Remove if against rules but need to be brought up. Admin of db0 seems to think everyone to the left of the db0 instance is out to kill/murder them. Then for some reason does more massive rants against cowbee.
Idk if should be in different comm but with this and their support of angry quoka user getting worrying
When the proposed “solution” of the ML(M) would be to place me in a fascist regime with a red coat of paint and oppress me (if not outright murder me in the name of the revolution), I will fucking call them red fash.
@db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com What’s that a solution to? You’re constantly paranoid about leftists coming for you, but never over anything specific. Solutions are things applied to perceived problems, so what problem is it you imagine you’re creating?
My solution would be to give them some unshat pants and tell them to stop shitting themselves
You’re constantly paranoid about leftists coming for you, but never over anything specific.
Poor lil guy thinks we all hate him or something, when we just feel bad for him and want him to get better.
When you’re dogmaticly against all forms of hierarchy then you become the natural enemy of all hierarchy. There is no solution this supposed ML(M) could propose that the dogmatist would accept. In their mind it would be better to be dead then to be wrong.
But in all the situations this paranoid fantasist presents, there were reasons beyond “they don’t like hierarchy”. So I’m wondering what it is db0 believes they do, beyond posting, that would get them sent to them camps
Lenin, writer of anarchist praxis is a good one.
for some reason does more massive rants against cowbee.
We salute our legendary posters :07:
Never ending praise for cowbee in the posting trenches!
Oh my god db0 is the most miserable person I’ve ever encountered. Just total contrarian hall monitor nerd energy. The evil tankies aren’t coming to oppress you.
Not to mention that nobody outright says that they’re going to be oppressive. Lenin sounded great in . . . 1917 when he was writing effectively anarchist praxis. We just know that the creation of a new state is going to inevitably end up oppressing and killing those who oppose creating a state.
This is an excellent bit
What is now happening to Lenin’s theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement concur in this doctoring of Leninism. They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social-chauvinists are now “Leninists” (don’t laugh!). And more and more frequently German bourgeois scholars, only yesterday specialists in the annihilation of Leninism, are speaking of the “anarchist” Lenin, who, they claim, educated the labor unions which are so splendidly organized for the purpose of waging a predatory war!
Famous Anarchist Lenin
Wasn’t Lenin in 1917 writing “kill the bastards” as advice in a bunch of his missives? I’ve never been big on the russian civil war, but I remember something about Lenin making Stalin look like a lamb
There’s this wonderful old Yiddish anarchist song from Russia where they sing joyfully about putting the tsar and his mother in a box [timestamped]
It wasn’t just Lenin calling to kill the bastards - even the anarchists were doing it back then.
Shit, I don’t say this very often but I swear that if some of today’s western anarchists met a figure like Durruti or Malatesta and listened to what they advocated for, they’d denounce them for being tankies.
Shit, I don’t say this very often but I swear that if some of today’s western anarchists met a figure like Durruti or Malatesta and listened to what they advocated for, they’d denounce them for being tankies.
I think a lot of modern western leftists just flat out can’t imagine the horrible conditions people had to endure back then, I’m not trying to call people “soft” or whatever, or advocate for similar positions, but I really struggle to understand the pre-revolutionary conditions in places like China or Russia. It’s beyond my scope of truly understanding how awful it must have been. And I’ve gone out of my way to learn about what things were like back then, listened to people telling stories passed down by their grandparents, because the conditions of these places just flat out aren’t taught in the west whatsoever, just a vague “things were bad and people were unhappy.”
While the Russian Civil War did start in 1917, I think they mean prior to the October Revolution, but you can still just read State and Revolution and other texts and see that Lenin was very much opposed to anarchist ideas and argued for the necessity of the use of state violence on the part of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Radlibs haven’t read Lenin, they just “know” he wrote “anarchist praxis” because some other radlib who also has never read Lenin said so on
I was thinking of his letters back home while he was in exile. I remember something about him sending a bunch of letters urging the Bolsheviks to do more and be more violent
I’d be interested in reading it if you find specific examples.
They hated Cowbee because he told the truth
idk what db0 is and I couldn’t care to find out, but every time i see it I just think it’s dragon ball related and in my head you ppl are having anime battles between one another.
