It wasn’t a hostile discussion or anything, i didn’t even go full “the kulaks deserved it” (although the mod that single-handedly banned me did go full “the kulaks did not deserve it”). I just laid out plainly and calmly that revolutions are inherently authoritarian, that Luxemburg said “the revolution will be as violent as the ruling class makes it necessary” and that there’s one Trotzki quote i 100% agree with: “If the October Revolution hadn’t succeeded, the world would have known a Russian word for fascism 10 years before Mussolini’s March on Rome”. Basically the whole “Jakarta Method” train of thought laid out clearly and without calling anybody names.
Note that this was on an explicitly left-leaning server that does not allow cops and troops to join. Also after several days of another poster starting destructive, aggressive bad faith arguments in the politics channel until a number of users went “disengage” on her and the channel had to be frozen until recently, when she immediately started being hostile and arguing in bad faith again, which got her not one, but two warnings from the same mod without further consequences. Meanwhile, when i defend AES without attacking anybody, that’s apparently too much for her to handle. No advance warning, no “sis, you’re talking to me as a mod here”, not even a notification that i got banned.
The best part is that according to screenshots a friend just sent me, she’s now completely going off about “authoritarians”. The nerve some people have.
Sorry for posting pointless internet drama here, i just needed to vent.
beyond the material aspect of, i there’s also something very appealing to westerns about the ‘end of history’ line of thinking - the way that it obfuscate capitalism and its ideology. it’s a self-made mythos. western liberals saw the fall of the soviet union as liberalism’s final triumph over communism, cementing the neoliberal idea the that there can be no alternative. admiting that they’re wrong - that there is an alternative - now also means conceding that they’ve bought into, and is guilty of upholding, a system that is more monsterious than any communist boogeyman that could dream up
it’s far more comfortable to just tear down any alternative; to find some reason to exorcise the spectre of marx. that’s probably why western academia, so self-assured in its own skepticism, became enamoured with deconstructionalism following the decline/fall of the soviet union