I got kicked off my favorite trans discord for defending the USSR
I got kicked off my favorite trans discord for defending the USSR
It wasn't a hostile discussion or anything, i didn't even go full "the kulaks deserved it" (although the mod that single-handedly banned me did go full "the kulaks did not deserve it"). I just laid out plainly and calmly that revolutions are inherently authoritarian, that Luxemburg said "the revolution will be as violent as the ruling class makes it necessary" and that there's one Trotzki quote i 100% agree with: "If the October Revolution hadn't succeeded, the world would have known a Russian word for fascism 10 years before Mussolini's March on Rome". Basically the whole "Jakarta Method" train of thought laid out clearly and without calling anybody names.
Note that this was on an explicitly left-leaning server that does not allow cops and troops to join. Also after several days of another poster starting destructive, aggressive bad faith arguments in the politics channel until a number of users went "disengage" on her and the channel had to be frozen until recently, when she immediately started being hostile and arguing in bad faith again, which got her not one, but two warnings from the same mod without further consequences. Meanwhile, when i defend AES without attacking anybody, that's apparently too much for her to handle. No advance warning, no "sis, you're talking to me as a mod here", not even a notification that i got banned.
The best part is that according to screenshots a friend just sent me, she's now completely going off about "authoritarians". The nerve some people have.
Sorry for posting pointless internet drama here, i just needed to vent.
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I feel like the kind of shit marginalized people go through in the imperial core tends to be inherently radicalizing in an anti-capitalist direction without necessarily being radicalizing in a pro-communist and anti-west direction.
That makes a lot of sense considering even the most marginalized people in the imperial core have the privilege of not having to worry about bombs being dropped on their homes, CIA backed coups deposing their democratically elected leaders, nor the general all encompassing horror of imperial resource extraction. The result is that western marginalized and privileged citizens alike will both readily accept the never ending deluge of atrocity propaganda against AES emanating out of essentially all western media outlets.
If you believed in literally everything the CIA said about AES, how would you feel about countries like the USSR or PRC? At that point, the red fascist rhetoric actually makes sense. How many fascists should you allow to sit at your table? 0. It's insidious, and it has broken the brains of too many otherwise decent people. For that reason I try not to judge people like your discord moderator (other than for unironically being a discord moderator) too harshly for things like this.
I don't think people within the imperial core in general will soften up on AES until real communist organizations can build up local mutual aid networks to support the most precarious of us in their communities. Ideally they'd provide necessary social services running parallel to the rotting remains of the social safety nets once maintained by western governments until the fall of the USSR. That would lend to us the necessary position of public trust to displace the misinformation put out by corporate media by providing relevant education on communism, specifically AES, where the public education system has purposefully failed. Deliberate agitation on this front is very necessary in that there is no horrible experience one can endure in the imperial core that would result in intuitively figuring out we need to organize society in a similar way to AES countries.
I am pretty aware that I would be dead three times over in third world country by now, the point is though that the west tries to pass that off as its achievement, and not it causing the conditions that make ND trans people die in the third world. Maybe I'd be fine in Cuba, idk, I just hate queers who defend capitalism a bit more bc they are happy servants of an evil that kills their siblings and keeps them down extra hard
If you believed in literally everything the CIA said about AES, how would you feel about countries like the USSR or PRC? At that point, the red fascist rhetoric actually makes sense. How many fascists should you allow to sit at your table? 0. It's insidious, and it has broken the brains of too many otherwise decent people. For that reason I try not to judge people like your discord moderator (other than for unironically being a discord moderator) too harshly for things like this.
I'm glad someone mentions this. We're constantly being bombarded by propaganda and there's very little pushback, I can't really blame people for believing that the USSR was a cruel, genocidal regime and I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they are acting in "good faith" when they do shit like this. If I believed that Stalin deliberately engineered the Holodomor etc., I would ban people from my discord too if they said the USSR was cool.
people believe the propaganda because they trust the system that spews it. and they trust the system because it still works for them, or they think it does. it's no different from any liberal counterrevolutionary.
For how many people do you think the system actually "works?" Do you think the system works for the mods of this trans discord server?
People believe the propaganda because it's being repeated much more often and much more loudly than the alternative, they believe it because the people around them believe it and because they were exposed to it from a young age when they hadn't yet developed critical thinking skills.
These people don't trust the system, otherwise they wouldn't have rules against cops. They know the system doesn't work for them. But you have to consider just how all-encompassing "the system" really is, how much it affects everything around us and how much of what we believe is influenced by having lived our entire lives under capitalism. Realizing the underlying ideological influence of your own beliefs is a long journey, it's not an on/off switch.
