After seeing a megathread praising Mao Zedong, an actual mass killer, and a post about a guy saying “99% of westerners are 100000000000% sure they know what happened in ‘Tiny Man Square’ […] the reasons for this are complex and involve propaganda […],” I am genuinely curious what leads people to this belief system. Even if propaganda is involved when it comes to Tiananmen Square, it doesn’t change the atrocities that were/are committed everywhere else in China.
I am all for letting people believe what they want but I am lost on why one would deliberately praise any authoritarian system this hard.
Can someone please help me understand why this is such a large and prominent community? How have these ideals garnered such a following outside of China?
I read marx/lenin, found them to be compelling.
I am very interested in the science of economic planning and ecosystem management.
Originally, I considered myself to be an anarchist, but other anarchists had a very strong tendency of supporting imperialists in their actions against non-western countries, and frankly, I’m not white enough to be tempted by the benefits I would not be gaining from installing rightist dictatorships in Venezuela or China or Cuba if the “anarcho-bidenist” types had their way.
Looking back at it I find the whole “fight” between anarchism and marxism-leninism to be very silly, but since I think that China and Hamas are actually doing useful work, this automatically makes me incompatible with many anarchists.
What part of opposing hierarchies equates in your mind to supporting extreme examples of hierarchies?
None, if you’re a principled anarchist. That’s why I don’t have a fundamental problem with anarchists (other than my philosophical objections to anarchism)
However, many self-proclaimed anarchists do in practice support imperialists because they have a big bone to grind with AES states or even anyone who positions themselves against western imperialism.
They internalise western propaganda against these states/nations, because I guess, it’s a state so therefore it must be as comically evil as the worst fearmongering described by anglophone media. Or my favorite, “even only 10% of the atrocities were real, they would still be super evil”, that kind of thinking.
Of course, I have some contact both with actual chinese or russian people (many of whom aren’t even socialists), and they clearly have a much deeper and nuanced understanding of their nations than the even the most “I hate the government not the people” type of western anarchists. It makes the anarchists come off as silly white supremacists.
Most likely, if my contact with anarchists had begun with third world anarchists, I would never have had a phase of hating anarchists (which itself was a silly thing to do). But either way, I still find Marx more compelling than any anarchist writer, so I am still philosophically a Marxist.
Yeah thus should be the main crux of things. There haven’t been real conflicts between anarchists and ML organizations outside of internet posting for decades now. The closest thing I can thing is during the Burkina-Faso revolution, some of the trade unions that called themselves anarcho-syndicalists were also allying themselves with the French government.
There’s just no real conflict otherwise. I’ve done organizations in both anarchist and ML orgs and it’s 99% identical. Maybe ML groups are more willing to endorse someone in an electoral race, maybe an anarchist group will be more willing to do something like petty theft from a grocery store or squatting. That’s been the only real difference I’ve noticed in tactics is that an ML group will usually try to stay above board and anarchist groups will commit crimes if necessary.
Otherwise there was never any real conflict. The people who comprised these movements came from largely identical political interests.
like?