[dude with glasses in a communist t-shirt, arguing] I’m the only leftist here, your opinions are TRASH
[dude holding a theory book on smug, arguing] Read theory you losers, you’re all WRONG
[dude in an anarchist hoodie, arguing] Nuh-uh, I’m the only leftist here, you’re SHITLIBS
[the three dudes are now caught in a cartoon fight, glasses gone flying, punches everywhere, while a firing squad of nazis are targeting them with rifles]
[a confused nazi asks] Why… why are they still arguing?
A professor in college once said something that stayed with me. He said that “bad ideologies will always find ways to self implode”.
This stuck with me because it’s true. Good ideologies tend to be pragmatic and flexible, and so they’re able to adapt and evolve. However, bad ideologies tend to be more rigid and focus mostly on theories and ideals, and therefore they’re unable to adapt or evolve. Far left ideologies firmly fall in the latter category which is why they are where they are.
Why are you all trying to have a serious discussion under a comic strip?
Where else should we have a serious discussion?
In a comic strip club.
You can try to have a serious discussion where you want but don’t expect to get anything much serious out of comic strips and memes.
People, people, people, we can kill each other AFTER the fascist are gone, please and thank you.
A lot of the far left types would rather have fascists rule and ruin everything just to spite their opposition rather than make compromises by working with them.
Chinese civil war be like:
The People’s Front of Judea vs the Judean People’s Front
SPLITTERS!
I feel like the nazis should be congratulating themselves on sowing discord, distracting those that could resist with bullshit
The infighting amongst the left is entirely self inflected
bLuE nO mAtTeR wHo unless it’s an actual progressive 😮💨
The only thing that matters is policy, I’ll work with anyone as long as it’s toward an egalitarian society with wealth redistribution.
Labels are nice for classifying, but not for executing. I don’t care if you identify as leftist, or liberal, or progressive; I care if you support good policies.
The issue is that you’re a minority in your camp. Broadly speaking, the left sees compromise as weakness, neutrality as cowardice, working with opposition towards a common cause as treachery. These are all symptoms of purity testing, and it’s the reason why the left in so many places is completely paralyzed.
How do you know that isn’t confirmation bias? We have no idea how many leftists there are that see purity testers and decide to not engage.
It’s a similar to MAGA in a way. MAGA’s biggest problem, as an ideology, is that it revolves around blind loyalty to a single idiot and therefore the entire movement starts and stops with his whims, no matter how contradictory, damaging, or nonsensical. You could say it’s confirmation bias that I have this opinion, but I think given recent events, this opinion does have a basis of fact to it. The same applies to the left when it comes to purity testing. It’s really not hard to see how prominent purity testing is in leftist discourse.
hear, hear
Yeah, but the question ultimately lies in how many bad and straight up harmful policies are worth the small step toward an egalitarian society? Where does it become ignoble to vote for one policy, when there are ultimately many more harmful ones outweighing the positive? Because it’s kinda rare that we get to vote on policy. We vote for people, with the vague promise of policy ideas that face an uphill battle and watering down— not to mention the straight up bastardization of those good policies, turning them into terrible ones.
I wish it were so black and white as us getting to vote on policy. The policymakers surely seem to be unable.
I’ll work with anyone as long as it’s toward an egalitarian society with wealth redistribution.
Okay, but here me out? What if we just privatize the mechanism of wealth redistribution? Also we’re going to be spending a bunch of money on foreign wars, but don’t worry - this time the people were fighting are ontologically evil, we promise. Yes, we will have to make deep cuts to social services in order to pay for the war (while still running enormous deficits because haha, psych, deficits don’t matter), but it will be vital to get the Moderate Conservative on board with our program.
Also, we control every branch of government, but we still need to compromise with fascists in the opposition.
Okay, why are you leaving? You’re clearly not serious about progressive reforms.
And STOP SAYING NICE THINGS AND CHINA! This is a red line we will not tolerate!
You know what? You’re not serious. We’re forming a coalition with Liz Cheney. See you in the losers bracket next year.
…
You’re the reason we lost control of the government.
…
Okay, now stop voting for a popular leftist mayor, or we’ll burn this whole party down.
It’s why ranked choice is the only sane voting approach. First past the post heavily favors right wing authoritarians.
Ranked-choice voting is a decent choice for uninominal elections.
Proportional elections are a popular alternative, and they are arguably fairer than even RCV because they are not susceptible to gerrymandering or votes otherwise being weighted by geography (i.e. your vote still matters just as much as anyone’s if you live in Redneckville, Mississippi). They do have other downsides though.
Unfortunately here in Belgium we do proportional voting and the Prime Minister is nonetheless a far-right separatist in charge of a right-wing coalition so, uh, maybe FPTP is not the only thing that stands between the citizenry and a communist utopia lol
Hell yea I would love to vote for the people I actually want to vote for
“Voting is actually bad” Tankies 🤝 Nazis
whelp, straight to infighting.
