Here are some good podcast episodes from Actually Existing Socialism that cover the GDR if you want a bit of an introduction:
East Germany: Stasi State or Socialist Paradise? w/Bruni de la Motte
The American Soldier Who Defected to East Germany (Part 1) w/ Victor Grossman
The American Soldier Who Defected to East Germany (Part 2) w/ Victor Grossman
What Has Socialism Ever Done For Women? w/ Julia Mead (This is a bit more tangential)
Writings available from the authors here:
Add "no bosses" to that list too.
Y'all think that any sort of construction or manufacturing is going to run in a self-organised fashion without foremen? Lol, good luck.
If you've never worked in a factory before, that's cool but there are much better ways of announcing this fact and I think that it's important to remember the old "No investigation, no right to speak" or, in their terms "In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker".
I try not to focus too much on these types because I'm convinced that a couple of years of touching grass, working for a living, and spending time doing on the ground organising will bring these infantile urges in people to a conclusion in all but the most stubborn-minded. Although you can cut through these naive ideological positions by tracing out how there was (vulgar) vanguardism in their favourite historical socialist projects and how leadership was crucial to their functioning. That being said I have more important things to do with my time than engaging people with discussions on that stuff tbh.
Yeah, more broadly the western left is in shambles but to see how (comparatively) rapidly it's shaping up gives me hope.
This could be representative of the circles I've moved in with my own political journey but MLism wasn't even on the table. Heck, being a revolutionary wasn't really either. If you look at, say, the anti-globalisation protests and the anti-war movement(s) around the bush era the left was mostly what I'd characterise as being extremely progressive. There was a time when Naomi Klein was extremely influential on this cohort.
Nowadays Klein isn't a name I see brought up in the left except for the very rare mention of her underrated documentary The Take because the left is much more radical now than she is.
There was a time where the compatible left was the left and it didn't have to go around proclaiming that Marxism-Leninism is a "dead ideology" which, if you look at it from the perspective of Implicature or you're a bit Hegelian about it, it's pretty obvious that if Marxism-Leninism really was dead then nobody would need to proclaim this fact because:
a) It would be self-evident; nobody needs to proclaim that Manichaeism is dead because it's already true
b) It would be irrelevant to say as much since it is already dead; I'd venture that most people haven't got a clue what Manichaeism even is because Manichaeism truly is dead
The opposite is true for Marxism-Leninism.
Nowadays there's a couple of major splits within the radical and circa-radical left, as I see it:
There's the essentially silent movement where people log off, touch grass, and are dedicated to organising in their communities. This isn't really seen unless you're embedded in an org or an online circle where you know people in it and you see them check out of their online presence in favour of on the ground work. But it's certainly happening although because this shift is predicated upon not announcing it online and not constantly touting it on social media it is largely invisible.
There's the radical left vs the compatible left split. This is where you see one side sheepdogging everyone to vote for the Dems and denouncing tankies as "ruining the left for everyone else" etc. vs the people who are capable of critiquing the progressive left and doing self-crit on the actual left who engage in materialist analysis and serve as the spectre haunting the internet because they are more organised, generally much better informed and more well-versed in theory etc.
The fact that Marxism-Leninism is on the rise is no accident. People have seen the failures of movements like Occupy and the CHAZ and they've learned from them. The material conditions have rapidly changed over the past two decades and I'd argue that this has a significant impact on people's ideological positions. Your political development arc mirrors that of a lot of people who are now communist too.
If you take PatSocs, as an example, this was essentially a line struggle that developed in the broader western left. I'd say that it's pretty much dead in the water now, thankfully. But there was a split in the ideological positions and the western left hashed out its position on regressive nationalism extremely rapidly. This is characteristic of a vital movement that is thriving and honing itself and that alone is worth celebrating because it means that not only is there enough people in a movement to cause a split(!!) but the movement is developing and it will continue to do so with future splits too.
