LMAO at all the liberals from lemmy.world already upset at this meme in the comment section, just an hour after it was posted
Cope and seethe
You know what’s not cool, Jordan? Crying everytime someone says Marxist
Just saw which instance this was. Apologies, I'll take my anarchist self elsewhere.
Respect. Although I’m curious what problem you as an anarchist would have with calling democrats blue maga lol
Oh, they're absolutely shit (even the furthest left of them) but, the system is rigged with FPTP and other "features" to give us either a neoliberal party or a fascist party. Neither is a good choice though I find equating them to be a false equivalency. My personal ethics require that I take what action that I can to reduce harm, especially to those must vulnerable and historically oppressed. Data shows anti-electoralism and third parties in FPTP to be functionally equivalent to voting for fascists, so, garbage neoliberals who at least aren't trying to string up trans people while robbing the working class is my option.
I agree, although I would also argue that in the specific case of the US, the situation is a bit more drastic since in most (specially oppressed countries) the liberals/moderate fascists/national bourgeoisie have a somewhat "revolutionary" role since they generally oppose the international bourgeoisie and do win some concessions for the working class, as you mention, or help with industrialisation and so on. In the case of the US, though, both parties represent the international bourgeoisie, and the international political agenda of both countries is essentially the same, interventionism, imperialism, economic blockades, and so on, so the difference is radically different in that the number of concessions the liberals/moderate fascists can give the working class, specially the working class of oppressed countries, is much smaller than in other places. I too critically support the left wing liberals in my country because the option is total deindustrialisation and selling everything to the lowest bidder otherwise, so I totally get your point but wanted to make a small distinction.
By the way, I don't know if you've heard of Hexbear, they're a pan-leftists instance who will be federating with us and a couple of other instances by the end of the month luckily, they have a pretty active anarchist community so you might have a better time there than on a general purpose liberal instance.
Definitely agreed and thank you for the solid discourse. My contention is that nominal support of a liberal/moderate international bourgeoise still tends towards reduction of harm, compared to fascists. They still practice imperialism and exploitation but tend to do so when softer gloves more frequently by compare. Additionally, their constituents tend to be more likely to urge further harm reduction, when they are unable to remain ignorant of it. My loyalties being to those groups that have been, from my perspective, most harmed throughout recorded human (indigenous peoples, minorities, and general non-combatants), I still have to make that choice in the artificial binary.
My ideal societal organization (mostly in-line with anachro-syndicalism) is something that I hold no illusion of being achievable in my lifetime, if it ever is, at least not without unacceptable suffering and loss of life (nor do I pretend that my non-violent path is the only one necessary to achieve positive change - the labor and civil rights movements being excellent examples contrary). So, I do what is within my means and abilities to corrode these systems by cultivating curiosity and kindness while mitigating harms in hope that this continues our species' social and psychological evolution towards something compatible with my ideals.
Thank you for recommending Hexbear! I hope that they federate with my home instance as well, which seems to skew more towards anarchism, in my experience, but is more topically aligned with free and open knowledge and creativity.
I need to make a bot to post this any time fascism gets mentioned.
The western left’s use of the term fascism, is borderline white-supremacist at this point. Fascism was a form of colonialism that died by the 1940s, and is only allowed to be demonized in public discourse, because it was a form of colonialism directed also against white europeans. It was defeated, and Germany / Italy / Japan reverted to the more stable form of government for colonialism (practiced by the US, UK, France, the Netherlands, Australia, etc): bourgeois parliamentarism.
British, european, and now US colonizers were doing the exact same thing, and killing far more people for hundreds of years in the global south, yet you don’t hear ppl scared of their countries potentially "adopting parliamentary democracy”. They haven't changed, and their wealth is still propped up by surplus value theft from the super-exploitation of hundreds of millions of low-paid global south proletarians.
This is why you have new leftists terrified that the UK or US or europe “might turn fascist!!”, betraying that the atrocities propagated by those empires against the global south was and is completely acceptable.
Make no mistake about it: parliamentary / bourgeois democracy is not only a more stable form of government, it's also far more effective at carrying out colonialism, and killing millions of innocent people.
Thank you for this. The historical and current colonial exploitation of the global South and indigenous peoples around the globe is absolutely something that is overlooked far too much in these conversations. A large part of this, I suspect is due to controlling narratives allowed in education and subverting factual accounts and analyses. A good recent example being the portrayal of The Troubles in Northern Ireland as a sectarian conflict.
