What Happened To Libcom

I used to enjoy many of the conversations as well. That said, I still appreciate many of the postings/publications.

My take on this is that the nature of online conversation has changed radically in the last 10 years or so and that forum are no longer a main way for this to happen.

There was less conversation here prior to the new site being launched but I think that did accelerate this process. It does seem harder now to find old conversation threads via search fwiw. But also there have been interesting threads on the Ukraine war recently:

https://libcom.org/article/british-anarchism-succumbs-war-fever

I miss the old days too and they were also a good education for me. I don't think much can be done to go back there though unfortunately...

I think social media mostly killed that side of things, Noah... which was a bit of a bugger for those of us who have no desire to use social media. Also, shutting down the old libcommunity forums meant there was a fair bit of people dropping off here. Sure, libcommunity type forums had their shite moments but there were some great conversations on there too.

I also think the move to make this site into more like an (almost academic) archive of libertarian communist/anarchist etc documents and ideas has tended to make those sort of friendly discussions dwindle.

Oh, just to add, there doesn't seem to be any way to message other users on here, which will also contribute to the decline in the 'interactive experience' on here.

Comments have been on a downward trajectory for the past fifteen years and especially in the past ten, I grabbed the past five years just now, we can then join them up to the 2017 traffic analysis post which includes 2017 all the way back to 2004:

Comments:
2022: 1469
2021: 2166
2020: 3956
2019: 4735
2018: 8386

The 2017 post says we had 98942 comments in 2007 (the most ever for one year) vs. 11187 in 2017.

On the other hand articles and image galleries are creeping back up again after hitting the lowest point since 2008:
2022: 1149
2021: 1050
2020: 1679
2019: 1296
2018: 1970

Private messages we removed as part of the migration for two reasons:

1. They weren't encrypted, so if the site ever got hacked it could put users at risk (this is also true for twitter dms and etc., encrypting stuff that's stored on a website for multiple different users is not easy).

2. While we were able to migrate all the visible content on the site successfully (after a lot of work) migrating old dms on top of that would have meant even more work on top of everything else. We did announce this as long in advance as we could.

I think social media is the main reason that discussion has gone quiet, new users just don't sign up to forums much if at all any more and they're dwindling everywhere. It's also the case that we never had a good moderation system for the forums either at their peak or when they've been quiet.

For articles there is a surprising amount of new content every year given the quantity of stuff on the site already. However our news section is moribund - we've tried to revive it in different ways at different times, and each effort failed after a few months. Also blogs are quiet which I mostly blame on social media again, but the people who do maintain blogs put them on medium/substack/patreon, which I don't like but we can't fully compete with for features.

Hey, nice to see you again!
But yes this is something which has definitely changed over the years.
While the number of people visiting libcom keeps going up, the number of people commenting has collapsed.
This has been the trend since 2007, when we had nearly 100,000 comments, which had gone down to around 40,000 by 2012, which halved in 2013 and continued to go down to only around 2,000 by 2021, the year before the upgrade. (By contrast, the number of new articles posted is pretty much the same now as in 2007, around 1,000-1,300 per year.)
As Fozzie says, we think this is because the nature of the Internet has changed. With the rise of social media, people much more were having discussions on there, rather than on Internet forums. And this wasn't something we could combat. Even though in many ways I think this is a real shame. Because while discussions in public forums are open, so they can be read by anyone – and plenty of our discussions were read by tens of thousands of people – who can then learn from them. On social media, discussions are much more siloed, and often just happen in the comments below private Facebook posts or in private Facebook groups, or in relatively closed Twitter exchanges.
Partly though as well we think the decline in comments would also be due to the completely broken nature of the old site. Where it was almost impossible for new users to register accounts, and existing users who forgot their passwords couldn't do password resets. So this probably helped kill off discussion as well, and we were only able to fix this stuff with the major upgrade last year.
So the redesign of the site, deprioritising the forums, was more just recognising what had happened anyway.
Of course, we do welcome constructive comments, so it would be great if you felt like contributing more, however, replies are definitely harder to come by these days.
With private messages, unfortunately these were unsecure, so TBH it wasn't great for security reasons that we ever had them. And they were very much abused by spam accounts which was difficult to deal with. So we couldn't really keep these. However, we did warn users multiple times and give many months notice, advising people to backup private messages they wanted to keep and exchange contact information with anyone they wanted to (e.g.: https://libcom.org/article/libcom-site-upgrade).
On a personal level, I could try to connect you with Hieronymous if you like, and see if he would be okay to share his email address with you?
I am sometimes nostalgic for the old days as well, however it is also worth remembering there was a lot of poor quality nonsense as well, as well as downright offensive, thoughtless and rude stuff in the comments!

As every new article posted appears in discussions actual discussions get lost in a sea of Situationist scans.

