Enough with these stupid categories.

 

One thing that I hate is that, in political discussions, people are almost never engaging with your ideas in a rational or even an emotional or empathetic way - they're just trying to label you, to categorize you, to stick you into a specific slot and make you equivalent with all the other people that they've filed away there, so that they don't have to think about you at all.

If you are in any way critical of capitalism, they call you a communist, and make you equivalent with Stalin and Pol Pot.

If you are then, let's say, critical of Stalin, they call you a Trotskyist.

Then, if you're critical of Trotsky, they call you an anarchist.

As if there are only two possible positions on the left: the extreme authoritarianism of Bolshevism, or absolute rejection of the legitimacy of any kind of government at all.

There are thousands - perhaps millions, or billions - of possible political positions between and outside of anarchism and Bolshevism (and of course there are many different kinds of anarchism and Bolshevism).  Even back in the early 20th century, there were - and of course the present is not the past.  Why reduce everything in the present to some antecedent in the past?

I can hear people now: Oh, so what are you - some kind of "social democrat"?  Shut up.  Shut up.

Why this pathological desire to categorize, to artificially divide the working class?  Who does it serve?

If you're going to engage in name-calling, at least be a little more creative.


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