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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25559 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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the sheer weirdness of the idea that being a revolutionary is congruent with following public health theater

Freddie deBoer referred to the strange phenomenon of self-professed anarchists protesting in favour of mask mandates as "definitional collapse". See also all the stick that Rage Against the Machine got for requiring proof of vaccination to attend their shows. "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me" indeed.

That’s because anarchism is a collectivist economic system. If the anarchist commune votes to make masks mandatory, that isn’t really a contradiction of anarchism.

These were self-identified anarchists protesting in favour of a public mask mandate enforced by the state, not a commune.

True, but as long as they believe the people would vote for it it’s no more of a contradiction than any policy by the bourgeois capitalist state is. For example they probably support gender self-ID or trans bathroom laws because they believe firmly that these would be policy in the revolutionary anarchist commune, even if the laws are implemented and enforced by the hated bourgeois neoliberal capitalist state.

Anarchism seems to have about as consistently applied of a definition as old-school fascism did. Whatever is deemed "good for the people" can be anarchism according to anarchists, with that whim changing on a dime. There are many fewer principled, anti-authoritarian anarchists than there are leftist fantasists with oppositional defiant disorder a la Zack de la Rocha.

Isn't deboer a "Marxist of an old-school variety"?" https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/about He is sort of right about the anarchists but doesn't the same apply to him?

My view is that the claimed utopian intentions of anarchocommunists is less relevant than their behavior while in power, or what they support politically. It is still ironic for an old school marxist to be a critic of anarchists for supporting state repression, when the same contradiction exists in old school marxism.

DeBoer is a strange bird. Yes, he calls himself a Marxist, and has become rather defensive when people ask him to explain the contradictions (in fairness, because he's probably sick of hearing the same questions over and over). But his role as "anti-woke leftist who's a bonafide Marxist but has a ton of right-wing readers" puts him in a weird niche.

My take on him has always been that he's an anarcho-socialist who understands the dangers of the managerial state. There is a theoretical model to thread that needle. I've always said I like anarcho-socialists, but I don't see how you actually thread that needle, how you bring that into practice. How do you defang the managerial state, and how you deal with people who are simply not "wired" for living with the necessary personal aesthetics for anarcho-socialism? (I.E. very concerned with relative status and power games)

He describes himself as such. Other people have referred to him as "post-Marxist" or similar. I don't know enough about Marxism or socialism to know which characterisation is accurate.

I do remember people in the ratsphere saying during the Trump years that a realignment in both political parties was underway, so perhaps the definitional collapse is a necessary ingredient of that.

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