The thread has made it to /all, lord help us.
So capitalism leads to fascism, and its socialism we want; is that right?
If an army is attacking your enemy you dont send your military in against both sides just because you dont like either. You will either sit and watch it play out (not a real option) or join the side you hate the least knowing that I the end they will need to go.
Modern Democrats are just old-school 1980s Republicans.
But have you considered that a system that leads to fascism is still better than actually manifested fascism?? And yea, maybe we should fix it before it gets there, but if it can’t be fixed with voting now then we should have voted harder before, and vote harder next time
Participating in democracy doesn’t lead to fascism, capitalism does. Protest non-voters are idiots that gave away the one best power our system offers. Congratulations on your new fascist overlords, dummies. Anarchism is about power to the people and power to communities, you vote for the best thing for your community regardless of your personal feelings. Do I wish there was a better candidate than Kamala Harris? Hell yeah I do, but she is lightyears better than Trump for my people so she got my vote. You have to start where you are, not in some fantasy land where leftists have a viable alternative. You want change? Go find a milquetoast liberal running uncontested and primary against them. Ask hard questions and make them accountable. Sitting on your high horse while the world burns is not only useless, but an insult to the people who are actually suffering because of your choices. Fuck off.
I will stop participating in liberal democracy. I will stop voting for any of the candidates because they all contribute to the status quo.
Please. Tell me: what ought we do? Do you have a roadmap or an effective strategy to achieve anything? I’d really like to know if there’s a better way. I’m here to learn.
What ought we do to achieve any of the goals of the left?
Thanks! <3
Liberals: best I can do is tittering at the edges.
If i sit on the fence, I will never be on the wrong side.
The fence is very squarely with medical for all, free education, democracy, and taxing the rich while the other side is about a mile away from the fence in 1930s Germany, so…
If the Democrats were willing and capable of getting Americans things like universal healthcare, why didn’t they do it while they were in power?
Democrats haven’t had 60 senators since 1979. They had 58 in 2010 for exactly 72 days and tried to pass public option healthcare but only 1 independent voted with them so they settled for the lesser medicaid expansion that the current Republicans are gutting in the budget. For the record, that medicaid expansion passed with supermajority as every singe Republican voted nay.
This is some Marxist nonsense my dude. Societies don’t have inevitable endpoints.
Historically, “conquered by neighbors” or “environmental collapse” are both strong contenders for “where societies inevitably go.”
Well I guess if you have a long enough timeline everything possible becomes inevitable. But I don’t think that’s quite what the meme is saying.
Well, to address the meme in particular then, it’s a fairly common saying that fascism is either capitalism in decline/crisis or is the end-game/final-form of capitalism. The first form is a direct quote from Vladimir Lenin: “Fascism is capitalism in decay.” The latter arises from statements by Mussolini, though it does seem the commonly cited “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism” may be a misquote or misinterpretation of his meaning.
I would actually lean into your rebuke somewhat, fascism is a form of authoritarianism and can make use of capitalism as a tool, but ultimately the totalitarian has as much interest in truly free markets as they do in truly free societies. I would say the inevitability is after allowing the market to centralize through unregulated monopolizing, the fascist would then nationalize the industry or otherwise bring it under their own personal control.
Fascism is fundamentally a cult devoted to power: they’ll ally with whichever power currently holds non-government sway, be that capitalists, feudal lords, or gang leaders. What fascists are deeply against is any form of distributed power: be that a truly free and well-regulated market, a trade union, or anarchism of any stripe.
Thank you, this is very well said. Any socio-economic structure that centralizes power in the hands of a few is vulnerable to fascism.
The first form is a direct quote from Vladimir Lenin: “Fascism is capitalism in decay.”
When did he say that? Fascism would’ve been very new at the time he died.
I think I have to concede this one. I have found numerous attributions of the quote but no mention of the source. Ultimately, i think it’s probably a misquote or a cross-wiring of Lenin’s essay: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. I think people are just freely substituting “fascism” for “imperialism”. Obviously, leftists would see them as related but shouldn’t conflate the two as being equivalent.
Historically though, capitalist societies have been built on fascist techniques of stripping broad swaths of the population of their civil rights. The most infamously capitalist society in history - the US - cares so little about actually living up to the ideals of “the free market” that up until the 60s or so, only about a third of the population was actually allowed to participate in the free market. A third of the population was legally allowed to operate independently, start businesses, etc. The rest were denied equal protection under the law, a legal regime intentionally designed to force the majority of the population into precarious wage slavery.
That is in the most capitalist country on Earth. The most capitalist nation on Earth hated free markets so much that they had to exclude the majority of the population from the free market in order to maintain a pool of easily exploitable labor.
So how many countries have failed due to authoritarian power control? It’s a consistent through all time and cultures. Power corrupts, and the people in power want more of it.
Fascism is a recent political invention, but authoritarian power that is unstable as soon as the wrong person is in control is a time honored tradition, from Rome to the dynasties of China. Even stable democracies have power grasps, limits of freedoms overtime, and so on.
History does not repeat but it does rhyme.
I completely agree. But to be clear, not all nations go down this path of increasing authoritarianism, and not all of those who do end up at fascism.
It might seem like a small distinction but this idea of the inevitable course of history is such a common thought terminating cliche and it leads to all sorts of wrong ideas and wrong political strategies that I feel a need to call it out. Even though my own position is not completely dissimilar.
Societies don’t have inevitable endpoints, in the same way that you can’t predict with 100% certainty that an individual will die of old age.
Old age isn’t even a thing you can die from. This analogy fails on multiple fronts.
Pedantry is the last refuge of fools.
It’s just a hilariously apt example of the overly simplistic narratives I’m criticizing. If you’re willing to label all capitalism as fascism then perhaps the narrative becomes true, just as falsely labeling all causes of death in the elderly old age makes your analogy work.
Kinda true. Didnt some liberal democracies also turn (partially) anarchist or socialist?
Have all the western countries that have had rising fascist dictatorship movements in the past few years come about through some other unrelated means?
We’re clearly in a trend of rising authoritarianism, but that doesn’t mean it’s inevitable. Such waves have receded in the past and they likely will again.
I just don’t like these inevitability narratives because they deprive people of agency in shaping society. Sure, maybe liberalism has a tendency to creep towards fascism, at least under some conditions. But this happens through the actions of the people that make up those societies and it can be resisted.
Capitalism inevitably results in fascism. It’s just the end result. The choice there is people maintaining a system that’s results in fascism.
Capitalism has existed for centuries and usually did not end in fascism. There’s no historical support for this claim. It’s simply an invention of authoritarian leftists because it’s useful to convince people they need to choose one brand of authoritarianism or the other.
It’s an easy thought-free assertion which makes all opposition to a system heroic, which means it gets wide traction.
Absolutely. This is a thought pattern I find very annoying. Just because you’re opposed to capitalism doesn’t make every critique of it correct. Defeating it means understanding and identifying its real features, not some caricature.
Fascism at its core is a way for a minority of the population to say, “we deserve wealth and power over everyone else regardless of merit. We’re going to take away rights and opportunity from everyone in order to give ourselves an unfair advantage. We’ll make it so only our group counts a fully legally human, and we’ll dominate society and the economy accordingly.” In this general sense, capitalism for the vast majority of its history has been some flavor of fascist, in the general sense. Obviously as a specific political system, fascism is more particular. But in the general sense of its mechanism, where one group tries to take control by stripping the rights from everyone else? That is the norm in capitalist societies, not the exception.
For the vast, vast majority of capitalism’s history, it’s been built on defining a certain in group who have rights, and an out group who have no rights and can be exploited. Western countries didn’t even give economic freedom to the majority of their population until the last 50 years or so. Women were legal property and couldn’t have bank accounts. They were legally not considered fully human in the same way men were. Men didn’t want to compete with women, so they took away women’s freedom and didn’t allow them to compete in the marketplace. The majority of the population, completely excluded from economic life, in the most capitalist societies on Earth.