So I'm guessing this instance is infested with MAGAts? Good to know; I'll grab my bug spray.
Nope. Marxist-Leninists. We agree on some things, disagree on others, sometimes rather vehemently. Rather than stir up unnecessary internet drama, I edited my comment because I know that it's something we're unlikely to come to any agreement on. Plus, it's their meme community - nothing positive for anyone to gain in bickering here.
no like seriously shout out to you, I'm not sure if I've ever seen an anarchist come in here on mistake and actually engage in good faith. Have you been to hexbear? it's an instance you should check out if not, they're a left unity instance, it is still mostly ML but the mods keep a tight grip on any sectarianism there
We all want to see the world organized in a more equitable way. What that looks like and how we get there may have some differences but the end state does at least rhyme. Engaging in bad faith is something that I try to avoid. The world's fucked up enough as is, adding to the division just. Thanks for your recommendation of Hexbear as well. I'm somewhat new on the Fediverse and will have to check it out.
Hey, you are a fucking cool dude you know that? I know hexbear will more likely be your kind of space but with the very good comments you've made in this thread, I'll say you are welcome here despite not being a Marxist–Leninist. Even if we will disagree on a lot of things xd
Much appreciated and thank you for being welcoming. I'm happy that this platform (and the Fediverse as a whole) has been home to a lot more positive interactions than have been consistently seen in the web at large in recent years. Hopefully we can continue that, keep humanizing each other, and avoid rhymes of past tragedies (both leftist and non-leftist).
Even if we end up in conflict, we're still brothers, sisters, and niblings wanting to make the world more fair and equitable for all of humanity. I think that is vital to remember and reinforce, lest we be unwitting tools of the forces of imperialism and anti-social philosophies that are resisting the very ideals that we try to work towards or worse, losing sight of the inequities that drove us down these paths in the first place, dehumanizing others, and perpetuating the very harms that we intend to oppose.
In that case, can you please explain how Marxism-Leninism leads to supporting Russia in the current war? Is Putin following Marx, Lenin, or any other socialist in any way?
The case for supporting Russia in the current conflict is not because it is some harbor of socialist development, Russia in it's current state is very much the opposite when it comes to it. Very much a capitalist shithole. That's what critical support means.
However, the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine has sparked new developments globally. This conflict has very much accelerated the trend of multipolarity, meaning that it weakens the hegemony of the United States thus allowing third world countries as well as communists some breathing room. The development of BRICS is very much a positive one for the working classes of Africa, Asia and South America by giving these countries an alternative to existing western institutions that were bleeding them dry. Like the IMF and the World Bank.
Now because of this conflict directly, imperialist forces have been preoccupied with different matters and thus are unable to intervene in case of progressive developments around the world as they normally would be able to. Take a look at Libya, it was an example for many countries to stay in line.
For example the coup in Niger, would never have happened just a few years ago. This is massive progress in a very short time span!
If Russia were to „win” this conflict it would only exacerbate the current developments further, no matter what happens it was essentially proven that NATO is not well equipped for combat with a peer power, dedollarization is already happening and would then only accelerate with Russia being declared the de-facto victor.
Also to add something personally. I don't like Nazis, and seeing Azov and others get turned into swiss cheese was some very positive news to read B)
Thank you for a serious answer and not just a downvote.
Unfortunately, you are mostly wrong. It has indeed sparked new developments, but those developments are making the world even more reliant on the US. Europe is now importing American gas instead of Russian one, this is giving the US tons of extra money and power, both of which used to go to Russia. Wagner had to be pulled out of Africa and Syria which means there is nobody there to counter US interests. China is now looking at Siberia rather than Africa.
I will concede that if Russia won in 3 days, then all of the international responses probably wouldn't happen at all. But they didn't, and in the current state every day they stay there is worse for BRICS.
I'm not an Marxist-Leninist, myself, but an anarchist. I do not see eye-to-eye with many online M-Ls that I've encountered on this topic or that of current regimes. I would rather let them answer so that I don't offer an inaccurate explanation based on misunderstanding or my personal biases.
Lemmygrad is a communist instance. Primarily marxist-leninist.
Communists are anti-liberal.
Liberalism as a political philosophy is the underpinning of capitalism.
We can't destroy capitalism without doing away with it's political philosophy.
As an aside, from this perspective both American liberals and conservatives are liberals - they both spring from the philosophy of liberalism.
I understand that it's confusing to hear criticism of the Democrats from the left - it's relatively uncommon in the U$.
