That's not far left IMO, that's just left. This is a recurring problem we have in France too, where medias call "far left" parties that are just left. This is a slippery slope, the one on which Overton window slips towards the (far) right...
Literally yes. Housing, employment, education, healthcare and pensions are guaranteed in Cuba, and were guaranteed in the USSR, both in theory and in practice. What are you exactly talking about?
Communism is just impossible to implement. It only takes one human's greed to destroy the system. Center-left is far more plausible where the economy is capitalist with lots of checks and balances to counter extreme capitalists' greed and the state having control over essential industries and important parts of the economy (energy, water supply, transportation, education, healthcare and stuff) while abolishing religious systems to nil the discrimination on that end.
The entire concept of life itself is very capitalist — You have to exploit all resources available to you so you can survive and thrive. Only some species share resources — that too if they are in abundance for them.
Capitalism literally encourages human greed to accumulate wealth and destroy the societal system. Even if you tax and regulate them that's still what's encouraged, as its literally the entire point of the system
And regarding "only some species share resources.." Yes. Us. That's literally what society is. How do you think humans grew to become the most successful species on earth? If you win I do not lose. It's not a zero-sum game. Cooperation is literally a win-win. Do you think technology and science would thrive and prosper in a cutthroat society where people kill and steal from each other over any tiny advantage they can get?
You guys ignore the very fact that socialism and communism is a failed system because they are so extreme in its nature. You have to make people believe that the opposite is worse. Capitalism is failing today because it is going towards an extreme, both are the 2 sides of the same coin. Having the best of both worlds is what will create balance. The capitalism from 50 years ago and capitalism today are vastly different. Because earlier we were either centre-right or centre-left.
technology and science would thrive and prosper in a cutthroat society where people kill and steal from each other over any tiny advantage they can get?
The entire concept of life itself is very capitalist — You have to exploit all resources available to you so you can survive and thrive. Only some species share resources — that too if they are in abundance for them.
This is an incredibly inaccurate way to describe nature and you feed into narratives that capitalism is "natural" that stop us from thinking critically both about nature and humanity when you frame things in this way.
Apart from that every multicellular lifeform is a collective. True, those multicellular organisms prey on each other and fight to keep their species thriving. They don't knowingly harm their own fucking species like capitalism does.
I agree with what you say except the last part about the entire concept of life being capitalist. It is not. All life in the natural world is in equilibrium. There is give and take but all work in tandem. Parasites are the capitalists, taking until there is nothing left to give and ultimately killing their host.
Ever wonder why there are fights over territories, mates, food, water? Even trees fight other trees for the groundwater. Even when pet dogs have abundant food supply, they still hoard as much as they can when they are given something to eat and not hungry. It is just unsaid in nature because obv there are no agreements, MoUs, or money involved. When a Tiger has control over a territory, most other Tigers agree to it until some other challenges it.
all work in tandem
It is the ecosystem that works in tandem when you zoom out from an individual living being level.
I gave you a plethora of actual evidence of human rights in an actually existing socialist country, and you went with the "gommunism impossible because hooman greed".
But please elaborate: why is the nationalization and collectivization of means of production so vulnerable to greed? A system in which power is distributed among all workers is actually less prone to greed issues than one in which a single human is in control of the whole company. The whole "human greed" argument is a hollow sophism without any actual analysis of everything.
How is it more sustainable to maintain an elite of wealthy company owners with interests opposed to those of the workers than to maintain a worker controlled state? You are witnessing with your own eyes the disintegration of the western capitalist system, the fascists entering power in USA, Italy, Finland, and probably soon Germany and France and Spain will follow, likely UK too. All the "center-left checks and balances" with strong union membership in the 1960s-1980s disappeared overnight when the threat of global communism disappeared in the 1990s and capitalism didn't need to appear to be better anymore.
I gave you a plethora of actual evidence of human rights in an actually existing socialist country
Yeah, Cuba. Where everyone is poor w/o any major scientific and cultural influence in the world.
And yeah, USSR. They did try to influence the world but its internal economy was so shit that it couldn't even exist for 100 years and was a one party authoritarian regime. In the end it started to shift towards to capitalism. Also they supported the Nazis during Poland's invasion. The population who was so frustrated with their country that they toppled the Berlin Wall when USSR was collapsing.
But please elaborate: why is the nationalization and collectivization of means of production so vulnerable to greed?
Because the very nature of life I explained to you earlier. Life evolved in such a way that it is the survival of fittest, which requires hogging up all the resources as much as you can. Greed is ingrained in every living being's DNA.
Even you are greedy to want to divide all the wealth equally because for you it might be the only way to get richer than you currently are. It is not a matter of if being greedy is right or wrong, it is a matter of if your greed is so high that it destroys other people's lives and where to draw that line as a civilized society.
All the “center-left checks and balances” with strong union membership in the 1960s-1980s disappeared overnight
They never existed in practice in the U.S after the collapse of the USSR because communism failed and thus the perception swayed towards the extreme capitalist way. Later the extreme lobbying by the wealthy and anti-left got rid of the whatever regulations of systems that didn't allow them to be absurdly rich. It is called lobbying in the west while we call it corruption.
Before that when the governments didn't used to only work for the wealthy, the system was performing better than any other one. Europe's War Torn economy was improving, The US was in its golden economic age and all this while people overall had more rights and freedom than any socialist and communist regime. It started to go haywire when the extreme capitalists started to take over and the government stopped working for all the people but only for the rich.
There is no point in living in an extreme capitalist and a fascist country nor there is a point living in a poor socialist or communist country.
I gave up on the comments below. I saw a lot of them with myopic vision and simplification of ideas. Their general idea is “Billionaires bad — Capitalism bad”. “Communism good — No Billionaires” while completely ignoring the fact it results in poor qualify of life lack of technological advancements, lack of freedom, doesn’t allow democracy to exist, and is just a utopian vision.
A pure left or a pure right ideology cannot exist when there are differences in opinions and ideals. We will always get something in between.
You claim communism is impossible to implement yet you have no issue in attempting to implement a democracy that capitalism won't be able to pervert, despite one never having existed before and it being impossible for one to exist.
It sounds less like genuine rationality and more like rationalising a status quo bias. Even worse when people are claiming capitalism to be the natural order of life, despite existing for less than 0.0000001% of it and humans being egalitarian for far longer than they were capitalist.
Peak homoeconomus experiencing "capitalist realism." They even colonised your dreams.
Yes, capitalism as a formal economic system is recent but the behaviours it’s built on aren’t.
Competition, territorial control, hoarding for security, unequal outcomes all of these exist across nature (including humans).
Lions fight for dominance, trees compete for sunlight, squirrels hoard food.
Resource competition is older than any ideology.
Communism, on the other hand, assumes sustained large scale human cooperation without hierarchy, which has never existed stably either outside small tribes where scarcity was low and populations small.
Scaling that to millions is where it collapses.
I’m not defending status quo. I support regulated capitalism with social welfare (centre-left).
Capitalism needs checks, not abolition.
Meanwhile Communism needs human behaviour to fundamentally change.
One system builds on instinct and incentives and the other demands we override them entirely.
The way I see it, between left and far left the direction is roughly the same, that's the means and end point that differ (i.e. revolution or not and how far we go into sharing resources). This is an important difference and they should thus not be mixed.
In a naive attempt to "meet everyone’s basic needs" sure, but in practice it would almost certainly end up enriching and entrenching a new ruling class, or collapsing under external pressure even if there are some early wins.
Many things sound simple from the outset. But tearing down and rebuilding an entire society isn’t something you do without significant (and often lethal) force and with plenty of intended and unintended casualties along the way (and there’s still a very good chance we'd screw it up).
If it's not "the good guys" wielding overwhelming force, it’ll be "the bad guys" stepping in. Every political system ultimately rests on the realistic threat/application of force; the only question is who controls it and how accountable they are.
I'm not inclined to trust anyone waving guns in my face, nor encourage situations that make that more likely. So, things would have to get a lot worse for me (and I'd venture most people) to want violent overthrow of my current (far from perfect) political and social system. That said ... at some point, for many people in many countries, it may be too late. Apathy isn't appropriate either.
but in practice it would almost certainly end up enriching and entrenching a new ruling class
Damn, seems like real-world data contradicts your preconceived notions. Now, as a responsible adult, you'll surely retract and reflect on why you've been misled to believe that communism perpetuates inequality, right?
Are you trying to say that communism leads to a failed authoritarian state resembling the US in terms of income inequality? Do you have the same stats for wealth inequality too?
Do you have the same stats for wealth inequality too?