Or you could look it from a racial lens. De jure discrimination was written into the law until the 1960s or so. And de facto racial discrimination never went away. You say that capitalism doesn’t usually end in fascism, yet the US kept a substantial portion of its population in a nightmare system of fascist apartheid. White people didn’t want to compete with black people in the market, so they stripped black people of their civil rights.
The key thing to keep in mind about capitalism is that in a true free market, no one earns any profits. If there were no barriers to entry, starting competitors would be easy, and profit margins for all businesses would be razor thin. But that’s not how capitalism works in the real world. There are barriers to entry, and in capitalist countries, owners and those in power do everything they can to give themselves unfair advantages so they don’t have to compete in the market. And one of the easiest ways to make sure your group doesn’t have to compete freely in the market is to simply declare large swaths of the population as not fully human and thus undeserving of economic freedom.
Interesting points but I think you’re conflating fascism with what I would call authoritarianism. If you define fascism as any system where a minority clique takes control of society then you’re going to have to call nations like the USSR or China fascist. Which, while I agree they have similar features, are getting pretty far from the colloquial and academic definitions of fascism.
But you’re absolutely right that no modern society has had universally equal rights. We still have many groups that don’t have much legal protection including felons, children, immigrants, even animals could be viewed through this lens as well. But I don’t think that makes any societies that don’t meet this very high standard fascist.
The last waves of fascism this advanced in America were in the 1930s. Throughout the latter half of the 20th century outright Nazis were generally associated with skinheads and were almost universally hated by mainstream culture. There are now actual Nazi movements in control of western nations. And even where they aren’t, they are winning over sizable percentages of the population.
This isnt going to pass as easily as you seem to think. Genocide has been live streamed around the world for almost 2 years and resistance to it has been relatively minor in terms of what you would actually expect. White western Christians (men especially) are actually mostly very down with white supremacy and neofascism. It benefits them specifically. And they represent the largest voting block in most western nations.
Liberalism could have prevented this by preventing Nazis from ever coming into positions of economic / cultural / political power in the first place. Liberalism is primarily concerned with countering revolutionary politics, moreso even than preventing fascist uprisings. It’s more important to them that pro capitalist values are the dominant ones in politics and culture than whether anti fascist values are. The ruling class almost entirely stands to benefit either way, they’re ambivalent towards fascism.
I didn’t say it would be easy, just that fascism is not inevitable.
Can you elaborate on how liberalism could have prevented this? This seems in contradiction to your overall point that fascism is inevitable under liberal governments.
Support working class politics. Support public ownership. Essentially, become a working class state. Outlaw fascist rhetoric. Redistribute wealth from billionaires to the working class. The main reason that fascist media organizations exist is because billionaires do. They wouldn’t be able to mass indoctrinate if they did not have essentially boundless economic power. Fascists won in Germany and America both because of media dominance and manipulation of the western liberal political system. In very comparable ways honestly.
The German democracy failed to respond in any way to the rise of the fascists. The only political party attempting any actual resistance of the fascists was the communists. The conservative and liberal parties were more interested in combating the communists than they were about combating the fascists. It was more important to them that the institutions of capital remains unaffected than fascism being stopped. They could have never let Hitler step foot out of a jail cell again. They honestly could’ve shot him, and a fair number of his nazi party upper echelon. People were calling for it, literally. Most people believe that Hitler mass indoctrinated all of Germany and won a landslide election and from there dismantled German democracy. That actually isnt true though. The final fair and democratic elections in Weimar Germany resulted in an extremely slim victory for the Nazi party. The communists were very close behind them. And in turn were conservatives and social democrats close behind the communists. On the whole, the majority of the nation voted for other parties. Once a bad actor was chancellor, all he had to do was find an excuse to enact emergency powers. He was handed the best possible opportunity on a silver platter by a young communist who was doing his part to fight back. If only others had followed his example, maybe history wouldve ended differently. As it was, Hitler enacted emergency powers to suspend all civil liberties in Germany. He banned the communists from any political organization and started literally rounding up communists and communist politicians and putting them in concentration camps. This was in 1933. The first camps were for communists. Then when Hindenburg died a short while later there was literally nothing standing between him and pure absolute dictatorship.
He could’ve been stopped at many points if liberal democracy was an ideology that prioritized the rights of the working class. If they had had an aim whatsoever of stopping fascism, it was preventable. Much like the democratic party though, their primary aims were to protect the ruling class of capitalists and the institutions that allow them to steal working class labor.
Support working class politics. Support public ownership. Essentially, become a working class state. Outlaw fascist rhetoric. Redistribute wealth from billionaires to the working class
Literally all of this is in opposition to liberalism, there’s a reason why the trend is the opposite in quite literally all liberal democracies
Yes, i very much agree. Liberalism will never present a legitimate defense against fascism, and will never prioritize working class rights.
I agree. But I also think capitalist systems make facism easy. And naturally trend towards it.
I agree “inevitability” is too strong and a little too marxist oversimplification of history for me.
I largely agree. Authoritarian systems tend to support one another over the long term, even as they compete in other ways. So capitalism, being a system where economic power is concentrated in the hands of the few can also encourage the establishment of similar state structures. But this is not necessarily fascism. We can see similar trends happening in historically socialist countries today. But fascism is one possible manifestation of this process.
inevitably
If you could have voted, didn’t vote for Harris, and aren’t actively out in the streets hucking bricks at ICE and trumpers, then I have no respect for you.
You played the game and you played to lose. You played to lose when we had everything to lose, and nothing to gain. You made the 4th worst choice I can think of in the last 30 years.
There are other parties. There was Jill Stein. If you could have voted, didn’t vote for Stein and aren’t actively out in the streets chucking bricks at ICE and trumpers, than I have no respect for you.
You played the game and played to win. Exactly what both right wing parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, want you to do. You’re easily set up to blame your fellow people instead of a system that has made you a tool to their disposal. You’re a spineless husk that listens to a leader that supports bombing children on the other side of the world just because the other party is “more evil”.
Stop voting for evil, vote for good. Because voting for the lesser evil will still end in evil.
Shouldn’t you be spending your gaslighting budget on your fellow liberals who actually understand what the term genocide means, liberal?
They have to proselytize and guilt trip for a politician failing at their job of winning over voters.
It’s not just a politican they are proselytising for… they are proselytising for an entire ideology that has hit rock-bottom. Liberalism’s lies have come crashing down - and it’s adherents will happily consign colonised peoples to the abyss if it means they can pretend it hasn’t.
They will keep talking to themselves as how voting the only thing that matters, everyone has to vote for the 2nd most evil candidature, and then fail at earning votes.
And then blame people for not being interested in “I will have as strong as a border as Trump, I will have the strongest military ever, I will abide by rules for anti-trans states, and I will do nothing about Gaza.”
They will keep talking to themselves as how voting the only thing that matters, everyone has to vote for the 2nd most evil candidature
I think you need to re-read my original comment. To summarize it here though…
You are either working within the system (voting/or abstaining from voting) or working outside the system (overthrowing by force), but I have no respect for people who work within while intending to fail, knowingly risking everything for that failure, for no possible gain, and then have the audacity to think that other people are the deluded ones making poor choices.
If you didn’t vote for Harris, and you aren’t burning shit, then you’re either a trumper who is fine with all the shit that is going on, or you’re a spineless imbecile who was willing to ruin everything for everyone, but unwilling actually make a meaningful attack on the system.
It’s not gaslighting if it’s the truth.
By voting (or just not voting) you participated in the system. If you want to be against the system, then you need to overthrow it.
You played to lose, which was dumb, and you played to lose when there was nothing to gain, and everything to lose (which is even more dumb). If you aren’t burning shit, then you never actually cared enough to be against it, you’re an apathetic asshole who squandered their only voice to say “I don’t care if the facists win, Kamala isn’t perfect and I can’t stand that”. You may not have voted for trump, but you sure as fuck voted for all of this. I have no respect for the people that lack neither the intelligence to make the right decisions, nor the conviction to live with the consequences of making the wrong one.
It’s not gaslighting if it’s the truth.
