Same. He saw *gestures broadly* coming and tried to prevent it as best as he could. Whatโs that Greek legend about an oracle whose catastrophic prophecies always come true, but theyโre never believed and always blamed for them?
Bernie is basically a modern day version of Bernstein. Though a century apart, both peddle reformism as a political pacifier, diverting energy from the radical systemic change required to dismantle capitalism. Their approaches, while superficially progressive, function as ideological traps, diverting energy from serious movements necessary to upend capitalism.
Bernstein was a leading figure in Germany's SPD, and he famously rejected Marxist revolutionary praxis in favor of evolutionary socialism. He argued capitalism could be gradually reformed into socialism through parliamentary means, dismissing the inevitability of class conflict. He neutralized the SPD's revolutionary potential, channeling working-class demands into compromises like wage increases or limited welfare programs that left capitalist hierarchies intact. As Rosa Luxemburg warned in Reform or Revolution, Bernstein's strategy reduced socialism to a "mild appendage" of liberalism, sapping the working class of its transformative agency.
Likewise, the political project that Bernie pursued mirrors Bernstein's trajectory. While Sanders critiques inequality and corporate power, his platform centers on social democratic reforms, such as Medicare for All, tuition-free college, a $15 minimum wage, that treat symptoms instead of root causes. By framing electoral victory as the primary objective, Sanders diverted a what could have been a millions strong grassroots movement into the Democratic Party, an institution structurally committed to maintaining capitalism. His campaigns absorbed activist energy into phone banking and voter outreach, rather than building durable, extra-parliamentary power such as workplace organizations, tenant unions, and so on.
When Sanders conceded to Hillary Clinton and later Joe Biden, his base dissolved into disillusionment or shifted focus to lesser-evilism. Without autonomous structures to sustain pressure, the movement's momentum evaporated similarly to how the SPD was integrated into Weimar Germany's capitalist state. However, even if his agenda were enacted, it would exist within a neoliberal framework. Much like FDR's New Deal coexisted with Jim Crow, imperial plunder, and union busting. Reforms within the system are always contingent on their utility to capital, and their purpose is demobilize the workers.
A meaningful challenge to capitalism requires a long-term strategy that combines direct action, mass education, and dual power structures. Imagine if Sanders had urged supporters to unionize workplaces, organize rent strikes, and create community mutual aid networks alongside electoral engagement. Movements like MAS in Bolivia, show how grassroots power can pressure institutions while cultivating revolutionary consciousness. Instead, his campaign became a referendum on his candidacy, leaving his followers adrift after his defeat.
Bernstein and Sanders, despite their intentions, exemplify the dead end of reformism. Their projects mistake tactical concessions for strategic victory, ignoring capitalism's relentless drive to commodify and co-opt. In the end, the reformist approach ends up midwifing full blown fascism. By channeling energy into parliamentary politics, the SPD deprioritized mass mobilization. Unions and workers were encouraged to seek concessions rather than challenge capitalist power structures. This eroded class consciousness and left the working class unprepared to confront the nazi threat.
When the nazis gained momentum, the SPD clung to legalistic strategies, refusing to support strikes or armed resistance against Hitler. Their faith in bourgeois democracy blinded them to the existential threat of fascism, which exploited economic despair and nationalist resentment. In the end, SPD famously allied with the nazis against the communists.
The "progressive" wing of the Democratic Party is following in the footsteps of the SPDโs reformist trajectory. While advocating for policies like Medicare for All or climate action, it operates within capitalist constraints, undermining radical change and inadvertently fueling right-wing extremism. The Democrats absorb grassroots energy into electoral campaigns while their reliance on corporate donors ensures watered-down policies that fuel disillusionment.
The SPD's reformism actively enabled fascism by disorganizing the working class and legitimizing capitalist violence. Similarly, the Democratic Party's commitment to pragmatic incrementalism sustains a system that breeds reactionary backlash. Trump is a direct product of these policies. We're just watching history on repeat here.
Maybe for those who wish to support bombing foreigners while funnelling the military industry into their state.
Motherfucker parades around like he's antiwar because he voted "nay" on a single ballot initiative that was already a shoo-in and inconsequential for him to vote against. Literally a couple months later, he voted to further the funding for those military actions.
Bernie has had blood on his hands for 30-40 years now and continues to try to wash it off with more blood.
Someone who pretends to support the poor at home while simultaneously supporting bombing and invading the poor elsewhere sure is a role model, just not a good one.
Bernie has been pretty shitty on foreign policy. He supported the NATO bombing of Belgrade for 78 straight days, which is why he fell out of favor with his socialist friend, Michael Parenti.
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The right side is just liberalism. This is what happens when the left and liberal are melded together in everyday western society/language and the water is muddied. Itโs intended. It confuses people, overwhelms them, and leads them to use the apparatus that the ruling class has placed in front of us to circumvent true working class interests and movements. Itโs why liberals scoff at potential allies (leftists), instead of seeing the truth: a unified working class.
.ml people will stand by people resisting the imperialism of one country, and then condemn people resisting the imperialism of another, and still won't realize they are effectively nationalists.
Liberals will invent fanfiction about Marxists before genuinely trying to engage with Lenin's analysis of Imperialism or attempt to have a genuine conversation about it.
Even in Stalinโs time there was collective leadership. The Western idea of a dictator within the Communist setup is exaggerated. Misunderstandings on that subject are caused by lack of comprehension of the real nature and organization of the Communist power structure. Stalin, although holding wide powers, was merely the captain of a team and it seems obvious that Khrushchev will be the new captain.
A lot of the cold war propaganda about the USSR turned out to be bullshit, as contemporary Western academic historians will tell you, including Domenico Losurdo.
Karl Marx died an anarchist.
This is laughably false by simply reading what Marx actually wrote.
Even if it were true that Marx threw out his entire lifeโs work and became an anarchist on his deathbed, how did the Paris Commune turn out? Why has no anarchist society lasted more than a few months before collapsing from within, or from without by capitalist/imperialist forces? Anarchism has not and can not succeed in the world we presently live in, if for no other reason than they cannot defend themselves against the imperialist forces of the monopoly capitalists who want to profit from everything everywhere.
But a real socialism, it is argued, would be controlled by the workers themselves through direct participation instead of being run by Leninists, Stalinists, Castroites, or other ill-willed, power-hungry, bureaucratic cabals of evil men who betray revolutions. Unfortunately, this โpure socialismโ view is ahistorical and nonfalsifiable; it cannot be tested against the actualities of history. It compares an ideal against an imperfect reality, and the reality comes off a poor second. It imagines what socialism would be like in a world far better than this one, where no strong state structure or security force is required, where none of the value produced by workers needs to be expropriated to rebuild society and defend it from invasion and internal sabotage.
The pure socialistsโ ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.
The pure socialists had a vision of a new society that would create and be created by new people, a society so transformed in its fundaments as to leave little opportunity for wrongful acts, corruption, and criminal abuses of state power. There would be no bureaucracy or self-interested coteries, no ruthless conflicts or hurtful decisions. When the reality proves different and more difficult, some on the Left proceed to condemn the real thing and announce that they โfeel betrayedโ by this or that revolution.
I think that report wasnโt an honest assessment but rather the cold war talking points to be used for cold war propaganda. The CIA is as much in the job of disinformation as it is in information. Contemporary Western academic historians, having access to declassified US & USSR documents from the time, have published accounts that put these cold war cartoon villain narratives to bed.
This is a book from written by Professor Grover Furr that goes through and Thoroughly debunks all of the Anti-Communist Myths and Accusations that were made in...
No, lol. Marx wanted a fully publicly owned and planned economy free of class antagonisms, Anarchists want decentralized networks of communes. These are very different systems with very different analysis.
Socialism in One Country is correct, Trotsky wanted to abandon building Socialism essentially and just keep trying to do revolutions elsewhere. The correct path is to not abandon building Socialism, while still supporting Socialist movements elsewhere.
You have to be together to be divided. I don't consider the people that have caused or enabled all of the suffering in the US to be united with the working class, personally.
I think unity can only be achieved through a genuine alliance in values and methods. Liberals, fundamentally, disagree on what the prime issue is and how to fix it. Marxists and Anarchists, despite having different goals and methods, are at least aligned in opposition to Capitalism and Imperialism and can work together. Liberals support Capitalism and therefore, intentionally or not, support its Imperialism, so any feigned resistance towards the atrocities of the US Empire rings hollow coming from Liberals.
I don't know what you mean by "pure," nor what value that would have. If Leftists seek to establish some form of Socialism, and Liberals wish to perpetuate and maybe tweak the current system just a bit, then these people are never going to be able to meaningfully work together. "Purity" has nothing to do with it, and never has.
Can you elaborate in any way? I thought I gave a fairly well-thought out response to why division exists between Leftists and Liberals in the first place, and you responded with vague character assassinations. I don't know what to make of this, really, it just seems silly.
Unity means Vote Blue no Matter Who, unless theyโre to the left of the center-right, in which case we spare no expense or moral compunction to primary the fuck out of them.
My dear fellow user, there is no need to be so defensive. No one is going to kill you or shame you because you express your views. I and many others here may even be convinced by you. Your opinion does matter, and so does you, so, there is no need to disregard someone open to discussion just because you diverge in something. If you don't want to discuss on something, there is always the option to not give these quick-witted responses, saying few words and assuming positions from "the enemy" that the person has never said. No one here is your "enemy".
If you really think u/Cowbee is wrong, and wish for other people to understand you, articulate your answers. Say in a comprehensible way WHY he is wrong, instead of making arguments like "oh yes because my opinion is shit and you are the only pure socialist" or some ironic weak shit like that. We are (mostly) all adults, there is no need to engage in childish behavior, and you should not expect that we will understand what you mean by saying "his definition is wrong" without saying what "definition".
If you really think that there is no convincing anyone here, because we are all hopeless mfs or smth, just stop arguing and save yourself the time and sanity.
I think that condescending users who only care to label and deride aren't worth talking to, so I finally blocked that guy. It's unfortunate that his attitude is so common.
what attitude? cowbee has been nothing but polite in every reply to you. and what do you mean by label and deride? it's as though you're replying to the wrong comments because none of this makes any sense.
The post's existence is what I'm talking about; that user spends their life hating "liberals" and assigning that label to people they've exchanged a sentence with. I'm done here, you can stop responding now.
Funny you put quotes on the word liberal. You know words have meanings and definitions right? I know many people don't bother to check a term's meaning and end up miss using it, but that does not detract from the fact that the word still has meaning.
Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, the right to private property and equality before the law. Liberals espouse various and often mutually warring views depending on their understanding of these principles but generally support private property, market economies, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion. Liberalism is frequently cited as the dominant ideology of modern history.
Note that liberalism defends the right to private property (AKA Capitalism). (Also, private property and personal property are two different things.)
I never once tried to engage them in the way they wanted. I've been really close to blocking them (finally did) several times because fuck tankies. Yes there I said it, I used a label. Because that's all I was afforded. Y'all don't need to get so butthurt about being self righteous. The fact that you are is telling.
I got blocked for asking what you mean? I just wanted to hear what you were genuinely trying to ask about, but guess that doesn't matter anymore because you can't read this.
Exactly! Marxists, anarchists, and leninists are alllies. Statist liberals on the other hand, whether they be social democratic corporate capitalists or stalinistic state capitalists, will always try to infiltrate and divide the communist movement.
It's just like this motte-and-bailey meme. The implied position is that the communists were wrong to tell the Americans to vote against fascism. The strong position, which is claimed to be the only position when it meets resistance, is that it's only against capitalist liberals.
Yes, itโs hard for them to understand because of a lifetime of anti-socialist & pro-capitalist propaganda, propaganda which most of them arenโt even aware of, because for them itโs just common sense.
Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist, one of the founders and leaders of the Italian Communist Party. In 1926, he was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini's fascist...
Capitalism is so all-consuming it's like water to fish. "Capitalism" becomes synonymous with words like economy, markets, trade, laws, and government. It no longer is an ideology, but an immutable force in the universe.
I'll say it again, in the United States the term "liberal" is used to refer to liberal social ideas NOT liberal economic ideas. To the average US citizen left and liberal are synonyms. This doesn't mean your definition isn't correct for academics and the entire rest of the world. But this meme, and this left vs liberal argument for this post, are US based.
We know that, which is why weโre trying to deprogram Americans from the Orwellian newspeak theyโve been mistaught so they can develop class consciousness.
I'm not sure how colloquial vocabulary usage prevents developing class consciousness. I'd potentially argue refusing to accept the evolution of language and refusing to communicate to people in the terms they use and understand inhibits said deprogramming. Again very US centric in this definition but it's who needs deprogramming.
Sometimes the evolution of language isnโt so much organic as it is a political project, such as a century of red scares and socialist purges.
Americans believe Sanders when he calls himself a socialist because theyโve lost a vocabulary for socialism itself. And they think Sandersโ centrism is โthe left,โ because the Overton window has shifted so far right that there is no left left.
We canโt simply use their terms, because their terminology is both muddled and lacking.
Sometimes the evolution of language isnโt so much organic as it is a political project, such as a century of red scares and socialist purges.
Ok. But regardless of the cause, organic or political project, it doesn't change the fact that the language has moved on correct?
We canโt simply use their terms, because their terminology is both muddled and lacking.
But there's the rub. You/we ARE using their terms and the message is muddled and lacking BECAUSE OF the difference in perceived definitions. And as the past couple decades have shown there is zero chance of getting the American people to learn things, or unlearn as the case may be.
I assume very few people this far down a thread into a political discussion, on Lemmy, don't know what the Overton windowS are and how fucked the US is because of the current far right position on the left/right scales. I find it lacking and dislike it's libertarian origins. We are even now discussing the difference of a word being used for social vs economic ideas and these two scales do not necessarily overlap.
~~What? That's literally the opposite of what I'm saying... I'm saying words can have multiple meanings depending on context. But the point of this was how does "liberal" having a different colloquial definition from how op was using it have anything do with "developing class consciousness" which can be done regardless of this single word?~~
But anyway liberalism is the ideology of capitalism. The artificial differences created between conservatives and progressists is just a smoke screen to create a false debate and prevent from challenging capitalism, switching the enemy from the rulling capitalist class to the person next door with different views
This is also wrong. US liberals are just as anticommunist as their further right counterparts, and their "social liberalism" goes only so far as not to infringe on capitalist "freedom" to do whatever they can get away with. Hence their hatred of homeless / the poor, communists, and colonized peoples.