Noah, that would be great but I'm afraid I no longer live there!
I will drop Hieronymus a line. Would you give me permission to get your email address by looking at your libcom profile?
In terms of discussions including new articles as well, Fozzie, definitely don't feel bad about your contributions!
We are working on building a user navigation dashboard, which will enable people to browse different types of content more easily. So hopefully this can include some way of perhaps either only browsing Discussions, or only browsing content which has comments. We will have a think about the best way to do this.
But we want as many contributions to the archive as possible, so we never want anyone to feel they need to limit their contributions!
At the moment, if you go to the very front page you can go to the recent comments section to see where the most recent comments have been posted.

Yeah, but you still get all the articles which often drowns out the discussions.

No, it looks like it has a real name in it…

I just wanted to say that, as a longtime (mostly) lurker, I also miss the days when the libcom forums were really active. I probably learned more about politics from libcom threads than all of the books and articles that I've read. This is not the only forum that I used to belong to that has become moribund, in fact, I don't think any of the forums that I used to read are active at all anymore. Unfortunately, there isn't anything that has managed to replaced them; good luck finding 20 pages of informed debate about the last 30 years of global anarcho-syndicalist history or 1000+ post threads of updates and discussion about various global social movements (the threads about Tahrir Square, 2010 uk student movement, Occupy, etc were incredible) on instagram or reddit.

I joined libcom at a particular inflection point in my life when I could have fallen away from revolutionary politics; the group in which I had come up as an organizer had fallen apart and I had moved to a small town without many like minded people. The forums provided a place for me to feel like the movements that I was aligned with had a real vitality and introduced me to a whole slew of thinkers which helped me develop a more focused and well-rounded set of politics. Over the past decade and change, I have not fallen away from revolutionary politics, but have remained active (sometimes more, sometimes less) in revolutionary organizations and in my workplace. If asked, I'd still identify myself first as a libertarian communist. I think I have the libcom forums to thank for much of that.

I really like libcom and owe a lot to it too, and feel strange we're sort of talking in the past sense about the community aspect. While I appreciate the redesign, I feel the decision to not even have a proper archive of all the old forum posts was a misplaced one.

There was a lot of good things in there, like very smart people explaining very complicated things, reports about events, people sharing experiences with actions, other groups etc... it's a step backwards to have that go and replace it with a non-stop feed of every post on the website that is impossible to follow.

Thanks for the feedback, really interesting and nice to read, redsdisease.

Sherbu, really not sure what you mean here though. The old forum posts are still mostly here, and now we actually have a functioning site search, so you can search the site for them. On the old site, which was completely broken, we had a situation where we had over 600,000 comments, with no way of searching them. All you could try to do would be to try to remember which sub- forum they were in, then manually look through hundreds or even thousands of pages of threads looking for the right one.

That said, as I have said above, and as we have said many times, this upgrade is an ongoing process. And we are working on an improved user dashboard with better ways of navigating active discussions.

Would also be pretty nice to have a comment-history page for users (the old site had a tracker or page for this I believe). It's pretty useful to be able to look up your comments on something from a couple months or years ago, especially if you don't remember the article/thread name

Hey Noah (and all you other esteemed comrades),

Thanks for starting this thread. Yes, I too miss the fun and engaged discussions we used to have here.

Sorry for the brevity of this. As the former Governator once said, "I'll be back!"

Noah, thanks again for drawing some of back to libcom,

Hieronymous

If it's any comfort, this isn't unique to libcom, it seems to be a general trend. Practically all of the forums and chats similar to this place I've been involved with or know about has also slipped into severe decline. Or much worse see for some examples (https://reddebreksbowl.blogspot.com/2023/04/notes-on-lefty-pol.html)

One thing thats a barrier to using this site is that there doesn't appear to be anyway to search for discussion threads alone even though they're still a feature of the site. This can make some threads essentially buried under library entries that have similar key words. I used to use the threads as prompts for reading quite regularly and that's now impossible.

On Monday an old family friend, who was in his 80s and had Parkinson's for the last several years, passed away. So getting an e-mail from Steven. on Tuesday, mentioning that Noah was trying to get in touch with me, really improved my spirits as I was dealing with grief.

15 years ago, during the heyday of vibrant discussion forums here on libcom, I know I could be a real dick. During heated debates, insults cascaded back and forth. I gave as well as I got. Yet I made several friends on libcom, some of whom I even met in-person, from as far away as New York City and London (I live in San Francisco). Some continue to be friends to this day. Conversely, a few former friends participated in the libcom forums and it was sad to see how acrimony continued to fester in cyberspace.

Yet what makes me relieved to see this thread is that it is a reminder of the real mutual aid and compassion some of us bonded over, ironically on the internet. In 2016 I had major surgery, then almost a year later I had another operation for a less serious hernia. I can't remember the exact chronology, but Noah went under the knife back then too -- and there were times when we got updates on threads which made us fear we were going to lose him. Thankfully, he recovered and he and I connected, then had wonderful private chats here on libcom.

