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[dude with glasses in a communist t-shirt, arguing] I'm the only leftist here, your opinions are TRASH
[dude holding a theory book on smug, arguing] Read theory you losers, you're all WRONG
[dude in an anarchist hoodie, arguing] Nuh-uh, I'm the only leftist here, you're SHITLIBS
[the three dudes are now caught in a cartoon fight, glasses gone flying, punches everywhere, while a firing squad of nazis are targeting them with rifles]
[a confused nazi asks] Why… why are they still arguing?
A professor in college once said something that stayed with me. He said that "bad ideologies will always find ways to self implode".
This stuck with me because it's true. Good ideologies tend to be pragmatic and flexible, and so they're able to adapt and evolve. However, bad ideologies tend to be more rigid and focus mostly on theories and ideals, and therefore they're unable to adapt or evolve. Far left ideologies firmly fall in the latter category which is why they are where they are.
interesting u should say that. theres actually this political system that someone used complex systems analysis to create in an adaptable, yet stable way. very much like the evolutionary process.
if ur interested, its this series, particularly part 2:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvwoHdNGq9wVweGZ5bj5ZxFYulL_Xll_z
Now make a comic about the redfascists shooting anarchists, or the (I am assuming leftcom) shooting anarchists.
Why are you all trying to have a serious discussion under a comic strip?
Where else should we have a serious discussion?
In a comic strip club.
You can try to have a serious discussion where you want but don't expect to get anything much serious out of comic strips and memes.
People, people, people, we can kill each other AFTER the fascist are gone, please and thank you.
A lot of the far left types would rather have fascists rule and ruin everything just to spite their opposition rather than make compromises by working with them.
Chinese civil war be like:
The People's Front of Judea vs the Judean People's Front
SPLITTERS!
The only thing that matters is policy, I'll work with anyone as long as it's toward an egalitarian society with wealth redistribution.
Labels are nice for classifying, but not for executing. I don't care if you identify as leftist, or liberal, or progressive; I care if you support good policies.
The issue is that you're a minority in your camp. Broadly speaking, the left sees compromise as weakness, neutrality as cowardice, working with opposition towards a common cause as treachery. These are all symptoms of purity testing, and it's the reason why the left in so many places is completely paralyzed.
How do you know that isn't confirmation bias? We have no idea how many leftists there are that see purity testers and decide to not engage.
It's a similar to MAGA in a way. MAGA's biggest problem, as an ideology, is that it revolves around blind loyalty to a single idiot and therefore the entire movement starts and stops with his whims, no matter how contradictory, damaging, or nonsensical. You could say it's confirmation bias that I have this opinion, but I think given recent events, this opinion does have a basis of fact to it. The same applies to the left when it comes to purity testing. It's really not hard to see how prominent purity testing is in leftist discourse.
bLuE nO mAtTeR wHo unless it's an actual progressive 😮💨
The antidote to infighting in my experience is organizing in ideologically diverse spaces. I've organized with liberals and all types of different leftists. It has left me with the perspective that all these people are good people that just want better for the world. It's hard to get angry at them once you know them. Per usual the solution is to touch grass.
You're right, BUT it will never happen. Hearing different perspectives and understanding other viewpoints will not only broaden your horizons, but it will also deradicalize you... but the people who you are asking to do this are the radicals who are allergic to ideologically diversity. Purity testing is one of the hallmark defining traits of the modern left, and the further left you go the more extreme it gets. The far left will excommunicate anybody who doesn't agree with on just about everything. You simply can't have a serious movement with this type of mentality being as prominent as it is.
It's why ranked choice is the only sane voting approach. First past the post heavily favors right wing authoritarians.
Ranked-choice voting is a decent choice for uninominal elections.
Proportional elections are a popular alternative, and they are arguably fairer than even RCV because they are not susceptible to gerrymandering or votes otherwise being weighted by geography (i.e. your vote still matters just as much as anyone's if you live in Redneckville, Mississippi). They do have other downsides though.
Unfortunately here in Belgium we do proportional voting and the Prime Minister is nonetheless a far-right separatist in charge of a right-wing coalition so, uh, maybe FPTP is not the only thing that stands between the citizenry and a communist utopia lol
Hell yea I would love to vote for the people I actually want to vote for
The idea that all "leftists" should just work together is stupid.
Leninism, Anarcho-primitivism and Social democracy (for example) are not different approaches to "leftism" that ultimately want the same things; they are completely separate ideologies that naturally come into conflict. The people who follow them disagree with each other because they want and value completely different things. If they were to put aside their differences there would be nothing left.