As the saying goes, US liberals are against every genocide except the current one. Hence their staunch support for Israel's genocide of Palestinians.
Just realized were in .ml my guy. These guys have thrown the brick on trapos crazy koolaid jammer and only want to circlejerk about liberals and their infallible god kings stalin and marx
based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed
Okay buddy. You guys just want to twist a good ideology into a wedge issue. The only thing vaguely "capitalist" about a liberal is the belief that the government isnt allowed to seize your shit unlawfully. The right to own property comes way after personal liberty in my book. That means billionaires dont get a pass for abusing the populace.
Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, the right to private property and equality before the law.
Personal property is property owned by a person for their own use, i.e. their possessions. Examples include one's toothbrush, car, phone etc. This is not to be confused...
That line says nothing about capitalism. Pro ownership? That is a tenet of some branches of leftism. I dont agree with corporations or the state having a monopoly on land ownership. Though the government cant come and take an individuals shit for no reason. Being an abusive billionaire though has an asterisk in the foot notes.
Though I'd argue that anyone owning shit comes a large and wide second or 3rd to human rights.
philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed
No, itโs anti-pinkwashing. Itโs anti-liberals failing to protect the vulnerable yet again. What have we gained since the pussyhat movement but the loss of reproductive rights under Bidenโs watch?
Officially named Pussyhats, they were first worn symbolically at the 2017 US Women's March in Washington DC. Created by Krista Suh and Jayna Zweiman (who met at an LA knitting club), the hat was made in direct response to grab em by the pussy remark from tdump. The original idea was for marchers to knit, sew, or crochet hats to create a visual statement โa sea of pink. "If everyone at the march wears a pink hat, the crowd will be a sea of pink, showing that we stand together, united," reads the introduction to the knitting pattern on the Pussyhat Project website. The actual hats were created by people who could not attend physically, but wanted to show their support.
Since then, some have come out against it as any one symbol isn't as all encompassing as they would like, but none have yet given or inspired a good replacement for such a strong show of women's solidarity.
I'm really struggling to find a party that i fully agree with.
For one, i like true leftist ideals, but i don't like guns, so i guess the left parts of the image doesn't apply to me.
On the other side, i think the long-standing support for Ukraine is an atrocious mistake, because it prolongs the suffering unnecessarily (after all, the uproar in Ukraine is mostly an CIA-inspired action after all i believe, and diplomatic solutions were not sought). But shitting on that pink hat (which is clearly a symbol for queer/trans people) is just unacceptable. just leave the people live their own private life as they want. What's so difficult about that?
Edit: as per the comments, i stand corrected and am sorry for my half-assed take. i'll leave it up anyways, because i guess it's a chance to learn for any reader.
its time to read theory. you are currently at the utopian anarchist stage. which is a step in a better direction, but ultimately irrational.
you need to better understand that the people in the image [conveniently] on the left incorporated violence because they lived under the constant threat of deadly violence. 99% of the violence was directed at them. Fred Hampton was executed by the police not long after that picture of him was taken.
It's time to read theory, comrades! As Lenin says, "Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle." Reading theory helps us identify the core contradictions within modern society, analyze their trajectories, and gives us the tools to break free. Marxism-Leninism is broken into 3 major components, as noted by Lenin in his pamphlet The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism: | Audiobook
Dialectical and Historical Materialism
Critique of Capitalism along the lines of Marx's Law of Value
Advocacy for Revolutionary and Scientific Socialism
As such, I created the following list to take you from no knowledge whatsoever of Leftist theory, and leave you with a strong understanding of the critical fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism in an order that builds up as you read. Let's get started!
Section I: Getting Started
What the heck is Communism, anyways? For that matter, what is fascism?
Breaks down fascism and its mortal enemy, Communism, as well as their antagonistic relationship. Understanding what fascism is, where and when it rises, why it does so, and how to banish it forever is critical. Parenti also helps debunk common anti-Communist myths, from both the "left" and the right, in a quick-witted writing style. This is also an excellent time to watch the famous speech.
Section II: Historical and Dialectical Materialism
By far my favorite primer on Marxist philosophy. By understanding Dialectical and Historical Materialism first, you make it easier to understand the rest of Marxism-Leninism. Don't be intimidated!
Further reading on Dialectical and Historical Materialism, but crucially introduces the why of Scientific Socialism, explaining how Capitalism itself prepares the conditions for public ownership and planning by centralizing itself into monopolist syndicates. This is also where Engels talks about the failures of previous "Utopian" Socialists.
Section III: Political Economy
That's right, it's time for the Law of Value and a deep-dive into Imperialism. If we are to defeat Capitalism, we must learn it's mechanisms, tendencies, contradictions, and laws.
Best taken as a pair, these essays simplify the most important parts of the Law of Value. Marx is targetting those not trained in economics here, but you might want to keep a pen and some paper to follow along if you are a visual person.
Absolutely crucial and the most important work for understanding the modern era and its primary contradictions. Marxist-Leninists understand that Imperialism is the greatest contradiction in the modern era, which cascades downward into all manner of related contradictions. Knowing what dying Capitalism looks like, and how it behaves, means we can kill it.
Section IV: Revolutionary and Scientific Socialism
Can we defeat Capitalism at the ballot box? What about just defeating fascism? What about the role of the state?
If Marxists believed reforming Capitalist society was possible, we would be the first in line for it. Sadly, it isn't possible, which Luxemburg proves in this monumental writing.
Excellent refutation of revisionists and Social Democrats who think the State can be reformed, without needing to be replaced with one that is run by the workers, in their own interests.
Section V: Intersectionality and Solidarity
The revolution will not be fought by atomized individuals, but by an intersectional, international working class movement. Intersectionality is critical, because it allows different marginalized groups to work together in collective interest, unifying into a broad movement.
Critical reading on understanding misogyny, transphobia, enbyphobia, pluralphobia, and homophobia, as well as how to move beyond the base subject of "gender." Uses the foundations built up in the previous works to analyze gender theory from a Historical Materialist perspective.
De-colonialism is essential to Marxism. Without having a strong, de-colonial, internationalist stance, we have no path to victory nor a path to justice. Fanon analyzes Colonialism's dehumanizing effects, and lays out how to form a de-colonial movement, as well as its necessity.
Solidarity and intersectionality are the key to any social movement. When different social groups fight for liberation together along intersectional lines, the movements are emboldened and empowered ever-further.
Section VI: Putting it into Practice!
It's not enough to endlessly read, you must put theory to practice. That is how you can improve yourself and the movements you support. Touch grass!
Mao wrote simply and directly, targeting peasant soldiers during the Revolutionary War in China. This pair of essays equip the reader with the ability to apply the analytical tools of Dialectical Materialism to their every day practice, and better understand problems.
Congratulations, you completed your introductory reading course!
With your new understanding and knowledge of Marxism-Leninism, here is a mini What is to be Done? of your own to follow, and take with you as practical advice.
Get organized. Join a Leftist org, find solidarity with fellow comrades, and protect each other. The Dems will not save you, it is up to us to protect ourselves. The Party for Socialism and Liberation and Freedom Road Socialist Organization both organize year round, every year, because the battle for progress is a constant struggle, not a single election. See if there is a chapter near you, or start one! Or, see if there's an org you like more near you and join it.
Read theory. Don't think that you are done now! Just because you have the basics, doesn't mean you know more than you do. If you have not investigated a subject, don't speak on it! Don't speak nonsense, but listen!
Aggressively combat white supremacy, misogyny, queerphobia, and other attacks on marginalized communities. Cede no ground, let nobody be forgotten or left behind. There is strength in numbers, when one marginalized group is targeted, many more are sure to follow.
Be industrious, and self-sufficient. Take up gardening, home repair, tinkering. It is through practice that you elevate your problem-solving capabilities. Not only will you improve your skill at one subject, but your general problem-solving muscles get strengthened as well.
Learn self-defense. Get armed, if practical. Be ready to protect yourself and others. Liberals will not save us, we must save each other.
Be persistent. If you feel like a single water droplet against a mountain, think of canyons and valleys. Oh, how our efforts pile up! With consistency, every rock, boulder, even mountain, can be drilled through with nothing but steady and persistent water droplets.
"Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent."
Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) is a national organization of revolutionaries fighting for socialism in the United States. Our home is in the working class.
Do you really need to read volumes of theory to grasp what is fundamentally a rather straightforward concept?
Leftism shouldnโt be locked behind intellectual elitism.
TL;DR the capitalist state will use threats of violence/actual violence against threats to capitalism which includes those who stand for progressive ideals. Leftists believe this is a justification to use violence against the state.
There's merit to your question. Ultimately, as someone who largely hadn't taken theory seriously until the last couple of years, I think theory is not only useful, but necessary. There are good comrades who do good work without theory, I don't want to discredit that. However, theory has had a profound impact on my understanding of history, tactics, and life itself. Theory is important because our predecessors have given their lives discovering and handing down the lessons they've learned.
From Marx, who dedicated his entire life to discovering the mechanisms of Capitalism to give the Proletariat the tools to surpass it, to Lenin, who analyzed Capitalism's monstrous evolution to Imperialism, to Gramsci who spent the later years of his life rotting in prison and reflecting on Marxian teachings, to Politzer who stood against the Nazis and taught Parisan workers Dialectical and Historical Materialism before being captured and executed for his Jewish heritage and Communist alliance, to modern theoreticians such as Losurdo, Parenti, and the many Communists who dedicated their lives to the working class. Revolutionaries like Mao, Fidel, Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Lenin, and more all have unique lessons to tell from their experiences in their existence. People like Mao, Deng, Xi, Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, and more have helped build and design the largest economy in the world. What can we learn from them? What should we copy, what should change?
We owe it to them to learn from the lessons they dedicated their lives to teaching us. We have a duty to humanity to move beyond the wretched system of Capitalism before the planet is destroyed by Climate Change for the pursuit of profit. We owe it to our predecessors to continue the work they started. We owe it to our successors to use the best tools we can to make their struggles easier. We owe it to ourselves, so that we have a future.
Theory is a tool. If you don't take every advantage you can against the most heartless, greedy, brutal Empire in history, do you really care at all? If you refuse to truly learn your enemy, in all its complicated facets of expropriation, or learn the successful tactics and strategies for overcoming them, or learn from the missteps of our predecessors or the correct actions they've taken, we will not have a decisive victory.
Not volumes. As you say, a little can go a long way. But rather than relearn the lessons of history from first principles, engaging with writings from people who have already seriously grappled with these things is the only efficient way to wrap oneโs mind around many different major factors working simultaneously in the material world.
But shitting on that pink hat (which is clearly a symbol for queer/trans people) is just unacceptable
That isn't what that is a symbol for at all. It was a knit hat made for an ineffective Trump protest in 2017. Actually queer and trans people found the hats exclusionary. So did non white people whose genitalia aren't that color. The entire pussy-hat movement was feel-good liberal activity that accomplished nothing and made no difference. Much like the liberal "support" for Ukraine.
but i donโt like guns
This is extreme privilege. None of us like guns just to like guns. Brother Malcolm was being threatened with his life daily and his home was firebombed then he was assassinated, he was trying to protect himself. Fred Hampton was literally murdered by the police. The Zapatistas and Palestinians don't resort to violence because they "like it" either, they are targets of the state that act with violence on them and both have learned that civil disobedience has its limits. Sacco and Vanzetti were anarchists that were executed by the state after being framed and falsely accused of a bombing, armed robbery and murder which the state of Massachusetts apologized for in 1977.
this is laughably utopian and ahistorical, i'm sorry but this is fantasy. There's a reason that the "violent" and "authoritarian" communists have actually won and seized power while the utopian eurocommies have never accomplished a single thing.
Your nation has never successfully had a revolution. They need to be listening and learning from those that have, following their example, and not trying to invent their own perfect (white) system from whole cloth
Thereโs a reason that the โviolentโ and โauthoritarianโ communists have actually won and seized power while the utopian eurocommies have never accomplished a single thing.
Well yeah i can tell you what the communists have achieved in the Sovjet Union, and that's 20 million people dead due to stalinistic terror. So much for "winning". No thank you.
Meanwhile, lots of european economies (and people!) have been doing well since after the second world war. Maybe they have accomplished something.
Life expectancy over doubled from the 30s to the 70s in the USSR. Literacy rates went from the 20s and 30s to 99.9%, above Western European and USian rates. Famine was ended by collectivization and industrialization in a country where famine was common under the Tsar. This same nation, barely industrializing at the start of the 20th century, beat the United States into space, and continued beating it with the first man and first woman in space.
Social Safety Nets expanded greatly. Healthcare and Education were free and high quality. Housing was incredibly affordable, and there was full employment. Abortion was not only legalized, but free. Women played a role even in the highest ranks of politics. The economy was democratized. 80% of the combat in World War 2 was on the Eastern Front, the Soviets defeated the Nazis.
Sadly, there were excess deaths, but 20 million people did not die, such a number comes from anti-communist myth-makers before the opening of the Soviet Archives. The numbers given by the Black Book of Communism include Nazis killed during World War 2, and use various other misdirections to grossly inflate the number of excess deaths. Were there excess deaths? Sadly, yes, and nobody denies this. However, when compared to contemporary peers like the British Empire who intentionally starved millions of Bengalis, the French who were colonizing Vietnam, Algeria, and more, or the United States who killed millions of Iraqis, Koreans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, and more, the USSR played a far more progressive role. From supporting Palestinian resistance against genocide, to helping China throw off their colonizers, to helping Algeria throw off the French, to helping Vietnam against the US Empire and French Colonialists, the Soviets played a far better role.
Wealth inequality went far down, whike GDP growth was constantly positive except during World War 2. It was one of the most rapidly growing economies in the 20th century.