History doesn't move in reverse, but perhaps we could carve out a little space on libcom and use it to continue communicating among ourselves. Thanks Noah, seeing you on this thread -- and several others -- really made my week! Let's keep in touch.

This is still the best website on the internet. I can't think of any other website that comes close.

When you use google to search libcom, use the following if you want to bring up only past forum discussions: "site:libcom.org/discussion [whatever your looking for]"

Edit to add: I just tried it myself and it doesn't seem to be working properly. Like I tried "site:libcom.org/discussion mutualism" and not a lot of threads appeared. I expected a lot more than what showed up in the results.

I also greatly miss the old Libcom discussions; the whole reason I ended up becoming an Anarchist at all was because someone gave me a Libcom flyer on some TUC A-to-B Hyde Park march when I was unemployed after graduating university.

Multiple times over the past few years I've thought or experienced something that has left me wondering what Libcom would have thought about it: only to find there's no discussion on the topic. A perfect example has been the massive increase in Strikes across Europe but especially the UK. When I was back in Britain over the winter it was wall-to-wall strikes across multiple sectors and what's more they seemed to command general public support. Old Libcom would have had a field day discussing those kinds of current issues.

Now I agree it's an obvious fact that social media killed a lot of forums, but I do find myself thinking that maybe it's ground we ceded too easily. It's true that most of my old forum-going friends use social media these days , but it's equally true that pretty much all of them fucking hate it. Like a lot of capitalist ventures, social media suckered people in with a better version of what the previous competition offered, and then once they had a captive (and sometimes addicted) audience, they started to degrade the product for profit.

In other words, while social media killed forums, I think it's still the case that people still want what forums offered: a sense of community around shared goals and interests.

As someone who only quite recently gave in and started using Discord, I wonder if Discord replicates the "forum experience" better than any other social media platform? Although their servers are closed and non-public by default, which have their pros and cons.

Discord is definitely more where younger people are to be found having these conversations I think, though groups like Signal/WhatsApp and comments on social media also play a fairly significant role. People have gotten used to a fairly "live" approach, which make static forum structures appeal relatively staid. I like forums but I'm also in my 40s ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You're probably best off telling them that, rather than me. Though I'll note that "publicly accessible" isn't always in and of itself a selling point for young people. Encryption doesn't mean very much if anyone curious can just publicly link your handle to years of comments.

Thanks for all of these comments. We were definitely be up for people having a go at trying to resurrect discussion on here. I think before we try this in a concerted way, we want to make a couple of changes to help, and we will try to do these shortly.
What we plan on doing is:
- Building a new index which shows everything which has the latest comments on it, in the Recent section
- Building a new index just to show items posted with the content type Discussions.
These should help people keep up-to-date and monitor discussions as they happen.

It's been great being back in touch. Yesterday, Noah and I talked by video chat for a couple hours and it was great catching up, talking about everything from anarchist politics, hiking and nature, to books and music. It was so nice to talk with a kindred soul!

A lot of forum threads seem to be missing. What happened? Did these threads fail to make it to the new site? Every time I search something, it's the same set of threads that keeps popping up.

Last Wednesday (7 June) my comrades here in the San Francisco Bay Area lost a militant to cancer at the much too young age of 62. He was an Uber/Lyft driver and was instrumental in creating the driver-led Rideshare Drivers United to struggle against the independent-contractor scam and to fight the bosses. Thankfully, I had friends like Noah to turn to in my time of grief. I'm so thankful for reconnecting with him and others. It's great to back in touch!

So sorry for your loss

By the way, you can look for threads under site:libcom.org/forums and site:libcom.org/discussion. I'm not sure why it's like that. But still, searching the former way, there are still a lot of threads missing. I hope they aren't lost forever.

There are three problems, I guess.
1 - Anarchism is not formulated yet and is suffering from faults of historical materialism. This let Marxian reactionaries to take advantage of young people. We need to fight Marxism, specially its inclination to create cult of personality.
2 - Libcom web doesn't use a web page efficiently. Its pages are too large and have too much blank spaces. Images are large too. Title/Content ratio is high.
3 - Social media is a problem, yes. Social media is a very wrong and dangerous media for anti authoritarian movement (anarchist movement). We have just let people use it without criticism. So many have been arrested, tortured, imprisoned, assassinated and executed using social media for revolutionary activities - just check what Iranian government did to the people who revolted against the fascist regime last year. People relied too much on social media and web sites. New tech, cameras and hacking, are also works well against revolutionaries. Criminals will go to jail for few years, revolutionaries will be monitored for life long. We need to basically rely on traditional method of communication. Just use social media for non political reason.