I don't but they're irrelevant. The only possible way to get money in the USSR was through labor and income, since there was no capitalist accumulation or return rates on investment by design. The highest paid individuals in the USSR were actually highly trained professionals such as university professors, members of research institutions and high profile artists and media personalities.
Are you trying to say that communism leads to a failed authoritarian state resembling the US in terms of income inequality?
No, that's what the end of communism leads to, to a return to capitalism. That was only possible because communism began in a 400-million pool of people in backwards and unindustrialized Eastern Europe, the cold war was uneven from the start.
I'd love to see a utopia, but I don't see communism making any sustainable inroads anywhere in the world... that is, unless things get much much worse, to the point that your average man is willing to pick up a pitchfork (or other weapon of choice) and participate in overthrowing ruling class by force.... but nowadays the masses are so divided and confused that they'll probably start killing each other for scraps of food rather than the billionaires for a life of dignity. Even then, it's just temporary until capitalism and/or authoritarianism takes hold again.
I couldn't agree more. Although I'll add that education and basic health/social support is also needed for long term stability, or large swathes of the population will be manipulated by fear and dis/misinformation, and will likely end up voting against their own interests. Social cohesion is important, which is why it is used as a weapon by nation states and other political actors.
How? I'm the one preserving peoples rights here. No one in my country is enslaved. Everyone has basic rights AND we have the freedom of ownership and democracy. Everything convincing point socialists have can be achieved in a capitalist system.
Wrong. Your country has homeless people without a right to housing and your country has unemployed people without the right to work. As for healthcare and education, your country is dismantling those systems in favour of private ones and worsening coverage, and the same can be said about pensions. This is almost universally true for capitalism except for a few countries in Latin America which manage to maintain rights for now (until right wing gets reelected). Now, tell me, what country are you from?
Wrong. The homeless people in my country choose to be homeless as they are offered free housing and community support workers. My country is currently expanding their public healthcare and increasing the salaries of nurses as well as expanding publicly funded gp vists. This is all done within a capitalist system with no large wealth funds and we are not particularly rich as a nation.
You shouldn't speak so confidently when you seem to have no idea of the world outside America.
"...and to achive that, you will do the job we pick for you, you will work the hour we decided, you will be paid not in money but in basic needs, and any excess you have will be confiscated."
Let's not pretend we didn't have the example for far left.
Literally making this up. By the 1970s in the USSR, 1 in 10 positions in the economy were open, and people were completely free to change their jobs and move to others without having the threat of unemployment. The only restriction I've seen to that, is that university graduates, as a payment back to society (university, as of all education in the USSR, was free and actually included accommodation and upkeep), had to work for a few years on a state-mandated position in their field of study. I'm a Spaniard physicist and 9 in 10 of my friends are unhappy fucks who are either unemployed or hating their lives in consulting.
you will be paid not in money
Tell me one socialist state that hasn't paid their workers in money. I can tell you that my girlfriend's mom, in a capitalist country, once got paid in juice boxes because the company didn't have money for her salary.
any excess you have will be confiscated
Again literally untrue. You're mistaking capital (private property used to produce goods and services in order to extract surplus value from workers) with personal property (the things you use on your own for your own shit, like your house or your toothbrush).
Have you ever actually talked with a Marxist, or are you just going off what you heard on FOX news?
I must admit i don't talk with Marxists nor do i know what is FOX news, and i do exaggerated my point, but lets not pretend Mao Zedong and North Korea didn't exists, whatever you mentioned above is no way closer to far left. Socialism is practiced everywhere, but that doesn't make them far left.
You're mistaking capital (private property used to produce goods and services in order to extract surplus value from workers) with personal property (the things you use on your own for your own shit, like your house or your toothbrush).
The excess in your opinion is forbidding rich people from exploiting the poor. There were plenty of people making the same point against abolition of slavery in 200BCE that you're making right now.
lets not pretend Mao Zedong and North Korea didn't exist
Under Mao Zedong, China's life expectancy went from 23 years of age to almost 60, more than doubling. Apply this to 1 billion Chinese, and you get that communism in China saved hundreds of millions of people. China in the early 1900s was a western colony much like India, and it had similar levels of industrialization and economical progress. Comparing the development of India and China since communism, the only possible conclusion is that communism uplifted a billion people from destitute poverty, gave them healthcare, education, pensions, jobs and housing. Mistakes were made during Mao? For sure they were. The balance is still overwhelmingly positive by any metric you want to apply.
As for North Korea, maybe if the USA hadn't bombed the country using more explosives than in the entire Pacific theater of WW2, and destroyed literally 85% of the buildings in the entire country, North-Koreans wouldn't have had such an extreme policy of international isolation and self-defense.
Mistakes were made during Mao? For sure they were. The balance is still overwhelmingly positive by any metric you want to apply.
The mistake is millions of death while Mao walks away without any repercussions.
North-Koreans wouldn't have had such an extreme policy of international isolation and self-defense.
And maybe if nk didn't self isolate for so long they would've recover. Just look at singapore. Did you know North Korea have an embassy in Malaysia? Did you know what happen next? They decided to assassinate Kim Jong Nam in Malaysia, then blame Malaysia for it, and cut all ties. NK might have been a victim of US, but their current situation is 100% their own doing.
Well that conclude my reason of not speaking with Marxist, you guys are nut lol.
We're talking about the ultra wealthy sharing the stockpiles of resources they have stolen and enslaved to gather, and the first spin is that they "aren't allowed to have private things" and "we aren't allowed to accumulate wealth"
Yeah, this thread is full of people who have lived their lives under absolute capitalist doctrine and cannot see an alternative and have never considered the underlying philosophy and morality of that system and can't even imagine another, so they backfill the blanks and rationalize what they have so they don't have to deal with actually thinking about it deeper because that would require effort and discomfort.
Politicalmemes? Yep, another right wing breeding ground, it always is.
Yeah. Somehow, every morally just ideology that liberals/democrats ever had suddenly became the sole property of the far left when they decided to label everything even slightly right of Stalin as “bLuEMaGa”.
Each and every one of them now sit at the dead center of a their own little circle, where they try very hard to entertain themselves, and one another- by attempting to smugly out enrage everyone with edgy memes.
Most poor world be better off under left wing ideals, yet they vote right wing anyway because they're scared that brown people will steal their crumbs.
There’s a twisted sort of logic to this. Let’s put ourselves in the position of that worker with one cookie for a second.
Two things are true in America:
the rich don’t pay taxes
benefits cost money
If the worker feels caught between those two things, he has to ask which he can change more easily. And clearly, denying benefits to the poor is easier than taxing the rich. In today’s climate, there is a “deny benefits to the poor” party that is very well mobilized and has delivered numerous victories. And where is the “tax the rich” option? Nowhere.
The funny bit is that sometimes José too is a conservative, which is how you see plenty of immigrants doing the whole "pull the ladder up once you're in" and voting rightwing.
It is true for the general disposition. Do you vote in your own interests vs do you vote in the general best interest. Your motivations may be malicious or incompetent, a two party system doesn't discern.
I don't believe this. People may have multiple agendas. They may hate foreigners or cultures, but people's allegiances are always first and foremost to their own, to keep living in the most comfortable way they can with the lowest possible eftort. It's kind of game theoretical in some sense.
Game theory occupies itself with the adversary roles of generosity (a moral principle) and calculation (a purely rational one), and in some way you could say that in a system which only allows one of two outcomes, a lot of assumptions are subsumed under those two separate outcomes.
What if Candidate A is for lower taxes, higher immigration and Candidate B is for higher taxes and lower immigration?
What if both candidates agree on lower taxes and lower immigration, but one of them also proposes reinstating slavery, and the other one wants none of it but instead mandatory abortions?
In a two party state you don't get enough fine grained resolution to deal with problems that require any complexity beyond perfectly white and perfectly black.
they are systemically undereducated and inundated with propaganda telling them that their problems stem not from the class war but from the culture war, which has long been a dogwhistle for the race war
You also vote far right if you’re willing to sacrifice something yourself to make sure no one ever gets it without having to make heavy sacrifices to do so. Life is pain, princess. Anyone who says differently is selling something! /s
It's because we lefties say completely justified mean things about so-called 'centrists', and criticizing the literal record of centrism is tantamount to insulting a centrist's identity.
The centrists made up the term so they wouldn't have to face the fact that they're conservatives.
The post-WW2 transition to liberal democracy in Germany, Italy (Adenauer and De Gasperi), and in general European integration; ending apartheid in South Africa; 1991 economic reforms in India; Deng Xiaoping's socialist market economy in China which lifted millions from destitution; Chile's transition to democracy; the labor-capital compromise in Scandinavia which allows them to have very free markets and very strong welfare systems at the same time.
Not really, I provided some examples to some other user where they were clearly "centrists". There were people who leaned more on both sides and the advancement was achieved by someone who was more moderate.