“My own entitlement and vindictive emotional state is far more important than broad policy measures to make the best outcomes for the most people.” - Tankies 🤝 Nazis
edit: I will forever smirk that over a third of the people who read this felt “Well they don’t understand that MY emotions are special, the unrealistic things I want are more important than any of those other things! How dare they equate my feelings with those of nazis, those creatures weren’t even human, unlike me!”
“I support genocide”
Anti-tankies 🤝 Nazis
" The Holo-incident is not THAT bad" Tankies 🤝 Nazis
Comparing a famine caused by poor harvests across eastern europe and exacerbated by poor management to the fucking holocaust is wild.
Literally only tankies are stupid enough to believe old Soviet Propaganda about how Holodomer was not a genocide. when it clearly was.
Well you can either look at the now public soviet archives to see what the government was saying to themselves, you know primary sources, and plenty of historians who cite those or you can accept what anti-communists with no primary sources and a weird tendency to rehabilitate nazi-collaborators say.
“poor management” is one hell of a way to put it.
I mean, even the Holocaust could also be said to boil down to poor management if we’re just doing shitty arguments.
Not just wild, also a form of Holocaust denial.
Man, tankie really doesn’t mean anything anymore does it?
This is why far “left” and “right” are itself misguided labels. It’s more like far opposite on the other end where they meet.
Idk why you’re downvoted, horseshoe theory has proven to be correct over time. There’s that much that separates Marxist Leninist authoritarianism and Fascist authoritarianism
Horseshoe theory is literally just
Okay yeah I see what you mean. I rescind my original post.
Yeah, that really nails it.
Horsehoe theory is misguided itself, it was pitched purely to distance liberalism from fascism when historically they are linked, and to demonize those who support collectivization over privatization. Read Blackshirts and Reds.
Liberalism is antithetical to fascism both ideologically and historically. Literally only online Marixsts are ignorant enough to think that liberalism is just fascism lite.
For almost all of human history, the current center of the the western Overton window would have been considered far, far left. Does that mean that monarchism and feudalism is the true center, and liberalism is actually the same as being to the far right of monarchism?
The modern left-right political spectrum only makes sense in a modern sense. Trying to apply it like it’s some sort of universal law is stupid. Monarchism, for example, can’t be placed on the spectrum because there are different types of monarchies that are radically different from each other and there are different monarchs within each of those systems that are radically different from each other.
The antidote to infighting in my experience is organizing in ideologically diverse spaces. I’ve organized with liberals and all types of different leftists. It has left me with the perspective that all these people are good people that just want better for the world. It’s hard to get angry at them once you know them. Per usual the solution is to touch grass.
You’re right, BUT it will never happen. Hearing different perspectives and understanding other viewpoints will not only broaden your horizons, but it will also deradicalize you… but the people who you are asking to do this are the radicals who are allergic to ideologically diversity. Purity testing is one of the hallmark defining traits of the modern left, and the further left you go the more extreme it gets. The far left will excommunicate anybody who doesn’t agree with on just about everything. You simply can’t have a serious movement with this type of mentality being as prominent as it is.
Can we smoke weed instead? It’s also green.
Grass is dangerous, specially if you have allergies. My advice is to never touch grass!
LOL as someone with significant autoimmune issues this rings to true.
The antidote to infighting in my experience is organizing in ideologically diverse spaces.
You are saying (correctly) that we need to organize in ways that appeal to more median voters, moderates, liberals and even conservatives around much broader initiatives that appeal to more populist ideas like wealth inequality, social programs to help poor neighborhoods, rebuilding infrastructure and creating more livable communities.
But people who read this are going to translate it as:
“They’re saying I should reach out to the Green/Primitivist Anarchists I banned from my discord server” or “Maybe we should include the Orthodox Marxist–Leninists even though we hate them”
Or even worse: “HOW DARE HE SUGGEST I COMPROMISE WITH MY OPPRESSORS I WILL RIP THROATS OUT”
We all have to live next to each other even if we get the best policy results and I think everyone on either side forgets this. This isn’t centerism, this is understanding that we have to rebuild together even if we don’t share objective realities, we have no choice in the matter. I think too many people get stuck in their algorithmic ideology bubbles and think “the revolution/race war is coming, and everything will be great after.”
Nobody is coming. Nobody is going to make it better. There is no secret cabal or underground movement, there will be no socialist revolution. What we see is what we get and if we want it better, we need to get a LOT better about getting our shitty emotions under control, learning to socialize and using our energy wisely.
