Category: No Tanks! (Page 1 of 2)

A random list of political bullshit I’m tired of

2024-03-01 / The Woke Contrarian / 0 Comments

Promoting “decolonial” or “postcolonial” movements that are just racist, nationalist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, chauvinistic, fascist, religious fundamentalist, reactionary, intolerant tripe that merely mirrors former colonisers’ crimes. Or if they’re not regressive right-wing juntas, they’re capitalist, “reformist” states that sell the country out to the highest imperialist bidder, as long as that imperialist isn’t one that they were recently ruled by. And, of course, some countries can exemplify both these tendencies. (America, Burma, Jamaica, Ukraine, Nigeria, Israel and Palestine, I’m looking at all of you.)
Related to the earlier point, promoting a “decolonial” (I actually hate this expression) approach that comes primarily from highly educated, upper-middle-class or upper-class members of colonised cultures. (Uh, like me. Just the highly educated part, though—I grew up working class and am now part of the squeezed middle-middle class.)
Thinking that all social injustices can be solved by voting in the right politicians.
Refusing to vote when one candidate is a milquetoast liberal and the other one is a borderline fascist. I don’t like centrist Democrats either, but Donald Trump was and is more dangerous. This kind of voting is harm reduction. (Unfortunately, it’s practically impossible to do foreign-policy harm reduction in American electoral politics—this needs to be a long-term project—but at least you can do something about domestic policy.)
Stringing together a lot of jargonistic terms that cause people to shut down. It feels as though I’m being hit over the head with words like bourgeois, settler-colonialist, base and superstructure, decolonial, carceral, cisheteropatriarchy, kyriarchy. You shouldn’t need a master’s degree in women’s & gender studies or political science to get involved with activism. I hate cops as much as the next leftist, but you should be clearer.
Repeating terms like neoliberal and bourgeois as though it were self-evident what they meant. (Admittedly, I have referred to neoliberalism here, and I probably shouldn’t have, since it’s vague.)

Playground bullies don’t go away; they just support authoritarian politics instead

2023-12-18 / The Woke Contrarian / 0 Comments

The bullies in middle school who pick on the poor kids for having unfashionable hand-me-downs don’t go away. The ten-year-olds who mock the gender-non-conforming kids don’t suddenly become enlightened without intervention. The high schoolers who snub the Syrian refugee for not speaking English well enough or knowing all their cultural references will not magically lose their prejudices just by reaching the age of 18, 21 or even 50. The snooty Mean Girls who got away with bullying the weird kids because they earned straight A’s, sucked up to the teacher, and maintained their popularity with the “normal” kids continue to get away with it in the workplace. The 12-year-old who made fun of the disabled kids on the short bus isn’t going to abandon ableism, though he may “reform” and become a behaviour analyst. The kids flinging around racial slurs on the playground may grow up to join Atomwaffen Division or the Rise Above Movement. Grown-up bullies may have learned to stop beating up queer, poor, disabled, immigrant, Black, brown, or otherwise different kids on the playground, but they continue to attack them with their social media posts, votes, and policies.

Time alone will not heal bullies. If their xenophobia, racism, and other prejudices are allowed to fester, they will become abusive parents, vindictive bosses, radicalised crusaders against minorities’ civil rights, or at the worst, totalitarian dictators. People like this are taught to value social conformity over individual or collective well-being—and they will use any method available, including bullying and ostracism, to ensure that anyone who sticks out is punished. If you follow the rules, nothing will happen to you; if you don’t, you’ll pay for it.

Whenever you see a politician, commentator, writer, or random Twitter gadfly rail over and over and over again about some disliked minority, it is time to wonder whether they were a bully in school.

Right-wing politics tends to attract this kind of bully, since the right tends to favour arbitrary social conformity over diversity¹. (Yes, regardless of what right-wing commentators say. “Viewpoint diversity” frequently means “I want to get away with opposing pluralism in a pluralistic society,” which isn’t far off from “War is peace.”)

I want to emphasise, though, that your average conservative is not a bully. The problem with your typical right-leaning voter is that their unfamiliarity with or discomfort around minorities or nonconformists (which usually comes from living in homogeneous and highly conformist communities) makes them easy pickings for reactionary leaders who turn discomfort and unfamiliarity into hate. These Trump or Putin voters’ primary goal is not to inflict harm on anyone else, but they are afraid of what their bullying leaders may do to them if they dare step out of line. These are the archetypal authoritarian followers. They want to be loved by the Mean Girls—they’re too normal to be terrorised by them, but they don’t have the charisma to join the clique. They’re more scared than scary. I used to be this flavour of conservative as a teenager, and the conservatives I currently know are like this as well.

