You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if leftist BBSs were a thing back in the day. Or if techies who used the small local ones tended left enough that getting into arguments about theory was a thing that happened not infrequently.
From my own experience the lefty BBSs and IRC channels were full of cranks and academic cranks. A weirdly high number of them were Avakians or die hard Trotskyites.
They were largely full of arguing and mud flinging, but some were very helpful to me as a teenage burgeoning leftist. Maybe my experience is very anecdotal but that’s how I remember it. Very knowledgeable people who would often split, make their own even smaller forum, then come back a year later claiming to be a different sort of leftist. Lots of struggle sessions over very minor differences in ideology so I guess some things stay the same.
But as far as I know the very reputable Marxists.org started from some kind of crankish BBS or chat room so honestly I gotta respect them for that
Early Internet leftists were mostly Trots, and party splits were a common and expected occurence? Gee, what a surprise.
(Way too many Leftist Websites even today look like they were made at the very beginning of the Net, before the Soviet dissolution, and haven’t been layout/style/coding updated since not long after that, some look like real time capsules. And a lot of that type of leftist sites are run by Trotskyists. Plus, y’know, Trots and party splits are like Protestants and church splits. We call it sectarianism for a reason.)
I don’t know what an Avakian is but I assume they’re even more of a crank magnet than Trotskyist parties.
I wish those chat rooms were still a thing. Completely useless for anything meaningful, but I do sometimes just want to argue with a random Trot I’ll probably never have to see again til we’re both blue in the face.
I wonder how much more common arguments about the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, in the vein of modern lefty-net struggle sessions about China and Cuba, were back in the days when the Internet was brand new and before the dissolution/right afterwards, the whole “this was the left when the USSR wasn’t quite dead yet” is probably the only reason I so desperately want to know every little detail about that era of Online Leftism.
there are still lefty chatrooms but a lot of them are just discord channels where several times a year some of the mods get revealed as pedophiles. It’s not as fun as you’d think. Hexbear has so far been the best lefty internet experience I’ve ever had, ever. Believe me, it’s much nicer to have a ton of people who are both knowledgeable, agreeable, and not tainted by weird online crankery.
Also Avakians are the Revolutionary Communist Party, and that’s a whole bag of weeds I won’t waste your time with lol. They aren’t so much cranks as they are very uh…aggressive? With their presence and propaganda. Plus there’s allegations they’re a cult. But they generally have the correct messaging. I’ve personally always found them a little fishy, but whatever
Oh yeah, leftist Discords are definitely a thing. The best ones are for MLs only and make you fill out a short ideological questionnaire. Some are an okay place to participate in group theory reading if a more organised party or an IRL reading group isn’t something you’re able to join or organise. Some have good resources. Just avoid the cranks and Red Guards types in the chats. The bigger the server is, the less likely it is to be any fun.
Oh, RCP. I think I’ve dealt with one of those cranks a time or two. Yep. Nutjob magnet. Imagine a Mormon missionary, but his button down is red, his name tag says “Comrade [name]”, and he’s trying to sell you a newspaper and recruit you to a rather culty communist party, not give you a religious book and recruit you to an actual religious cult. That’s what dealing with the RCP(I think that was who he claimed to be with?) guy I ran into online a few months ago felt like. (Or maybe that was a different cultish Trot party. There’s a lot of them around.)
You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if leftist BBSs were a thing back in the day. Or if techies who used the small local ones tended left enough that getting into arguments about theory was a thing that happened not infrequently.
From my own experience the lefty BBSs and IRC channels were full of cranks and academic cranks. A weirdly high number of them were Avakians or die hard Trotskyites.
They were largely full of arguing and mud flinging, but some were very helpful to me as a teenage burgeoning leftist. Maybe my experience is very anecdotal but that’s how I remember it. Very knowledgeable people who would often split, make their own even smaller forum, then come back a year later claiming to be a different sort of leftist. Lots of struggle sessions over very minor differences in ideology so I guess some things stay the same.
But as far as I know the very reputable Marxists.org started from some kind of crankish BBS or chat room so honestly I gotta respect them for that
Early Internet leftists were mostly Trots, and party splits were a common and expected occurence? Gee, what a surprise.
(Way too many Leftist Websites even today look like they were made at the very beginning of the Net, before the Soviet dissolution, and haven’t been layout/style/coding updated since not long after that, some look like real time capsules. And a lot of that type of leftist sites are run by Trotskyists. Plus, y’know, Trots and party splits are like Protestants and church splits. We call it sectarianism for a reason.)
I don’t know what an Avakian is but I assume they’re even more of a crank magnet than Trotskyist parties.
I wish those chat rooms were still a thing. Completely useless for anything meaningful, but I do sometimes just want to argue with a random Trot I’ll probably never have to see again til we’re both blue in the face.
I wonder how much more common arguments about the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, in the vein of modern lefty-net struggle sessions about China and Cuba, were back in the days when the Internet was brand new and before the dissolution/right afterwards, the whole “this was the left when the USSR wasn’t quite dead yet” is probably the only reason I so desperately want to know every little detail about that era of Online Leftism.
there are still lefty chatrooms but a lot of them are just discord channels where several times a year some of the mods get revealed as pedophiles. It’s not as fun as you’d think. Hexbear has so far been the best lefty internet experience I’ve ever had, ever. Believe me, it’s much nicer to have a ton of people who are both knowledgeable, agreeable, and not tainted by weird online crankery.
Also Avakians are the Revolutionary Communist Party, and that’s a whole bag of weeds I won’t waste your time with lol. They aren’t so much cranks as they are very uh…aggressive? With their presence and propaganda. Plus there’s allegations they’re a cult. But they generally have the correct messaging. I’ve personally always found them a little fishy, but whatever
Oh yeah, leftist Discords are definitely a thing. The best ones are for MLs only and make you fill out a short ideological questionnaire. Some are an okay place to participate in group theory reading if a more organised party or an IRL reading group isn’t something you’re able to join or organise. Some have good resources. Just avoid the cranks and Red Guards types in the chats. The bigger the server is, the less likely it is to be any fun.
Oh, RCP. I think I’ve dealt with one of those cranks a time or two. Yep. Nutjob magnet. Imagine a Mormon missionary, but his button down is red, his name tag says “Comrade [name]”, and he’s trying to sell you a newspaper and recruit you to a rather culty communist party, not give you a religious book and recruit you to an actual religious cult. That’s what dealing with the RCP(I think that was who he claimed to be with?) guy I ran into online a few months ago felt like. (Or maybe that was a different cultish Trot party. There’s a lot of them around.)