Leapfrogging past most of the substantive stuff to opine about left vs liberal... regardless of its origins, my whole life the vernacular of "liberal" meant leftwing and the opposite of conservative, and likewise "conservative" meant the reverse. Is it useful to describe political thought as two binary poles? Who cares, that's how probably 98% of this country understands it, and as far as I'm concerned, self-labeled "leftists" are the only part of the entire leftwing coalition in this country who feel the need to distinguish themselves from other leftwing people because they disdain them. Whatever people call themselves - progressive, liberal, leftist, Democratic - I don't care, so long as the label isn't used to factionalize rather clarify particular nuances of your own stances. But in practice that is almost solely what it is used for when self-applied, and then when Normies use the term to describe others they see zero distinction anyway.
It drives me absolutely crazy that "liberal" is often defined by people who specifically consider themselves not liberals. Conservatives of course use liberal as a perjorative, and I don't know why leftwing people think it makes sense to adopt that very same messaging. It's like, dude, to the people who you are trying persuade to vote for you and adopt your policies, *you are a goddamn liberal to them!* But even beyond that, so many leftists seem to view "liberals" as like, a crappier spineless version of all their own beliefs rather than a coherent ideology that might sincerely and intelligently disagree with particular positions or values, and so much of that comes from never actually respecting the people they consider liberals enough to listen to what they say they believe. One of the purest distillations I've seen of this was on ContraPoints' latest tangent about Daddy Politics:
"I'm also #concerned by the end of this video. While I've known I'm probably a bit farther left than Natalie, nothing about her videos has ever suggested she's a liberal, or wanted to create more liberals (in the American sense). Liberals are for Israel, genocide in Gaza, for profit healthcare, foreign wars, billionaires, stagnant wages, p. much stagnant everything. The status quo."
Natalie, of course, has talked all the time about what her actual views are and why she is satisfied with the label "liberal*," but this guy is like, "uhh, instead of actually listening to what you say, I'm just going to be confused that your label contradicts all the things that I accuse the label of believing." I very easily understand why leftists hate liberals so much, because I promise you on a personal level, I hate those people so much more than they hate me lol. Like the only people who have ever been truly nasty to me on the internet have been liberal-hating "leftists." And I still vote for their candidates, which is how we ended up with fucking Fetterman, something that I have yet to see any leftist try to reflect on what happened there. As much as it sucks that so many people are low-information Vibes voters or whatever, I think it's worth recognizing the reality that human interpersonal interaction is a very complicated, sophisticated thing that evolved over millenia. So much underpinning the notion of "trust" is going to be determined by interpersonal interactions and how people carry themselves generally, and that's vitally important for getting people on board with political projects. It doesn't matter how "objectively" good your platform might be, people need to trust that you'll implement it well, they need to trust that you aren't going to betray them or screw them over somehow, and a lot of the signals about that are sent just in how you behave as a person.
Anyway, her video about Daddy Politics was pretty good (small audience will see this link so I feel ok sharing it even though it is a Patreon bonus one https://youtu.be/x56kAvehyzk?si=Ac_qcUEF1A0kRzHl) and I think her observations about "leftism" vs liberalism are astute, albeit not the full explanation (nothing ever is.) Essentially that the rise of this particular incarnation of an American leftwing faction is in response to the social coding of Democrats as Mommy and Republicans as Daddy, and Trump's massive success as embracing that psychosexual Daddy affect and humiliating the Mommies in a way that transcends traditional conservative positions and values. There's a desire to harness that same power, I mean the "dirtbag left" in particular seemed to basically be saying it back when they were a thing people weren't ashamed to call themselves. We'll have a cross-party coalition of people who say the R-word, I guess, lol. A lot of online leftism I discard out of hand because in the end I don't really believe it is motivated by leftist values - they might be leftist positions, for now - but I don't understand how a person can truly believe in an ideology premised on an expanded social contract and also behave like a contemptible douche. In the meantime, I am likewise happy to embrace the feminine drudgery of the "liberal" label, where someone has to keep the day-to-day running while we aspire for a better world.
*Side note - people seem to be endlessly disappointed to learn that ContraPoints does not identify as a leftist and fequently says she is not one despite being smart and funny and having good ideas about things, and never once reflect on the possibility that this could be because she has a point about not being a "leftist." Another dimension to this is something another transfemme woman I follow on bsky laments a lot, which is that there is a contingent of the trans community (and some of the broader LGBTQ community too) that views simply being trans as a Radical Act, and as a result you are expected to be a Radical about everything else. It's an example she uses for how some lefist affect and positions are actually deeply anti-humanist and not really leftwing, because to forever be a Radical Act is to forever be an outside, oppressed minority and any attempts to rectify that would undermine the radicalism. And it actually is premised on the conservative beliefs about rigid social and gender roles, if being trans has to be more than just being a Person (who is trans.)
