It’s all made up to split the left, recuperate people’s semi-radical impulses into centrism and right-wing beliefs, and give right-wingers a platform to radicalise people who otherwise wouldn’t let them post there. It’s the reason that things like hippies/magic/conspiracy theories are powerful tools for right-wingers and the Thule Society was a major engine of the Nazis like Qanon is the modern right.

What it’s obscuring for us is really just organising strategies. The communist and anarchist projects have the same ultimate result. Anarchists think that is best achieved through people organically forming democratic structures that replace the state, like a network of mutual aid militias and communes and councils and unions. Communists think that is best achieved through people organically forming a political party out of their shared interests as workers and using it to replace the state, like a network of mutual aid militias and communes and councils and unions with a specific set of goals and a plan to achieve them. Both result in a classless, democratic society. Both require organised violence to get there. Both provoke a counterrevolutionary response that will have to be suppressed. But I as a Marxist just spent yesterday cooking for the anarchist Food Not Bombs org because they do the exact same thing that the Marxist Black Panther Party saw as the path to revolution. The big disagreement is just how you think that scales up best and whether it requires hierarchy to stay organised.

With the political compass it’s saying that despite us having the same policy goals and broadly the same positions, you should entertain libertarians and I should entertain fascists because we somehow share a common impulse with them too. Both get a platform as a result despite them being variations of the same toxic groups nobody would want to associate with otherwise.