There’s a hazy progression that goes from demsocs, self-described Socialists and revolutionary communists. Most of us began as the former and, through experience and study, became the latter.
The difference between different groups purity testing is what they’re testing for. Liberals and liberal-adjacent people test your moral purity, or at least the moral purity of your rhetoric. Say all the right things, signal you’re on the good side, and don’t signal that you want the bad things. They do this because they are political idealists: that is, they have a fundamentally magical understanding of how power works, even if they don’t realize it. They think that if enough people hold The Right Opinions, then change will spontaneously follow. Their view of the world is a static one where everything fits into neat moral categories, and conveniently those moral categories just so happen to match what the person espousing it is comfortable with. To a liberal or socdem, violence against capital is morally unacceptable, no matter how many people it stands to save (and as of right now, it stands to save all of them). Their test is concieved as a test of abstract moral purity; in reality, it’s a test of how much atrocity you are willing to abide for the sake of being a good boy.
Marxists, communists, etc are materialists: we believe that the world is a constantly moving, ever evolving machine with a trillion moving parts that all change and are changed by one another. To make a long story short, dialectical materialism or “marxism” is simply applying the scientific method to all of reality instead of just formal science. That’s why the phrase “reality has a marxist bias” exists: because communists begin with the facts and build an understanding upwards, while liberals begin with the primacy of liberalism/capitalism and build an architecture of justification downwards, until they create friction with the uneven terrain of reality. “Blue maga” is an example of this phenomenon. Bill Maher is the spiritual avatar of this phenomenon.
When Communists purity test, we do so based on the effectiveness of your practices and the understanding that guides them. It’s basically peer review. We’re purity testing in a chemical way, to determine the potency of your shit and assess it for wider adoption.
To your last question, I respect anarchists. We fundamentally love humanity in the same way and want the same things for it, we just disagree on tactics. But they have a deep understanding of the urgent necessity of revolutionary change, and that makes them comrades.
I’ll be a honest a lot of that was pretty flowery for me, but theres some stuff in there that was really interesting and I appreciate you sharing your perspective with me! ☺️
It does feel like revolutionary communists (that seems like a better label for me to use :) also purity test for some of the same reasons everyone does- to dismiss the stances they see as outside of their group. Thats more the purity testing I find it hard to navigate. The implication in one of the previous comments is that a socdem is really just a liberal, and a liberal is capitalist, and a capitalist is really just a fascist so actually you’re a fascist. Which I don’t think is really ever a particularly useful beyond dismissing the need to ever engage with that person. I get why, but the way I see it you can just say that a socdem has bad ideology. It doesn’t require comparison to a fascist, which I don’t really think is accurate, though the other reply about social democrats and demsocs siding with capitalism when revolution is on the table makes sense, and I can see why that would make revolutionary communists uninterested in engaging
And thats interesting! Anarchism I think is what I most intuitively feel drawn to, but I don’t feel like there are some things I see it struggling to achieve, and I understand political theory well enough to truly identify with any ideology so I’m just trying to learn more and see where it takes me
If I may ask a question (don’t feel obligated to answer, I know I’m showing up in other people’s spaces and just interrogating folks to learn lol 😅)- a lot of what I find intimidating about ideologies or governments that would fall into the revolutionary communist category is that through the perspective I have now, they seem authoritarian and I generally (as one might guess from interest in anarchism) lean anti-authoritarian. What kind of actual governmental structure (or structures) in terms of power do revolutionary communists seek? How does power get organized? Are there ways that they structurally seek to counterbalance the way that concentrated power leads to overreach (like in western capitalist society democracy is ostensibly supposed to fill that role)? Like can revolutionary communism be Democratic? Are there reasons that doesnt seem like a concern to you for other reasons I may not have considered? (I don’t really mean to ask 30 seperate questions, I just wanna leave things open ended to whatever kind of answer makes the most sense, and I don’t know what kinda answer that might be)
And/or I would also welcome thoughts on what you mean by “applying the scientific method to all of reality”, that idea sounds interesting but its too abstract for me to know what that might actually mean in practice
Regardless of whether you choose to chat more thanks for taking the time to reply with your previous comment ☺️
Warning, long:
There’s a hazy progression that goes from demsocs, self-described Socialists and revolutionary communists. Most of us began as the former and, through experience and study, became the latter.
