Infighting
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Comparing a famine caused by poor harvests across eastern europe and exacerbated by poor management to the fucking holocaust is wild.
"poor management" is one hell of a way to put it.
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The antidote to infighting in my experience is organizing in ideologically diverse spaces. I've organized with liberals and all types of different leftists. It has left me with the perspective that all these people are good people that just want better for the world. It's hard to get angry at them once you know them. Per usual the solution is to touch grass.
The opposite is the case. What worked historically is organizing in an ideologically united platform.
Vanguard parties won revolutions. Ideologically diverse big tent organizations have always eventually broken apart and none has brought a revolution thus far.
And working with liberals has never been a good idea. They're not a part of the left, they belong to a right wing ideology. That would be like saying we should work together with Nazis, because after all they have socialist in their name.
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No. I've seen marxist-leninists, maoists, and anyone in that area of thought arguing the following:
- LGBTQ+ identities are bourgeois degeneracy
- Trans people are a capitalist invention to divide workers
- Nazis have a point when it comes to nationalism
- Assad and Putin are leftists
- Anarchism has never been tried successfully (because every time someone tried they got betrayed by MLs and executed by them for wrongthink)
- Animal Farm is capitalist propaganda
- Killing millions of people is necessary for a better world
- States are 100% necessary for the development of socialism
- China is communist or will be communist by 2050
- Ukraine is a Nazi state who deserves to be invaded
- Russia taking children from Ukraine and relocating them is just them being nice and removing them out of the warzone
- Anarchists are all children who don't know better
- The socialist state must uphold "traditional values"
- Stalin exclusively killed Nazis
- The only valid leftist theory is the one that argues Marxism-Leninism is correct
- "Socialist" police are a good thing because they don't serve capital, they serve the people
- Leftists who don't agree with us are enemies of the revolution and should be enslaved because they will attempt to overthrow our successful socialist state
If you think ANY of those arguments are valid for leftism, then I'm sorry, but I don't want you around me.
wrote last edited by [email protected]This is literal ruling class propaganda. No Marxist or Marxist-Leninist is against LGBT, thinks Nazis or nationalism has a point, claims Putin is leftist, etc.
Stop trying to stir division, astroturf.
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There were no anarchists left in the USSR.
wrote last edited by [email protected]The Soviet Union was established before the Nazis existed. There was no need to ally with anarchists against them when they didn't exist yet and waged war.
A better example would be the Spanish civil war where communists, liberals and anarchists did fight on the same side until infighting broke out due to an ineffective and non-authorative government. Meaning they failed to establish a leading ideology which could have prevented this.
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“Voting is actually bad”
TankiesNazis
whelp, straight to infighting.
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See the comments for a bunch of examples
wrote last edited by [email protected]Still looking for a single leftist here who claims they support communism. I constantly see it being attributed to the left, but in real life scenarios I just don't see it, only in memes, unless you meant socialism, which is a healthy system of every country, including US.
EDIT: I guess I should stop waiting, this feels like strawman argument/gatekeeping
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I'm anti authoritarian and anti right. Tankies are leftists that I have no interest in getting along with. They are just as excited to be holding the gun in this comic
They would also tell me to my (virtual) face that they think my country has no right to exist, so that too makes it pretty hard to have any sort of productive collaboration.
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It took centuries before any liberal or democratic project managed to produce a society that wasn't far more brutal than the USSR. Yet you don't see people going around saying "the French Revolution permanently damaged the Democratic brand!"
Because the French Revolution didnt permanently damage democracy as a political system. And democratic system in one form or another existed for millennia before the French Revolution.
The USSR and China under the CCP permanently discredited (without any chance of rehabilitation) communism as legitimate ideology.
No one in their right mind would want anything to do with communism. It's like asking for genocide, mass killings, gulags, lack of free expression and poverty. No one is going to do that.
And I not saying this in the polemical sense used by pro-crime/pro-corruption Americans ("this is such a socialist shirhole").
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There were no anarchists left in the USSR.
And the Soviets allied with Nazi Germany and carved up Poland with their new buddies.
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Because the French Revolution didnt permanently damage democracy as a political system. And democratic system in one form or another existed for millennia before the French Revolution.