The right-wing authoritarian followers to fear are the petty bullies, the office tyrants, the social media trolls who go out of their way to bully awkward autistic trans women who are just coming into themselves, the people who kick and piss on homeless Latino immigrants in Boston and use Trump as a motivator. They are the police officers who wantonly shoot Black people who are just minding their own business. They are the ones who record their autistic kids having meltdowns and post the entire affair on YouTube to shame them into not having any more embarrassing meltdowns. They are the parents who kill their disabled children, citing how burdensome they are. It is those people, the ones who have made social conformity into a fetish and have lost their ability to see the Other as a person, who are the ones who will enthusiastically follow the next Hitler or Mussolini off a cliff. And these are the people I fear the most, even more than the Hitlers and Mussolinis themselves. Hitler cannot be Hitler if there is no throng of eager Nazis to march behind him.

Are there left-wing bullies and jerks? Of course. Are there Black, Brown, gay, trans, disabled bullies? Absolutely. We’re all human, and unfortunately, some human beings are assholes, no matter what they fill out on a census form. I am the last person to claim that because someone is marginalised, he cannot be a bully or harasser. But authoritarian leftism has comparatively little draw in North America or Europe compared with its right-wing counterpart, and the stories the authoritarian left tells are different.

Hitler and Mussolini tell you that the dominant culture should stay dominant, and anyone who doesn’t fit should be exterminated or severely marginalised. Stalin and Kim Il Sung, on the other hand, tell you that marginalised people will be liberated from colonial or royal oppression, that the outcasts will now gain control. But instead, they set up a new authoritarian dictatorship instead, just with new guys on top. The school analogues for left authoritarians are the autistic-adjacent geeks who got made fun of in school, go into Big Tech, and start becoming bullying assholes themselves. (I have known autistic people like this, mostly young white guys. They are deeply unpleasant and a pain in the ass in disability activism.) They are more sympathetic than the Mean Girls, but they are still repugnant and unworthy of support.

To sum it up: Right-wing authoritarians favour the current hierarchy. Left-wing authoritarians want to get rid of it and bring in a new hierarchy instead. Neither is particularly concerned about social justice, human rights, or basic decency.

(as opposed to the good kind of conformity, like “don’t be a sociopathic asshole”) ↩

About freedom

2023-12-11 / The Woke Contrarian / 0 Comments

We talk a lot about freedom, but what kinds of freedom matter?

Freedom of speech. Freedom of association. Freedom from poverty. Freedom from unemployment. Freedom to hire and fire as one wishes. Freedom to be an entrepreneur. Freedom from homelessness. Freedom of assembly. Freedom to set the definitions of one’s labour.

There are two kinds of freedom: positive freedoms and negative freedoms. Positive freedoms are the “freedoms to”: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of association. Liberals, centrists, right-libertarians, and moderate conservatives focus on positive freedoms, often disdaining negative freedoms as an unwanted constraint on individual (or corporate) liberties. The rhetoric of Marxists, some progressives, and other leftists focuses on negative freedoms, or the “freedoms from”: freedom from hunger, freedom from poverty, freedom from homelessness, freedom from illness. Traditionalist conservatives and fascists care neither about positive freedoms nor negative freedoms, except for the ruling class.

Both positive and negative freedoms are necessary for a functioning society. They are not mutually exclusive; in fact, they are synergistic (and I use this word advisedly; it’s not just business jargon if you use the term to say “these things work together and the whole is more than the sum of its parts.” Without negative freedoms, you have a lot of rights that won’t put food in your belly, keep a roof over your head, protect you from preventable diseases, or keep you safe from domestic violence—and others may have the right to exploit your labour, refuse to serve you because of your race, rip you off because there are no regulations on the books. Wage slavery deprives people’s lives of meaning. Without positive freedoms, you can’t speak truth to power. You can’t make your own choices about how you live. Everything you do is tightly regimented. With no choice, you may see life as futile.

Lopsided freedoms make people’s lives miserable.

