamental flaws in how anarchism analyzes the world, how it prioritizes its political goals, and how it functions in terms of organizing and defending itself.

MLism isn't without flaws or valid criticisms but it has an answer for big questions/problems that emerge in most anarchist models like how do you navigate working alongside people who aren't deeply political and who aren't open to being politicized to a high degree - think of your average middle aged mom and pop who love their grandkids and enjoy gardening but they just aren't ever going to engage with theory deeply enough to develop into the model anarchists capable of achieving full political self-actualization, or however you want to describe it. In terms of politics, they are going to be followers, essentially, and that's okay - a movement should be able to accommodate that without expecting them to be at every organizing meeting and to engage with hundreds of hours worth of theory reading.

In terms of the general population, all of us here (regardless of political orientation) would be in the top 1% for political engagement and that's not to flatter us but rather to point out that we can invite others to become more political and we can educate/agitate/organize to develop the political consciousness of people but it's naive to expect that everyone can and/or will reach this level. And, let's be honest with ourselves, it's hard enough to get this particular demographic to do the reading (I'm very much guilty of this myself btw so I'm not pointing the finger at others, I'm just being realistic) so I don't think it's a viable strategy to expect that the median person in terms of political development and engagement would fare better. But let's presume that it is, as a thought experiment - what so we need to do create the conditions for that median person to achieve a high degree of politicization?

Imo we would need to do away with capitalism and colonialism, we obviously would need to have a revolution to achieve that, we would need to defend the revolution, we would need to fundamentally change how work functions so that they have enough free time for their political development, and we might just need to wait until we are a couple of generations on from that person because culture changes slowly and often people get very set in their ways that makes it very hard to get them to budge.

And how do you achieve all of that in a practical sense? For me MLism has a viable, practical answer. I don't see most anarchist tendencies having one though. To oversimplify, there's a chicken-and-egg problem that MLism (or vanguardism) has a solution for.

I'm sure none of what I've written here is news to you though.

1d ago

I am so fucking tired

Jump

ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 1d ago

I saw younger gens claiming that millennials are as bad as boomers and there was a decent amount of agreement and replies echoing it. That was a wild take.

I don't like fuelling inter-gen conflict but, my god, a lot of boomers would be one notch below literally spitting in your face for being openly queer or in a mixed race relationship or something like that.

Idk about anyone else but I've never heard a millennial say "Oh what cute kids! It's a shame their daddy happens to be black." and I've never seen a millennial's smile literally melt right off their face when you correct them by telling them that you have a girlfriend, not a boyfriend. I've never encountered a millennial who votes to kick away the ladder with stuff like access to foodstamps and, upon being challenged with "But you literally raised me for half my childhood on foodstamps", they respond with "Yeah but it's too expensive these days and I saw a very real post on Facebook about how someone bought Mercedes by scamming SNAP and I refuse to entertain any points about how this is a falsehood."

Millennials have all sorts of problems, don't get me wrong, but damn.

1d ago

User banned from lefty memes for being too good at memes

Jump

ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 1d ago

There's this wonderful old Yiddish anarchist song from Russia where they sing joyfully about putting the tsar and his mother in a box [timestamped]

It wasn't just Lenin calling to kill the bastards - even the anarchists were doing it back then.

Shit, I don't say this very often but I swear that if some of today's western anarchists met a figure like Durruti or Malatesta and listened to what they advocated for, they'd denounce them for being tankies.

1d ago

User banned from lefty memes for being too good at memes

Jump

ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 1d ago

I always appreciate learning and people who have a commitment to accuracy, so these corrections might not seem like much but it matters to me a lot.

2d ago

User banned from lefty memes for being too good at memes

Jump

ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 2d ago

Oh that's interesting to know, thanks for the correction!

2d ago

User banned from lefty memes for being too good at memes

Jump

ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 2d ago

That's a good point. Not to come off as snarky towards anarchists but there's only a couple of anarchist projects that we can even look to as historical examples - in Ukraine, in the Spanish Civil War, in Korea with the KPAM (extremely briefly and it seems like a lot of the scholarship on it is bound up in the Korean language, if it even exists.)