Amazing posts! This is the correct approach. 99.9% of people want the same thing salvo’s all the time, it’s tiny issues that divide us and we’ve allowed that divide to grow and grow. People surround themselves with echo chambers and become more and more extreme hating each other and just making things worse.
We have an enemy. We always have. The mega rich. The billionaires, the grifters, those taking advantage of other people. That’s who we need to go after.
The opposite is the case. What worked historically is organizing in an ideologically united platform.
Vanguard parties won revolutions. Ideologically diverse big tent organizations have always eventually broken apart and none has brought a revolution thus far.
And working with liberals has never been a good idea. They’re not a part of the left, they belong to a right wing ideology. That would be like saying we should work together with Nazis, because after all they have socialist in their name.
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The truth about many republicans, is that they want good things for society as well. However they are some of the most gullible, ignorant, uneducated, even miseducated people you will ever care to meet.
It is possible to reach them. But it is one of the most Herculean tasks you will ever undertake. One of the hardest parts of it is to avoid triggering their programming. Starting small with basic concepts you can both agree on. And working from there.
It is possible to reach them. But it is one of the most Herculean tasks you will ever undertake.
If we’re talking about the stereotypical cartoon characters that you see hired by Jubilee to drive up hate and “engagement” then yes, they are real and they are almost impossible to exist around.
But they’re not the majority of people who identify as “conservative” or to be more correct, they don’t tend to identify as anything. The large swath of America’s conservative movement has been just uninformed people who work all day and night and don’t even have time to watch the news and believe earnestly that one out of five people are now trans and they’re trying to shape public policy… because this is the reporting they see on their two hours of downtime they get on Sunday night while scrolling Facebook. These are the tens of millions of people who say “I didn’t know who to vote for, I would have voted for Bernie if he ran, but I picked Trump just to see if he would be better than Harris, at least he’s gonna do something about [problem X].”
If you want to change people and reach hearts and minds, you become better at socializing, you make people like you, then you introduce actual progressive politics to them slowly and gently, starting with class-consciousness. Teach people where their tax money goes first and you will create Marx’s greatest warriors in a week.
I was a conservative, I found my way on my own but I have reached many people, I have turned many people to community consciousness and equality and even equity, because I know what it really looks like, I understand that the stupid unwashed masses just need guideance and they fall so very fast.
Oh God yes Jubilee and that surrounded bs. Though the recent one with Jordan Peterson was somewhat cathartic. Yeah they get some of the most toxic ones.
Yep the majority of them are more like my brother-in-law or my SO. She at least realized back in February the mistake she made. Though I can understand it. As a military daughter who spent her life going from Base to Base as her father moved them around the world. Republican bullshit is sort of ingrained in her family. And she doesn’t actually engage with a lot of the news personally. Instead it gets filtered to her through family.
Brother-in-law came from a privileged bougie family. They own a number of stores in the area. All the fancy tchotchkies as a child. Summers and other regular holidays throughout the year at the lake. Started out from 3rd and thought he made a home run. With a very similar story. Hereditary republicanism. No critical thinking. For One Shining Moment talking about how Democrats and Republicans both suck. On which we could agree. Only to inevitably return back to the Republican talking points. That situation is a whole other shit sandwich unfortunately though.
Just as a tangent, Jubilee and ALL the related content-farmers on Youtube, Tiktok and other social media platforms are radically skewing our own perceptions as well as that of the right. They are the enemy of our better tomorrow.
We’re all getting lost down ideological, algorithmic bubble-worlds but the worlds look so different it’s hard for us to identify that we’re also being manipulated.
This is another area you can find common-ground with the right, and a way to get them to start realizing they’re being played and cucked by corporate elites. (Use that language.)
Absolutely. None of us are immune to propaganda or our own biases.
How do you find common ground when “wanting good things for society” to them means “enslaving all the n****** and killing all the f******”?
It’s shockingly easy to reach people of different political ideology if you view them as humans. Don’t interact with the people who have punisher tattoos and roll coal, but that’s not everyone right of center. Most conservatives are just ill-informed working people with no emotional intelligence or no capacity to care about larger problems than their next utility bill and resent progressive messaging because they’re struggling so hard.
You can break through with class consciousness, almost every conservative I’ve talked to, and turned, started with educating them where their tax money goes, so get educated yourself how the tax code works, what the federal budget actually looks like, what your state’s work laws are and such, and teach them why they can’t afford food AND electricity some months.
You also need to be social and hospitable, do not have the intention of changing people, have the intention of teaching ONE thing and stick to it. This is what Bernie did for decades.
