@kijib taking it to the libs in r/dsa

    • bcels [comrade/them]
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      4 years ago

      I went from conservative teenager in the early 2000s to a Ron Paul libertarian to socialist by 2010-11. Chris Hedges and Jeremy Scahill radicalized me and I skipped right over a lib phase

      • JayTwo [any]
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        edit-2
        4 years ago

        Similar. Grew up in a right wing household. Went libertarian because it was the closest ideology I knew of to what I believed. Quickly learned how awful libertarians were and how the invisible hand doesn't actually exist. Self identified as "apolitical" but was actually somewhere on the bottom left of the political compass for a while, with Orwell and Chomsky to thank for that. Then found Marx.

    • Chomsky [comrade/them]
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      4 years ago

      I'm proud to say I never really was. My bedroom decorations when I was a kid included a decorative chairman Mao plate and a Soviet flag.

      The closest I got to being a lib was a phase I went through with anarchism. My dad was a lib and I remember one time when I was kid him freaking out because I stood my ground in saying that I wasn't proud to be Canadian.

      Ultimately you are right, some libs stop being libs, but it's never going to be enough as long as the material conditions support them being libs. I think it's anti Marxist to rely on people's good will to change, so I think the primary focus should be on anti imperialism and supporting the third world proletariat in resisting Western imperialism in any way possible.

      If third world people can resist imperialism in a significant way, material conditions will change in a way that heightens contradiction dramatically in the west and open up the room for positive change. But as long as the west continues to enslave most of the world, the majority will go along with it.

      It's like recycling. Recycling is the perfect metaphor for modern liberalism. They will recycle to pay themselves on the back, but heave to centrism the minute a policy is suggested that means the will need to take the bus to work.

      Voting for the harm reduction candidate and making a big deal out of it is the recycling of politics.