It’s a nazi instance run by a cryptofash who wraps everything in an “anarchist” aesthetic
TBH a lot of the instance is less like this than db0 himself. I don’t even think he himself is a cryptofash (except by accident) but he will, from what I’ve seen, protect them based on in-group loyalty which really sucks.
To me he lost all plausible deniability as anything but a fascist when he started making up lies about all of us for calling out his fascist buddy.
If we could just have on their banner that clearly saying that “the Red Army soldiers should have surrendered to the Nazis, and the fact that they didn’t means the ones who were executed in captivity for being Slavs (or Jews, etc.) weren’t victims of a genocide,” is considered by the admins to be acceptable Discourse that we would oppose merely on a sectarian basis, I feel like it would deflate most of the popular support for db0’s shit takes.
They’ve made being a “tankie” in some cases synonymous with being correct, seemingly only opposing it to be contrarian and even despite the broad agreement from many ideologies that the above statement is the exclusive domain of a subset of fascists.
They’ve made being a “tankie” in some cases synonymous with being correct, seemingly only opposing it to be contrarian and even despite the broad agreement from many ideologies that the above statement is the exclusive domain of a subset of fascists.
Bingo. Using anarchism as an excuse to support the most fascist and reactionary takes and actions against the soviets (or any communist group) is anti-anarchist and pro-fascist. Truth doesn’t matter for these people, what matters is whatever narrative is a rhetorically effective club.
That’s not to say that there isn’t legitimate Marxist or anarchist critique against AES states, of course, my point is that it’s clear that a small but extremely vocal portion of users seem to proceed from the goal of discrediting Marxism and use whatever is effective in doing so regardless of validity, rather than a pursuit for correct analysis we can apply to build a better understanding of the past to inform our current practice.
Yes, that was the specific incident I was thinking of as well.
However, the instance as a whole actually has a lot of good people and IMO it’s a benefit to be federated with them. Part of the reason he’s crashing out like this seems to be that the instance is warming up to Hexbear and he doesn’t like that.
Agreed, big time. Lot of cool users, but the very non-cool users are getting extra-upset that things have been warming between the two instances.
Edit: Bingo. db0 sees libs and MLs as equally vile, and is concerned that MLs are seen more positively than libs, fearing that this is pushing anarchists away from dbzer0. The admins are split on this, though, as are the mods, with db0 taking an appeared minority position on the matter.
Well, TBH I got that idea from you originally lol.
Ahh shush… that’s not important lol
Piracy/anarchist instance called dbzer0, with an admin db0. The piracy resources are fantastic, I’ll say that.
It’s just terrifying seeing the changes. Although considering their defenses of a certain user maybe just finally coming to the surface
I think the userbase is actually decent, some cool people there too. I think the more vocal bad actors there are getting restless because dbzer0 and Hexbear seem to be on better terms. Just my vibes-based analysis.
I cant speak for anyone else but on a personal level I don’t tend to agree that calling people “tankies” and “red fash” is productive when referring to other leftists
what i don’t get is why db0 defederated grad but not hexbear. usually it’s one way or the other
Grad is nearly full ML, which db0 sees as red fash. Hex has anarchists, and that’s something db0 can see.
Maybe because of the left-unity thing. While the “tankie” obsessives call our anarchists tankies, they are actually anarchist and can hold discussions like anarchists and other users can see that. It makes sense for db0 being both relatively permissive and nominally anarchist.
Agreed it’s just unsettling. Or I’m too good at finding/seeing it :(
Although considering their defenses of a certain user
I thought at first you were referring to the way he claimed the “27 million Soviets deserved to be murdered by the nazis” user was being maliciously misrepresented, but you mention of “angry quoka user” in the post body makes me think maybe not?
There are multiple at this point. Quoka isn’t to the level of they deserved to be murdered by the nazis but the defense and boosting is getting there.
In the reply here I was meaning 27 million user
I exist too!
They would all lose to the might of the saiyan Prince. They don’t have the cobbles. Uh what are we talking about?
You’re the best poster around vegeta
People who get mad at Cowbee’s in depth responses are the same people who feel attacked when you are just trying to explain something to them. Like, sure big paragraphs scary, but, like, maybe read?
Liberals don’t believe in reading things that they criticize.
