After Bernie dropped out I saw increasing receptivity to Marxism-Leninism. I don’t want to say we were winning but I felt a definite shift towards communism, towards ML thought at a certain point, although I’m sure some of that was just meme-communists and brocialists who would have immediately gone all in on AOC 2024 the moment that happened. But I’m also sure we were winning over people and encouraging them to move beyond imperialist dogma.
I would say ML’s had pretty good success there in the last six months in that when we presented our arguments clearly we were increasingly more often upvoted than not. Of course you had your share of opportunists upvoted as well so it was a battlefield to be sure, anarchists, succdems, even Trots trying to claim the destruction of police stations as acts of their party.
I think keeping a light mood can be helpful but I can’t say I liked every bit of CTH’s humor. Certainly humor is a powerful weapon for counter-propaganda against liberal indoctrination. Certainly I think many more radical liberals feel more comfortable if there is humor instead of just straight up discussion of theory and people thumping against the latest state dept propaganda, it makes spaces more inviting. I do agree there is a necessity for ML spaces that do not really tolerate liberalism but I also think we should be open to spaces that are less strict to try and grow. That I think is the real tragedy of the loss of CTH. Not that an ML space was lost but that an outreach space was lost, that a place for Marxists to reach into the rest of reddit and interact with liberals and reactionaries and push back and win minds was lost.
Yep. You just wrote out all my feelings about CTH for the past few months. I definitely had that feeling when posters like you and fatpollo (holy shit, this person is flat out the best poster on that sub) were eating chauvinists and radlibs for breakfast.
I was a fairly new ML leaning leftist (was a lib/socdem not too long before) just last year, the Hong Kong discourse was insufferable as you well know. But the tankie struggle sessions on there really pulled the sub back IMO and basically solidified my belief in ML.
Memes for sure help people radicalize in some ways, but the biggest problem was lack of professionalism. It’s a semi-anonymous internet forum so of course that would not be possible, but the lack of any sort of push for education meant people get stuck in a cycle of edgy memes and shitposting.
It was an easy access to “leftist” ideas, which is something sorely lacking online. The problem with subs like communism101 is the heavy handed modding. I get wanting to keep a clean line if thinking, but subs aren’t parties. There is no party line. They’re open forums for discussion and as such the learning subs need to be more welcoming to new communists. It’s a bit intimidating to potential comrades when you get banned or looked down on for asking a question; it just pushes them away to stay liberal or towards anarchism as they have no substantial theory and makes the barrier of entry to liberals easier
The second one I think it’s more a matter of striking the right balance. I certainly think some of them the mods perhaps have grown weary and trigger happy but you also don’t want the other end where the mods let the users run the sub until it turns into a hole of liberalism and then you’re faced with having to try and purge most of your userbase. It’s a delicate act of being open but not letting certain liberal sentiments or ideas take root and for that you also need users who downvote/upvote/engage with people to keep the liberal sentiments out and the unrepentant and unreformable liberals outside the sub.
There’s a question that’s been nagging at me for a good while now and it’s why wasn’t CTH utterly infested with reactionaries? Why didn’t we regularly see threads where out of 20 answers given, 10 of which were fascists answering in place of socialists? Was it because they didn’t use the word ‘communist’ and as such avoided painting such a huge target on their backs? Was it due to the quarantine?
One was it got a reputation among reactionaries (and liberals) as a “shithole” in the vein of 4chan or something full of deranged, radical people who would in addition to downvoting and chiding you for posting reactionary thought would comb through your post history and make fun of you and/or demand you post pictures of your penis (hog) to be allowed to continue to post or receive interaction back from the community. Of course it was never a shithole, it just treated reactionaries, racists, etc like shit and harassed them. I think the demands for penis pictures were deeply unsettling as among other things reactionaries have all kinds of psycho-sexual hang-ups and probably either have an inferiority complex about their penis or are made to feel uncomfortable like they’re being objectified by gay/bi men in the same way they’re used to objectifying women. In fact I think the idea for that came from the old misogynist chan demand that women “post tits”.
