In this post that I found while browsing via Popular, people are openly talking about Marx and capitalism. In another post I saw, people were praising Lula. These are both posts I found via Popular, ie these are the ones the algo is promoting and are getting a lot of traction. That’s a good sign!
I’m sure there are plenty bad parts to Reddit, and the site as a whole might be astroturfed to hell, but there are so many people there that are open to socialism, maybe more than any other popular social media platform.
Maybe you can’t praise China or talk about Russia, but I feel everything else is game. And honestly? I think that’s fine. If we can get the average Redditor to turn to socialism and to bring down western imperialism, then that is already gonna be the biggest possible help the global south can ask for.
If we can get the average Redditor to turn to socialism and to bring down western imperialism, then that is already gonna be the biggest possible help the global south can ask for.
lol
Death to America
12k upvotes and removed because it is "low quality".
but there are so many people there that are open to socialism, maybe more than any other popular social media platform.
You see leftism is an aesthetic. Maybe you remember back in the days when r/latestagecapitalism got popular, or when r/futurology had like 200k subs. Heck even go back to the Bernie era and you'd be forgiven for having a little bit of hope for the future.
But no, it is just aesthetic. Pointing out things suck is a great way to get upvotes, just don't ponder the alternatives or even the only real alternative and you'll get the same "well you see maybe Capitalism sucks but TINA".
"Oh Capitalism sucks but dEmOCraCYyYYYYYYYYY!"
"Oh capitalism sucks but tankies are worse than nazis!"
When you put the Bernie effect into context here it is also quite clear the "socialists" of reddit want healthcare and college anyway not socialism, and socialism doesn't mean a workers revolution but moving to Sweden.
I thought the title was going to be the set up for a punch line like
"Because they all share the same joke!"
Ah. Well. I didn’t know that. But I guess it’s a good sign that it’s so popular.
Bernie was huge on Reddit in 2016, and still popular but turfed in 2020. There's lots of radlibs there. They stay there (radlib reddit) cuz that's as far as they're willing to go a lot of the time
Maybe they don’t know where else to go except the type into the void. We can shooow them the waaaay.
Eh. Don't mean to be too :doomer: but aside from some people in union organizing, "Socialism" in the west is still just an intellectual / aesthetic movement. Weekend hobby do-goodery if we're feeling generous. A few reddit posts don't really change that; nothing will until some combo of e-dollarization and hyper-federalism derails the imperial treat train.
You can’t possibly be cherry-picking that hard comrade. At least find multiple subreddits
This was two different posts from different subreddits though. I don’t browse Reddit that much so I don’t really know the popular subs. Usually I just check a couple of niche subs and that’s it lol.
Basically there are so so many subs that concluding that it's "pretty socialist , actually" is off base. We call it :reddit-logo: for a reason, it waxes and wanes in favor of a broad "progressivism," but anything further than that, like socialism, and you're basically toast. There are a few decent spots, but on the whole, it reflects the politics of its users who are by and large not any flavor of socialist
I guess. I think the fact that socialist subreddits/posts/comments rise to the top is a good sign. Maybe most people aren’t socialists but they can be if that pattern continues.
There was a post on D&D memes yesterday saying "The big bad in D&D has always been capitalism" the comments were mixed but most were pretty strongly anti capitalist.
Took me a while to get this is about the latest controversy. Initially I thought "surely it would be feudalism"
I admire your optimism comrade. This is a lot of optimism too lol, :lenin-laugh:
What is now happening to Marx’s theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism. They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social-chauvinists are now “Marxists” (don’t laugh!). And more and more frequently German bourgeois scholars, only yesterday specialists in the annihilation of Marxism, are speaking of the “national-German” Marx, who, they claim, educated the labor unions which are so splendidly organized for the purpose of waging a predatory war!
In these circumstances, in view of the unprecedently wide-spread distortion of Marxism, our prime task is to re-establish what Marx really taught on the subject of the state. This will necessitate a number of long quotations from the works of Marx and Engels themselves. Of course, long quotations will render the text cumbersome and not help at all to make it popular reading, but we cannot possibly dispense with them. All, or at any rate all the most essential passages in the works of Marx and Engels on the subject of the state must by all means be quoted as fully as possible so that the reader may form an independent opinion of the totality of the views of the founders of scientific socialism, and of the evolution of those views, and so that their distortion by the “Kautskyism” now prevailing may be documentarily proved and clearly demonstrated.
Let us begin with the most popular of Engels’ works, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, the sixth edition of which was published in Stuttgart as far back as 1894. We have to translate the quotations from the German originals, as the Russian translations, while very numerous, are for the most part either incomplete or very unsatisfactory.