Western Europe (and of course the US to a greater degree), to this day, relies on brutal expropriation of the Global South through outsourcing industry and brutal IMF loans. They have been doing well because they are Imperialists. To say they are doing well is to say the Trust Fund kid working at his father's investment firm is doing well, he does so on the backs of actual laborers and did not earn his vast wealth, but inhereted it from former and current Empire.
well i guess it's good for you to spit these facts but i gotta make my own judgement, and i can see the things around me, and saying "They have been doing well because they are Imperialists. To say they are doing well is to say the Trust Fund kid working at his fatherโs investment firm is doing well, he does so on the backs of actual laborers and did not earn his vast wealth, but inhereted it from former and current Empire." does not make me believe your point, just fyi
Colonization and now Imperialism have been the driving forces of Western European Economies for centuries. All of this sheer expropriation of wealth hasn't gone away in any capacity, the IMF still debt traps countries in Africa, Latin America, and other areas in the Global South. Especially during the latter 19th and early 20th centuries, countries like Britain, Germany, and France had industrialized to the point of monopolization, and a blending of financial and industrial Capital. This turned towards the Global South, seeking to export Capital to super-exploit for super-profits.
If you want to read about the origins of this system, the book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism is quite a quick read, written in the early 20th century (though it mentions many entities that exist today in the same forms, like Deutsche Bank). For modern analysis, Super-Imperialism by Hudson, though it is US based Western European Imperialism is intricately tied to US Imperialism.
It is a kayfabe democracy. It has only oligarchical management, not democratic representation. No matter who wins the elections the policies are predetermined. Rooting for Kamala over Trump is no different than rooting for The Undertaker in Wrestlemania.
It was, yeah. The US was going to implode and decline no matter which person was appointed by your oligarchy. You didn't vote for any of the corporate board members who control your society and government in November. You also didn't actually have a choice, in kayfabe democracy the results are predetermined, much like all the elections in authoritarian carceral states.
No, I strongly disagree that Harris would have all DEI removed, all black history everything paused for the military, etc. Harris was not going to push for more tax breaks for the ultra rich. The project 2025 agenda was not going to be pursued under Harris. You may not approve of the Harris agenda, but they are not remotely comparable except through an absolutist all or nothing lens. Claiming they are the same is absurd.
You are not understanding what I am saying. You do not live in a democracy. Harris had no chance of winning because your elections are fake. That is what I mean by results are predetermined, just like Wrestlemania. The US oligarchs fixed the elections during redistricting years before the election took place. During the ridiculous run up to the event nothing you did mattered. You live in a authoritarian oligarchy.
Those who didnโt vote, or voted third party, due to the pointless war in the middle east that involved war crimes just like every war I can think of since the Geneva Convention became a thing, that President Biden funded, did so in safe states that VP Harris won.
The makeup of the United States means that Republicans have an advantage in the Senate and therefore also the Electoral College.
Republicans gerrymander, Democrats half-heartedly gerrymander, since that is against the ideology of liberalism. This gives Republicans an edge in the House of Representatives as well.
The Republican advantage in the Senate is so great that the only way for Democrats to get a majority is to include neoliberal or conservative senators like Manchin, meaning progress is continuously stifled.
The Republicans are allowed to get away with stretching the rules, while the Democrats have to follow the rules at all times. Part of this, again, is due to adhering to liberal ideology, and part of it is due to the ruling class favoring Republicans. There has been a conservative majority in the Supreme Court since the 1980s. Democrats are controlled opposition, in that no matter how hard they try, they will never be able to enact meaningful change.
An actual left-wing candidate would not be liberal, as is the point of this post. Therefore, they would have no chance of winning the Democratic primary. That would force them to run as an independent or in a third party, and our system makes it almost impossible for a third party candidate to win, at least at the national level.
Yes, it is better to vote for a Democrat than a Republican, but it is much better to build grassroots support for leftism, which, shocker, is what leftists have been trying to do in the US for centuries. If anything, the leftists are doing the most to fight fascism, by trying to get rid of the US system of government that is biased towards the status quo, which by definition benefits the ruling class.
The problem with Solarpunk is that it isn't really grounded in theory, it's a vibe and an aesthetic, a hope for a better future but without any real binding ideology. It's easy to transform, like cottagecore being weaponized into upholding traditional gender roles.
Solar will absolutely be a huge part of the future, but getting there requires taking supremacy over Capital to go against the car and oil industries. This requires Socialism.
The term "tankie" was originally used by dissident MarxistโLeninists to describe members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who followed the party line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Specifically, it was used to distinguish party members who spoke out in defence of the Soviet use of tanks to suppress the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring, or who more broadly adhered to pro-Soviet positions.
The term was literally created by Marxists to insult the kind of person who wants to use tanks to suppress a worker's revolution. Tankies aren't communists. They're counterrevolutionaries who want to stop all progress made towards dissolving the state as Marx said.
We demand general elections by universal, secret ballot are held throughout the country to elect a new National Assembly, with all political parties participating. We demand that the right of workers to strike be recognised.
We demand complete revision of the norms operating in industry and an immediate and radical adjustment of salaries in accordance with the just requirements of workers and intellectuals. We demand a minimum living wage for workers.
So you're saying the revolution demanding minimum wage and the right to strike wasn't a worker's revolution? Are all tankies this right-wing or just you?
One of the biggest and most dangerous mistakes made by Communists is the idea that a revolution can be made by revolutionaries alone. On the contrary, to be successful, all serious revolutionary work requires that the idea that revolutionaries are capable of playing the part only of the vanguard of the truly virile and advanced class must be understood and translated into action.
- Lenin, 1922
It probably means they read Lenin and liked his ideas a lot better than Stalin's nonsense. Now, you were explaining how tankies oppose minimum wage and the right to strike?
To be clear, drag is calling Nazis and Nazi sympathizers "the advanced working class." Trying to twist Lenin into supporting fascism is incorrect, to say the least.
Moreover, Stalin was dead before 1956, this was Khrushchev.
drag asked for sources, was that just to waste my time? Read them. Here's another few excerpts:
Section from the book โThe Truth about Hungaryโ by Herbert Aptheker; a prominent figure in U.S. scholarly discourse in the 1940โs, and Marxist Historian. Written in 1957 it outlined what later would be confirmed by the bourgeois Western press:
"The special correspondent of the Yugoslav paper, Politika, (Nov. 13, 1956) describing the events of those days, said that the homes of Communists were marked with a white cross and those of Jews with a black cross, to serve as signs for the extermination squads. โThere is no longer any room for doubt,โ said the Yugoslav reporter, โit is an example of classic Hungarian fascism and of White Terror. The information,โ continued this writer, "coming from the provinces tells how in certain places Communists were having their eyes put out, their ears cut off, and that they were being killed in the most terrible ways."
"But the forces of reaction were rapidly consolidating their power and pushing forward on the top levels, while in the streets the blood of scores of massacred Communists, Jews, and progressives was flowing."
"Some of the reports reaching Warsaw from Budapest today caused considerable concern. These reports told of massacres of Communists and Jews by what were described as 'Fascist elements' ...." (N.Y. Times, Nov. 1. 1956)
"The evidence is conclusive that the entry of Soviet troops into Budapest stopped the execution of scores, perhaps thousands of Jews, for by the end of October and early November, anti-Semtic pogroms - hallmark of unbridled fascistic terror - were making their appearance, after an absence of some ten years, within Hungary."
"A correspondent of the Israeli newspaper Maariv (Tel Aviv) reported:
During the uprising a number of former Nazis were released from prison and other former Nazis came to Hungary from Salzburg . . . I met them at the border . . . I saw anti-Semitic posters in Budapest . . . On the walls, street lights, streetcars, you saw inscriptions reading: โDown with Jew Gero!โ โDown with Jew Rakosi!โ or just simply โdown with the Jews!โ
Leading rabbinical circles in New York received a cable early in November from corresponding circles in Vienna that โJewish blood is being shed by the rebels in Hungary.โ Very much later-in February, 1957-the World Jewish Congress reported that โanti-Semitic excesses occurred in more than twenty villages and smaller provincial towns during the October-November revolt.โ This occurred, according to this very conservative body, because โfascist and anti-Semitic groups had apparently seized the opportunity, presented by the absence of a central authority, to come to the surface.โ Many among the Jewish refugees from Hungary, the report continued, had fled from this anti-Semitic pogrom-like atmosphere (N.Y. Times, Feb. 15, 1957). This confirmed the earlier report made by the British Rabbi, R. Pozner, who, after touring refugee camps, declared that โthe majority of Jews who left Hungary did so for fear of the Hungarians and not the Russians.โ The Paris Jewish newspaper, Naye Presse, asserted that Jewish refugees in France claimed quite generally that Soviet soldiers had saved their lives."
drag does realize that the Hungarian counter-revolutionaries were working with literal Nazis, and were marking the doors of Jews and Communists, right? They were lynching people, and even freed Nazis from jail to help with the lynching. The "political parties" they wanted to be able to participate were not worker parties, but fascist ones.
This is genuinely what liberals often accuse "tankies" of doing: uncritically supporting movements based on nominally being progressive, despite in reality being highly reactionary. Further, Hungary wanted to get out of paying reparations for World War II, that was one of the biggest cruxes of the situation. Who did Hungary fight alongside in WWII, does drag remember?
Overall, when it comes to geopolitical enemies of the United States in particular, it would not be a bad idea to treat drag's current understanding with extreme skepticism until drag has investigated counter-sources as well. That doesn't mean the US always lies, in fact it frequently tells mostly the truth, but will distory either the quality or quantity of an event.
If they were capitalists, why didn't the demands of the student protesters say anything about capitalism? If the USSR allowed workers the right to strike, why were the students demanding it?
Read the sources drag asked for. What this was was a bourgeois supported counter-revolution that armed fascists that were doing pograms. The legitimacy of the demands immediately comes into question when drag understands that these were Nazi sympathizers. They wanted to allow fascist and Capitalist parties to dominate Hungary and wanted to get out of paying reparations for the damage they did as Nazis during World War II.
As for striking, it happened sometimes in the Soviet Union. Worker rights were much better there than in Western countries so it wasn't as common.
What the hell you talking about? These are all revolutionary heroes acting in self defense and promoting solidarity.
Calling Fanon a tankie is the most ridiculous thing I've read today. Try reading a book for once in your life. He talks about how violence psychologically harms the revolutionary more than it does the people they attack.
Malcolm X was protecting himself after being firebombed here.
Fred Hampton was a socialist and preached cross racial solidarity and black power as a way of elevating black people into solidarity.
The Zapatistas are indigenous heroes who are resisting oppression of the state, who prefer civil disobedience but will act to protect themselves.
Sacco and Vanzetti were organizing a general strike and were framed then murdered by the state
Leila Khalid was separated from her family at 15 during the Palestinian expulsion and resisting Israeli occupation
Where the hell are the tankies in this pic? What are you people even talking about
Drag didn't accuse anyone in the picture of being a tankie. Drag thought the image was relevant to the discussion. As you can see in this thread, users of this community are defending the use of tanks to suppress the 1956 Hungarian revolution. Drag thought that tankies might like to comment on your meme, and called them tankies. And as everyone can see, drag was right.
drag is defending a fascist counter-revolution, and refused to read sources after asking for them. drag wasn't right about anything. You are defending people that lynched and massacred Jewish people and Communists.
Section from the book โThe Truth about Hungaryโ by Herbert Aptheker; a prominent figure in U.S. scholarly discourse in the 1940โs, and Marxist Historian. Written in 1957 it outlined what later would be confirmed by the bourgeois Western press:
"The special correspondent of the Yugoslav paper, Politika, (Nov. 13, 1956) describing the events of those days, said that the homes of Communists were marked with a white cross and those of Jews with a black cross, to serve as signs for the extermination squads. โThere is no longer any room for doubt,โ said the Yugoslav reporter, โit is an example of classic Hungarian fascism and of White Terror. The information,โ continued this writer, "coming from the provinces tells how in certain places Communists were having their eyes put out, their ears cut off, and that they were being killed in the most terrible ways."
"But the forces of reaction were rapidly consolidating their power and pushing forward on the top levels, while in the streets the blood of scores of massacred Communists, Jews, and progressives was flowing."
"Some of the reports reaching Warsaw from Budapest today caused considerable concern. These reports told of massacres of Communists and Jews by what were described as 'Fascist elements' ...." (N.Y. Times, Nov. 1. 1956)
"The evidence is conclusive that the entry of Soviet troops into Budapest stopped the execution of scores, perhaps thousands of Jews, for by the end of October and early November, anti-Semtic pogroms - hallmark of unbridled fascistic terror - were making their appearance, after an absence of some ten years, within Hungary."
"A correspondent of the Israeli newspaper Maariv (Tel Aviv) reported:
During the uprising a number of former Nazis were released from prison and other former Nazis came to Hungary from Salzburg . . . I met them at the border . . . I saw anti-Semitic posters in Budapest . . . On the walls, street lights, streetcars, you saw inscriptions reading: โDown with Jew Gero!โ โDown with Jew Rakosi!โ or just simply โdown with the Jews!โ
Leading rabbinical circles in New York received a cable early in November from corresponding circles in Vienna that โJewish blood is being shed by the rebels in Hungary.โ Very much later-in February, 1957-the World Jewish Congress reported that โanti-Semitic excesses occurred in more than twenty villages and smaller provincial towns during the October-November revolt.โ This occurred, according to this very conservative body, because โfascist and anti-Semitic groups had apparently seized the opportunity, presented by the absence of a central authority, to come to the surface.โ Many among the Jewish refugees from Hungary, the report continued, had fled from this anti-Semitic pogrom-like atmosphere (N.Y. Times, Feb. 15, 1957). This confirmed the earlier report made by the British Rabbi, R. Pozner, who, after touring refugee camps, declared that โthe majority of Jews who left Hungary did so for fear of the Hungarians and not the Russians.โ The Paris Jewish newspaper, Naye Presse, asserted that Jewish refugees in France claimed quite generally that Soviet soldiers had saved their lives."
Perhaps if the revolutionaries had been allowed to seize the government and impose order, they would have put down the opportunistic fascist movement. Instead, it seems at first glance that the USSR sent their tanks in to cause chaos, created the lawlessness that allowed the fascists to fester, and then took credit for solving the problem they themselves caused.
The fascist movement was the "revolution." If you're saying that the Soviets caused this by beating the Nazis and the Axis powers in World War II, you're siding with the Nazis.