So you admit to gaslighting, then. Plus one for honesty, I guess.
By voting (or just not voting) you participated in the system.
Soooo… neither participating nor not participating means anything - is that correct?
and everything to lose
LOL! Lose what, genius? Did you really think that glorified pig was going to actually protect you from the fascists? I guess you don’t understand why the libs institutionalised that very thing we call “fascism” today in the first place, huh?
Wake the fuck up.
By voting (or just not voting) you participated in the system.
Soooo… neither participating nor not participating means anything - is that correct?
Couldn’t be more wrong. You are either playing to win, not playing to win, or not playing. In a 2 party system, a non-vote is the same decision as a vote. If you want to not play, then you need to be hostile to the system.
LOL! Lose what, genius?
Well, let’s see… My grandparents Medicare, my LGBTQ friends and family members rights, retirement savings, what little healthcare we actually had before, literally climate and the ability to live at or near the equator and coasts… Didn’t even have to google any of that. I guess if you want the full list, you can read project 2025, and the also draw conclusions from related activities. Oh, vaccine availability and herd immunity. 1st Amendment rights. Habeas corpus just to tack on a few more there.
You wake the fuck up and look and the fucking mess you made because a perfect person wasn’t put up against Orange Hitler.
You are either playing to win
Win what, liberal? Four more years of liberals doing absolutely everything in their power to make life easier for fascists?
Well, let’s see…
Oh… you mean those things your precious liberal racketeers haven’t lifted a finger to protect in any way whatsoever? Do tell, genius - what did your “good cop” overlords do when the fascists took away Roe vs. Wade? What did they do when Trump sicced a white supremacist lynch mob on the US capitol?
Except tell you to “vote harder,” that is?
Again… wake the fuck up.
Your plan is working so well right now!
Palestine is doing great! Economy has never been better and inflation is under control! People aren’t being rounded up and sent to extra-national torture prisons without a trial. The world you’ve heralded in is just doing so fucking great!
Palestine is doing great!
About that… how is that lie - oops, sorry, I meant to say “prediction your ilk peddled” - that Trump was going to be (supposedly) “worse” for Palestine turn out?
Your liberal-funded genocide - which the people you voted for enabled, of course - now looks pretty much the exact same as it did under Genocide Joe.
Do tell… will you be peddling this same lie again in four years’ time?
Well, let’s see… My grandparents Medicare, my LGBTQ friends and family members rights, retirement savings, what little healthcare we actually had before, literally climate and the ability to live at or near the equator and coasts… Didn’t even have to google any of that. I guess if you want the full list, you can read project 2025, and the also draw conclusions from related activities. Oh, vaccine availability and herd immunity. 1st Amendment rights. Habeas corpus just to tack on a few more there.
But why worry about that when you can decry THE LIBS for trying to avert catastrophe? Don’t the LIBS know that just averting catastrophe won’t bring about utopia?
Perfect example of the lib thinking that just voting means they actually did something so they don’t have to do any direct action. Which is of course why your country inevitably goes to shit.
How many trumpers have you hit with a brick?
Harris would have abolished ICE and gotten rid of the cages that Trump set up and Biden ignored, right?
…Right?
Ignored? Biden did try to reunite with their families the migrant children who were caged under Trump’s first term. Some couldn’t be found because of the Trump administration’s lax recordkeeping, but they didn’t just ignore them. That’s just a lie.
So everyone was freed form the cages and they were removed, making it harder for Trump to keep doing it? Zero people in there by the end of 2024?
If we’re talking about the cells that were built during the Obama administration as temporary holding cells, which Trump then used to permanently hold migrant children who were separated from their guardians by his inhumane policy, then yes, there were no children being held in those cells by the end of 2024.
Nah you’re right. Good thing trump is getting rid of them…OH WAIT.
“What about Trump being evil?”
Yeah he’s fucking evil, good going dodging my question.
It’s all liberals know how to do. Cannot for the life of them take responsibility. Blame the left for their failure while using the right as a boogeyman to force compliance.
No cages is obviously the ideal case. Fewer cages is obviously better than more cages, which was the choice at the polls.
“I don’t believe in voting” fine, enjoy the more cages option.
But the cages didn’t go down with Biden. COVID was ignored under Biden. Trump wanted these things and Biden kept them. It’s not lesser evil, its incremental evil.
I also didn’t say anything about not voting. I voted for Harris. I’ve proven it before and I will proven it again if needed. It was useless here in California but I did it anyways.
Sorry, couldn’t answer your question because I don’t live in an alternate reality where trump didn’t win. Maybe ask some of the other people here?
So Harris would have kept ICE then, got it.
Probably, since ICE was created by Congress as part of the 2002 Homeland Security Act. The President oversees it, but funding and removing the organization is a power of congress and not the president. You would know that if you bothered to learn a little bit before forming opinions.
“You see we need to keep the Gastapo, parliament passed it so why stop it?”
I understand Harris can’t write bills as president, you dingus. A president has sway over their party. What Biden wanted, Dems pushed. What Trump wants, Republicans demand.
If Harris, a brown woman said “Hey ICE is a racist police organization made post-9/11 to go after brown people, let’s push to get rid of it” that would spark movement in Congress.
It honestly made fuck all difference how I voted. My state went for Harris. My state was always going to go for Harris.
Matter of fact? My state is the only state that actually went MORE for Harris than it did for Biden.
What are the top 3?
Trump 2024, Trump 2020, and Trump 2016.
Removed by mod
I guess this means you don’t know what a “progressive” is, huh?
I think they’re confusing “progressive” with “Performative Discord Leftists Who want to have intellectual arguments but are afraid of real conservatives so they just infight and purity test all day” or “Lemmy users”
real conservatives
The last one im aware of died in 2013. He was almost 90, and would probably be an anarchist in modern context. He seemed like he was moving that way.
but are afraid of real conservatives
Why should they be afraid of something that hasn’t existed since the end of WW2?
Progressives are Neoliberal 2.0. In the corporate sector, this is called getting ahead of the problem. co-op the left before the left can even learn to walk again. There are billionaires on both sides supporting this pseudo world aka left and Right paradigm. We are all just watching Shadows dance on the walls. We are not going to vote our way out of these bigger problems. And if you keep it real and you see how the sausage is made, you can pretty much predict how this is all eventually gonna go. The Ratchet effect. We move further and further to the right. And clearly this has something to do with fiscal realities and the suffering of the working class. Like guns aren’t the problem. The problem is fiscal. And those fiscal problems lead to interpersonal issues. The guns don’t help though. We don’t like to deal with the root causes because it questions the very nature of our existence. Ultimately, I am victorious because we will destroy ourselves. We are literally in the process of destroying all life on Earth. It’s kind of awesome being right about everything. Unfortunately, I am mortal and I suffer just like all the other slobs.
There are billionaires on both sides supporting this pseudo world aka left and Right paradigm.
Really? Do tell… which billionaire parasites are (supposedly) funding the left?
It’s kind of awesome being right about everything.
That just tells me you’ve never been right about anything.
So that’s your idea of a “progressive,” huh? Two plutocratic racketeers in over-priced suits?
Oh snap.hahahah
I grew up in a country that insisted these two guys were somewhere to the left of Fidel Castro.
Show me what a True Progressive American Politician looks like, please.
Sooooo… you don’t know who Bernie Sanders is? That’s a “progressive” - or, more accurately, an edgy liberal.
I’m going to go ahead and assume that even here, on a (supposedly) anarchist community, I will still have to waste my energy explaining to liberals how their own ideology actually works?
Sooooo… you don’t know who Bernie Sanders is?
He’s the guy who spent twelve years stumping for Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris, right?
waste my energy explaining to liberals how their own ideology actually works?
Does liberal ideology work? Seems like its in full collapse at the moment.
He’s the guy who spent twelve years stumping for Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris, right?
Yeah… you know that thing “progressives” were doing right up to the election?
Does liberal ideology work?
You’ll know when it stops working - you’ll see liberals roll out the red carpet for fascists while pretending they cannot do anything to stop them. Do you see anything like that happening now, perhaps?
