It’s true but it’s also exhausting. Like swimming upstream
This is a good reminder for all comrades who push baby leftists out of spaces because they ask basic questions or still hold some lib values. None of us were born with a copy of Capital in our hands (except Lemmygrad Mods). We need to be a fostering and open community for all who will listen. After all, is that not the entire point of collective politics?
This is a good reminder for all comrades who push baby leftists out of spaces because they ask basic questions or still hold some lib values.
I will go even further and claim that memorizing theory by rote shouldn’t be the litmus test that decides who is a “baby leftist”.
A person who organizes communities and mutual aid, but disregards or reinterprets theory in a way you disapprove of is still more of a valuable participant than someone who just dunks on the libs online.
Revolutions need to be designed around individual societies, and if it happens in the West, we shouldn’t reject it just because it doesn’t mirror the revolutions of the past.
Would a suitable response be to direct them to [email protected] when it’s hard to judge whether we’re being trolled?
I hear you, I’ve spent way too much of my life in online leftists spaces and it’s tiring and frustrating trying to decipher trolls. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with directing people to resources but I do think we should give some benefit of the doubt. And also be realistic how much value we get from only sitting behind screens reading theory.
To give you a real world example, I was heavily involved with the PSL (Party for Socialism and Liberation in the U.S.) and we would often get refugee Bernie Bros after the 2016 election (I was even one of them). Many of them came with ideas of Socialism being plowing roads or universal healthcare or whatever the topic of the day was. Many of them would scoff at us when we told them about “”“real”“” Socialism, for lack of a better term, but many were open to the idea. I’ve had many great conversations in the real world with people from all over the political spectrum.
I think the most important lesson I learned is that online it may feel like you have a big impact when you really don’t but in the real world it may feel like you don’t have any impact all but you really do.
Hope that makes sense!
I tend to find the trolls are fairly easy to spot though, someone saying something naive or problematic will react with confusion when called out, a troll will flat out ignore the response in favour of pretending the other person is saying something else entirely. Baby leftists learn, trolls ignore.
I think responses should be designed with this in mind so that it doesn’t matter whether the person’s trolling or not. On social media at least the primary target is usually passive observers rather than the person themselves anyway.
I like to develop (or steal) semi-canned responses to common talking points so that these kind of people can be addressed with proportionate effort.
Leftists rn
Absolutely true. Maybe some people become devoted Marxist-Leninists after reading 50 books of theory in a cave by themselves. Others like myself start out with the Communist Manifesto then drift left in a group of friendly people, whether online or in person before engaging in theory. I’d wager that there is more of the latter than the former.
