I will not defend Stalin and I will not defend the CCP. Just because capitalism isn’t good doesn’t mean that we have to glaze imperialist states. Ask Ukraine and the Baltic states how good they had it during the USSR; my point being that pro-USSR sentiments are largely just pro-Russian propaganda.
China is doing some good nowadays, but it still definitely has corruption. There are still billionaires, polluted air, capitalistic factories—which have terrible working conditions and sell cheaply made carcinogenic products, they’re building AI data centres—some of which will boil the water temperature, bans citizens from accessing a lot of websites, etc.
I even decided to join a solidarity website and it mentioned f**cking Kim Jong-Un as a leftist figure ffs 💀. Literally, ANY North Korean defector will tell you how bad the North Korean regime is. The site had no mention of actual decent examples like Peter Kropotkin, Nelson Mandela, Thomas Sankara, Martin Luther King Jr, or even Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.
Edit: did not know that Proudhon was a bigot. My bad; thanks immensely for telling me.
I agree with the sentiment, absolutely, but I have to say I snorted a bit when I read ‘leftist spaces have a lot of red flags’ lol. Yea, kind of the flag of choice here lol (though I prefer Anarchist black or a combination of the two)
Humanity is a red flag, left, right, middle; what community of size isn’t full of deceit and violation? Many people use organizations as tools to get what they want, regardless of what the cause is; religion, political, financial, it’s always a fight against corruption, lies, and incompetence that never ends.
Not one passes its own purity test.
I concur.
When we see a tankie, we laugh and point, then we move on. There’s no talking them out of it. I grew up in the USSR, they don’t believe my experience. Laugh then ignore.
The problem with the “laugh then ignore” philosophy is that many who are attracted to power do so to abuse that power.
As such, I keep running into moderators of leftist spaces on Lemmy who smack me for calling out abuses of the CCP, USSR, and DPRK. Specifically, lemmy.world/c/latestagecapitalism, lemmy.ml/c/memes, and one other that I can’t remember and can’t find because they deleted all of my comments on their community.
When you have seas of downvotes and bad faith arguments combined with moderators brutally cracking down on dissent, it makes leftists look ridiculous to most. I (and apparently OP) are then frustrated enough to be compelled to spread the word that not every socialist is engaging in good faith. I don’t know if that’s more damaging to socialism than what they do or not, but it’s the truth.
TL;DR: Echo chambers suck.
There’s nothing a woker-than-thou hates more than someone speaking from their own lived experience.
I try to point out the errors, block and move on. I usually only succeed after a round or three.
Personally I don’t consider authoritarians to be “leftist”.
Tankies and libs are both right-wing just with different imperial branding.
I don‘t think that this attitude is productive. Every school of thought has the potential of turning authoritarian and attract people who just want power and influence over people.
This fact is why anarchism is so appealing to me, they don’t have all the answers but they’ve at least identified the problem: Authority.
It’s kind of also the biggest problem with anarchy. It still has a foundation of social contract, the idea that we’re allowed to exist without authority. There really isn’t anything that stops someone from building power and exerting it on others. No one wants to accept a despot over freedom but if someone rolls up to my farm in a tank and says they own it now, I’m not really in any position to say otherwise. In a hierarchy of need, living sits above liberty.
That’s why I can’t be an anarchist. They’re like the libertarians of the left. They’re too idealistic. They never explain how they’ll keep people from asserting power over others, and prevent nation states from forming, because it isn’t possible without giving a different person similar power.
I’ll take an imperfect but stable system over one that collapses the second someone with bad intentions gains control over weapons or other means of exerting power.
That’s the edge democracy has, you can kick the motherfucker out.
That edge cuts both ways though, the history of democracy dating back to its foundation is people who should never have been given power getting put in charge. How many early democracies become dictatorships? Even today, the US has been trying to shake off the parasitic powers that be for decades and they just keep getting stronger.
Tell me, who and how many had actual real power, when the United States was founded?
Sure, but do you have a (credible) alternative?
IMO we should work on democracy (wherever you live) and make it more grassroot and direct. Power to the people, and not just "vote every 3-4-5-6 years.
Yeah this is pointing toward my view as well.
Non partisan, community or regional based, term limited, focused entirely on evidence, social needs, working for an electorate.
After Lenin positioned himself as opposite to “left-wing communism” and called it an infantile disorder, I guess Leninism being right-wing became explicit.
Left and right are economic vectors up and down (authoritarian and freedom) are the ones to plot.
“up and down” is a very recent thing
Id respectfully argue that freedom vs tyrany is a very old concept and this is just another way to express that
I mean, in the context of 100 years ago, up and down weren’t directions considered in the political spectrum
What do you think that book is about?
also helps to remind those folks china and russia are capitalist.
I got banned from lemmy.ml for pointing out that the Dengists are state capitalists who literally came to power by repressing actual communists.
A lot of people aren’t aware of who won the Cultural Revolution. It wasn’t the people calling for worker ownership of the economy.
No, it doesn’t.
