theory / praxis / 'kindness worker'

There's a lot of discourse on 'echo chambers' being the death of political conversation but I really do think that echo chambers can do a lot of harm on Twitter. I started following MLs because they had a lot of really valuable leftist perspectives, and the more of them I followed the more it appeared that they were the ONLY leftists with the ONLY "correct" perspective, which is especially mindboggling when you think about their philosophy itself, which is very much centered around combating US imperialism and warmongering with China (a good thing to resist obviously) by dying on the hill of the nation-state (perplexing???)

I think I give way too much equal benefit of the doubt to people. Some ML will tweet something while on the toilet and I'll spend hours using my full brain power to try and understand their perspective. Because I haven't read a lot of theory at all when it comes to socialism/communism I want to stay really open minded and understand why people think the way they do, but I think I spend too much time trying to decode ML ideas - like, way more time than actually doing anything useful. They have such a strong us-or-them ideology that you can get really easily sucked in. 

I did the LeftValues quiz and my results were: 

Revolutionary 70.6% - 29.4% Reform 

Scientific 47.1% - 52.9% Utopian (I'm neutral on this as I don't really know anything about dialectics)

Central 45.0% - 55.0% Decentral (I also have no idea, I've never really thought about this)

Internationalist 62.5% - 37.5% National (I'm surprised this isn't more skewed towards internationalism considering the MLs really didn't like it when I said borderless solidarity struggles were more interesting than uncritical jingoism and licking repressive state boot for free online) 

Party 46.2% - 53.8% Union (Yeah I also am pretty neutral on this - I'm definitely very ambivalent about the idea of a 'vanguard party') 

Production 23.6% - 76.4% Ecological

Conservative 27.9% - 72.1% Progressive

And it said I was into Council Communism and Eco-Marxism; it also said I was 0% Marxist-Leninist

The rapid way that you get sucked into this kind of stuff was demonstrated when I told people I was 0% ML and it made me interested in reading Lenin in order to understand why the quiz thought I disagreed with him; people were all like "ML is what tankies call themselves, they are Stalinists" and i was like wow so there are communists who aren't tankies??? Where have they been?? Why did I get stuck with the tankies????? and I'm glad that when I was 16 and angsty about my identity, wanting to reconnect with my Chinese roots, confused by the sinophobic media, I wasn't on Twitter because I would definitely have just become a tankie instead of letting myself do the soul-searching and introspection by myself, and through Sine Theta, in a space not dominated by other people's writings, so that I could come to independent conclusions (especially through my own first-person observations) about anti-fascism, anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, police and prison abolition, border abolition. I told someone that I don't really know what kind of "-ist" I am, but I know that I want a world governed by kindness and compassion, where we all take care of each other by providing everything people need for free and allowing communities to thrive. 

I think it's important for everyone to come to an anti-capitalist perspective on their own and THEN to go and read theory / think about different schools of thought when it comes to how to combat capitalism/implement socialism. It means that you're secure in yourself and your thinking and don't get swayed easily by mob mentality/peer pressure/tribalism. I know that my convictions are right when it comes to these fundamentals. 

Anyway, so I'm still reading a lot of different stuff and trying to just inhale information. 

I'm not not open to MLs (for now, as I'm asking a ton of questions to someone who is an ML and has offered to have a discussion) but I'm just thoroughly confused by this investment in nationalism. I'm also thinking about the inherent privilege of diaspora and being overseas - the second you leave the country and are economically tied to things abroad you have divorced yourself from the reality of China! Even migrants who smuggle themselves into the UK to pick cockles in the sea are using that money to build empty mansions back in Fujian. Diaspora MLs will get super excited about the prospect of moving "back" to China via getting a job or doing a degree, both of which would put them in the 1% of China -- they speak English, they have all of this prestige from being overseas. They obviously won't see the harsh, unequal reality of China. If there are 60 million people in China who live on less than 1000RMB per month, how can China still be this Marxist utopia that needs total defense online?? 1000RMB means nothing to any normal middle-class family. How can such inequality be allowed in a state that still gets defended as a bastion of socialism? Why the binary thinking that if you think a single critical thought about the PRC, you're evil and a reactionary or a 'fake leftist'? 

I read Vijay Prashad's interview with Qiao Collective today and on this, he says that Marxism/dialectics isn't about binaries and either/or. He says it doesn't matter whether China is communist or capitalist (which I think it does, because MLs spend so much energy upholding China's so-called communism to the point where they'll either deny the existence of the Uyghur camps or even celebrate them as successful counterterrorism measures which is... baffling) but that it's important that China adapted to modern industry in order to develop the nation and better serve the people. But this is confusing to me, because it's precisely the 'people' that were sacrificed in order to make China rich - the peasants who precariously migrated to the South to work in factories without the ability to chagne their residencies for better treatment, who got AIDS because they had to sell their blood to survive. Clearly the PRC is not going to suddenly stop all this in 2025 and confiscate all of Jack Ma's wealth and then redistribute it to these guys. It feels like the judgement of who/what is "real left" and who/what is "fake left" who manipulate leftist language/vocabulary for reactionist intentions -- never mind what those intentions actually are, I almost never see any kind of evidence/analysis of what makes some leftists fake and others real, lke the CCP, which is apparently truly communist even though its actions are all capitalist??? 

So yeah I have a lot of thinking and reading to do but I'm glad that talking to different people has allowed me to get away from this dangerous tankie path, and that my common sense has led me to fundamentally question the ML tendency to jingoism. Knowing that other leftists exist has really helped lol.