PorkrollPosadist

Does hesitation mean something else where you live?

Steve Huffman commends you on upholding his moderation policy.

It is definitely inducing cognitive dissonance. The developers are simply are communists trying to collectivize social media, and that will live in their heads rent free as long as they stick around.

Anti-sectarianism is the general rule. The community is predominantly Marxist, but has its share of Anarchists. There is no official list of points of unity, but anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, anti-racism, anti-gender/sexuality discrimination are basically non-negotiable.

I can only speak for myself, but my sentiment is that the left in the imperial core is so disorganized that the majority of sectarian disagreements are purely hypothetical and stupid to get worked up over. We can have discussions about theory and tactics, but there is no reason to assemble the perfect party platform and get into bitter fights about its nuances when there is no party to speak of. You can't build the mass line without the mass.

Of course, this doesn't apply to the type of historically illiterate, American-exceptionalist Reddit "Anarchists," or any of that PatSoc MAGA Communism bullshit. People stanning the Shining Path will probably get a lot of weird looks. We give the handful of Trots their fair share of noogies, but we don't exclude them.

It is a relatively small community. If you are comment in good faith and demonstrate you aren't full of imperialist brainworms you will probably be fine. If you pick out individual people with the dumbest takes and graft that onto broad movements, putting words in peoples' mouths, you might run into trouble. We love dunking on people with bad takes, but if you take a particular Bellingcat dropout's cringepost and act like they are the designated spokesperson of Anarchism, that's the kind of thing that doesn't fly. Basically, don't be disingenuous.

We're not the type of community that will ban somebody for mentioning in passing that they participate in mutual aid on the basis that mutual aid is charity and therefor not praxis. That kind of hair-splitting dogmatism can stay on Reddit as far as we're concerned.

Communism is when no uptime

I think the conclusion here hinges entirely on the question, "Is Russia imperialist?" The answer itself, in my opinion, is not so obvious. I see a lot more people drawing a conclusion one way or the other than I do analyzing the economic and material circumstances which form the basis of their conclusion. This is forgivable. The economic situation is complex to begin with, many of the primary sources are gated behind a language barrier. To give the situation a proper analytical treatment, we need various specialists to converge and sort through the details (which is not the most reassuring thing to tell people at the peak of a crisis).

When Russia is held up against the United States, the conclusion that "these are the same thing" is laughable. If we want to determine whether or not Russia is imperialist strictly based on capital exports or the extraction of super-profits, I don't think it is quite there yet. On the other hand, we can see the manifestation of several prerequisite trends, including the development of industrial monopolies and the concentration and increasing dominance of finance capital.

I find the question hard to answer because contemporary Russia truly finds itself in this sort of "in-between" phase in the development of imperialism, and this conflict has highlighted a few of the traps which can result from treating imperialism as a binary "yes or no" condition and basing all further analysis on that conclusion.

"No war but class war" and working towards the defeat of our local bourgeoisie is solid ground to begin from, but to understand this crisis better and anticipate where it is heading, we need a much deeper analysis than "Russia isn't imperialist" vs. "but they're acting imperialistly."