I grew up in a country that insisted these two guys were somewhere to the left of Fidel Castro.
Your post makes me think you somehow believed them…
Instead of a politician, what about a civil revolutionary?
Martin Luther King Jr. was a leftist.
He was a socialist, not an American leftist. He was a goddamn dirty commie that the FBI tried to get him to commit suicide. And libturds like to whitewash’s ass. Martin Luther King was killed by the FBI. Then he was paraded around as a mascot for neoliberalism and the libturds. The Empire made him a mascot and gave him a holiday. In Empire, you have many holidays, gladiator games, and idols to worship.
Socialism falls under leftism.
Ah, the United States (ca. 2016)
Removed by mod
Let me be clear, we’re occupying Afghanistan, but we’re going to be doing it the right way this time.
Much better yeah
Progressives aren’t quite the same as infighting discord leftists and socially isolated teenagers who think we’re going to topple capitalism aaannnny day now.
There are millions and millions of people who we would consider “progressive” and they tend to do things like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmwvHyJJr50
Removed by mod
Join a Union? Feed the homeless? Organize your fellow tenants? Actually attend a city council meeting?
You’re smugly confirming your allegiance to the liberal death cult, because your only conception of “political engagement” is voting in a system that is crumbling before our very eyes.
And no, just voting wouldn’t have stopped that decay. Nothing in the world is static, and 1000 years of Obama wouldn’t stop the larger political-economic factors that are fueling fascism, political polarization, and civil unrest.
Cool, go vote, especially if it’s in your local and state elections that no one actually pays attention to. But disengage from the rat race, and do something with an actual impact in your community.
Removed by mod
Aaaaaaand moderators have nuked my comments. Awesome. Any explanation as to why, besides not liking the points I was making?
it’s in the mod log.
rule 7
Removed by mod
you can leave
Blocking the community now. Enjoy your very correct views that aren’t allowed to ever be challenged for very good reasons.
bye
Not voting means the party has to start offering policies to entice you back.
Blindly supporting means the party can start offering policies to entice those who don’t vote for them (conservatives).
Tell me again which moves the overton window?
Not voting means the party has to start offering policies to entice you back.
No, it doesn’t. The pseudo-democratic spectacle liberals call “democracy” is completely immune to abstinence or boycotts.
The libs don’t lose when the fascists win. There’s a good reason they keep fascists around.
Not voting means the party has to start offering policies to entice you back.
Leftists have been doing this strategy for a couple decades now. How successful has this been at moving the Overton window left?
Leftists have been doing this strategy for a couple decades now.
No. The left hasn’t.
Yes it has. Voting turnout in the US is dreadful. Who do you think does reliably get out to vote? I’ll give you a hint: it’s right wingers.
Yes it has.
No, it hasn’t. That is, unless you want to claim that liberals lying themselves into a corner is (somehow) “leftist strategy.”
What? What does that mean in the context of this conversation?
This you?
Leftists have been doing this strategy for a couple decades now.
I could have sworn that was you.
And those right wingers have gotten momentum and a lot of what they have asked for. Dems are not as left as we want, but that is where the little progressive politics we have lives. Not voting for it or working to grow is is hurting us.
Leftists have been doing this strategy for a couple decades now.
Wait, what? No they haven’t. They’ve been turning out in droves in both primaries and general elections.
If leftists are turning out in droves in the primary how are we getting Joe Biden?
Warren split the vote.
If you combine Sanders and Warren into one they still would have lost to Biden by a pretty wide margin.
Warren is to the right of Bernie anyway, and Bernie is barely left enough for many leftists; I can’t imagine it was leftists that Warren was splitting away.
If you combine Sanders and Warren into one they still would have lost to Biden by a pretty wide margin.
That’s incorrect
Probably be more successful if you stopped being rightists and joined them?
And I think you’ll find that blindly supporting blue no matter who has been done far more often for a couple of decades now. How successful has this been at moving the Overton window left?
Let’s compare leftist strategies of never turning out with the evangelical strategy of driving massive turnouts.
Who has had better success shifting their party?
The Tea Party, they obliterated the old GOP by not voting them and voting for their people instead. The DNC has kept their party under lock and key to avoid any of that happening.
You’re misremembering.
The Tea Party pushed more conservative candidates in primaries, but in general elections Tea Party voters never sat out in protest - instead, they either supported the GOP candidate or, in a few cases, backed third-party or independent runs, but there were never large-scale abstention.
What planet are you living on where either of those strategies are actually what’s being employed?
The right turns out because they’re getting what they want. Would they still turn out of the candidate was a RINO who was soft on things like guns, abortion, or immigration? Probably not! The party has been disciplined by the base for deviating on those issues often enough that they have kept moving to more extreme right positions and the right no longer has any reason to defect.
Meanwhile, there are tons of people on (what passes for) the left who will readily agree that Biden and Harris were complicit in genocide, in some of the worst crimes imaginable, and yet, we should still fall in line behind them. Right wingers will be like, “Sure, this guy has an impeccable record on most of the issues I care about, but he accepted free federal Medicare expansion, which is socialism, so fuck that RINO piece of shit commie traitor I’m voting Libertarian!” And so the Libertarian Party is triple the size of the Greens. And yet, somehow, libs are constantly obsessed with this idea that somewhere out there, someone might be standing on leftist principles, and that’s the worst thing ever and they must immediately be lectured and shamed for it.
Try to pull that shit in some of their circles and you’re liable to get shot. I mean, can you imagine? “Look, I’m as upset as anybody that the only realistic candidates are anti-gun, but you just have to accept that guns are not on the ballot this time around, you’re going to have to vote for someone who wants to take your guns away, and if you don’t, it means you’re a bad person and I’ll constantly lecture you about it. Hey, where are pointing that- OK, OK, I’LL LEAVE”
As Lonergan and Blyth put it in Angrynomics, the right has better tribal enforcement along the boundaries they care about. Like a football team with more fired up and cohesive fans.
The democratic party has two major problems;
-
Their leadership is technocratic and alienated along class lines from the voter base they’re trying to reach. Nobody trusts them to do anything more than run on focus group issues, then turn around the moment they get into power and fail to act on them. This is not isolated to American politics - France’s emmanuel macron is another really good example. The working-class voting base, more than any other group, has been burned too many times on this since clinton1 to get enthusiastic about a democrat candidate. They are almost immediately viewed - and rightly so - as being fundamentally untrustworthy. The DNC’s subsequent games with the 2016 primaries lost an entire generation of potential voters who now view themselves as disenfrachised party outsiders. Now that the senile party leadership is literally dropping dead in office, there is nobody left to replace them who have the blessing of those same aging party elites. From their perspective, they are under siege from without vs. the republicans, and within from the newbies. They well and truly did it to themselves by resisting the emerging organic self-interest of their replacements. Kronus ate his children.
-
Funding sources come from billionaires and the top .01%. Normal people no longer have the disposable income, even at >$250kpa, to make significant enough contributions to run effective election campaigns. This is a form of capture by the ultra-wealthy, and therefore it makes it very difficult to run a campaign on small donations. The political process is entirely captured by the owner class, because nobody else has the $$$$$$ to own anything at all, and now gets charged rents to keep them in usury. Corporate donors can’t be relied upon because they are simple organisms who act in their own best interest of making more money. This needed to be corrected in the 2000’s, and the opportunity was lost. Instead we used QE to prop up a zombie economic system which did not provide appropriate investment in the next generation of the population, nor did it appropriately invest in infrastructure. So instead of flying taxis, vibrant broadband-enabled online fora, high speed trains, electric vehicles, stable rural communities and walkable cities, we got NFT’s, crypto scams, decaying suburbs harboring increasing deaths of despair, ludicrously oversized and inefficient vehicles and auto-enshittifying privacy-destroying cloud capital phone apps. It’s a paper tiger that is now falling to pieces vs. other emerging global competitors because it has extracted every drop of value from its feeder resource pools and is now well into the process of self-cannabalizing. It is a pest economy in the final stages of ecosystem collapse.