Edit: I will reemphasize for anyone reading down this far, PLEASE STOP TRYING TO CHANGE EVERYTHING. You’re not going to get Bubba and Sheila down in the trailer by the scrapyard to suddenly start promoting trans rights and advocating for a free Tibet. Just let it go, our focus on micro-problems and social issues that don’t impact the majority of people has been a deliberate sabotage of progressive movements to make people turn away. If we can turn people against Republican politics the rest falls in place and we get a better tomorrow, maybe not today but eventually and we have to start planting trees and stop expecting to have all our desires satisfied in our lifetimes.
They think that “those people” must be controlled and enslaved even for their own good. They have been programmed and indoctrinate so deeply they actually believe that those people are the problem. That it wasn’t systems Etc that kept them disadvantaged and down. But somehow something in there very being
Similar to those sneaky manipulative immigrants. Who are on the whole often far more abiding than your average American citizen. Somehow thinking they have forced employers to pay them less and take advantage of them just to hurt law abiding americans. It’s not logical, it’s honestly fucking insane. But a lot of it comes from a similar place. They are hurting too. Much like the rest of us. They just can’t see everyone else. It’s always about them. So the best way to start in on them. Is to point out how the exact same systems have victimized them. And how those they support have enabled and supported it.
Don’t get me wrong there are absolutely many you are shitty people to their core. Whom you shouldn’t bother with. The plenty of them have no concept of class 4 or how much they are being manipulated by Elite bourgeoisie. They just want things to be better. But have no clue about what that would look like or how to go about it. Often times having been completely indoctrinated against it.
But it is one of the most Herculean tasks you will ever undertake.
So follow his lead. Divert a river and float the shit away or make them run in snow until they are tired.
You pretend, for a little while, then slowly introduce truth to them drip by drip. Like an undercover propaganda agent.
Since that’s probably what they’re doing to us.
This strategy is dishonest though. We cannot use all the same methods of the far right and ruling class.
There’s a conflict of interest between wanting people to think critically and then lying to them and only slowly letting them learn parts of a truth. In another example, you can’t have a democracy when all parties try to deceive the voters. That will damage the concept of democracy and the existing supposed democracy.
There is also the danger of falling your own rhetoric and propaganda. Prime example of this is how fascism was created. Mussolini actively engaged in nationalist pro-war propaganda as he thought the continued war would lead to the conditions necessary for socialist revolution. He wasn’t wrong about that as then revolutions broke out in several successors / breakaways of the Russian Empire, in Germany and in Hungary. But eventually he fell to his own propaganda and created fascism.
I’ve seen this type of tactic really well displayed in this video by SquidTips.
This man talked to a fucking Proud Boy wearing a rainbow shirt that said in large letters “GAY” on it with a button that had the hammer and sickle in trans colors, mentioned his partner was trans, and got the guy to agree with him on the fact that he should be focusing on the class war rather than the culture war.
Even Proud Boys and people on the far, far right still think that what they’re doing is good for society. You don’t have to convince them to “stop being evil, switch to being good” you just have to convince them that “this is a more effective method at making society better than what you currently believe is the best.”
Will it work for everyone? Of course not. Some people are just going to be too far gone for you to reach, but there’s a lot more people than you might think that could be swayed, despite what the flood of media coverage of the extremes of society can make you believe.
I’ve found that even if you do this, it doesn’t really alter their behavior. A moment of consensus is never going to be enough.
People need to treat this kind of stuff like breaking someone from a drug addiction or helping someone lose weight. Without addressing the lifestyle factors that drove them down that path, you’ll never get them to actually change.
That’s why the brainwashing is so terrifying. People can fall into it pretty quickly and then it can take years and years to deprogram them.
Fair enough, though I do think this can still help with any broader approach to changing their overall mentality.
A moment of consensus on its own might not be enough to sway someone, but if they hear someone try and contradict what they had recently agreed on, it can then make them feel more cognitive dissonance, and potentially make them at the bare minimum just stop and think for a second.
If someone else is later trying to sway them in some way, it’s going to be easier when that person says something, and they can think “I remember saying something similar” rather than “this is the opposite of what I already believe.”
Plus, there’s also just the sort of “exposure therapy” factor to it, as well. A lot of people are radicalized to believe that the “opposing side” is pure, limitless evil, and that they hate you and want you dead, so just interacting with them can be enough to help slowly deradicalize them.
For example, this Pew Research article states, regarding the likelihood of people to support trans people’s existence:
“Though Republicans who know a trans person are more likely than Republicans who don’t to say gender can be different from sex assigned at birth, more than eight-in-ten in both groups (83% and 88%, respectively) say gender is determined by sex at birth. Meanwhile, there are large differences between Democrats who do and do not know a transgender person. A majority of Democrats who do know a trans person (72%) say someone can be a man or a woman even if that differs from their sex assigned at birth, while those who don’t know anyone who is transgender are about evenly split (48% say gender is determined by sex assigned at birth while 51% say it can be different).”
