this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2025
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chapotraphouse
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This is some of the people in my life and they are absolutely insufferable to have any sort of conversation with politically. "Communists are all fascists waiting to seize power" and shit like that. This one person, they say this shit and then turn around and say "i dont know what to think and believe, but i have faith in anarchy" and im just sitting there like wtf you literally just called me and people i respect fascists and then admit to not having any ideological framework??? Like, if you dont actively develop your ideology you will end up adopting the cultural default ideology, we have talked about this and they agreed with me, like, deeply unserious people using punk and anarchist aesthetics because it "looks cool".
There are many people who devote their entire lives and work to anarchy, but there are a lot of people who get into it because it's the "safest" radicalism because only rightist boomers bother to stigmatize it (via "antifa thugs" or whatever), though I honestly have a little more respect for them than the other "safe" radicalism of more precisely what I was talking about where you're an anarcho-neoliberal-socdem who just says "radical" things but opposes any radical practice, who will attack Mao for not being left enough and then concern troll that some Berniecrat is unrealistic, which is extremely typical among certain kinds of academics. Like, they will simultaneously say "Oh, Stalin says that those who do not work, neither shall they eat. So much for 'to each according to their needs!' Also, collectivization stifles innovation."
But talking to you rather than myself, what you are saying reminds me a little of the better parts of that essay "Why Marxism?" where faux-radicals in the west will denounce anything and everything, seeming to be the most radical of all but really supporting the status quo in the west by denying that there's ever been anything better than it anywhere while certainly (and partially correctly) asserting that many things are worse than it. This lets them be at the apex, at a vast frontier where they have basically no one and nothing to learn from beyond liberal commentators and sometimes the most co-opted faux-left trash like Chomsky. The closest thing you'll see to decency in these people is some default socdemist fetishization of the New Deal and of Nordic "socialism," and that's still a far cry from actual decency.
But yeah, if someone admits that they're just running on vibes (and the people I'm talking about are mainly pretentious academics who could never), then I don't see what could be better for them than to learn to exercise some epistemic humility until they have a framework by means of which to judge things that they can actually defend. If you aren't acting on behalf of your own ideology, you're uncritically acting on behalf of someone else's.
To be clear, i wasnt trying to disparage anarchists in general. The anarchists in my life are generally some of the people who have the best grasp on group dynamics, effective mobilization, and how to show up and build community.
There is so much of this around me and its exhausting. I dont even know how to counter it, not because i dont have the information but just because the pure time and energy and effort is so much.
Also re nordic countries, if i have to explain to someone one more goddamn time how the nordic model is fucked, doctors with 1000 patient caseloads, denial of trans healthcare, internment schools for sami people that shut down not all that long ago, continuing destruction of sami rights and way of life (looking at you fosen), rampant liberalism and neoliberalism, the way various parties are trying to destroy the healthcare system a la nhs in the uk, etc etc etc... Well my head might just pop. Not to mention the horrible racism. The amount of people ive heard argue that their version of the n word isnt actually the english n word and is unrelated and therefore ok to say is just so depressing.
Im not a maoist but the phrase "no investigation no right to speak" should be used way fucking more istg
You're good, I was just trying to be clear about where I was coming from.
I think the thing to do in these situations is to start with first principles, probably supplied by them with gentle nudging, and then simply drawing conclusions from those principles more coherently than they've been inclined to so far.
We seem to be speaking from experiences with somewhat different types of people despite the overlap you noted, but if it's even slightly helpful, I wrote about the ideological tendencies of liberal academics and how it relates to people at other levels of education here: https://hexbear.net/post/5277098/6249585 . That probably doesn't help, but I don't think I have adequate experience to address the sort of people that you are discussing because I have had much more trouble understanding how to communicate with them.
I tend to just avoid overly-specific discussions about Nordic "socialism" by explaining that those states function as the crown jewel of a blood-soaked beast that only exists on the basis of brutal imperialism (even if it still fails to live up to what it could do domestically to boot!). And I agree on Mao, of course. idk what you mean by "maoist" in this context, but he wrote many helpful texts and honestly you would probably find several of them more helpful than talking to me, like the Peasant Movement in Hunan, etc.