Leading rabbinical circles in New York received a cable early in November from corresponding circles in Vienna that โJewish blood is being shed by the rebels in Hungary.โ Very much later-in February, 1957-the World Jewish Congress reported that โanti-Semitic excesses occurred in more than twenty villages and smaller provincial towns during the October-November revolt.โ This occurred, according to this very conservative body, because โfascist and anti-Semitic groups had apparently seized the opportunity, presented by the absence of a central authority, to come to the surface.โ Many among the Jewish refugees from Hungary, the report continued, had fled from this anti-Semitic pogrom-like atmosphere (N.Y. Times, Feb. 15, 1957). This confirmed the earlier report made by the British Rabbi, R. Pozner, who, after touring refugee camps, declared that โthe majority of Jews who left Hungary did so for fear of the Hungarians and not the Russians.โ The Paris Jewish newspaper, Naye Presse, asserted that Jewish refugees in France claimed quite generally that Soviet soldiers had saved their lives."
Drop the act. I'm blocking you now, Maybe you can get people to defend your moronic third person shit but I can see your ridiculous trolling for what it is. How dare you make a mockery of people who genuinely need to come to terms with their identities.
The "left" is way too broad of a grouping today. The classic political compass is 2D with left-right referring to economic and up-down (authoritarian-libertarian) to social policy. And even that is oversimplifying it, many saying it should be 3D. Grouping everyone into either A or B is I guess what humans do when their understanding of a topic is too narrow.
I find this especially funny with Trump's tariffs. You know, the mechanism with which you control the market... closing it... like leftist economic policy does. Trump is a leftist now? Any more tariffs and he'll be a complete communist! Dismantle more government and he'll be an anarchist! It just completely falls apart.
This is supposed to be a tetrahedron, but I suck at drawing 3D shapes. Just imagine that anarchism is the top of the tetrahedron and that the triangle is the base.
EDIT: Also, yellow is liberalism, if you canโt read it
EDIT 2: I have no qualm with down-voting, but I would prefer a comment explaining what parts specifically you did not like, so I know how to not make the same mistake in the future.
EDIT 2: I have no qualm with down-voting, but I would prefer a comment explaining what parts specifically you did not like, so I know how to not make the same mistake in the future.
Political compasses are silly and pointless brainrot. Yes, this includes trying to make new and better galaxy brain political compasses. It especially includes that. "Meritocracy" lol.
I'll offer an explanation, I think it would be helpful.
First, mapping complex political beliefs on ill-defined and vague lines adds more confusion than it clarifies. What is authoritarianism? What is meritocracy? We have a general idea, but these aren't useful for measuring ideologies.
Second, making it 3D makes little sense. Why is Liberalism in the "meritocracy" column, when one of the most widely agreed countries to focus on an idea of meritocracy, China, is a Socialist Market Economy? Why is liberalism distinct from conservativism enough to be an entirely separate leg?
All in all, it's nice to think about how to view ideologies, but we should view them as they are, and not on some map that doesn't exist. For example, why is a fully publicly owned, democratic society considered more "authoritarian" than society decided by the whims of few Capitalists competing like warlords?
While this is somewhat true, in all of the west there are only 3 groups currently : liberals, fascists and leftists.
Liberals are a diverse group, ranging from socio-democrat and liberal green parties to libertarian who leans on fascism.
Fascists are all the brands of conservatives who leverage racism, authoritarianism and nationalism.
Leftists are basically the groups opposed to both fascism and liberalism.
Those are 3 objective groups. They are the groups that determine how likely they will cooperate or oppose each other, or how elections will turn.
Some parties will be a bit in between, but that's merely political communication. In practice a group that promote itself as a middle group is actually leaning right. This means that "leftist liberals" (who range from some green parties and movements to the socio-democrats) will always pick liberals if they must choose between them and the left. Likewise, conservatives and libertariens are leaning toward fascism when given the choice.
The political spectrum is radicalised and triparted. You can deny this model and blur the information, but it usually means that you are leaning more to the right than you are pretending.
The leftist revolutionary heroes are resisting the people on the right, it is a hard split. The people on the right are shepherds of the US carceral state and imperial murderers
Ranked Choice Voting is both too ineffective to make any change, and too difficult to get in the first place. It's the perfect endless carrot on a string, the eternal "just one more lane and traffic will be gone."
Even if that's so, you'd still need to vote for the people on the right, because voting third party in first past the post is objectively just terrible for everyone with similar goals.
Alternative voting methods have proven useless against capitalist power. Countries like Australia and Japan use them, and it does nothing. It might make candidate stacking a little more expensive, and they have to pay more to advertise their candidates, but that's it.
Alternative voting methods allow for smaller parties, ones who's values may align more with the general population, an actual fighting chance. You gotta admit at some point that having only two realistic choices is a bit of a problem, right?
It seems like it should help, but in practice, its been useless. You end up having a greater diversity of candidates and parties, but if capital still stands above the political system and controls it, it just means more capitalist puppets, and more advertising money required to get those preferred puppets elected.
Multi-party Bourgeois parliamentarism is not really any different from the ancient roman imperial senate. Its government by oligarchy / the wealthy entrenched class.
In current Polish sejm there is 17 parties and 42 indpendents (on 460 seats). But every single one of them is procapitalist, proimperialist, pro USA, anticommunist. Alternative voting methods do literally nothing by itself.
Last time I checked, that's not how that works, everyone has a wide range of ideals and views. Not 1 or 2, there can be 1 1/2, 1 1/3, 1 1/10000, whatever
Unless you're gay, lesbian, trans, atheist, Muslim, Jewish, Satanist, black, brown, female, an immigrant, or really anything other than a straight white Christian man.
What an incredibly privileged take. Try having some empathy for other people sometime.
of course. let's have some respect for the american minorities while minorities abroad can be tortured in some basement in a third world shithole while being watched over by a cia agent.
and i get to be called privileged by some oversized gringo. oh the imperialist exceptionalism.
No way you're unironically pulling out the identity politics when just about every single revolutionary party in the US' history was led by minorities. We are the first to feel the brunt of capitalism and for that reason we are the ones to lead the charge against it while the privileged sit in their condos waiting for everything to blow over so they can say "Oh I actually supported civil rights this whole time ๐"
And also, the US bombs all the groups above you just mentioned without distinction. The Obama administration for example dropped an average of 80 bombs every day of his presidency on the middle east and north africa.
For trans people in the U.S., the difference between a GOP win and a Dem win in the house, senate, and presidential elections is the difference between having or not having certain rights.
Federal prisons now will force trans women to be transferred to male prisons and they will be denied gender-affirming care like access to estrogen.
If you are a trans person in the U.S. there is a clear difference between the Dems and the GOP - one is clearly better than the other.
Nothing in response has responded to this, shown it to be false, etc.
It does not require that we overlook that the Dems have far-right policies, especially on immigration and international affairs. It does not require we defend U.S. imperialism to say the Dems are better than the GOP for trans people in the U.S. Both are true.
I understand the moral disgust and the impulse to see how villainous the Dems are, I feel the same way, but if you care about the political outcomes, you can't ignore that there remain significant and tangible differences between the parties and their policies.
Rights are proclaimed and fought for by the marginalized, not gracefully given by our rulers. If you put so much emphasis on which group of tyrants to vote for, youโll never think โmaybe I should become a Stormรฉ DeLarverie and actually make a differenceโ
All he did was save capitalism which inevitably led to what the US has today. There is no future for humanity with oligarchs like him and his family despite their supposed good intentions
He did a lot more than "save capitalism". Social Security, the Citizens Conservation Corpse, and the full blown WW2-era command economy (complete with ration cards and production quotas and public housing for all the rapidly mobilized industrial workers) had far more in common with Stalinism than Coolidge's laisse-faire market economy. Hell, FDR even had his share of gulags, when you consider how Japanese Internment Camps were created and administered.
There is no future for humanity with oligarchs like him and his family
There's a sharp line between an oversized land baron clutching a fist full of stock certificates and a popular elected bureaucrat charged with administering the public labor force.
Oligarchy can't just be "guy with rich parents" or it quickly descends into austerity fetishism. Oligarchy is fundamentally anti-populist. It requires a strong centralized police force to compel a broad, disorganized public into acting against their own material interests. FDR's New Deal was a meaningful shift away from oligarchy precisely because he adopted policies from his left-leaning proletarian base in defiance of the Depression-Era economic elites. And he implemented them with the enthusiastic support of the body public. Nobody was getting held up at gunpoint to take a salary from the Parks' Department or to pile into Keynesian school house construction programs or to patch up wounded soldiers at the VA.
FDR's personal wealth gave him a platform upon which to propagandize left-liberal policies on a national stage. But his messages resonated because they had a popular basis not because he simply hammered people with Madison Avenue propaganda.
You seem to be arguing that FDR was a leftist because of the policies he implemented. But I think what you are missing is why he implemented those policies. I think the truth is he didn't really have the public interest at heart. His agenda was to contain a growing threat to capitalism in the form of the Communist Party of the 1930s. His strategy to contain the CP was to neuter the party by bringing it into the Democratic party fold, alienating their most militant members, and slowly squashing their agenda. Of course he had to appeal to their interests to do so. But it was a temporary strategy, not a real shift in US policy. There are a few articles on the topic if you are genuinely interested. Here's one. And here's a quote from another.
The New Deal reforms Sanders evokes were not the product of a farsighted, enlightened reformer, but responses to tumultuous class struggles in the early and mid-1930s. These reforms sought to contain explosive social struggles and were never truly universal, excluding women and African-Americans, for example. After mass struggle ebbed, Roosevelt shifted back to his original goal of stabilizing US capitalism while moving toward establishing US global domination during World War II. Progressive reforms came to an abrupt halt in the late 1930s, allowing the rollback of many popular gains during the 1940s.
FDR was a leftist because of the policies he implemented.
Its hard to argue a politician is something other than his policies.
you are missing is why he implemented those policies
The why hardly matters. Only the consequences. You can definitely argue that FDR failed to cement the more progressive programs (fully employment through public agencies, public control of finance and agriculture, a long term peaceful coexistence with the Soviet states). And for that reason, he was a kind-of failure. But I would argue putting the weight of the world on one man's shoulders is deeply unfair. FDR took US policy as far as he could. Then it was Truman and Eisenhower and their lackeys who fumbled the bag (or capitulated to corporate interests deliberately).
His strategy to contain the CP was to neuter the party by bringing it into the Democratic party fold, alienating their most militant members, and slowly squashing their agenda.
The Democratic Party, as a whole, has a vested interest in neutralizing rival movements and harvesting their members. That's not a strategy FDR invented or pioneered. Neither was the DemSoc liberalism of FDR incompatible with a more Reform Oriented American Communist Movement. The strategy worked in large part because American Communists saw FDR's outreach to Stalin's Russia and Mao's China as a positive turn foreshadowing a real global movement.
I might argue that Stalin's "Communism in One Country" and Mao's failure to open China up until Nixon, thirty years later, that did more damage than FDR's liberal-washing of Communist organizing efforts. I could easily argue that the Truman/Eisenhower Cold War was what ultimately did in the American Communists. Socialists couldn't uproot Hoover from the FBI or unseat McCarthy from a strong union state like Wisconsin or keep guys like Nixon or Kennedy from worming their way into the upper echelons of the US government on a wave of mafia money.
At some point, you have to acknowledge the failures within the leftist organizing movements that happened in the US. Deng and Khrushchev and Ho Chi Mein and Kim Il Sung didn't collapse in the face of these problems in their home states and they all had it much worse.
Oh you mean pro-Incarceration, pro-imperialism, pro-colonialism pro-genocide? Honestly I think you need to pick up a book if you think supporting any of that isn't ignorant shit. Shit, there's whole songs about how you're wrong.
I hate liberals because they think they can stay in their heated box and ignore their community while people freeze and starve to death because they can't contribute to some oligarch's capital and only leave to work for said oligarch so they can afford their funco pops and magic cards.
I hate liberals because they don't intersectionalize and they're quicker to bend a knee to their boss then to join in a strike.
Profitez des vidรฉos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
This framing isn't particularly helpful for solidarity.
The left relies on coalitions. Criticizing the stewards of those coalitions because they fail to address the needs of the people they rely on for votes is helpful and constructive. Just reducing all left-wing voters to a pair of stereotypes and trying to push one of those stereotypes away from the other? Not helpful.
We need nuanced dialogue and mutual aid. It's a matter of survival. This isn't that.
They are imperial murderers and managers of corporate oligarchy. The solidarity we form is against them. They are not left-wing at all, they are hard right wing reactionaries in a nation where the overton window has been shifted and the population is so brainwashed that they can even entertain that they are left-wing. They are barely left of most right wing politicians in the world. As a prosecutor, Kamala Harris has condemned thousands of innocent people to hard labor in slave camps and is an agent of the carceral state. Anyone in the US government is the enemy of free people in the US and around the world.
Your last phrase uses the words of the people on the left not the right, but clearly you don't understand the problem. You are just an apologist for genocide, slavery and empire.
Yeah, I didnโt even touch Pennsylvania. If you ignore Pennsylvania (specifically PA-7 and PA-8 which are the most likely candidates for election shenanigans) and the one seat Republicans gained due to gerrymandering (technically three: NC-6, NC-13, NC-14, but Republicans actually had to remove gerrymandering leading to Democrat wins in LA-6 and AL-2), Democrats would have taken the House. This is why the Supreme Court ended up voting against Independent State Legislature, as it would have benefited the Democrats due to ending the independent redistricting committees in states like California.
EDIT: I honestly think Republicans thought the race would be closer than it was, so they messed with suburban Philadelphia specifically since Pennsylvania was key to their strategy. This is mostly due to polling errors in PA-7 and PA-8 that underestimated the Republican by eight points, along with comments by Musk and Trump.
In Luzerne County, one of two eastern Pennsylvania counties where Republicans overtook Democrats in active voter registration earlier this year, poll workers failed to set up shop on time.
Polls were supposed to open at 7 a.m., but in Luzerne County, wokers (sic, lmao) at a precinct in Laflin Borough were unable to access a scanner due to an issue with the lock. By about 8:40 a.m., several machines were up and running.
They didnโt say this, but Laflin Borough is part of PA-8.
Being willing to accept an end to the war in any other way than Zelenskyโs impossibly maximalist goals means wanting Ukrainians to be genocided. Also history began on Feb. 24, 2022.
Right, because being willing to accept an end to the war in any other way than Zelenskyโs impossibly maximalist goals means wanting Ukrainians to be genocided. Also history began on Feb. 24, 2022.
Hey, I'm actually interested in your personal opinion. Are you pro Russian and if so why? Is there a long game being played out that fits your views with Russian expansion? Or rather the west's decline.