Basically, the triangulation game is already played out, the dam has disintegrated and there’s no longer any useful opposition to the rightwards move, because in order to even be an oppositional force, it would require selfless multi-billionaire unicorns (hah!) to effectively sacrifice their family fortunes in order to fund and animate such a movement- whilst somehow political candidates capable of rebuilding five decades of broken promises and tonedeaf social positions regards to the working class come out of the woodwork as a fully-formed well-oiled political machine that both offers and delivers enough Good Things to budge the needle. The technocratic so-called “Abundance Agenda” currently being circulated amongst DNC circles fails to do this - in typical democrat fashion - by attempting to lobotomize the working class out of the picture and reducing them to a mute “consumer of ideas”.
I guess stranger things have happened, but I’m pessimistic on the outlook at this point, because they’d have to win against an entrenched radical political insurgency, with full control of the government, and near unanimous support of the owner class, that legitimately doesn’t want democracy to succeed anymore.
As long as the democratic party elite fail to engage in good faith, they will continue to lose. Even if they do, they’ll also have an uphill battle until they have demonstrated in terms of lived experience to a chronically abused electorate that they have the will and capability to deliver on their promises.
I agree with most what you’re saying but I think you’re minconstruing the abundance book. Ezra has been clear and very vocal about wanting to execute the goals of the left. He’s just calling for a more fluid mechanism that doesn’t put up dozens of roadblocks throughout the process. No one ever addresses the elephant in the room: the upper echelon progressive home owner class. This group alone is blocking every progressive movement indirectly while also spouting the usual progressive rhetoric.
-
Voting blue no matter who seems to have done the US wonders huh?
You can’t have it both ways. Either the progressives not voting had no change on the outcome on of the election thus their strategy has no merit, OR progressives not voting cost democrats the election and the democrat party were at fault for abandoning their base. Oh what’s that? The apathetic vote is not to blame for either scenario? No shit.
You’re getting confused because it doesn’t have anything to do with the outcome of the last election.
Leftists don’t vote, therefore no one caters to them, therefore the overton window moves right.
Leftists have been doing this strategy for a couple decades now
OBJECTION!
What actual
evidencedo you have of this claim?This gets thrown around all the time as “conventional wisdom,” but it’s never actually backed up by anything. In fact, the Libertarian Party typically gets roughly three times the number of votes as the Green Party, and the last major third party candidate, Ross Perot, split the Republican vote leading to Clinton’s election.
More recently, the 2016 election had two major “outsider” candidates. Of them, Trump refused to rule out a third party run, while Sanders went all out campaigning for Clinton, despite all the shenanigans with superdelegates.
Only in 2024 can I see a credible case that some of the left has begun using the stubborn, “my way or the highway” tactics that the right has been employing for decades - with a high degree of success, I might add! The Republican Party has shifted further and further right to accommodate the demands of their base, because they know that if they’re soft on things like guns or abortion, significant portions of their base will denounce them as RINOs and sit out or vote third party. The Democratic Party, by contrast, knows that they can always count on the left to flinch, to be “reasonable,” to accept the “lesser evil,” and so they have moved further right as well, taking those votes for granted.
Again, every piece of actual evidence contradicts this “conventional wisdom,” which only exists in the first place because liberals are so preoccupied with the idea that someone, somewhere, might choose to stand on principle rather than fall in line. Meanwhile, people on the right are constantly choosing to die on the dumbest, most petty hills imaginable.
Removed by mod
In hindsight, everyone on the left side of the spectrum would have been better off not voting in the 2020 presidential presidential election.
Removed by mod
Focusing on nothing but voting enables neoliberalism in promoting fascism.
We can only ever have one message. Classic and so true /s
Electoralism doesn’t change shit and binds resources.
Electoralism doesn’t change shit and binds resources.
Jesus fucking Christ.
Look, it’s PugJesus being angry at the anarchists in the anarchist com! Go figure. /s
The amount of simping for electoralist politics in an anarchist sub is truly depressing.
Removed by mod
Voting changes things. See: every election that wasn’t rigged. Maybe some that were.
Ok, my bad: it doesn’t change shit in your favour.
Well I’m right behind you bud. I’ll vote AND you let me know what you wanna do.
They want to kill anybody who disagrees with installing an autocrat who promises to redistribute wealth via execution.
Veryeanarchist stance /s
Vote if you want. But don’t waste too much time doing so and join a political org.
Good news for you, voting only takes one day.
But that’s not counting this time we’re spending on it right now.
The United States has some of the longest election cycles, maybe in the world, but definitely among western liberal democracies.
So yes, the literal act itself takes a day. But everything surrounding that day is taken up by planning for the next election, enough robs people of other kinds of political engagement, by being such a massive time and energy sink.
That’s for the democrats to choose
Are the choosing democrats in the room with us? Because last time I checked they can only watch as Republicans cut social security, medical, and education while raising taxes and setting up concentration camps.
I’m sure you’re okay with all of that so long as you can send a message.
Oh yea, i can see them only watching. Can’t have your members go against the
mandate of the people
I mean who can ask for more from them? that stern letter they sent only after trumps points fell to 40. I am sure that hit home to that one staffer he has that can read. Oh and at the same time democrats were sitting at a 27 so you know, too busy watching and censuring their own to ensure there is no impediments to republicans directed fee fall into tyranny, no time for self reflection!
When democrats won it was all the minority parties fault we can’t get anything done. But you see, decorum is far more important than fighting tyrants.
Embarrassing
There haven’t been more DNC than GOP senators in over 10 years. You want them to do stuff? Volunteer for them in the midterms.
Uh riiight
Blindly voting means the Right win.
Vote for the furthest left-wing candidate in the primary.
Vote the for furthest left-wong candidate in the general.
It’s not difficult.
Ill vote in the primary, but 2020 showed us, if our guy doesn’t win, voting for a conservative in the general is still handing power to the Republicans
I would say not voting for the “conservative” in 2024 more directly handed power to the Republicans, no?
Voting for the conservative in 2020 gave us Trump in 2024.
The only way we could have avoided Trump in 2024 is if a conservative didn’t win the primary in 2020, and the only way that would have happened is if the DNC knew a conservative didn’t have a shot in hell.
If the DNC believes we will vote for whatever they give us, we will get no concessions. Our mistake in 2020 was compromising and voting for Biden in the hope we could get some concessions after the election.
You forgot a step. Short term vs long term planning.
The problem with voting with your method is you only get to vote once. Every vote you need to make the decision:
-
I should vote based on the optimal outcome of this election.
-
I should vote based on the optimal outcome over many elections.
It’s important that you first ask yourself this question. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. And often by voting for (1) you’re hurting (2).
For example, everyone to the left of Republicans would have been better off if Trump had won in 2020. The primary process was rigged to keep progressive Democrats divided while forcing Biden through as the centrist compromise. People on the left tried to vote for progressive candidates, but the DNC rigged it so that all the centrists EXCEPT Biden dropped out early, while the progressive candidates had their vote divided. The DNC organized for Biden to win the primary. And then, in the general, everyone on the left held their nose and voted for him. They followed your advice to the letter, and everyone to the left of Republicans was massive harmed as the result of following your exact advice.
Those on the left followed your instructions exactly, but they ended up with an inferior option than if they had voted third party.
Biden winning in 2020 guaranteed a MAGA win in 2024. Biden was never going to make the changes needed to prevent MAGA from returning to power. This was predicted by many on the left before he was even sworn in.
Trump in 2020 would have been far less dangerous than a Trump in 2024. He wouldn’t have had 4 years to regroup and plan out his whole Project 2025. He would have been a lame duck from day one, and he wouldn’t have had the political capital he came in with in 2024.
Centrists, liberals, leftists, all of them did themselves a disservice by voting for Biden in 2020. Objectively, everyone EXCEPT Republicans would have had a better long-term outcome if Trump had won in 2020. But in your strategy, we’re not allowed to consider the long term effects of our decisions. We’re just supposed to myopically focus on this and only this election.