So I've been spending a bunch of time on communist spaces recently because I'm trying to research different aspects of the history and ideology for more posts, and a lot of this attitude thing you are seeing is directly promoted there as the right way to conduct yourself. See this sticky on r/communism101: https://www.reddit.com/r/communism101/comments/12sblev/an_amendment_to_the_rules_of_rcommunism101/
Within is also a cool video on They Live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVwKjGbz60k which goes into the absolute necessity of the infamous fight scene. I don't know if the irony is lost on the poster, though, that they are also fully devoting themselves to an ideology, and beyond that, an ideology that generally tolerates little to no deviance or criticism by its adherents, and promotes as a positive the use of propaganda.
They see talking to liberals as the process of trying to get Keith David to put on the glasses, and liberals either walk that gauntlet of having their eyes forcibly opened, or they are no use. At its heart, though, is the fact that they are approaching from the standpoint of communism as a revolutionary ideology, rather than a reformist one. And for a revolutionary ideology, if you aren't going to join the revolution, you are useless to a revolutionary, there's no point to them in being decent to a non-joiner at that point (especially in ones that follow the common practice of then exiling or murdering these people).
The problem obviously is that there is no revolution happening. They are out here using a revolutionary strategy while still going about their business, trying to promote candidates to vote for, get legislative reform passed, and the like. And the rhetoric is adopted by people who are not true revolutionaries, who have no intention of going to war with the government for their principles, or organizing a mass proletariat insurrection. And in this context, it's not a useful way to communicate at all.
The growth in popularity of communism recently is directly fueling what we are experiencing. For one, the use of "liberal" as a pejorative from the left is directly from communist rhetoric. When we were talking before about frustration with tankies--and I get the sense Natalie is dealing with this as well--I asked myself why is such a small group taking up so much mental bandwidth. This is the reason. It's small but it's growing, and its principles have leaked into the popular discourse. Also to your point of leftists affecting anti-humanist positions (of which authoritarian state socialism in the vein of Stalin, Mao, Kim, Pol Pot, etc. are), this is the model for that, an idea that the needs of any one individual cannot be allowed to get in the way of the overall health of society.
Humanism is a part of liberalism, but if you imagine something to the left of liberalism (how society might progress from liberalism, that is), that thing might not necessarily be humanist, if you see progress as being something trans-human. For example, if you see progress as going from an individual cell to being part of an organism, wherein individual needs are subsumed).
Do I think most of the people acting like this have this kind of thought-through anti-humanism? No, absolutely not, I think only a small minority of them are actually informed and have studied a lot of the historical contexts. Most are young, came through a school system that in the U.S. sucks pretty bad and has declined, have attached themselves to one thing they see as a remedy, adopted the ideology (see Žižek They Live video) and not studied alternative views, not studied what contemporary economics actually says, etc..
The communism sticky is amazing, it's like... a psychologically rich text to me. Is tone-policing tone-policing tone-policing?
On one hand I'm totally cool with a place being like, don't come into our space and get people to spend all their time arguing with us about our language and culture (of course then it's also totally cool for someone to leave their space and talk about how much they and their language and culture suck.) But it does make me laugh that they're saying, "We hate the way reddit works! If only it were like a forum!" on Reddit rather than just... going to a forum. Like yeah, part of how Reddit works is having normies blunder in from the front page all the time. I follow some weird niche subs like r/Aquariums or bettafish to look at people's fish and people are constantly patiently responding to the same newbie shit, because those people actually love and care about aquariums and want to see even the dumbest rando's aquariums be good. If ya wanna have a cool kids club where you only let the cool kids in and you all think each other are cool, ok, that's not something for the masses, it's the complete opposite. It's a side point but it does go directly to how they think about the world.
The video is making me remember that I had The Pervert's Guide to Cinema on my Netflix disc queue back when I was in college lmao and just never got to it. Yeah, the immediate odd thing about the video is that even though I know Zizek is a communist himself, he only refers to the removal of ideology - any ideology that underlies implicit and unexamined norms. American society is lampooned in the movie, so you see capitalist aspects of American society naturally lampooned as well. But some of the examples of ideology stripped away are not explicitly or exclusively capitalist, like "Marry and Reproduce" (unless they think that Adam Smith came up with "be fruitful and multiply"?) I didn't see the context that the video was linked, so is the idea just that "a communist said this, so it's about communism"? I'm not even sure which irony is weirder, the idea that if you stripped away capitalist ideology, communism is what you'd see underneath (as if it's not an ideology), or the idea that some people should expect (and embrace) being corporeally violently induced into seeing beyond their ideology but communists shouldn't even have to undergo the like 10th-order violence of conforming to bourgeois norms by being told to not be an asshole by other communists?
I wondered initially why this was the metaphor that resonated rather than the more commonly used Red Pill, and it's gross to think that it's probably because it requires a human agent for the violence of awakening. Neo's awakening when he takes the Red Pill is violent too, but it's the violence of a symbolic death & rebirth, not of succumbing to someone else's will (also was thinking about this because I already mentioned ContraPoints earlier and her vid on liminal spaces is one of my all time faves, she spends some time talking about the origins of the word "liminality" in reference to rites of passage and how those symbols are often found in media that we associate with liminal spaces, such as The Matrix or Spirited Away ANYWAY.)
