I want to draw attention to the elephant in the room.
Leading up to the election, and perhaps even more prominently now, we’ve been seeing droves of people on the internet displaying a series of traits in common.
- Claiming to be leftists
- Dedicating most of their posting to dismantling any power possessed by the left
- Encouraging leftists not to vote or to vote for third party candidates
- Highlighting issues with the Democratic party as being disqualifying while ignoring the objectively worse positions held by the Republican party
- Attacking anyone who promotes defending leftist political power by claiming they are centrists and that the attacker is “to the left of them”
- Using US foreign policy as a moral cudgel to disempower any attempt at legitimate engagement with the US political system
- Seemingly doing nothing to actually mount resistance against authoritarianism
When you look at an aerial view of these behaviors in conjunction with one another, what they’re accomplishing is pretty plain to see, in my opinion. It’s a way of utilizing the moral scrupulousness of the left to cut our teeth out politically. We get so caught up in giving these arguments the benefit of the doubt and of making sure people who claim to be leftists have a platform that we’re missing ideological parasites in our midst.
This is not a good-faith discourse. This is not friendly disagreement. This is, largely, not even internal disagreement. It is infiltration, and it’s extremely effective.
Before attacking this argument as lacking proof, just do a little thought experiment with me. If there is a vector that allows authoritarians to dismantle all progress made by the left, to demotivate us and to detract from our ability to form coalitions and build solidarity, do you really think they wouldn’t take advantage of it?
By refusing to ever question those who do nothing with their time in our spaces but try to drive a wedge between us, to take away our power and make us feel helpless and hopeless, we’re giving them exactly that vector. I am telling you, they are using it.
We need to stop letting them. We need to see it for what it is, get the word out, and remember, as the political left, how to use the tools that we have to change society. It starts with us between one another. It starts with what we do in the spaces that we inhabit. They know this, and it’s why they’re targeting us here.
Stop being an easy target. Stop feeding the cuckoo.
I suppose it must make the world a lot simpler if you assume the US Democratic and Republican parties represent the full range of beliefs that exist in the world, and anyone who doesn’t neatly fit into those categories is simply lying.
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I’m not “spreading discord” nor “trolling.” I have no interest in disguising my beliefs.
Yes, I will defend the USSR. I will also “defend” just about any nation, if the claims being made about it are false, because my priority is the truth. For many people, the truth doesn’t matter so much as they feel this need to demonstrate that they’re part of an in-group or to communicate that they themselves aren’t going to revolt, and so they allow all kinds of lies spread and propagate them themselves. Because to counteract blatant misinformation about a country is to defend it.
As for democracy, I don’t believe in bourgeois “democracy” where the winner is decided by who has the most money and virtually every important decision is taken out of the sphere of public influence. I do not believe in a “democracy” where the people have to choose which face will be the one to commit genocide. That’s not really democracy though, is it?
I embrace the label “tankie,” mostly because it is thrown around so wantonly that it’s meaningless, and loses any punch it might have otherwise have. In practice, if you have a single positive thing to say about any self-described socialist state in history, for example, “Cuba’s literacy program was good,” then someone’s gonna call you a tankie.
Personally, I love that, because it turns it into this broad, all-inclusive term for any serious leftist, and papers over some differences. It’s kinda like the word “queer.” Whether you’re an Anarchist or a Marxist or whatever else, if the liberals are calling you “tankie” you’re probably a comrade, and if you’re throwing around the term yourself you’re probably a liberal. You Ain’t Done Nothing If You Ain’t Been Called A
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Socialism is when you ask nicely for the bourgeoisie to pretty please give up their wealth and stop exploiting people and the nicer you ask the more socialistier it is.
Classic. Assuming I’m against a socialist revolution despite me never having made this claim.
Edit: To be clear I am very much in favor of socialist revolutions. Unlike a certain someone else I am however not in favor of military dictatorships which pretend to be socialist,
Fredrick Engles, famous non-socialist
How irrelevant. I’m talking about the end result of the revolution. You want to establish dictatorship. I want to establish worker democracy. I am a socialist. You are an authoritarian.
Edit: Never understood why tankies are so obsessed with quoting old dead authoritarians as if that somehow changes the present in some way. I don’t let auths redefine my words. Also how about quoting the anarchists they are so fond of murdering instead.
I must correct my previous statement.
Socialism is when you violently overthrow the bourgeoisie, then immediately allow yourself to be overthrown by a fascist counter-revolution in which everyone on the left is exterminated, because you’re too afraid of your own shadow to stop them.
