The hate largely comes from the side of anarchists who refuse to work with MLs and spend their time trying to discredit the accomplishments of existing socialist states.

You have been discrediting the accomplishments of anarchists while I have been acknowledging the accomplishments of marxists.

While the left bickers, the right is rapidly growing in power in vast majority of western countries.

I agree, but remember this conversation was started because you were insinuating that anarchists never accomplished anything.

This is getting repetitive and we’re just talking past each other so let’s just agree to disagree about the USSR. I just want to make the point - which I hope we can agree on - that the revolution wouldn’t have been successful without political pluralism within the ranks, and no future revolution will either. Dismissing the contributions of anarchists will only harm your cause.

What I’m pointing out is that all ideologies compete with others. That’s the reality of the world. If Anarchists are not able to defend the way they want to organize society then their ideology ends up being trampled by others. That’s the world we live in. Calling this victim blaming doesn’t change the material reality of the world.

The Bolsheviks’ had the ill-gotten might to push their agenda, but might does not make right. The Bolsheviks lied to and used the anarchists to achieve what they did, but anarchists have learned from their past mistakes and will prove you wrong.

USSR existed under siege from global capitalism throughout its whole existence, and that was the reason it was organized the way it was.

Capitalist aggression did not make necessary the regressive views on social issues and science the USSR had (which resulted in famine), nor the widespread corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency of state officials. You cannot simply excuse all flaws of the USSR by blaming global capitalism.

You’re using the same argument capitalists use to dismiss socialism, namely that socialism clearly doesn’t work because all socialist projects ended in collapse or continue in a state of poverty. This is, in essence, victim-blaming. Just as socialism struggles under the oppression of capitalist hegemony, anarchism struggles under the oppression of both capitalists and statists.

What Bolsheviks achieved was the betrayal of all who fought for the liberation of the proletariat. If power had gone to the Soviets as the Bolsheviks promised then the USSR would not have collapsed under the weight of its’ contradictions. You speak as if the USSR only repressed the forces of reaction, but it also repressed the very same workers it claimed to support when they tried to claim the worker control of the means of production they were promised.

Nah, I’m going by the actual tangible achievements, or lack of thereof as the case may be, of anarchists based on the teachings of their thinkers.

The Bolsheviks discount anarchist achievements by claiming them as their own. Anarchists fought alongside the Bolsheviks because they promised to realize the anarchists’ goal of all power to the Soviets. When it became clear the Bolsheviks lied in order to selfishly establish themselves as the intelligentsia, a privileged class, the anarchists resisted and were violently repressed by their former brothers and sisters in arms.

I would like to hear about your experiences growing up in the USSR as I know there were many positive aspects, but by betraying the values for which many of the revolutionaries fought they created a society with an unstable foundation, as evidenced by its’ eventual collapse. Anarchists did not reject real world solutions, they defended them with their lives and lost. The Bolsheviks have themselves to blame for the collapse.

You claim to know with great detail and certainty what anarchists believe without citing any anarchist thinkers. All you are doing is constructing a strawman of anarchists based on vibes hoping that none will be here to refute it. Anarchy is more than the absence of the state, and none who are knowledgeable posit that anarchy will materialize without effort. Anarchists are idealists not out of naivete, but necessity. It has been born out of history that when means and ends are not unified, the means become the ends. This was true of the Russian revolution when “all power to the Soviets” became hollow words and “war communism” became the new oppressor of the people.

This is an idea explored in The Egg by Andy Weir.

Yes, multiple voices, probably debating what I’m going to cook for dinner later. At this point I might be going a bit too far anthropomorphizing the voices, it’s not like actual separate personalities, they’re all me. It’s more like perspective taking. I’m engaging in a conversation with myself and the different voices will take different stances. For example I might have a “lazy voice” that just wants to eat leftovers and a “craving voice” that wants to cook tacos. I decide what to do by having the voices hash it out.

As I’m describing this it all sounds very intentional and like I’m playing pretend, but it really is just automatic.

If a word does not adequately describe what I’m thinking I just use more words, or I get creative with them and use them in new ways. I guess that’s what makes me prone to getting lost in thought for long periods of time or being very long winded when I’m talking to people. When I’m talking about something I’ve recently been very interested in people often have to cut me off because I’ll essentially start verbalizing my thought process to them and forget they’re there.

For me it’s not that I can’t think without words, it’s just that the words are very useful tools for organizing my thoughts. I’ve been doing it all my life though so it doesn’t really require more effort than thinking in concepts. It’s like breathing, it happens automatically but I can stop or control it if I want to. When I stop my inner voice I would describe my thoughts as sort of fuzzy and ephemeral. I would easily forget them or have difficulty expressing them without first putting them into words.

That does make me wonder if maybe I use my inner voice as a bit of a crutch when I’m reading, but I think it helps me infer tone and get immersed in what I’m reading. Perhaps I am sacrificing some reading speed but I do believe it helps me with comprehension and memory.

Though I will add that it’s more the concepts that I remember than the words themselves. Give me a quote and I couldn’t tell you what page and where on the page it was, but I could tell you what was happening in that scene, what happened before and after, what the character was feeling and why they said it, who they said it to and so on.

Learning to get over religious shame and guilt took quite some time for me, and I still have to catch myself sometimes when an inner voice says things I no longer believe/agree with. Part of getting over that meant cultivating other voices. When one voice bites another bites back lol.

As a plus I’m very good in a debate.

That’s what irks me the most, when people act like abstaining from an election is a grand act of protest that will change things for the better. I understand the reluctance to vote, but that should never be accompanied by a reluctance to act.

Perhaps! I also think internal monologues can develop just from learning to read and write silently. Having an inner voice makes it easier to absorb the information in a book or to plan out your writing in advance.

Your anecdote seems to support that it’s a learned behavior/skill, which tracks for me. I have a very active internal dialogue that’s difficult to turn off. I say dialogue instead of monologue because I often make up “other voices” that bounce ideas off each other, and this generally happens without my conscious effort. I think I developed this because as I was growing up I was encouraged to pray regularly, and I was very fanatically religious as a kid so I did so as often as I could. I prayed silently so often in fact that my thoughts were basically a constant one-sided monologue directed to god. Whenever I would daydream or let my imagination wander I would imagine god responding, and eventually the constant monologue became a dialogue. I would work out problems or make decisions by having conversations with an imaginary god. When I stopped believing in god the second voice never went away, I just started recognizing it as my own.

So you can spend 10 minutes to an hour getting poked with needles or you can just pop an ibuprofen.

Imagine enforcing shitty copyright laws on yourself like some code of honor. We developed the technology to make infinite copies of any media and then spend endless resources fighting it because it undermines our parasitic economic model.

Imagine for a moment that society embraced the full potential of digital technology. We could have a library of all human art and knowledge ever produced available for free, instantly, everywhere. If book libraries didn’t already exist and were proposed today the excuses for rejecting it would be the same. The answer is also the same, change our economic model to support people’s basic needs unconditionally and directly subsidize the production we need/want (like art).

Craigslist was always on the fringes, before Facebook marketplace came in there were a bunch of separate and disconnected online marketplaces. Facebook marketplace had the advantage of already having a massive user base (larger than any of the existing online marketplaces), causing it to become the largest one right out the gate, which then of course makes it the most attractive option for sellers since they will reach more people.

What’s your opinion of the Bolsheviks?

I would be wondering what I did to make his job more difficult.