99% of what I say is general observation and I can provide zero evidence, but I think more than communism itself becoming more popular, it's... communists? Like there's this loose web of parasocial hangers-on to posters and podcasters and youtubers who yearn for the Revolution but don't have nearly as concrete a concept of how post-revolution society would operate than dyed in the wool communists do. Especially because I think anarchists are popular in this space too, in fact I see more directly anarchic ideas espoused by people (abolish prisons, abolish the police, anti-work, whatever) than necessarily communist, but they still use language and cultural signifiers of communism. And I don't know if that's because they find it easy or acceptable to dismiss stuff that they disagree with from competing ideologies because in their mind it's all sort of Shitposting anyway and you can cherry pick what you think is sincere or if it's because really what unites them is the hatred of liberals. Like "yeah I don't agree with X but at least it stands for something!" Probably the most communist-incompatible thing that I see regularly with online leftists is their devotion to the idea that individual choices are sacrosanct. Individual people should not be held responsible for contributions to climate change, because it's the design of systems that must change to solve large systemic problems, and also sometimes more stupidly that Big Powerful corporations are the biggest offenders and should be targeted instead. Questioning perceived luxuries from different people is taboo because there is ableism is baked into assumptions about what is a luxury vs necessity. Stuff like that. Whereas communism DEMANDS personal sacrifice for the cause, at the very least it demands personal buy-in and contribution. And the thing that gets me is that I agree with those leftist positions I just described there, at least in degrees, and that's why I still find self-styled leftists and liberals to be ideologically pretty similar but only one group hates the idea that we could be similar (my hate is social, I find them miserable to be around and undeservedly self-assured about how right they are about everything and especially with an absurd degree of precision.)
I thought of something else regarding the mental health stuff I wrote yesterday, in part reminded because that trans bsky poster I was talking about was having a Day today arguing about typical lib vs leftist bullshit (and I'm not even 100% on board with the amount of influence/blame leftists hold for things like election outcomes but I don't fault her for being extra mad about the influence they do have lol) and she posted this: https://bsky.app/profile/eleanor.lockhart.contact/post/3lswjmmboxk2j
And it reminded me of a thing she had written about in the past that was not strictly political, more an intra-trans-community issue, that some trans communities have a severely psychologically abusive aspect where they tell insecure trans people things like that cisnormative society will never truly accept them, that they can't trust people who purport to be allies, all a sort of blackpill with the implication being "we'll be the only people to ever love you. You can never leave us." I think she sees direct overlap between this and those communities' radicalism too - you will never be happy until the Revolution comes because reform will never abolish the gender hierarchies. If you find any happiness now in the status quo, where oppression of queer people obviously exists, then you are complicit in our oppression. And it occurs to me that this applies just in general, this way of thinking can be highly predatory on people predisposed to depression and anxiety. This feedback loop of validating your self-loathing or lack of motivation or misery and reinforcing by saying yes yes, of course you feel unfulfilled, of course you feel like shit, this fallen world is shit, you will never stop feeling like shit until our liberation with glorious [socialism/communism/anarchism/vague amalgamation of left wing ideology]. It's grosssssss
The context they use Zizek's video in (it's linked to the specific timestamp of the fight part talking about the discomfort) is that when a reader who purports to be a communist sees someone being harsh to a liberal and has the urge to tone-police them, the discomfort in the purported communist reader at seeing the harsh communist is revealing that the would-be policer is still actually beholden to liberal ideology and hasn't actually accepted the rejection of it that communism entails. So in this case the liberal may be a lost cause, but the policer is still actually in the uncomfortable process of having the glasses forced on them. Or perhaps the tone-policer is witnessing this brutal fight and feels uncomfortable at the violence, but they are supposed to realize that this is what is needed and supposedly for the good of all involved. The fact that they haven't accepted it and examined their discomfort in seeing it means they haven't done the work to fully be a communist and therefore shouldn't be posting on a place for instructing on communism.
I was planning on talking about the "coolness" factor of communists or revolutionaries in my next, or one of my next, posts, actually.
But also, there is an ideology that is mix of anarchy and communism, anarcho-communism, which in my opinion is pure fantasy, and one of the stupidest ideologies that exists when applied to the real world. Even if you made some sort of commune like the people in my early communism post, you are still relying on the state to enforce your right to be on that land and not have a stronger outside group come and remove you from it or force you to work for them. Or you need a structure to defend yourself which requires organized force which somehow a bunch of free agents needs to magically agree on supplying and manning and directing and taking part in horrifc violence, and then everyone to voluntarily surrender that power.
