people always tell me to grow up and then end up coming to the same conclusions in adulthood that I did when I was 16
I’m starting to learn a lot of liberals could have skipped like 15 years of political development if they had just listened to punk music as a teenager like I did (also protesting the Iraq war)
mfs could have used a little Refused
Yup things continue to get significantly worse, and I’m told one of the same two things
1.) “I’m sure children who died in factories during the Industrial Revolution would agree with you”
2.) “Unfortunately that’s just how the world is. I was like you once”
I really don’t know how else to say it. Like I can acknowledge the fact that I’m privileged and want to use my privilege to try and do something about the flagrant injustices around, but that comment is usually left with a snide response as well.
I keep shouting from the fucking mountain tops that the only way to make change is to build solidarity in your local communities, but fucking DNC plants are dropped from the sky it seems telling people to invest that energy into calling their representatives and VOTING. Which has yet to do jack shit materially
And surprise surprise. The same ghoulish developers and builders keep coming in to gentrify everything in fucking sight, corporations start outsourcing factory jobs leaving hundreds unemployed, rent increases astronomically all while millions of people are fixated on an election that is effectively kayfab
When you think of it like this, the DNC is so so fucking evil. They have a robust network of organizations that they could theoretically use to make a meaningful difference in people’s lives. But of course they fucking don’t, too busy posting about how the latest ruling or whatever has made them sad.
They’re going to do such a
when trump 2.0 is elected and opine about “the state of our country” or some shit while completely ignoring their role in all of this.The children who died in factories in the 19th century did fucking agree with me we have the fucking letters and they think August Willich was a lib.
And Willich challenged Marx to a dual for not being radical enough, so that’s really saying something
Everyone ships Marx/Engles but no one reads the deep lore of 1848 and ships Engles/Willich
My inner lib wants you to know that two ships can be true at the same time.
3 actually. Marx started a slanderous rumour that Willich was gay (possibly he was bi, it’s hard to say) because he suspected he was making moves on Jenny.
Bring this shit back. Cornel West needs to fist fight Biden immediately
The finger on the monkey paw curls and we see Cornel West on stage with Joe Biden exchanging fist bumps as he endorses him as the real Bernie sanders progressive
choosing to read this as Joe endorsing Cornel
As his new vice-president candidate
I came to those same conclusions at 16, then briefly thought teenage me was just being edgy and idealist, then very quickly realized that teenage me was right and we should in fact [redacted] every fascist cop.
every fascist cop
But you repeat yourself
yeah for real. There were a few years when I faltered, thinking huh maybe they all are right. I have been more and more vindicated as time goes on however.
I remember going through history and reading about the fall of Rome, Greece, Persia, etc and thinking to myself "it sure looks like I’m living during the decline of the US empire… Listened to Punk and Ska, and asked how “Trickle down economics” would ever work when a public corporation’s sole reason for existing is to provide value for shareholders.
I also remember talking to my dad in the early 2000s about global warming and asking how any of it could ever change. He told me we’d have to vote for the right people.
Then Citizens United happened and put the nail in the coffin for all of it.
Seriously. I can’t help it that I’ve always been ahead of the curve. More of a them problem at that point.
literally yes
social-democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism
The key word is objectively. If you disagree, it’s not a difference of opinion. You’re just wrong
I mean, the guy who said that went on to ally with social democracies against real fascists. And whatever the theoretical merits, I see no evidence that calling 90%+ of the U.S. population fascists will do anything to advance any leftist cause. It certainly doesn’t help grow any sort of American left-wing movement.
It really is OK to say someone’s take is bad without calling them a fascist. Fascists should be shot; anyone who thinks everyone from AOC to the right needs to be shot is (in the parlance of our times) deeply unserious.
I mean, the guy who said that went on to ally with social democracies against real fascists.
social democracy is the moderate wing of fascism
moderate fascists are better than extreme fascists
no contradiction here
tldr
Lol yep it’s word-for-word Biden voter logic
Fascists should be shot; anyone who thinks everyone from AOC to the right needs to be shot is (in the parlance of our times) deeply unserious.
They clearly aid and abet fascism though. You’d be a fool not to see that they’re ultimately enemies of real social change and they must be deposed or else nothing good can come.
Do you want to be (arguably) correct on some theoretical point, or do you want people to listen to you? Because the vast majority of people will immediately tune out “AOC is a fascist.”
Clearly it’s more complex than that, and I don’t think I’d be upfront about that. I think, if you talked about how there’s a historical precedence for people like AOC coming into power on a wave of radicalism and just being the same old same old, and how it’s an unavoidable consequence of our system, people would be more willing to hear that. And it’s the same damn concept.