None of those advances were made with a minority of support in society. Is the argument that the populace has since become more conservative?
I think what's more likely is that people you'd consider "centrist" backed those changes. You're dead set on characterizing this "centrist" entity that you have only vaguely defined to create an enemy that doesn't exist.
Don't be dishonest, you did more than that. The enemy you're creating is the "evil centrist". Your own example does not support that simplistic view.
Achievements like Civil Rights didn't come about because just a small part of the "left" pushed for it. It came about because the majority of the left stood for it. So no, you don't get to take all the credit and YES, you're splitting the party for no discernable reason.
I mean to be fair... groups that consider themselves far left also exterminate groups.
The trick is to not go too far. You wanna end up at Scandinavian liberal socialism, but not overshoot it to let's create a famine for kicks and kill all people wearing glasses.
I think it's necissary when talking about "left governments" to have that caveat. I wouldn't personally consider the Khmer Rouge, USSR, or CCP, left wing but they did.
They are just different shades of authoritarianism.
I mean to be fair... groups that consider themselves far left also exterminate groups
[Citation needed]
The trick is to not go too far
Yeah, you wouldn't want society to become TOO egalitarian and fair! 🙄
You wanna end up at Scandinavian liberal socialism
Speaking as an actual Scandinavian leftie: nope. Not good enough.
Social Democratic Liberalism (which is what it actually is. Socialism is a very different thing) is still capitalist and thus exploitative at its core.
It's better than most, but it's far from the utopian ideal that people from the American Left tend to think it is.
but not overshoot it to let's create a famine for kicks and kill all people wearing glasses
You're thinking along the wrong axis there. There's a HUGE difference between ultra authoritarian leftism like that of the USSR and Pol Pot's Cambodia, and libertarian (original meaning, not bastardized American definition) leftism.
It's actually a "The end justifies the means" situation - Marxism-Leninism tries to achieve Communism (the Perfect Equality utopia) via the Dictatorship Of The Proletariat stage, a form of Autocracy, and all tries so far in the so-called "Communist" countries got stuck in that stage.
So whilst the end objective is not authoritarian, it's used to justify means to supposedly get there which are most definitelly authoritarian though they're are supposed to be used only temporarily
Whilst I'm pretty sure in the very beginning of the Communist Revolutions most people in it were guided by leftwing principles and trully saw the authoritarianism as merelly a distasteful temporary need, nowadays in those countries the genuinelly leftwing grand objective seems to be just an excuse to be used in justifing the continued use of authocratic power by those who hold it, rather than something those in power genuine want and expect to one day reach.
Dictatorship Of The Proletariat stage, a form of Autocracy
The dictatorship of the proletariat isn't a form of autocracy, it means that the proletariat (overwhelming majority of developed industrial societies) rules democratically without taking into account the input of the few capitalist owners (overwhelming minority).
This take is too anarchy-pilled. I don't love the idea of a vanguard party but it's hard to honestly argue something of the sort isn't necessary to push things along until broad cultural norms shift far enough Left to be self-sustaining.
All those Commie Bastards were just fucking Red Fascists
Yeah, fucking red fascists and their completely free healthcare and education, guaranteed housing, guaranteed employment and guarantee of retirement pensions at 60 years old (55 for women). Fucking red fascists supporting anticolonial movements all over Latin America, Africa and Asia, allowing Vietnam to decide a future for itself instead of being forced into submission by American bombing. Fucking red fascists saving Europe from Nazism and saving tens of millions of lives from extermination and genocide. Fucking red fascists with their self-sufficient economic system that doesn't rely on the exploitation of the global south. Fucking red fascists respecting the cultural diversity of the peoples (look up the evolution of number of speakers of Occitan Language since 1900 to see what's real cultural erasure happening in real time)
Go tell those Uyghurs and Tibetan Monks how good they have it
You are literally free to do so. Take a flight to China tomorrow, and visit Kashgar in the Xinjiang province, or visit the Tibet region. You'll find that people are living normal plentiful lives and support the Chinese government in their majority. China is, as a matter of fact, the country in the world with highest government satisfaction rates consistently
That info comes from western organizations like the University of California or the Pew Research Institute, BTW, not from any "evil CCP propaganda".
China is funding radical theocratic dictatorship in Iran who armed and organized Hamas to reignite the war in Gaza
Ohhhh, I get it, you're a Zionist! Should have started from there, I would have wasted a lot less time if I knew I was dealing with a genocidal maniac, gotcha. Bye
This video very well explains some issues with China from a pretty well trusted source (Mehdi Hasan). From their own representatives mouth. Dismissing the fact of Chinese residents not having freedom of speech seems to be a major oversight of your suppositions about their feelings on their government.
(Speaking as a mod)
This comment has been reported for misinformation. I don't think you're citing misinfo sources, but rather glossing over animosity and lived experiences from people such as these audience participants with missing family members that seem comically evil to gaslight in the way that China officially and undeniably has. So not misinformation, but I certainly understand why it was when the intention to miss crucial points is so apparent. It'll remain up with this note in place.
Yeah, communism may have provided all the astonishing advances in human rights to hundreds of millions of people, saved hundreds of millions of lives from poverty and serfdom, and introduced doubling and tripling of life expectancy where it arrived despite having to contend against the western capitalist empire. But did you know they had prisons during the WW2 times when 25 million soviets were murdered by Nazis?
If I could point toward actual socialist governments not based on exploitation (rather than Scandinavia) I would. But it really is just a hypothetical idea at this point.
I've never been optimistic enough to believe the libertarian/anarchic theories work on any scale above small communities. Anytime I discuss egalitarian and anarchic societies I can't get beyond the point of humans are intrinsically greedy andviolent which that collapses the system.
If I could point toward actual socialist governments not based on exploitation [...] I would
There you go, now you can point towards a socialist government not based on exploitation! (USSR).
Anytime I discuss egalitarian and anarchic societies I can't get beyond the point of humans are intrinsically greedy andviolent which that collapses the system
"Humans are greedy... That's why we should have a system in which the greedy people can become ultra rich and use their money to exploit the not so greedy people".
So anything thats acturally left wing is bad? Because left wing means genuene real socialism, as in not capitalism socialism. As in the type of socialism that doesn't require oppressing the global south (which shouldn't even be a question).
You wanna end up at Scandinavian liberal socialism
Finland keeps putting hundreds of thousands into poverty thanks to its "liberal socialism" constantly pushing austerity policy as the rest of Europe. And even when things were better in Finland, that's because the entirety of the western world is supported on the exploitation of Africa, South America and Asia.
I don't wanna end up at Scandinavian liberal socialism because it's currently electing fascists into government, and because it perpetuates the exploitation of the global south.
I mentioned nothing about not liking Finland, I just don't like their governance system because it's leading to fascism. You can stop your weird adhominem and address my points
Sure, if you put stock in classifying yourself. Eventually people get overly consumed arguing ideologies and the right way to be that the individual topic of debate is lost, and the conversation turns into a popularity contest. It's arguably the core issue the US is dealing with at the moment.
Issue is, we have more than one far-left and right, and often "radicalism" is conflated with "stupidity", thus some annoying liberals are getting called "far-left", such as Brianna Wu (watch Dead Domain's video on Brianna Wu, if you're not up to date on everything: the Israel bit is just the tip of the iceberg).
What does any of this have to do with Putin? You live in the west, with its own fascist leaders either in power (Trump, Italy, Finland) or getting into power (Germany, likely France, likely Spain), and you think all of the evil in the world comes from the evil barbarians of the east?
I known you're joking, but the USSR in Stalin's times (not Stalin personally) saved a hundred million lives in Europe by eliminating Nazism, which wanted to exterminate essentially every non-German between Berlin and the Urals. Life expectancy also doubled from 28 years of age to 55ish at the time of Stalin's death (it kept rapidly climbing after).
Many excesses were made during the times of Stalin, and some 700k people died in the Gulags, but this needs the context that the Nazi invasion murdered 25 million Soviet citizens.
The dumbest lemmy take I've read all day (that said, the day has just begun)
The far left wants to exterminate a particular social group - capitalists - because it directly oppresses everyone else through violence. Depending on the flavor of leftism, extermination of a group doesn't have to mean extermination of individuals, rather it means the destruction of their social status and the redistribution of their wealth. The goal is self-defence: stop the literal physical violence through which the masses are kept poor & under control, through violence if necessary.
The far right wants to exterminate all minorities. And in that case it does literally mean hanging black people in trees and setting gay couples on fire, physical destruction of marginalized individuals. The goal is to install an religious ethnostate.
