I'm not one to post often. I'm not really one to rant to strangers online often, even. But, after migrating from r*ddit to lemmy, I've had this on my mind and this seemed like the place to vent.
I see discourse about tankies constantly on Lemmy. This struck me as odd. Why are these so called tankies such a threat? Why do I see people calling themselves left-wing and attacking tankies more voraciously than neoliberals and, sometimes, even fascists?
I think I know the answer, just as well as most people who will read this. These are the Zizeks of the world: people who do indeed think in a left-wing oriented way, but fail to recognise that they're also Western to the core and the biases that come with that.
I sincerely care about this much less than the actual reason I'm making this post. That is: why don't these people notice that their talking points, left-oriented as they may seem, always end up supporting US allies or attacking US enemies? I mean, do these people not see that Ukraine winning the war is a boon to the US, regardless of who is "right" in that conflict? Many other such cases, but I think I've made my point, or, rather, my confusion, clear.
That's it. That's the post.
and adding on to this with in my mind a more critical point, said capitalist state not only doesn't care, but actively benefits from it and has its own arms (both capitalist and intelligence/state) to push it and manipulate it. Anti-capitalism can be sold as a product, made into a consumer identity, alienated from and scrubbed of its content where needed, and reify itself back into capitalist consumerism. An obvious example is the Che shirt phenomenon. Or all those hot topic type shops that sell anarchist or ACAB shirts.
The internet is great at doing this, through funneling anti-capitalist trends into and making and consuming 'anti-capitalist content' and engaging in 'anti-capitalist communities' hosted on ad-supported data-mining social media sites and apps, etc. It railroads expression of "anti-capitalism" into impactless entertainment and cathartic sloganeering which still generates private profit and continues the cycling of capital; all while being able to track and contain and siphon off anti-capitalists and adjacent into status-quo reinforcing pools; and in cases isolate and crush those who differ from these trends, both on a macro scale and on a narrower and even individual scale when "known quantities" change or go dark or what have you (google was originally funded by the CIA to help them identify and track mass informational trends of humanity).
It happens online and in the real world
an extremely sharp example of this contradiction around the subsumption and reification of anti-establishment politics in the real world is that the original Black Lives Matter protestors in Ferguson were extremely radical and explicitly movement-building for larger structural change. Then rose a Liberal Black Lives Matter Organization as an institution completely separate from the original movement, and financed by all kinds of sketchy donations and billionaire and state dept NGO support, while being explicitly less militant, more liberal and reformist and palatable in its actions and goals, while maintaining some rhetoric around topics that instigated protests but alienated from and scrubbed of the root causes and their solutions. The original protest leaders were vehemently critical of this, and while the media shifted into drumming up facades-of-empty-support and hand-wringing rage and terror on either 'wing' of the corporate-party media landscape of this newly-centered Liberal institutional organization BLM; the original protest leaders were disappeared and murdered including being found shot to death in a burning car with no suspects named by the police to this day.
It's part of the long legacy of the "Agreeable Left" campaigns that the CIA and FBI worked tirelessly on during the original red scare era; including them financing and publishing anarchist anti-communist literature to disrupt communists among the well known COINTELPRO programs and their ilk.