I miss forums.
I think the massive drop in comments was as the "social" side moved to social media, but when you stop the social side you tend to log on a lot less often so the overtly political stuff dries up too.
It makes me think of the pub, most of the time we talked shite, but there were some good conversations that made a difference.
The other thing is access. I used to use my computer on evening shifts at work. I wrote loads of the CPE blog and news articles there, I wouldn't do that now.
There was a lot of good on libcom back in the day, but those days are gone, now it is more of a library.
I wish I had archived some messages, but there were thousands on there and I didn't know how to do that, so I dithered and did nothing. It was a shame, but then I had a long time to look at that stuff and never did.
It is a shame that those discussions are not visible easily, because like many here, I learnt a lot from the discussions.
I was thinking about the news section before I saw this thread. It has been dead for a long time. It takes a fair amount of work and you need a fair few contributors.
Noah, if you click on a username you can send someone an email through the contact form.
Assuming they still use the address.

I think it's just because people with admin privileges see more info... so you better be nice to jef, or else they'll subscribe you to a whole bunch of Trotskyist mailing lists

The contact page doesn"t show you the other person's email address.

Also Trotskyists pay very poorly for leads.

Do you mind if I ask what you're talking about then? You're not talking about the libcom contact button are you? (I also wasn't implying that you're a Trotskyist; I just meant subscribing people to Trotskyist mailing lists as a form of punishment.)

I've always like the forums. I understand that with the diminution of discussions, some shitty flame out and some morons, participation basically trickled out. Miss 'em, but understand why they disappeared.

Regarding site improvements, I've noticed that the font changes every so often when I load/re-load a page. I'm not sure why it does that, but it would be nice if there was just one font.

May I suggest libcom get on bluesky? Its value-proposition is that:
- it’s not the fascist bird app, run by erratic, right-wing billionaire
- it’s not a Meta app (threads)
- it’s more scalable than ActivityPub/Mastodon
- it will support decentralisation and account portability (thus avoiding being at the mercy of erratic billionaires)
- it’s still early days, therefore good opportunity to stake a claim

It's a good idea, we just don't have the capacity to run another social channel at the moment

From what I remember, I think East Anglia AFed are an autonomous group not actually affiliated with national AFed: https://eastangliaafed.noblogs.org/about-us/
Although, as you say, it doesn't makes a huge amount of difference one way or another if they don't answer their emails.

The way you are going it may take only a few thousand years to get any where significant on the industrial front. I don't think you have that time.
Check out per google search Rebel Worker Review of "A Beautiful Idea: A history of Freedom Press Anarchists" for a critique and a way forward

fwiw there's now a new 'comments' tab in recent, showing any post with one or more comments
https://libcom.org/recent/comments

And the discussions tab only shows discussions now.

Still feels a bit like the Negev here Mike.

Absolutely spot on. I'm sure the change in direction this site has taken is largely down to a decade old scandal, involving a small group of British academics and a tiny circulation journal almost nobody has ever heard of, and not at all to do with most of the world having moved away from shit posting in forums. I expect this place was a nightmare to moderate and everyone is now shouting at each other on discord.
Hi folks, I still lurk.

Missed you Fleur, like a hole in the head. ;-)

Seriously though, Aufheben might appear as a minor academic journal from afar but within the anarchist milieu in the UK it was captivating. The revelations regarding one of its key academics sent shockwaves quite out of proportion. It formed a rupture between the once homogenous, cross classist body of anarchism.

Aufheben had one academic member.

Not sure what you mean? Its whole output was academic, in both senses of the word.

The controversy had a minor long term influence on this site, the main influence on forum decline was the shift away to social media.

Is libcom.org not Social Media?

Aufhebengate didn't cause any ruptures of the kind you claim.

Are you sure?

A journal that appeared once a year didn't have the kind of influence you claim.

Some copies were more threadbare than a Zane Grey paperback. There is no doubt it captivated the anarchist milieu for a decade.

This was just one reason for the decline. Other reasons, already cited above, were the banning of large numbers of users, understandable on a commercial website, but strange on an avowedly "libertarian" one; the disparaging attitude of certain users; the volume of trite content...

What nonsense. Captivated the anarchist milieu? I don't think so.

The above is uninformed nonsense

Unfortunately, this seems to be a recurring pattern in posts from this user.

Foolish dogs bark at the moon. Better to keep stúmm.

Red Marriot: "Take your own advice: stop littering this site with your nonsensical ignorant crap": "At least in the UK... the rural proletariat is small..."

In 2022, the urban population of the United Kingdom was approximately 56.52 million, while the rural population was around 10.45 million.

academic

adjective

1. relating to education and scholarship.
"academic achievement"
2. not of practical relevance; of only theoretical interest.
"the debate has been largely academic"

social media

noun

websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking.

Better to keep stúmm.