If you can't tell the two apart, you're literally the centrist from the OP meme
Well, far left happen to want exterminate groups as well pretty often. NGL, their ends are far much better than of far rights (if we assume communism is achievable and stuff), but they still don't justify the means.
They both lie and fail to achieve what they promise. Niether actually wants to do what they promise, they just want to use the promise and some symbolic actions to gain influence, money, and power. So yeah, in a lot of ways, they are the same. Neither is helping the people they are supposed to be serving.
Its not the premise of having everyones basic need met theyre calling bulshit on, its the politicians' claim that that is an objective they will actually try to enact.
I know what you mean though. Some of the worthless dumbfucks who pass themselves off as being far left are just identity politics dipshits who think feminist media criticism is activism.
In that sense, if someone were looking between far left (“Xeno pronouns are valid!”) and far right (“Build that wall!”) then it wouldn’t be ridiculous to say fuck both sides. That’s kind of the dilemma we’re in now.
Please explain how the capitalist empire of Russia, which has recently arrested a Kazakh student for having a Marxist reading of Das Kapital at university, and arrested some communist activists in Donetsk, is pushing communist propaganda through the far left.
The far left always claims to be the ideology of peace, but somehow far left regimes around the globe guided by far left ideologies hold THE highest death tolls in human history.
I was actually thinking about this yesterday. I'm something of a centrist.
Fascists want to exterminate their enemies, and the problem is that they are pretty good at it once they get into power.
Communists want to feed everyone, and the problem is that they're pretty bad at it once they get into power.
Both have caused plenty of deaths and misery, and both are in that way horrible, but I'd say that it's always better that your intention are good even if your ideas practically suck -- just as long as your intentions don't include fascist-adjacent harrowing shit like "let's kill all rich people and generally anyone who disagrees with us". There's at least a distinct possibility that at some point something can be improved in the way communism is implemented.
But obviously for fascists, there's no potential good ever. The only way fascism improves is when it becomes less fascist.
edit Damn, lots of either angry fascists or oblivious communists in here.
Hate to burst your bubble but far left sound and act like violent facists and helped pave the way for the far right. They do sound the same. It's the moderates that actually want everybody's needs met.
People are so forcefed bullshit from their echo chamber watering holes that they really do believe it's just a right vs left war meanwhile billionaires are sipping their gold infused dom perignon on their yachts a few yards out to sea watching it all burn down.
What are we considering far left in this scenario? I’m asking genuinely, because I think we can all acknowledge there are a handful of loonies on the far left, but I think you’re talking about me because I sometimes like to joke about being a dictator and executing right wingers.
There is also a group of people who cannot take a joke but I mean the people who would scream/yell, shame you, criticize you or call you a Nazi just for having an opinion you don't agree with or so much as catching a whiff that you can't yet empathize with their problems. Threats and acts of violence.
You know it's the youth that's tipping the voter's scales by in large because they're not able to rationalize other people's emotional damage including those of wing influencers and left wing doomers and blow hards.
You agree? Do the work, or your the problem. Disagree? You're a Nazi. Wanna just live your life? Complicit Nazi.
There's a thing in criminology called labelling theory. It transcends the idea of criminality. Combine this with a strong thrust of financial hardship and you start sinking ships
This is actually pretty true. I think the reason lots of decent folks balk at this is because there are so many right wing traitor lunatics who say “you just don’t like opinions that are different from yours,” when in fact we’re talking about them saying things like, “Deport them all, I don’t care if it costs $1 trillion.” Then I’ll tell you that you deserve the death penalty.
Western countries: mass media and social media are all literally owned either by the pro-capitalist government or directly by capitalist companies, the latter being the wealthiest and most powerful institutions
This lemmitor: "ItS tHe FeMiNiStS fAuLt ThAt ThE Far RiGhT wOn"
You're putting words in my mouth when you know darn well it isn't the mass media or even the billionaires that are posting the influential content. They are complicit in the destruction they sew. I also said nothing about feminists. Check your own damage before you help make this worse
::: spoiler Needs text alternative.
Images of text break much that text alternatives do not.
Losses due to image of text lacking alternative such as link:
usability
we can't quote the text without pointless bullshit like retyping it or OCR
some users can't read this due to lack of alt text
users can't adapt the text for dyslexia or vision impairments
systems can't read the text to them or send it to braille devices
web connectivity
we have to do failure-prone bullshit to find the original source
we can't explore wider context of the original message
authenticity: we don't know the image hasn't been tampered
searchability: the "text" isn't indexable by search engine in a meaningful way
fault tolerance: no text fallback if
image breaks
image host is geoblocked due to insane regulations.
Contrary to age & humble appearance, text is an advanced technology that provides all these capabilities absent from images.
:::
Is this referring to authoritarians on the left & right?
Edit: Wait, why are you spamming the same broken markdown? Is it seriously just because you think you're trolling people by pretending to be AI? That's... really dumb.
Horseshoe theory: far left & right look similar if far means authoritarian.
Is OOP referring to that or a different kind of far?
If your client is broken, that's on you: it renders fine as <details> & <summary> elements on standard web browsers with the standard theme.
Follow the fediverse link in a web browser & weep at your broken client.
My choice of client not fixing your off-spec markdown has nothing to do with... whatever the heck is going on there. Could you try maybe rewriting your copypasta to be slightly more intelligible?
Losses due to image of text lacking alternative such as link:
Maybe try something a little bit less "All your text is belong to us"? Because this just doesn't make sense. I genuinely do not understand what you are trying to say.
Nor does it address why you're spamming posts with it.
You can just go look up the spec, what you're posting doesn't adhere to that. That the web pages correct for it isn't the issue here, that's just someone correcting for user behavior with the parser, it's fairly common to do that. I don't actually care that much about it though, because mainly I'm trying to figure out how to batter and deep fry your word salad into something to do with "accessibility" and the irony is just painful.
Are you trying to say that... this should've been OCR'd automatically then linked to? That seems like serious overhead when we have such an awesome community of transcribers ( ❤️ u guys)
That's not far left IMO, that's just left. This is a recurring problem we have in France too, where medias call "far left" parties that are just left. This is a slippery slope, the one on which Overton window slips towards the (far) right...
Far left is: "We're going to destroy the very concept of private ownership and wealth accumulation"
"... to meet everyone's basic needs"
"..."
"To meet everyone's basic needs, right?"
/AnakinAndPadmeMeme.jpg
Literally yes. Housing, employment, education, healthcare and pensions are guaranteed in Cuba, and were guaranteed in the USSR, both in theory and in practice. What are you exactly talking about?
Communism is just impossible to implement. It only takes one human's greed to destroy the system. Center-left is far more plausible where the economy is capitalist with lots of checks and balances to counter extreme capitalists' greed and the state having control over essential industries and important parts of the economy (energy, water supply, transportation, education, healthcare and stuff) while abolishing religious systems to nil the discrimination on that end.
The entire concept of life itself is very capitalist — You have to exploit all resources available to you so you can survive and thrive. Only some species share resources — that too if they are in abundance for them.
Capitalism literally encourages human greed to accumulate wealth and destroy the societal system. Even if you tax and regulate them that's still what's encouraged, as its literally the entire point of the system
And regarding "only some species share resources.." Yes. Us. That's literally what society is. How do you think humans grew to become the most successful species on earth? If you win I do not lose. It's not a zero-sum game. Cooperation is literally a win-win. Do you think technology and science would thrive and prosper in a cutthroat society where people kill and steal from each other over any tiny advantage they can get?
I am not saying capitalism is great.
You guys ignore the very fact that socialism and communism is a failed system because they are so extreme in its nature. You have to make people believe that the opposite is worse. Capitalism is failing today because it is going towards an extreme, both are the 2 sides of the same coin. Having the best of both worlds is what will create balance. The capitalism from 50 years ago and capitalism today are vastly different. Because earlier we were either centre-right or centre-left.
It definitely didn't thrive under socialism.
This is an incredibly inaccurate way to describe nature and you feed into narratives that capitalism is "natural" that stop us from thinking critically both about nature and humanity when you frame things in this way.
Apart from that every multicellular lifeform is a collective. True, those multicellular organisms prey on each other and fight to keep their species thriving. They don't knowingly harm their own fucking species like capitalism does.
Did I ever say capitalism is good? I am saying extreme ends of both economic systems are impossible if you want a free and thriving society.
I agree with what you say except the last part about the entire concept of life being capitalist. It is not. All life in the natural world is in equilibrium. There is give and take but all work in tandem. Parasites are the capitalists, taking until there is nothing left to give and ultimately killing their host.
Ever wonder why there are fights over territories, mates, food, water? Even trees fight other trees for the groundwater. Even when pet dogs have abundant food supply, they still hoard as much as they can when they are given something to eat and not hungry. It is just unsaid in nature because obv there are no agreements, MoUs, or money involved. When a Tiger has control over a territory, most other Tigers agree to it until some other challenges it.
