Not us Chapos specifically, but I see on reddit and fb a shit ton of actual vitriol spewn back and forth between MLs, ancoms, anarchists and others. To the point where they’re banning and attacking others they deem too tankie or not woke enough. On here it’s pretty dang inclusive. I haven’t seen too much infighting, and who doesn’t love the sarcastic jab every once in awhile?
The stuff that happened in Kenosha has me pretty dang shook, and it’s not over. I have a friend who lives with his brother out in Kenosha, and this was minutes from his house. I live four hours away from Kenosha and I easily can see this going down in any city closeby me.
Right now it feels like the fascists outnumber us. Not only the out-and-out fascists, but there is a LOT of wishy-washy support for civility and police. When it gets down to physical violence and shooting from both sides, people won’t distinguish the leftists from the nazis, they’ll condemn both and want to go back to normal as quickly as possible.
So the only common struggle that we have is with each other. Socialists and anarchists both want to dismantle the capitalist system and achieve egality. We all want to keep this earth going for awhile, (well, except maybe for you posadists), and we all want to defend ourselves and defeat the fascists. We can only have the numbers high enough to do this if we can reach out, not only intersectionally and inter-ideologically, but in real life and in other social media spaces.
I could see this site getting large enough to have the strength to spread propaganda, infiltrate, and reach out. We should organize and develop strategies here (maybe have a separate community for it?) and try to get our ideals out into the world better. Because right now, it doesn’t feel like too many people in the middle are ready to fight with us.
Idk, I just smoked for the first time in a week and this has been on my mind today.
I’ve cleverly sidestepped most infighting by being too dumb to read any kind of theory and powering my leftward movement solely with my instinctive lizard-brain hatred of Elon Musk, Ben Shapiro, and the hosts of Pod Save America.
This is the actually way to persuade a lot of people. Most regular folks will never read theory but they know who is fucking up their life
hearing Bryan from street fight (IIRC) say that it’s ok to be dumb and be a leftist was an embarrassingly big turning point for me
You don’t have to be Albert Einstein to grok that we should maybe distribute the combined resources and production of the world towards more than like 3 people.
I really only ever get the sense that resistance to left unity only ever comes from anarchists. Like a lot of them are pacifist and hate MLs with a passion. The worst I see the other way is a mild disrespect of anarchist ideology.
When you visit r/COMPLETEANARCHY for example, they seem obsessed with tankies. Like I see more posting about tankies than about actual anarchism. I really get the sense that to them left unity is anathema to pacifist beliefs. If you search ‘unity’ in r/debateanarchism they seem to consistently reject the idea of left unity.
I’m not going to downplay how some extremely online anarchists are obsessed with the boogeyman of ‘tankies’, especially those residing in gentrified spaces like reddit or memesubs like the one you mentioned.
However. The way you’re deflecting blame in your very comment towards ‘them’ is just another flavor of the sectarianist accusational tone towards some ‘other’ - and I don’t think it’s any more helpful than ‘blaming tankies’. This phenomenon of leftist infighting, of sectarianism is certainly not something that “only ever comes from anarchists”, your comment being evidence of that.