It can get a bit quiet around here, though I think the site's still useful for archivig purposes, and there are some interesting discussions every now and then. Are people still mostly using Twitter/X these days? It doesn't seem like that many people have really left it for Mastodon. Also, what Discords are people referring to in this thread (like invite-only-type groups or groups that are open to anyone)?

Not sure if you mean people that used to use Libcom or people who engage in discussions in general. I've always given Twitter a wide berth and not signed up for Mastodon or anything like that. I was in some quite busy Facebook anarchist groups probably about five years ago, but they rapidly degraded into a cesspool of Maoism and identitarian politics.

For me, the era of naive optimism about social media and Facebook discussions has passed. The best discussions I now have are via invite-only Zoom reading groups, or face-to-face if I'm lucky.

I don't know how good Reddit is for this kind of thing? Some YouTube comments sections can seem quite busy too.

Reddit is fucking terrible for discussions. 99% of the commenters/participants will not read or watch the thing that started the thread, I don't mean they disagree so they couldn't have, I mean they will not bother looking at the thing at all. YouTube is about the worst online platform for discussion, comments only still exist purely to drive algorithms.

westartfromhere wrote: In 2022, the urban population of the United Kingdom was approximately 56.52 million, while the rural population was around 10.45 million.

What I wrote, which was in regard to discussing the farmer protests;

At least in the UK, farmer protests will be a majority of this [small business/middle] class - the rural proletariat is small and more likely to work in retail and tourism. The agricultural workforce only accounts for 1% of the total UK workforce and only some will be "rural proletarians". https://libcom.org/discussion/farmers-movement-europe

Thanks for proving my point; as you show, only around 20% of the UK population is rural. And many aren't proletarians, so yes, relatively small. The total size of a rural population tells you little about the size of "the rural proletariat"; unless you use the ridiculous lump definition that you do; ie, including small businesses/farmers, peasants, large landowners etc - all supposedly being "proletarians" (as well as anyone who clashes with cops on Countryside Alliance demos), as seen in comments in link above.

Most people understand the difference between forums like these and social media like Facebook, Twitter etc. But apparently that's beyond you.

Aufheben had an academic approach in many respects but they weren't, with one exception, academics; they were politically active without academic professional roles.

If you try to insist on conformity with dictionary definitions - regardless of commonly understood meanings within particular contexts - maybe that's one reason why you don't understand what you're talking about; be it Aufheben, Marx, farmers, proletarians or whatever.

Reddit hasn't been that bad in my experience (I was on r/marxism_101 a few years back), though I'm sure other people's experiences may have varied. I'm not sure if popular subreddits like r/antiwork, which is a wonderful new development in my opinion, are really the places for serious discussions though; it's mostly just people writing about how much they dislike (capitalist) work. (Just for reference r/antiwork currently has over 2.8 million members; other subreddits like, say r/anarchism, have around 267,000.) I wouldn't mind giving Discord a try, but I'm not aware of any groups. I'm also kind of put off by how the platform seems geared more towards gamers/younger people. Mastodon also seems quite empty still. Oh well

Red Marriot, the millions that compose the rural proletariat are not "small", relative or otherwise. Why you chose to mention employment in tourism and retail in this context perhaps says more about your interaction with the countryside of England than anything else? As a typical rural proletarian myself, I have been employed in many agricultural roles, as trussmaker, chicken hatcher, drayman, car part manufacturer, pallet maker, passenger assistant, cleaner, stadium seating constructer, bottle plant operative, surplus labourer...

The long and the short of it is the comments have dropped from 10,000 in 2007—by, I would estimate, commenters in the thousands—to a trickle—now predominantly by Members who have invested more than 10 years service to the site.

A perusal of this thread (partially deleted by the administrators) will give readers further insight as to why there is a reluctance to pass through here.

"Instaban" was the first thing that struck me as strange. Then, the fact that a portion of the discussion has disappeared into the ether. The fact that many of the contributers' accounts are no longer live—there does not appear to be any way of unenrolling from the site. What's poor Schmoopie done to offend you? This does not read as rambling but common sense:

Zionism is anti-Semitism.

Auld-bod In reply to Schmoopie #27

Please explain.

Zionism is a foreign (European) bourgeois institution imposed upon the native Semitic working population. Does that explain Auld-bold, #28?

Auld-bod In reply to Schmoopie #35

Thanks.

...

Our role as communists/anarchists is not to broker a peace between competing factions of the bourgeoisie. Our role is steadfastly to delineate between the force for revolution (in this instance the insurgent Palestinian working class) and the force of reaction (the Israeli State and Palestinian nationalist aspiration for a state).

...

Historically, the main factor that distinguished Jew from gentile in European history has been the exclusion of Jews from agriculture. This exclusion by the ruling Christian elite forced Jews to find other means of earning their bread. One of these pursuits was usury, another the Stage, diplomacy, tailoring, etc.

Have been reading this from your former co-writer and friend, Red. Yo man, it's a good yarn.