I fully expect people to not agree with everything I have to say, and I openly admit my biases, too. It isn’t really difficult to find my position on any one thing, if it’s a salient topic I’ve probably spoken about it at some point.
db0’s mangling of what you say is pretty ridiculous tho
I agree, but when it’s pointed out it backfires on them anyways.
Yes but you see your supposed to just believe whatever the latest state dept statement says. To do otherwise is uncivilized and rude and tankie and red fash and bannable.
db0 just digs holes for himself over and over again. Completely unnecessary self-embarrassment, even trying to bring cowbee into it and chickening out the moment he’s asked for any evidence of his lies.
It’s disappointing to see how db0 has developed, although they’d say the same about me. I really don’t recall them being this way a long time ago. They used to be more level headed but now it seems like, ironically, they are a petty tyrant of their e-fief and they guard it jealously against imagined threats lurking in every shadow.
They aren’t even capable of engaging with reasonable arguments. They just snap to accusations and knee-jerk reactions where they assure themselves that they are always in the right. The tragedy of this is that db0’s skepticism towards hierarchy and how power is wielded apparently only extends outwards and never inwards into self-critique for how they act.
There’s a good argument for the anarchist hero Nestor Makhno being authoritarian. He ordered the summary execution of leaders in his own military, deploying his military secret police(!!) to carry out the executions. Volin, then-head of what was ostensibly the civil administration oversight body, the Military Revolutionary Council, which had mandate over all things that weren’t about conducting war or where it fell into a state of exception (e.g. Makhno finally giving Grigoriev exactly what he deserved when Grigoriev pulled a gun on Makhno) and so it was expected that Makhno would have held a trial and that there would have been sentencing. Except Volin wasn’t in the room when this order was issued so the executions were carried out and only after did Volin express dismay at this action by Makhno.
Volin being in the room when decisions like this were made meant that he did keep a check on Makhno at other points, such as when a domestic Ukrainian printing press was printing material that Makhno deemed to be “too sympathetic” towards the Bolsheviks and so Makhno ordered that the newspaper be banned and their printing press be destroyed. Volin countermanded this order based on anarchist principles and on the fact that it was a matter for the civil administration and not for the leader of the military to decide.
There are other examples of Makhno’s actions being just as “authoritarian” as what you’d find people criticizing communists for, including using the military secret police to establish terror cells in the USSR to subvert the government (remember this next time you hear the “stabbed in the back” trope that gets trotted out routinely), but these get overlooked or excused as being “Bolshevik propaganda”. Meanwhile most sources are either anarchist, pro-Makhnovshchina, or they are primary sources from actual anarchists like Volin and Belash; never let facts and sources get in the way of an opportune handwaving, I guess?
There’s other matters, like his personal conduct and the way he established a clique of officers around him and insulated himself from everyone else while ruling by edict, and the very tricky matter of the way that the Black Army treated the Mennonites. But that’s a long story.
Suffice it to say that I don’t need to explain that memes that glorify Makhno are certainly permitted there, despite him very easily qualifying for the title of authoritarian dictator himself. I already know that zero discussion would be permitted on this because either it would require db0 to acknowledge that even figures like Makhno had to, at times, resort to “authoritarian” measures (not that every time it was justified), and that almost any criticism of communist leaders could easily be applied to Makhno as well, or it would require acknowledging that Makhno was authoritarian and thus memes that lionize him are not permitted. Both are anathema to a dogmatist like db0.
Though I guess with specters like comrade Cowbee haunting the mind of db0 with the latent awareness that he will bring a very well-reasoned argument and the historical sources to back it up, is it any wonder why db0 acts like they’re afraid of their own shadow?
Tbf on your Mahkno section, he wasn’t exactly normal for anarchists of the time. He advocated for an anarchist vanguard. That’s organising along lines of ML hierarchy but for anarchist means. It’s very muddled in its own way.
I’d argue that the Socialist-Revolutionary Party was doing an anarchist vanguard without calling it either anarchist or vanguard, so it wasn’t that unusual.
That’s a good point. Not to come off as snarky towards anarchists but there’s only a couple of anarchist projects that we can even look to as historical examples - in Ukraine, in the Spanish Civil War, in Korea with the KPAM (extremely briefly and it seems like a lot of the scholarship on it is bound up in the Korean language, if it even exists.)