I donโt think Russia currently has an interest in expansion. I already linked above to the reasons for Russiaโs invasion, and they werenโt revanchism or Lebensraum, as Western governments & media claim.
Itโs also often said that Russia is imperialist. I think that if Russia could be imperialist it would be, but since it presently canโt, it presently isnโt. Putin tried to join NATO once, to join the imperialism club, but the US rejected Russia, because the US wanted (and still wants) Russia Balkanized and re-plundered instead. Russia has figured out that itโs better off allying with Global South countries than attempting imperialist adventures upon them. And this war has accelerated that allyship.
Thanks. The nuance is appreciated. If Russia "reclaims" Ukraine through total victory do you think they would allow the Ukraine identity to subsist? Are there more countries Russia would like to revanche? I think Moldova would be an easy grab.
I think Russia knows full well that it canโt โreclaimโ western Ukraine: few people there want to be part of Russia, and the Banderite fascists especially donโt. It would be a absolute nightmare to hold. There would be endless insurgencies and bloodshed, and it would be a huge drain on state resources. Russia wants what is says it has wanted since the 1990s: a neutral buffer state.
Keep in mind that when the invasion started, Eastern Ukraine had been in a civil war with Western Ukraine for almost a decade, and some in Eastern Ukraine had for years pleaded Russia to intervene. Eastern Ukraine is a very different situation from Western Ukraine. Russia had almost no issues when it โinvadedโ Crimea in 2014, because most of the people were glad to no longer be ruled by the Banderite coup government. They were right, too, because they didnโt suffer nine years of fascist paramilitary terrorism like their northern neighbors in Eastern Ukraine did.
Are there more countries Russia would like to revanche? I think Moldova would be an easy grab.
As I said, revanchism isnโt what this was ever about, despite what Western states publicly claim and Western media repeat. Russia would piss off its allies and its enemies if it invaded another country, and its enemies would probably ramp up their war machines against it significantly.
The stated goal of the US State Department is to drag out the conflict for as long as possible. Years ago, Boris Johnson threatened to cut Ukraine out of financial markets if Zelenskyy held peace talks with Russia.
There's a group that wants as much suffering as possible out of this war. But it's not the people who recognize that being the proxy in a struggle between the US and Russia is only going to hurt the people of Ukraine.
There's definitely some BS the west is imposing on Ukraine to drag this conflict out. It feels like it's to financially ruin Russia. I just don't understand why Russia doesn't cut it's losses and just take what they already have. Ukraine is never going to be a part of NATO so I don't understand the NATO expansion argument either.
Why would they? That's like saying the Capitalists in the US could willingly implement Socialism. This isn't an actual solution, as long as it is in Russia's interests to continue, they will. Russia gains nothing by packing up and going home, and they have the means and will to continue.
It's hardly in Russia's interest for their sons to die, their equipment to explode, and their economy to crumble. It's self destructive, which it has in common with capitalism, but worse than that it's a genocide of the Ukrainian people.
Russia's economy isn't crumbling, and its industrial capacity is fairly high. What Russia wants, ultimately, is either an assurance of Ukranian neutrality with respect to NATO or full demillitarization of it. Russia went to war to combat NATO encirclement of its borders. If a peace deal isn't met, Russia can just continue to slowly advance while the US carves out Ukraine for profit.
This is why I usually try not to label myself these days. Invariably there is nuance that I'm not aware of, or that some others interpret differently.
I'm NOT a democrat, republican, conservative, communist, socialist, liberal, maga, or anarchist.
But I lean left on social issues, often hard left, though I say that while also saying I'm firmly anti-authoritarian. And I don't really put fiscal on a separate axis because there are fiscal impacts to any set of beliefs with regard to how various social issues should be considered. I'm also not at all conversant in the slightest bit of nuance regarding how the economy works.
I'm sure some folks would call me a leftist based on the above. Others would insist I'm a liberal. Am I a progressive? Not sure.
That's why I'd rather call myself center left. By US standards I'm still probably "far left", because I'm for public healthcare, strong regulations and very robust social safety net. But unlike probably most people here on lemmy, if someone runs a business that's not completely out of control and has unionized employees, I don't think there's a problem with that.
slazer2au
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •like this
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hoshikarakitaridia
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •liyunxiao
in reply to hoshikarakitaridia • • •IndescribablySad@threads.net
in reply to liyunxiao • • •compostgoblin
in reply to IndescribablySad@threads.net • • •Continued to support Democrats after they fucked him in the 2016 primary, Iโm guessing?
I donโt know, I still like him
like this
Maeve likes this.
IndescribablySad@threads.net
in reply to compostgoblin • • •Lumiluz
in reply to IndescribablySad@threads.net • • •chuckleslord
in reply to IndescribablySad@threads.net • • •โ Yฯษ ฦิฯส โ
in reply to hoshikarakitaridia • • •Bernie is basically a modern day version of Bernstein. Though a century apart, both peddle reformism as a political pacifier, diverting energy from the radical systemic change required to dismantle capitalism. Their approaches, while superficially progressive, function as ideological traps, diverting energy from serious movements necessary to upend capitalism.
Bernstein was a leading figure in Germany's SPD, and he famously rejected Marxist revolutionary praxis in favor of evolutionary socialism. He argued capitalism could be gradually reformed into socialism through parliamentary means, dismissing the inevitability of class conflict. He neutralized the SPD's revolutionary potential, channeling working-class demands into compromises like wage increases or limited welfare programs that left capitalist hierarchies intact. As Rosa Luxemburg warned in Reform or Revolution, Bernstein's strategy reduced socialism to a "mild appendage" of liberalism, sapping the working class of its transformative agency.
Likewise, the political project that Bernie pursued mirrors Bernstein's trajectory. While Sanders critiques inequality and corporate power, his platform centers on social democratic reforms, such as Medicare for All, tuition-free college, a $15 minimum wage, that treat symptoms instead of root causes. By framing electoral victory as the primary objective, Sanders diverted a what could have been a millions strong grassroots movement into the Democratic Party, an institution structurally committed to maintaining capitalism. His campaigns absorbed activist energy into phone banking and voter outreach, rather than building durable, extra-parliamentary power such as workplace organizations, tenant unions, and so on.
When Sanders conceded to Hillary Clinton and later Joe Biden, his base dissolved into disillusionment or shifted focus to lesser-evilism. Without autonomous structures to sustain pressure, the movement's momentum evaporated similarly to how the SPD was integrated into Weimar Germany's capitalist state. However, even if his agenda were enacted, it would exist within a neoliberal framework. Much like FDR's New Deal coexisted with Jim Crow, imperial plunder, and union busting. Reforms within the system are always contingent on their utility to capital, and their purpose is demobilize the workers.
A meaningful challenge to capitalism requires a long-term strategy that combines direct action, mass education, and dual power structures. Imagine if Sanders had urged supporters to unionize workplaces, organize rent strikes, and create community mutual aid networks alongside electoral engagement. Movements like MAS in Bolivia, show how grassroots power can pressure institutions while cultivating revolutionary consciousness. Instead, his campaign became a referendum on his candidacy, leaving his followers adrift after his defeat.
Bernstein and Sanders, despite their intentions, exemplify the dead end of reformism. Their projects mistake tactical concessions for strategic victory, ignoring capitalism's relentless drive to commodify and co-opt. In the end, the reformist approach ends up midwifing full blown fascism. By channeling energy into parliamentary politics, the SPD deprioritized mass mobilization. Unions and workers were encouraged to seek concessions rather than challenge capitalist power structures. This eroded class consciousness and left the working class unprepared to confront the nazi threat.
When the nazis gained momentum, the SPD clung to legalistic strategies, refusing to support strikes or armed resistance against Hitler. Their faith in bourgeois democracy blinded them to the existential threat of fascism, which exploited economic despair and nationalist resentment. In the end, SPD famously allied with the nazis against the communists.
The "progressive" wing of the Democratic Party is following in the footsteps of the SPDโs reformist trajectory. While advocating for policies like Medicare for All or climate action, it operates within capitalist constraints, undermining radical change and inadvertently fueling right-wing extremism. The Democrats absorb grassroots energy into electoral campaigns while their reliance on corporate donors ensures watered-down policies that fuel disillusionment.
The SPD's reformism actively enabled fascism by disorganizing the working class and legitimizing capitalist violence. Similarly, the Democratic Party's commitment to pragmatic incrementalism sustains a system that breeds reactionary backlash. Trump is a direct product of these policies. We're just watching history on repeat here.
โ๏ธ-
in reply to โ Yฯษ ฦิฯส โ • • •โ Yฯษ ฦิฯส โ
in reply to โ๏ธ- • • •krolden
in reply to โ Yฯษ ฦิฯส โ • • •MeowZedong
in reply to hoshikarakitaridia • • •Maybe for those who wish to support bombing foreigners while funnelling the military industry into their state.
Motherfucker parades around like he's antiwar because he voted "nay" on a single ballot initiative that was already a shoo-in and inconsequential for him to vote against. Literally a couple months later, he voted to further the funding for those military actions.
Bernie has had blood on his hands for 30-40 years now and continues to try to wash it off with more blood.
Someone who pretends to support the poor at home while simultaneously supporting bombing and invading the poor elsewhere sure is a role model, just not a good one.
davel
in reply to hoshikarakitaridia • • •- YouTube
www.youtube.comorca
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •like this
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๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด
in reply to orca • • •like this
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orca
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •theturtlemoves [he/him]
in reply to orca • • •Ram_The_Manparts [he/him]
in reply to theturtlemoves [he/him] • • •orca
in reply to theturtlemoves [he/him] • • •_____
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •HappySkullsplitter
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •themeatbridge
in reply to HappySkullsplitter • • •โ๐-๐๐
in reply to HappySkullsplitter • • •Cowbee [he/they]
in reply to โ๐-๐๐ • • •Dragon Rider (drag)
in reply to Cowbee [he/they] • • •Marxists are great people. Leninists have fantastic ideas. And Marxist-Leninists betray everything Marx and Lenin stood for.
"Socialism in one country" is the invention of a bourgeois dictator who sought to destroy communism because it was a threat to his power.
Karl Marx died an anarchist.
davel
in reply to Dragon Rider (drag) • • •Declassified CIA report:
A lot of the cold war propaganda about the USSR turned out to be bullshit, as contemporary Western academic historians will tell you, including Domenico Losurdo.
CIA COMMENTS ON THE CHANGE IN SOVIET LEADERSHIP : CIA : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Internet ArchiveDragon Rider (drag)
in reply to davel • • •reddit.com/r/DebateAnarchism/cโฆ
Please judge this source by the content of the writing and the sourcing of its own arguments rather than by the hosting medium.
davel
in reply to Dragon Rider (drag) • • •Even if it were true that Marx threw out his entire lifeโs work and became an anarchist on his deathbed, how did the Paris Commune turn out? Why has no anarchist society lasted more than a few months before collapsing from within, or from without by capitalist/imperialist forces? Anarchism has not and can not succeed in the world we presently live in, if for no other reason than they cannot defend themselves against the imperialist forces of the monopoly capitalists who want to profit from everything everywhere.
From Michael Parentiโs 1997 book Blackshirts and Reds:
Anticommunism & Wonderland
redsails.org๐ดAkuji
in reply to davel • • •davel
in reply to ๐ดAkuji • • •๐ดAkuji
in reply to davel • • •davel
in reply to ๐ดAkuji • • •Okay. We try to do that, butโฆ
Bloodlies : Grover Furr : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Internet Archive๐ดAkuji
in reply to davel • • •Cowbee [he/they]
in reply to Dragon Rider (drag) • • •No, lol. Marx wanted a fully publicly owned and planned economy free of class antagonisms, Anarchists want decentralized networks of communes. These are very different systems with very different analysis.
Socialism in One Country is correct, Trotsky wanted to abandon building Socialism essentially and just keep trying to do revolutions elsewhere. The correct path is to not abandon building Socialism, while still supporting Socialist movements elsewhere.
TrickDacy
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •liyunxiao
in reply to TrickDacy • • •like this
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Cowbee [he/they]
in reply to TrickDacy • • •like this
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TrickDacy
in reply to Cowbee [he/they] • • •Cowbee [he/they]
in reply to TrickDacy • • •TrickDacy
in reply to Cowbee [he/they] • • •Cowbee [he/they]
in reply to TrickDacy • • •TrickDacy
in reply to Cowbee [he/they] • • •Cowbee [he/they]
in reply to TrickDacy • • •davel
in reply to Cowbee [he/they] • • •unless theyโre to the left of the center-right,
in which case we spare no expense or moral compunction to primary the fuck out of them.
kasai (he/him)
in reply to TrickDacy • • •My dear fellow user, there is no need to be so defensive. No one is going to kill you or shame you because you express your views. I and many others here may even be convinced by you. Your opinion does matter, and so does you, so, there is no need to disregard someone open to discussion just because you diverge in something. If you don't want to discuss on something, there is always the option to not give these quick-witted responses, saying few words and assuming positions from "the enemy" that the person has never said. No one here is your "enemy".
If you really think u/Cowbee is wrong, and wish for other people to understand you, articulate your answers. Say in a comprehensible way WHY he is wrong, instead of making arguments like "oh yes because my opinion is shit and you are the only pure socialist" or some ironic weak shit like that. We are (mostly) all adults, there is no need to engage in childish behavior, and you should not expect that we will understand what you mean by saying "his definition is wrong" without saying what "definition".
If you really think that there is no convincing anyone here, because we are all hopeless mfs or smth, just stop arguing and save yourself the time and sanity.
TrickDacy
in reply to kasai (he/him) • • •Lunar
in reply to TrickDacy • • •TrickDacy
in reply to Lunar • • •Lunar
in reply to TrickDacy • • •prototype_g2
in reply to TrickDacy • • •Funny you put quotes on the word liberal. You know words have meanings and definitions right? I know many people don't bother to check a term's meaning and end up miss using it, but that does not detract from the fact that the word still has meaning.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberaliโฆ
Note that liberalism defends the right to private property (AKA Capitalism). (Also, private property and personal property are two different things.)
political and moral philosophy based on liberty, consent of the governed and equality
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Lunar
in reply to TrickDacy • • •lemmy.world users and completely missing the point of every single argument
name a more iconic duo
TrickDacy
in reply to Lunar • • •Lunar
in reply to TrickDacy • • •TrickDacy
in reply to Lunar • • •Lunar
in reply to TrickDacy • • •TrickDacy
in reply to Lunar • • •Cowbee [he/they]
in reply to TrickDacy • • •Dragon Rider (drag)
in reply to Cowbee [he/they] • • •Exactly! Marxists, anarchists, and leninists are alllies. Statist liberals on the other hand, whether they be social democratic corporate capitalists or stalinistic state capitalists, will always try to infiltrate and divide the communist movement.
