Most of the memes are fine but for some reason they have one saying either AES or Russia are fascist and we’re evil tankies for critically supporting them. The comments are strange. There’s Communists saying “you sound stupid when you say “tankie”.” And then when they get a reply they’re like “obviously I don’t support AES or Russia, stop grouping me with them.” There are a couple other people defending AES with me in the comments and one is a patsoc 💀.
When your ideology is primarily individualist and largely aesthetic, you end up with a ton of people who treat their political orientation as a fashion statement.
Speaking as an ex-anarchist, there’s a massive trend in anarchism to not be focused on the ideological distinctions between the plethora of anarchist subtypes but instead to align oneself to a flavour of anarchism which is most appealing.
In communist thought you have very clear distinctions which are based on theoretical and practical disagreements (practical in the sense of socialism being put into practice); you have leftcoms and Trotskyists and council communists and MLs and MLMs etc. All of whom you can trace out their positions and their ideological stances from.
In anarchism it’s much more about what the individual is most attracted to as a cause than this. Sure there are platformists, DeLeonists, and egoists, for example, which fit what I’ve mentioned above about disagreements on theory and practice but you’re more likely to find an anarcha-feminist or an eco-anarchist than you will a DeLeonist or a platformist imo.
With that in mind it should come as no surprise that so much of anarchism is focused on fashion.
There’s a lot of “no veggies at dinner, no bedtimes” empty hedonistic self-described “anarchists” out there. They’re barely even leftist except in a passive way and just want people to NOT TELL THEM WHAT TO DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
Add “no bosses” to that list too.
Y’all think that any sort of construction or manufacturing is going to run in a self-organised fashion without foremen? Lol, good luck.
If you’ve never worked in a factory before, that’s cool but there are much better ways of announcing this fact and I think that it’s important to remember the old “No investigation, no right to speak” or, in their terms “In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker”.
I try not to focus too much on these types because I’m convinced that a couple of years of touching grass, working for a living, and spending time doing on the ground organising will bring these infantile urges in people to a conclusion in all but the most stubborn-minded. Although you can cut through these naive ideological positions by tracing out how there was (vulgar) vanguardism in their favourite historical socialist projects and how leadership was crucial to their functioning. That being said I have more important things to do with my time than engaging people with discussions on that stuff tbh.
I met too many folk just like this in college. I considered myself an ancom. I knew an anarcho-syndicalist, ecosocialist, democratic socialist, guild socialist, libertarian socialist, Christian anarchist…
I can’t fault them or myself too much, we are taught to identify with ANYTHING but Marxism-Leninism. I was the edgiest one of the lot for daring to even identify with “communism” (albeit in its softer, less threatening anarchoform.) We agreed on pretty much everything, yet we all identified our politics as meaningfully different based on what we named them.
Continued study of imperialism and self-criticism turned most of us into genuine communists. Some got tired of radical politics and became Hilary stans. One’s a pastor and a patsoc who believes in literal demons and performs exorcisms and shit.
The U.S. left is in an absolute state.