Didn’t check if it’s up on LibGen or Anna’s Archive/Z-Lib but here you are:

https://files.catbox.moe/q0ypsa.pdf

Thanks so much for the feedback and for supporting this little project of mine. I had a really good time chatting with you too, I’m already looking forward to the next time I do this!

Wednesday seems good, depending on how many spoons I can muster on the day.
If you’re keen then we can arrange a time that suits you better than this time slot I picked - I reckon you and I are in similar time zones.

Cool! I’m planning to make this a semi-regular thing as my circumstances allow and I plan to run the server at different times to cover different days of the week and different time zones. This first time is gonna be trial run to iron out any bugs and to generate a bit of interest. I’m gonna be hanging out and playing the game until someone who wants to chat joins so there’s no pressure.

A very good question. I’ve just checked and it’s possible to view other players’ Steam profile page, as it would be with any other online co-op game. This isn’t the same as your Steam ID though, it’s just the public-facing info you have on your profile page. I actually haven’t even set up my steam account in all the years I’ve had it but I know that other people have set their profile to private or public and this is all I someone else is able to view of a private Steam account page:

So it’s profile pic and username, nothing more than that and both of which can be edited. I opened the options menu and I think I can request to follow or friend the private profile but that’s it. I really appreciate you asking this - I’m going to edit the post with updated information based on your question.

There was probably some small player in WWI who got dragged into it due to treaties or to fight alongside a larger neighbouring force. Like idk Montenegro or Malta or something. But it’s almost guaranteed that they were fighting or aiding some scumbag country in WWI given the fact that virtually everyone in WWI was a scumbag country, especially in Europe at the time.

Also don’t quote me on Malta or Montengro, those were just hypotheticals and WWI isn’t my speciality.

The best you’re likely to find aside from some small country with reasonably clean hands in WWI would be an underdog; it’s a bit like looking for the good guy during the century of humiliation in China (at least until the CPC formed and, I’d argue, the KMT under Sun Yat-Sen gets a pass too); the Qing Dynasty were definitely the underdogs and countries like Britain and Japan were definitely the aggressors but everyone was terrible and it only varied in the degree to which they were terrible. And usually then the only limiting factor in how terrible these players were was their relative political, economic, and military weakness that restrained them from being able to expand the scope of how terrible they were.

Btw the game costs around $5 USD, less if you’re in a developing country. If you’re hard up for cash but you want to join the server then let me know and I’ll work something out.

I sincerely appreciate you letting me know how things have been going for you. I’m so happy that you took this step, I know that it’s going to be worth it; you deserve a fulfilling life where you are comfortable to be who you are. I’m excited for you for where this journey will take you.

Sorry it has taken me so long to get back to this comment. I hadn’t forgotten about it. I just had a rough patch (when my account went dark) which I’ve been dragging myself out of in fits and starts. My recent comments have been me working hard to lift myself up enough to express some thoughts and contribute a bit before sliding back down again. It’s a bummer but it is what it is and at least I’m trending upwards at the moment. It’s been really nice to have yourself and another couple of people on here appreciating my existence recently, it’s truly meant a lot to me.

https://files.catbox.moe/am5lhv.mp4

The dredge tank never dies, it just reached depths that aren’t accessible to us anymore.

Job interviews are like the final boss for autistic masking

I mean, you can say that but the evidence in the documentary that I linked clearly proves otherwise.

If that’s true then how do you explain this?

There was definitely a lot of friction between Kropotkin and Lenin due to ideological differences. They saw things in a way that was basically diametrically opposed to the other’s perspective and in that transcription of their meeting this becomes obvious, a lot like when HG Wells met with Stalin actually.

They definitely disagreed on lots of matters but Lenin really did have a lot of respect for Kropotkin at the same time. Whether that was reciprocated or not idk. But also this is something that you see when people or groups are deeply invested in something - politics, religion, a field of science etc. - they’ll lambast and denounce one another, often in really vicious ways, and yet underneath that they will still have a genuine respect for each other. They’ll write an article slamming the other person and then at a conference they’ll greet each other as old friends and they’ll dine and drink together. Obviously there are situations where people are just outright antagonistic to one another without having any respect (e.g. Lenin’s sentiment towards Kautsky, as far as I’m aware) but I think it’s important to remember that vehement disagreements with someone don’t necessarily mean that there’s enmity there as well. (A lot of people feel this way about parts of their family tbh - they disagree on most things but they still have love and respect for each other despite the fact that everyone in conversation around the Thanksgiving dinner table cautiously avoids bringing up those third rail topics.)

