Kiddie Stalinism

edit - I cross posted with gram negative and repeated some of their points, but yeah that

I haven't met any, but there's quite a few on twitter and it does seem to be a real phenomenon. I think there's a few things going on, some connected, some not, and it does seem to be mostly centred on the US so only addressing that here:

1. Since Ferguson and BLM, there's been a lot of people revisiting '60s Black radicalism and the Black Panthers specifically. Excavating that history for a new generation is great regardless of your view on it, but the problem is a lot of the history out there is superficial or frozen in time. If you look for a summary of the politics of the Black Panthers, you just get 'Black nationalist' or 'Marxist Leninist' or sometimes 'Maoist' - you have to go quite a bit deeper to get to ex-panthers like Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin or Russell Maroon Shoatz who've rejected Marxist-Leninism decades ago. The BPP represents the best known radical component of the late/post-civil rights movement, and doesn't have any European equivalent at all, so this is a uniquely US thing.

[This is my main theory for where non-aligned/heterodox Marxist Leninists are coming from].

2. You mentioned the DSA, while the DSA as an organisation, its leadership, and aligned magazines like Jacobin are pretty firmly social democrats, that's not a membership requirement, and there are both anarchists and tankies joining it (as well as left liberals and social democrats of course). This is a fair bit different from people joining Momentum which is much more explicitly tied to the Labour Party. So someone could be a DSA member but politically Marxist Leninist without the same contradictions that would pose in Momentum. This is fully compatible with [1].

3. The Workers World Party and Party for Socialism and Liberation (both descendants of the Sam Marcy Wing of the Socialist Workers Party, which split from the SWP in 1956 after supporting the USSR invasion of Hungary - almost unique variety of tankie trots) both engage in direct action. The Durham confederate statue take down was done by at least some IWW and WWP members, with one of the arrestees Takiyah Thompson being a student WWP member. Younger WWP and PSL members also appear to get involved in street antifascism, black blocs etc.
For example: PSL's description of taking part in a demo in Seattle: https://www.liberationnews.org/seattle-protests-trump-and-disrupts-alt-right-event/

Durham WWP stuff: https://www.indyweek.com/news/archives/2017/08/15/demonstrator-who-climbed-durhams-confederate-monument-arrested

This distinguishes them from trots like Socialist Action or the ISO, which are more likely to shop antifascists to the cops. Also there are no trots on twitter.

Compare to this badjacketing by the ISO:

https://socialistworker.org/2017/02/08/making-sense-of-what-happened

4. Senior WWP and PSL figures regularly appear on RT news - RT likes them because of their campism and support for Assad.
WWP's Sara Flounders on Ferguson 2014 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-mfaxB2KNs

WWP's Sara Flounders on Russia/Nato 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbJXsaY4ThE

PSL's Brian Backer has a regular show on Sputnik: https://sputniknews.com/radio_loud_and_clear/

More examples here of course: https://libcom.org/library/investigation-red-brown-alliances-third-positionism-russia-ukraine-syria-western-left

Not sure how much this has actually raised their profile but it's mainstream media coverage they otherwise wouldn't have got.

5. Syria itself. With a fair degree of success they've continually pushed the line that if you don't support Assad, you're supporting either the US or ISIS or both. To some extent this is campist ('the anti-imperialism of fools') politics (Rojava being an actual project of US imperialism as opposed to making temporary alliances with anyone who they think will keep them going, anything that Assad might have done is imperialist propaganda being manipulated to justify an invasion etc.), sometimes going off the deep end into full on conspiracy theories about the White Helmets using crisis actors, staging rescues etc.

A communist internationalist position on Syria doesn't give you much to latch on to - meaning the quantity of articles on Syria and general commentary/anti-war activism is much lower and it doesn't provide easy answers. Even with Rojava supporters it's focused on the internal changes rather than the geopolitics, so is not providing an explanation for people coming from a blanket anti-war/geopoliitcs position I think. Between all that, people who can give the impression of knowing a lot, with awful politics, are drawing people in.

6. The general 'collapse of the centre' where the right wing of the Democrats have moved from being a reluctant least-worst option to mostly a complete joke (mirrored by Corbyn's relative success in the UK) has also been accompanied by a lot of red-baiting (and this also happens from the right wing of the DSA). I think this red-baiting has to some extent benefitted all radical politics, but again Stalinist politics provides an easy riposte to US-style anti-communism:

- North Korea has a lower incarceration rate than the US
- the US has political prisoners who have been in prison for four decades and in solitary confinement for most of those decades
- the US police extra-judicially kills around 1,000 people per year
- the CIA has overthrown democratically elected governments all over the world, when has North Korea, Cuba, Syria or the USSR done this? etc. etc.
- Cuba has socialised healthcare despite sanctions, the US doesn't despite being the richest counry in the world
- the USSR was largely responsible for the defeat of Hitler etc.

etc. etc.

It's an easy segue from that broadly correct what-aboutism, and US-centrism, to 'if you don't support the DPRK you're supporting US imperialism' and 'Stalin did nothing wrong'. Also Trots would smear anarchists as individualists or whatever a decade or two ago which is easily debunked, tankies mostly call anarchists and ultra-leftists aligned with Hungarian fascists, Ukrainian fascists, the CIA etc. which... where do you even start?

7. Meme arms race - helicopter rides vs. gulags, Kekistan flags vs. hammer and sickle, not sure this is very important but it's not absent either.

The particular variant of online stalinism that points 3-6 deal with is closer to a conspiracy theory than a politics, which also means it's a lot more internally consistent than Trotskyism. Trotskyism mostly offered a route into a sect and getting stuck there via constant activity and fronts, or a route out of itself if you managed to read some non-Trot stuff (post-war Trotskyism mostly being a history of people breaking with Trotskyism and awful organisations everyone else hated including other trots).

Tankie conspiracy theories I see random twitter anarchists repeating too occasionally - because who wouldn't want to be against fascism and US imperialism? The popularity of conspiratorial politics since Occupy is a more general issue but it fits easiest into either fascist or campist politics.