hissing_serpents [she/her, it/its]

Just to defend the vast majority of people who subscribe to anarchism a little, ime huge amount of self proclaimed anarchists don't have particularly strong opinions on methods for organizing or effecting change at scale, mostly because a lot haven't done much organizing. In my experiences with anarchist types they're pretty flexible on the methods part just because it's nice to do anything for a change and doing basic organizing in the maximally anarchist fashion can just get exhausting.

Granted i'm mostly talking abt like new to leftism anarchist by default types but the anarchists who're ideologically committed to the point of opposing all centralization in organizing bc authority are overrepresented online and irl MLs are incredibly unlikely to even have a chance to work with them.

i think being trans probably pushed me towards the left, before i figured that out abt myself i literally couldn't articulate an actual reason for why i felt drawn towards the left instead of being a typical shitlib like my class and cultural background would dictate.

Going full def isn't the default tho, so i attribute the rest to getting an i think above average level of education on american slavery and british colonialism (really a bizarre amount of british history for an american teenager, basically covered the transition from feudalism to capitalism over like 3 years of highschool) early on and then getting exposed to Indigenous ideas and history taking college electives. All that and having a special interest abt the Vietnam War instilled a really strong hatred and disgust towards the colonial/imperial mindset which is what's pulled me more and more towards being a massive tankie.

I did start out on the more libertarian anarchist type side of the left mostly bc that's what most people around me were, but the more i read and talked abt things like decolonization and whiteness the answers from that school of thought just weren't satisfying or convincing to me and i really started to distrust the way the (exclusively white) anarchists/libsocs/mainstream leftists around me engaged with what is imo the most important question for the left in this country. Not that every white person is personally culpable and incapable of solidarity but a lot of the engagement from my fellow lefties feels way too focused on absolution in a way that icks me out and is probably related to a bigger overcorrection away from the whole personal responsibility thing.

went off on a tangent kinda but TL;DR trans woman indoctrinated into being a self hating anti-white racist by woke history classes, becomes a turbo tankie who no longer believes in freedom bc whitey won't voluntarily do what must be done without reeducation