If you’re homeless, starving, and hungry, is that really freedom? Even if you are not constrained by the law—after all, under “at-will” employment, you are just as free to quit as your company is to fire you—you are constrained by your material conditions. Free speech matters—after all, leaders need to be held accountable—but you can’t eat free speech. But under a dictator, you are under both the constraints of an authoritarian regime AND your material circumstances. If the state assigns you a job and you end up hating it, how do you find fulfilment when you’re occupied with tedium eight hours a day, even when there is no risk of being fired? Instead of these nightmarish scenarios, it’s better to give companies some discretion, but ban workplace discrimination and provide a generous social safety net for those who can’t find fulfilling work or simply can’t work at all. This way there is freedom from want and freedom of association.

This is why I vehemently disagree with both tankies and libertarians about their idea of freedom: their utopias are dystopias for everyone… including them.

ProleWiki is always good for a laugh.

2023-12-05 / The Woke Contrarian / 0 Comments

The last I checked, China, Russia, and Iran all had empires. All three of these countries have had leaders typically called emperors. “Anti-American” and “anti-imperialist” are not synonymous. If you’re an expansionist country with a leader called an emperor, you’re an imperialist power or have a history of imperialism. Russia, China, and Iran may have different geopolitical interests from the US and its allies, but that doesn’t stop them from being imperialist powers.

There are tankies—yes, hardened Stalin-idolising tankies—in Russia who seem to get the difference.

A screenshot of ProleWiki's "state media of anti-imperialist" countries, including Chinese, Iranian and Russian state media.

My horse, my horse, my kingdom for a horse…

2023-11-25 / The Woke Contrarian / 0 Comments

…I mean, a left movement that manages to avoid the following things:

Praising Hamas or other theocratic terrorist organisations (eg, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, Palestinian Islamic Jihad or Hezbollah)
Writing in a way that’s inaccessible to the people they claim to stand for (usually the working class, and sometimes disabled people if it’s disability-studies scholars who sound no different from their non-disabled counterparts in all the worst ways)
Politicising identity to the point that people turn into two-dimensional “oppressor” and “oppressed” classes (usually based on ethnicity, race, or gender) without nuance or distinction
Thinking that YELLING LOUDLY WITHOUT CLARIFYING YOUR POSITION is a GOOD WAY TO MAKE A POINT IN AN ARGUMENT. Extra points if you use the clapping 👏 hand 👏 emoji 👏 or repeat your sentence three times, first time in regular type, then italicised, then boldfaced
Promoting ideas that are impossible to implement on a large scale unless there’s a transitional period between the current and ideal states
Claiming that state propaganda organs like RT (Russia), Sputnik (Russia), TASS (Russia), the Korean Central News Agency (North Korea), Xinhua (China), Press TV (Iran), Global Times (China), TeleSUR (Venezuela), Prensa Latina (Cuba), Al Mayadeen (Lebanon), or Orinoco Tribune (Venezuela) are real “anti-imperialist news”
In contrast, relying solely or primarily on Western state media like Radio Liberty/Radio Free Asia (USA), BBC (UK), Deutsche Welle (Germany), or France 24, though this is more of a centre-left phenomenon. Although these sources are much more reliable than their Russian, Chinese, or Iranian equivalents, they tend to gloss over the faults of pro-Western regimes like Ukraine, South Korea, Japan, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia
Using only pro-government sources (there are sites that criticise the government without defending Russia) about the Ukrainian conflict, including Kyiv Independent, Kyiv Post, Ukraine Crisis Media Centre, Euromaidan Press, and Ukrainska Pravda. Ukrainian propaganda is less likely to make shit up than Russian propaganda, but it often treats Kiev’s repression and ethnocentric nationalism as a good thing
Using conspiracy-theory-laden websites like The Greyzone, MintPress News, Donbass Insider, and Moon of Alabama as reliable sources about China, Russia, or Syria
Spreading conspiracy theories in the name of “anti-imperialism,” including debunked claims about Syria’s gas killings and Ukraine’s purported biolabs
Treating activism like the Oppression Olympics, even though that’s a game nobody actually wants to win
Creating new political parties instead of trying to push existing ones further to the left (yes, I’m kind of an entryist; deal with it)
Related to the last point, running presidential or other candidates that have no chance of winning—why run anyone for office if you know damn well that a candidate from the People’s Socialist Party of Freedom, Equality and Liberation has zero chance of winning against the Democrat or Republican (or mainstream equivalents in other countries, like the Tories and Labour in the UK, or the German Christian Democrats and Social Democrats)
Refusing to build coalitions across the left because purity politics makes it impossible, thereby allowing the right to split us up and indirectly help leaders like Donald Trump, Geert Wilders and Jair Bolsonaro come to power
Expressing essentialist ideas about genders, races or cultures (“Russian culture exists to oppress Ukrainians,” “Indigenous Americans are noble sages,” “men are all rapists,” “‘real’ women are delicate flowers who need ‘sex-based rights’ to protect them from evil trans women”)
Calling anyone who disagrees with them “reactionary” or “pseudo-left” (Trotskyists do this a lot)
Focusing more on style than substance (“trans women” versus “transwoman”, #KyivNotKiev)
Venerating past and present tyrannical dictators like Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, “respected comrade” Kim Jong Un and the rest of his family, Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin (who isn’t even a leftist, much less a communist), Xi Jinping, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Nicolas Maduro, Daniel Ortega, ad nauseam
Focusing on foreign policy to the exclusion of domestic policy
Focusing on domestic policy to the exclusion of foreign policy
Treating Volodymyr Zelensky (and by extension the bumbling Ukrainian central government) as though the were the second coming of Winston Churchill
Throwing around jargon like “anti-imperialist,” “settler colonial,” “decolonise,” “bourgeois,” “proletarian,” “imperialist,” “neoliberal,” and “geopolitical economy” without being clear about what they mean
Reducing all relationships of dominance and oppression to the control of the means of production or the lack thereof (which is silly, since racism, all sexisms and xenophobia can occur under any economic system, including socialism)
Supporting right-wing authoritarian states because they’re opposed to US policy (mostly Russia and Iran)
Supporting authoritarian communist or socialist states because they’re opposed to US policy (mostly China, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Syria)
Treating politics like a sports game
Spouting ableist views—including fat-shaming—because their concept of class or identity organising completely ignores the idea that disability is political
Treating the writings of Marx and Engels (or sometimes Lenin, Stalin, and Mao) as holy writ
Siding with anti-Western states because they’re “anti-imperialist” (as though China and Russia weren’t expansionist empires, which is the analogue of Japanese, Ukrainian or Taiwanese boosting of Western imperialisms because they’re against China and Russia)
Supporting reactionary, xenophobic movements like Brexit (a common view among some British communists, as well as the perennial candidate and professional fruitcake and anti-vaxxer Jill Stein) because they’re against the EU’s neoliberalism
Dismissing reports of sexual abuse because they’re a “distraction” from the class struggle
Denying genocidal actions of anti-US regimes (China in particular)
Claiming that their movement, whether Trotskyism, orthodox Marxism–Leninism, anarchism, or any other tendency, is the only way to solve society’s problems
Uncritically defending Ukraine or other pro-Western countries with deeply problematic policies (more common in North American and Western European mainstream media, though views like this sometimes appear among social democrats and other more moderate leftists)
Dismissing, defending or promoting racism, misogyny, homophobia or transphobia on the grounds that feminism, pro-LGBTQ activism and antiracism distract from the class struggle
Constantly putting political one-upmanship over the real lives, concerns and feelings of actual human beings

Unfortunately, this seems impossible to find, at least for now. I know I can’t agree with everything I find, but the lacuna between my views and theirs is staggering. (But mainstream centre-left politics leaves me unsatisfied, too, and anything on the right is obviously out of the question.)

Right-libertarianism and Marxism are more similar than you’d expect

2023-11-24 / The Woke Contrarian / 0 Comments

I use “Marxism” and “right-libertarian” loosely to refer to ideas that, respectively, focus on the dichotomous struggle between the bourgeoisie (owners of the means of production, especially people who extract labour from their employees or consumers) and the proletariat (people who have nothing but their work to give), or the dichotomous struggle between the winners (those who benefit from capitalist conditions) and losers (those who have not managed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps).

Both these ideologies present a zero-sum view of humanity, though they take different perspectives: Marxists focus on the conflict between collectives, and right-libertarians seem these conflicts as individual. Both have a zero-sum character that reminds me of Social Darwinism. For one to survive, the other must be eliminated. This kind of winner-takes-all thinking is pervasive and seems to have brought us nowhere.