The USSR and China under the CCP permanently discredited (without any chance of rehabilitation) communism as legitimate ideology.
No one in their right mind would want anything to do with communism. It's like asking for genocide, mass killings, gulags, lack of free expression and poverty. No one is going to do that.
And I not saying this in the polemical sense used by pro-crime/pro-corruption Americans ("this is such a socialist shirhole").
Because the French Revolution didnt permanently damage democracy as a political system.
Ok. Neither did the communist revolutions of the 20th century permanently damage communism as a political system.
And democratic system in one form or another existed for millennia before the French Revolution.
As have anarchist and communistic systems.
The USSR and China under the CCP permanently discredited (without any chance of rehabilitation) communism as legitimate ideology.
No. They didn't. Only too western liberals who were always hostile to communism would say that. The idea that communism is permanently dead just because capitalists didn't like it is pure "end of history" Neo-liberalist nonsense, and basically ignores the fact that a large chunk of the worlds population still actively feels positively about these revolutionary projects; to say nothing of the people who don't like those particular ones, but still agree with communism in general.
Besides, so called "liberal democracies" have done far more evil than the USSR or Communist China. In fact, they're doing a repeat of the Holocaust as we speak. Does that "permanently (without any chance of rehabilitation) discredit democracy as a legitimate ideology"?
No one in their right mind would want anything to do with communism. It’s like asking for genocide, mass killings, gulags, lack of free expression and poverty. No one is going to do that.
Sure, if you're a complete dullard who has mainlined nothing but pure, concentrated cold war propaganda without any thought or consideration, without ever bothering to open a single book on political theory. Everyone else is not that stupid.
And guess what? You have genocide, mass killings, gulags, lack of free expression, and poverty now, no communism needed. In fact, communism has almost always been associated with a reduction in those things if you actually check the stats.
And I not saying this in the polemical sense used by pro-crime/pro-corruption Americans
Yes, you are. That is exactly how you are saying it.
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And the Soviets allied with Nazi Germany and carved up Poland with their new buddies.
The communists were never "buddies" with the Nazis. The communists spent the decade prior trying to form an anti-Nazi coalition force, such as the Anglo-French-Soviet Alliance which was pitched by the communists and rejected by the British and French. The communists hated the Nazis from the beginning, as the Nazi party rose to prominence by killing communists and labor organizers, cemented bourgeois rule, and was violently racist and imperialist, while the communists opposed all of that.
When the many talks of alliances with the west all fell short, the Soviets reluctantly agreed to sign a non-agression pact, in order to delay the coming war that everyone knew was happening soon. Throughout the last decade, Britain, France, and other western countries had formed pacts with Nazi Germany, such as the Four-Power Pact, the German-French-Non-Agression Pact, and more. Molotov-Ribbentrop was unique among the non-agression pacts with Nazi Germany in that it was right on the eve of war, and was the first between the USSR and Nazi Germany. It was a last resort, when the west was content from the beginning with working alongside Hitler.
Harry Truman, in 1941 in front of the Senate, stated:
If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.
Not only that, but it was the Soviet Union that was responsible for 4/5ths of total Nazi deaths, and winning the war against the Nazis.
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You pretend, for a little while, then slowly introduce truth to them drip by drip. Like an undercover propaganda agent.
Since that's probably what they're doing to us.
wrote last edited by [email protected]This strategy is dishonest though. We cannot use all the same methods of the far right and ruling class.
There's a conflict of interest between wanting people to think critically and then lying to them and only slowly letting them learn parts of a truth.
In another example, you can't have a democracy when all parties try to deceive the voters. That will damage the concept of democracy and the existing supposed democracy.There is also the danger of falling your own rhetoric and propaganda. Prime example of this is how fascism was created. Mussolini actively engaged in nationalist pro-war propaganda as he thought the continued war would lead to the conditions necessary for socialist revolution. He wasn't wrong about that as then revolutions broke out in several successors / breakaways of the Russian Empire, in Germany and in Hungary. But eventually he fell to his own propaganda and created fascism.
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Still looking for a single leftist here who claims they support communism. I constantly see it being attributed to the left, but in real life scenarios I just don't see it, only in memes, unless you meant socialism, which is a healthy system of every country, including US.