But of course, that isn’t just limited to acceptance of people by gender. It also applies to race, social and economic status, recipients and non-recipients of welfare programs, people working in different industries, etc.
Again, not saying it’s at all some magic universal way to change someone’s mind, or that on its own it’s necessarily a factor that can override their overarching condition, (hell, that quote from before shows that it had a much smaller impact on republicans than democrats even given the same exposure) but the more and more this happens, the stronger and stronger an effect it has overall, and I’d say that alone makes it worth doing.
True. And I’d expect you’d need fewer of these moments for younger people than older ones. Every little bump might be the one that diverts someone to a different path. I know it hasn’t worked well on my older family members, but it was those kind of moments that helped my diverge from my religious upbringing when I was younger.
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Well that’s why they’re winning, because they have no problem employing spies.
Armed and ready to fight.
Now make a comic about the redfascists shooting anarchists, or the (I am assuming leftcom) shooting anarchists.
This thread keeps popping up and it just clicked and I had to ask:
Is the guy in the red shirt supposed to be Vaush?
Would be funny considering how much Vaush hates Marxism-Leninism.
It’s the factory preset look for these pseudo-tankies that show up in my local activism group every now and then.
Always the big earring, unkempt beard, this specific shape of glasses, and the cheap aliexpress t-shirt with a political message on it.
Not my fault Vaush stole the look!
pseudo-tankies
I’m not even sure whether this is supposed to be an insult anymore. Is a “tankie” better or worse than a “fake tankie”?
In a thread complaining about leftist infighting, there’s a special irony in liberals singing out a leftist who is simultaneously too far left and not far left enough.
It’s a specific type of leftist we have in my country, french communists are a… special breed, let’s say.
In the 1980s our communist party bulldozed a migrant worker dormitory because they hated migrants that much. Red MAGA or something. The party recovered from that era, but french communists are still chauvinistic, xenophobic, and strangely not that much into anti-imperialism (which is meant to be the redeeming quality of tankies). They do however share with tankies the traits of applying “class first” logic to a lot of conversations, which makes them deathly allergic to intersectionality, and being terminally online and way into infighting. Thus they usually end up booted from actual activist groups, since they tend to hold us back and prevent us from actually getting shit done in the streets.
Hence me calling them pseudo-tankies because it’s hard to label them. We just call them tankies here: they’re members of a party that supported the crushing of the hungarian uprising with soviet tanks, and is ambiguous about tienanmen (no denying it happened but very alt-history about it), so pro-tanks they are.
I have an easier time getting along with the average online american tankie than with our local communist party’s members.
chauvinistic, xenophobic, and strangely not that much into anti-imperialism
Sounds like Nazbol to me.
The party recovered from that era, but french communists are still chauvinistic, xenophobic, and strangely not that much into anti-imperialism
Yeah, that’s been a problem in the US as well, under “Patriotic Communism”. But it’s also largely artificial - a product of party decay to the point that fascists can sock puppet the leftist labels without actually pursuing leftist policy.
Hence me calling them pseudo-tankies because it’s hard to label them.
One problem that really does plague leftist organizing is state espionage. It has become almost a running joke that half your local DSA meeting is going to be NYPD and FBI informants fighting for front row seats.
But that’s also more a legacy of Nixon/Reagan Era COINTELPRO, with the modern state security forces scrambling to invent incidents to thwart from whole cloth.
What I see labeled “Tankie” in the modern moment is anyone championing AES. For some reason, the greatest betrayal of any kind of revolution is… winning? So every socialist politician from Fidel Castro to Hugo Soto-Martínez is doing authoritarian stateism by being inside the halls of power, rather than outside waving a paper placard.
I have an easier time getting along with the average online american tankie than with our local communist party’s members
That’s a shame.
I looked it up, and yep, looks like the PCF abandoned Marxism-Leninism in 1979 and adopted Eurocommunism, which is a vulgarization of Marxism that upholds western imperialism. MLs would consider them to be patsocs, same as the American Communist Party which espouses “MAGA Communism.”
I thought maga communism was a joke.
We all wish it was…
The idea that all “leftists” should just work together is stupid.
Leninism, Anarcho-primitivism and Social democracy (for example) are not different approaches to “leftism” that ultimately want the same things; they are completely separate ideologies that naturally come into conflict. The people who follow them disagree with each other because they want and value completely different things. If they were to put aside their differences there would be nothing left.
That doesn’t mean arguing on the internet about ideology is meaningful, or that there can’t be common goals or enemies, just that you should give up the idea that all “leftists” are somehow natural allies, because it doesn’t make any sense.
I believe you are missing the forest for the trees. First, I acknowledge your examples are separate ideologies.
That concept also applies to the right… social conservatives, right-libertarians, and neoliberal ideologies are equally separate. However, those practitioners have no qualms about banding together to suppress dissent (or until such time they are the only voices).