The proletariat form the majority of both the rural and urban population. We are not small.

This is the context in which rural proletariat was used in the Farmers' Movement thread.

Logistically, the forces of order are not capable of using the same tactics on the rural proletariat as on the proletariat concentrated en masse in the city. Once the rural proletariat converges on centres of capital—Rugis, Brussels, London, Delhi, for example—"15,000 police and gendarmes had been mobilised to prevent the tractors from entering Paris and other cities", mass arrests have taken place, as well as gas and bludgeoning...

This has nothing to do with the relative size of the rural proletariat to the urban. Besides, in discussing the proletariat, why concentrate on the "working population". In bourgie terms, the working population excludes those in full time education, those invalidated from working, those economically inactive. These at least equal quantitively the number of the "working population".

We know that "Sam" wrote it. He told us you used to write with him. Who are "them"?

We haven't discussed anything. You have simply berated.

FWIW Samotnaf has asked for all the material written solely by them to be removed from Libcom. (I found this out because I inadvertently posted something by them here.) As far as I know they have not asked for that piece to be removed.

I'm not entirely sure what is meant by "The fact that many of the contributers' accounts are no longer live—there does not appear to be any way of unenrolling from the site." but it appears to me that most of the user accounts on the thread referred to are still "live" - i.e. that those people can still post here if they wish to do so.

As several others have said, there appears to have been a general decline in the use of internet forums similar to Libcom over the last ten years.

Perhaps some people are put off posting here for other reasons. I am sure we could speculate about that indefinitely.

It appears that the wildly pedantic discussion above has not encouraged other people to flock to Libcom to participate - with the welcome exception of Fleur. Perhaps that is not the intention or perhaps the discusison is just not yet pedantic enough - one more effort!

Most, the majority, of the Members' accounts are live on this thread, i.e. when one clicks on the name this is displayed on the screen, e.g. westartfromhere, Member for 10 months 2 weeks. The accounts that are not live count as follows: Sleeper, fidel gastro, Schmoopie, S. Artesian, Zeronowhere, factvalue. As an adminstrator of the site and Member for 20 years 3 months, Fozzie, you will possibly know how these Members' accounts became dead.

One Member, factvalue, appears to have been banned by the arbitrators of life and death of Members' accounts for writing material such as this:

The propaganda that facilitates all this braying of 'anti-Semitism!!' when the actions of the Israeli State are compared with those of the Nazis, not long ago resulted in that putrid arch-Zionist Alan Dershowitz alleging on the Harvard Law School website that Norman Finkelstein's deceased mother, who'd been through the worst of the Nazi holocaust from the Warsaw ghetto to concentration and slave labour camps and who, like his father, had lost her entire family, had been a Nazi collaborator.

As Finkelstein said at the time, it's the type of strategy promoted by Hitler in Mein Kampf: a lie's credibility is directly proportional to its size, so make your lies as spectacular as possible if you want people to believe you. Make your claims as brazen as possible and couch them in the crudest form you can and the mud will stick. Because 'after all' people will say, 'surely no-one would make such allegations unless they were true. Yes, mm, and that would explain why he's criticising Israel, mm, mm'. Dershowitz and those like him understand these things.

As Samotnaf has documented, we now know that collusion between the National Socialist regime of Germany and representatives of the nascent Zionist state did occur, so why the banning?

Noah posed the question. We have done our best to answer it.

'Ever since I touch down in England, everything I do is "wrong".'

On the exodus of active Members from Forums/Discussions of libcom.org

1. Hosting of a known White supremacist, Michael Schmidt
2. Purge of Members and deletion of their comments
3. Support for a Police collaborator (site rules prohibit the naming of this individual)
4. Removal of posted material deemed politically incorrect. For example, Dead Cities, by The Exploited

4. Removal of posted material deemed politically incorrect. For example, Dead Cities, by The Exploited

I doubt it would have been removed for political incorrectness, especially when libcom mods have stood by (on Twitter) other groups like Killdren in the past, along with their hit song "Kill Tory Scum."

Incidentally, I was also right in that stupid thread about that Crimethinc article, in which the author was trying to argue that violent imagery among the left and in socialist propaganda (e.g. guillotine imagery, songs like the Coup's "We Got the Guillotine" etc.) should be done away with since it supposedly promotes actual violence. Boots Riley is shite for other reasons, but I still doubt most people who listen to "We Got the Guillotine," or DK's "Let's Lynch the Landlord," then want to go out and behead billionaires or lynch landlords. It was also quite the irony that, around the same time, some libcom mod then proceeded to defend the group who (metaphorically) sang in favor of "Tory genocide"! In any case, I'm open to apologies from certain people within this thread whenever they're ready to admit that they and the article were wrong.

