mesonoxian
Well-known member
They aren't a gang, don't intend to "destroy all opposition", and they don't have a planned communist revolution. They don't do much as antifa outside of break up fascist demonstrations and protect antifascist ones. Most members do plenty of other stuff as members of various other groups, but like Antifa isn't going to be doing routine anarchist stuff like passing out literature, setting up squats, or running food pantries. And the idea that they have a planned communist revolution is pretty laughable. You've got anarchists, Maoists, Leftcoms, Trotskyists. You'd be lucky if the could come to an agreement about what revolution means, much less how (and whether) to carry one off.
I'm not going to chop this up and reply sentence by sentence, both because that is annoying to read and because I can't be assed to do so.
Wow, that is even a worse attempt at describing CRT than I thought. Like that isn't even the "copy a couple bits of Wikipedia but make it meaner" think you did for Antifa. Just curious, have you ever read any actual Critical Race theory? Or where did you get this idea. You don't have to answer if you don't want to. I'd just like you to indulge my morbid curiousity.
Okay, moving on. Yeah, fascism does have a fixation on the state, but most forms of fascism have a distinctly ethno-cultural conception of statehood. As I mentioned before, they are at their core a form of Romanticism. Popular nationalism of that sort identifies the "nation" as a particular racial and cultural group (and not even the kind of races modern society uses like European or African, but much narrower ones like Anglo-Saxon (excluding the "Celtic" Irish), or Germanic or Italian) and the state as the ruling body of this nation. Literal "ethnostates".
RE:100.000,000 dead under communism, I'm no fan of the USSR and Maoist China, but the "Black Book of Communism" from which that number derives is garbage. Like that number of "victims of communism" includes Soviets killed by Nazi Germany. The book is a hit piece, which is unnecessary. The actual facts on the ground were already pretty bad. But they were bad for reasons, and not because communists are evil vampires who like human misery.
I'm an anarchist so I actually fully agree with you that state based communism is inherently contradictory. Basically all communist regimes up to this point have descended from the Leninist revolution in Russia in the 1910s. The country was a basket case already. The people were living in abject poverty under the Tsar while the Russian nobility were utterly decadent. The economy was shambles and people were being poured into the meat grinder of WWI. Some kind of revolution was going to happen. The liberal government of Kerensky had the galaxy brained idea to keeep fighting WWI after the revolution. That cost them any legitimacy and the communist won by default.
Lenin's faction of communists were the most successful, and he had the brilliant idea that you would give a group of party leaders capacity to lead "in the name of the people" until the people were able to take power for themselves. There were actually some efforts toward that end in the early Soviet Union, and the SU in the 1920s, before things went entirely to hell is fascinating. There were local Soviets (workers councils) with real power, a democratically run military(!), and really interesting literature. But unsurprisingly things started to come unglued, because it turns out giving a small group near unlimited power is a pretty bad idea. And the worst possible guys won the resulting power structure. Two literal psychopaths, Stalin and Beria. And then the already famine producing central management of agriculture was combined with naturally occurring famines, turning a crime against humanity into one of the worst losses of life in human history. Then the Nazis invaded and killed an almost unthinkable number of Russians and destroyed their still barely recovered economy. And y the end of WWII Stalin had become essentially an absolute dictator. After he died the Soviet Union just sort of limped along. In a very real sense it never got out of the death spiral that started the revolution under the Tsar. the closest it got was Stalins forced industrialization, which itself had a substantial body count.
Stalinist Russia became the place you could turn to for aid against western powers. So if you were opposed to the western puppets in China, you could get help from Stalin, and that's how you get Mao in power. The Soviets backed Vietnamese anti-colonialists, too, after the Americans refused to help them. The communist states established during the Cold War were nearly all proxies of the Soviets, if only by natural selection. The ones that lacked Soviet backing (like Allende in Chile) were overthrown by the US.
Lenin's faction of communists were the most successful, and he had the brilliant idea that you would give a group of party leaders capacity to lead "in the name of the people" until the people were able to take power for themselves. There were actually some efforts toward that end in the early Soviet Union, and the SU in the 1920s, before things went entirely to hell is fascinating. There were local Soviets (workers councils) with real power, a democratically run military(!), and really interesting literature. But unsurprisingly things started to come unglued, because it turns out giving a small group near unlimited power is a pretty bad idea. And the worst possible guys won the resulting power structure. Two literal psychopaths, Stalin and Beria. And then the already famine producing central management of agriculture was combined with naturally occurring famines, turning a crime against humanity into one of the worst losses of life in human history. Then the Nazis invaded and killed an almost unthinkable number of Russians and destroyed their still barely recovered economy. And y the end of WWII Stalin had become essentially an absolute dictator. After he died the Soviet Union just sort of limped along. In a very real sense it never got out of the death spiral that started the revolution under the Tsar. the closest it got was Stalins forced industrialization, which itself had a substantial body count.
Stalinist Russia became the place you could turn to for aid against western powers. So if you were opposed to the western puppets in China, you could get help from Stalin, and that's how you get Mao in power. The Soviets backed Vietnamese anti-colonialists, too, after the Americans refused to help them. The communist states established during the Cold War were nearly all proxies of the Soviets, if only by natural selection. The ones that lacked Soviet backing (like Allende in Chile) were overthrown by the US.
Now you can think they are full of it and entirely wrong about how that will work out. But combine this with the fundamental difference in their interpretations of history and economics and they are clearly ideologically miles apart. And that is before the fact that most fascism is off the walls irrational, violent, and racist.
As to your slanders about socialists hating culture and art, all I can say is that you're wrong based on every socialists I have ever met, and all the socialism I have ever read. Some socialists are hostile to religion. And some are working within specifically religious movements like liberation theology and Catholic socialism. Socialism is big and varied and while you can find a lot of different things in their, only a few things are really universal, and they are mostly fundamental beliefs about economic value and hierarchy.