It's just like this motte-and-bailey meme. The implied position is that the communists were wrong to tell the Americans to vote against fascism. The strong position, which is claimed to be the only position when it meets resistance, is that it's only against capitalist liberals.
ClathrateG [none/use name]
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •like this
Maeve likes this.
Belly_Beanis [he/him]
in reply to ClathrateG [none/use name] • • •Hatandwatch [she/her, comrade/them]
in reply to Belly_Beanis [he/him] • • •Z_Poster365 [none/use name]
in reply to ClathrateG [none/use name] • • •themeatbridge
Unknown parent • • •culprit
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •leftist : anti-capitalism :: liberal : pro-capitalism
Why is this so hard for some radlibs to understand? I think it is all the propaganda they passively consume.
davel
in reply to culprit • • •Antonio Gramsci - ProleWiki
ProleWikiBelly_Beanis [he/him]
in reply to culprit • • •lewdian69
in reply to culprit • • •davel
in reply to lewdian69 • • •awareness of one's social class
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)lewdian69
in reply to davel • • •Again very US centric in this definition but it's who needs deprogramming.
davel
in reply to lewdian69 • • •Sometimes the evolution of language isnโt so much organic as it is a political project, such as a century of red scares and socialist purges.
Americans believe Sanders when he calls himself a socialist because theyโve lost a vocabulary for socialism itself. And they think Sandersโ centrism is โthe left,โ because the Overton window has shifted so far right that there is no left left.
We canโt simply use their terms, because their terminology is both muddled and lacking.
range of ideas tolerated in public discourse
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)lewdian69
in reply to davel • • •Ok. But regardless of the cause, organic or political project, it doesn't change the fact that the language has moved on correct?
But there's the rub. You/we ARE using their terms and the message is muddled and lacking BECAUSE OF the difference in perceived definitions. And as the past couple decades have shown there is zero chance of getting the American people to learn things, or unlearn as the case may be.
I assume very few people this far down a thread into a political discussion, on Lemmy, don't know what the Overton windowS are and how fucked the US is because of the current far right position on the left/right scales. I find it lacking and dislike it's libertarian origins. We are even now discussing the difference of a word being used for social vs economic ideas and these two scales do not necessarily overlap.
PunnyName
in reply to lewdian69 • • •You don't think words can mean things?
You just live in some kind of word salad blob?
lewdian69
in reply to PunnyName • • •~~What? That's literally the opposite of what I'm saying... I'm saying words can have multiple meanings depending on context.
But the point of this was how does "liberal" having a different colloquial definition from how op was using it have anything do with "developing class consciousness" which can be done regardless of this single word?~~
Yes
bloubz
in reply to lewdian69 • • •Isn't it progressism?
But anyway liberalism is the ideology of capitalism. The artificial differences created between conservatives and progressists is just a smoke screen to create a false debate and prevent from challenging capitalism, switching the enemy from the rulling capitalist class to the person next door with different views
Dessalines
in reply to lewdian69 • • •This is also wrong. US liberals are just as anticommunist as their further right counterparts, and their "social liberalism" goes only so far as not to infringe on capitalist "freedom" to do whatever they can get away with. Hence their hatred of homeless / the poor, communists, and colonized peoples.
As the saying goes, US liberals are against every genocide except the current one. Hence their staunch support for Israel's genocide of Palestinians.
kaprap
in reply to culprit • • •Leftist โ Liberalism
Liberalism is Leftwing leaning but isn't leftist
blindbunny
in reply to kaprap • • •Z_Poster365 [none/use name]
in reply to kaprap • • •folaht
in reply to Z_Poster365 [none/use name] • • •Liberal is centre-right to right-wing.
PunnyName
in reply to kaprap • • •FTFY
Quadhammer
in reply to kaprap • • •Z_Poster365 [none/use name]
in reply to culprit • • •Quadhammer
in reply to culprit • • •dubyakay
in reply to Quadhammer • • •Quadhammer
in reply to dubyakay • • •Okay buddy. You guys just want to twist a good ideology into a wedge issue. The only thing vaguely "capitalist" about a liberal is the belief that the government isnt allowed to seize your shit unlawfully. The right to own property comes way after personal liberty in my book. That means billionaires dont get a pass for abusing the populace.
davel
in reply to Quadhammer • • •Liberalism means PRO CAPITALISM.
The first sentence from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberaliโฆ:
From the first paragraph of en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_โฆโ :
Liberalism: A Counter-History (online copy)
โ Not to be confused with personal property.
Personal property - ProleWiki
ProleWikiQuadhammer
in reply to davel • • •That line says nothing about capitalism. Pro ownership? That is a tenet of some branches of leftism. I dont agree with corporations or the state having a monopoly on land ownership. Though the government cant come and take an individuals shit for no reason. Being an abusive billionaire though has an asterisk in the foot notes.
Though I'd argue that anyone owning shit comes a large and wide second or 3rd to human rights.
It says it right there.
blindbunny
in reply to Quadhammer • • •Dessalines
in reply to Quadhammer • • •krolden
in reply to Dessalines • • •JusticeForPorygon
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •gandalf_der_12te
in reply to JusticeForPorygon • • •nothing, it's just anti-trans, anti-queer bullshitting.
Edit: after looking it up, if i understand it correctly, it's misogynistic bullshit? maybe? maybe not? idk
davel
in reply to gandalf_der_12te • • •pink cat-ear beanie hats
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)goldfndr
in reply to davel • • •What did Biden have the authority to do that wasn't done (to avoid this loss)?
blindbunny
in reply to goldfndr • • •Reddfugee42
in reply to blindbunny • • •blindbunny
in reply to Reddfugee42 • • •Krauerking
in reply to Reddfugee42 • • •queermunist she/her
in reply to goldfndr • • •The Supreme Court ruled that any Official Act done by the President is Constitutional.
Surely you can think of some pretty cool stuff this enables?
ubergeek
in reply to goldfndr • • •plzExplainNdetail
in reply to JusticeForPorygon • • •Officially named Pussyhats, they were first worn symbolically at the 2017 US Women's March in Washington DC. Created by Krista Suh and Jayna Zweiman (who met at an LA knitting club), the hat was made in direct response to grab em by the pussy remark from tdump. The original idea was for marchers to knit, sew, or crochet hats to create a visual statement โa sea of pink. "If everyone at the march wears a pink hat, the crowd will be a sea of pink, showing that we stand together, united," reads the introduction to the knitting pattern on the Pussyhat Project website. The actual hats were created by people who could not attend physically, but wanted to show their support.
Since then, some have come out against it as any one symbol isn't as all encompassing as they would like, but none have yet given or inspired a good replacement for such a strong show of women's solidarity.
The Pussy Power Hat is more than just a piece of headwear; it is a symbol of protest, unity, and the power of grassroots movements. The project demonstrated how a simple act of knitting could contribute to a larger political discourse, inspiring similar initiatives worldwide.
The Pussy Power Hat: A Symbol of Solidarity and Resistance - Encyclopedia of Design
Simon (Encyclopedia Design)Dragon Rider (drag)
in reply to JusticeForPorygon • • •SoJB
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •RizzRustbolt
in reply to SoJB • • •I'm okay with it.
I hate those stupid transphobic hats.
gandalf_der_12te
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •I'm really struggling to find a party that i fully agree with.
For one, i like true leftist ideals, but i don't like guns, so i guess the left parts of the image doesn't apply to me.
On the other side, i think the long-standing support for Ukraine is an atrocious mistake, because it prolongs the suffering unnecessarily (after all, the uproar in Ukraine is mostly an CIA-inspired action after all i believe, and diplomatic solutions were not sought). But shitting on that pink hat (which is clearly a symbol for queer/trans people) is just unacceptable. just leave the people live their own private life as they want. What's so difficult about that?
Edit: as per the comments, i stand corrected and am sorry for my half-assed take. i'll leave it up anyways, because i guess it's a chance to learn for any reader.
Maturin [any]
in reply to gandalf_der_12te • • •its time to read theory. you are currently at the utopian anarchist stage. which is a step in a better direction, but ultimately irrational.
you need to better understand that the people in the image [conveniently] on the left incorporated violence because they lived under the constant threat of deadly violence. 99% of the violence was directed at them. Fred Hampton was executed by the police not long after that picture of him was taken.
gandalf_der_12te
in reply to Maturin [any] • • •โ๐ณ๏ธโโง๏ธEdie [it/it/its/its/itself, she/her/her/hers/herself, fae/faer/faer/faers/faerself, love/love/loves/loves/loveself, des/pair, null/void, none/use name]
in reply to gandalf_der_12te • • •Political theory. Like this intro reading list
Cowbee [he/they]
2024-11-12 13:19:57
Cowbee [he/they]
in reply to โ๐ณ๏ธโโง๏ธEdie [it/it/its/its/itself, she/her/her/hers/herself, fae/faer/faer/faers/faerself, love/love/loves/loves/loveself, des/pair, null/void, none/use name] • • •gandalf_der_12te
in reply to โ๐ณ๏ธโโง๏ธEdie [it/it/its/its/itself, she/her/her/hers/herself, fae/faer/faer/faers/faerself, love/love/loves/loves/loveself, des/pair, null/void, none/use name] • • •mortemtyrannis
in reply to Maturin [any] • • •Do you really need to read volumes of theory to grasp what is fundamentally a rather straightforward concept?
Leftism shouldnโt be locked behind intellectual elitism.
TL;DR the capitalist state will use threats of violence/actual violence against threats to capitalism which includes those who stand for progressive ideals. Leftists believe this is a justification to use violence against the state.
Cowbee [he/they]
in reply to mortemtyrannis • • •There's merit to your question. Ultimately, as someone who largely hadn't taken theory seriously until the last couple of years, I think theory is not only useful, but necessary. There are good comrades who do good work without theory, I don't want to discredit that. However, theory has had a profound impact on my understanding of history, tactics, and life itself. Theory is important because our predecessors have given their lives discovering and handing down the lessons they've learned.
From Marx, who dedicated his entire life to discovering the mechanisms of Capitalism to give the Proletariat the tools to surpass it, to Lenin, who analyzed Capitalism's monstrous evolution to Imperialism, to Gramsci who spent the later years of his life rotting in prison and reflecting on Marxian teachings, to Politzer who stood against the Nazis and taught Parisan workers Dialectical and Historical Materialism before being captured and executed for his Jewish heritage and Communist alliance, to modern theoreticians such as Losurdo, Parenti, and the many Communists who dedicated their lives to the working class. Revolutionaries like Mao, Fidel, Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Lenin, and more all have unique lessons to tell from their experiences in their existence. People like Mao, Deng, Xi, Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, and more have helped build and design the largest economy in the world. What can we learn from them? What should we copy, what should change?
We owe it to them to learn from the lessons they dedicated their lives to teaching us. We have a duty to humanity to move beyond the wretched system of Capitalism before the planet is destroyed by Climate Change for the pursuit of profit. We owe it to our predecessors to continue the work they started. We owe it to our successors to use the best tools we can to make their struggles easier. We owe it to ourselves, so that we have a future.
Theory is a tool. If you don't take every advantage you can against the most heartless, greedy, brutal Empire in history, do you really care at all? If you refuse to truly learn your enemy, in all its complicated facets of expropriation, or learn the successful tactics and strategies for overcoming them, or learn from the missteps of our predecessors or the correct actions they've taken, we will not have a decisive victory.
โ๐ณ๏ธโโง๏ธEdie [it/it/its/its/itself, she/her/her/hers/herself, fae/faer/faer/faers/faerself, love/love/loves/loves/loveself, des/pair, null/void, none/use name]
in reply to mortemtyrannis • • •Yes! The three volumes on shitting are essential reads. (/s)
Z_Poster365 [none/use name]
in reply to mortemtyrannis • • •Maturin [any]
in reply to mortemtyrannis • • •๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด
in reply to gandalf_der_12te • • •That isn't what that is a symbol for at all. It was a knit hat made for an ineffective Trump protest in 2017. Actually queer and trans people found the hats exclusionary. So did non white people whose genitalia aren't that color. The entire pussy-hat movement was feel-good liberal activity that accomplished nothing and made no difference. Much like the liberal "support" for Ukraine.
This is extreme privilege. None of us like guns just to like guns. Brother Malcolm was being threatened with his life daily and his home was firebombed then he was assassinated, he was trying to protect himself. Fred Hampton was literally murdered by the police. The Zapatistas and Palestinians don't resort to violence because they "like it" either, they are targets of the state that act with violence on them and both have learned that civil disobedience has its limits. Sacco and Vanzetti were anarchists that were executed by the state after being framed and falsely accused of a bombing, armed robbery and murder which the state of Massachusetts apologized for in 1977.
ShinkanTrain
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด
in reply to ShinkanTrain • • •WorldsDumbestMan
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •moody
in reply to gandalf_der_12te • • •So you suggest they should have let Russia annex and genocide the rest of Ukraine like they did with Crimea?
Z_Poster365 [none/use name]
in reply to gandalf_der_12te • • •gandalf_der_12te
in reply to Z_Poster365 [none/use name] • • •wait until they self-destruct, mostly.
i say this as an european
Z_Poster365 [none/use name]
in reply to gandalf_der_12te • • •this is laughably utopian and ahistorical, i'm sorry but this is fantasy. There's a reason that the "violent" and "authoritarian" communists have actually won and seized power while the utopian eurocommies have never accomplished a single thing.
Your nation has never successfully had a revolution. They need to be listening and learning from those that have, following their example, and not trying to invent their own perfect (white) system from whole cloth
gandalf_der_12te
in reply to Z_Poster365 [none/use name] • • •Well yeah i can tell you what the communists have achieved in the Sovjet Union, and that's 20 million people dead due to stalinistic terror. So much for "winning". No thank you.
Meanwhile, lots of european economies (and people!) have been doing well since after the second world war. Maybe they have accomplished something.