Summing up his historical analysis, Engels says:
“The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without; just as little is it ’the reality of the ethical idea’, ’the image and reality of reason’, as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms, these classes with conflicting economic interests, might not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it became necessary to have a power, seemingly standing above society, that would alleviate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of ’order’; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state.” (Pp.177-78, sixth edition)
This expresses with perfect clarity the basic idea of Marxism with regard to the historical role and the meaning of the state. The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable.
It is on this most important and fundamental point that the distortion of Marxism, proceeding along two main lines, begins.
On the one hand, the bourgeois, and particularly the petty-bourgeois, ideologists, compelled under the weight of indisputable historical facts to admit that the state only exists where there are class antagonisms and a class struggle, “correct” Marx in such a way as to make it appear that the state is an organ for the reconciliation of classes. According to Marx, the state could neither have arisen nor maintained itself had it been possible to reconcile classes. From what the petty-bourgeois and philistine professors and publicists say, with quite frequent and benevolent references to Marx, it appears that the state does reconcile classes. According to Marx, the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of “order”, which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between classes. In the opinion of the petty-bourgeois politicians, however, order means the reconciliation of classes, and not the oppression of one class by another; to alleviate the conflict means reconciling classes and not depriving the oppressed classes of definite means and methods of struggle to overthrow the oppressors.
For instance, when, in the revolution of 1917, the question of the significance and role of the state arose in all its magnitude as a practical question demanding immediate action, and, moreover, action on a mass scale, all the Social-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks descended at once to the petty-bourgeois theory that the “state” “reconciles” classes. Innumerable resolutions and articles by politicians of both these parties are thoroughly saturated with this petty-bourgeois and philistine “reconciliation” theory. That the state is an organ of the rule of a definite class which cannot be reconciled with its antipode (the class opposite to it) is something the petty-bourgeois democrats will never be able to understand. Their attitude to the state is one of the most striking manifestations of the fact that our Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks are not socialists at all (a point that we Bolsheviks have always maintained), but petty-bourgeois democrats using near-socialist phraseology.
On the other hand, the “Kautskyite” distortion of Marxism is far more subtle. “Theoretically”, it is not denied that the state is an organ of class rule, or that class antagonisms are irreconcilable. But what is overlooked or glossed over is this: if the state is the product of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms, if it is a power standing above society and “alienating itself more and more from it”, it is clear that the liberation of the oppressed class is impossible not only without a violent revolution, but also without the destruction of the apparatus of state power which was created by the ruling class and which is the embodiment of this “alienation”. As we shall see later, Marx very explicitly drew this theoretically self-evident conclusion on the strength of a concrete historical analysis of the tasks of the revolution. And — as we shall show in detail further on — it is this conclusion which Kautsky has “forgotten” and distorted.
:lenin-rage:
STATE AND REVOLUTION Chapter 1. Section 1: The State: A Product of the Irreconcilability of Class Antagonisms
This is to say, Reddit in in fact not "pretty socialist" actually.
They are socialistic until the slightest thing goes wrong. They absolutely adored Bernie until Biden won then it was all "what is the problem we this Bernie loon"
yeah just wait until a strike or environmental protest or something makes them 15 minutes late for work or delays their funko pop shipment from amazon and see how socialist they are then
they talk a big game sometimes but r*ddit is "socialist" to the extent that they dont have to do anything except :vote: and as long as they arent personally inconvenienced in the slightest
In another post I saw, people were praising Lula.
That doesn't necessarily mean much considering he's replacing Bolsonaro, who you don't have to be a leftist to hate.
More importantly, there isn't a propaganda campaign going on against Lula. If Lula ever falls into the crosshairs of the US, then the media will run a bunch of negative stories about him, and Reddit will fall in line behind whatever sanctions or regime change the US does. That's why you can't just be like, "Oh well you can't support the countries that are currently in America's crosshairs, but you can still support the ones that aren't, so it's fine," because the ones that aren't may someday find themselves in those crosshairs, and at that point the previous support will dry up and become meaningless.
Of course most people have left-ish ideas, but if they can be easily manipulated into supporting bad things, then so what? Like, my chud mom once quoted, "All that's necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing," ...in defense of the invasion of Iraq. Values and principles are largely irrelevant if your view of reality can be easily manipulated.
I haven’t visited stormfront since I saw somewhere that doing so pumps a shitload of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. It just isn’t worth it.
I think its' mostly that the contradictions are mounting and that every one can see it now. Most of reddit isn't socialist but they are defiantly realizing that capitalism is a failure.