Where the left leaning practitioners are unable to do so, they will be forever tyrannized by the banded majority.
To put it more succinctly, the enemy of my enemy is my friend (when freedom is on the line).
Where the left leaning practitioners are unable to do so, they will be forever tyrannized by the banded majority.
You are assuming no ideological changes of opinion are possible or useful.
People that vote right wing aren’t better off just because they voted that way. They’re not tyrants oppressing the left, they’re fellow citizens who get oppressed just as much. Their vote for the winning team doesn’t win them anything.
The solution to right-wing banding isn’t left wing banding, it’s disbanding the right wing by showing its voters that they’re being had. And that takes a cohesive and functional alternative.
Leftist “infighting” is healthy. It’s a process of discovering these alternatives, and it regularly churns out consensus issues such as consent-based queer rights, veganism, not funding genocide, and how the US government is now fascist.
Over time these issues get normalized through leftist action until liberal centrists rewrite the histories as if they are responsible for producing them through liberal democracy.
To put it more succinctly, the enemy of my enemy is my friend (when freedom is on the line).
Daily reminder that the DNC does not acknowledge that the US government is now fascist. Uniting under a common front doesn’t mean we fight fascism together, it means we canvas for votes until we’re black bagged one by one.
Ultimately it is important to vote in every election for a candidate that has a good chance of actually getting in to represent you, but that is just one day every year or two. Everything else should be dedicated to finding and testing these alternatives.
K.
It does help that the overarching theme of the right is centered around taking as much for yourself as possible and not caring about the collateral damage. The right is full of single-issue voters who might, say, not actually explicitly hate gay people but who also don’t give a shit about their rights and safety if it means they can keep their guns. The left, almost definitionally, needs to consider the complexity inherent in not being able to ignore the effects that any given policy might have on others and this means that there is so much more opportunity for conflict.
You’re correct, of course, I’m just pointing out the difference such that it might help attack the issue from a better perspective.
There’s the nuance the original post relies on ignoring. But it’s supposed to be a humorous joke-post anyway.
This. They act like they’re giving up fringe beliefs to keep the consensus more left. It’s isolating and alienating
Leninism, Anarcho-primitivism and Social democracy (for example) are not different approaches to “leftism” that ultimately want the same things; they are completely separate ideologies that naturally come into conflict.
In a fascist dictatorship, they have a lot more in common than opposition. What’s more, there’s ample room for compromise when members of these caucuses are able to communicate and collaborate freely.
The biggest hurdle to Left Unity I consistently see is Liberal Wreckers stepping in to insist any one ascendant philosophy is unserious and counterproductive, right before they form a coalition with corporationists and fascists.
you should give up the idea that all “leftists” are somehow natural allies
There’s a material basis of alliance that stems from the communities that form the base of each faction.
The idea that a Social Democrat like Lulu or Sheinbaum can’t form coalition with Anarcho-Prim native people in the rural Brazilian/Southern Mexican territories is demonstrably untrue.
The idea that a Leninist like Castro or Mandela couldn’t lead a popular Socialist revolution in Cuba or South Africa is demonstrably untrue.
The idea that Bookchin-style Eco-socialists can’t find allies in Xi’s China or among the Maoist factions of North India is demonstrably untrue.
It takes work and it takes the right historical moment, but not everything has to end like the Spanish Civil War. Left Alliance isn’t some impossible dream.
In a fascist dictatorship, they have a lot more in common than opposition.
But if the dictatorship is a communist one they have more in common with the nazis! Or if your country is invaded by Russia you might find yourself fighting side by side with the Azov battalion.
There are libertarians who genuinely care about free speech and might make useful allies on those issues.
Just because someone is the enemy of your enemy, or an occasionally useful ally, doesn’t mean you want to unify with them.
the dictatorship is a communist one
A dictatorship of the proletariat and a dictatorship of the bourgeois are actually the same thing, you idiot, you imbecile.
I was considering putting scare quotes around “communism”, but refrained in order to avoid an argument about what is and isn’t really communism. Yet here we are. So much for left unity! ;D
Of course. Real Communism is everything except AES. As soon as leftists begin making any kind of public policy decisions, they become reactionaries because the anti-communists in the US media told me so.
We’re already seeing this in the NYC Mayoral Race and Mamdani isn’t even elected yet.
I’m anti authoritarian and anti right. Tankies are leftists that I have no interest in getting along with. They are just as excited to be holding the gun in this comic
Yes, leninists are nominally on the left. Nominally. However throughout history most similar ideologies have consistently exterminated executed and oppressed everyone that ever disagreed with them. Allies or not. Left or right. Which makes them authoritarian and untrustworthy first. Left at their convenience.
