cross-posted from: https://quokk.au/c/[email protected]/p/426876/the-downsides-of-running-a-fediverse-platform
S17E3 “Mac and Dennis Become EMTs”
cross-posted from: https://quokk.au/c/[email protected]/p/426876/the-downsides-of-running-a-fediverse-platform
S17E3 “Mac and Dennis Become EMTs”
I feel your pure motives are in tension with practical constraints.
Messaging achieves efficacy through simplification. We pick the most important priorities, while still maintaining more rigorous discourse for anyone specifically able to engage more deeply. As movements evolve, and public consciousness develops, we find newer priorities, perhaps ones more favorable generally.
Being overly earnest in seeking a pure form of communication simply keeps the larger mass alienated that we rather need to be participants.
Regardless, state capitalism is not any kind of opposition to capitalism. We certainly should exclude opposition that is not meaningful.
I think you replied to me twice with the same comment:
What is the practical constraint?
I already said I dont think there’s value in approaching this as a messaging campaign. I also don’t see how this would be an important priority.
I don’t understand what you’re trying to convey by saying this is a ‘pure form of communication’. I think that this is a material struggle and trying to approach it like a marketing campaign is not constructive, it also reproduces liberal assumptions about power by treating domination as a matter of style rather than structure.
I don’t think wholesale denunciation of past revolutionary movements in the name of consciousness-raising is useful. It turns complex, material struggles into symbols of what not to be, tailored for acceptability rather than understanding. That kind of simplification doesn’t challenge domination, it reassures people that nothing more disruptive need be imagined.
The reality is that our movements may only succeed through expanding participation and improving unity.
Messaging plays a vital role in our movements developing along such a successful course, messaging that is accessible and straightforward even at the cost of completeness.
I doubt you will find a historical example to contrary, but it seems that on the particular matter we are simply in disagreement.
I don’t disagree that expanding participation and unity matters. I don’t see that specific type of messaging as constructive to that end.
Most mass movements that achieved real gains did so by forcing confrontation with material conditions, not by first correcting public misconceptions. Simplified messaging tends to follow success rather than generate it.
Also that simplification isn’t exactly neutral, it shapes how people understand power, struggle, and possibility. Messaging that gains accessibility by adopting liberal moral frames around ‘authoritarianism’ may broaden appeal in the short term, but it does so by narrowing the horizon of what opposition to capitalism can look like.
That tradeoff isn’t just about completeness, it’s about whether unity is built around confronting material structures of domination or around reassuring people that nothing too disruptive is required. I think we’re simply at different conclusions.
I appreciate the conversation, even if we don’t agree.
I stand by my assertion that accessible and straightforward messaging is essential, even while not sufffient, for movements to succeed, and that some simplification becomes inevitable.
I understand you disagree.
Regardless, criticism of authority is fundamental and unique to leftism. It is not “liberal moral frames”.
I don’t deny the need for accessibility or simplification. I’m questioning whether centering ‘authoritarianism’ is a neutral simplification, rather than one that imports liberal assumptions about power and legitimacy.
Critiquing authority is central to anarchism precisely because liberalism already critiques some authorities while normalizing others. That distinction tends to get blurred when domination is understood more in moral terms than in structural ones.
Criticism of authority is central to anarchism because anarchism entails opposition to authority. Liberalism is incidental.
The anarchist criticism of authority is that it cannot occur except by coercion and deceit, and always produces exploitation and oppression.
All along I have been using the language “authoritarian leftism”. I am at a loss to imagine how anyone would think I am referring to other than leftism. We clearly have authoritarian leftism, anti-authoritarian leftism, and liberalism, as three distinct orientations.
My argument was that the framing reproduces liberal ways of evaluating power, even when applied internally to the left.
Liberalism is not incidental because it materially structures how authority is understood and justified in capitalist society.
You seem very certain that there’s three distinct orientations. I’m not convinced those are discrete or stable categories in practice, rather than overlapping tendencies that emerge differently under specific material conditions.
What does this three-part distinction explain that a structural analysis of power doesn’t?