The mods also weren’t totally inactive. They would let more amusing reactionaries post but those who just spammed the same “commies killed trillions” comments on threads would get banned.
Many would try and come for a debate and very often they just wouldn’t be given it or any satisfaction in that regard, instead people would comb through their post history, make fun of them for inadequacies in their lives, or just kind of insult them and ignore the subject matter of their debate attempts which probably frustrated them.
One problem you’re going to have on any educational sub is to some degree you want to assume people are coming in good faith even if from a place of incredible anti-communist propaganda indoctrination. So some of these tactics may not be ideal. Then again if you can look through their post history and see what type of person they are you can often see some of the worst bad faith ones but not always.
CTH had a kind of ironic uncaring detachment you’re never going to get in an educational sub, they legitimately did not care if a reactionary of liberal learned, they just were happy to silence or bully them if they got out of line and started spewing “muh millions” type nonsense.
And they just had a very active community. On any given time of day on the sub even after quarantine you had probably 3k people online and browsing the sub. That’s a lot of instant downvotes even on larger and older threads for posting reactionary-thought.
I’ll also say CTH had this rep of being this vicious brigade and harassment sub. The rest of reddit was convinced by this myth that they would follow you to other subs you posted in and continue harassing you if you came in and annoyed them. And well there was some user pinging stuff before the quarantine so the harassment stuff did exist to a degree and the sub was full of people who were very active on the rest of reddit. And well people probably would follow reactionaries back to the subs they posted in after they came into our sub and annoy them there and they got upset about being “brigaded” and of course in the reactionary mind the forces of persecution against them are always larger than they are so they built us up into this monster that would downvote their threads to single digits and argue with them in their own spaces when in fact a lot of the people doing that were liberals with no affiliation with the sub.
It also had a lot of memes. I will say it definitely creates a lot of meme communists but one good thing about meme communists is they will help keep your spaces clear of reactionaries and liberals by memeing on them. They should never be given an ounce of power of course but they’ll help keep spaces clean and police them. Many of them can also be given basic educations with effort posts and replies that emphasize theory. You won’t get them to memorize or deeply understand theory but you can often get them to avoid repeating common ignorant tropes and some of them, maybe many of them with enough time can get the interest of actually picking up theory and moving past meme communism. In a learning space you might not want to permit so many memes, it kind of distracts from the purpose of the sub.
CTH was not a communist learning sub, it was a sub of many things and contrasts which created a unique environmental mix of memes, support for people, and theory and effort posting which drew in and engaged a large audience beyond that which might typically be interested in these things.
Ah that hit the spot! I was beginning to miss the good ol’ CTH tankie long reply (even though it’s only been what, 3 days?) and you came through with one just like that.
I guess the question I really wanted to get at was that if people are insinuating that supposedly meme subs like CTH are effective at teaching (the job of the learner sub) while being somewhat less heavy handed (the primary criticism of the learner sub) and able to police more effectively, why even bother with the learner subs? Why not dispense with the learner subs and instead meme and mock your way into teaching communism?
Because in my experience it’s often only effective up to a point. They can disabuse people of anti-communist propaganda and even get them to have an interest in communism or self-declare themselves communists. And this is let me be clear, uh a good thing, unambiguously a good thing. Some people like myself would be the types who would at a certain point begin reading theory but a large number of people there are quite frankly uninterested in that and quite content to continue posting memes and remain somewhat uninvolved and uninterested. Call them whatever you’d like, meme communists, aesthetic driven, whatever.
