I don’t know if this is the best community to post to but I intend this to be a serious post.
What are your impressions of people who, in short, think of themselves as marxist communists but reject any form of what they call idpol? Best exemplified by r/stupidpol on Reddit.
It’s probably there that I have to point out that we are not liberals, we combat liberalism, and so we are against liberal idpol, but not marxist analyses of identity or intersectionality – which the stupidpoller is incapable of differentiating and so fights all equally. Or maybe I should say i because I don’t speak for everyone, but this is generally my experience in my org and with online comrades.
My impression is that they stay mostly between themselves and you rarely see them outside of their spaces. But when they spill out, you spot them directly because they look like reactionaries. Think about that: they look more like fascists than communists.
Have you met people like this in real life? There is actually one in my org, kinda. I think more than having a principled position, he is mostly uninformed on these issues and he would probably be open to being corrected.
I don’t believe they do anything for the movement. They don’t seem class-conscious to me, as they regularly get in fights with other comrades. Their misanthropy towards people is ultimately misanthropy towards the working class.
What is the typical profile, if you had to make one? What leads people to adopting these positions? Personally, I am completely against such spaces because they harbour fascists (obviously, as they have more in common with national-socialists than communists) and if a young communist begins their journey there, chances are they’ll never move beyond and stay stuck in this reactionary space for all their revolutionary lives.
We def won’t allow them a space here. They’re complete reactionaries equivalent to single-issue-voters, but their only concern is their freedom to say increasingly offensive racist, transphobic, ableist or sexist slurs.
The normal reaction to someone telling you that’s offensive to X group, is really simple, its just “oops my bad, I didn’t realize that, I won’t do it in the future.”
Obvi tho making fun of liberal idpolers / harry potter liberals is good tho of course.
Watching people be upset about identity politics is hilarious. Guess what shitheads, literally every political ideal originates from identifiers. If you’re a fundamentalist Christian, and you don’t want abortion to be legalized because you see it as something that’s against your religion, you’re using your identity to inform your politics. If you’re a worker and you believe you should be paid more for your work, you’re using your identity as someone who makes little money to influence your political views. These people are generally deep in the core reactionaries, whom have adopted disillusion of capitalism, but haven’t adopted leftist identity politics. Thus leaving them in the broken dumpster fire no-folks-land of the economic left, social right.
Those people can get straight fucked right out of here.
Very good take. I’ve always thought it weird how so many “leftists” do their best to try to extricate class from identity, when it literally is an identity. When a large group of an ethnicity is suffering from decades of generational poverty, how is that unrelated to class, and how do these dirtbag leftists justify trying to separate one from the other?
I don’t believe they do anything for the movement. They don’t seem class-conscious to me, as they regularly get in fights with other comrades. Their misanthropy towards people is ultimately misanthropy towards the working class.
exactly, they’re also usually anti-AES and imperialists
What do we make of so-called stupidpollers?
fertilizer
It takes a huge level of mental gymnastics to be a Marxist and deny the contredictions between races and other identities, so much so I’d say you would no longer be a Marxist. Class and Imperialism are the greatest contradictions, but not the only ones.
/r/stupidpol was a natural progression from the “Dirtbag left” types (like Vaush). The sub was actually started by a few /r/ChapoTrapHouse users who always got downvoted for class reductionism. It somehow devolved into allowing racial and sexist slurs. Then it invited conservatives with open arms, which isn’t surprising since they both uphold this abstract notion of “idpol” (which is really a spook in the way they inconsistently utilize the term).
Like another user said, not every /r/stupidpol user is a reactionary or class reductionist. Some of their content is legitimately criticizing liberal idpol and woke capitalism. Especially since the banwave. But for some reason, this space has also created a legion of reactionary leftists who fight the same culture war they criticize.
They are the white settler labor aristocracy. These types have a long history of calling themselves communists while attacking workers of color. In South Africa during the Rand Rebellion they marched under the slogan “Workers of the World Fight and Unite for a White South Africa!”
See http://readsettlers.org/ch5.html#3 for context.
Careful. I’ve watched r/stupidpol for several years. There is a mix of people. Plenty of comrades post there. Generally I’ve seen pushback against the reactionary takes, although I haven’t really assessed the sub since the recent sub bans.
Well I don’t know that sub at all, so without that context, what do you make of the people that OP describes?
I guess I’m not the expert, and maybe I don’t know the sub as well as I thought I did. There def are ppl on that sub who are really shitty and not worth engaging with, but they’re usually tagged as such. I just didn’t think it’s a majority or even close. I’ve had good discussions on there. Idk. I shouldn’t vouch for the sub. I think I’ve missed whole phases it has gone through.
I’ve never been to the subreddit but I think debate over whether disregarding idpol is valid or not should be allowed, as I myself am curious and unsure of where to go for information.