Cowbee [he/they]
in reply to gandalf_der_12te • • •Life expectancy over doubled from the 30s to the 70s in the USSR. Literacy rates went from the 20s and 30s to 99.9%, above Western European and USian rates. Famine was ended by collectivization and industrialization in a country where famine was common under the Tsar. This same nation, barely industrializing at the start of the 20th century, beat the United States into space, and continued beating it with the first man and first woman in space.
Social Safety Nets expanded greatly. Healthcare and Education were free and high quality. Housing was incredibly affordable, and there was full employment. Abortion was not only legalized, but free. Women played a role even in the highest ranks of politics. The economy was democratized. 80% of the combat in World War 2 was on the Eastern Front, the Soviets defeated the Nazis.
Sadly, there were excess deaths, but 20 million people did not die, such a number comes from anti-communist myth-makers before the opening of the Soviet Archives. The numbers given by the Black Book of Communism include Nazis killed during World War 2, and use various other misdirections to grossly inflate the number of excess deaths. Were there excess deaths? Sadly, yes, and nobody denies this. However, when compared to contemporary peers like the British Empire who intentionally starved millions of Bengalis, the French who were colonizing Vietnam, Algeria, and more, or the United States who killed millions of Iraqis, Koreans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, and more, the USSR played a far more progressive role. From supporting Palestinian resistance against genocide, to helping China throw off their colonizers, to helping Algeria throw off the French, to helping Vietnam against the US Empire and French Colonialists, the Soviets played a far better role.
Wealth inequality went far down, whike GDP growth was constantly positive except during World War 2. It was one of the most rapidly growing economies in the 20th century.
Western Europe (and of course the US to a greater degree), to this day, relies on brutal expropriation of the Global South through outsourcing industry and brutal IMF loans. They have been doing well because they are Imperialists. To say they are doing well is to say the Trust Fund kid working at his father's investment firm is doing well, he does so on the backs of actual laborers and did not earn his vast wealth, but inhereted it from former and current Empire.
gandalf_der_12te
in reply to Cowbee [he/they] • • •Cowbee [he/they]
in reply to gandalf_der_12te • • •Colonization and now Imperialism have been the driving forces of Western European Economies for centuries. All of this sheer expropriation of wealth hasn't gone away in any capacity, the IMF still debt traps countries in Africa, Latin America, and other areas in the Global South. Especially during the latter 19th and early 20th centuries, countries like Britain, Germany, and France had industrialized to the point of monopolization, and a blending of financial and industrial Capital. This turned towards the Global South, seeking to export Capital to super-exploit for super-profits.
If you want to read about the origins of this system, the book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism is quite a quick read, written in the early 20th century (though it mentions many entities that exist today in the same forms, like Deutsche Bank). For modern analysis, Super-Imperialism by Hudson, though it is US based Western European Imperialism is intricately tied to US Imperialism.
3rd Edition: Super-Imperialism | Michael Hudson
Michael (Michael Hudson)anarchoilluminati [comrade/them]
in reply to gandalf_der_12te • • •That would be a funny tagline.
Ram_The_Manparts [he/him]
in reply to gandalf_der_12te • • •gandalf_der_12te
in reply to Ram_The_Manparts [he/him] • • •Z_Poster365 [none/use name]
in reply to Ram_The_Manparts [he/him] • • •Z_Poster365 [none/use name]
in reply to gandalf_der_12te • • •GrammarPolice
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •MechanicalJester
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •Helps get a rapist felon fascist get elected
๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด
in reply to MechanicalJester • • •MechanicalJester
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •Wakmrow [he/him]
in reply to MechanicalJester • • •๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด
in reply to MechanicalJester • • •in professional wrestling, the portrayal of staged events as if they were true
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)MechanicalJester
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด
in reply to MechanicalJester • • •MechanicalJester
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •Harris was not going to push for more tax breaks for the ultra rich.
The project 2025 agenda was not going to be pursued under Harris.
You may not approve of the Harris agenda, but they are not remotely comparable except through an absolutist all or nothing lens.
Claiming they are the same is absurd.
๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด
in reply to MechanicalJester • • •Wakmrow [he/him]
in reply to MechanicalJester • • •ziproot
in reply to MechanicalJester • • •Yes, it is better to vote for a Democrat than a Republican, but it is much better to build grassroots support for leftism, which, shocker, is what leftists have been trying to do in the US for centuries. If anything, the leftists are doing the most to fight fascism, by trying to get rid of the US system of government that is biased towards the status quo, which by definition benefits the ruling class.
blindbunny
Unknown parent • • •UltraGiGaGigantic
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •WorldsDumbestMan
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด
in reply to WorldsDumbestMan • • •ynthrepic
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •Why couldn't your meme show like solar punk utopian imagery, and people living in beautiful harmony with nature.
Oh, that's why.
Cowbee [he/they]
in reply to ynthrepic • • •The problem with Solarpunk is that it isn't really grounded in theory, it's a vibe and an aesthetic, a hope for a better future but without any real binding ideology. It's easy to transform, like cottagecore being weaponized into upholding traditional gender roles.
Solar will absolutely be a huge part of the future, but getting there requires taking supremacy over Capital to go against the car and oil industries. This requires Socialism.
ynthrepic
in reply to Cowbee [he/they] • • •Dragon Rider (drag)
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •AntiOutsideAktion
in reply to Dragon Rider (drag) • • •Dragon Rider (drag)
in reply to AntiOutsideAktion • • •The term was literally created by Marxists to insult the kind of person who wants to use tanks to suppress a worker's revolution. Tankies aren't communists. They're counterrevolutionaries who want to stop all progress made towards dissolving the state as Marx said.
AntiOutsideAktion
in reply to Dragon Rider (drag) • • •Dragon Rider (drag)
in reply to AntiOutsideAktion • • •en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demands_โฆ
So you're saying the revolution demanding minimum wage and the right to strike wasn't a worker's revolution? Are all tankies this right-wing or just you?
Demands of Hungarian Revolutionaries of 1956 - Wikipedia
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)AntiOutsideAktion
in reply to Dragon Rider (drag) • • •Dragon Rider (drag)
in reply to AntiOutsideAktion • • •- Lenin, 1922
It probably means they read Lenin and liked his ideas a lot better than Stalin's nonsense. Now, you were explaining how tankies oppose minimum wage and the right to strike?
Cowbee [he/they]
in reply to Dragon Rider (drag) • • •To be clear, drag is calling Nazis and Nazi sympathizers "the advanced working class." Trying to twist Lenin into supporting fascism is incorrect, to say the least.
Moreover, Stalin was dead before 1956, this was Khrushchev.
Dragon Rider (drag)
in reply to Cowbee [he/they] • • •Cowbee [he/they]
in reply to Dragon Rider (drag) • • •drag asked for sources, was that just to waste my time? Read them. Here's another few excerpts:
Section from the book โThe Truth about Hungaryโ by Herbert Aptheker; a prominent figure in U.S. scholarly discourse in the 1940โs, and Marxist Historian. Written in 1957 it outlined what later would be confirmed by the bourgeois Western press:
Cowbee [he/they]
in reply to Dragon Rider (drag) • • •drag does realize that the Hungarian counter-revolutionaries were working with literal Nazis, and were marking the doors of Jews and Communists, right? They were lynching people, and even freed Nazis from jail to help with the lynching. The "political parties" they wanted to be able to participate were not worker parties, but fascist ones.
This is genuinely what liberals often accuse "tankies" of doing: uncritically supporting movements based on nominally being progressive, despite in reality being highly reactionary. Further, Hungary wanted to get out of paying reparations for World War II, that was one of the biggest cruxes of the situation. Who did Hungary fight alongside in WWII, does drag remember?
Spoiler: the Nazis.
Dragon Rider (drag)
in reply to Cowbee [he/they] • • •Cowbee [he/they]
in reply to Dragon Rider (drag) • • •This is a decent overview of the background that led up to the events of 1956, and this is a decent overview of the darker side, where the lynchings happened. Content Warning: lynched corpses. Here is a source on MI6 training and arming the counterrevolutionaries. Those 3 articles give only the briefest overview of the events, but don't do the real buildup to them, their complexities, what the people actually supported, or the real character in any depth. If drag wants to actually take a deep dive, these are additional sources:
The History of the Working Class Movement in Hungary
1956 Counter-Revolution in Hungary
Others can offer more sources.
Overall, when it comes to geopolitical enemies of the United States in particular, it would not be a bad idea to treat drag's current understanding with extreme skepticism until drag has investigated counter-sources as well. That doesn't mean the US always lies, in fact it frequently tells mostly the truth, but will distory either the quality or quantity of an event.
The 1956 counter-revolution in Hungary and the present-day anti-Communist Propaganda
www.idcommunism.comDragon Rider (drag)
in reply to Cowbee [he/they] • • •Cowbee [he/they]
in reply to Dragon Rider (drag) • • •Read the sources drag asked for. What this was was a bourgeois supported counter-revolution that armed fascists that were doing pograms. The legitimacy of the demands immediately comes into question when drag understands that these were Nazi sympathizers. They wanted to allow fascist and Capitalist parties to dominate Hungary and wanted to get out of paying reparations for the damage they did as Nazis during World War II.
As for striking, it happened sometimes in the Soviet Union. Worker rights were much better there than in Western countries so it wasn't as common.
AntiOutsideAktion
in reply to Dragon Rider (drag) • • •๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด
in reply to Dragon Rider (drag) • • •What the hell you talking about? These are all revolutionary heroes acting in self defense and promoting solidarity.
Calling Fanon a tankie is the most ridiculous thing I've read today. Try reading a book for once in your life. He talks about how violence psychologically harms the revolutionary more than it does the people they attack.
Malcolm X was protecting himself after being firebombed here.
Fred Hampton was a socialist and preached cross racial solidarity and black power as a way of elevating black people into solidarity.
The Zapatistas are indigenous heroes who are resisting oppression of the state, who prefer civil disobedience but will act to protect themselves.
Sacco and Vanzetti were organizing a general strike and were framed then murdered by the state
Leila Khalid was separated from her family at 15 during the Palestinian expulsion and resisting Israeli occupation
Where the hell are the tankies in this pic? What are you people even talking about
Dragon Rider (drag)
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •Cowbee [he/they]
in reply to Dragon Rider (drag) • • •drag is defending a fascist counter-revolution, and refused to read sources after asking for them. drag wasn't right about anything. You are defending people that lynched and massacred Jewish people and Communists.
Section from the book โThe Truth about Hungaryโ by Herbert Aptheker; a prominent figure in U.S. scholarly discourse in the 1940โs, and Marxist Historian. Written in 1957 it outlined what later would be confirmed by the bourgeois Western press:
Dragon Rider (drag)
in reply to Cowbee [he/they] • • •Cowbee [he/they]
in reply to Dragon Rider (drag) • • •The fascist movement was the "revolution." If you're saying that the Soviets caused this by beating the Nazis and the Axis powers in World War II, you're siding with the Nazis.
Anarcho-Bolshevik
in reply to Cowbee [he/they] • • •Cowbee [he/they]
in reply to Anarcho-Bolshevik • • •๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด
in reply to Dragon Rider (drag) • • •Quadhammer
in reply to blindbunny • • •Typical leftoid
blindbunny
in reply to Quadhammer • • •gearheart
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •There two sides.
1% and their zombies
The rest of us.
Let's not split up and weaken. ๐ช
BrainInABox
in reply to gearheart • • •PieMePlenty
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •The "left" is way too broad of a grouping today. The classic political compass is 2D with left-right referring to economic and up-down (authoritarian-libertarian) to social policy. And even that is oversimplifying it, many saying it should be 3D. Grouping everyone into either A or B is I guess what humans do when their understanding of a topic is too narrow.
I find this especially funny with Trump's tariffs. You know, the mechanism with which you control the market... closing it... like leftist economic policy does. Trump is a leftist now? Any more tariffs and he'll be a complete communist! Dismantle more government and he'll be an anarchist! It just completely falls apart.
ziproot
in reply to PieMePlenty • • •This is supposed to be a tetrahedron, but I suck at drawing 3D shapes. Just imagine that anarchism is the top of the tetrahedron and that the triangle is the base.
EDIT: Also, yellow is liberalism, if you canโt read it
EDIT 2: I have no qualm with down-voting, but I would prefer a comment explaining what parts specifically you did not like, so I know how to not make the same mistake in the future.
aelixnt
in reply to ziproot • • •Political compasses are silly and pointless brainrot. Yes, this includes trying to make new and better galaxy brain political compasses. It especially includes that. "Meritocracy" lol.
Cowbee [he/they]
in reply to ziproot • • •I'll offer an explanation, I think it would be helpful.
First, mapping complex political beliefs on ill-defined and vague lines adds more confusion than it clarifies. What is authoritarianism? What is meritocracy? We have a general idea, but these aren't useful for measuring ideologies.
Second, making it 3D makes little sense. Why is Liberalism in the "meritocracy" column, when one of the most widely agreed countries to focus on an idea of meritocracy, China, is a Socialist Market Economy? Why is liberalism distinct from conservativism enough to be an entirely separate leg?
All in all, it's nice to think about how to view ideologies, but we should view them as they are, and not on some map that doesn't exist. For example, why is a fully publicly owned, democratic society considered more "authoritarian" than society decided by the whims of few Capitalists competing like warlords?
ziproot
in reply to Cowbee [he/they] • • •Cowbee [he/they]
in reply to ziproot • • •bouh
in reply to PieMePlenty • • •While this is somewhat true, in all of the west there are only 3 groups currently : liberals, fascists and leftists.
Liberals are a diverse group, ranging from socio-democrat and liberal green parties to libertarian who leans on fascism.
Fascists are all the brands of conservatives who leverage racism, authoritarianism and nationalism.
Leftists are basically the groups opposed to both fascism and liberalism.
Those are 3 objective groups. They are the groups that determine how likely they will cooperate or oppose each other, or how elections will turn.
Some parties will be a bit in between, but that's merely political communication. In practice a group that promote itself as a middle group is actually leaning right. This means that "leftist liberals" (who range from some green parties and movements to the socio-democrats) will always pick liberals if they must choose between them and the left. Likewise, conservatives and libertariens are leaning toward fascism when given the choice.