Also frankly some people are going to be repulsed or off-put by the culture of a place like CTH and memes in general to say nothing of edgy ones. Some people are just not going to be receptive to that. Now a lot of younger people are but you definitely risk alienating people who want that more serious discussion and who want a place where they can mostly get straight answers in a relatively short period of time instead of people memeing and occasionally giving an answer. A lot of how CTH worked I think was osmosis, just stewing in it long enough to pick up enough good bits. Just as capitalist hegemony reinforces itself in a million invisible ways in our lives on TV, outside, in music, video games, etc so too does stewing a sub that is broadly anti-capitalist begin to work on a person in ways that we might call subtle.
I would say CTH could never replace a communism101 sub but that has more to do with it being broadly friendly to everyone from demsocs to anarchists and the mods having nothing resembling a party line or stated ideology. A lot of people over time learned in that sub thanks to effort posting and people kind enough to actually engage with others when they have questions. However a lot of other people probably gave up having their questions answered and have been kind of coerced into silence or conformity without understanding why and that’s not ideal. But that’s just perhaps a trade-off you have to make.
MTC back before the past two months or so certainly was closer to this mythical sub that isn’t strictly a leaning sub but uses things like memes while having plenty of theory-read comrades in the replies to answer questions. Of course it was stricter than CTH and as a self declared “tankie” sub it had certain lines drawn, against blatant imperialist apology, apology for the CIA, etc.
The truth is I don’t think I have a good answer to your question. I think certainly there are benefits to the mixture of content with memes model but also drawbacks. I think a lot of these drawbacks are eliminated if you have a strong moderation vanguard and learned posters willing to regularly reply and help new users and get a kind of turn-over process going over time where those new users once a bit more knowledgeable help even newer users with basic questions and subject matter they’re now familiar with.
Fascists and chuds were scared off in its early stages because people would regularly harass them by doing stuff like “summoning” them (by pinging their username) and demand they explain their support for pedophelia if they were a libertarian or demanding they post a pic of their hog if they made there way into the sub (in a humorous mirror of the old misogynist “tits or gtfo”). cth users would also take over other subreddits. By its end it was a scary place if you were fashy or neolib.
Fascists are cowards, always have been. cth was simply too scary a place for them and there was no joy in trolling.
Would you recommend this as a tactic for all the strict learner subs then, since the endless wave of reactionaries seem to be their biggest problem and is, according to the subs’ moderators, the reason they are as ban-happy as they are?
Not the person you asked but I guess the question is what learner subs want. I agree with stricter moderation practices on subs like that.
I guess you could try and make fun of some of these people but unless you really have a lot of people keyed in on this stuff you’re going to make fun of and abuse some people who were legitimately open to communist thought and well you may or may not turn them off. I will mention many people did regard CTH as toxic because of this unwillingness to suffer people spouting the most generic anti-communist crap and it probably drove people away, but people who stuck around a little and were more open to considering they had been lied to or at least just listening to our side of things seemed to come out of it alright for the most part. Maybe that’s a better acceptable compromise than letting reactionaries run rampant in replies or just banning everyone who deviates from the ML line. You don’t have to do much in that vein, the old “shut up/shut the fuck up liberal” standby and some downvotes conveys the message that they’re engaging in liberalism, that their silence in these matters as a consequence is desired and it brings to mind those hilarious memes of Stalin, Lenin, Mao with laser eyes. But it isn’t particularly nice and I would never say it is the ideal. I would suggest having macros that spam a few resources to debunk common propaganda and if they continue without reading them or in bad faith otherwise then time to pull out the old “shut the fuck up liberal” and/or ban-hammer. Because those most amenable to learning will in most cases read links you give them. They might have more questions, they might be unwilling to give up the propaganda so easily but they will noticeably engage with it.
The ideal on a learning sub is really just having a lot of moderators in the same way the science subs do and just being ruthless in removing bad stuff and if needed issuing temp bans to try and dissuade people from doing again exactly what they did without totally excluding them and giving them another chance. Of course in practice having enough people to do that who don’t suffer from burn-out is a challenge.