It is the ecosystem that works in tandem when you zoom out from an individual living being level.
Civilisation would be impossible to implement if we didn't criminalise destructive behaviour like murder.
Make greed (hording wealth) illegal.
I gave you a plethora of actual evidence of human rights in an actually existing socialist country, and you went with the "gommunism impossible because hooman greed".
But please elaborate: why is the nationalization and collectivization of means of production so vulnerable to greed? A system in which power is distributed among all workers is actually less prone to greed issues than one in which a single human is in control of the whole company. The whole "human greed" argument is a hollow sophism without any actual analysis of everything.
How is it more sustainable to maintain an elite of wealthy company owners with interests opposed to those of the workers than to maintain a worker controlled state? You are witnessing with your own eyes the disintegration of the western capitalist system, the fascists entering power in USA, Italy, Finland, and probably soon Germany and France and Spain will follow, likely UK too. All the "center-left checks and balances" with strong union membership in the 1960s-1980s disappeared overnight when the threat of global communism disappeared in the 1990s and capitalism didn't need to appear to be better anymore.
Yeah, Cuba. Where everyone is poor w/o any major scientific and cultural influence in the world.
And yeah, USSR. They did try to influence the world but its internal economy was so shit that it couldn't even exist for 100 years and was a one party authoritarian regime. In the end it started to shift towards to capitalism. Also they supported the Nazis during Poland's invasion. The population who was so frustrated with their country that they toppled the Berlin Wall when USSR was collapsing.
Because the very nature of life I explained to you earlier. Life evolved in such a way that it is the survival of fittest, which requires hogging up all the resources as much as you can. Greed is ingrained in every living being's DNA.
Even you are greedy to want to divide all the wealth equally because for you it might be the only way to get richer than you currently are. It is not a matter of if being greedy is right or wrong, it is a matter of if your greed is so high that it destroys other people's lives and where to draw that line as a civilized society.
They never existed in practice in the U.S after the collapse of the USSR because communism failed and thus the perception swayed towards the extreme capitalist way. Later the extreme lobbying by the wealthy and anti-left got rid of the whatever regulations of systems that didn't allow them to be absurdly rich. It is called lobbying in the west while we call it corruption.
Before that when the governments didn't used to only work for the wealthy, the system was performing better than any other one. Europe's War Torn economy was improving, The US was in its golden economic age and all this while people overall had more rights and freedom than any socialist and communist regime. It started to go haywire when the extreme capitalists started to take over and the government stopped working for all the people but only for the rich.
There is no point in living in an extreme capitalist and a fascist country nor there is a point living in a poor socialist or communist country.
First level headed comment i think ive ever read on lemmy. People need to get out of black and white thinking. It has to be a blend.
We need libraries and fire stations. We also need some competition and industry so we can live comfortably and buy shit; thats just how it is.
We dont need billionaires.
I gave up on the comments below. I saw a lot of them with myopic vision and simplification of ideas. Their general idea is “Billionaires bad — Capitalism bad”. “Communism good — No Billionaires” while completely ignoring the fact it results in poor qualify of life lack of technological advancements, lack of freedom, doesn’t allow democracy to exist, and is just a utopian vision.
A pure left or a pure right ideology cannot exist when there are differences in opinions and ideals. We will always get something in between.
You claim communism is impossible to implement yet you have no issue in attempting to implement a democracy that capitalism won't be able to pervert, despite one never having existed before and it being impossible for one to exist.
It sounds less like genuine rationality and more like rationalising a status quo bias. Even worse when people are claiming capitalism to be the natural order of life, despite existing for less than 0.0000001% of it and humans being egalitarian for far longer than they were capitalist.
Peak homoeconomus experiencing "capitalist realism." They even colonised your dreams.
Yes, capitalism as a formal economic system is recent but the behaviours it’s built on aren’t. Competition, territorial control, hoarding for security, unequal outcomes all of these exist across nature (including humans). Lions fight for dominance, trees compete for sunlight, squirrels hoard food. Resource competition is older than any ideology.
Communism, on the other hand, assumes sustained large scale human cooperation without hierarchy, which has never existed stably either outside small tribes where scarcity was low and populations small. Scaling that to millions is where it collapses.
I’m not defending status quo. I support regulated capitalism with social welfare (centre-left). Capitalism needs checks, not abolition. Meanwhile Communism needs human behaviour to fundamentally change.
One system builds on instinct and incentives and the other demands we override them entirely.
That’s the difference in feasibility.
Wait, if we can have capitalism with regulations why can’t we just have communism with regulations instead?
The way I see it, between left and far left the direction is roughly the same, that's the means and end point that differ (i.e. revolution or not and how far we go into sharing resources). This is an important difference and they should thus not be mixed.
Also needs to be a clear distinction between democratic left and authoritarian left.
In a naive attempt to "meet everyone’s basic needs" sure, but in practice it would almost certainly end up enriching and entrenching a new ruling class, or collapsing under external pressure even if there are some early wins.
Many things sound simple from the outset. But tearing down and rebuilding an entire society isn’t something you do without significant (and often lethal) force and with plenty of intended and unintended casualties along the way (and there’s still a very good chance we'd screw it up).
If it's not "the good guys" wielding overwhelming force, it’ll be "the bad guys" stepping in. Every political system ultimately rests on the realistic threat/application of force; the only question is who controls it and how accountable they are.
I'm not inclined to trust anyone waving guns in my face, nor encourage situations that make that more likely. So, things would have to get a lot worse for me (and I'd venture most people) to want violent overthrow of my current (far from perfect) political and social system. That said ... at some point, for many people in many countries, it may be too late. Apathy isn't appropriate either.
You guys are talking about basic capitalism, right? You all understand that, don't you?
I may have got carried away in my response to a one line quip. 🤣
Look, nobody here knows what the fuck we're doing anyway.
Damn, seems like real-world data contradicts your preconceived notions. Now, as a responsible adult, you'll surely retract and reflect on why you've been misled to believe that communism perpetuates inequality, right?
Are you trying to say that communism leads to a failed authoritarian state resembling the US in terms of income inequality? Do you have the same stats for wealth inequality too?
I don't but they're irrelevant. The only possible way to get money in the USSR was through labor and income, since there was no capitalist accumulation or return rates on investment by design. The highest paid individuals in the USSR were actually highly trained professionals such as university professors, members of research institutions and high profile artists and media personalities.
No, that's what the end of communism leads to, to a return to capitalism. That was only possible because communism began in a 400-million pool of people in backwards and unindustrialized Eastern Europe, the cold war was uneven from the start.
I'd love to see a utopia, but I don't see communism making any sustainable inroads anywhere in the world... that is, unless things get much much worse, to the point that your average man is willing to pick up a pitchfork (or other weapon of choice) and participate in overthrowing ruling class by force.... but nowadays the masses are so divided and confused that they'll probably start killing each other for scraps of food rather than the billionaires for a life of dignity. Even then, it's just temporary until capitalism and/or authoritarianism takes hold again.
You always have this problem if you have people with concentrated power aka a “ruling class”
Only way to prevent this is transparency and tools that the people of country can control the ruling class
Very important for such a setup is, that politics, media, law enforcement and courts are separated and controlling each other
And that private companies are not allowed to fuck with the system
I couldn't agree more. Although I'll add that education and basic health/social support is also needed for long term stability, or large swathes of the population will be manipulated by fear and dis/misinformation, and will likely end up voting against their own interests. Social cohesion is important, which is why it is used as a weapon by nation states and other political actors.
Absolutely agree 🙏🏻
Except removing those rights is not required to meet everyone's basic needs
Talking like a slavery apologist from 200BCE
How? I'm the one preserving peoples rights here. No one in my country is enslaved. Everyone has basic rights AND we have the freedom of ownership and democracy. Everything convincing point socialists have can be achieved in a capitalist system.
Wrong. Your country has homeless people without a right to housing and your country has unemployed people without the right to work. As for healthcare and education, your country is dismantling those systems in favour of private ones and worsening coverage, and the same can be said about pensions. This is almost universally true for capitalism except for a few countries in Latin America which manage to maintain rights for now (until right wing gets reelected). Now, tell me, what country are you from?
Wrong. The homeless people in my country choose to be homeless as they are offered free housing and community support workers. My country is currently expanding their public healthcare and increasing the salaries of nurses as well as expanding publicly funded gp vists. This is all done within a capitalist system with no large wealth funds and we are not particularly rich as a nation.
You shouldn't speak so confidently when you seem to have no idea of the world outside America.