As an anarchist, I have no major beef with actual communist. While I will disagree a lot with demsoc or socdems. I have no issue allying with them where we agree. Because even though we disagree, on the things we agree on. I know they are just as committed, and won’t turn on us the moment it’s convenient.
But I’m all too familiar with the type that behave like the comic. I think we all are. Anyone using the term shitlib or blue maga for instance.
As an anarchist
You aren’t an anarchist though, you’ve never actually expressed anarchists beliefs: you’re a hard core DNC supporter and liberal. There’s a reason your main complaint is people using terms like “shitlib” and “bluemaga”, because those are what you are.
I do it all the time. Done it several places in this thread even. Though lying and dishonesty from a joke like you. Who’s shitty hot takes are regularly posted on and laughed at in many communities. That’s completely on brand.
For every weak and tepid bit of support I’ve ever given the DNC during the presidential election. I could give you 10 to 13 calling them out. Because I do it all the time. However terminally online little trolls like yourself aren’t interested in facts or reality. And your disapproval is a badge of honor.
I do it all the time.
I literally never see it, but I do often see you saying things that are explicitly incompatible with anarchism.
Who’s shitty hot takes are regularly posted on and laughed at in many communities
“We make fun of you in our secret tree house that you aren’t allowed in” is not the sick burn you think.
I could give you 10 to 13 calling them out.
And for every one tepid, qualified criticism of the democrats you offer, I could you give 20 of you viciously tearing into the left for not supporting the democrats enough.
However terminally online little trolls like yourself aren’t interested in facts or reality. And your disapproval is a badge of honor.
Oh my god, go back to Reddit you insufferable dweeb. You’re really doing the “facts and logic” bullshit?
Exactly, all authoritarians (far left/far right) can suck a big fat one. They are always the best boot lickers.
Yes, Unity cannot be enforced. Unity can only coexist with consent. And those that would violate consent to enforce Unity actually despise both.
This person has previously advocated for hanging people for treason.
They would also tell me to my (virtual) face that they think my country has no right to exist, so that too makes it pretty hard to have any sort of productive collaboration.
No communist thinks any country has a “right to exist”.
This “anti-authoritarian” recently called for mass execution of their enemies.
Me? Is this because I said the SS should have been executed?
Are you now going to argue that that isn’t an authoritarian act because it was justified? Because, guess what, every “authoritarian” believes their actions are justified
Protecting Jewish and other minorities rights to live and safety is not an authoritarian act. It is in fact protecting the most vulnerable’s liberty. Anti authorization is not lawless. You are a very weird little person and I have no interest in trying to convince you Nazis are bad. I hope you can figure that one out on your own
I believe what @BrainInABox@lemmy.ml is getting at is that all states are authoritarian, and that there are positive and negative uses of authority. Executing SS officers is a positive use of authority. Since all states are an extension of the ruling class, it is better for that ruling class to be the proletariat, rather than the bourgeoisie, and for the proletariat to use its authority to oppress the bourgeoisie and gradually sublimate capital until all production is collectivized, class ceases to exist, and by extension the state withers away, leaving only administration, management, etc.
No I’m pretty sure they pulled something from another post to try to misrepresent it because they’re a bitter terminally online loser. That is a very generous interpretation though
I’m saying it because I’ve seen them make the same argument, as I have done myself, in different ways.
This is what happens when hyper-individuality becomes a core of your (western) society. It’s also a byproduct that inadvertently benefits the ruling class. They want division and leftist pockets are already doing it themselves in a lot of cases. Purity tests can fracture communities and needlessly push away potential allies.
It’s why I tend to quote Fred Hampton often. He correctly understood that it was a working class versus ruling class situation and that arguing amongst ourselves was detrimental to organizing. It’s a vertical fight and horizontal attacks waste energy. You can still point out errors in what a comrade says. Criticism, self-criticism, and debate are all components of democratic centralism.
The problem lies when one particular set of “leftists” thinks the best way foward is to have a literal capitalist state with a red flag and execute anyone who could even be a minimal obstacle to that.
The more nuanced communists understand that the past doesn’t have to define the future 1:1, but they also have the uphill battle of people agreeing with everything they say, until they actually mention the word “communism,” thanks to decades of propaganda.
It’s not only decades of propaganda.
Whether you like it or not, but many countries have suffered enourmosly (genocides, extermination of local language and culture) under the banner of regimes that claimed to represent communist ideals and allegedly aimed to develop a communist society.
I was born in the tail end of the USSR, so I honestly don’t really remember it. But from the stories of my parents and relatives, it was trash.
You can’t just dismiss the association between the USSR and attempts at achieving communism.
I’ve talked to a handful of people that lived through that era in Russia and none of them had positive things to say. They were all working class folks. I trust their judgment over someone on the internet, and I don’t get sucked into team sports identity type shit. We can pick and choose the good ideas and acknowledge the shitty ones.