Often anarchists use Rojava, aka AANES, but they really aren’t anarchist (although I tend to avoid debate on this matter) and then there’s the MAREZ led by the EZLN, often just referred to as “The Zapatistas” (which irritates me because it gives those western chauvinist vibes) but they explicitly reject the label of anarchism because it’s from a western political and colonial paradigm. Can’t say I’d have any objections to that even if I did have a say, which I don’t.
Both the Malhnovshchina and Revolutionary Catalonia are really good examples of hierarchies and anarchist vanguardism of a sort, not to mention of states themselves, so it’s a catch-22: I’m going to look at it and my conclusion will be that these structures are a necessity to advance and defend the revolution, at least insofar as they were able to, but I could see anarchists rejecting this and arguing that it’s a quirk of history and that they aren’t necessary and that it is possible to advance an anarchist revolution without it. I can imagine that some anarchists would argue that these structures are also what led to each revolution failing too, although I’ve never come across a good argument or any sources that seem to vindicate this position.
It’s interesting how Makhno and Arshinov leaned harder into vanguardism after they fled Ukraine with the collapse of the Black Army where they developed platformism as a response to what they identified as critical flaws within the Makhnovshchina.
I wonder if Makhno wasn’t so bitterly opposed to the Bolsheviks, for obvious reasons since he had such a personal stake in opposing them, if he would have taken Arshinov’s path and ended up going full-Bolshevik in the end?
EZLN can’t be considered anarchist either. They explicitly said they weren’t anarchist and that saying they were endangered their project entirely as it could divide them, further evidence of that is shown in the fact that they reorganised in a way I think can only be described as soviet-style organising due to losing territory to cartels. They have reorganised into something that is clearly a hierarchy.
I’m going to look at it and my conclusion will be that these structures are a necessity to advance and defend the revolution
Yes 100%. The successful anarchist projects used these structures or were pushed into using these structures to survive.
I wonder if Makhno wasn’t so bitterly opposed to the Bolsheviks, for obvious reasons since he had such a personal stake in opposing them, if he would have taken Arshinov’s path and ended up going full-Bolshevik in the end?
Perhaps, we can only speculate and there’s no way any anarchists will agree entertain the idea unless they’re already sympathetically ML-aligned and likely to slide back and forth between anarchism and MLism anyway. I am one such person. I am ML but deeply sympathetic to criticisms of hierarchy and, in particular, anarchist community building feels very good to be part of, it feels right, I’ve been part of several such communities. The problem is that it does not defend itself well at all.
Hook me up to a blood pressure monitor and then claim that MAREZ is anarchist and refer to it as “Chiapas” or “The Zapatistas” and watch those numbers climb lol. There’s something about referring to a primarily indigenous political movement by their location rather than their chosen name that really gives the same vibes as a colonial era Brit on safari referring to “the natives” or some subspecies of animal; it’s almost like invalidating the legitimacy of their polity by not respecting it enough to call it by its name.
I think you and I are working along similar lines here. In many respects I’d love to still be an anarchist but your political position isn’t a sports team where you can just pick out the one you favor the most. This isn’t intended to sound facetious but I’d genuinely love for anarchism to prove me wrong but, until that day comes, I think there are fundamental flaws in how anarchism analyzes the world, how it prioritizes its political goals, and how it functions in terms of organizing and defending itself.
MLism isn’t without flaws or valid criticisms but it has an answer for big questions/problems that emerge in most anarchist models like how do you navigate working alongside people who aren’t deeply political and who aren’t open to being politicized to a high degree - think of your average middle aged mom and pop who love their grandkids and enjoy gardening but they just aren’t ever going to engage with theory deeply enough to develop into the model anarchists capable of achieving full political self-actualization, or however you want to describe it. In terms of politics, they are going to be followers, essentially, and that’s okay - a movement should be able to accommodate that without expecting them to be at every organizing meeting and to engage with hundreds of hours worth of theory reading.