Trump winning in 2020 being better is a BIG assumption that fails to consider just how bad things could have gone.
Off the top of my head, would things be better right now if we’d had Turkey’s levels of inflation? How bad would poverty have gotten? How many people would’ve died from suicides and extra Covid deaths? Would he immediately have gone into revenge for BLM mode?
There is a level of death and destruction that you are failing to consider.
Also, really consider how this conspiracy to stop Bernie in 2020 is just the centrists making a strategic decision not to split the vote. In the French parliamentary elections, like 200 left-wing and centrist candidates withdrew from the second-round run-off races to avoid splitting the anti-far-right vote —Do you consider what they did to be unethical and a subversion of democracy?
You claim to worry about long term planning when you don’t even have the hindsight of all the horrible shit happening we could have avoided.
That’s the kind of moron speak we get from these people though. They pretend to care about stopping fascism but would gladly usher it in to tEaCh DeMoCrAtS a LeSsOn
-
Removed by mod
no one cares
no one will work for your interests
no one will overthrow the oppressive systems
no one has never taken a bribe
Removed by mod
Right, we’ve seen the train coming for decades as 2 right wing parties exploit a country and drain its people of wellbeing and as expected it enabled the rise of fascism.
Pretty stupid to stay on the track instead of hopping off and not supporting them.
Removed by mod
You’re the one not wanting to change?
Can we stop pretending like voting for the Democrats as they exist now stops the Republicans from winning? It only makes them win more slowly. It is literally why everyone is so disillusioned and why the Democrats were unable to sell their message to enough people. And can we also take for granted that me saying this doesn’t mean that I didn’t vote for Kamala Harris?
Removed by mod
Can we stop pretending that withholding a Democratic vote will make any positive difference?
So you know they won’t learn, but want people to vote for them anyway? Fucking idiot you are
Removed by mod
not voting does not exist, it’s a vote for the other side.
this is a lie
“Please stop bombing children”, “How about we don’t back a genocide”, “Maybe illness shouldn’t put you into bankruptcy”, “Police shouldn’t be able to assault and murder innocent people”
I feel like these are reasonable requests, and quite different than “short of perfect”
Maybe if the Democrats fought for those values, instead of against them, then they would gain leftist support.
You’re confusing cause and effect; democrats need to promise policy that improves people’s material conditions if they want people to vote for them, and use every single power at their disposal to prevent further harm until then to prove they will do as they say if they win. Nobody is going to vote for a party that they dont believe will help them.
You cant win while telling your own base “eat shit, what are you gonna do, not vote?”
You cant win while telling your own base “eat shit, what are you gonna do, not vote?”
The only thing that tells you that is a common sense analysis of the situation
There is also the fact that democrats lost in 2024, and 2016, and the way the dems lost the house and senate in 2010 after bailing out the banks for stealing people’s houses and giving the health insurance companies subsidies instead of giving us healthcare. Turns out when you do the opposite of what your base wants, fewer people vote.
The Democrats exist as they do now because they can’t rely on the left to vote. So they have to pander to the center.
The centrist voter is a myth. There is not a human who will vote for “means-tested subsidies for a state-run employer-funded health insurance marketplace where you have no idea what it will cover or cost.” But wouldn’t vote for “free healthcare” when you move to the center by compromising your bills, you lose voters who suspect the policy won’t help them, you dont gain a bunch of “moderate Republicans” who want only half of immigrants subjected to inhumane conditions.
You’re not exactly wrong, but it’s even more fundamental than that. If leftists were a more reliable voting bloc, then Democrats couldn’t exist as they do today. They would be primaried by more leftist candidates. And then, if hard left policies were more popular with the general electorate, they would win.
The nightmare we’re all living in right now is proof. I don’t believe for an instant that The Powers That Be wanted Donald Trump to be president. Even by fascist standards he’s kind of a disaster. They wanted fucking Jeb! But Trump’s implicit message of “I’m going to fuck shit up and the establishment doesn’t want me” resonated with a lot of people. It just got the extra boost from being tied with fucked up racism, sexism, and ignorance, all of which are tied to pretty solid groups of voters.
Take a marketing class. If you think that politics is about pandering and not about convincing people, then you’ve lost the game already
Removed by mod
Except the person they were responding to phrased the situation poorly by leaving out important context.
In reality, the Democrats lost because they kept expecting leftists to vote against their working class interests in favor of right wing, pro corporate policies that only serve to maintain the capitalist system. You know, the very thing we are fundamentally against?
Maybe if the Democrats actually made strides for legitimate left wing policies, they would encourage more left wing individuals to throw their hat in with them.
Yet, time and time again, they have shown to throw the working class under the bus if it serves the whims of the capitalist market. Now, no one trusts them to uphold our interests when push comes to shove.
Ah I understand now. You took Marketing 101 and have it all figured out.
I definitely don’t have it all figured out, but I wanna know do you ever think about stuff like what it took for the civil rights movement of the 1960s to succeed? Do you think it was a matter of pandering to the interests of centrist liberals or do you think that a big part of it was criticizing status quo liberalism and refusing to settle? I really think that you should read theletter from Birmingham jail by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. because the archetype that he addresses in that work is replayed out every single time somebody ever deigns to criticize the Democrats for their political strategy.
Maybe we could stop pretending that the shitty Democrats that have never learned their lesson suddenly will if Republicans win one more time
Removed by mod
“some of my colleagues lost. I shall now begin the transformation to a totally new human”
Yes. That’s how electoralist politics work. The power as a voter lies in the ability to withhold their vote or to vote for someone else. The moment your vote is being forced into compliance, you have thus lost all your political power under that system.
It’s kinda one of the major flaws of an electoralist system.
Congratulations for reaching the point.
Congratulations for reaching the point.
Yes it is our fault we’re in this mess. You know, the people who used their vote to stop it. Those who didn’t? Well, they are blameless.
You fucking lawn dart. No it doesn’t and this is the dumbest, most short sighted, most fucking idiotic opinion I have seen on the subject.
You and others like you not voting just pushed the Overton window in the direction opposite of what you want.
Okay centrist.
Choosing not to vote doesn’t make you not a centrist.
No that comes from not voting for centrists.
Jesus fuck me, you are a moron.
Okay centrist.
Okay centrist.
Not voting means the party has to start offering policies to entice you back.
Blindly supporting means the party can start offering policies to entice those who don’t vote for them (conservatives).
That’s true in a democratic system, sure. But what I think the electoral entryists lose sight of is the real incentive of a politician isn’t necessarily to win election. The real incentive of a politician is to build political capital within the party/government in order to pursue an objective. And that objective isn’t necessarily going to be a popular one.
Case in point, look at the UK Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn. The Labour Right very deliberately and explicitly tanked their own chances to win in 2019, because they didn’t want the policies that Corbyn was championing. The fact that Corbyn had brought in an enormous number of new, enthusiastic left-liberal voters was considered a problem to solve not a benefit of his campaign strategy.
Consequently, when Corbyn lost to Johnson, New Labour spent the next years systematically weeding out all of the new left-liberals introduced to the party in the prior cycle. They consolidated support around Starmer by shrinking participation not by expanding it.
The modern Democratic Party is engaged in a similar project. The goal is not to entice anyone into the party. It is to establish the Dem Party as the only viable alternative to Trump and demand voters approach the liberal(ish) party on its own terms. The Dems exist to cater to the donors first and then to the corporate media and then to the celebrity class.
Tell me again which moves the overton window?
The only thing that moves the Overton Window is consolidation of control over the local media.
Leftists quite literally need to get control of the airwaves and democratize the engines of journalism and information commerce. Anything else is a fool’s errand.
You aren’t going to beat FOX News at a propaganda contest by being a Silent Majority. All you’re going to get is BlueMAGA blaming you when they lose, while MSNBC calls you a bunch of Putin Bots and TikTok degenerates.
Not voting means the party has to start offering policies to entice you back.
That’s an assumption. Another assumption is that they try to win over the voters who reliable show up and ignore the ones who don’t as unreachable.
