Dutch left is going through this now. Everyone right of the center party Green/Labor is a racist and everyone left of them is a traitor. People who get caught up in the right wing web of lies are called racist, dumb, stupid, whatever. It’s like they expect everyone to somehow end up on the left side of the spectrum without doing any outreach and while calling everyone who disagrees with them names. Meanwhile the far right welcomes these people with open arms while explaining how a brown refugee is responsible for Shell not paying taxes on their 36 billion euro profit.

Get off your high horse. Reach out to the people. Be nice to them and never stop explaining.

Rule of thumb for online discussions: if it’s inappropriate in the real world, then don’t say it.

Tbh since I stopped using Reddit Ive had no urge to rage at Internet Liberals to their faces and mock their every word. It’s not like “out of sight, out of mind” but when you’re on Reddit, you see the worst, most confrontational takes (from a Marxist perspective, the rest of the globe sees it as normal decent content) and hearing normal people voicing concerns IRL and trying to get ahead of false narratives or godforbid even talk them out of supporting a Nazi/Apartheid/Fascist state really fills me with more hope and joy than giving all the best Pro-AES sources in the world to a right-winger who won’t read what I sent.

Last week someone here called me a ‘fucking worm’ (repeatedly) and a ‘little baby’, and told me I should be ‘erased from existence’, along with a pile of other insults. (Someone else reported and the mods banned them, in addition to deleting the worst of their comments. Thank you.) That outburst was in response to me trying to voice what is, imo, another aspect of this same exact problem. That experience naturally got me thinking even more about this pattern, and my own relationship to it.

I’ve been cruel and domineering online before, especially in my late teens and early twenties. Honestly, I’m still trying to figure out how to be critical and steadfast in my criticism without ever being vicious.

Finding one’s way to communism means, among other things, becoming more intimately aware of horrible, painful facts about imperialism past and present. There’s also a real sense of alienation that comes with rejecting the dominant ideologies in one’s own culture and society. I think that unfortunately often, among young men especially, ‘conversion’ to socialism does less to challenge certain patriarchal attitudes to violence and domination than to direct those attitudes to new targets.

It’s perhaps an especially difficult thing when learning the real history of socialist revolutions involves coming to understand that revolutionary violence can be truly necessary, that ‘terrorism’ is a label that has been weaponized against righteous and successful liberation struggles, that failure to suppress counterrevolution has historically meant defeat at the hands of brutal, brutal, reaction, and so on.

Emphasis on the material as a historical force, as something which generates ideology as a kind of rationalization, can also be misused to downplay or turn away from the role of the subjective. If one is already so inclined, it is easy to dismiss any call to introspection as idealism— especially when one sees radlibs make such calls in bad faith and treat them as the limit of politics.

The road to socialist understanding for men and boys raised under patriarchy is riddled with pitfalls. The distance and abstractness of online interaction don’t help here, either.

I haven’t gotten into any arguments recently, but I’m definitely guilty of saying downright evil and hateful things on this platform (e.g. calling for indiscriminate slaughter of Iseaelis, including the children; going on about how pogroms against suburban whites would be based; etc.). It’s the kind of shit that even saying is wrecker/fed shit, and would almost certainly get me booted from any org.

Literally the first time I ever tried to honestly refer someone to a video of socialism, just to educate them on terms, not even try to convert them, I got a death threat.

A fucking death threat.

I mean, yes we need to try to do better than them, but man, that’s just hard when you are up against someone who thinks you’re a terrorist when you try to clarify terms.

Yes we need to do better, but don’t feel like you can’t take a break, take a break from the internet, from the terrible people calling for genocide.

Edit: I forgot to mention that internally here, yes we need to be less dogmatic, more unified, and be more willing to simply explain things and preech less, even to each other. In real life I try to do more explaining and less arguing, but even then that’s mostly to family.

I’ve had to limit my interactions on both here and especially Hexbear because of this toxicity. Idealistic based bickering and hatred of individuals. Constantly wishing death on groups of people instead of understanding the material reasons they act the way they do.

I found memes like “To the wall with them!” amusing enough at first; but then I realized that more often than not the meme is being used seriously.

save the energy for the actual fascists, not the politically disinterested/uninvested or the center

Getting sucked into the toxicity of online spaces bleeds back into your offline conversations, comrades. I always appreciate whenever someone checks a statement of mine as questionable. I think we can all do better to hold each other accountable about behavior and in a respectful way.

And an additional note, One thing I’ve noticed about leftist orgs is that they are filled with a lot of neurodivergent people (talking about myself too) who have suffered a lot of trauma under capitalism. And in my experience I’ve noticed a lot of toxic communication tendencies arise from that, since not everyone is in a position to get therapy or meaningfully address their alienation.

I know “self-care” is a meme at this point, but everyone here really needs to work on healing their traumas and becoming aware of their own damaging impulses if they expect to build healthy relationships.