In terms of the general population, all of us here (regardless of political orientation) would be in the top 1% for political engagement and that’s not to flatter us but rather to point out that we can invite others to become more political and we can educate/agitate/organize to develop the political consciousness of people but it’s naive to expect that everyone can and/or will reach this level. And, let’s be honest with ourselves, it’s hard enough to get this particular demographic to do the reading (I’m very much guilty of this myself btw so I’m not pointing the finger at others, I’m just being realistic) so I don’t think it’s a viable strategy to expect that the median person in terms of political development and engagement would fare better. But let’s presume that it is, as a thought experiment - what so we need to do create the conditions for that median person to achieve a high degree of politicization?
Imo we would need to do away with capitalism and colonialism, we obviously would need to have a revolution to achieve that, we would need to defend the revolution, we would need to fundamentally change how work functions so that they have enough free time for their political development, and we might just need to wait until we are a couple of generations on from that person because culture changes slowly and often people get very set in their ways that makes it very hard to get them to budge.
And how do you achieve all of that in a practical sense? For me MLism has a viable, practical answer. I don’t see most anarchist tendencies having one though. To oversimplify, there’s a chicken-and-egg problem that MLism (or vanguardism) has a solution for.
I’m sure none of what I’ve written here is news to you though.
But let’s presume that it is, as a thought experiment - what so we need to do create the conditions for that median person to achieve a high degree of politicization?
Imo we would need to do away with capitalism and colonialism, we obviously would need to have a revolution to achieve that, we would need to defend the revolution, we would need to fundamentally change how work functions so that they have enough free time for their political development, and we might just need to wait until we are a couple of generations on from that person because culture changes slowly and often people get very set in their ways that makes it very hard to get them to budge.
I think some anarchists recognise that it is easier to radicalise, agitate and politicise people under capitalism than it is under socialism and this leads them to believing that socialism is a greater enemy to their project than capitalism because it’s easier to grow anarchist numbers under it.
That’s a really interesting perspective and it’s a very dialectical take on something that I haven’t considered before. I’m gonna need to turn this over in my mind.
To add, there’s also anarchists that believe that socialism is good, just not good enough, and thus advocate for anarcho-pacifism within socialism and standard violent revolutionary anarchism within capitalism, including critical support for socialist revolution if that pans out. We can see the latter in practice with the red anarchists in the Russian Civil War that joined the red army.
Makhnovian anarchists were highly idealistically aligned with a petty bourgeois agrarian base and actively opposed to prole city interests. Rather than find a way to bridge these interests into a coherent whole, they tended to just steal from industrializing cities and break shit, demanding the products of those industries but not paying for them. This was rationalized as being very anarchist, same as then not providing any food to those now further-impoverished workers.
At a basic level they just amplified a class antagonism between classes oppressed by the bourgeoisie rather than uniting them to create a lasting revolution and weakening this antagonism over time. Many of them literally just idealized agrarian life as being the only valid way of being of the people, and not coincidentally were the children of small landholders. Unsurprisingly, they constantly ceded ground to the bourgeoisie in the western regions, particularly industrializing cities, and had to repeatedly re-mobilize against a threat they could have more permanently ended if they weren’t solely focused on establishing and defending an agrarian-centric, parasitic, petty bourgeois “commune”.
This is also the antagonism that eventually led to the so-called “betrayel” by the Red Army, who was putting down the Whites for good. The Makhnovians just plain could not stop forcibly stealing from cities and destroying their materials to support their “communes” while letting the Whites rebuild in (alienated!) cities, threatening to destabilize the entire revolutionary project in what is now Ukraine. With the Red Army increasingly present in those cities, this led to repeated direct conflicts, with “anarchists” stealing from them and bombing their buildings or setting fire to their materials, often over an inventive idealistic froth like you see from db0. Being “anarchists”, who came into existence as militants just as often as they disappeared back to “the people”, it was also often conveniently impossible for the black army to promise to exercise discipline, even though they repeatedly did so when they actually wanted to, with highly hierarchical ranks and coercion. After hundreds of back-and-forths of escalations and false promises and excuse-making, the Red Army finally abandoned the pretense of being allies and rapidly crushed the Black Army. This is spun as some kind of sneaky betrayal by the Reds by Western chauvinistic “anarchists” that tend to just be embarrassed liberals rather than an expected outcome of constant provocation and intentionally escalated oppressed class contradictions.
