RevLeft

RevLeft was a far left website consisting primarily of a forum. Billing itself as the "home of the revolutionary left" it supported communism, anarchism and hardline "antifa" (anti-fascism). It was also factionalism incarnate. Its forum was full of cranks adding their own cranky ideas to already crank-prone ideas like communism and anarchism. On a side note you can show this site to anyone who refers to Obama and the Democratic Party (or even Bernie Sanders) as "socialists." Rest assured it will stop. As of June 11, 2018, RevLeft is no longer active as a forum.

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Communism
Opiates for the masses
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v - t - e
“”Particularly on the Left, political thought is a sort of masturbation fantasy in which the world of facts hardly matters.
—George Orwell

Structure

RevLeft had subforums devoted to specific subjects including Occupy Wall Street[1] the Arab Spring[2] and Che Guevara.[3] Alongside all these were debates over whether Pokemon promotes a capitalist or socialist worldview.[4]

The site had its own wiki, although those expecting a far-left equivalent of Metapedia[5] will have found it disappointingly tame. Amongst the burning issues covered was Holden Caulfield.[6] The wiki had been removed, probably for being rubbish.

RevLeft was also ironic in that its user base liked to complain about censorship by the government/the right/the evil capitalists, while taking anyone who was not a revolutionary communist/anarchist and putting them in their own little forum called "opposing ideologies". The site even auto-censored certain words such as RedMarx (a hostile/rival forum), Rooster (an influential and infamous crank member who got banned) and others... but not the name of their supposed arch-enemies at StormFront.[7]

The forum had an excessive history of cliquishness revolving around the reputation point system, a system that both discriminated against the supposed newbs if their rep count is low and also encouraged the same old flame wars over the respectability of Leon Trotsky that basically forced posters to write the same stupid one liners and essentially whore themselves and their positions for imaginary credits.

There had been many ebbs and flows in the entertainment value and respectability RevLeft had to offer, and ironically many failed revolutions against the moderation team-which was hardly surprising considering the level of intellectual maturity shown by certain members of the team.[8] This made for an interesting parallel to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with constant power struggles and members getting banned after being denounced for their (real or imagined) ideological deviation (i.e. a secular equivalent of Heresy). One infamous case involved forum moderator Ismail (successfully) calling for a mass ban due to a supposed fascist infiltration of RevLeft through forum games. Seriously.[9] [10]

Purges

The site was essentially (in Trotskyist terminology) a deformed workers' state, controlled by a junta that tightly controlled public discourse and used shady means[11] to eliminate all opposition while usually pretending there was nothing going on.

Notable events in the site's recent history was the great purge of 2011, which although supposedly centered on "fascist" infiltration of the map games subforum led to a collective outburst of anti-moderator sentiment and that ended in halfassed devil's advocates who were clearly sock puppets of the mods (the rep of one guy shot up exponentially even though everyone disliked his posts) and the all-out shutdown of the site while the junta put online dissident ring leaders into the infinite loop or outright banning, and the Avanti event, where a legitimately deranged person spread the ideology of cyberpunk anarchism/complete collapse of civilization into armed gangs through a strangely intoxicating mix of poetry and a lack of sentence structure.[12] A general amnesty was declared but few returned, mainly due to the lack of fun and continued disappearances.

The common purges had spawned several splinter forums, all of them now defunct, such as RedMarx, RevForum and The Red Flag. All these forums had never managed to approach the activity level of RevLeft, since most members stopped posting soon after getting banned from RevLeft, with only a dozen or so hardliners.

Many posts detailing these happenings could be found on RedMarx.com, but were recently deleted. Their existence can still be confirmed via Google.

Criticism

RevLeft had been the target of criticism from the invitingly-named blog Maoist Rebel News, authored by a self-publishing e-book mogul named Jason Unruhe.[13] In a post entitled "RevLeft is a Bunch of Pedophile-Zionists" the blog pointed to a thread at the forum in which moderators argued that child pornography should be legalised, and went on to attack the owner of RevLeft for being pro-Israel.[14]

Despite the label of being a home for radical leftists of all stripes, Anarcho-Primitivists, Third-Worldists and Jucheists were all considered to be “Opposing Ideologies”, and prevented from having access to the main forums, groups, etc.[15] Their stance on market socialism was unclear, but it seems most of its adherents were restricted.[16][17][18]

The good

Aside from all this, RevLeft had produced an excellent, comprehensive take-down of the oft-repeated white nationalist mantra "Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white".[19]

gollark: I made a minor typo and accidentally broke all the styling and JS.
gollark: WHy IS DOKUWIKI LIKE THIS
gollark: ... oops, my content security policy is problematic.
gollark: Learn mid-level language.
gollark: Why?

References
  1. http://www.revleft.com/vb/occupy-wallstreet-and-f270/index.html?s=&daysprune=100&f=270
  2. http://www.revleft.com/vb/arab-world-protests-f266/index.html
  3. http://www.revleft.com/vb/ernesto-che-guevara-f13/index.html?s=&daysprune=100&f=13
  4. http://www.revleft.com/vb/capitalist-pok-mon-t174942/index.html
  5. Which, inicidentally, has a hilarious article about RevLeft: "RevLeft has a strict policy of banning anybody who doesn't support the Jewish social agenda pertaining to homosexuality, feminism, immigration, abortion, internationalism and other social-ills which are pushed by decadent liberal scum in the West."
  6. http://web.archive.org/web/20090810105338/http://www.revleft.com/wiki/index.php/Holden_Caulfieldimg
  7. http://www.revleft.com/vb/other-radical-theory-t179843/index3.html
  8. http://www.revleft.com/vb/men-interject-womens-t166367/index.html?p=2330448#post2330448.
  9. https://www.revleft.space/vb/threads/189929-Revleft-purges
  10. https://hollaforums.com/thread/1350815/activism/mexican-revolution-forum-game.html
  11. http://aggregator.anarchyplanet.org/page/15/
  12. http://www.revleft.com/vb/search.php?searchid=5204039
  13. http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/MaoistRebelNews His book store is basically his blog posts bound in volumes, how original.
  14. http://maoistrebelnews.wordpress.com/2010/09/19/revleft-is-a-bunch-of-pedophile-zionists/
  15. http://trotskyite.wordpress.com/2011/07/30/revleft/ Critique of the site by a radical leftist
  16. http://www.revleft.com/vb/market-socialism-t159134/index.html
  17. http://www.revleft.com/vb/member.php?u=37758
  18. http://www.revleft.com/vb/member.php?u=35097
  19. 'Anti-Racism is a codeword for Anti-White' - RevLeft
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