Often anarchists use Rojava, aka AANES, but they really aren't anarchist (although I tend to avoid debate on this matter) and then there's the MAREZ led by the EZLN, often just referred to as "The Zapatistas" (which irritates me because it gives those western chauvinist vibes) but they explicitly reject the label of anarchism because it's from a western political and colonial paradigm. Can't say I'd have any objections to that even if I did have a say, which I don't.

Both the Malhnovshchina and Revolutionary Catalonia are really good examples of hierarchies and anarchist vanguardism of a sort, not to mention of states themselves, so it's a catch-22: I'm going to look at it and my conclusion will be that these structures are a necessity to advance and defend the revolution, at least insofar as they were able to, but I could see anarchists rejecting this and arguing that it's a quirk of history and that they aren't necessary and that it is possible to advance an anarchist revolution without it. I can imagine that some anarchists would argue that these structures are also what led to each revolution failing too, although I've never come across a good argument or any sources that seem to vindicate this position.

It's interesting how Makhno and Arshinov leaned harder into vanguardism after they fled Ukraine with the collapse of the Black Army where they developed platformism as a response to what they identified as critical flaws within the Makhnovshchina.

I wonder if Makhno wasn't so bitterly opposed to the Bolsheviks, for obvious reasons since he had such a personal stake in opposing them, if he would have taken Arshinov's path and ended up going full-Bolshevik in the end?

2d ago

User banned from lefty memes for being too good at memes

Jump

ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 2d ago

You're welcome. It's very much a sketch rather than being something comprehensive. I've read a fair bit about the Makhnovists although I'm no scholar. I tend to keep this stuff under wraps a lot of the time because often there's not much point sharing it - it's liable to just fuel online slapfights that produce little aside from spectacle.

I do genuinely believe that most of what the Makhnovists did in terms of establishing a state and defending it were necessary, and I try to be careful not to treat it as some gotcha like a debatebro would.

2d ago

User banned from lefty memes for being too good at memes

Jump

ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 2d ago

I don't disagree with what you've said here and I want to get back around to this comment to reply more thoroughly but in the meantime, in matters of the "betrayal" trope, this is the official communiqué that Makhno issued publicly upon signing a treaty with the Red Army:

...but this doesn't gel with the current narrative of the duplicitous Bolsheviks and the persecuted underdog Makhnovist victims.

2d ago

User banned from lefty memes for being too good at memes

Jump

ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 2d ago

Yeah, on not surprised to hear that. I was a latecomer to Lemmy. db0 has been around longer than that though.

I'm not sure if my experience of db0 changed when I became an outsider (not that I ever knee them personally) or if they changed over time but it's sad to see their ziq-ification regardless.

2d ago

User banned from lefty memes for being too good at memes

Jump

ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 2d ago

"You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you add to your to-read pile"

— Seneca, probably

2d ago

User banned from lefty memes for being too good at memes

Jump

ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 2d ago

You don't need to be threatening to be perceived as a threat, I suppose.

2d ago

User banned from lefty memes for being too good at memes

Jump

ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 2d ago

On the Lemmyverse or before that point?

2d ago

User banned from lefty memes for being too good at memes

Jump

ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 2d ago

It was really brain-melting seeing anarchist comrades I knew well, who had denounced the Cheka and the Stasi and so on, take one of two routes when I raised the Makhnovist military secret police - either they'd deny it and claim it was merely Bolshevik propaganda (lol) or they would immediately switch to defending it and providing justifications despite not being aware of it up until that point. I was already deeply questioning my anarchist politics at this point but to see anarchists, some of whom I sincerely respected, start doing the same thing that they'd lambaste "tankies" over really shook me and it led me to question the dogmatism that I became aware of, which eventually led me to get serious about materialism. Ultimately, it speaks volumes that an anarchist movement irl required the establishment of a secret police force during a period of civil war to defend the revolution. I'm not going to say that their every action was justified but if you lean into it, it says something about the nature of and the necessity for concentration of authority and of state apparatuses. I guess I wasn't quite hardheaded enough that I could ignore this for long, although only by a narrow margin.

So, as is customary, you've replied to me and so it's only right that I provide you with yet another item to add to your reading list [PDF Warning]. Fortunately Kontrrazvedka: The Story of the Makhnovist Intelligence Service is short, but it's quite comprehensive for the topic of the Makhnovist military secret police (Kontrrazvedka being the Ukrainian term for them.) There are other mentions of them in other historical sources but they are often small and fragmentory.