The political spectrum is radicalised and triparted. You can deny this model and blur the information, but it usually means that you are leaning more to the right than you are pretending.
m532
Unknown parent • • •Korhaka
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด
in reply to Korhaka • • •Cowbee [he/they]
in reply to Korhaka • • •Lila_Uraraka
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด
in reply to Lila_Uraraka • • •JohnDClay
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •Cowbee [he/they]
in reply to JohnDClay • • •JohnDClay
in reply to Cowbee [he/they] • • •Cowbee [he/they]
in reply to JohnDClay • • •JohnDClay
in reply to Cowbee [he/they] • • •Dessalines
in reply to JohnDClay • • •Itsapersonn
in reply to Dessalines • • •Dessalines
in reply to Itsapersonn • • •It seems like it should help, but in practice, its been useless. You end up having a greater diversity of candidates and parties, but if capital still stands above the political system and controls it, it just means more capitalist puppets, and more advertising money required to get those preferred puppets elected.
Multi-party Bourgeois parliamentarism is not really any different from the ancient roman imperial senate. Its government by oligarchy / the wealthy entrenched class.
PolandIsAStateOfMind
in reply to Itsapersonn • • •Lila_Uraraka
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •tiredturtle
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด
in reply to tiredturtle • • •vga
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด
in reply to vga • • •Zerush
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •AbsoluteChicagoDog
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •vfreire85
in reply to AbsoluteChicagoDog • • •AbsoluteChicagoDog
in reply to vfreire85 • • •Unless you're gay, lesbian, trans, atheist, Muslim, Jewish, Satanist, black, brown, female, an immigrant, or really anything other than a straight white Christian man.
What an incredibly privileged take. Try having some empathy for other people sometime.
vfreire85
in reply to AbsoluteChicagoDog • • •of course. let's have some respect for the american minorities while minorities abroad can be tortured in some basement in a third world shithole while being watched over by a cia agent.
and i get to be called privileged by some oversized gringo. oh the imperialist exceptionalism.
Catfish [she/her]
in reply to AbsoluteChicagoDog • • •Dessalines
in reply to AbsoluteChicagoDog • • •Wikimedia list article
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Dessalines
in reply to AbsoluteChicagoDog • • •America dropped 26,171 bombs in 2016. What a bloody end to Obama's reign
Medea Benjamin (The Guardian)dandelion (she/her)
in reply to Dessalines • • •For trans people in the U.S., the difference between a GOP win and a Dem win in the house, senate, and presidential elections is the difference between having or not having certain rights.
Federal prisons now will force trans women to be transferred to male prisons and they will be denied gender-affirming care like access to estrogen.
If you are a trans person in the U.S. there is a clear difference between the Dems and the GOP - one is clearly better than the other.
Nothing in response has responded to this, shown it to be false, etc.
It does not require that we overlook that the Dems have far-right policies, especially on immigration and international affairs. It does not require we defend U.S. imperialism to say the Dems are better than the GOP for trans people in the U.S. Both are true.
I understand the moral disgust and the impulse to see how villainous the Dems are, I feel the same way, but if you care about the political outcomes, you can't ignore that there remain significant and tangible differences between the parties and their policies.
Jentu
in reply to dandelion (she/her) • • •Grandwolf319
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด
in reply to Grandwolf319 • • •UnderpantsWeevil
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •He did a lot more than "save capitalism". Social Security, the Citizens Conservation Corpse, and the full blown WW2-era command economy (complete with ration cards and production quotas and public housing for all the rapidly mobilized industrial workers) had far more in common with Stalinism than Coolidge's laisse-faire market economy. Hell, FDR even had his share of gulags, when you consider how Japanese Internment Camps were created and administered.
There's a sharp line between an oversized land baron clutching a fist full of stock certificates and a popular elected bureaucrat charged with administering the public labor force.
Oligarchy can't just be "guy with rich parents" or it quickly descends into austerity fetishism. Oligarchy is fundamentally anti-populist. It requires a strong centralized police force to compel a broad, disorganized public into acting against their own material interests. FDR's New Deal was a meaningful shift away from oligarchy precisely because he adopted policies from his left-leaning proletarian base in defiance of the Depression-Era economic elites. And he implemented them with the enthusiastic support of the body public. Nobody was getting held up at gunpoint to take a salary from the Parks' Department or to pile into Keynesian school house construction programs or to patch up wounded soldiers at the VA.
FDR's personal wealth gave him a platform upon which to propagandize left-liberal policies on a national stage. But his messages resonated because they had a popular basis not because he simply hammered people with Madison Avenue propaganda.
BobTheDestroyer
in reply to UnderpantsWeevil • • •You seem to be arguing that FDR was a leftist because of the policies he implemented. But I think what you are missing is why he implemented those policies. I think the truth is he didn't really have the public interest at heart. His agenda was to contain a growing threat to capitalism in the form of the Communist Party of the 1930s. His strategy to contain the CP was to neuter the party by bringing it into the Democratic party fold, alienating their most militant members, and slowly squashing their agenda. Of course he had to appeal to their interests to do so. But it was a temporary strategy, not a real shift in US policy. There are a few articles on the topic if you are genuinely interested. Here's one. And here's a quote from another.
The Popular Front Didnโt Work
jacobin.comUnderpantsWeevil
in reply to BobTheDestroyer • • •Its hard to argue a politician is something other than his policies.
The why hardly matters. Only the consequences. You can definitely argue that FDR failed to cement the more progressive programs (fully employment through public agencies, public control of finance and agriculture, a long term peaceful coexistence with the Soviet states). And for that reason, he was a kind-of failure. But I would argue putting the weight of the world on one man's shoulders is deeply unfair. FDR took US policy as far as he could. Then it was Truman and Eisenhower and their lackeys who fumbled the bag (or capitulated to corporate interests deliberately).
The Democratic Party, as a whole, has a vested interest in neutralizing rival movements and harvesting their members. That's not a strategy FDR invented or pioneered. Neither was the DemSoc liberalism of FDR incompatible with a more Reform Oriented American Communist Movement. The strategy worked in large part because American Communists saw FDR's outreach to Stalin's Russia and Mao's China as a positive turn foreshadowing a real global movement.
I might argue that Stalin's "Communism in One Country" and Mao's failure to open China up until Nixon, thirty years later, that did more damage than FDR's liberal-washing of Communist organizing efforts. I could easily argue that the Truman/Eisenhower Cold War was what ultimately did in the American Communists. Socialists couldn't uproot Hoover from the FBI or unseat McCarthy from a strong union state like Wisconsin or keep guys like Nixon or Kennedy from worming their way into the upper echelons of the US government on a wave of mafia money.
At some point, you have to acknowledge the failures within the leftist organizing movements that happened in the US. Deng and Khrushchev and Ho Chi Mein and Kim Il Sung didn't collapse in the face of these problems in their home states and they all had it much worse.
Quadhammer
in reply to blindbunny • • •blindbunny
in reply to Quadhammer • • •Quadhammer
in reply to blindbunny • • •blindbunny
in reply to Quadhammer • • •Oh you mean pro-Incarceration, pro-imperialism, pro-colonialism pro-genocide? Honestly I think you need to pick up a book if you think supporting any of that isn't ignorant shit. Shit, there's whole songs about how you're wrong.
I hate liberals because they think they can stay in their heated box and ignore their community while people freeze and starve to death because they can't contribute to some oligarch's capital and only leave to work for said oligarch so they can afford their funco pops and magic cards.
I hate liberals because they don't intersectionalize and they're quicker to bend a knee to their boss then to join in a strike.
But you do you, spineless lib.
- YouTube
youtu.beBelly_Beanis [he/him]
Unknown parent • • •UnderpantsWeevil
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •"You can't trust those leftists because they're just tankies"
The Tankie they're referring to:
millie
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •This framing isn't particularly helpful for solidarity.
The left relies on coalitions. Criticizing the stewards of those coalitions because they fail to address the needs of the people they rely on for votes is helpful and constructive. Just reducing all left-wing voters to a pair of stereotypes and trying to push one of those stereotypes away from the other? Not helpful.
We need nuanced dialogue and mutual aid. It's a matter of survival. This isn't that.
๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด
in reply to millie • • •They are imperial murderers and managers of corporate oligarchy. The solidarity we form is against them. They are not left-wing at all, they are hard right wing reactionaries in a nation where the overton window has been shifted and the population is so brainwashed that they can even entertain that they are left-wing. They are barely left of most right wing politicians in the world. As a prosecutor, Kamala Harris has condemned thousands of innocent people to hard labor in slave camps and is an agent of the carceral state. Anyone in the US government is the enemy of free people in the US and around the world.
Your last phrase uses the words of the people on the left not the right, but clearly you don't understand the problem. You are just an apologist for genocide, slavery and empire.
millie
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •ziproot
Unknown parent • • •Yeah, I didnโt even touch Pennsylvania. If you ignore Pennsylvania (specifically PA-7 and PA-8 which are the most likely candidates for election shenanigans) and the one seat Republicans gained due to gerrymandering (technically three: NC-6, NC-13, NC-14, but Republicans actually had to remove gerrymandering leading to Democrat wins in LA-6 and AL-2), Democrats would have taken the House. This is why the Supreme Court ended up voting against Independent State Legislature, as it would have benefited the Democrats due to ending the independent redistricting committees in states like California.
EDIT: I honestly think Republicans thought the race would be closer than it was, so they messed with suburban Philadelphia specifically since Pennsylvania was key to their strategy. This is mostly due to polling errors in PA-7 and PA-8 that underestimated the Republican by eight points, along with comments by Musk and Trump.
Oh, and also this article. Yes itโs New York Post, bear with me here. nypost.com/2024/11/05/us-news/โฆ
They didnโt say this, but Laflin Borough is part of PA-8.
Election Day problems in 3 deep-red Pennsylvania counties threaten to delay results for critical swing state
Ethan Dodd (New York Post)Airportline
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •โ๐ณ๏ธโโง๏ธEdie [it/it/its/its/itself, she/her/her/hers/herself, fae/faer/faer/faers/faerself, love/love/loves/loves/loveself, des/pair, null/void, none/use name]
in reply to Airportline • • •ILikeBoobies
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •If someone said they were leftist then I would very much hope they were pro EU and pro Ukraine
Itโs the far right that is against those
Pilferjinx
in reply to ILikeBoobies • • •ILikeBoobies
in reply to Pilferjinx • • •Probably not left then
Just want to pretend they are because they arenโt as far right as someone they can point to
Pilferjinx
in reply to ILikeBoobies • • •explodicle
in reply to Pilferjinx • • •agent_nycto
in reply to Pilferjinx • • •davel
in reply to agent_nycto • • •davel
in reply to Pilferjinx • • •Pilferjinx
in reply to davel • • •Pilferjinx
in reply to davel • • •davel
in reply to Pilferjinx • • •I donโt think Russia currently has an interest in expansion. I already linked above to the reasons for Russiaโs invasion, and they werenโt revanchism or Lebensraum, as Western governments & media claim.
Itโs also often said that Russia is imperialist. I think that if Russia could be imperialist it would be, but since it presently canโt, it presently isnโt. Putin tried to join NATO once, to join the imperialism club, but the US rejected Russia, because the US wanted (and still wants) Russia Balkanized and re-plundered instead. Russia has figured out that itโs better off allying with Global South countries than attempting imperialist adventures upon them. And this war has accelerated that allyship.
Iโve answered this before: lemmy.ml/comment/9498456
sudden release of price and currency controls
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Pilferjinx
in reply to davel • • •davel
in reply to Pilferjinx • • •I think Russia knows full well that it canโt โreclaimโ western Ukraine: few people there want to be part of Russia, and the Banderite fascists especially donโt. It would be a absolute nightmare to hold. There would be endless insurgencies and bloodshed, and it would be a huge drain on state resources. Russia wants what is says it has wanted since the 1990s: a neutral buffer state.
Keep in mind that when the invasion started, Eastern Ukraine had been in a civil war with Western Ukraine for almost a decade, and some in Eastern Ukraine had for years pleaded Russia to intervene. Eastern Ukraine is a very different situation from Western Ukraine. Russia had almost no issues when it โinvadedโ Crimea in 2014, because most of the people were glad to no longer be ruled by the Banderite coup government. They were right, too, because they didnโt suffer nine years of fascist paramilitary terrorism like their northern neighbors in Eastern Ukraine did.
As I said, revanchism isnโt what this was ever about, despite what Western states publicly claim and Western media repeat. Russia would piss off its allies and its enemies if it invaded another country, and its enemies would probably ramp up their war machines against it significantly.
AppleTea
in reply to Pilferjinx • • •The stated goal of the US State Department is to drag out the conflict for as long as possible. Years ago, Boris Johnson threatened to cut Ukraine out of financial markets if Zelenskyy held peace talks with Russia.
There's a group that wants as much suffering as possible out of this war. But it's not the people who recognize that being the proxy in a struggle between the US and Russia is only going to hurt the people of Ukraine.
Pilferjinx
in reply to AppleTea • • •AbsentBird
in reply to AppleTea • • •Cowbee [he/they]
in reply to AbsentBird • • •AbsentBird
in reply to Cowbee [he/they] • • •What do they gain by continuing the war?
It's hardly in Russia's interest for their sons to die, their equipment to explode, and their economy to crumble. It's self destructive, which it has in common with capitalism, but worse than that it's a genocide of the Ukrainian people.
Cowbee [he/they]
in reply to AbsentBird • • •krolden
in reply to ILikeBoobies • • •ILikeBoobies
in reply to krolden • • •Itโs about a super power trying to exploit a small country
Palestine isnโt leftist either but you will find people campaigning for the protection of their people
octopus_ink
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •This is why I usually try not to label myself these days. Invariably there is nuance that I'm not aware of, or that some others interpret differently.
I'm NOT a democrat, republican, conservative, communist, socialist, liberal, maga, or anarchist.
But I lean left on social issues, often hard left, though I say that while also saying I'm firmly anti-authoritarian. And I don't really put fiscal on a separate axis because there are fiscal impacts to any set of beliefs with regard to how various social issues should be considered. I'm also not at all conversant in the slightest bit of nuance regarding how the economy works.
I'm sure some folks would call me a leftist based on the above. Others would insist I'm a liberal. Am I a progressive? Not sure.
Sorgan71
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •deerdelighted
in reply to ๐ด hamid the villain [he/him] ๐ด • • •But unlike probably most people here on lemmy, if someone runs a business that's not completely out of control and has unionized employees, I don't think there's a problem with that.