That doesn't mean arguing on the internet about ideology is meaningful, or that there can't be common goals or enemies, just that you should give up the idea that all "leftists" are somehow natural allies, because it doesn't make any sense.
I believe you are missing the forest for the trees. First, I acknowledge your examples are separate ideologies.
That concept also applies to the right... social conservatives, right-libertarians, and neoliberal ideologies are equally separate. However, those practitioners have no qualms about banding together to suppress dissent (or until such time they are the only voices).
Where the left leaning practitioners are unable to do so, they will be forever tyrannized by the banded majority.
To put it more succinctly, the enemy of my enemy is my friend (when freedom is on the line).
Where the left leaning practitioners are unable to do so, they will be forever tyrannized by the banded majority.
You are assuming no ideological changes of opinion are possible or useful.
People that vote right wing aren't better off just because they voted that way. They're not tyrants oppressing the left, they're fellow citizens who get oppressed just as much. Their vote for the winning team doesn't win them anything.
The solution to right-wing banding isn't left wing banding, it's disbanding the right wing by showing its voters that they're being had. And that takes a cohesive and functional alternative.
Leftist "infighting" is healthy. It's a process of discovering these alternatives, and it regularly churns out consensus issues such as consent-based queer rights, veganism, not funding genocide, and how the US government is now fascist.
Over time these issues get normalized through leftist action until liberal centrists rewrite the histories as if they are responsible for producing them through liberal democracy.
To put it more succinctly, the enemy of my enemy is my friend (when freedom is on the line).
Daily reminder that the DNC does not acknowledge that the US government is now fascist. Uniting under a common front doesn't mean we fight fascism together, it means we canvas for votes until we're black bagged one by one.
Ultimately it is important to vote in every election for a candidate that has a good chance of actually getting in to represent you, but that is just one day every year or two. Everything else should be dedicated to finding and testing these alternatives.
K.
I feel like the nazis should be congratulating themselves on sowing discord, distracting those that could resist with bullshit
The infighting amongst the left is entirely self inflected
This thread keeps popping up and it just clicked and I had to ask:
Is the guy in the red shirt supposed to be Vaush?
It's the factory preset look for these pseudo-tankies that show up in my local activism group every now and then.
Always the big earring, unkempt beard, this specific shape of glasses, and the cheap aliexpress t-shirt with a political message on it.
Not my fault Vaush stole the look!
pseudo-tankies
I'm not even sure whether this is supposed to be an insult anymore. Is a "tankie" better or worse than a "fake tankie"?
In a thread complaining about leftist infighting, there's a special irony in liberals singing out a leftist who is simultaneously too far left and not far left enough.
It's a specific type of leftist we have in my country, french communists are a… special breed, let's say.
In the 1980s our communist party bulldozed a migrant worker dormitory because they hated migrants that much. Red MAGA or something. The party recovered from that era, but french communists are still chauvinistic, xenophobic, and strangely not that much into anti-imperialism (which is meant to be the redeeming quality of tankies). They do however share with tankies the traits of applying "class first" logic to a lot of conversations, which makes them deathly allergic to intersectionality, and being terminally online and way into infighting. Thus they usually end up booted from actual activist groups, since they tend to hold us back and prevent us from actually getting shit done in the streets.
Hence me calling them pseudo-tankies because it's hard to label them. We just call them tankies here: they're members of a party that supported the crushing of the hungarian uprising with soviet tanks, and is ambiguous about tienanmen (no denying it happened but very alt-history about it), so pro-tanks they are.
I have an easier time getting along with the average online american tankie than with our local communist party's members.
chauvinistic, xenophobic, and strangely not that much into anti-imperialism
Sounds like Nazbol to me.
The party recovered from that era, but french communists are still chauvinistic, xenophobic, and strangely not that much into anti-imperialism
Yeah, that's been a problem in the US as well, under "Patriotic Communism". But it's also largely artificial - a product of party decay to the point that fascists can sock puppet the leftist labels without actually pursuing leftist policy.
Hence me calling them pseudo-tankies because it’s hard to label them.
One problem that really does plague leftist organizing is state espionage. It has become almost a running joke that half your local DSA meeting is going to be NYPD and FBI informants fighting for front row seats.
But that's also more a legacy of Nixon/Reagan Era COINTELPRO, with the modern state security forces scrambling to invent incidents to thwart from whole cloth.
What I see labeled "Tankie" in the modern moment is anyone championing AES. For some reason, the greatest betrayal of any kind of revolution is... winning? So every socialist politician from Fidel Castro to Hugo Soto-Martínez is doing authoritarian stateism by being inside the halls of power, rather than outside waving a paper placard.
I have an easier time getting along with the average online american tankie than with our local communist party’s members
That's a shame.