The frustrating thing is that right-libertarians often have valuable things to say about freedom of speech and expression, though they are often dismissive of how groups of people experience systemic oppression. A lot of them think that sexism, racism, homophobia and transphobia will be vanquished in the free marketplace of ideas—or that these forms of prejudice are even justifiable because they continue to exist. And Marxists have an acute understanding of how economic inequality and exploitation lead to poverty, suffering and misery—but they don’t always care about individual rights and support the suppression of dissent. And like their right-libertarian counterparts, they may pooh-pooh racism and other systemic oppressions—or uphold them—because they’re secondary to the class struggle. (And then you have the identity-reductionist counterparts, but they are distinct enough from Marxists and right-libertarians that I’ll deal with them separately.) All these are counterproductive, reductive mindsets that ignore the complexities inherent to human existence.

ProleWiki: Tankies have created the funniest/most infuriating thing I’ve seen all week

2023-10-23 / The Woke Contrarian / 0 Comments

Tankies have created their own counterpart to Wikipedia: ProleWiki.

A picture of a blonde light-skinned man saying, "North Korea is a socialist workers' paradise!" He's wearing a dark-red T-shirt with a red star on it and is giving the viewer the thumbs-up.

You can learn that the correct name for Americans is actually “Statesians.” You’ll also learn that North Korea—I mean the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea—is a happy workers’ paradise, not a totalitarian hellhole full of people who are fed a healthy diet of propaganda rather than actual food to eat. Russia’s RT, Iran’s Press TV, and other state media from authoritarian states, as well as conspiracy-mongering publications like CovertAction Magazine and The Greyzone, are now “anti-imperialist media.” And you’ll learn that virtually anything wrong in the world is a “Statesian” plot led by the CIA. The words “bourgeois,” “capitalist,” “ruling class,” “means of production,” and “material” are thrown around liberally.

A picture of a frowning light-skinned woman with purple hair, saying, "The kulaks had it coming!" She's wearing an off-the-shoulders pink top with a teal sleeveless shirt underneath, and there is a black choker with a teal pendant around her neck.

And to the editors of ProleWiki, Stalin and Kim Jong-un are deeply misunderstood men who want to do right by their people, not iron-fisted tyrants. And Xi Jinping is praised by way of a quote from that stalwart champion of human rights, Fidel Castro. In general, if the media say anything negative about the USSR, North Korea, China, Cuba, Vietnam, or any other “actually existing socialist state,” it’s bourgeois propaganda.

At least the ProleWiki editors are pro-LGBTQ, unlike some other Marxist–Leninists who see anything non-heteronormative as being bourgeois, idealist, or degenerate. I guess even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Dear Marxists,

2023-10-22 / The Woke Contrarian / 0 Comments

…it is racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia and ableism that are distractions from the class struggle, not the drive to eliminate these prejudices. By dismissing—or in some cases, upholding—these hostilities, you make it possible for the ruling classes to drive women, queer people, immigrants and disabled people from socialism. “They’re no better than the conservatives, since they’ll also ban me from transitioning or marrying my partner.” “They’re no better than the current leaders, since they won’t care if I’m going to be killed by the police because they see members of my race as dangerous.” “I can’t get involved with this movement because they’re going to ban abortion and weaken domestic-violence laws.” The message, whether tacit or explicit, is that some proletarians (men, ethnic or racial majorities, straight and cis people) are worth more than others. And when it’s explicit, when you actively express racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia or any other non-class prejudice, you are just as divisive as the “Lean In” feminists or those who focus on racial injustice without considering socioeconomic inequality. Any movement that dehumanises me, that says I don’t deserve basic rights, that claims I’m inferior—why would I join your stupid revolution? It would be all the same to me, just as it would be all the same for a poor or working-class person in a society that has eliminated all non-class discrimination.

If you want to get rid of identity politics, then don’t excuse or perpetuate the social divisions that give rise to it.

Category: No Tanks! (Page 1 of 2)

A random list of political bullshit I’m tired of

About freedom

ProleWiki is always good for a laugh.

Right-libertarianism and Marxism are more similar than you’d expect

ProleWiki: Tankies have created the funniest/most infuriating thing I’ve seen all week

Dear Marxists,

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