Or you need to imagine that the whole world adopts this at the same time (and hope no dangerous extraterrestrials show up), which, how? This part does line up with the final stage of Marxism (also in my more recent post) but that is also one of the fuzziest parts of it--how exactly do you go from a dictatorial style of governance to those people who have power just deciding it's not necessary anymore and abdicating it? It all just assumes that bad actors don't exist, which as we've talked about are all over the place derailing every system. There's some sort of magic they use where once everyone is comfortable and well-supplied, no self-interested power-hungry individuals will be born or exist--there is absolutely no nature, only nurture.
Also, that blackpill trans subset actually reminds me of what were the early arguments for Zionism. Theodor Herzl basically wrote that in book form, about how Jews would never be accepted anywhere they go, assimilation is impossible, you think you are living OK lives by leaving Russia for the West, but anti-semitism will come for you everywhere unless we make our own strong place where we are in charge.
Yeah, separatist movements are... not good. I was just struck by the immediacy of the relationships, like all the people saying this stuff to you include people you consider friends. There does exist the perfect melding of those two, the personal and the ideological coming down from community leaders: a cult
Like, if I had been beaten up by police right before Trump won in 2016, I don't even know how to describe how that would change the vibe of the past decade. The Trump win still feels to me like American voters giving up on even trying to care about anything other than whatever petty grievances they have that day, and being angry & tired of listening to anyone else who tries to make them care, so they let fascism in and didn't give a fuck. But if the Trump presidency started with jackboot thugs, I dunno, it's differently demoralizing. Losing doesn't always feel like being beaten, but getting literally beaten certainly can change that.
There was another Studs interview with Pete Seeger I think in the 80s where Phil came up, and Studs wondered aloud about disillusionment and not being able to cope, which Pete (maybe wisely imo) demurred on. And the two of them are sort of the perfect comparison for leftist vs lib potshots in a way, Pete even is gently mocked by Phil in Love Me I'm a Liberal, so you have your squishy lib platitudes in Pete and serious leftist praxis in Phil. And then Phil died young, miserable, basically alone, never seeing most of the things he was fighting for come to pass. Pete died in his 90s, performing as recently as 3 months before he died (https://youtu.be/MzWqYrMXTNM?si=5Y-YO0ywDf5J-3mG), surrounded by a big family from a 70-year marriage that seems to have been genuinely extremely close, having seen and some of his personal passion projects such as the cleanup of the Hudson River actually succeed.
But it's worth remembering that Phil suffered from bipolar disorder and all mental health treatment sucked ass until the past few decades (whereas now it merely sucks.) Which on one hand is like, yeah, there is a limit to how many broad conclusions you should take about the rational parts of people's lives (like their politics) when they have a deeply irrational illness too. But on the other, I think about a common meme among bluesky liberals is that so many self-described leftists are basically Posting Through their Mental Illnesses and channeling it into politics. Particularly anxiety and depression. So much of rhetoric about, say, genocide in Palestine is pretty easy to see through not as something the poster thinks actually will do a single thing to help the situation or change a mind, but to forestall any accusations that *they* didn't care enough about Gaza, that *they* might be a geoncidaire too for continuing to live out their normal life largely unaffected and all the other daily contradictions and hypocrisies of trying to live in accordance to your values. I do genuinely think what is often mistaken for "purity tests" is actually insecurity and defense mechanisms. A lot of online leftism is coming from marginalized communities that have suffered a lot, and we are also biased towards seeing the views of people who might not be doing well (lots of time on their hands to post because they are stuck in some sort of crappy situation.) So maybe contextualizing a lot of political thought with mental illness is in fact important. I thought this thread was spot-on about a *how* a lot of online leftism at least SOUNDS: https://bsky.app/profile/aelkus.bsky.social/post/3lrxskgxlhk2r
Other random thoughts are that this discussion about the creation of the Electoral College with Jamelle Bouie is really interesting (https://open.spotify.com/episode/0Rc5WnPBqT34jDzpNVQHF5?si=1b9122fd4803414a). Maybe most interesting in the end to me is just the idea that any random half-baked shit in any system is eventually going to become an exploit. Patch pls. And that also just makes me think of the issue about the necessity of good-faith actors for making our system work. That is a far, far more intractable problem to me, because ANY and EVERY system requires good faith usage to actually work. I'm not sure how any system can self-regulate against a truly malicious actor, one who knowingly seeks out things to exploit and abuse in the system. I think about this all the time from my workplace where we (and mostly I) basically got the opportunity to design our whole workflows from scratch. There were NO new rules, new levels of oversight, etc. that we could implement to get Toby to produce what we wanted him to produce because he fundamentally disagreed about what he wanted the system to do. All we ended up with was a byzantine number of rules and redundancies to try to correct for it, when the actually solution was for him to leave our group and get a position elsewhere in the division lmao.
Leapfrogging past most of the substantive stuff to opine about left vs liberal... regardless of its origins, my whole life the vernacular of "liberal" meant leftwing and the opposite of conservative, and likewise "conservative" meant the reverse. Is it useful to describe political thought as two binary poles? Who cares, that's how probably 98% of this country understands it, and as far as I'm concerned, self-labeled "leftists" are the only part of the entire leftwing coalition in this country who feel the need to distinguish themselves from other leftwing people because they disdain them. Whatever people call themselves - progressive, liberal, leftist, Democratic - I don't care, so long as the label isn't used to factionalize rather clarify particular nuances of your own stances. But in practice that is almost solely what it is used for when self-applied, and then when Normies use the term to describe others they see zero distinction anyway.
