And I thought Reddit was bad…
I want to preface with this: 1. I’m not western. I don’t think anyone in this world would consider my country part of the west or the imperial core. I’m from the global south and working class. 2. I’m young and only a couple of years ago started engaging with marxist theory and as a consequence the online western left. And 3. Everything here is my opinion and some details escape me due to the fact that I don’t follow the discussion on the internet 100%. While I spend a lot of time online, most of that time is not wasted on Twitter or Reddit or what not. That being said, this is an insomnia induced rant aimed mainly to my american comrades, but anyone else in the western/anglo sphere also can take something useful from here. I don’t know.
I started following western/internet leftists on twitter recently as a consequence of me making a twitter account. I’ve come to the conclusion that the western/western adjacent left (ie. All the anglosphere) is completely useless staying on the internet in any capacity. American and european communists debate the dumbest possible shit and reach no useful results. Motherfuckers agree on 99% of things and start attacking each other like rabid dogs for the stupid 1% in which they disagree. I wouldn’t even call it infighting because that would compare it with the debates and disagreements of the historic left like the Bolsheviks. But the Bolsheviks were debating and discussing actually important thing while actually doing something, while going to the people and organizing. Imbeciles do jackshit and pretend that by attacking someone else on twitter they are achieving something valuable or reaching to the people and making a change. Their “propaganda” is garbage. While the people that actually do something to bring about the revolution aren’t concerned by their idiocy. The example of this are the “discussions” that a lot of “leftists” have had with Ben Norton recently and that is what compeled me to write this rant.
In my opinion Ben is the best journalist out there. Both with the ideological conviction and the actual ability to do the job of journalism with integrity and courage to denounce the capitalist rulers, and his work clearly shows it. Similar to the people at The Grayzone but actually a communist. And by the way, it is clear that that is the line along which he “broke” with Blumenthal.
Ben, having seen with his own eyes the hell brought to Latin America by the United States (living in Nicaragua), naturally empathizes with the struggle and the outlook of the people towards the US. But people on twitter still attacks him or disagree with him on completely delusional matters.
One example: Noah from Midwestern Marx. I love Modwestern Marx. Carlos and Eddy are some of the best propagandists you americans have right now. But twitter really damages any possibility of reaching the masses significantly. his disagreement with Ben is about the US flag. Ben is on the opinion (rightly so), thay the US flag represents terror, war, imperialism, death, to the people’s of the world. And that US communists should NOT use a symbol like that to rally the people. Noah disagrees and says that using that symbol has been democratically elected by the people (?). Not only that, he states (without a grain of evidency and clearly not even listening or reading what Ben actually says) that Ben is “reading too much Sakai and not enough Lenin”… WHAT THE FUCK?! And then he doubles down and defends the use of that flag by some indigenous people in the US. Needless to say, but I’m saying it anyways, colonized people holding their colonizer’s flag doesn’t make it a good flag.
Some others, like Xiangyu of all people, post stupid shit like “Oppose the Nortons” (mf you are not Mao) or call Ben a radlib, and being rude in general. Straight up infantile shit. And oh, while also self righteously calling people that disagree with him “degenerates” all while saying he laments Dugin’s daughter assassination (a whole other can of worms).
I hate that that is the state of the left in the US and adjacent. And I hate that I saw that shit willingly. If you american communists don’t get to work and do a revolution soon, the rest of the world will, with or without your support, and things will get ugly, like, really ugly. For us, but specially for you.
I post this all not because I think the details matter, they don’t. But to illustrate the point that as long as you keep falling to the trap of social media like twitter (it makes you angry by design), you won’t achieve anything. And the people that will do something will be the worst elements of the western society, either on the right or pretending to be left (coff coff Maupin). The west, and specially the US, have a way of shaping your mind that I have seen too many times, both online and offline. Shake that shit out of you. It is making you inhumane and ineffective, and the bourgeoisie is winning thanks to that.
There are certain formats like discord and twitter, that bring out the worst in people. Those platforms bank on angry, non-stop-repyling and “engagement”, because they know it drives up the amount of time people spend on the site. People will stay angry for days replying on certain threads and it wrecks their brains, and makes them combative, irritable people.
W/ regard to the patsocs, we are seeing a resurgence of them that’s very similar to the kautsky vs Lenin debate on patriotism and social chauvinism (which makes it doubly hilarious that the person is trying to pit Lenin against Sakai). Its almost become a litmus test that anyone who hates refusese to read Settlers, considers themselves a “patriot”, or wants to preserve the US in any way, is a social chauvinist who should shut their damn mouths and learn about the history of US empire.
Ben is doing great work, it’s really unfortunate to see him get flak for what should be a bare-minimum communist position: advocating for the downfall of the US empire, capitalism’s worldwide military enforcer.
There are some good US orgs, PSL, CPUSA, PCUSA, that are mostly staying out of these shitfights by enforcing social media discipline, which is good to see. The party I’m in, PSL, hates patsocs, and in the recent months CPUSA publicly distanced themselves from patsocs too.
Related to your last paragraph, I think PCUSA is doing an absolute banger of a public service with their People’s School series and the person who narrates the readings has such an incredible reading voice that the dryest shit becomes incredibly engaging. Although I know from members CPUSA is abandoning a lot of the liberalism that has defined them in the past and regrouping as more staunchly Marxist-Leninist, I still feel as if PCUSA’s platform is much much better and free from electoral obsession. I wish they’d distance themselves from this patsoc garbage but they seem to be embracing it, or at least were. It’s my only hang-up about the party.
I’ve raised something like this several times on several platforms. I was a particular proponent of killing the downvote on Hexbear, which had very split opinions on the site when it was implemented but the community now prefers it massively.
One of the issues of social media is that the systems design in a competitive win/loss mindset in people’s engagement(winning getting upvotes and losing getting ratio’d or downvoted or whatever). The person you’re talking to isn’t the person that matters when you’re having an interaction, what matters is the audience reading.
This creates a scenario in where people don’t actually have honest interactions with each other, they are having an interaction to sway the hundreds or perhaps thousands of people reading instead. They are seeking the Likes, Hearts, Upvotes, whatever. And not only that but they are also seeking that the person they disagree with get downvotes or ratio’d, etc.
The systems of social media depersonalise the interaction between 2 people and make it about writing for an audience of people who decide the “winner” and the “loser” instead. This is the driving force of some of the shittiest behaviour out there. We desperately need a different style of gameification that does not produce this outcome and shifts the focus of people’s behaviour to a different mindset.