Like let's give them an opportunity to study theory and apply doctrine in reeducation camps before committing them to a life of exile or death. Everyone will either come around, or they won't. Simple as that.
I say rip it off like a band-aid. Explain why it's for the greater good. I think there's clearly a problem with messaging in just criticizing capitalism without advocating for the alternative.
It's really easy to kick over sandcastles, but it's hard to build one with such limited tools. So let's unveil the castle in its full glory. Let's go mask off and make this a reality.
:stalin: :juche-boi: :evo: :fidel-salute: :xi: :chavez-salute: :chairman: :guaido: :back-to-me: :sankara-salute: :nasrallah:
This feels more and more like a bit with each new controversial topic that gets brought up. It's also disingenuous to claim that "enemies get the wall" is the end-all-be-all of solutions for reactionary individuals post-revolution. At the end of the day, as AlephNull said, the solution(s?) wouldn't be dictated by any one of us online, but the people, together. Whatever solution ends up being implemented will, by its nature, be a shitload more unified than any current political struggle in capitalist society.
But who is the "we"? Decided democratically, autocratically?
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Fair enough. I guess I just see the holes too, and I'm just much more cynical about human nature and the lust for power.
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You've officially got me out of my league. Your answer to that question would depend on which of the myriad communist tendencies you subscribe to, and I'm not well-read enough in theory to defend a stance there. However, Screamo nails it again. Building broad support for an inclusive left movement and seeing what shape the movement begins to take will provide answers to those questions in time, but with current politics our efforts are best spent doing just that.
I guess another way to put it is, if we all grew up in a capitalist system, how did we all arrive here (give or take a few ideological differences)? Even in a marketplace of free ideas, I have still found my way to communities like this. So why does it need to be browbeat into others rather than organically letting them come to the same conclusions we have?
Organically? The capitalist superstructure spends an incredible amount of money to keep itself up... It coups countries that go pink or red in Latam. It constantly reduces the opportunities for radicalisation and education. We have to actively fight it, browbeat it, propagandise.
I like this question, a lot- and thinking about it helped me understand why I enjoy reading others' stories of radicalization. It certainly feels at times that in a society so inundated with right-wing propaganda, so fundamentally anti-left, that finding ourselves here makes us special.
I think, at the end of the day, we were lucky in a sense- some of us came to this space through genuine ideological self-critique spurred on by nothing more than interest in politics, but I find that many of us just happened to stumble upon the right take at the right time in our lives (when our material conditions had degraded against our own internal ideas of meritocracy and work ethic, or dissonance between what we saw and felt versus what we believed to be true became too much).
Who's to say that all that it takes to bring most people around to support us wouldn't be simply solidarity and education combined with the absence of capitalist propaganda efforts, which some people are deeply vulnerable to?
everywhere, politics is radicalizing. whether to the left or the right, the way things are today is no longer stable. so people go looking for answers, for comfort, for community with others and they do so in places that are already familiar to them. for this community, that place was reddit. I doubt many people came here without first spending time on reddit and becoming frustrated with its reactionary politics. moreover, that's why our userbase is so demographically homogenous relative to the whole population.
what free marketplace?
I'm not sure what the "it" is here but generally, this community holds certain lines partially because we've fought over them so many times and have found a few positions we can all definitely agree on, and partially because we know what the consequence of allowing certain lines to slip will be, eventually -- this place becomes indifferentiable from reddit.