R Totale wrote: Happy to say that I'd give the DKs a pretty clean bill of health here, in that, as far as you can take it as a serious statement of intent, lynching the landlord would still be much closer to the kinds of hands-on, spontaneous, insurrectional violence, rather than something comething from a state system of punishment like a guillotine.

adri wrote: So you're ok with lynching landlords [...] but not with artistic usage of guillotines in people's music videos, even when the latter said vengeance was not the message?

Joe Meek might also be up your alley in that case.

Noah wrote: Maybe I’m being thick but I really don’t understand this comment. Help me out?

Joe Meek killed his landlord.

Sorry for derailing the above argument, which is a derailment of this thread anyway. (I just really dislike Crimethinc.) Carry on derailing!

well! it looks like things are heating up again, at least on this thread.
though i will forever miss the mess that was libcom c. 2010.
is devrim about?

Instead of advocating the taking of human life, "the kinds of hands-on, spontaneous, insurrectional violence" that libertarian communists should be promoting is the stripping naked of an entire squadron of Police in south-east Asia that occured in recent years of the proletarian revolution.

Joe Meek was a British music engineer that pioneered the use of the recording studio as an instrument in its own right to produce music. Despite the huge amount of labour he carried out producing music, Joe ended up indebted to the capital. He ended his days and the days of his landlady with a shotgun.

Devrim is still flirting around the skirts of the Left wing of the Borg.

So, since the site is still being tweaked and this thread served as a something of bug report in the past, I'm finding it difficult distinguishing in threads and comments where one person ends and another begins, perhaps a more noticeable border where the username and time posted could help with that.

In addition, I think the loss of messages was a detriment to the site, I understand most users didn't use them, but members who did use them used them for a reason, I used to stay in contact with several users, co-ordinate archiving and report issues to the admins, not sure what we're supposed to do now, make a thread or contact the libcom social media accounts? This could cut down on the "is ____ still around?" posts that are cropping up.

Absolutely fascinated by the suggestion that the reason not as many people post on libcom anymore is because you can't post Exploited songs.

Happy to say that I'd give the DKs a pretty clean bill of health here, in that, as far as you can take it as a serious statement of intent, lynching the landlord would still be much closer to the kinds of hands-on, spontaneous, insurrectional violence, rather than something comething from a state system of punishment like a guillotine.

Also kind of ignoring how the Chinese Communist Party and Viet Minh/North Vietnamese (as just two examples) killed thousands of landlords before and after coming to power, so it's not like there's anything "intrinsically anti-state or anarchist" about lynching landlords, if that's what's being suggested. What you're saying is even more gruesome considering how you weren't even talking about agricultural landlords in, say, pre-industrial China or Vietnam (where conditions were far worse and landlords far more despotic), but presumably just modern-day landlords in industrialized countries. It's difficult to imagine any modern revolutionary situation where "lynching landlords" would actually play a part (especially if they posed no threat, and even then there would likely be other ways of dealing with them), but it's nice to know that you're ready and waiting.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Is that the last face a landlord will see before you clobber him to death with what seems to be sticks? Sickening. *ok that's all*

Hi Steven! I'm good, surviving, which I'm lead to believe is better than the alternative :) Hope you're happy and well.

I remember that thread. Doesn't that feel like a hundred years and several lifetimes ago? We live in interesting times....

"Could you maybe do a little mockup of what you're suggesting? Not really clear what you are trying to say exactly."

Well let's start with what we have now, we have user name in small font size, the date time in faint font colour and a red box that says new if the comment is new, and the rest is empty space. And at the bottom of the comment, there's a thin line separating comments.

If I'm trying to find a specific comment to reply to or re-read that part blends into the body of the text. It doesn't stand out very well to me. Perhaps increase font size and change the background colour and extend the background to the width of the comment since the space is empty. Divide the space between the user and the message.

"Also kind of ignoring how the Chinese Communist Party and Viet Minh/North Vietnamese (as just two examples) killed thousands of landlords before and after coming to power, so it's not like there's anything "intrinsically anti-state or anarchist" about lynching landlords, if that's what's being suggested."
In both those examples, it wasn't landlords as a group but those who opposed them that were targetted for repression, they both defended landlords from their tenants if those landlords co-operated with them. That was the distinction between patriotic/democratic/progressive bourgeoisie and reactionary bourgeoisie was for.

In China, the Mao approved war on all landlords was during the Cultural Revolution and targetted people who hadn't been landlords since 1952 when the state took ownership of all land and housing making it the sole landlord, their relatives (except for Mao whose father had exploited rents and loans against his poor neighbours, that son of the landlords was exempt for some reason) and people who had no connection to owning land but accusing them of that was a convenient justification.

In both those examples, it wasn't landlords as a group but those who opposed them that were targetted for repression, they both defended landlords from their tenants if those landlords co-operated with them. That was the distinction between patriotic/democratic/progressive bourgeoisie and reactionary bourgeoisie was for [my emphasis].