I don’t disagree with what you’ve said here and I want to get back around to this comment to reply more thoroughly but in the meantime, in matters of the “betrayal” trope, this is the official communiqué that Makhno issued publicly upon signing a treaty with the Red Army:
…but this doesn’t gel with the current narrative of the duplicitous Bolsheviks and the persecuted underdog Makhnovist victims.
Yes, indeed. There is also a heavy dose of LARPing in the narrative, as if the white imperial core settler “anti-tankie” has so much in common with the small Ukrainian landholder’s son caught up in a world historical revolution and civil war. All one has to do is apply the label: “leftist”, “anarchist”, “collectivist”, “horizontalist”, and suddenly you share in their pain because you profess a completely non-acted-upon belief against capitalists and hierarchy. And through this alchemic transformation, you can be assured that your true enemies are actually other white imperial core leftists who profess an alignment with communist thought, and damn they’re gonna “betray” you, too! Truly aggrieved, aren’t they?
That’s the weirdest part to me that I’ve complained about for a while, that these people who have never faced the vaguest hint of a prospect of violence from communists except, in extreme cases, on the level and seriousness of a bar fight, talk about the reds murdering them like by calling themselves anarchists they are connected in a material way to these events, which are then transposed forward to the present circumstance. Them talking about cops brutalizing them makes perfect sense, because that’s a realistic possibility, but communists? Come on.
It’s reminding me of nationalist drivel about how neighboring nations are “eternal enemies” and so on.
Thank for writing this comment I have learned much.
You’re welcome. It’s very much a sketch rather than being something comprehensive. I’ve read a fair bit about the Makhnovists although I’m no scholar. I tend to keep this stuff under wraps a lot of the time because often there’s not much point sharing it - it’s liable to just fuel online slapfights that produce little aside from spectacle.
I do genuinely believe that most of what the Makhnovists did in terms of establishing a state and defending it were necessary, and I try to be careful not to treat it as some gotcha like a debatebro would.
Every time comrade ReadFanon comments I learn new things!
1·6 days agoI wanna do another “Uphold ReadFanon Thought” post but more general and not just neurodiverse related.
But also
3399 comments
Not helped by the recent changes made to limit how many pages of comments/search/etc you can get.
ⓘ This user is suspected of being a cat. Please report any suspicious behavior.
MOOOODS. Please gimme a dump of all ReadFanon comments
Also please gimme a dump of all comments that contain emojies
so I can make a post telling people what emojies have been most used.
ⓘ This user is suspected of being a cat. Please report any suspicious behavior.
I bet there are some emoji that have never been used lol
First you spin up a Lemmy instance , then you subscribe to every community, then you pull the data from your server. 😎
Is this going to give me comments from before I setup the lemmy instance?
ⓘ This user is suspected of being a cat. Please report any suspicious behavior.
It should I think. I haven’t tested it myself but once subscribed to a community you get history from that server for the community.
So I think it’s at least a partial history. It might cut off at some predetermined point but I haven’t investigated how it works fully.
db0 has always been like this.
On the Lemmyverse or before that point?
Ever since the db0 lemmy instance has existed, at least.
Yeah, on not surprised to hear that. I was a latecomer to Lemmy. db0 has been around longer than that though.
I’m not sure if my experience of db0 changed when I became an outsider (not that I ever knee them personally) or if they changed over time but it’s sad to see their ziq-ification regardless.
It’s unfortunately common among “leftists”, usually sheltered Westerners who see politics through their own self-actualization more than a world historical project.
Interesting, I knew about Makhno’s banditry towards the bolsheviks, but not about having a secret police or shutting down that Ukrainian printing press! I tend to agree, there’s a selective blindness going on that seems ideologically driven, and I think it’s because dbzer0 as an instance is gaining more Marxist sympathies as a whole. Heightened contradictions and all that.
Though I guess with specters like comrade Cowbee haunting the mind of db0 with the latent awareness that he will bring a very well-reasoned argument and the historical sources to back it up, is it any wonder why db0 acts like they’re afraid of their own shadow?
This is the thing that puzzles me, db0 regularly uses me in particular as an example whenever they want to make a point about Marxists, despite me not representing every Marxist or even speaking with them in days. It seems like I’m a go-to example, but as that thread showed it doesn’t look like they particularly care to represent my views accurately.
db0 is trying to bait you because they refuse to (likely could not even if they tried) actually engage with what you say. I’m sure they think this is very smart and “anarchist” of them to be doing.