The difference between different groups purity testing is what they’re testing for. Liberals and liberal-adjacent people test your moral purity, or at least the moral purity of your rhetoric. Say all the right things, signal you’re on the good side, and don’t signal that you want the bad things. They do this because they are political idealists: that is, they have a fundamentally magical understanding of how power works, even if they don’t realize it. They think that if enough people hold The Right Opinions, then change will spontaneously follow. Their view of the world is a static one where everything fits into neat moral categories, and conveniently those moral categories just so happen to match what the person espousing it is comfortable with. To a liberal or socdem, violence against capital is morally unacceptable, no matter how many people it stands to save (and as of right now, it stands to save all of them). Their test is concieved as a test of abstract moral purity; in reality, it’s a test of how much atrocity you are willing to abide for the sake of being a good boy.
Marxists, communists, etc are materialists: we believe that the world is a constantly moving, ever evolving machine with a trillion moving parts that all change and are changed by one another. To make a long story short, dialectical materialism or “marxism” is simply applying the scientific method to all of reality instead of just formal science. That’s why the phrase “reality has a marxist bias” exists: because communists begin with the facts and build an understanding upwards, while liberals begin with the primacy of liberalism/capitalism and build an architecture of justification downwards, until they create friction with the uneven terrain of reality. “Blue maga” is an example of this phenomenon. Bill Maher is the spiritual avatar of this phenomenon.
When Communists purity test, we do so based on the effectiveness of your practices and the understanding that guides them. It’s basically peer review. We’re purity testing in a chemical way, to determine the potency of your shit and assess it for wider adoption.
To your last question, I respect anarchists. We fundamentally love humanity in the same way and want the same things for it, we just disagree on tactics. But they have a deep understanding of the urgent necessity of revolutionary change, and that makes them comrades.
I’ll be a honest a lot of that was pretty flowery for me, but theres some stuff in there that was really interesting and I appreciate you sharing your perspective with me! ☺️
It does feel like revolutionary communists (that seems like a better label for me to use :) also purity test for some of the same reasons everyone does- to dismiss the stances they see as outside of their group. Thats more the purity testing I find it hard to navigate. The implication in one of the previous comments is that a socdem is really just a liberal, and a liberal is capitalist, and a capitalist is really just a fascist so actually you’re a fascist. Which I don’t think is really ever a particularly useful beyond dismissing the need to ever engage with that person. I get why, but the way I see it you can just say that a socdem has bad ideology. It doesn’t require comparison to a fascist, which I don’t really think is accurate, though the other reply about social democrats and demsocs siding with capitalism when revolution is on the table makes sense, and I can see why that would make revolutionary communists uninterested in engaging
And thats interesting! Anarchism I think is what I most intuitively feel drawn to, but I don’t feel like there are some things I see it struggling to achieve, and I understand political theory well enough to truly identify with any ideology so I’m just trying to learn more and see where it takes me
If I may ask a question (don’t feel obligated to answer, I know I’m showing up in other people’s spaces and just interrogating folks to learn lol 😅)- a lot of what I find intimidating about ideologies or governments that would fall into the revolutionary communist category is that through the perspective I have now, they seem authoritarian and I generally (as one might guess from interest in anarchism) lean anti-authoritarian. What kind of actual governmental structure (or structures) in terms of power do revolutionary communists seek? How does power get organized? Are there ways that they structurally seek to counterbalance the way that concentrated power leads to overreach (like in western capitalist society democracy is ostensibly supposed to fill that role)? Like can revolutionary communism be Democratic? Are there reasons that doesnt seem like a concern to you for other reasons I may not have considered? (I don’t really mean to ask 30 seperate questions, I just wanna leave things open ended to whatever kind of answer makes the most sense, and I don’t know what kinda answer that might be)
And/or I would also welcome thoughts on what you mean by “applying the scientific method to all of reality”, that idea sounds interesting but its too abstract for me to know what that might actually mean in practice
Regardless of whether you choose to chat more thanks for taking the time to reply with your previous comment ☺️