Honestly Lenin seemed to truly respect Kropotkin’s work, his efforts, and his commitment to the struggle. He thought Kropotkin was utterly ideologially blinded, but then Kropotkin also thought the same thing of Lenin lol.

Yeah, I see it as a great foreclosure on the imagination and on the horizon of possibility. Once you look for it in liberalism, you’ll start noticing it everywhere.

I live in a country where it’s common for very progressive progressives and radicals to lament that the masses are extremely politically apathetic. Like, the polar opposite of the French who start flipping cars and starting fires in the street because parliament is trying to reduce pensions kinda thing.

I don’t disagree with that take that people are apathetic but I think there’s something deeper going on than just some widespread individualistic moral failing. I think that liberalism has been very effective here in creating a cultural belief that it’s impossible to make things better and that there’s no point fighting for things.

There’s a reason why people identify so strongly with that Churchill quote “Democracy is the worst form of Government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time” and it’s because they genuinely believe that liberalism is shit but it’s the best that things are gonna get. It’s like some sort of mass Stockholm syndrome or a political learned helplessness experiment inflicted on the masses.

You encounter it when organising. People are deeply pessimistic and genuinely hopeless, if you dig under the surface a little bit. Contemporary liberalism requires the erosion of hope so that masses remain passive and they don’t organise and fight, so they don’t vote en masse outside of the two party system, so they don’t start a revolution etc.

If you want to go deep on this there’s a weird sort of dualism in liberals because this hopelessness makes people react by resorting to investing hope in the status quo as a secondary response. This is why people put so much hope in electing Harris but they try to convince people that a third party vote is a waste:

“We all have to band together and vote for Kamala to stop things from getting worse!!”

“Cool but what if we all band together and vote for the PSL or the green party and make things better?”

“Um, no. That will never work.”

I’m sorry, what??

I think that’s why the DNC were so desperate to clip Bernie’s wings (outside of the economic reasons to do so); he represented a massive political threat to the DNC because a movement that has mass support where people start making demands means that they can no longer force their agenda on the compliant masses who believe that the only thing they can do is accept the hidden bipartisan consensus on government policy.

In order to radicalise, I think people in the west generally have to go through a process of losing hope, even that secondary response to hopelessness by investing hope in the status quo, so when they get spat out of liberalism they mostly end up bereft of hope entirely. I’d say for most people that’s necessary to negate the indoctrination from liberal hegemony. The problem is when people fail to genuinely create hope for the struggle and for a better world. It’s not all anarchists who have this sort of lack of hope, this “don’t seize power because you’ll only make things worse if you try” kinda attitude because it’s pretty endemic in lots of the left more broadly; there are leftcoms and doomer tendencies like with Mark Fisher or Chris Hedges and the people who buy into the anti-USSR paradigm and so on.

You can ask this type of person what all the failures and inadequacies of something like the Soviet Union were and if you genuinely listen they’ll have a laundry list of complaints, which is fine - that’s their prerogative. But when you ask them what movement they do find inspiring, which one was better than the USSR they tend to come up with nothing or they’ll give you a half-hearted answer like “Burkina Faso led by Thomas Sankara I guess” and if you get them to talk about why they find Burkina Faso’s revolution inspiring they tend to give very shallow answers or they’ll regress into talking about what could have been. I think this is representative of a deep kind of hopelessness that is really commonplace.

I’m gonna do some detestable armchair psychologist cultural critic routine here (like I haven’t already been doing that lol), so excuse me while I get self-indulgent, but I genuinely think for a lot of people that psychological trauma of losing all hope in politics when they radicalise goes unresolved and so when they are confronted with the invitation to engage in political optimism, they tend react very negatively and viscerally to it because they aren’t ready to hope again as the experience of suffering disappointment and losing all hope has been too much for them to deal with and they haven’t really completed the cycle of grief that they needed to go through, so it draws out all sorts of hostility and rejection and apathy. I’m not saying that everyone in the radical left must get hyped for the Soviet Union or otherwise they are psychologically broken but to see very brokenhearted people whose politics lacks any genuine hope, I think there’s a psychological response going on beneath the surface that drives this.