"...and to achive that, you will do the job we pick for you, you will work the hour we decided, you will be paid not in money but in basic needs, and any excess you have will be confiscated."
Let's not pretend we didn't have the example for far left.
Literally making this up. By the 1970s in the USSR, 1 in 10 positions in the economy were open, and people were completely free to change their jobs and move to others without having the threat of unemployment. The only restriction I've seen to that, is that university graduates, as a payment back to society (university, as of all education in the USSR, was free and actually included accommodation and upkeep), had to work for a few years on a state-mandated position in their field of study. I'm a Spaniard physicist and 9 in 10 of my friends are unhappy fucks who are either unemployed or hating their lives in consulting.
Tell me one socialist state that hasn't paid their workers in money. I can tell you that my girlfriend's mom, in a capitalist country, once got paid in juice boxes because the company didn't have money for her salary.
Again literally untrue. You're mistaking capital (private property used to produce goods and services in order to extract surplus value from workers) with personal property (the things you use on your own for your own shit, like your house or your toothbrush).
Have you ever actually talked with a Marxist, or are you just going off what you heard on FOX news?
I must admit i don't talk with Marxists nor do i know what is FOX news, and i do exaggerated my point, but lets not pretend Mao Zedong and North Korea didn't exists, whatever you mentioned above is no way closer to far left. Socialism is practiced everywhere, but that doesn't make them far left.
Literally the excess i'm talking about.
You don't know what Fox News is?
Should i?
The excess in your opinion is forbidding rich people from exploiting the poor. There were plenty of people making the same point against abolition of slavery in 200BCE that you're making right now.
Under Mao Zedong, China's life expectancy went from 23 years of age to almost 60, more than doubling. Apply this to 1 billion Chinese, and you get that communism in China saved hundreds of millions of people. China in the early 1900s was a western colony much like India, and it had similar levels of industrialization and economical progress. Comparing the development of India and China since communism, the only possible conclusion is that communism uplifted a billion people from destitute poverty, gave them healthcare, education, pensions, jobs and housing. Mistakes were made during Mao? For sure they were. The balance is still overwhelmingly positive by any metric you want to apply.
As for North Korea, maybe if the USA hadn't bombed the country using more explosives than in the entire Pacific theater of WW2, and destroyed literally 85% of the buildings in the entire country, North-Koreans wouldn't have had such an extreme policy of international isolation and self-defense.
The mistake is millions of death while Mao walks away without any repercussions.
And maybe if nk didn't self isolate for so long they would've recover. Just look at singapore. Did you know North Korea have an embassy in Malaysia? Did you know what happen next? They decided to assassinate Kim Jong Nam in Malaysia, then blame Malaysia for it, and cut all ties. NK might have been a victim of US, but their current situation is 100% their own doing.
Well that conclude my reason of not speaking with Marxist, you guys are nut lol.
typical
We're talking about the ultra wealthy sharing the stockpiles of resources they have stolen and enslaved to gather, and the first spin is that they "aren't allowed to have private things" and "we aren't allowed to accumulate wealth"
eat shit
Yeah, this thread is full of people who have lived their lives under absolute capitalist doctrine and cannot see an alternative and have never considered the underlying philosophy and morality of that system and can't even imagine another, so they backfill the blanks and rationalize what they have so they don't have to deal with actually thinking about it deeper because that would require effort and discomfort.
Politicalmemes? Yep, another right wing breeding ground, it always is.
Its horrible! Where can I go on lemmy thats free of this? Where can I go across the internet?
It is the far left of the current Overton window, not an objective scale.
Yeah. Somehow, every morally just ideology that liberals/democrats ever had suddenly became the sole property of the far left when they decided to label everything even slightly right of Stalin as “bLuEMaGa”.
Each and every one of them now sit at the dead center of a their own little circle, where they try very hard to entertain themselves, and one another- by attempting to smugly out enrage everyone with edgy memes.
It’s pretty fucking entertaining if you ask me.
Who are "they"? Your comment has more pronouns than a Tumblr thread
Centralists
Don’t ban abortion but support families with children more If you really want less abortion and more children..
Sex education
freely dispersed contraceptives
No kid wants to be pregnant.
You vote left because you want the best for the general good of society, you vote right because you want what's best for yourself, in particular.
The sad thing is, that's not even true.
Most poor world be better off under left wing ideals, yet they vote right wing anyway because they're scared that brown people will steal their crumbs.
(But actually that guy in the middle doesn't just have this plate full of cookies. He owns a huge vessel full of cookies)
There’s a twisted sort of logic to this. Let’s put ourselves in the position of that worker with one cookie for a second.
Two things are true in America:
If the worker feels caught between those two things, he has to ask which he can change more easily. And clearly, denying benefits to the poor is easier than taxing the rich. In today’s climate, there is a “deny benefits to the poor” party that is very well mobilized and has delivered numerous victories. And where is the “tax the rich” option? Nowhere.
If this had a next image it would be the old rich guy stealing that last cookie while the other two fight.
There is a version going in this direction
But rich white men stealing their crumbs is fine because they aren't brown
Better than Jose over there, a hard working fine gentleman, getting his needs met
The funny bit is that sometimes José too is a conservative, which is how you see plenty of immigrants doing the whole "pull the ladder up once you're in" and voting rightwing.
ftfy
Good bars man
It is true for the general disposition. Do you vote in your own interests vs do you vote in the general best interest. Your motivations may be malicious or incompetent, a two party system doesn't discern.
Plenty of people also vote right based on hate and fear. They'll vote against there own best interests because of hate and fear.
You vote right because you want the people you don't like to suffer.
I don't believe this. People may have multiple agendas. They may hate foreigners or cultures, but people's allegiances are always first and foremost to their own, to keep living in the most comfortable way they can with the lowest possible eftort. It's kind of game theoretical in some sense.
Game theory occupies itself with the adversary roles of generosity (a moral principle) and calculation (a purely rational one), and in some way you could say that in a system which only allows one of two outcomes, a lot of assumptions are subsumed under those two separate outcomes.
What if Candidate A is for lower taxes, higher immigration and Candidate B is for higher taxes and lower immigration?
What if both candidates agree on lower taxes and lower immigration, but one of them also proposes reinstating slavery, and the other one wants none of it but instead mandatory abortions?
In a two party state you don't get enough fine grained resolution to deal with problems that require any complexity beyond perfectly white and perfectly black.
I guess you missed the "He's not hurting the people he needs to be hurting" thing the other year.
They're not nice people. They will vote for the leopard and act surprised when it comes for them.
Maybe I'm overthinking it. Maybe they just dumb.
they are systemically undereducated and inundated with propaganda telling them that their problems stem not from the class war but from the culture war, which has long been a dogwhistle for the race war
They vote right because cable news told them it's best for themselves. It's not.
And then never realise that you voted against what is best for you because you just believe propaganda rather than think logically…
You also vote far right if you’re willing to sacrifice something yourself to make sure no one ever gets it without having to make heavy sacrifices to do so. Life is pain, princess. Anyone who says differently is selling something! /s
It's because we lefties say completely justified mean things about so-called 'centrists', and criticizing the literal record of centrism is tantamount to insulting a centrist's identity.
The centrists made up the term so they wouldn't have to face the fact that they're conservatives.
That's right, the centrists are conservatives and the so-called "conservatives" are really regressives at best, plenty of them fascists.
We don't just call everyone we don't like fascists. But uh, them folks are fascists.
Many of the greatest political advancements in the history of humanity were achieved by people you'd call "centrists".
Such as?
The post-WW2 transition to liberal democracy in Germany, Italy (Adenauer and De Gasperi), and in general European integration; ending apartheid in South Africa; 1991 economic reforms in India; Deng Xiaoping's socialist market economy in China which lifted millions from destitution; Chile's transition to democracy; the labor-capital compromise in Scandinavia which allows them to have very free markets and very strong welfare systems at the same time.
I could go on.
HA! Sure, buddy, sure, we’ll let you call that centrism. Do you need help finding your way back to the children’s table?
Point out which of these don't have elements of "centrism" plz
Point out where they do.
Not really, I provided some examples to some other user where they were clearly "centrists". There were people who leaned more on both sides and the advancement was achieved by someone who was more moderate.
The "left" wanted very different things in most of these cases. For instance, in post-war Italy, it wanted a revolution and to join the Warsaw pact.
Plz explain to me how the examples I brought up aren't "centrist" examples but examples of left victories.
None of those advances were made with a minority of support in society. Is the argument that the populace has since become more conservative?
I think what's more likely is that people you'd consider "centrist" backed those changes. You're dead set on characterizing this "centrist" entity that you have only vaguely defined to create an enemy that doesn't exist.