No I think you misunderstood. I agree with your idealogy. But to talk shit about liberals, when we are liberals who actually lean left (unlike Democrats who are moderates in disguise), well that's just plain dumb. It makes you sound like a Trumpanzee.
I'm a liberal, and I'm also a proud socialist. And so are you.
Edit: Y'all are missing the point. There's no reason for all this infighting. Communist, Socialist, Liberal, or whatever; we need to stop arguing over the differences and band together to stop the rise of Fascism. Some of these replies make me worried that a lot of you will vote for 3rd parties in the next election and effectively hand the votes over to Trump. Please don't do that.
No, we're not liberals, we're communists. We talk shit about and dunk on liberals because we fundamentally disagree and take issue with the entire ideology. We take issue with being called liberals, because we're not.
Liberals have nothing to do with the left.
You can't be a liberal and a socialist at the same time, unless you're talking about philistine and opportunist social democracy.
Non-digetic screams just summarized this whole thing perfectly.
We're Marxists. We're against liberalism. Liberalism is the ideology of capitalism as another user already told you.
You've been taught a false binary. This is intentional to limit your ability to think critically about capitalism. All of us were. There is no binary.
There is liberalism (subset of which include conservatism, US Republicans), Marxism, and technically you could have non-liberal reactionaries like say sincere Monarchists who prefer a return to feudalism or some other older system and reject the enlightenment. However, largely speaking there are two groups as the amount of reactionaries who genuinely reject liberalism and assert a desire to return to and an embrace of a pre-liberal philosophy is shockingly small and they have no real traction anywhere among anyone, especially among Republican voters seething and crying about liberalism as to a one those people like most parts of liberalism (many of them espousing a return to "classical liberalism" or "liberalism before all these uppity women and minorities got rights and did things I didn't like) and embrace for example the liberal idea of free enterprise, free markets, etc.
We reject the notion that we are at the end of history, that liberalism represents some final, perfect stage of humanity as opposed to previous societal stages such as the feudal, the monarchistic, the slave-society, the tribal, hunter-gatherer primativism, etc. As Marxists we say of liberalism what many liberals said of feudalism, namely that it was a historical stage, that it may have in certain ways represented advancements over previous ways of organizing society, but that it never-the-less is inferior to our proposed successor.
Just as liberalism did not represent some sort of wacko total year-zero rejection of the societies and systems that came before it but rather proposed a radical furthering of certain rights and ideas, so too Marxism while rejecting liberalism as out-modded, out-dated, and at this point backwards and bad, does not wholly reject and want to turn all of society upside down. We are a progressive force. We are for progress. We are for emancipation. But we are against capitalism. We are against privately held means of production. We are for the people, the workers being the rulers, the dictatorship over the current owning class to impose our will, our ends, our goals, our goods over their greed. With force. To create a new society, to gradually erode away the old as liberalism eroded away previous societies before it. This is our project, this is our calling. So yes we reject liberalism.
We embrace a scientific approach, we reject many things liberals take as immutable, as unchallengable, as laws unable or unwise to be challenged by humans.
Liberalism is not leftism. We must fight fascism and liberalism at the same time. Fascism is the mask off form of liberalism. When the ruling class has to stabilize capitalism by inflicting colonial tactics from the liberals on to the home land, on white people.
No I think you misunderstood. I agree with your idealogy. But to talk shit about liberals, when we are liberals who actually lean left (unlike Democrats who are moderates in disguise), well that's just plain dumb. It makes you sound like a Trumpanzee.
I do not consider liberals "part of the left". The left starts at anti-capitalism.
I'm a liberal, and I'm also a proud socialist. And so are you.
That's an insult here. I am not a liberal (who, by definition support capitalism and private property). I am a Marxist-leninist.
I do not understand how you can come to this conclusion.
I do not consider liberals "part of the left". The left starts at anti-capitalism.
Agreed. And I'm an Anarchist for the record.
Democrats will fight the hardest they have ever fought to avoid giving up their position as the polite, norms-respecting Republicans.
anarchists will claim to not be liberals but get so upset and mass-downvote us when we critique liberal parties kekw
Bit of a strawman there. I'm an anarchist and I'll happily upvote any dunks on the shitlibs.
No offense to you or some of the other better anarchists I’ve seen, but it’s not really a strawman when a sizable portion of people who call themselves anarchists spend all their time punching left and supporting dems or calling for the abolition of literacy and bedtimes.