That’s my point. USSR and the CCP have arguably permanently damaged the communism “brand”.
And you talked to russians, things were even worse for nations occupied by the russians.
It took centuries before any liberal or democratic project managed to produce a society that wasn’t far more brutal than the USSR. Yet you don’t see people going around saying “the French Revolution permanently damaged the Democratic brand!”
Because the French Revolution didnt permanently damage democracy as a political system. And democratic system in one form or another existed for millennia before the French Revolution.
The USSR and China under the CCP permanently discredited (without any chance of rehabilitation) communism as legitimate ideology.
No one in their right mind would want anything to do with communism. It’s like asking for genocide, mass killings, gulags, lack of free expression and poverty. No one is going to do that.
And I not saying this in the polemical sense used by pro-crime/pro-corruption Americans (“this is such a socialist shirhole”).
Trying to decouple the term and core ideas from the past actions is going to be an uphill battle forever. That requires imagination and forward thinking, but you have the folks dunking on it because of the atrocities carried out under it, and the folks on the other side that have managed to embrace those parts so hard that they can no longer sea reason or find nuance.
Yes it is exactly like how antichrists have co-opted the term Christian. For many if it ever was, it will never be clean again in their lifetime unless there’s some massive Purge. They never were Christians and, will never be christians. But as long as they’re allowed to be the face of Christianity it’s only going to hurt it as a whole. At least more than it already hurts itself.
Yes, we need a “brand” that builds upon the ideals (and some of the theory) of communism/Marxism while taking in account both history (e.g. even something as simple as democratic governance being non-negotiable) and the “spirit” and challenges of our times.
Under capitalism you can criticize capitalism. under communism, dissension is met with punishment.
If not death, or being institutionalised.
But you can also get institutionalised or killed under capitalism too if you say the wrong things (China, Russia, the Gulf States).
While you might not be killed in the US, but you can be harassed via lawsuits or deported to a foreign internment camp if you say the wrong things.
“claimed” and “allegedly” being the keywords here
I am aware of that. I’m just like… I see a lot of “leftists” that think “successful socialist projects” have to replicate the USSR 100% with everything good and bad about it mixed in. If your definition of “building a better world” is killing or enslaving people for disagreeing with you, you are not a leftist, you’re a nazbol.
And like, the USSR clearly does not exist anymore, and for most of its existence it made a joke out of socialist principles.
We’ve also seen years of what Russia in its current state and Putin are capable of. None of it is good. Hell, when I was more active in activist circles I was in very close proximity to a Russian-driven disinformation campaign in 2016 that used and exploited leftist organizations for its own benefit. It wasn’t some “hey, we’re friends” situation; it was the Kremlin using and disposing of people to destabilize in the same way the US and western powers have for decades themselves. Hitching your wagon to other political powers is a shit idea. There is a reason I don’t trust any politician.
I was in very close proximity to a Russian-driven disinformation campaign in 2016 that used and exploited leftist organizations for its own benefit.
How did you uncover this information?
Articles started popping up and an activist group near me, as well as a couple others across the country, were also involved. A Russian very obviously associated with the Kremlin, was flowing money to these orgs under the guise of a common goal and alignment. Their ultimate goal was to sow chaos during election time and to take votes away from other candidates. It was US-esque tactics on US soil.
I didn’t uncover anything and was merely volunteering with one of the groups when I could, but it was one of those “oh fuck” moments when I saw articles involving the group I was working with.
Articles started popping up
What do you mean “articles”? Articles where? Based on what?
an activist group near me, as well as a couple others across the country, were also involved
Involved in what? How did you determine this?
A Russian very obviously associated with the Kremlin
What do mean “very obviously associated with the Kremlin”? How did you determine this?
Their ultimate goal was to sow chaos during election time and to take votes away from other candidates.
Again, how did you determine this?
it was one of those “oh fuck” moments
What was? What actually was found?
Well… How hard to they want to use that word?
Even more because if everybody is actually agreeing, that means they didn’t wander anywhere outside of the “Social Democracy” boundaries of communism, and don’t need to use the generic label that fascists stole long ago.
I don’t care what someone calls themselves as long as they oppose fascism and understand that the only place where Pedophiles are welcome is the inside of a wood chipper.
I can understand the emotional impulse, but i would change it to “active pedophiles”. They can’t really choose what arouses them, but they can choose not to act on those impulses - that is what counts. This distinction is important, because i would very much prefer if inactive pedophiles (who probably beat themselves up constantly, leading to emotional instability, depression and therefore a higher risk of becoming active) had easy access to ressources to help them stay inactive like therapy or the equivalent to Narcotics Anonymous.