After Bernie dropped out I saw increasing receptivity to Marxism-Leninism. I don’t want to say we were winning but I felt a definite shift towards communism, towards ML thought at a certain point, although I’m sure some of that was just meme-communists and brocialists who would have immediately gone all in on AOC 2024 the moment that happened. But I’m also sure we were winning over people and encouraging them to move beyond imperialist dogma.
I would say ML’s had pretty good success there in the last six months in that when we presented our arguments clearly we were increasingly more often upvoted than not. Of course you had your share of opportunists upvoted as well so it was a battlefield to be sure, anarchists, succdems, even Trots trying to claim the destruction of police stations as acts of their party.
I think keeping a light mood can be helpful but I can’t say I liked every bit of CTH’s humor. Certainly humor is a powerful weapon for counter-propaganda against liberal indoctrination. Certainly I think many more radical liberals feel more comfortable if there is humor instead of just straight up discussion of theory and people thumping against the latest state dept propaganda, it makes spaces more inviting. I do agree there is a necessity for ML spaces that do not really tolerate liberalism but I also think we should be open to spaces that are less strict to try and grow. That I think is the real tragedy of the loss of CTH. Not that an ML space was lost but that an outreach space was lost, that a place for Marxists to reach into the rest of reddit and interact with liberals and reactionaries and push back and win minds was lost.
Yep. You just wrote out all my feelings about CTH for the past few months. I definitely had that feeling when posters like you and fatpollo (holy shit, this person is flat out the best poster on that sub) were eating chauvinists and radlibs for breakfast.
I was a fairly new ML leaning leftist (was a lib/socdem not too long before) just last year, the Hong Kong discourse was insufferable as you well know. But the tankie struggle sessions on there really pulled the sub back IMO and basically solidified my belief in ML.
Memes for sure help people radicalize in some ways, but the biggest problem was lack of professionalism. It’s a semi-anonymous internet forum so of course that would not be possible, but the lack of any sort of push for education meant people get stuck in a cycle of edgy memes and shitposting.
It was an easy access to “leftist” ideas, which is something sorely lacking online. The problem with subs like communism101 is the heavy handed modding. I get wanting to keep a clean line if thinking, but subs aren’t parties. There is no party line. They’re open forums for discussion and as such the learning subs need to be more welcoming to new communists. It’s a bit intimidating to potential comrades when you get banned or looked down on for asking a question; it just pushes them away to stay liberal or towards anarchism as they have no substantial theory and makes the barrier of entry to liberals easier
I agree with your first paragraph strongly.
The second one I think it’s more a matter of striking the right balance. I certainly think some of them the mods perhaps have grown weary and trigger happy but you also don’t want the other end where the mods let the users run the sub until it turns into a hole of liberalism and then you’re faced with having to try and purge most of your userbase. It’s a delicate act of being open but not letting certain liberal sentiments or ideas take root and for that you also need users who downvote/upvote/engage with people to keep the liberal sentiments out and the unrepentant and unreformable liberals outside the sub.
There’s a question that’s been nagging at me for a good while now and it’s why wasn’t CTH utterly infested with reactionaries? Why didn’t we regularly see threads where out of 20 answers given, 10 of which were fascists answering in place of socialists? Was it because they didn’t use the word ‘communist’ and as such avoided painting such a huge target on their backs? Was it due to the quarantine?
Well several things probably.
One was it got a reputation among reactionaries (and liberals) as a “shithole” in the vein of 4chan or something full of deranged, radical people who would in addition to downvoting and chiding you for posting reactionary thought would comb through your post history and make fun of you and/or demand you post pictures of your penis (hog) to be allowed to continue to post or receive interaction back from the community. Of course it was never a shithole, it just treated reactionaries, racists, etc like shit and harassed them. I think the demands for penis pictures were deeply unsettling as among other things reactionaries have all kinds of psycho-sexual hang-ups and probably either have an inferiority complex about their penis or are made to feel uncomfortable like they’re being objectified by gay/bi men in the same way they’re used to objectifying women. In fact I think the idea for that came from the old misogynist chan demand that women “post tits”.