It drives me absolutely crazy that "liberal" is often defined by people who specifically consider themselves not liberals. Conservatives of course use liberal as a perjorative, and I don't know why leftwing people think it makes sense to adopt that very same messaging. It's like, dude, to the people who you are trying persuade to vote for you and adopt your policies, *you are a goddamn liberal to them!* But even beyond that, so many leftists seem to view "liberals" as like, a crappier spineless version of all their own beliefs rather than a coherent ideology that might sincerely and intelligently disagree with particular positions or values, and so much of that comes from never actually respecting the people they consider liberals enough to listen to what they say they believe. One of the purest distillations I've seen of this was on ContraPoints' latest tangent about Daddy Politics:
"I'm also #concerned by the end of this video. While I've known I'm probably a bit farther left than Natalie, nothing about her videos has ever suggested she's a liberal, or wanted to create more liberals (in the American sense). Liberals are for Israel, genocide in Gaza, for profit healthcare, foreign wars, billionaires, stagnant wages, p. much stagnant everything. The status quo."
Natalie, of course, has talked all the time about what her actual views are and why she is satisfied with the label "liberal*," but this guy is like, "uhh, instead of actually listening to what you say, I'm just going to be confused that your label contradicts all the things that I accuse the label of believing." I very easily understand why leftists hate liberals so much, because I promise you on a personal level, I hate those people so much more than they hate me lol. Like the only people who have ever been truly nasty to me on the internet have been liberal-hating "leftists." And I still vote for their candidates, which is how we ended up with fucking Fetterman, something that I have yet to see any leftist try to reflect on what happened there. As much as it sucks that so many people are low-information Vibes voters or whatever, I think it's worth recognizing the reality that human interpersonal interaction is a very complicated, sophisticated thing that evolved over millenia. So much underpinning the notion of "trust" is going to be determined by interpersonal interactions and how people carry themselves generally, and that's vitally important for getting people on board with political projects. It doesn't matter how "objectively" good your platform might be, people need to trust that you'll implement it well, they need to trust that you aren't going to betray them or screw them over somehow, and a lot of the signals about that are sent just in how you behave as a person.
Anyway, her video about Daddy Politics was pretty good (small audience will see this link so I feel ok sharing it even though it is a Patreon bonus one https://youtu.be/x56kAvehyzk?si=Ac_qcUEF1A0kRzHl) and I think her observations about "leftism" vs liberalism are astute, albeit not the full explanation (nothing ever is.) Essentially that the rise of this particular incarnation of an American leftwing faction is in response to the social coding of Democrats as Mommy and Republicans as Daddy, and Trump's massive success as embracing that psychosexual Daddy affect and humiliating the Mommies in a way that transcends traditional conservative positions and values. There's a desire to harness that same power, I mean the "dirtbag left" in particular seemed to basically be saying it back when they were a thing people weren't ashamed to call themselves. We'll have a cross-party coalition of people who say the R-word, I guess, lol. A lot of online leftism I discard out of hand because in the end I don't really believe it is motivated by leftist values - they might be leftist positions, for now - but I don't understand how a person can truly believe in an ideology premised on an expanded social contract and also behave like a contemptible douche. In the meantime, I am likewise happy to embrace the feminine drudgery of the "liberal" label, where someone has to keep the day-to-day running while we aspire for a better world.
*Side note - people seem to be endlessly disappointed to learn that ContraPoints does not identify as a leftist and fequently says she is not one despite being smart and funny and having good ideas about things, and never once reflect on the possibility that this could be because she has a point about not being a "leftist." Another dimension to this is something another transfemme woman I follow on bsky laments a lot, which is that there is a contingent of the trans community (and some of the broader LGBTQ community too) that views simply being trans as a Radical Act, and as a result you are expected to be a Radical about everything else. It's an example she uses for how some lefist affect and positions are actually deeply anti-humanist and not really leftwing, because to forever be a Radical Act is to forever be an outside, oppressed minority and any attempts to rectify that would undermine the radicalism. And it actually is premised on the conservative beliefs about rigid social and gender roles, if being trans has to be more than just being a Person (who is trans.)
So I've been spending a bunch of time on communist spaces recently because I'm trying to research different aspects of the history and ideology for more posts, and a lot of this attitude thing you are seeing is directly promoted there as the right way to conduct yourself. See this sticky on r/communism101: https://www.reddit.com/r/communism101/comments/12sblev/an_amendment_to_the_rules_of_rcommunism101/
Within is also a cool video on They Live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVwKjGbz60k which goes into the absolute necessity of the infamous fight scene. I don't know if the irony is lost on the poster, though, that they are also fully devoting themselves to an ideology, and beyond that, an ideology that generally tolerates little to no deviance or criticism by its adherents, and promotes as a positive the use of propaganda.