So I think that other responses in this thread are right about liberal anti-communist indoctrination but in my opinion there’s also deeper psychological reasons for why people adopt this indoctrination and really cling to it, otherwise it would be a simple process of providing counterfactuals that debunk this indoctrination and people would change their minds almost instantly because their position was purely based on false information. But I think we are all aware that it’s a much more involved process than simply correcting some falsehoods and this is because there’s psychological factors that motivate this belief at play, which is what I’ve been outlining here.

Hannah “Um ackshually totalitarianism is really bad, I’m gonna have a relationship with the Nazi philosopher now” Arendt

he talks about how the anarchist ideology came from some russian noble who went to the serfs villages and rebelled against the royalty (iirc)

It’s funny to me that you could be describing Bakunin or Kropotkin here but I’m guessing that he was talking about Kropotkin.

What’s interesting about Kropotkin is that he was a beloved figure in Russia and Lenin himself had a sincere respect for him. They actually met one time when Lenin sought an audience with Kropotkin. There’s even a transcript of their meeting available online.

When Kropotkin died soon after the October Revolution, there was an immense crowd that gathered to attend the public funeral procession in the USSR.

There’s a few of these figures who really poison-pilled the left, at least historically speaking - Gene Sharp, Saul Alinsky, Hannah Arendt… they are all on my shitlist.

I’m exhausted but I’ll try and take a swing at this, speaking as a long-term ex-anarchist. Note that I can only speak for myself but these are the trends I observed and a lot of this is exactly what I experienced.

So in transitioning from progressive liberal to the radical left, it’s basically a rite of passage to identify all the ills and the egregious excesses of the government and corporations. I think this is not only valid but it’s also extremely important.

The problem that emerges is that anarchists and LibSocs can fall into a trap of universalising this very valid skepticism to expand to all forms of hierarchy that have existed and will ever exist.

This is going to sound uncharitable but it’s really not intended to be this way but I see a deep form of liberal hegemony as being not a positive form of hegemonic ideology but a negative form of it. Let me explain: the USSR established its own cultural hegemony. It was very much a positive cultural hegemony: this is who we are, this is how we act, this is the future we are striving to achieve etc. etc. You absolutely see this in Soviet art and film and propaganda.

The negative form of cultural hegemony that I understand liberalism to mostly rely upon, especially in a post-Gilded Age era or a neoliberal era or wherever you want to draw that line, is epitomised by Francis Fukuyama’s pronouncement about arriving at the end of history; this wasn’t a positive proclamation but rather it was a negation of the future, of the need to strive for a better world, of the demand to be better. Instead it was essentially an attack on and an erasure of aspirations.

This is also seen on a small scale with people demonstrating antipathy towards unionism; “they’re all corrupt”, “they used to be important in the past but there’s no use for unions anymore”, “there’s no point joining a union because I’ll just get fired or management will close this branch down if we all unionise”. That sort of thing. It’s also seen in the shadow cast by this plethora of pseudo-choice we are offered and, forgive me for invoking Horkheimer & Adorno but, the pseudo-individuality inherent to this developed form of capitalism we exist under. There’s no point boycotting because how do you avoid consooming products from one of the two or three oligopolistic companies that have cornered a market? Why bother attempting to divest from BlackRock when they already own everything? Why bother protesting against war when we know the government is going to ignore us and prosecute it anyway? etc.

So this negative form of ideology or liberal cultural hegemony tends to inculcate the belief in LibSocs and anarchists that the best we can really achieve is abolition of the current state of affairs and not the construction of a positive project to bring about the revolution.

This is where I take issue with Audre Lorde, or at least the way that people quote her and what this is used in service of. She is absolutely right that you cannot dismantle patriarchy with patriarchy or that white supremacy will not be dismantled by a different form of racial supremacy. I think the distortion of Lorde comes with people thinking that this quote is in service of abstaining from using some of the most valuable tools available to us; you cannot hug the violence out of the bourgeois state no matter how hard you try (just ask the hippies). But at the same time I think we need to be cautious about how far we take this message; people can arrive at pacifism simply because the bourgeois state uses war and violence, if you took this to the the point of absurdity you could imagine people rejecting construction itself or maybe even hammers because infrastructure has been used to enact genocide and land theft and vast exploitation through colonialism and imperialism in so, so many countries. Heck, hammers have been used for DV and assault so you wouldn’t want to taint yourself by benefitting directly from that instrument of violence, would you?

But it’s very easy to slip into a reductive or reflexive rejection of things like the state simply because most states have historically been dogshit. If you look exclusively at the west from the advent of feudalism to today, it’s basically all of them.