How do you ensure the outcome you’re looking for happens? Hope is not a strategy.
The electoral college?
Which itself was appeasement to the slave states to get them to ratify the Constitution.
I’d like to hear your thoughts on this one more.
I can see the senate as exactly what you described since it grants equal representation to all states regardless of population. Thus granting more power to the lower population slave states of the south.
The three fifths compromise did bolster slave state population numbers helping them in terms of population based seats in the house and the population determination of the electoral college.
But the electoral college system still favors states with the highest population. It gave more power to the more densely populated northern states that tended to be against slavery. If anything is gave more power to the abolitionists. For example, imagine a Pennsylvanian farmer that lives along the border with Maryland or Virginia (rememberin this time West Virginia was still Virginia). They may see the wealth of these plantation owners and grow envious, people can be greedy after all. They may even be encouraged to vote in favor of slavery, but it wouldn’t matter. Philadelphia was the most populous city in the United States at the time and would always swing the state away from pro-slavery candidates. Meaning 100% of the states presidential votes would go to candidates that oppose slavery. The free states almost always had the most electoral college votes. It was the senate that prevented slavery from being abolished.
Or at least this is my understanding, but I really would like to hear your perspective
EC gives more weight to lower population states, because the number of electors is the number of Representatives plus the number of Senators.
How would that make a difference?
Since it is equal between states the starting baseline of 2 votes seems negligible when compared to the much more substantial number of votes determined by the house of representatives. That would still give a much higher weight to the most populous states.
Well, also EC is winner take all except in NE and ME. That’s probably a bigger impact.
The system installed by slave owners to enable slave owners have more sway than the slaves?
What about it?
Weird to see a pro authoritarian post in an anarchy community
What a naive and simplistic view. The people who think this have never lived in a country with an unstable government. Not everybody wants to join a revolution. Some people just want to live their life.
Germans said the same in 1938
Yeah and there were a lot of quiet heroes in Germany who did small-scale acts of rebellion and saved a lot of lives by hiding people and helping them escape.
There’s a lot of quiet libs doing small acts of rebellion hiding immigrants or escorting people to get abortion or providing plan b.
I feel like some of you “revolutionaries” have lost the plot, like the revolution only matters if it’s big and cinematic. I think you’ve made it more about your ego and internal revolution LARP than actually helping people.
Exactly this, I never said I wouldn’t help people hide, or give out information to ICE or any other dickheads who are looking for legal immigrants to deport. Just bcz I dont want to pick up a gun and run around shooting people doesn’t mean i dont care.
lol who said anything about “pick up a gun and run around shooting people”. Y’all are erecting some mighty tall strawmen.
How many peaceful revolutions do you know of, not many im aware of…
You realize that revolutions turn violent because the rulers don’t want to lose control, yes?
deleted by creator
Diversity of tactics.
Just like a revolution made entirely of fighters is most likely to result in an unjust society (extremely vulnerable to being subverted by those who simply love violence), one without a threat to those who exploit and crave power over others is also likely doomed to failure.
OK but what actually defeated fascism? The people within fascism that did small-scale acts of rebellion? Or the people in the neighbouring country who eliminated fascism within through socialist revolution, and then killed 80% of all dead Nazis in the war?
The USSR and US, the biggest contributors to the defeat of the Nazis, were/are both internally very fascist. The USSR originally sided with Hitler, and the Nazi party drew their inspiration from Jim Crow in the US. US and modern Russia have just slid even further into being imperialist authoritarian regimes.
Fascism thrives wherever there is military might, and power concentrated in the hands of a few.
both internally very fascist
Fascism is when you eliminate unemployment, guarantee housing, give free healthcare and education to every single person in the country, reduce wealth inequality to the lowest levels seen in the history of the country, and kill Nazis.
The USSR originally sided with Hitler
This is an especially disgusting lie to hear as a Spaniard. In 1936 in Spain there was a coup d’etat by the fascists against the Republican government, and the ONLY country in the world to supply weapons to the republicans against the fascists was the Soviet Union, while the Nazis supplied the fascist side and directly bombed the Republicans. The Soviets were fighting Nazism and fascism in Europe before anyone else.
The Soviet Union proposed France, Poland and England in 1939 to send ONE MILLION soldiers together with artillery, tanks and aviation, in exchange for a mutual defense agreement against Hitler, but these rejected. After ten years warning Europe, the Soviet Union decided that it wasn’t going to face Nazism in a one-on-one conflict (as that would be devastating for the country and would have likely ended the Soviet Union and killed tens of millions more of people than died already in the conflict), and instead decided to pursue a non-agression pact with the Nazis to postpone the war as much as possible. The Soviets had gone as far as offering to collectively invade Nazi Germany as an alternative to the Munich agreements, which again the allies rejected.
Stop trying to rewrite history. The Soviets saved Europe from Nazism, whether you like it or not.
instead decided to pursue a non-agression pact with the Nazis to postpone the war as much as possible
A non-aggression pact which splits Poland and Eastern European countries between Stalin and Hitler via the secret protocol? It was imperialist opportunism. If you aren’t opposed to Soviet imperialism, you aren’t opposed to imperialism.
Ok, I’ll try to explain this in detail and in good faith. Please, I beg you do the effort of reading through my comment, I’ll explain the reasons why I believe Molotov-Ribbentrop wasn’t imperialism:
1) Most of the invaded “Polish” territories actually belong to modern Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus. In 1919, Poland started the Polish-Ukrainian war and invaded Ukraine, Belarus and part of the RSFSR. This so-called “carving of Poland by the Soviet Union” liberated many formerly oppressed non-Polish national ethnicities such as Lithuanians in Polish-controlled Vilnius arguably being genocided, or ceding the city of Lviv to the Ukraine SSR. Here’s a map of the territories of modern Poland that were actually invaded by the Soviets, and which ones (the vast majority) actually belong to modern Ukraine and Belarus.
And here’s a map of the pre-Molotov-Ribbentrop Poland and the majority ethnicities per region:
Please look at those two maps, and notice how the “Polish” territories invaded by the Soviet Union in 1939 were actually Ukrainian/Belarusian/Lithuanian majority and were returned to their corresponding republics after they were invaded and forcefully taken by Polish nationalists in 1919.
2) The Soviet Union had been trying for the entire 1930s to establish a mutual-defense agreement with Poland, France and Britain against the Nazis, under the doctrine of the then-People’s Commisar of Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov. This decade-long proposal for mutual-defence went completely ignored by France and England, which hoped to see a Nazi-Soviet conflict that would destroy both countries, and Poland didn’t agree to negotiations by itself either. The Soviet government went as far as to offer to send one million troops together with artillery, tanking and aviation, to Poland and France. The response was ignoring these pleas and offerings.
Furthermore, this armistice between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany happened only one year after the Munich Betrayal. The Soviet Union and France had a Mutual Defense Agreement with Czechoslovakia, which France (together with the UK) unilaterally violated in agreement with the Nazis when ceding Czechoslovak territories to Nazi Germany. Stalin offered France, as an alternative to the Munich Betrayals, a coordinated and two-front attack to Nazi Germany, which France rejected in favour of the Munich Agreements.
