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this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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No such thing. Ask away!
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There is no leftist community on the internet that will ever be good because there will necessarily be people with clandestine motives weather they're doing so for work or fun. Every actual organization ive been in on the left operates under the assumption that some of our members are plants. The secret US orgs have been disrupting leftist anything for as long as they've existed and so long as they exist a real online community for serious leftist thought will always be under attack. Actually organizing in the actual community is the only remedy, and even then the bad actors are still there, they just can't be faceless and as inflammatory.
See, my view is that this would be very easy to spot if leftist communities were more academically engaged and rejected a lot of the more mindless revolutionary rhetoric to begin with. That kind of rote populism where everything western is irredeemably evil and must be burned to the ground is the part which is ripe for exploitation, while the bits about economic egalitarianism and labor unity are broadly popular. My entire gripe is that if leftist communities focused on the latter, wed deny the provocateurs oxygen to begin with.
I don't think it's that easy. The academics of the left still leave plenty of room for subterfuge, even studied scholars don't always agree and even bicker at times. More over the academics aren't what draws people to leftism, direct action and engaging the communities we want to engage is what wins people over, academic first orgs end up looking like insular book clubs with slow and little growth in my experience and from the opinion of others I've read in books about organizing.
I think it serves the left better to meet the acute needs of their local communities, which to me serves as the center of organization. Very hard to argue against initiatives like the BPPs Breakfast Program. Which by the way was exactly what put them on the Feds radar, because my guess is the feds have accepted what I describe here as true, or at least best revolutionary practice. I also find organizing around the needs of the community to be very agreeable, I've been in orgs where they itemize our goals and use approval voting to rank them, and mutual aid items are more than usually very agreed upon.
I'd love a honest academic space, but even then our movement is a communal one, and if you're able to help in a 'boots on the ground' capacity but you only engage in academics instead, you likely won't really make to much material impact. Hell I'd love to be wrong about it being near impossible to have an honest leftist space too, and I don't want to give the feds more credit than they deserve for even the ills of the movement, we learn nothing that way, but it's really hard to cut through the noise when they specialize in noise. I'd wager some of these noisemakers have even read more anticapitalist books than some of the people who actually are anticapitalists.
I do think you're onto something though, the average understanding of the academics of leftism (why we do the things we do), is less understood among leftists than ever before. My guess is the increase in the number of leftists and how acceptable the beliefs are seen as being these days helps foster leftism among people who don't exactly read their heads off about theory.
It's like to see more stuff about leaning and organizing that knowledge. Keep the sniping and bullshit out of it. Just have a link to something like The Reactionary Mind and a quick blurb about how it makes an argument about conservatism is a new movement because it has to react to enlightenment and give a reason why a group of people deserve a privilege.
It blew my mind to learn that after the French revolution there was some dude arguing to put a king back. Like holy shit. They just killed a king. Some fucked really thinks that's a good idea? It was fun to drive into that head space and listen to someone's argument that there are some people that are better and deserve to rule. Gross, but interesting.
It's led me to learn more about Jefferson and Burr and some of the early American history where some of those guys thought the same way. That they should dress up in wigs and shit and thought they were better. I'm probably mis remembering which names, but I remember the first vice guy was all about that class shit.