This is where anarchists tend to develop the basis of a quite bitter ideological distinction from communists, although obviously this varies in degree depending on what sort of anarchist we’re talking about here. (I’ll try to remember to circle back on this negative urge and how it provides a degree of… I guess ideological comfort or safety for anarchists once I’ve finished the other parts of this comment.)

The other factors are a disagreement on the pace of the post-revolution construction period (which likewise comes from the difference between materialists orienting themselves to addressing material conditions and working to resolve contradictions and anarchists who mostly prefer abolition as the means to address these issues) and the other one is that anarchists tend to be exposed to convenient historical narratives that are overly reductive if not downright anaemic.

So for the pace of the post-revolution construction, most anarchists expect a very swift transitional phase - the abolition of capitalism, often the abolition of markets themselves, prison abolition, and all sorts of other things to establish a more-or-less horizontal or low/zero hierarchy society. Again this depends on the different types of anarchist in question but to put it simply they tend to believe that post-revolution you knock all or most of it down, then establish a government or council of sorts (which again varies) and you call it good.

So from that perspective, communists get into power and instead of following what anarchists believe to be the correct path, instead communists go completely the wrong way and even start building up more state than existed under the Tsardom, for example. With this in mind I think it’s easy enough to understand why they perceive this to be a betrayal of principles and of the revolution.

The last thing I want to touch on is the historical narratives. Anarchists have a tendency to share a distorted perspective on historical moments; the communists betrayed the anarchists in the Spanish Civil, the Bolsheviks stabbed the Black Army of Makhnovia in the back, occasionally you’ll hear discussion of the KPAM likewise being crushed by the Soviets (although not very often tbh).

All three are actually very complicated topics and there’s a lot to cover with them but in broad brushstrokes the narrative is that the communists were the aggressor and that they opted not to leave the anarchists alone to do their thing because they wanted to crush the true revolution. I disagree with this narrative these days, although I didn’t always disagree with it.

There’s a really good article by Jones Manoel on this sort of preference for martyrdom-over-statecraft mentality here. While he only discusses western Marxists, it definitely applies to a lot of anarchists and LibSocs. I think that Manoel simply doesn’t regard the latter two as worth addressing though.

So we’ve got the martyrdom and purity fetish for the immaculate revolution covered there. Last of all to circle back around to the ideological comfort of the negative, I’ve seen plenty of anarchists do this and I have definitely been guilty of doing this myself - by not supporting or critically supporting any but the briefest attempts at revolution (and then only maybe 3 or so of those), you can create a rhetorical and ideological detachment from the real world attempts. You don’t have to engage or defend anything, you can just reflexively dismiss things as being statist or hierarchical or authoritarian and thus you don’t have to grapple with the reality of their circumstances or to consider what would be a better way of resolving the contradictions or moving forwards with the project. “You committed the sin of statism? Then I can wash my hands of you and that’s that.”

This is alluring because it’s a simple rubric and you don’t need to wrestle with the reality of things. To put this into an analogy that’s probably more relatable, imagine a Marxist who refuses to engage in the ol’ agitate/educate/organise because “liberals are social fascists and counterrevolutionary - I’m not gonna waste my time befriending my enemies!”

On the face of it, there’s nothing false in that statement. But the application of this line of thinking absolves this Marxist from needing to do any of the hard work because they have created a rhetorical and ideological detachment from the most important task that a revolutionary faces and so by abdicating from this duty they never have to put in any effort and they never have to deal with fuckups and failures and addressing their own inadequacies.

That’s a pretty close match to this urge that exists in a lot of anarchists and it’s also why they can invest a lot into their grudge against communists, because ultimately the other option is to engage in the hard work of listening and learning and working with/working on the “authoritarians”.

Obviously all of this is my vain attempt at brevity so I didn’t cover the broad terrain of different ideology tendencies within anarchism and I’m talking specifically about the anarchists who really bear a grudge against communists. Plenty of anarchists do not begrduge communists and are very willing to work with them and to engage with them (or to roll up their sleeves and engage in the difficult work of educating, agitating, organising as well as grappling with the historical realities fafed by revolutions) so I haven’t given consideration to this cohort of anarchists because it’s beyond the scope of the question, although if I gave the impression that what I’ve said is true for all anarchists then that’s on me.

including a fantastic list from @[email protected]

Well shit, I didn’t expect anyone to find it useful that I’m red, mad, and nude online. Honestly I was just venting in that comment.