if you’ll pardon me complaining about this publicly: some of the meanest mfs i’ve met online are internet-poisoned communists. If i weren’t already a marxist-leninist, i would have some very unsavory ideas about what communists are like.
Lemmygrad and Hexbear are very nice places, thank you comrades _ … but elsewhere, even IRL, i’ve met incredibly rude people calling themselves communists and i need to stress this: if you want people on our side, you need to give good impressions of what we’re like. Don’t be hostile or dismissive or just violently anti-social. If you have to explain something for the millionth time to yet another liberal or anarchist… do it [insert Sankara quote], or at least find a nice way of saying you don’t want to. Save your offensive capabilities for people who deserve it. And please, PLEASE, go outside occasionally. IRL interaction is healthy, and will quickly kill any terminally online behaviours you might have. Maybe join an org while you’re at it ;)
i’ll stop stating the obvious now. Have a great day, comrades.
Last week someone here called me a ‘fucking worm’ (repeatedly) and a ‘little baby’, and told me I should be ‘erased from existence’, along with a pile of other insults. (Someone else reported and the mods banned them, in addition to deleting the worst of their comments. Thank you.) That outburst was in response to me trying to voice what is, imo, another aspect of this same exact problem. That experience naturally got me thinking even more about this pattern, and my own relationship to it.
I’ve been cruel and domineering online before, especially in my late teens and early twenties. Honestly, I’m still trying to figure out how to be critical and steadfast in my criticism without ever being vicious.
Finding one’s way to communism means, among other things, becoming more intimately aware of horrible, painful facts about imperialism past and present. There’s also a real sense of alienation that comes with rejecting the dominant ideologies in one’s own culture and society. I think that unfortunately often, among young men especially, ‘conversion’ to socialism does less to challenge certain patriarchal attitudes to violence and domination than to direct those attitudes to new targets.
It’s perhaps an especially difficult thing when learning the real history of socialist revolutions involves coming to understand that revolutionary violence can be truly necessary, that ‘terrorism’ is a label that has been weaponized against righteous and successful liberation struggles, that failure to suppress counterrevolution has historically meant defeat at the hands of brutal, brutal, reaction, and so on.
Emphasis on the material as a historical force, as something which generates ideology as a kind of rationalization, can also be misused to downplay or turn away from the role of the subjective. If one is already so inclined, it is easy to dismiss any call to introspection as idealism— especially when one sees radlibs make such calls in bad faith and treat them as the limit of politics.
The road to socialist understanding for men and boys raised under patriarchy is riddled with pitfalls. The distance and abstractness of online interaction don’t help here, either.
Dutch left is going through this now. Everyone right of the center party Green/Labor is a racist and everyone left of them is a traitor. People who get caught up in the right wing web of lies are called racist, dumb, stupid, whatever. It’s like they expect everyone to somehow end up on the left side of the spectrum without doing any outreach and while calling everyone who disagrees with them names. Meanwhile the far right welcomes these people with open arms while explaining how a brown refugee is responsible for Shell not paying taxes on their 36 billion euro profit.
Get off your high horse. Reach out to the people. Be nice to them and never stop explaining.
I just recently saw a couple of posts on reddit that blew my mind with how condescending and downright hostile some folks were to someone asking an honest question on the fucking communism101 sub. Basically the person asking a question about if being a lawyer would be a good profession to get into to assist people and they were basically told that they just wanted to live a cushy life and were self serving, unethical, and basically gave the impression that whatever good they wanted to do was just liberal fantasy. I felt so bad for OP especially since it was a communism for beginners sub. There was a similar post on the regular r/communism where OP got their ass chewed out too. I can see getting annoyed with those types of questions but good lord did they leave a bad taste in my mouth.
One person did post a pretty interesting article that has made me shift my perspective a bit but even in that they called social workers pathetic and like, how is that constructive at all?
How can they be communists and not know that Castro and Lenin were lawyers?
The CIA even created a whole booklet about communist lawyers called “Communist Legal Subversion: The Threat of Communist Lawyers”.
Damn I forgot that about Castro and I don’t know much about Lenin (yet), that’s wild that they would just ignore that to bully someone online. Pretty much everyone told him it’s a self serving idea. Link it felt insufferable and I wanna read and post that booklet now
communism101 has been toxic as hell for a long time now
What do you think makes people get so cynical? I just don’t understand it.
I couldn’t give you a definite answer but I have a quirky little theory of how the users there got to be that way. It’s important to realize that most Marxist learning groups don’t sprout from a place of everyone being given the same authority. Like Mao wrote, “NO INVESTIGATION, NO RIGHT TO SPEAK.” /r/communism101 on the other hand has no such barrier to opinion and so revisionism and flawed analyses are abundant. There is nothing keeping this in check because the mods are absent at best and unprincipled at worst. It’s essentially a breeding ground for debatebros.
The life cycle of a /r/communism101 debatebro goes something like this:
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A promising socialist in the process of unlearning liberalism goes to /r/communism101 to get their questions about Capital answered.
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They get their questions answered with likely revisionist perspectives and skewed applications of dialectics by flawed but well meaning comrades.
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They lurk on the subreddit for a while until eventually they feel confident enough to carry on the game of telephone that is the amorphous ideology of /r/communism101. At this point their liberalism has likely not been filtered out yet, ideological purity, moral superiority, and an inability to receive critique are common traits found in a /r/communism101 debatebro. These traits inspire the toxicity you find in that community.
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Tbh since I stopped using Reddit Ive had no urge to rage at Internet Liberals to their faces and mock their every word. It’s not like “out of sight, out of mind” but when you’re on Reddit, you see the worst, most confrontational takes (from a Marxist perspective, the rest of the globe sees it as normal decent content) and hearing normal people voicing concerns IRL and trying to get ahead of false narratives or godforbid even talk them out of supporting a Nazi/Apartheid/Fascist state really fills me with more hope and joy than giving all the best Pro-AES sources in the world to a right-winger who won’t read what I sent.
the rest of the globe sees it as normal decent content
I’m fairly sure the majority of the world recognizes (or would recognize if they used it) that most political posts and comments on Reddit are awful
