Renegade Trotsky, folks, he's a very bad man. The sympathizers to the Opposition Bloc, they are "Hot to Trot" to start another Great War when we Soviets just finished with two wars. You know what I say, folks? "Hold your horses!" What we need is to avoid war so that we can develop from the conditions that Swiss Cheese Nicky left our Soviet Socialist Republics with. We need time! We can't go off half-cocked after those traitors in the SPD murdered dear Rosa and that other guy . . . Bernard? Very dear friends of mine and they were betrayed!
GarbageShoot
joined 3 years ago
It was the stance of the Soviets under Stalin that something like that would be a Bad Idea, because the Soviets probably would not have survived such an endeavor. I think it's debatable that they should have found some way to secure all of Germany, even if there was limited military conflict with the other Allies, for the sake of denazifying and a more economically viable GDR. Such an effort could easily have turned into a WW2.5 that the USSR would probably lose, so that's the "debatable" part.
Just say it's intrepid investigation
I think this is a complicated example because although at times Marxists and Islamists made common cause, Islamists were also a very effective weapon against communists, such as in Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, etc.
I am begging you to think about this dialectically. Obviously, I am not saying "Islamists are good friends to Marxists". Generally, I would hold the opposite to be true. That having been said, we can see today in Palestine and sometimes other places that MLs and Islamists can work together quite well when they have a common enemy that they oppose more than each other. Even in the best of circumstances, it is a partnership that will end in bloodshed as they turn on each other following the hypothetical defeat of their colonial oppressors, but for a stretch of time it works quite well.
Exactly this is what I am saying of the anarchists and Marxists in, for example, America. Perhaps it will come to an end that one or the other won't like, but if an anarchist thinks it is more worth it to fight muh tankies than to join hands with them to fight fascists, they are smoking crack.
I don't think the Zapatistas or Rojava are clear examples, or at a large scale.
Rojava is worth mentioning but Zapatistas, in the main, aren't anarchists and vociferously object to such a label.
And yet there's comparatively successful political coalitions that involve both socdems and communist parties. I'm thinking particularly in South America. China and the DPRK have sanctioned liberal/socdem parties, but I don't believe anarchist organizations are permitted. I mean, many social democrats see themselves as reformist socialists or Marxists of some stripe. And third world social democracy seems very different from imperial core socdems, but we don't have to qualify socdems as "western socdems" to criticize th
Part of the issue here is the simple inadequacy of anarchism with large-scale organizing and its natural opposition to compromise. What do you expect the PRC to do that would allow a show-and-tell anarchist to feel satisfied? To have a little commune or syndicate? But then mustn't such an entity be beholden to laws at a higher level, in both a theoretical and practical sense, to not just be a liability to the state and a cult-in-the-waiting? Doesn't sound very horizontal to me!
Of course, what I would consider a serious anarchist is someone who supports the revolution that feeds the children while pushing in the direction of horizontality, and by such a definition surely they should be happy with the implementation of, for example, the Tae-an farming system in the DPRK. But one who it more interested in spreading a religion of anarchism, to whom feeding the children with any verticality involved is an insidious deception, the fact that those collectives still must answer to the state means that any virtue they have is farcical.
Your sectarianism is my tolerance paradox, I guess, and it's indeed part of the insidiousness of capital that it's quite willing to compromise when it needs to.
"Socdem" is a difficult term to use the way you've expressed it because the term has a long and varied history with many offshoots in usage. The way that HB usually phrases it is that the people you just identified are in large part actually demsoc, and I think that phrasing is fair. One could also argue that the true dividing line is if the so-called demsoc believes revolution isn't the best strategy, or would actually oppose revolution should it appear seriously viable, with the uprising already underway.
My brain is so fried I thought the pizza was in the IOF 
It's not sectarian to have mutually incompatible principles.
That's plainly not what we're talking about here, again see my example of MLs and Islamicists.
But what percentage of anarchists are going to want hang out on a website that has strict rules about criticizing socialist states?
Ones that have their heads screwed on tight enough to not be fixated on talking bullshit about other countries when their own is a neoliberal hellscape. We criticize China all the time, and there are weird cases of softballing like with revisionism in Yugoslavia, but I think that's just because so few people care to investigate it in one direction or another.
The two obvious examples, the Russian Revolution and the Spanish Civil War, are not examples of successful coalition building.
In one case anarchists failed to organize in a way that didn't cause them to produce more fascist militants than they killed, and in the other they just failed to organize period. If you're holding up Makhno as the highest aspiration of big tent initiatives, I'd suggest retirement.
I can say that social democracy is the left wing of fascism, but not that anarchism is the highest stage of liberal idealism.
Sure, but that's because the socdems want to defend capitalism and the anarchists (the ones who fall under the aegis, anyway) don't.
Such people (not the careerists, but the low-grade recruits) need education perhaps the most of anyone in society on account of their mis-education leading them to risk their lives for murder and oil.
This is in part one of those situations where your argument amounts to question-begging. The reason being, just as a test: What if Russia was on the correct side of the war, would this still be coherent? Is there any contradiction in these Russian publicity outlets publishing correct information that is then opportunistically used by the rival party to the current US administration to discredit the latter?
If you already assume slava ukra'ini and that reactionaries have some magical inability to say things that are true, you can make a coherent story, but I would argue that the antithesis is at least as coherent a story.
I'm sure RT, etc. also publish bullshit that is also used by the right just as readily, but imo the Russian center-right can get by on policy wrt Ukraine by simply reporting facts faithfully, because theirs is a position [shared by much of the Russian left as well] that is only more justified as historical context increases and actors are more closely scrutinized. I was objectively late to the party when, in 2018, I was reading about the CIA backing Azov, but still I saw reality completely recast leading up to the invasion and thereby I had some advantage over the liberals who seem to believe that Ukraine is Palestine despite the fact that it's Ukraine slaughtering ethnic minorities.
It doesn't help that Ukraine can't seem to find pictures of its military that don't include fascist symbols, or that they absolutely wear their banderite bullshit on their sleeve if you actually listen to them speak. You can just report on these things faithfully and make the Ukrainian government and especially its military look monstrous to many viewers.
Maybe where you're at is where they are logging on from? If MLs can make common cause with Islamicists for the sake of anticolonial struggle, anarchists should be able to tolerate MLs for the purpose of opposing their much more present common enemy. The basis of "big tent" theory is that groups should mutually tolerate each other, and groups that cannot do not receive the same protections. Your argument is essentially "all real anarchists are hopelessly sectarian, so speaking as though the non-sectarian ones are the preferable ones is itself sectarian". If you were right -- and you demonstrably aren't -- all you'd be arguing for is that anarchists cannot function in a big tent.
796 is an example of a good episode that is fairly recent, if you're interested.
One of my colleagues talks about getting into real estate and it just confuses me because it seems like striking while the iron is freezing cold. Like, there's getting on on the ground floor and then there's getting in on the roof.
It's weird, it's like a religious affiliation. In the same breath as trying to get people to not look like parasocial freaks, he makes himself look like a thousand times more of a parasocial freak for running cover for someone who he clearly believes is a pedo and is attached to despite that.