Tell me, what are your thoughts on Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran? A progressive leader who came to power through a peaceful, popular movement against British colonialism, nationalized the oil industry and reclaimed it’s profits for the benefit of the common people, and then, as the CIA began infiltrating the country, refused to implement any “authoritarian” measures, leading to his overthrow? Leading to the installation of the shah who hunted down and exterminated any and all leftists in the country with his secret police? Leading to generations of Iranians living their entire lives under far-right governments, with no end in sight?
There’s a reason why existing socialist governments are willing to employ authoritarian methods, it’s called “survivorship bias,” as in, all the movements that were too averse to such methods were subverted and exterminated.
Honestly, I find your position less coherent and less respectable than outright liberalism. If you’re serious about revolution, then you have to be prepared for what that entails and you have to understand the life-or-death stakes. If you blow it, not only will everyone involved be killed, but the example will live on and the next opportunity might not arise for another 100 years or more. You are playing with powerful forces, and failure is not an option. It’s necessary to adapt to the situation and use whatever methods are most effective, whether those methods are “authoritarian” or not.
What you want to do is to try to fight the vastly superior foe of capitalism, but before you even start, you want to put on a blindfold and tie one hand behind your back. You want to win in the “right” way, the way that makes you feel good. You’re trying to play games, but the other side does not fuck around.
Of course, I assume you don’t have thoughts on Mossadegh because I assume you haven’t actually studied historical examples to inform your views, nor actual theory. My views are not something I was born with or that were just naturally appealing to me, it’s only after studying such things and seriously considering them that I arrived here. In a world where leaders like Mossadegh didn’t get overthrown, I wouldn’t hold the views I do, unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in. I’d rather survive, win, and deliver on material improvements, rather than be an aspiring martyr.
Take that, you strawman! And that!
“I disagree with both the Republicans and the Democrats.”
“Impossible! You must be a secret Republican here to turn people against the Democrats”
“It kinda seems like you’re assuming has to be either a Democrat or a Republican”
“Strawman! I never said those exact words!”
I have to say it’s pretty ironic to accuse someone else of strawmanning while simultaneously rejecting every single thing they say about their own position and arbitrarily assigning them a completely different position that contradicts everything they say in a way that makes it easier to dismiss what they say.
And if the people OP is criticizing were saying that, then what you were saying wouldn’t be a strawman.
But, they aren’t, and he is drawing a very explicit picture of the behavior they’re displaying which is very distinct (although I guess you could say that people who disagree with both R and D are part of a superset of which OP’s described people are a tiny little specific subset with specific behaviors… although in practice they very rarely say anything about “both the Republicans”. It’s mostly heaping scorn on the Democrats exclusively and sometimes taking time out to say that the Republicans are better or equivalent on some issue on which they objectively are not).
And that’s what makes what you are saying a strawman.
Weird that you’re taking all this time to call out people who focus their criticism on the Democrats, yet your post is completely silent on Ghenghis Khan. I can only conclude that you support rampant killing and pillaging since you don’t spend as much time calling them out as you do calling us out, since apparently that’s how you think logic works.
Alternatively, we can acknowledge the simple fact that it’s not necessary to make arguments about why Ghenghis Khan was bad if nobody is defending him around here, and by the same logic it isn’t necessary to argue about why the Republicans are bad when nobody is defending them around here.
The few times that I’ve seen a Trump supporter wander into Lemmy (and inevitably gotten ratio’d hard), I have attacked and criticized them. I can show my receipts if you like.
You can’t present receipts of me doing that. Maybe somebody at some point has made such a claim, but it’s generally a bullshit strawman.
If Ghengis Khan had been running for president of the United States last year, and I had been running around Lemmy yammering and biting my nails about what a problem Kamala Harris was, then fuck yes that would be weird. I think people should have called me out for it. Yes. That’s my point.
That is, in fact, exactly the reason why I think it’s stupid that these people were biting their nails so hard. Especially since the sum total of what they accomplished is to help put Ghengis in charge.
Sorry for interrupting your circlejerk, I guess. Apparently we’re supposed to spend a bunch of time talking about things that already have near-universal agreement here. I don’t find that particularly interesting or worthwhile.
I’m not saying that everyone should have spent all their time on Lemmy agreeing with each other that Ghengis was bad. I’m saying that spending all our time leading up to that election talking about what a problem Kamala Harris was, and how we shouldn’t vote for her, would be weird and suspicious in precisely 100% the exact same fashion as what people were actually doing. Thank you for making my point for me, in fact, that’s a really good analogy to explain it.
It’s not a good analogy for your point, it’s just replacing one person everyone agrees as bad with another while keeping everything else the same, if Ghenghis Khan was running and everyone on Lemmy hated him I wouldn’t waste much time talking about how bad he was either. The analogy is 100% pointless if you use it that way, and it’s grasping pretty hard to act like you’re owning me with it, it only makes sense if you already agree with your position. But then, I guess you’re more interested in circlejerking anyway, so go for it.
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