It wasn’t a hostile discussion or anything, i didn’t even go full “the kulaks deserved it” (although the mod that single-handedly banned me did go full “the kulaks did not deserve it”). I just laid out plainly and calmly that revolutions are inherently authoritarian, that Luxemburg said “the revolution will be as violent as the ruling class makes it necessary” and that there’s one Trotzki quote i 100% agree with: “If the October Revolution hadn’t succeeded, the world would have known a Russian word for fascism 10 years before Mussolini’s March on Rome”. Basically the whole “Jakarta Method” train of thought laid out clearly and without calling anybody names.

Note that this was on an explicitly left-leaning server that does not allow cops and troops to join. Also after several days of another poster starting destructive, aggressive bad faith arguments in the politics channel until a number of users went “disengage” on her and the channel had to be frozen until recently, when she immediately started being hostile and arguing in bad faith again, which got her not one, but two warnings from the same mod without further consequences. Meanwhile, when i defend AES without attacking anybody, that’s apparently too much for her to handle. No advance warning, no “sis, you’re talking to me as a mod here”, not even a notification that i got banned.

The best part is that according to screenshots a friend just sent me, she’s now completely going off about “authoritarians”. The nerve some people have.

Sorry for posting pointless internet drama here, i just needed to vent.

  • robinn2 [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    “The State is Counterrevolutionary” Pt. 1:

    This quote from Lenin’s work What Is To Be Done? is quite instructive of the attitude he takes toward revolutionary organization: “Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers.” Leninism is predicated on a fundamental lack of faith in the workers to organize themselves and to arrive upon a coherent conception of their class position without a party to lead them. To Lenin, the vanguard, occupied by enlightened socialist thinkers, was a representative body of proletarian class consciousness. Thus it was the job of the revolutionary party to tutor the masses on their liberation ‘from without.’ Wherein the workers lacked such a guiding hand, Lenin took a dim view of their mass potential, believing that the highest state that they could achieve on their own was what he called trade union consciousness; that is to say, the ability to band together into trade unions.

    Should all workers attain class consciousness at once? Even the real means of material liberation will be distributed equally or in separate intervals. Why, then, should a worker’s vanguard be opposed? Leadership is absolutely necessary, and nobody is calling workers stupid. In fact, the theoretically advanced and devoted as those making up the vanguard are derived from the workers themselves. The quote from What is to Be Done is so deliberately misconstrued as to invoke a great suspicion of dishonesty. We will begin from where OP left off:

    “The sphere from which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge is the sphere of relationships of all classes and strata to the state and the government, the sphere of the interrelations between all classes. For that reason, the reply to the question as to what must be done to bring political knowledge to the workers cannot be merely the answer with which, in the majority of cases, the practical workers, especially those inclined towards Economism, mostly content themselves, namely: ‘To go among the workers.’ To bring political knowledge to the workers the Social Democrats must go among all classes of the population; they must dispatch units of their army in all directions.”

    Either Anark read, “We therefore beg the reader not to get wrought up, but to hear us patiently to the end” and ignored this warning, or neglected to read the work entirely. In any case, this is a grave mistake that risks discrediting their entire argument.