It was really brain-melting seeing anarchist comrades I knew well, who had denounced the Cheka and the Stasi and so on, take one of two routes when I raised the Makhnovist military secret police - either they’d deny it and claim it was merely Bolshevik propaganda (lol) or they would immediately switch to defending it and providing justifications despite not being aware of it up until that point. I was already deeply questioning my anarchist politics at this point but to see anarchists, some of whom I sincerely respected, start doing the same thing that they’d lambaste “tankies” over really shook me and it led me to question the dogmatism that I became aware of, which eventually led me to get serious about materialism. Ultimately, it speaks volumes that an anarchist movement irl required the establishment of a secret police force during a period of civil war to defend the revolution. I’m not going to say that their every action was justified but if you lean into it, it says something about the nature of and the necessity for concentration of authority and of state apparatuses. I guess I wasn’t quite hardheaded enough that I could ignore this for long, although only by a narrow margin.
So, as is customary, you’ve replied to me and so it’s only right that I provide you with yet another item to add to your reading list [PDF Warning]. Fortunately Kontrrazvedka: The Story of the Makhnovist Intelligence Service is short, but it’s quite comprehensive for the topic of the Makhnovist military secret police (Kontrrazvedka being the Ukrainian term for them.) There are other mentions of them in other historical sources but they are often small and fragmentory.
Azarov is a contemporary Ukrainian anarchist so it’s really hard for his work to be reflexively dismissed as a source too, which is nice. I still think he handles the subject with kid’s gloves, honestly, but at least he stuck his neck out to write this work and he did criticize the Kontrrazvedka, which is more than I can say for some anarchists. (It’s a bad period of history to be a prominent anarchist living in Ukraine though and I wonder how he’s doing.)
Congrats on being promoted to boogeyman status. That’s something we could all aspire to be lol
Kontrrazvedka being the Ukrainian term for them
It’s actually Russian (контрразведка), Ukrainian would be Kontrrozvidka (контррозвiдка), which is almost the same anyway.
Oh that’s interesting to know, thanks for the correction!
Makhno used Russian and Ukrainian words pretty much interchangeably (which is typical of Southern and Eastern Ukraine), and most information got through Russian-language sources anyway.
I always appreciate learning and people who have a commitment to accuracy, so these corrections might not seem like much but it matters to me a lot.
Books!
(not that I’m gonna read anytime soon)
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“You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you add to your to-read pile”
— Seneca, probably
Yep, what you describe is a similar path I took from anarchism to Marxism. Seeing anarchist movements forced through necessity into making concessions and adapting structures that normally go against horizontalism was one of the bits that propelled me towards Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, and then the rest of the Marxist canon. And thanks for the book! There’s no chance I can get to it anytime soon, but it’s absolutely getting added to the list of books I intend to read.
Hope Azarov is doing well too, that’s terrifying.
And yep, I’ve basically been a boogeyman for quite a few people for quite a while now. I don’t really get it though, I’m one of the least confrontational and least aggressive people that talk about Marxism here on Lemmy.
You don’t need to be threatening to be perceived as a threat, I suppose.
I think that’s what’s more threatening, as comrade Are_Euclidding_Me pointed out. It’s easier to dismiss rude or confrontational people, no matter how justified they are, than someone that avoids slapfighting.
I’m one of the least confrontational and least aggressive people that talk about Marxism here on Lemmy.
I legit think it’s this! You’re always so calm and composed and you treat the comments you’re arguing against with such respect, more than they often deserve. I think it makes it really hard for people to argue against you in a compelling way, and it pisses people off that their arguments look so bad in comparison to yours
They get so mad at cowbee and cowbee is just
Every time, lol. I had nothing to do with that user or the thread either.
lol, db0 definitely wasn’t expecting to be called out on that ”ideal form of communism” comment.
They claimed they thought I made that comment but that they didn’t want to bother digging it up, which is fair enough. At least I got to actually explain my views before the thread gets locked.
No that’s not fair enough, lol. He lied about you and then chickened out rather than take any responsibility for his own lazy excuse-making.