Don't be dishonest, you did more than that. The enemy you're creating is the "evil centrist". Your own example does not support that simplistic view.
Achievements like Civil Rights didn't come about because just a small part of the "left" pushed for it. It came about because the majority of the left stood for it. So no, you don't get to take all the credit and YES, you're splitting the party for no discernable reason.
From Disco Elysium:
Your “far-left” is the centric, your “centric” are fascist accepting far-right, and your “far-right” is right extreme fascists…
Thank you for the fix.
I hope that this is satire 😄
I think it was a joke I deleted when I saw someone else had made it already but I forget.
holy cap gng 💔🥀😭
They’re just people who are too weak and dumb to have real opinions and they just want to be in the in crowd
It must take such bravery to not be in the center, sir. How can I become this brave.
It’s called executive disfunction
It's called being a bullshitter
Even the left normalized the false narrative of “far left”. America does not have any “far left” party
American has a small group that considers itself far-left that actually helps the right and far-right.
America doesn't even have a slightly left party.
Only right-wingers use the term far Left.
::: spoiler Transcription A Tweet by "Vivian" @suchnerve:
Can we be better than twitter with these bullshit fallacy arguments.
Fishhook theory > horseshoe theory
I mean to be fair... groups that consider themselves far left also exterminate groups.
The trick is to not go too far. You wanna end up at Scandinavian liberal socialism, but not overshoot it to let's create a famine for kicks and kill all people wearing glasses.
Is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that statement.
I think it's necissary when talking about "left governments" to have that caveat. I wouldn't personally consider the Khmer Rouge, USSR, or CCP, left wing but they did.
They are just different shades of authoritarianism.
[Citation needed]
Yeah, you wouldn't want society to become TOO egalitarian and fair! 🙄
Speaking as an actual Scandinavian leftie: nope. Not good enough.
Social Democratic Liberalism (which is what it actually is. Socialism is a very different thing) is still capitalist and thus exploitative at its core.
It's better than most, but it's far from the utopian ideal that people from the American Left tend to think it is.
You're thinking along the wrong axis there. There's a HUGE difference between ultra authoritarian leftism like that of the USSR and Pol Pot's Cambodia, and libertarian (original meaning, not bastardized American definition) leftism.
It's actually a "The end justifies the means" situation - Marxism-Leninism tries to achieve Communism (the Perfect Equality utopia) via the Dictatorship Of The Proletariat stage, a form of Autocracy, and all tries so far in the so-called "Communist" countries got stuck in that stage.
So whilst the end objective is not authoritarian, it's used to justify means to supposedly get there which are most definitelly authoritarian though they're are supposed to be used only temporarily
Whilst I'm pretty sure in the very beginning of the Communist Revolutions most people in it were guided by leftwing principles and trully saw the authoritarianism as merelly a distasteful temporary need, nowadays in those countries the genuinelly leftwing grand objective seems to be just an excuse to be used in justifing the continued use of authocratic power by those who hold it, rather than something those in power genuine want and expect to one day reach.
The dictatorship of the proletariat isn't a form of autocracy, it means that the proletariat (overwhelming majority of developed industrial societies) rules democratically without taking into account the input of the few capitalist owners (overwhelming minority).
This take is too anarchy-pilled. I don't love the idea of a vanguard party but it's hard to honestly argue something of the sort isn't necessary to push things along until broad cultural norms shift far enough Left to be self-sustaining.
Yeah, fucking red fascists and their completely free healthcare and education, guaranteed housing, guaranteed employment and guarantee of retirement pensions at 60 years old (55 for women). Fucking red fascists supporting anticolonial movements all over Latin America, Africa and Asia, allowing Vietnam to decide a future for itself instead of being forced into submission by American bombing. Fucking red fascists saving Europe from Nazism and saving tens of millions of lives from extermination and genocide. Fucking red fascists with their self-sufficient economic system that doesn't rely on the exploitation of the global south. Fucking red fascists respecting the cultural diversity of the peoples (look up the evolution of number of speakers of Occitan Language since 1900 to see what's real cultural erasure happening in real time)
You are literally free to do so. Take a flight to China tomorrow, and visit Kashgar in the Xinjiang province, or visit the Tibet region. You'll find that people are living normal plentiful lives and support the Chinese government in their majority. China is, as a matter of fact, the country in the world with highest government satisfaction rates consistently
That info comes from western organizations like the University of California or the Pew Research Institute, BTW, not from any "evil CCP propaganda".
The fact that you believe Uyghur or Tibetan people are unhappy with their government is because you've fallen for propaganda yourself. Western-manufactured organizations like the East Turkestan Liberation Organization (based in Türkiye, NATO nation) or the Tibetan Government in Exile (based off India) create propaganda implying that people in said regions aren't happy with the government and want independence, but if you look inside China and ask the actual population, you'll find that's a very minority position. Certainly nothing in Tibet like the literal police violence against pro-independence protestors causing 800 wounded in Catalonia in my homeland of Spain because their right to self determination is violated abusing the Spanish constitution.
Ohhhh, I get it, you're a Zionist! Should have started from there, I would have wasted a lot less time if I knew I was dealing with a genocidal maniac, gotcha. Bye
(Speaking only for myself)
https://youtu.be/kmYdpHtOv_E
This video very well explains some issues with China from a pretty well trusted source (Mehdi Hasan). From their own representatives mouth. Dismissing the fact of Chinese residents not having freedom of speech seems to be a major oversight of your suppositions about their feelings on their government.
(Speaking as a mod)
This comment has been reported for misinformation. I don't think you're citing misinfo sources, but rather glossing over animosity and lived experiences from people such as these audience participants with missing family members that seem comically evil to gaslight in the way that China officially and undeniably has. So not misinformation, but I certainly understand why it was when the intention to miss crucial points is so apparent. It'll remain up with this note in place.
POV Lemmy user learns that people can do both bad and good things at the same time
Yeah, communism may have provided all the astonishing advances in human rights to hundreds of millions of people, saved hundreds of millions of lives from poverty and serfdom, and introduced doubling and tripling of life expectancy where it arrived despite having to contend against the western capitalist empire. But did you know they had prisons during the WW2 times when 25 million soviets were murdered by Nazis?
POV Lemmy user doesn't learn anything
Close your ears if you want, I made my point and you're just shouting "lalala I didnt listen".
If I could point toward actual socialist governments not based on exploitation (rather than Scandinavia) I would. But it really is just a hypothetical idea at this point.
I've never been optimistic enough to believe the libertarian/anarchic theories work on any scale above small communities. Anytime I discuss egalitarian and anarchic societies I can't get beyond the point of humans are intrinsically greedy andviolent which that collapses the system.
There you go, now you can point towards a socialist government not based on exploitation! (USSR).
"Humans are greedy... That's why we should have a system in which the greedy people can become ultra rich and use their money to exploit the not so greedy people".
So anything thats acturally left wing is bad? Because left wing means genuene real socialism, as in not capitalism socialism. As in the type of socialism that doesn't require oppressing the global south (which shouldn't even be a question).
LIBERALISM = REACTIONARY
SOCIALISM = REVOLUTIONARY
Finland keeps putting hundreds of thousands into poverty thanks to its "liberal socialism" constantly pushing austerity policy as the rest of Europe. And even when things were better in Finland, that's because the entirety of the western world is supported on the exploitation of Africa, South America and Asia.
I don't wanna end up at Scandinavian liberal socialism because it's currently electing fascists into government, and because it perpetuates the exploitation of the global south.
Oh wow I'm shocked that this guy, of all people, doesn't like Finland. CRAZY.
I mentioned nothing about not liking Finland, I just don't like their governance system because it's leading to fascism. You can stop your weird adhominem and address my points
Why don't you just invade them?
Poor quality bait
Worked in Ukraine. Just about preserving spheres of influence, right?
Or better yet, it's just fine having a plethora of different views on different individual topics and not subscribing to any particular ideology.
Everything is an ideology my guy. Even apathy/indifference
Sure, if you put stock in classifying yourself. Eventually people get overly consumed arguing ideologies and the right way to be that the individual topic of debate is lost, and the conversation turns into a popularity contest. It's arguably the core issue the US is dealing with at the moment.
So your ideology is just "do-nothing-ism" and "I-just-wanna-grill-ism". That just means conservatism, i.e. "let things remain as they are".
Wow that's quite a few assumptions, not sure how you extrapolated that conclusion from two comments. And for the record, you are quite wrong lol
Too bad the left has never had power in the US
Neoliberals don't want or allow things to improve
Libertarians: ME!!!
far ming: we're gonna need a couple cows
Issue is, we have more than one far-left and right, and often "radicalism" is conflated with "stupidity", thus some annoying liberals are getting called "far-left", such as Brianna Wu (watch Dead Domain's video on Brianna Wu, if you're not up to date on everything: the Israel bit is just the tip of the iceberg).