They see talking to liberals as the process of trying to get Keith David to put on the glasses, and liberals either walk that gauntlet of having their eyes forcibly opened, or they are no use. At its heart, though, is the fact that they are approaching from the standpoint of communism as a revolutionary ideology, rather than a reformist one. And for a revolutionary ideology, if you aren't going to join the revolution, you are useless to a revolutionary, there's no point to them in being decent to a non-joiner at that point (especially in ones that follow the common practice of then exiling or murdering these people).
The problem obviously is that there is no revolution happening. They are out here using a revolutionary strategy while still going about their business, trying to promote candidates to vote for, get legislative reform passed, and the like. And the rhetoric is adopted by people who are not true revolutionaries, who have no intention of going to war with the government for their principles, or organizing a mass proletariat insurrection. And in this context, it's not a useful way to communicate at all.
The growth in popularity of communism recently is directly fueling what we are experiencing. For one, the use of "liberal" as a pejorative from the left is directly from communist rhetoric. When we were talking before about frustration with tankies--and I get the sense Natalie is dealing with this as well--I asked myself why is such a small group taking up so much mental bandwidth. This is the reason. It's small but it's growing, and its principles have leaked into the popular discourse. Also to your point of leftists affecting anti-humanist positions (of which authoritarian state socialism in the vein of Stalin, Mao, Kim, Pol Pot, etc. are), this is the model for that, an idea that the needs of any one individual cannot be allowed to get in the way of the overall health of society.
Humanism is a part of liberalism, but if you imagine something to the left of liberalism (how society might progress from liberalism, that is), that thing might not necessarily be humanist, if you see progress as being something trans-human. For example, if you see progress as going from an individual cell to being part of an organism, wherein individual needs are subsumed).
Do I think most of the people acting like this have this kind of thought-through anti-humanism? No, absolutely not, I think only a small minority of them are actually informed and have studied a lot of the historical contexts. Most are young, came through a school system that in the U.S. sucks pretty bad and has declined, have attached themselves to one thing they see as a remedy, adopted the ideology (see Žižek They Live video) and not studied alternative views, not studied what contemporary economics actually says, etc..
Exhibit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ussr/comments/1e6oyni/age_demographics_poll/
Also, I like the Daddy politics thing, and the point about trans-ness and radicalism.
The communism sticky is amazing, it's like... a psychologically rich text to me. Is tone-policing tone-policing tone-policing?
On one hand I'm totally cool with a place being like, don't come into our space and get people to spend all their time arguing with us about our language and culture (of course then it's also totally cool for someone to leave their space and talk about how much they and their language and culture suck.) But it does make me laugh that they're saying, "We hate the way reddit works! If only it were like a forum!" on Reddit rather than just... going to a forum. Like yeah, part of how Reddit works is having normies blunder in from the front page all the time. I follow some weird niche subs like r/Aquariums or bettafish to look at people's fish and people are constantly patiently responding to the same newbie shit, because those people actually love and care about aquariums and want to see even the dumbest rando's aquariums be good. If ya wanna have a cool kids club where you only let the cool kids in and you all think each other are cool, ok, that's not something for the masses, it's the complete opposite. It's a side point but it does go directly to how they think about the world.
The video is making me remember that I had The Pervert's Guide to Cinema on my Netflix disc queue back when I was in college lmao and just never got to it. Yeah, the immediate odd thing about the video is that even though I know Zizek is a communist himself, he only refers to the removal of ideology - any ideology that underlies implicit and unexamined norms. American society is lampooned in the movie, so you see capitalist aspects of American society naturally lampooned as well. But some of the examples of ideology stripped away are not explicitly or exclusively capitalist, like "Marry and Reproduce" (unless they think that Adam Smith came up with "be fruitful and multiply"?) I didn't see the context that the video was linked, so is the idea just that "a communist said this, so it's about communism"? I'm not even sure which irony is weirder, the idea that if you stripped away capitalist ideology, communism is what you'd see underneath (as if it's not an ideology), or the idea that some people should expect (and embrace) being corporeally violently induced into seeing beyond their ideology but communists shouldn't even have to undergo the like 10th-order violence of conforming to bourgeois norms by being told to not be an asshole by other communists?
I wondered initially why this was the metaphor that resonated rather than the more commonly used Red Pill, and it's gross to think that it's probably because it requires a human agent for the violence of awakening. Neo's awakening when he takes the Red Pill is violent too, but it's the violence of a symbolic death & rebirth, not of succumbing to someone else's will (also was thinking about this because I already mentioned ContraPoints earlier and her vid on liminal spaces is one of my all time faves, she spends some time talking about the origins of the word "liminality" in reference to rites of passage and how those symbols are often found in media that we associate with liminal spaces, such as The Matrix or Spirited Away ANYWAY.)