The mods also weren’t totally inactive. They would let more amusing reactionaries post but those who just spammed the same “commies killed trillions” comments on threads would get banned.
Many would try and come for a debate and very often they just wouldn’t be given it or any satisfaction in that regard, instead people would comb through their post history, make fun of them for inadequacies in their lives, or just kind of insult them and ignore the subject matter of their debate attempts which probably frustrated them.
One problem you’re going to have on any educational sub is to some degree you want to assume people are coming in good faith even if from a place of incredible anti-communist propaganda indoctrination. So some of these tactics may not be ideal. Then again if you can look through their post history and see what type of person they are you can often see some of the worst bad faith ones but not always.
CTH had a kind of ironic uncaring detachment you’re never going to get in an educational sub, they legitimately did not care if a reactionary of liberal learned, they just were happy to silence or bully them if they got out of line and started spewing “muh millions” type nonsense.
And they just had a very active community. On any given time of day on the sub even after quarantine you had probably 3k people online and browsing the sub. That’s a lot of instant downvotes even on larger and older threads for posting reactionary-thought.
I’ll also say CTH had this rep of being this vicious brigade and harassment sub. The rest of reddit was convinced by this myth that they would follow you to other subs you posted in and continue harassing you if you came in and annoyed them. And well there was some user pinging stuff before the quarantine so the harassment stuff did exist to a degree and the sub was full of people who were very active on the rest of reddit. And well people probably would follow reactionaries back to the subs they posted in after they came into our sub and annoy them there and they got upset about being “brigaded” and of course in the reactionary mind the forces of persecution against them are always larger than they are so they built us up into this monster that would downvote their threads to single digits and argue with them in their own spaces when in fact a lot of the people doing that were liberals with no affiliation with the sub.
It also had a lot of memes. I will say it definitely creates a lot of meme communists but one good thing about meme communists is they will help keep your spaces clear of reactionaries and liberals by memeing on them. They should never be given an ounce of power of course but they’ll help keep spaces clean and police them. Many of them can also be given basic educations with effort posts and replies that emphasize theory. You won’t get them to memorize or deeply understand theory but you can often get them to avoid repeating common ignorant tropes and some of them, maybe many of them with enough time can get the interest of actually picking up theory and moving past meme communism. In a learning space you might not want to permit so many memes, it kind of distracts from the purpose of the sub.
CTH was not a communist learning sub, it was a sub of many things and contrasts which created a unique environmental mix of memes, support for people, and theory and effort posting which drew in and engaged a large audience beyond that which might typically be interested in these things.
Ah that hit the spot! I was beginning to miss the good ol’ CTH tankie long reply (even though it’s only been what, 3 days?) and you came through with one just like that.
I guess the question I really wanted to get at was that if people are insinuating that supposedly meme subs like CTH are effective at teaching (the job of the learner sub) while being somewhat less heavy handed (the primary criticism of the learner sub) and able to police more effectively, why even bother with the learner subs? Why not dispense with the learner subs and instead meme and mock your way into teaching communism?
Because in my experience it’s often only effective up to a point. They can disabuse people of anti-communist propaganda and even get them to have an interest in communism or self-declare themselves communists. And this is let me be clear, uh a good thing, unambiguously a good thing. Some people like myself would be the types who would at a certain point begin reading theory but a large number of people there are quite frankly uninterested in that and quite content to continue posting memes and remain somewhat uninvolved and uninterested. Call them whatever you’d like, meme communists, aesthetic driven, whatever.