For how many people do you think the system actually "works?"
to put a number on it? almost certainly more than 19 out of 20 people in the first world
Do you think the system works for the mods of this trans discord server?
I think it's likely, although ofc I can't say for sure. it's surprisingly difficult to be failed by the system to the point that you're not invested at all in it anymore.
I was reading an article yesterday telling the story of a trans man who couldn't get T in florida because of desantis. that's about a worst case scenario but in the end he just got to the front of a waitlist to get some, and then saved up enough money to move out of state anyway. there's a lot of wealth in this country, and life or death stuff is not very often tightened to the point that people would start throwing molotovs at police cars out of desperation
they believe it because the people around them believe it and because they were exposed to it from a young age when they hadn't yet developed critical thinking skills
they believe it because they have no material reason to reject it, full stop
These people don't trust the system, otherwise they wouldn't have rules against cops
I used to know someone who spent years in prison and hated the cops to the point that he got re-arrested for flying into a rage when one tried to ask him questions.
but he also hated china for taking "our" jobs. even as a racialized victim of police brutality he still identified with this idea of america. in fact, he talked constantly about how much money there was to be made in starting a business
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things aren't really as bad as you make them sound
a lot of people don't have cash savings but only 1 or 2 per thousand people is actually homeless. you can live paycheck to paycheck in the sense that you can't miss a mortgage payment, and still have a house to sell or friends/family to help if you need time to find a new job
alienation in working conditions is in fact very precedented; working women gritted their teeth and bore it when they had to do 70-80 hours per week of grueling, dangerous work for half wages in textile mills, and things were even worse back in england
my sister's fairly poor and she's worked on average probably ~20 hours a week for the last decade. food stamps and housing assistance help a lot, and she's always gotten health/dental through medicaid
she's not trans, but I am. not that it really matters since trans people are a rounding error to that "95%" number, but fwiw things aren't the worst, most of the trans people I talk to are getting by or doing well, at least economically. for myself the state is currently paying for transition stuff. it can be scary to be caught in the middle of a culture war and I really feel for trans kids especially but I'm not usually afraid for my safety anymore when I go out, and I live in a bright red county. also ime transfems at least share hrt pretty readily if anyone ever needs it and there are support networks. work is more difficult but not as remotely hard as it was for trans people in the past. you have a decent shot of being okay nowadays I think.
in fact, yeah compare this to history. probably ~2 million people died in a pointless, yearslong war for the tsar before russians ran out of faith. in germany it was chronic hunger, population body weights plummeting and child mortality rising. where is that here? people generally aren't as online as you and me are fretting over the blogs every day. if they can find a tolerable job and put food on the table and not feel physically in danger and have some hope for the future that's really all it takes, no matter the day to day frustrations. especially if they have a car, some nice stuff, some savings.
and of course people with a home and a career - which is most americans by the way - are perfectly fine. anxieties about maybe having to slum it with the poors pretty much just prove that they're still invested in maintaining their position in a system that they feel able to work to their relative benefit
your question about what makes hexbears special is fair. it reminds me of an enzensberger quote about media crit:
Basically, the user of the media appears as a defenceless victim ... the programme makers on the other hand as crafty criminals. This polarity is maintained with great seriousness and considerable thoroughness: manipulators and manipulated, actors and imitators, simulants and simulated, stupefiers and stupefied face one another in a fine symmetry.
The question, on which side any particular theorist is to be found, has to remain open. Either he makes no use of the media at all, in which case he doesn't know what he's talking about; or he subjects himself to them, and then the question arises, through what miracle he has escaped their effects; because unlike everyone else, he has remained completely intact morally, can distinguish in a sovereign manner between deception and reality and enjoys complete immunity in the face of the idiocy which he sorrowfully diagnoses in them.
imo the answer is that mostly we're nerds with no particular reason to fall into this camp beyond a personal affinity for it. without a real material push the appeal here can only ever get as far as setting up a booth next to that one american monarchist youtuber in the marketplace of ideas, both of you hoping that you can talk loud enough to drown out the loudspeakers in the liberal pavilion. you'll get a more or less random share of the people wandering away from the liberals, but that's it. and it'll be the equivalent of cultural christianity, like you just know that hardly any of the high school age communists on reddit are going to be sticking around for long after they finish college and start working as engineers or whatever.
at this point we're misfits, same as that monarchist or any weirdo fash. we just believe that ultimately when things get bad enough, if a popular movement can arise and have enough of a class orientation, and the bourgeois state is weak enough, then there will be fertile ground to expand this coterie of nerds into a socialist mass movement. until then it's pretty much stage one of the standard formula for development of a leninist party: collect the small number of people we can get while getting ready for things to actually change enough for anyone else to start listening