99% of what I say is general observation and I can provide zero evidence, but I think more than communism itself becoming more popular, it's... communists? Like there's this loose web of parasocial hangers-on to posters and podcasters and youtubers who yearn for the Revolution but don't have nearly as concrete a concept of how post-revolution society would operate than dyed in the wool communists do. Especially because I think anarchists are popular in this space too, in fact I see more directly anarchic ideas espoused by people (abolish prisons, abolish the police, anti-work, whatever) than necessarily communist, but they still use language and cultural signifiers of communism. And I don't know if that's because they find it easy or acceptable to dismiss stuff that they disagree with from competing ideologies because in their mind it's all sort of Shitposting anyway and you can cherry pick what you think is sincere or if it's because really what unites them is the hatred of liberals. Like "yeah I don't agree with X but at least it stands for something!" Probably the most communist-incompatible thing that I see regularly with online leftists is their devotion to the idea that individual choices are sacrosanct. Individual people should not be held responsible for contributions to climate change, because it's the design of systems that must change to solve large systemic problems, and also sometimes more stupidly that Big Powerful corporations are the biggest offenders and should be targeted instead. Questioning perceived luxuries from different people is taboo because there is ableism is baked into assumptions about what is a luxury vs necessity. Stuff like that. Whereas communism DEMANDS personal sacrifice for the cause, at the very least it demands personal buy-in and contribution. And the thing that gets me is that I agree with those leftist positions I just described there, at least in degrees, and that's why I still find self-styled leftists and liberals to be ideologically pretty similar but only one group hates the idea that we could be similar (my hate is social, I find them miserable to be around and undeservedly self-assured about how right they are about everything and especially with an absurd degree of precision.)
I thought of something else regarding the mental health stuff I wrote yesterday, in part reminded because that trans bsky poster I was talking about was having a Day today arguing about typical lib vs leftist bullshit (and I'm not even 100% on board with the amount of influence/blame leftists hold for things like election outcomes but I don't fault her for being extra mad about the influence they do have lol) and she posted this: https://bsky.app/profile/eleanor.lockhart.contact/post/3lswjmmboxk2j
And it reminded me of a thing she had written about in the past that was not strictly political, more an intra-trans-community issue, that some trans communities have a severely psychologically abusive aspect where they tell insecure trans people things like that cisnormative society will never truly accept them, that they can't trust people who purport to be allies, all a sort of blackpill with the implication being "we'll be the only people to ever love you. You can never leave us." I think she sees direct overlap between this and those communities' radicalism too - you will never be happy until the Revolution comes because reform will never abolish the gender hierarchies. If you find any happiness now in the status quo, where oppression of queer people obviously exists, then you are complicit in our oppression. And it occurs to me that this applies just in general, this way of thinking can be highly predatory on people predisposed to depression and anxiety. This feedback loop of validating your self-loathing or lack of motivation or misery and reinforcing by saying yes yes, of course you feel unfulfilled, of course you feel like shit, this fallen world is shit, you will never stop feeling like shit until our liberation with glorious [socialism/communism/anarchism/vague amalgamation of left wing ideology]. It's grosssssss
The context they use Zizek's video in (it's linked to the specific timestamp of the fight part talking about the discomfort) is that when a reader who purports to be a communist sees someone being harsh to a liberal and has the urge to tone-police them, the discomfort in the purported communist reader at seeing the harsh communist is revealing that the would-be policer is still actually beholden to liberal ideology and hasn't actually accepted the rejection of it that communism entails. So in this case the liberal may be a lost cause, but the policer is still actually in the uncomfortable process of having the glasses forced on them. Or perhaps the tone-policer is witnessing this brutal fight and feels uncomfortable at the violence, but they are supposed to realize that this is what is needed and supposedly for the good of all involved. The fact that they haven't accepted it and examined their discomfort in seeing it means they haven't done the work to fully be a communist and therefore shouldn't be posting on a place for instructing on communism.
I was planning on talking about the "coolness" factor of communists or revolutionaries in my next, or one of my next, posts, actually.
But also, there is an ideology that is mix of anarchy and communism, anarcho-communism, which in my opinion is pure fantasy, and one of the stupidest ideologies that exists when applied to the real world. Even if you made some sort of commune like the people in my early communism post, you are still relying on the state to enforce your right to be on that land and not have a stronger outside group come and remove you from it or force you to work for them. Or you need a structure to defend yourself which requires organized force which somehow a bunch of free agents needs to magically agree on supplying and manning and directing and taking part in horrifc violence, and then everyone to voluntarily surrender that power.
Or you need to imagine that the whole world adopts this at the same time (and hope no dangerous extraterrestrials show up), which, how? This part does line up with the final stage of Marxism (also in my more recent post) but that is also one of the fuzziest parts of it--how exactly do you go from a dictatorial style of governance to those people who have power just deciding it's not necessary anymore and abdicating it? It all just assumes that bad actors don't exist, which as we've talked about are all over the place derailing every system. There's some sort of magic they use where once everyone is comfortable and well-supplied, no self-interested power-hungry individuals will be born or exist--there is absolutely no nature, only nurture.