Also frankly some people are going to be repulsed or off-put by the culture of a place like CTH and memes in general to say nothing of edgy ones. Some people are just not going to be receptive to that. Now a lot of younger people are but you definitely risk alienating people who want that more serious discussion and who want a place where they can mostly get straight answers in a relatively short period of time instead of people memeing and occasionally giving an answer. A lot of how CTH worked I think was osmosis, just stewing in it long enough to pick up enough good bits. Just as capitalist hegemony reinforces itself in a million invisible ways in our lives on TV, outside, in music, video games, etc so too does stewing a sub that is broadly anti-capitalist begin to work on a person in ways that we might call subtle.
I would say CTH could never replace a communism101 sub but that has more to do with it being broadly friendly to everyone from demsocs to anarchists and the mods having nothing resembling a party line or stated ideology. A lot of people over time learned in that sub thanks to effort posting and people kind enough to actually engage with others when they have questions. However a lot of other people probably gave up having their questions answered and have been kind of coerced into silence or conformity without understanding why and that’s not ideal. But that’s just perhaps a trade-off you have to make.
MTC back before the past two months or so certainly was closer to this mythical sub that isn’t strictly a leaning sub but uses things like memes while having plenty of theory-read comrades in the replies to answer questions. Of course it was stricter than CTH and as a self declared “tankie” sub it had certain lines drawn, against blatant imperialist apology, apology for the CIA, etc.
The truth is I don’t think I have a good answer to your question. I think certainly there are benefits to the mixture of content with memes model but also drawbacks. I think a lot of these drawbacks are eliminated if you have a strong moderation vanguard and learned posters willing to regularly reply and help new users and get a kind of turn-over process going over time where those new users once a bit more knowledgeable help even newer users with basic questions and subject matter they’re now familiar with.
Fascists and chuds were scared off in its early stages because people would regularly harass them by doing stuff like “summoning” them (by pinging their username) and demand they explain their support for pedophelia if they were a libertarian or demanding they post a pic of their hog if they made there way into the sub (in a humorous mirror of the old misogynist “tits or gtfo”). cth users would also take over other subreddits. By its end it was a scary place if you were fashy or neolib.
Fascists are cowards, always have been. cth was simply too scary a place for them and there was no joy in trolling.
Would you recommend this as a tactic for all the strict learner subs then, since the endless wave of reactionaries seem to be their biggest problem and is, according to the subs’ moderators, the reason they are as ban-happy as they are?
Not the person you asked but I guess the question is what learner subs want. I agree with stricter moderation practices on subs like that.
I guess you could try and make fun of some of these people but unless you really have a lot of people keyed in on this stuff you’re going to make fun of and abuse some people who were legitimately open to communist thought and well you may or may not turn them off. I will mention many people did regard CTH as toxic because of this unwillingness to suffer people spouting the most generic anti-communist crap and it probably drove people away, but people who stuck around a little and were more open to considering they had been lied to or at least just listening to our side of things seemed to come out of it alright for the most part. Maybe that’s a better acceptable compromise than letting reactionaries run rampant in replies or just banning everyone who deviates from the ML line. You don’t have to do much in that vein, the old “shut up/shut the fuck up liberal” standby and some downvotes conveys the message that they’re engaging in liberalism, that their silence in these matters as a consequence is desired and it brings to mind those hilarious memes of Stalin, Lenin, Mao with laser eyes. But it isn’t particularly nice and I would never say it is the ideal. I would suggest having macros that spam a few resources to debunk common propaganda and if they continue without reading them or in bad faith otherwise then time to pull out the old “shut the fuck up liberal” and/or ban-hammer. Because those most amenable to learning will in most cases read links you give them. They might have more questions, they might be unwilling to give up the propaganda so easily but they will noticeably engage with it.
The ideal on a learning sub is really just having a lot of moderators in the same way the science subs do and just being ruthless in removing bad stuff and if needed issuing temp bans to try and dissuade people from doing again exactly what they did without totally excluding them and giving them another chance. Of course in practice having enough people to do that who don’t suffer from burn-out is a challenge.
This almost sounds like seeing live accelerationism. It’s so weird. I’m gutted too but that’s what losing something feels like.