I get that most leftists won’t consciously lead with that hot of a take. But we have it all over this public forum that libs frequently wander into, so you can tell a lot of folks who’ll lead with “AOC is not a path to revolutionary change” will break out “social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism” after about two beers. And I’d say those are two very different concepts.
Then when they push back we’ll give historical precedence and evidence. My experience with MLs was having them be clearly correct in a way that a lot of others weren’t and then they would say wack shit like “AOC is a fascist” but I’d stick around anyway and now I understand why it’s true. I think it’s generally good for us to always be honest
I mean, the guy who said that went on to ally with social democracies against real fascists.
You understood history wrong. The European powers wanted to use Nazi Germany, Poland and Japan to destroy the USSR. Many of them had signed military and economic cooperation agreements with Nazi Germany. The British literally just signed the Dusseldorf Agreement for the cooperation between British and German industries in March 1939, and the Munich Agreement before that with the British, France, Italy and Germany in 1938.
It was the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, engineered by the Soviet diplomatic team and supposedly without Hitler’s involvement, at the last minute that saved the day. It drove a wedge between Germany and Poland (who had just shared Czechoslovakia together), forcing Germany to invade Poland, and in turn forcing France and the Great Britain to declare war on Germany. The entire Japanese cabinet resigned over the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and backed down from interfering with the Soviets. Like, why do you think the Japanese government would resign over a pact signed by two foreign countries?
The European “social democracies” wanted the Soviet Union dead. They wanted to destroy communism. They simply did not expect to be outplayed at the last minute when the Soviets managed to turn Nazi Germany against the Europeans themselves.
What further reading can I do regarding all this?
The European “social democracies” wanted the Soviet Union dead.
Agreed – and Stalin would go on to ally with those exact same countries.
Stalin was often foolish and would have done well listening to more of zhukovs wisdom.
We liberated Europe from fascism, but they will never forgive us for it
That isn’t the point; it’s that your rhetoric is self-defeating.
I see no evidence that calling 90%+ of the U.S. population fascists will do anything to advance any leftist cause. It certainly doesn’t help grow any sort of American left-wing movement.
Neither does allowing people to believe that fake shills like AOC represent any kind of actual leftist movement. At this point, this type of politician is an active hinderence to advancing any real left politics, with the exception of their actions and stances disillusioning people.
I don’t disagree. My point is we can get all that across without flattening it to “AOC is a fascist,” which sounds like crank shit to everyone who is not already a communist.
This is a communist forum
if you can’t quote Stalin here then where?If libs are checking this out then good. Hopefully they’ll learn something. If not then they’ll engage with something else until they’re ready. This really isn’t a space where we should be concerned with optics and what libs might think of they’re even looking to learn
Quote Stalin all you want, but his word isn’t gospel, especially when he himself later allied with nations that would (at best) fall under his “moderate wing of fascism” umbrella. The CPC’s line on Stalin is something like 70% good, 30% bad, so there’s plenty of room for disagreement.
I’m not overly concerned with optics on this site, but what we meme about here pops up elsewhere, and if we want people to agree with us we do have to put thought into how to present our ideas.
Once again you misquote “social fascist” as “fascist” despite being corrected on this very error in another conversation. You are here in bad faith. Social fascist is a specific thing.
Fascists shouldn’t be shot, they should be re-educated. Only those who engage in crimes should be shot. I explained this to you and you still regress back to your liberal baseline
Good faith is phrasing your side of a disagreement as “I corrected you”
It’s repeating the same objectively incorrect argument over and over, changing the definitions of terms to twist it into what you want. Social fascism is not just simply “fascism”. This is a fact that you ignore. All fascists don’t deserve to be shot, not even the most hardline Stalinists shot every single fascist - they re-educated them if possible
You refuse to use the accepted definition of social fascists among communists and instead jump to a different term. Even when you know you shouldn’t and have been corrected on this leap, you do it again and again because you are a Liberal incapable of processing new information
There’s such a thing as knowing your audience. If you want to get your message across you have to do it differently to different people. Stating that social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism should only be done to an audience that already knows what fascism and social democracy is, such as here on this forum.
This doesn’t mean that it is not true though, it just means that if you were to say those exact words to a general audience they would believe you were some crank who thought AOC was itching to put on an armband and do the goose-step. A more general audience would be more perceptive to hearing about how the system corrupts even the most well-meaning individuals, how politicians all end up doing the same shit etc.
This is a public forum that’s federated with plenty of non-leftist instances, and that’s well known to even more non-leftist instances we aren’t federated with. We have occasional efforts to direct more people back here, including lifeboat comms for reddit communities. There are even more ties to the much larger reddit through shared users and the whole history of the CTH sub.
We’re not speaking to the most general of audiences, but there is a benefit to not looking like cranks. This isn’t even a particularly good hot take to cling to, as Stalin himself eventually allied with social democracies against fascists.
