Found some discussion on hexbear where dbzer0 was once more found to be living rent-free in their heads, but it got me thinking:
I find it telling that tankies will constantly prattle about “critical-support” of fascist chuds like Asad, and red-fash regimes like North Korea, or more often, just unironically bring up bog-standard SocDem capitalism like China as “Actually Existing Socialism” (AES), but will immediately marginalize, dehumanize or expel from their spaces anarchists who don’t support AES, or who support market-based forms of socialism (such as mutualism).
Likewise, why not give “critical support” to other SocDems for their good policies? (note, I don’t support socdems in either liberal-capitalist of state-capitalist form, I’m just asking questions, philosophically)
I can’t quite put into words why this bothers me, but I suspect it’s due to the usual hypocrisy I see from them. What do you think of this phenomenon?
The problem pretty consistently is they have simple solutions to complex problems and refuse to use nuance in anything.
They’ve reduced the problem space to one they can comprehend, have come to a conclusion about it, and now refuse to ever bend or change opinion.
If your regime is vocally on their side they’ll defend it unironically and ardently. If your regime has ever shown any pushback you’re a Western pig with shitballs.
It’s a very comforting worldview honestly. Having come from a radical religious upbringing I know how nice it is to just take a razor and slice the world in 2. Good guys on one side, bad guys on the other and never the twain shall meet. Bad people are eternally bad and the only way for them to not be bad is for them to look, talk and act like us because we’re good.
The problem of course is that it is exceptionally rare that you find someone who believes what they’re doing is wrong and continually fights for it because they enjoy being wrong. Everyone lands on continuous spectrums of belief and action and they’re usually doing what they think is right/good.
To be clear: I’m not saying I understand the entire problem space. I’ve read Marx and Gramsci. I’m not uninformed: I just know that the complexity of human systems are nigh on incomprehensible when attempting to solve them in their entirety. I don’t think the problem of government and economic organization is solvable so much as it is something we can do better than we currently do. It will never be perfect, but we can aim for good enough.
For what it’s worth I’m definitely in the big government camp rather than the anarchism camp: and yes I’m aware which community this is. Just calling out my own biases here.
I’m mostly on your side of the fence in the matter. For many accepting that reality is more complicated that they can handle or that has part they will never fully understand is too much to handle. They will reduce the problem to whatever they can handle. More often we’ll se that authoritarian solution are based in the hypocrisy of “everything will be alright for the majority of the people” or some thing of the likes. Some anarchistic and/or liberal solutions rely on believing that no bad apples will exist, is a never ending argument. But I prefer to dream that to oppress I guess i better to see tolerance as a social contract.
I think if we where to address the question directly it would be the blatant denial of the problems they generate and enable with their behavior? This can land as hypocrisy yes but the core is the reduction that leads to a denial IMO.
BTW I’m not pro big government per se but I believe that many part of our society do not need private interest involved at all and that many aspects of the private endeavor need regulation, we’re playing whack a mole for many things.