site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

14
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Did socialism just suck away anarchism’s energy by speaking to the same people disaffected by capitalism but offering a more compelling vision of society?

I'd say that, even moreso, Bolshevism and the post-Bolshevist Communist movement did this. The Bolsheviks had an extremely compelling argument for everyone that was dreaming of a society with capitalism overturned: "Look, we did it!" Compared to it, anarchists looked like unserious daydreamers.

Of course, Bolsheviks also quite literally bodied anarchists in several territories, like in Russian-Revolution-era Ukraine and Spanish Civil War, but even there, even the fact that they managed to do this served as an argument for them. The Communist Parties offered a militant, regimented organization that could basically be turned into an army that asserted its will on the society as the need be. Such organizations - communist, fascist, whatever - beat the inchoate, loose anarchist structures every time these two encounter each other in the field of ideological or actual battle.

Of course, when the Bolshevik-style Communism then ended up being a spent force, the general revolutionary energy dissipated. "It's easier to envision the end of the world than the end of capitalism" and all that. Whatever existing anarchist organizing there is is more of the "try to create an alternative society in the cracks of the existing system without directly fighting against the system too much" variety, but that sort of thing still tends to either get crushed (if they can't manage to avoid fighting the system too much) or recuperated (if they don't fight the system at all, or only in a perfunctory way) by the system.

This is a good point I hadn't fully appreciated, that the contest for support between the two schools of thought was often literally a military contest, where the anarchists were bested, and that once socialists societies were built they looked infinitely more viable