To go from "Oh no, we must be conscious consumers and stop supporting sweatshops with our hard earned cash!!" to "Let's set up camp outside Wall Street and... idk but we'll figure out the rest later lol" to "We are going to read Marx and Lenin and we're going to seize the state by force" is a very promising development arc.
When your ideology is primarily individualist and largely aesthetic, you end up with a ton of people who treat their political orientation as a fashion statement.
Speaking as an ex-anarchist, there's a massive trend in anarchism to not be focused on the ideological distinctions between the plethora of anarchist subtypes but instead to align oneself to a flavour of anarchism which is most appealing.
In communist thought you have very clear distinctions which are based on theoretical and practical disagreements (practical in the sense of socialism being put into practice); you have leftcoms and Trotskyists and council communists and MLs and MLMs etc. All of whom you can trace out their positions and their ideological stances from.
In anarchism it's much more about what the individual is most attracted to as a cause than this. Sure there are platformists, DeLeonists, and egoists, for example, which fit what I've mentioned above about disagreements on theory and practice but you're more likely to find an anarcha-feminist or an eco-anarchist than you will a DeLeonist or a platformist imo.
With that in mind it should come as no surprise that so much of anarchism is focused on fashion.
Go on then, tell me which leftist leaders you think should be upheld.
The past tense is in reference to the historical event, it doesn't refer to the present state of Finland's economy.
If someone had a post titled: "How Trump caused a rift within liberalism in the US" the past tense would not imply that Trump no longer exists or that he is no longer a politician, it would simply be referring to the political rift as a historical event.
...because I'll never be him
It's like I'd color my face blue and someone calls me a racist, discriminating penguins.
It's strange that this concern for context only ever goes in one direction. Symbolism, like words, develop meaning through their usage.
If I were to say that I ejaculated during intercourse with your wife last night, would you take that to be an insult or would you be dying on that same context hill that the verb to ejaculate used to refer to suddenly making a statement and that intercourse used to refer to having a discussion with someone?
Probably not.
Would you say that the swastika isn't a Nazi symbol because it originated in Indo-European religious and cultural symbology?
Maybe. I can't speak for you.
The origin of something doesn't determine its usage.
Can I offer you some Belgian chocolate [CW: disfigurement, discussions of racism] in these trying times?
I challenged this notion with a lib the other day.
The watermelon originated in Africa. That doesn't mean that the vile caricaturised depictions of black people eating watermelons is somehow not inherently racist.
You can also look to the origin and continuing usage of the swastika, especially in Asian cultures, as another example here - you aren't going to tell me that the right-angled unicode swastika being used by westerners on the internet isn't done in service of fascism 99% of the time.
And on that matter, don't let erm-ackshually dorks tell you that the 90 degree swastika wasn't used by Nazis and isn't representative of them. One of the most famous depictions of the Nazi swastika is a right angled one:
https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1214749781387436032/pu/vid/450x360/o0Nxlts0lffM8lUv.mp4
Anti-Outside Aktion on blast
I'm astonished at how sensitive the mods must be over there.
Apparently you're allowed to say whatever baseless slander you like about the eeeeevil tankies but the minute someone says "Hold up a sec, you claim to be anti-authoritarian and yet you support authoritarianism either explicitly or implicitly?" and they have to shut it down immediately.
Regardless, I think I made a pretty solid counterargument to the typical complaint about communism being authoritarian.
Mfers skim read the Wikipedia entry on Hannah Arendt and start thinking they're justified in slinging accusations about "muh authoritarianism" smh.
Just to contribute to this point with something to reflect upon:
During the (laughably titled) "Red Vienna" era, when SocDems ran the city, the government built high quality housing blocks for the working people, which would house one tenth of the city's entire population.
Rent in these blocks was around 4% of a working class income.
Are you pulling in more cash than a Viennese worker in the 1932, dollar-for-dollar (adjusted)? Probably.
Are you spending somewhere from 25-75% of your income on housing alone, making you effectively worse off than that Viennese worker in 1932? Again, probably.
When you crunch the rawest of numbers you can get some really skewed ideas about what the reality is. Statistics lie.