EDIT: I guess I should stop waiting, this feels like strawman argument/gatekeeping
I'm a communist, I support communism. Socialism isn't welfare, it's a transitional status towards the gradual sublimation of private property. The US is firmly capitalist and is in no way socialist, socialism isn't "when the government does stuff."
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ah yes, because marxist-leninism has no history of its adherents glorifying imperialism or state-capitalism.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Correct. Neither imperialism is glorified, nor is state-capitalism like the US Empire, Republic of Korea, Singapore, or Bismarck's Germany if you want an earlier example, are glorified by Marxism of any kind.
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Or Marxism and Marxist-leninist.
Say what you will about Democrats. Outside of the elected ones. Most of them don't have a strong ideology. Just actually wanting things to improve. But I'm sure of how to go about it. And when you approach them like that. Are plenty likely to be sympathetic and allies.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Not really sure what you're trying to say here as "Marxism and Marxism-Leninism." Are you saying these are antagonistic ideologies? Marxism is an umbrella, not a tendency within itself. History has progressed since Marx, and Marxist theorists since Marx have developed theory and practice accordingly. By far the largest tendency in Marxism is Marxism-Leninism, the closest to a "pure" Marxism you can get is Orthodox Marxism, which itself is ironically anti-Marxist and is overall an extreme fringe belief among Marxists.
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[dude with glasses in a communist t-shirt, arguing]
I'm the only leftist here, your opinions are TRASH[dude holding a theory book on smug, arguing]
Read theory you losers, you're all WRONG[dude in an anarchist hoodie, arguing]
Nuh-uh, I'm the only leftist here, you're SHITLIBS[the three dudes are now caught in a cartoon fight, glasses gone flying, punches everywhere, while a firing squad of nazis are targeting them with rifles]
[a confused nazi asks]
Why… why are they still arguing?Infighting | The Bad Website
Infighting - A comic on The Bad Website
The Bad Website (thebad.website)
bLuE nO mAtTeR wHo unless it's an actual progressive
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I believe you are missing the forest for the trees.
First, I acknowledge your examples are separate ideologies.That concept also applies to the right... social conservatives, right-libertarians, and neoliberal ideologies are equally separate. However, those practitioners have no qualms about banding together to suppress dissent (or until such time they are the only voices).
Where the left leaning practitioners are unable to do so, they will be forever tyrannized by the banded majority.
To put it more succinctly, the enemy of my enemy is my friend (when freedom is on the line).
It does help that the overarching theme of the right is centered around taking as much for yourself as possible and not caring about the collateral damage. The right is full of single-issue voters who might, say, not actually explicitly hate gay people but who also don’t give a shit about their rights and safety if it means they can keep their guns. The left, almost definitionally, needs to consider the complexity inherent in not being able to ignore the effects that any given policy might have on others and this means that there is so much more opportunity for conflict.
You’re correct, of course, I’m just pointing out the difference such that it might help attack the issue from a better perspective.
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Yeah, pretty much this.
Going over the comments I already see boat loads of people completely missing the point where right wing extremism is taking hold thanks in part due to the constant bickering.
Good old "divide and conquer".
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The only thing that matters is policy, I'll work with anyone as long as it's toward an egalitarian society with wealth redistribution.
Labels are nice for classifying, but not for executing. I don't care if you identify as leftist, or liberal, or progressive; I care if you support good policies.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Yeah, but the question ultimately lies in how many bad and straight up harmful policies are worth the small step toward an egalitarian society? Where does it become ignoble to vote for one policy, when there are ultimately many more harmful ones outweighing the positive? Because it’s kinda rare that we get to vote on policy. We vote for people, with the vague promise of policy ideas that face an uphill battle and watering down— not to mention the straight up bastardization of those good policies, turning them into terrible ones.
I wish it were so black and white as us getting to vote on policy. The policymakers surely seem to be unable.
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Correct. Neither imperialism is glorified, nor is state-capitalism like the US Empire, Republic of Korea, Singapore, or Bismarck's Germany if you want an earlier example, are glorified by Marxism of any kind.
glorified by Marxism of any kind.
i didnt claim that.
nevertheless, china was oddly missing in ur list of state-capitalist nations that werent glorified..