Swap far left and centrists. Don’t @me
Did the Putin Bots finally invade Lemmy?
What does any of this have to do with Putin? You live in the west, with its own fascist leaders either in power (Trump, Italy, Finland) or getting into power (Germany, likely France, likely Spain), and you think all of the evil in the world comes from the evil barbarians of the east?
Let’s not confuse centrists with idgit voters.
I do believe these "" have fallen from around the word centrists
"guns are necessary and pronouns are confusing so I'm pretty sure you're both heading in the wrong direction"
The Far Left also commit hard to 2
Stalin was just trying to make sure everyone had enough. Everyone left alive at least.
I known you're joking, but the USSR in Stalin's times (not Stalin personally) saved a hundred million lives in Europe by eliminating Nazism, which wanted to exterminate essentially every non-German between Berlin and the Urals. Life expectancy also doubled from 28 years of age to 55ish at the time of Stalin's death (it kept rapidly climbing after).
Many excesses were made during the times of Stalin, and some 700k people died in the Gulags, but this needs the context that the Nazi invasion murdered 25 million Soviet citizens.
Everyone but me are stupid
Somehow I seriously doubt that
far left: we're gonna exterminate entire social groups because they're impure
far right we're gonna exterminate entire social groups because they're impure
centrists: i literally cannot tell you two apart
you fixed it
The dumbest lemmy take I've read all day (that said, the day has just begun)
The far left wants to exterminate a particular social group - capitalists - because it directly oppresses everyone else through violence. Depending on the flavor of leftism, extermination of a group doesn't have to mean extermination of individuals, rather it means the destruction of their social status and the redistribution of their wealth. The goal is self-defence: stop the literal physical violence through which the masses are kept poor & under control, through violence if necessary.
The far right wants to exterminate all minorities. And in that case it does literally mean hanging black people in trees and setting gay couples on fire, physical destruction of marginalized individuals. The goal is to install an religious ethnostate.
If you can't tell the two apart, you're literally the centrist from the OP meme
Well, far left happen to want exterminate groups as well pretty often. NGL, their ends are far much better than of far rights (if we assume communism is achievable and stuff), but they still don't justify the means.
They both lie and fail to achieve what they promise. Niether actually wants to do what they promise, they just want to use the promise and some symbolic actions to gain influence, money, and power. So yeah, in a lot of ways, they are the same. Neither is helping the people they are supposed to be serving.
Just FYI, not everyone sees "having everyone basic needs met" as bullshit.
Its not the premise of having everyones basic need met theyre calling bulshit on, its the politicians' claim that that is an objective they will actually try to enact.
I feel like you made that up.
I know what you mean though. Some of the worthless dumbfucks who pass themselves off as being far left are just identity politics dipshits who think feminist media criticism is activism.
In that sense, if someone were looking between far left (“Xeno pronouns are valid!”) and far right (“Build that wall!”) then it wouldn’t be ridiculous to say fuck both sides. That’s kind of the dilemma we’re in now.
One person: "I have these views on gender and equality"
Another person: "I want to put all immigrants into extermination camps"
You: "damn bruh why are feminists SO ANNOYING!!!!"
That’s how it looks from the perspective of a worthless bottom of the barrel dumbfuck, absolutely.
The Neoliberals are the ones literally on Russian paychecks.
Neoliberalism is not a left wing ideology.
It's always convenient and reassuring to know one's own ideas, alone, are untainted by scary foreigners.
Please explain how the capitalist empire of Russia, which has recently arrested a Kazakh student for having a Marxist reading of Das Kapital at university, and arrested some communist activists in Donetsk, is pushing communist propaganda through the far left.
These bullshit Twitter takes are getting old. This is a more realistic interpretation.
Far left: We're going to exterminate entire groups for the sake of "equality"
Far right: We're going to exterminate entire groups for the sake of "purity"
End result = A bunch of people get murdered
Centrists: These both look pretty bad, we just want people's needs to be met
End result = pragmatic governance
If you're someone who hates centrists because they're not as extreme as you then YOU are a part of the problem.
TBH, I'm not seeing where the American far Left is advocating exterminating entire groups of people.
The far left always claims to be the ideology of peace, but somehow far left regimes around the globe guided by far left ideologies hold THE highest death tolls in human history.
I was actually thinking about this yesterday. I'm something of a centrist.
Fascists want to exterminate their enemies, and the problem is that they are pretty good at it once they get into power.
Communists want to feed everyone, and the problem is that they're pretty bad at it once they get into power.
Both have caused plenty of deaths and misery, and both are in that way horrible, but I'd say that it's always better that your intention are good even if your ideas practically suck -- just as long as your intentions don't include fascist-adjacent harrowing shit like "let's kill all rich people and generally anyone who disagrees with us". There's at least a distinct possibility that at some point something can be improved in the way communism is implemented.
But obviously for fascists, there's no potential good ever. The only way fascism improves is when it becomes less fascist.
edit Damn, lots of either angry fascists or oblivious communists in here.
Hate to burst your bubble but far left sound and act like violent facists and helped pave the way for the far right. They do sound the same. It's the moderates that actually want everybody's needs met.
People are so forcefed bullshit from their echo chamber watering holes that they really do believe it's just a right vs left war meanwhile billionaires are sipping their gold infused dom perignon on their yachts a few yards out to sea watching it all burn down.
What are we considering far left in this scenario? I’m asking genuinely, because I think we can all acknowledge there are a handful of loonies on the far left, but I think you’re talking about me because I sometimes like to joke about being a dictator and executing right wingers.
There is also a group of people who cannot take a joke but I mean the people who would scream/yell, shame you, criticize you or call you a Nazi just for having an opinion you don't agree with or so much as catching a whiff that you can't yet empathize with their problems. Threats and acts of violence.
You know it's the youth that's tipping the voter's scales by in large because they're not able to rationalize other people's emotional damage including those of wing influencers and left wing doomers and blow hards.
You agree? Do the work, or your the problem. Disagree? You're a Nazi. Wanna just live your life? Complicit Nazi.
There's a thing in criminology called labelling theory. It transcends the idea of criminality. Combine this with a strong thrust of financial hardship and you start sinking ships
This is actually pretty true. I think the reason lots of decent folks balk at this is because there are so many right wing traitor lunatics who say “you just don’t like opinions that are different from yours,” when in fact we’re talking about them saying things like, “Deport them all, I don’t care if it costs $1 trillion.” Then I’ll tell you that you deserve the death penalty.
Western countries: mass media and social media are all literally owned either by the pro-capitalist government or directly by capitalist companies, the latter being the wealthiest and most powerful institutions
This lemmitor: "ItS tHe FeMiNiStS fAuLt ThAt ThE Far RiGhT wOn"
You're putting words in my mouth when you know darn well it isn't the mass media or even the billionaires that are posting the influential content. They are complicit in the destruction they sew. I also said nothing about feminists. Check your own damage before you help make this worse
::: spoiler Needs text alternative. Images of text break much that text alternatives do not. Losses due to image of text lacking alternative such as link:
Contrary to age & humble appearance, text is an advanced technology that provides all these capabilities absent from images. ::: Is this referring to authoritarians on the left & right?
... what.
Edit: Wait, why are you spamming the same broken markdown? Is it seriously just because you think you're trolling people by pretending to be AI? That's... really dumb.
Horseshoe theory: far left & right look similar if far means authoritarian. Is OOP referring to that or a different kind of far?
If your client is broken, that's on you: it renders fine as
<details>&<summary>elements on standard web browsers with the standard theme. Follow the fediverse link in a web browser & weep at your broken client.The heck does that have to do with web connectivity?
is vague & no one's a mindreader. Use better software.
My choice of client not fixing your off-spec markdown has nothing to do with... whatever the heck is going on there. Could you try maybe rewriting your copypasta to be slightly more intelligible?
Maybe try something a little bit less "All your text is belong to us"? Because this just doesn't make sense. I genuinely do not understand what you are trying to say.
Nor does it address why you're spamming posts with it.
Accessibility, and no, your client is broken: it renders fine in the standard web browser indicating your client violates spec. 🤷
You can just go look up the spec, what you're posting doesn't adhere to that. That the web pages correct for it isn't the issue here, that's just someone correcting for user behavior with the parser, it's fairly common to do that. I don't actually care that much about it though, because mainly I'm trying to figure out how to batter and deep fry your word salad into something to do with "accessibility" and the irony is just painful.
Are you trying to say that... this should've been OCR'd automatically then linked to? That seems like serious overhead when we have such an awesome community of transcribers ( ❤️ u guys)