After seeing a megathread praising Mao Zedong, an actual mass killer, and a post about a guy saying “99% of westerners are 100000000000% sure they know what happened in ‘Tiny Man Square’ […] the reasons for this are complex and involve propaganda […],” I am genuinely curious what leads people to this belief system. Even if propaganda is involved when it comes to Tiananmen Square, it doesn’t change the atrocities that were/are committed everywhere else in China.
I am all for letting people believe what they want but I am lost on why one would deliberately praise any authoritarian system this hard.
Can someone please help me understand why this is such a large and prominent community? How have these ideals garnered such a following outside of China?
EDIT: Thank you to everyone who has responded! This thread has been very insightful :)
I read marx/lenin, found them to be compelling.
I am very interested in the science of economic planning and ecosystem management.
Originally, I considered myself to be an anarchist, but other anarchists had a very strong tendency of supporting imperialists in their actions against non-western countries, and frankly, I’m not white enough to be tempted by the benefits I would not be gaining from installing rightist dictatorships in Venezuela or China or Cuba if the “anarcho-bidenist” types had their way.
Looking back at it I find the whole “fight” between anarchism and marxism-leninism to be very silly, but since I think that China and Hamas are actually doing useful work, this automatically makes me incompatible with many anarchists.
Yeah thus should be the main crux of things. There haven’t been real conflicts between anarchists and ML organizations outside of internet posting for decades now. The closest thing I can thing is during the Burkina-Faso revolution, some of the trade unions that called themselves anarcho-syndicalists were also allying themselves with the French government.
There’s just no real conflict otherwise. I’ve done organizations in both anarchist and ML orgs and it’s 99% identical. Maybe ML groups are more willing to endorse someone in an electoral race, maybe an anarchist group will be more willing to do something like petty theft from a grocery store or squatting. That’s been the only real difference I’ve noticed in tactics is that an ML group will usually try to stay above board and anarchist groups will commit crimes if necessary.
Otherwise there was never any real conflict. The people who comprised these movements came from largely identical political interests.
like?
Hamas, by carrying out the Oct 7th attacks, has exposed Zionism in the world and a ton of formerly milquetoast “millenia old conflict” uneducated takes (myself included, to my own shame) have been cured.
China produces 93% of the solar panels in the planet, provides useful economic trade and affordable commodities to developing economies without the usual debt traps of the west and without a positive trade balance (i.e. without neocolonialism), and by simply being the strongest economy in the planet it’s breaking western imperialism’s monopoly over the planet.
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Anytime!
What part of opposing hierarchies equates in your mind to supporting extreme examples of hierarchies?
None, if you’re a principled anarchist. That’s why I don’t have a fundamental problem with anarchists (other than my philosophical objections to anarchism)
However, many self-proclaimed anarchists do in practice support imperialists because they have a big bone to grind with AES states or even anyone who positions themselves against western imperialism.
They internalise western propaganda against these states/nations, because I guess, it’s a state so therefore it must be as comically evil as the worst fearmongering described by anglophone media. Or my favorite, “even only 10% of the atrocities were real, they would still be super evil”, that kind of thinking.
Of course, I have some contact both with actual chinese or russian people (many of whom aren’t even socialists), and they clearly have a much deeper and nuanced understanding of their nations than the even the most “I hate the government not the people” type of western anarchists. It makes the anarchists come off as silly white supremacists.
Most likely, if my contact with anarchists had begun with third world anarchists, I would never have had a phase of hating anarchists (which itself was a silly thing to do). But either way, I still find Marx more compelling than any anarchist writer, so I am still philosophically a Marxist.
I’ve never met or spoke online to an anarchist online who wasn’t opposed to western imperialism. I’ve also never spoken to someone “with a bone to grind” with those against western imperialism unless they are rival imperialists in which case the “bone to grind” is with imperialism.
“Our glorious people’s Ministry of Truth has determined that their wretched Mistry of Truth is lying while assuring us that OUR Ministry of Truth would never lie”
I don’t know what you’re trying to do here, encouraging racism instead of criticism of the state?
This is where the issue comes down to because many western leftists pretend, based on their own misunderstandings that many western rivals are imperialists, despite the fact that many of these western rivals have a net export of surplus labor/commodities, being exploited by international capital, therby having a class interest opposite of imperialism.
Not to mention the military encirclement that these nations face, which their enemy nationalists take as some sort of natural God-given equilibrium. Deviating from this encirclement by forceful measures is then taken as a sign of evil/imperialist ambition, meanwhile leftists at home in the west fail to resolve military encirclement by pressuring their governments. I mean, for how many decades has Cuba been under a blockade? What horrific conditions gaza has been subjected to. Can any of these situations be resolved without force? And if these people use force, they get called imperialists.
In the interests of fairness, the PRC during Mao and Deng’s time also famously considered the USSR to be “social imperialists”, helping cause the downfall of the USSR and setting back socialism by a century. So this isn’t exclusively a western leftist problem.
My sibling in christ, do not insult my intelligence. The gaza genocide isn’t even over. At least wait for the bodies to become cold before you start defending western media institutions.
It is a common deflection that I have seen. Furthermore, it is quite stupid as well, since governments don’t fall from the heavens. They are made from the people. Modern states are not small warlord bands, but significant fractions of the entire populace and economy.