Also, that blackpill trans subset actually reminds me of what were the early arguments for Zionism. Theodor Herzl basically wrote that in book form, about how Jews would never be accepted anywhere they go, assimilation is impossible, you think you are living OK lives by leaving Russia for the West, but anti-semitism will come for you everywhere unless we make our own strong place where we are in charge.
Yeah, separatist movements are... not good. I was just struck by the immediacy of the relationships, like all the people saying this stuff to you include people you consider friends. There does exist the perfect melding of those two, the personal and the ideological coming down from community leaders: a cult
Other stuff:
I've been listening to so much Studs Terkel lately. There's a discussion he had following being at the Chicago 1968 riot (https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/james-cameron-and-studs-terkel-discuss-their-experience-lincoln-park-and-how-peaceful and https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/interview-british-journalist-and-writer-james-cameron-3) which were interesting to me in a way that's hard to describe, like as commentators they were trying to discuss it in a clear-headed way with placing it into context and analyzing the broader meanings of it for the future, but MOSTLY what came through to me was a clearly very personal feeling of surrealness/shock. That aspect of it makes it a far more interesting primary source document than their analysis, same with Phil's response. The deeply personal feeling of something having Died and you are mourning it.
Like, if I had been beaten up by police right before Trump won in 2016, I don't even know how to describe how that would change the vibe of the past decade. The Trump win still feels to me like American voters giving up on even trying to care about anything other than whatever petty grievances they have that day, and being angry & tired of listening to anyone else who tries to make them care, so they let fascism in and didn't give a fuck. But if the Trump presidency started with jackboot thugs, I dunno, it's differently demoralizing. Losing doesn't always feel like being beaten, but getting literally beaten certainly can change that.
There was another Studs interview with Pete Seeger I think in the 80s where Phil came up, and Studs wondered aloud about disillusionment and not being able to cope, which Pete (maybe wisely imo) demurred on. And the two of them are sort of the perfect comparison for leftist vs lib potshots in a way, Pete even is gently mocked by Phil in Love Me I'm a Liberal, so you have your squishy lib platitudes in Pete and serious leftist praxis in Phil. And then Phil died young, miserable, basically alone, never seeing most of the things he was fighting for come to pass. Pete died in his 90s, performing as recently as 3 months before he died (https://youtu.be/MzWqYrMXTNM?si=5Y-YO0ywDf5J-3mG), surrounded by a big family from a 70-year marriage that seems to have been genuinely extremely close, having seen and some of his personal passion projects such as the cleanup of the Hudson River actually succeed.
But it's worth remembering that Phil suffered from bipolar disorder and all mental health treatment sucked ass until the past few decades (whereas now it merely sucks.) Which on one hand is like, yeah, there is a limit to how many broad conclusions you should take about the rational parts of people's lives (like their politics) when they have a deeply irrational illness too. But on the other, I think about a common meme among bluesky liberals is that so many self-described leftists are basically Posting Through their Mental Illnesses and channeling it into politics. Particularly anxiety and depression. So much of rhetoric about, say, genocide in Palestine is pretty easy to see through not as something the poster thinks actually will do a single thing to help the situation or change a mind, but to forestall any accusations that *they* didn't care enough about Gaza, that *they* might be a geoncidaire too for continuing to live out their normal life largely unaffected and all the other daily contradictions and hypocrisies of trying to live in accordance to your values. I do genuinely think what is often mistaken for "purity tests" is actually insecurity and defense mechanisms. A lot of online leftism is coming from marginalized communities that have suffered a lot, and we are also biased towards seeing the views of people who might not be doing well (lots of time on their hands to post because they are stuck in some sort of crappy situation.) So maybe contextualizing a lot of political thought with mental illness is in fact important. I thought this thread was spot-on about a *how* a lot of online leftism at least SOUNDS: https://bsky.app/profile/aelkus.bsky.social/post/3lrxskgxlhk2r
Other random thoughts are that this discussion about the creation of the Electoral College with Jamelle Bouie is really interesting (https://open.spotify.com/episode/0Rc5WnPBqT34jDzpNVQHF5?si=1b9122fd4803414a). Maybe most interesting in the end to me is just the idea that any random half-baked shit in any system is eventually going to become an exploit. Patch pls. And that also just makes me think of the issue about the necessity of good-faith actors for making our system work. That is a far, far more intractable problem to me, because ANY and EVERY system requires good faith usage to actually work. I'm not sure how any system can self-regulate against a truly malicious actor, one who knowingly seeks out things to exploit and abuse in the system. I think about this all the time from my workplace where we (and mostly I) basically got the opportunity to design our whole workflows from scratch. There were NO new rules, new levels of oversight, etc. that we could implement to get Toby to produce what we wanted him to produce because he fundamentally disagreed about what he wanted the system to do. All we ended up with was a byzantine number of rules and redundancies to try to correct for it, when the actually solution was for him to leave our group and get a position elsewhere in the division lmao.
Lmaoo https://imgur.com/a/V7rFqzr