Hard one.
I thought the title was a pun lol
My biggest growth with leftism was just learning to let other well meaning people be wrong. I’m wrong most of the time but inviting other people to dunk on me never really fixed any of my issues so it probably wouldn’t help anyone else either.
There’s plenty of online space for people who think capitalism has to go but maybe we shouldn’t slob off mass murderers and imperialists to make that happen. It’s not a worldview we actually have to fight other internet leftists for. Especially since nothing done online is praxis.
While I appreciate the sentiment, how can we form cohesive organizations without cohesive ideas and policies? The Bolshevists struggled with this and took a lot of ideas into consideration, while forging policy. It doesn’t mean we automatically kick people out of dialogue, until it threatens the developed anticapitalist policy forged through these struggles among ourselves. It’s not that “not everyone has a voice,” as much as "certain policies take precedence in order to stop the advancement of capitalism that directly, indirectly, and more importantly, intentionally harms the many for the insatiable greed of the few.
Well, I’d argue that the cohesive ideas already exist within people’s consciousness in a serviceable state, even as wrong minded as we can be. What doesn’t exist is a directive within us to turn morally good ideas into actions that we take. And we just can’t get that from online, being here talking with eachother like this is too emotionally rewarding whether or not we’re arguing.
If you live in a place where you have a community that can act against capitalism in any particular way, doing that would probably be more effective than checking online with strangers like me or the .ml 社会信用体系 farm for alternatives. You know, it just doesn’t feel like there are any wrong answers now. Also me being here talking is 100% a part of the problem.
You should have that growth looked at.
doc says it’s benign
i would pay to unsee this
All I can see is pizza and french fries, weird.
Those aren’t leftist spaces. They’re propaganda places for China etc
A leftist place doesn’t magically become a chinese propaganda place whenever a few chinese propagandists show up there and raise their red flags. It’s just an aspect of the whole thing.
This sounds kind of like the “Nazis at a bar” problem.
If you let ‘a few’ start hanging out at a bar, it becomes a Nazi bar.
So, what’s the solution? Ban them all?
Yes.
I’m all for open and fluid communication, it’s why I like this platform, but there needs to be a respect for the social contract. If the area is for the organization and discussion of a specific political format than joining with the intention of converting others or the area to a different format is a violation of that contract. It’s the same situation as going into a meme channel and trying to talk people into making it about pet photos under the guise of believing your pet is memable.
They can have their own booth at the conference and anyone interested will come naturally, they don’t need to pretend to be someone else to trick the gulable.
At least when they start being the stereotype, that’s where that goes.
Tankies are only lefty on the economical spectrum, they are also full-blown authoritarian bootlickers. Fucking disgusting parasites if you ask me, sick in the head all of them.
Just an fyi, and speaking as an anarchist, I would NOT consider Proudhon a good example. Bro was a supporter of the Confederacy, as well as quite a few other very problematic stuff.
Noted! Thanks.
Nice double entendre.
MLs don’t have much love for anarchists or any other sort of anti-authoritarians. Never had, looking back at history.
Literally, ANY North Korean defector will tell you how bad the North Korean regime is.
Okay, but to be fair, you’re never going to hear positive things from a defector about the country they defected from.
But when the only way to leave a country is to defect and escape, that points to it being a bad place.
Yeah you can’t really say “only defectors will say bad things” when the only way to leave (to a country that won’t immediately deport you back) is through a literal mine field, barb wire fences, armed guards in watchposts ordered to shoot to kill, and also punishing every member of your family for 3 generations for doing so.
Pleasurable countries to live in won’t shoot citizens on sight trying to exit.
Yeah, true.
I don’t care what people say about a country, what the country says about itself… Anytime a country says “you’re not allowed to leave”, that’s a huge red flag, indicating that the country is an authoritarian shithole and a horrible place to be.
Koreans leave their country all the time.
It’s not that the defector has negative things it’s what those negative things are about.
There is a big difference between “healthcare system sucks” and “we are being taken, raped, tortured, and/or murdered for not loving dear leader.”
Because these people were never, ever paid to say these things.
This feels like victim blaming. If you literally aren’t allowed to leave your country, that’s a sign that things are dire.
Thousands of people have escaped and told their stories.
Who said they aren’t?
You serious?
You’re a liberal. Of course there are red flags in leftist spaces.
“Everyone I make myself mad at is a liberal”
I am unabashedly mad at capitalists. If you want to fuck around and play word games while Marxists dominate the conversation, be my guest.
“Everyone I make myself mad at is a
liberalcapitalist”
According to some (including you):
Failing to unconditionally defend any and all wrongdoings of any socialist(s) means you are a liberal.Obviously this flies in direct contradiction to the definitions set by any sensible human being, but… that doesn’t discount the fact that many agree with you.Are you following me around? Don’t do that. The big bad admins at .world will ban you.
Nah, I just remembered you from how nasty you were to me recently.
But fair point, I should block you. Enjoy your whatever your problem is!
Lots of glazers yeah
