I’d love to see those Hexbears have an answer for this!

  • Alaskaball [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    There were plenty of anarchist and libertarian socialists in the Soviet Union that weren’t insurrectionist counter-revolutionary opportunists that thought the best time for them to seize power and hit the full Communism button without building anything to actually achieve it was during times of duress, such as the civil war, the build-up to then during the second world War, the post-war rebuilding period in former fascist countries, the post-war rebuilding period in a reunified country freed from imperialist conquest, and so forth.

    If I was as historically illiterate and ideologically ignorant as the person that made this and all the clapping circus seals applauding this, I would say something completely out of line like “in the history of left unity, anarchism and libertarian socialism has only attempted to emerge into the world in the form of a cancerous tumor on the Communist movement and never has nor is able to emerge into the world on its own feet.” A completely unfair and intellectually dishonest statement that ignores the existence of anarchist communes in both the Sino and former Soviet states and erases their contributions to the defense of humanity and the revolution they made in fending off the imperialists and fascists and their contributions to the benefit of humanity and the revolution in their work among the people.

    Also love the casual racism against Asians by depicting Mao with slit eyes.

      • Alaskaball [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        7 months ago

        I’ll be real with you, it’s info that I read in passing and later lost because I keep fucking up and not saving my tabs. (My web browser on desk top has “close individual tab” and “close all tabs except this one” right next to each other, and I have at multiple times lost a few years of research because of a slip of the finger)

        From my recollection it was on a Russian history site I was translating that mentioned their existence through out the life of the Soviet Union as forms of experiments in alternative organizations of societies on a micro level.

  • SuperNovaCouchGuy2 [any]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    Us, if we fall for their lies again

    What “we”? You’re just a bunch of liberals playing dress up, your political involvement is just a performance that stops when you log out of reddit and vooote for Genocide Joe. No connection at all to the political legacy of the anarchists who risked life and limb for humanity.

  • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    Anarcho-bidenists have this weird habit of talking about themselves like they are Jewish or something in the sense of having a history of brutal persecution, even if the speaker in question is just some white guy from a liberal family with absolutely no connection to those historical anarchists except for that they now also call themselves an anarchist. Is really weird and LARPy.

    • ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      8 months ago

      Its a way for boring people who hate reading to tap into that “the communists KILLED my PEOPLE” narrative, its like a politcal personality starter pack. You get an underdog “subversive” ideology, a formative tragedy and an eternal enemy!

  • HornyOnMain [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    there’s someone in the original .world thread lumping in anyone who opposes capitalism as being a tankie and someone else saying that anyone who doesnt support israel is a “genocidal tankie” and repeatedly accusing one of the anti-tankies in the thread of being a tankie because they haven’t condemned hamas yet data-laughing

  • SweaterWeather [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    The evolution from “Stalin didn’t help enough” to “Stalin didn’t help at all” to “Stalin actually killed them” regarding the Spanish Civil War is fucking wild.

    Editing to fix my dog ass grammar

    • AntiOutsideAktion [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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      8 months ago

      Meanwhile in the original thread I’m arguing with ‘an historian’ claiming Stalin sent ‘his army’ there in a sentence that presented it equally to both Hitler and Mussolini

      I’m convinced that instance has the most tedious people on the planet

  • Dr_Gabriel_Aby [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    I can understand getting fooled and believing all the bad stuff about Mao and Stalin, but I genuinely don’t understand how libs treat Lenin like a great evil. They can’t even give Lenin the “his revolution got out of hand when he died” point. I really don’t see what Lenin did that was extreme. The provisional government was about to be overthrown by reactionaries and they already attempted so before the October Revolution. He took power by popular support and most of his factions enemies were foreign to Russian soil.

    • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      Well, to paraphrase Molotov, Lenin was even more harsh than Stalin, particularly to his allies. During the height of the revolution and civil war, if he got a letter from a peasant claiming communist party corruption or malfeasance in an area, he would deputize a university professor and some students to go check it out, and if evidence was found of that corruption or malfeasance to their satisfaction (which had no real legal precedent) they had the discretion to either eject them from the party or, depending on the severity of the offense, just straight up execute them, no trial. Which happened fairly regularly. It was not a case of “We have investigated ourselves and found no wrong doing.”

      Even if you think the evidence standards were lax in the USSR during Stalin’s time (which imo they were basically the same as pretty much everyone else’s at the time, they were just far more aggressive at pursuing legal actions against high level party members and generals) at the helm, he still always had trials before executing people, even going as far as trying people in absentia, something that Lenin would have considered a ridiculous liberal facade.

      Don’t get me wrong, these were harsh people, but in comparison to the consequences that would face them and the millions peasants they led if they failed, I don’t think they were unnecessarily harsh.

      • 420blazeit69 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        8 months ago

        Even if you think the evidence standards were lax in the USSR during Stalin’s time (which imo they were basically the same as pretty much everyone else’s at the time

        Yeah people who complain about this don’t compare 1930s Soviet courtrooms to 1930s U.S. courtrooms (because that would be whataboitism, not, you know, having perspective). Think of all the people who had confessions beat out of them or got railroaded on the flimsiest of evidence. Think of all the black people who never made it to the courtroom at all.