The CCP never viewed agricultural landlords as being part of the (“progressive”) bourgeoisie! The CCP mostly regarded them as “feudal elements” who were holding back China’s development towards capitalism. Additionally, the fact that the CCP were much less harsh in their treatment of certain landlords, particularly those who supported the CCP and were apologetic about their past exploitation of peasants, does not refute the fact that the CCP essentially won the Chinese Civil War by appealing to the peasantry and targeting the landlord class.[1]

Sticking with the CCP during the Civil War, their fraternization with the upper classes was actually more true for the much smaller capitalist class in China (i.e. capitalists who allied themselves with the CCP) than it was for landlords, who the CCP more often viewed as entirely reactionary. The CCP wanted “communist”-sympathizing capitalists to stick around seeing as how they regarded them as “historically progressive” and thought that they could assist the CCP in industrializing China. These people were the so-called “progressive bourgeoisie” who you seem to be referring to, and by definition they had very little to do with landlords who primarily built their wealth by exploiting peasants. The Shanghai manufacturer Liu Hongsheng would be just one example of such a CCP-sympathizing capitalist who the CCP had persuaded to stay following their victory against the GMD in the Civil War.

We can also start another thread if you want to continue this discussion about China and Vietnam; I don’t think this is really the place for it.

1. Although some CCP members, notably Peng Pai in Haifeng, had successfully organized among peasants prior to the 1927 Shanghai Massacre (i.e. the GMD’s betrayal of the CCP, who had been cooperating with the GMD against warlords during the Warlord Period), the CCP only really began to focus on the peasantry after this date, particularly as the GMD then drove the CCP out of the cities. Previously the CCP, following instructions from the Soviet Union, had appealed to the much smaller Chinese working class/proletariat, which the Soviet Union would continue to insist that the CCP do following the GMD betrayal.

as an apartment dweller i have sympathy with those oppressed by noise levels. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/12511423/violet-ethel-shenton

He did produce some quite loud (but good) music...

edit, what is a "crawdaddy" though and why were people in the '60s going around saying it? surely they're not singing about a crayfish?

"The CCP never viewed agricultural landlords as being part of the (“progressive”) bourgeoisie!"

That's certainly not true if we take the CCP at their word, both the New Democratic Revolution and the Alliance of the Four Revolutionary classes (Prole, Pes, Petite-B, and National-B) made room for landlords willing to work with them in the latter 2 categories just as peasants were divided into lower, middle and upper, with the upper peasants often overlapping with lesser landlords and often lumped in as targets during the anti-landlord agitation, especially during the cultural revolution when landlords had ceased to exist.

"But if there is to be a proper representation for each revolutionary class according to its status in the state, a proper expression of the people's will, a proper direction for revolutionary struggles and a proper manifestation of the spirit of New Democracy, then a system of really universal and equal suffrage, irrespective of sex, creed, property or education, must be introduced. "

Mao maintained support for this strategy upto his death. In 1974 he advised Sihanouk to build a similar broad coalition including landlords and capitalist if he were to re-take power.

The CCP attitude to landlords was never as simplistic or unyielding as your suggesting. The periods of strong hostility to the landlords followed action by the peasantry. Mao endorses their actions in 1927 in the Hunan peasant report but others in the party disagree.

Then in 45-52 there is the land reform movement where the party comes out against landlords. Again this movement follows the mass resistance by peasants due to the collapse of the GMD and the party does not take a consistent approach. In some areas they actively take part in killings and repression in others they intervene and in other areas stay out of it. The deciding factor seems to be the balance of power in the area, there is also widespread resistance to CCP from the peasantry over its attempts to control land and its grain taxes in the same time.

You're correct that the party appealed to the peasantry but it did not do it exclusively nor always sucessfully. The peasants were their own people and actors. And of course the party itself became the sole landlord extracting rent and deciding how land should be divided and used.

The Maoists were pragmatic and opportunistic and they made mistakes and lagged behind. You only find consistent anti landlord sentiments (which included urban landlords FYI) in their agitprop during campaigns with that objective. Usefulness to the party at that time was what counted the most.

In both those examples, it wasn't landlords as a group but those who opposed them that were targetted for repression, they both defended landlords from their tenants if those landlords co-operated with them. That was the distinction between patriotic/democratic/progressive bourgeoisie and reactionary bourgeoisie was for.

adri wrote: The CCP never viewed agricultural landlords as being part of the (“progressive”) bourgeoisie!

That's certainly not true if we take the CCP at their word. . . .

What words? Landlords are not capitalists, even though many industrialists might have had landlord backgrounds in the past or come from gentry families. Mao specifically talked about the "enlightened gentry" (i.e. landlords who sided with the CCP and allowed the redistribution of their landholdings), if that's what you're referring to, but such exceptions do not really change the fact that the CCP targeted the landlord class as I said. We're really splitting hairs here.