3) The Soviet Union had been through WW1 up to 1917, the Russian Civil War up to 1922 (including a famine that killed millions) in which western powers like France, England or the USA invaded the Bolsheviks and helped the tsarist Whites to reestablish tsarism, which ultimately ended with a costly Bolshevik victory; the many deaths of famine during the land-collectivization of 1929-1933, and up to 1929 was a mostly feudal empire with little to no industry to speak of. Only after the 1929 and 1934 5-year plans did the USSR manage to slightly industrialize, but these 10 years of industrialization were barely anything in comparison with the 100 years of industrialization Nazi Germany enjoyed. The Soviet Union in 1939 was utterly underdeveloped to face Nazi Germany alone, as proven further by the 27 million casualties in the war that ended Nazism. The fact that the Soviet Union “carved Eastern Europe” in the so-called “secret protocol” was mostly in self-defense. The geography of the Great European Plain made it extremely difficult to have any meaningful defenses against Nazis with weaponry and technological superiority, again proven by the fact that the first meaningful victory against Nazis was not in open field but in the battle of Stalingrad, which consisted more of a siege of a city. The Soviet Union, out of self-preservation, wanted to simply add more Soviet-controlled distance between themselves and the Nazis. You don’t have to take my word for all of this, you can hear it from western diplomats and officials from the period itself. I hope nobody will find my choice of personalities to reflect a pro-Soviet bias:
“In those days the Soviet Government had grave reason to fear that they would be left one-on-one to face the Nazi fury. Stalin took measures which no free democracy could regard otherwise than with distaste. Yet I never doubted myself that his cardinal aim had been to hold the German armies off from Russia for as long as might be” (Paraphrased from Churchill’s December 1944 remarks in the House of Commons.)
“It would be unwise to assume Stalin approves of Hitler’s aggression. Probably the Soviet Government has merely sought a delaying tactic, not wanting to be the next victim. They will have a rude awakening, but they think, at least for now, they can keep the wolf from the door” Franklin D. Roosevelt (President of the United States, 1933–1945), from Harold L. Ickes’s diary entries, early September 1939. Ickes’s diaries are published as The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes.
"One must suppose that the Soviet Government, seeing no immediate prospect of real support from outside, decided to make its own arrangements for self‑defence, however unpalatable such an agreement might appear. We in this House cannot be astonished that a government acting solely on grounds of power politics should take that course” Neville Chamberlain House of Commons Statement, August 24, 1939 (one day after pact’s signing)
"It seemed to me that the Soviet leaders believed conflict with Nazi Germany was inescapable. But, lacking clear assurances of military partnership from England and France, they resolved that a ‘breathing spell’ was urgently needed. In that sense, the pact with Germany was a temporary expedient to keep the wolf from the door” Joseph E. Davies (U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, 1937–1938) Mission to Moscow (1941)
I could go on with quotes but you get my point.
4) The Soviet Union invaded Poland 2 weeks after the Nazis, at a time when there was no functioning Polish government anymore. Given the total crushing of the Polish forces by the Nazis and the rejection of a mutual-defense agreement from England and France with the Soviets, there is only one alternative to Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland: Nazi occupation of Eastern Poland. Seriously, what was the alternative, letting Nazis genocide even further east, killing arguably millions more in the process over these two years between Molotov-Ribbentrop and Operation Barbarossa? France and England, which did have a mutual-defense agreement with Poland, initiated war against Germany as a consequence of the Nazi invasion, but famously did not start war against the Soviets, the main reason in my opinion being the completely different character of the Soviet invasion. Regardless of this, please tell me. After the rejection of mutual-defense agreements with the Soviet Union: what was the alternative other than Nazi occupation of Eastern Poland?
I beg you answer point by point on my response because I’ve taken the time to do the actual reading on this, and I’m yet to see anything that can really challenge any of the points I’m making. Maybe you do have knowledge I’m missing and which would help me understand the history of Molotov-Ribbentrop better.
Thanks for reading anyway.
And fwiw, I’m sure Nazi Germany has it’s share of revolutionary LARPers who fantasized about overthrowing Hitler but never got out of their house to do it.
Exactly, because being a LARPer at home isn’t being revolutionary. Join a fucking antifascist organization, I already have.
I feel like some of you “revolutionaries” have lost the plot, like the revolution only matters if it’s big and cinematic. I think you’ve made it more about your ego and internal revolution LARP than actually helping people.
Counterculture as politics. It’s insanity.
I would hope that anybody who is talking about overturning a system for the betterment of society is already putting in work to better society instead of just creating a personal armory. I.e. volunteering for some sort of community work.
You would hope, but some posts just scream “chronically online, no social interaction with local community”.
Be mad at libs but they are community involved, in mutual aid, and protests, local elections. If you want to help your community, you’re going to find yourself allied alongside lots of libs.
Be mad at libs but they are community involved, in mutual aid, and protests, local elections. If you want to help your community, you’re going to find yourself allied alongside lots of libs.
But working with LIBS is impure. Only pure victories in a society that is fucking 99% further right than us allowed.
Holy strawman Batman!
edit:
Cute, can’t even respond to being called out.
Holy strawman Batman!
Chill bro it’s satire.
Everyone was smart enough to not yell “strawman” at what was obviously a silly low effort bait post, but not smart enough to the silly low effort bait replies.
Downvoting is truly the cruelest form of shitlib oppression.
Don’t you have tankiejerk posts to mass-downvote or something?
Also, lmao
EDIT:
Christ, you even downvoted me for questioning a Lenin quote’s veracity? Thanks for introducing me to Lemvote, I guess.
Germany’ Republic fell in the early 1930s because a splintered left failed to form a government for years and a right wing party took control as a result.
German Communists: “guys we either do a revolution RIGHT NOW or we’re getting overrun by fascists”
German Socialdemocrats: murder Rosa Luxembourg and end the communist movement through state violence
German Socialdemocrats: “dang, how did the fascists get so powerful? Must be the fault of the communists I guess”
If your only options are taking what you want with violence or having things taken from you with violence, you’re a shit negotiator.
Libs like you saying “let’s negotiate with fascists” is exactly why fascists get to power. Please remind me, who eliminated fascism in WW2 and how did they do it?
You’re the one making the Fascists the option in the hypothetical. There does not need to be any fascism.
You’re negotiating with the general population as a whole.
making the Fascists the option in the hypothetical
The hypothetical? Do you really think that when I talk of 1930s and the murder of Rosa Luxembourg by the German SPD I’m talking about hypotheticals? I’m talking about historical events
When Rosa Luxembourg was murdered fascism wasn’t an international threat but a local Italian movement at best. Or is everything you don’t like fascism to you?
Funny how communists were aware of the dangers of fascism though and tried to warn anyone and everyone about it though. Maybe because their (our) political analysis makes sense?
That might be funny if you can show an actual contemporary quote, otherwise it’s just your non-historical babbling.
I really don’t know what kind of mental exercise you’re trying to do. Do you really think that the core characteristics of fascism were invented in Italy in that particular period? Rosa Luxembourg, as any revolutionary from the late 1910s, was very aware of the core belief system of fascism. Proto-fascist groups such as the Black Hundreds in Russia were well known, and Italian/Nazi fascism doesn’t stray very far from the core of these people.
Failed to form a united Left because of right-wing liberal dipshits parading as leftists, sowing division, and playing controlled opposition for the rising fascist regime.
Gee why does that sound familiar?
Talk about naive…
Let’s say you or someone you care about (other than yourself that is) is in an accident of some kind and while laying down dying, someone passes by. They take a look and say “Not everybody wants to save others. Some people just want to live their life.”, then walk away.
Wouldn’t you feel even a shred of anger at the indifference? Or maybe want some kind of retribution to befall this kind of cruelty? After all, had they acted, you or your loved one might have been saved.
We’re emotional creatures. That’s why, not helping is the same as hurting. So when you choose to stand aside, you actually choose to harm.
Do you think I’m not angry about whats happening in the U.S.? I don’t see you starting a revolution either, just typing on your keyboard. So honestly, how are you any different?
Didn’t say i was different. Just letting you know it can and likely will get worse even if you just wanna live your life.
OP wasn’t suggesting helping people, but calling liberals a death cult for not overthrowing a Capitalist system.
So more like, you see that person on the side of the road, you help them, and the OP says “how dare you spend your time helping that one individual while living in a society that exploits people globally”.
I don’t think OP really meant that but it was low effort bait for fake internet points.
Your example, there should be a potential cost to the person. How much is a human life valued at these days? 4 million usd? They may or may not have to pay 4 million dollars to get this stranger treatment.
Resistance isn’t free. Setting up systems to ignore, prevent, or cover the cost is nearly as important as the resistance.
Human life value varies by weight of minimum wage.
And the latest Trump/republican administration has proven that systems put in place ain’t worth shit if no one’s there to enforce them.