I wouldn’t be too worried about what the imagined liberals in the walls might think. There can’t be too many of them and bad faith actors will always be able to find something and take it out of context. And if you can’t speak freely as a communist on a communist niche forum where can you?
Stalin, unlike any of the morally pure western leftists, actually held power and had to defend it and he did so successfully. It’s not like aligning the USSR with “moderate” imperialist nations didn’t have it’s downsides but the alternative was to be overrun and slaughtered by the more radical fascists.
A pragmatic alliance made for lack of better alternatives doesn’t change the analysis of the nature of social democracy. They serve the same master as the fascists. Where the social democrats wants to preserve capitalism by bribing a select labour aristocracy into complementary the fascists use more direct violence but ultimately they will both tend to side with capital if it’s rule is threatened.
Not my fault you’re objectively wrong, chief
I made the mistake of arguing with them, when this is, objectively, the best response
It’s completely objective!
Should and Would are diffrent. It would fix a good part of the world’s problems.
I always said it, but I never understood it till I watched Bernie’s stance on Gaza in real time.
“The mask of humanity fall from capital. It has to take it off to kill everyone — everything you love; all the hope and tenderness in the world. It has to take it off, just for one second. To do the deed. And then you see it. As it strangles and beats your friends to death… the sweetest, most courageous people in the world. You see the fear and power in its eyes. Then you know.”
" What?"
“That the bourgeois are not human.”
many people are saying this folks. The succdems - that’s what i call them, i call them succdems- they’re very nasty people.
I feel incredibly sad and depressed and disillusioned with Bernie, AOC and everyone else. Fuck them all. They will sell the rest of the world to the devil for a promise of some progress on the domestic front that’ll get broken anyways. And they know it’ll be broken! They know it! So why not stand in solidarity?! Why make the deal at all?
I’m just done.
Especially Bernie, fucker has been in the game long enough to know better, at least AOC I could understand early on and blame it on her being naive but she’s just angling to be another career dem politician like the rest of them.
It’s because he understands the game, that he has been able to keep his successful political position for so long, I’m sure AOC wants a long mainstream political career like Sanders. I always like to compare Sanders to Corbyn, they destroyed Corbyn’s political career, and we all know the big difference between Corbyn and Sanders.
we all know the big difference between Corbyn and Sanders.
Length?
she’s just angling to be another career dem politician like the rest of them.
Her 6 months as a bartender was stolen valor. She’s no different than Mayo Pete doing his photo op tour in Afghanistan, except she’s way better at politics than him
They are politicians in the Democratic Party. Expecting more from them is just setting yourself up for disappointment
socdems are fascists
AOC is literally just doing what the unions want her to
stop,stop! they’re already dead!Do you disagree?
Rank and file
Not to discredit those based 17 year olds but 9/10 you can bet on a yankee being a fascist and end up correct, it’s on them to prove otherwise.
Self crit, love to see it
I do in fact have to hand it to him: if more libs could admit when they were wrong like this, they might not be libs for long, and we wouldn’t have to keep clowning on them.
They will say shit like this and upvote Lenin memes and then denounce Hamas and vote for Social Democrats
patronizing fool, open one of stalin’s published books and LEARN.
also gotta love the thinly veiled insult, because someone who likes stalin must obviously be insane!
Removed by mod
You are 100% right and i agree with you. When i read the tweet, i mostly felt positive about a lib getting properly disillusioned and admitting it simce that’s a beautiful fitst step to getting to the other side of western propoganda.
At the same time, i feel what comrade bazingabrain is saying in my bones lol. Its frustrating living in the west and being ML, as you acknowledge. I think its pretty fair to blow off some of thst steam here. But you’re right, we can’t just hate all the average people, who hage no power, around us, just for our own sanity if no other reason
Yeah, also a good comment, I was just incredibly tired and frustrated
Totally understandable
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Acting like this person thinks Stalin wrote anything
Maybe AOC doesn’t mind that Gaza getting flattened.
Maybe she reads settler the same way as Janet yellen reads Das kapital
Fuck AOC. Her Spanish sucks too.
I have never been more vindicated and called out
I’m nowhere near 17 now lmao
Nor do I have a stalin pfp
You can still improve one of those things
you can in fact improve both of those things… getting further away from 17 is a good thing imo
Hahaha correct.
Oh wow who woulda thought the immortal science was, you know, immortal.
Election years are always good for stoking the fire in my soul.
RETVRN
Stalinist’s Curse of Cassandra strikes again.
What would happen if capital succeeded in smashing the Republic of Soviets? There would set in an era of the blackest reaction in all the capitalist and colonial countries, the working class and the oppressed peoples would be seized by the throat, the positions of international communism would be lost.
