By Cake Boy
Liberal, socialist, communist, or anarchist movements need mass support to achieve their political goals.
You can only create mass support if you fight for common goals and forget about niche issues.
For example. A socialist party could unite thousands of people around one common goal. A goal like ‘housing’ or ‘workers rights’ or something like that
What do we all care about? What is the core of politics? Housing, food, safety, defense, trade, and diplomacy. Every political faction needs well-defined answers to these questions.
After that, people can all come together to fight for these things. This is something that the Social Democratic and Neoliberal parties in the past did very well. They were able to unite all kinds of people under the same banner. Back then, politics was pretty pragmatic.
But in the current era, we have seen a lot of divisive currents. Currents that scatter and keep movements impotent
On the left, we had feminists who hate men. We had transgender people who hate feminists. We had black nationalists who hated whites.
On the right, we had national anarchists, who created division between black and white people, by using horrible white power symbols.
We had red pill conservatives and ‘incels’ who hate all woman.
We had feminists who hate women who are not progressive enough.
We had woke, who hate conservatives. We had conservatives who hate people who are ‘too progressive,’ etc.
It’s all a very silly kind of tribalism. Meanwhile, the big geopolitical and financial institutions ensure they are not divided by these kinds of nonsensical issues. They understand what real power is.
A political party or theory needs to be able to sustain itself. A socialist state needs a defense and needs to feed the population. An anarchist confederation is the same. These are the actual political goals you should look at.
If we look from an anarchist lens, the questions are: How can something like Rojava exist, trade, defend itself, and maintain diplomatic relations with all kinds of institutions? These are the questions. The questions are not: what kind of sex do trans people like to have? What is the color of your skin? Would you like to get married? Do you go to church or not? What is your ‘race’? Do you like men or women? When was the last time U2 had a concert? What is the color of your fingernail paint?
I think neoliberal culture created a focus on rational/calculating individualism. And this individualism is then defined by opposition to others. This is how people describe themselves. Im a liberal, so i have blue hair and i hate MAGA. Im a MAGA, so i go to church. Im a tradwife, im a lesbian, im a real straight man, im a real ‘queer’ man im this, im that.
This superficial form of individualism makes political formation impossible.
I think something like Rojava (the anarchist mass project) could exist, because in the Middle East, this form of neoliberal individualism doesn’t exist that way. And, there was a situation of crisis, which mean there was no time for debates between ‘cis’ and ‘queer’ people. The question was, how do we make sure everyone gets water, not: what is your pronunciation?
We now see that the current communists can step out of the divisive policies. And they can formulate realistic long-term goals and perspectives. The other leftist and liberal movements stay stuck in the swamp of division and sectarianism—the swamp of incompetence.