Azarov is a contemporary Ukrainian anarchist so it's really hard for his work to be reflexively dismissed as a source too, which is nice. I still think he handles the subject with kid's gloves, honestly, but at least he stuck his neck out to write this work and he did criticize the Kontrrazvedka, which is more than I can say for some anarchists. (It's a bad period of history to be a prominent anarchist living in Ukraine though and I wonder how he's doing.)

Congrats on being promoted to boogeyman status. That's something we could all aspire to be lol

2d ago

User banned from lefty memes for being too good at memes

Jump

ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 2d ago

It's disappointing to see how db0 has developed, although they'd say the same about me. I really don't recall them being this way a long time ago. They used to be more level headed but now it seems like, ironically, they are a petty tyrant of their e-fief and they guard it jealously against imagined threats lurking in every shadow.

They aren't even capable of engaging with reasonable arguments. They just snap to accusations and knee-jerk reactions where they assure themselves that they are always in the right. The tragedy of this is that db0's skepticism towards hierarchy and how power is wielded apparently only extends outwards and never inwards into self-critique for how they act.

There's a good argument for the anarchist hero Nestor Makhno being authoritarian. He ordered the summary execution of leaders in his own military, deploying his military secret police(!!) to carry out the executions. Volin, then-head of what was ostensibly the civil administration oversight body, the Military Revolutionary Council, which had mandate over all things that weren't about conducting war or where it fell into a state of exception (e.g. Makhno finally giving Grigoriev exactly what he deserved when Grigoriev pulled a gun on Makhno) and so it was expected that Makhno would have held a trial and that there would have been sentencing. Except Volin wasn't in the room when this order was issued so the executions were carried out and only after did Volin express dismay at this action by Makhno.

Volin being in the room when decisions like this were made meant that he did keep a check on Makhno at other points, such as when a domestic Ukrainian printing press was printing material that Makhno deemed to be "too sympathetic" towards the Bolsheviks and so Makhno ordered that the newspaper be banned and their printing press be destroyed. Volin countermanded this order based on anarchist principles and on the fact that it was a matter for the civil administration and not for the leader of the military to decide.

There are other examples of Makhno's actions being just as "authoritarian" as what you'd find people criticizing communists for, including using the military secret police to establish terror cells in the USSR to subvert the government (remember this next time you hear the "stabbed in the back" trope that gets trotted out routinely), but these get overlooked or excused as being "Bolshevik propaganda". Meanwhile most sources are either anarchist, pro-Makhnovshchina, or they are primary sources from actual anarchists like Volin and Belash; never let facts and sources get in the way of an opportune handwaving, I guess?

There's other matters, like his personal conduct and the way he established a clique of officers around him and insulated himself from everyone else while ruling by edict, and the very tricky matter of the way that the Black Army treated the Mennonites. But that's a long story.

Suffice it to say that I don't need to explain that memes that glorify Makhno are certainly permitted there, despite him very easily qualifying for the title of authoritarian dictator himself. I already know that zero discussion would be permitted on this because either it would require db0 to acknowledge that even figures like Makhno had to, at times, resort to "authoritarian" measures (not that every time it was justified), and that almost any criticism of communist leaders could easily be applied to Makhno as well, or it would require acknowledging that Makhno was authoritarian and thus memes that lionize him are not permitted. Both are anathema to a dogmatist like db0.

Though I guess with specters like comrade Cowbee haunting the mind of db0 with the latent awareness that he will bring a very well-reasoned argument and the historical sources to back it up, is it any wonder why db0 acts like they're afraid of their own shadow?

2d ago

You can never hate centrists enough

Jump

ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 2d ago

Hot take: if you're so easily startled that your first instinct when under pressure is to grab a gun and start blasting at a person then you should not be allowed to have a gun nor should you be allowed to work in a job where you carry a gun.

[CW: minor discussion of child abuse]

If a person's first reaction when under pressure or they panic is to hit the nearest child then they aren't gonna last a single week as a teacher. Why is it that "law" "enforcement" gets treated the complete opposite?

2d ago

Can you identify these two celestial bodies?

Jump

ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 2d ago

I ain't no snitch - I've never seen either of them in my life, okay officer?(/s)