        • VILenin [he/him]@hexbear.netM
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          7 months ago

          You don’t understand, the real tragedy is that powerful people had to face consequences for their actions. USSR bad because everyone was executed, but also USSR bad because the elite (lol) was never punished ever

    • panopticon [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      Another one I’ve seen is blaming Lenin for the Russian Civil War and thus hanging all the war deaths on him as well as the deaths from the subsequent famine. He did advocate for turning the imperialist war into a revolutionary (edit: civil) war, so it’s not completely absurd, but how many would have died if Russia had stayed in WWI? Insert the Mark Twain quote about the two reigns of terror.

  • Huldra [they/them, it/its]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    Unsure where the author of this meme has heard either Lenin or Stalin call for left unity? Both were pretty clearly and consistently hostile towards Anarchism/Libertarian Socialism as well as what we’d call modern Social Democratic tendencies.

    Only not including Mao because I havent read enough Mao and Khruschev because I honestly don’t expect him to have written or spoken in particular about left tendency conflicts.

    Really funny to just put “intellectuals” under Mao though.

    • Huldra [they/them, it/its]@hexbear.net
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      8 months ago

      If they wanted a remotely accurate meme they should have put “no unity with counter-revolutionaries” as the dialogue, since that at least gets at the core divide and argument of the conflict, both then and now.

      Edit: Actually the more I look at it the funnier it gets, like theres no Kronstadt? You put “factory councils” over like the one specific thing everyone gets to hear about and have to have an opinion on? What is this, a crypto-Trotskyist meme?

      • Nagarjuna [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        8 months ago

        One of the (more legitimate) grievances put forward by the anarchists is that the bolsheviks ended elections in the soviets and replaced elected delegates with Bolshevik appointees. During the Civil War and consolidation it made sense, but the fact that the soviets weren’t democratize again during peace time was a failing (although, obviously, the time between the Civil War and the German invasion was brief). I think that’s probably what it was in reference to?

    • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      8 months ago

      Lenin did kind of revere Kropotkin, but you are right that it was explicitly part of their organization that “there is one party line, not two” and that the vanguard must behave in a unified fashion following the results of a vote or other method of decision-making.

      • Alaskaball [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        8 months ago

        and that the vanguard must behave in a unified fashion following the results of a vote or other method of decision-making

        This is democratic centralism: Freedom of debate - Unity of action.

    • Nagarjuna [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      8 months ago

      Mao was an anarchist for a minute and actually tried to set up a representational system where multiple anti-capitalist parties could hold office, but no liberals (it was during the Civil War and lasted about 5 minutes before getting replaced by a single party system)

  • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    If anyone, anywhere, is ever told what to do for any length of time for any reason, that may as well be a firing squad according to No Veggies At Dinner No Bedtimes unexamined theory-free “DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO” pop anarchists.

    • Philosoraptor [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      8 months ago

      Think Kropotkin-style anarchism. “Libertarian” used to refer to anarcho-communism–communism without states, hierarchies, and so on–until Rothbard and company started using it to mean laissez-faire capitalism during the 20th century. Some anarchists will still call themselves libertarian socialists or left-libertarians (not to be confused with “bleeding heart libertarians” or “liberaltarians,” which are as awful as you’d expect).

        • Philosoraptor [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          Yeah, that was their deliberate plan. Rothbard wrote:

          For the first time in my memory, we, ‘our side,’ had captured a crucial word from the enemy. ‘Libertarians’ had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we have taken it over.

          He was successful to the point that very few people use it in the old sense anymore, unfortunately. This is especially true in amerikkka

    • 420blazeit69 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      8 months ago

      Socialism with kid-diddling characteristics

      Really it’s “socialist economy with a significant emphasis on individual rights, e.g., free speech.” It doesn’t sound too bad until you (paraphrasing Parenti here) contemplate the difficulties of actually running a state, confronting capitalist attacks on your state, handling reactionary groups within your state, etc. Basically “do you let the fascists publish their newspaper the day after the revolution?”

    • Huldra [they/them, it/its]@hexbear.net
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      8 months ago

      Basic summary is its supposed to be Communism without as hard of a grip on the state and structures of society, “without the authoritarianism” as ideological of an explanation as that is.

    • CommCat [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      8 months ago

      or for once organize a big enough movement that has a chance of success, then they can actually deal with “tankies”. Instead they join every Western supported protest movement with their tiny insignificant numbers, thinking they can actually change the course of these pro-West colour revolutions.

  • plinky [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    sadness anarcho-comrades shouldn’t have exploded bukharin tho, dumbest target selection in history of selections. *And shot lenin

    But ussr should have allowed internal factionalism after nep and/or after ww2

      • plinky [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        7 months ago

        Not that much, he was mildly sympathetic to anarchists (closer to lenin, than stalin/trotsky). He was temperating influence i feel, so collectivization may have gone smoother with him being more influential. I have kinda confusing feelings on him, as his theoretical work at first was bleh, but his economic outlook/general aims were more humane