Does hesitation mean something else where you live?

Steve Huffman commends you on upholding his moderation policy.

It is definitely inducing cognitive dissonance. The developers are simply are communists trying to collectivize social media, and that will live in their heads rent free as long as they stick around.

Anti-sectarianism is the general rule. The community is predominantly Marxist, but has its share of Anarchists. There is no official list of points of unity, but anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, anti-racism, anti-gender/sexuality discrimination are basically non-negotiable.

I can only speak for myself, but my sentiment is that the left in the imperial core is so disorganized that the majority of sectarian disagreements are purely hypothetical and stupid to get worked up over. We can have discussions about theory and tactics, but there is no reason to assemble the perfect party platform and get into bitter fights about its nuances when there is no party to speak of. You can’t build the mass line without the mass.

Of course, this doesn’t apply to the type of historically illiterate, American-exceptionalist Reddit “Anarchists,” or any of that PatSoc MAGA Communism bullshit. People stanning the Shining Path will probably get a lot of weird looks. We give the handful of Trots their fair share of noogies, but we don’t exclude them.

It is a relatively small community. If you are comment in good faith and demonstrate you aren’t full of imperialist brainworms you will probably be fine. If you pick out individual people with the dumbest takes and graft that onto broad movements, putting words in peoples’ mouths, you might run into trouble. We love dunking on people with bad takes, but if you take a particular Bellingcat dropout’s cringepost and act like they are the designated spokesperson of Anarchism, that’s the kind of thing that doesn’t fly. Basically, don’t be disingenuous.

We’re not the type of community that will ban somebody for mentioning in passing that they participate in mutual aid on the basis that mutual aid is charity and therefor not praxis. That kind of hair-splitting dogmatism can stay on Reddit as far as we’re concerned.

The way I see it, this isn’t really a step backwards. On the centralized platforms, our communities get banned and their ashes get scattered to the winds. On the fediverse, we get blacklisted by large instances operated by liberals, but our communities remain intact and can still network with one another directly. We are also protected from ideologically hostile admins quietly picking off our comrades one by one.

Capitalism was not inevitable. Feudalism could have just stagnated or died out. Capitalism is what ultimately resolved the contradictions of Feudalism and this happened over the course of centuries. Likewise, Socialism will resolve the contradictions of Capitalism (hopefully before life on Earth is doomed).

In Marx’s time, it was presumed that the most advanced centers of Capitalism would be the first to progress to Socialism, but historically this didn’t bear out. The Socialist revolution didn’t take place in England or Germany, but in Russia, which was a backwater by contemporary standards, barely letting go of serfdom. As a functionally feudal monarchy on Europe’s periphery, the bourgeois class of Russia was stunted, and this certainly played a role in their defeat. The vast majority of places we see revolutionary class struggle endure, from China to Korea to Cuba to Vietnam tend not to be the centers of industrial production (at least, at the times of their revolutions).

So you could say that countries like the USSR and China skipped past Capitalism, but only in a regional sense. It still remains as a world-hegemonic system which they have always been forced to contend with.

There is a tendency to deem revolution as impossible in the West, and rest all hope for the future on China. Regardless of whether China is blazing the trail towards Communism or not, this is an excuse for apathy and inaction. It is a form of de-politicization.