No please don't post this stuff, the leninists are close to the nazis and deserve criticism!
A lot of this tangles with moral purism as well. Simplified there are two groups of people: one accepts harm reduction (always chooses the Lesser Evil even though it is evil) and sees the actual real world consequences as the most important, and the other doesn't accept harm reduction and thinks keeping personal moral integrity is more important than anything else (refuses to choose even if that means the Greater Evil wins, as long as their own morals stay pure).
You can see this divide in many places, easy ones to spot online are vegans (both in-group and out-group fighting) and in lemmy for example the usaian debate between "voted against trump because the least amount of genocide" vs. "didn't vote to oppose Trump, because both candidates support genocide"
My question is, how did a peasant/uneducated workers movement become a part of intellectual elitism? Like, you shouldn't have to read a bunch of theory to be any kinds of leftist...
The right seems to get this. What's wrong with the left?
The issue is that historically the authoritarian leftists (marxist-leninist groups) turn on every other leftist group the minute they gain power, rounding up anarchists or regular Marxists to either imprison or execute them.
It has happened very consistently, such as during the Russian Revolution, Chinese Revolution, Spanish Civil War, etc. Without that historical context it makes it seem like the infighting is over pointless squabbles, when in actuality it's Anarchists and Marxists trying to prevent people from being tricked into supporting an ideology that would result in yet another lethal purge and dictatorship were they to gain traction and political power.
Which, ya know, I think is a pretty reasonable concern.
Exactly. Tankies always assume left unity to mean everyone rolls over and submit to their authoritarianism. They are blocking left unity by betraying the other leftist groups as soon as they get power. Critical support for antifascism, but other than that I don't want tankies near me
Authoritarian communists are why "tankie" is still a valid insult.
Forgive me if I am mistaken, but wasn't the betrayal, so to speak, of anarchists in China early during the united front against Japan? The communists weren't exactly the powerbrokers yet. I don't know a great deal about anarchism in China, so there could easily be another phase when the KMT and CPC were at war that anarchists were burned that I don't know about.
The CCP was hostile to Anarchists before 1949, but there is limited information on that period. Most Anarchists fled China when Mao took power, and the CCP later cracked down on anarchist-like egalitarian communes that began to form.
There was also a split within Maoism in the 60's that pointed out the revolution had just created a new elite bureaucratic class, and called for China to be remodeled on the Paris Commune. That group was violently suppressed by the state with the charge of 'Anarchism'.
Aka tankies
There is some validity to this in debates, but when things start getting bad, the lefties all do seem to work together on what steps are taken. That does give me some level of optimism for change in the now, even if the future will have a divide again, I think many of us can agree that the future left-to-left divide is better than the current divide. For smaller examples, anarchists and Marxist-leninists would both be against rising fascism, and often attend similar protests. For larger examples, the anarchist and communist factions of Spain during the 1930s bonded together to fight Franco's nationalist faction. Now in all fairness, eventually the ML faction usurped the anarchists, but I'm not even gonna pretend to be smart enough to know if that's just the Soviet's influence, or communist governments in general.
Marxist-Leninism by its very nature will attempt to betray all other non-authoritarian friendly factions at some point, as the ideology at its core calls for centralized control under a 'vanguard', which inherently attracts people seeking dictatorial power.
The Spanish Marxist-leninist faction not only betrayed the Anarchists, but also an anti-stalinist Marxist faction, the POUM, as allowing them to remain would've made their consolidation of power more difficult. Instead, they called the POUM 'secret fascists' that were collaborating with the enemy, and laid the same claim on the Anarchists, to justify the purge.
Now do the same comic but replace the swastica with a hammer and sickle lol
Behold a man and a few dozen upvoters missing the fucking point yet again.
Why don't you explain it to us then.
I'll second this. I've seen people touting marxism-leninism as the gold standard enough that I feel I'm missing something. I wanna learn, I have an open mind, but every time I've seen a discussion about it, Every. Dang. Comment. always throws disrespect to any question or criticisim. Like dude I actually want to listen, but please don't disrespect me for not knowing.
It's leftist infighting. It's dismissing the idea of working with Marxist comrades against capitalism because you are convinced that they will betray you and roll out the tanks like it's the 1920s.
Essentially, you refuse to accept anyone who even slightly praises China or the Soviets as allies in the fight against capital, which in practice means you lose.
I agree that dictatorship is bad, and you should be vigilant against it. However, you're living in it. What do you have to lose?
We have the potential future worker control to lose!! obviously
The country I live in does not routinely do summary executions of leftists the way fascists and Bolsheviks or Maoists did. So to me they are similar adversaries in that neither is in power and they would both be extremely dangerous if they were. Furthermore, I think these groups who support dictatorships have strayed so far from leftist values that it's not clear to me they're still members of the ideology at all. The same way fascists tried to convince everyone they were simply an evolution of socialism. But that doesn't make it true, and Stalin claiming the mantle of leftism doesn't make him a leftist. Not even if he was one in his youth.
That's not to say I will never work with authoritarians if the situation requires it. But I do not consider them allies unless and until they are willing to acknowledge the crimes of the people they idolize. Until such time it is completely reasonable to believe they would repeat the same actions all over again if they had the chance.
In the United States there are people who genuinely believe NATO is a leftist organization. (There are NATO countries that legalized gay marriage, unlike non-NATO countries. That is the kind of actual rationale, I am not kidding.)
We also have folks that truly believe socialism is fascism. (Citing the authoritarianism of Stalin.)
Which means we got people who are NATOist anti-communists who fully believe they are leftist anti-fa.
We have been wholly robbed of the means of coherent discourse that it is barely even infighting. It's just plain fighting.
Shitlib. I'm the only real communist. I bet you don't even read theory.
I will portray you as a crying soyjack on a political compass opposite of me, depicted as the chad. Literal praxis.
Why does the tankie there look like Vaush? He's still not one, he just has L opinions on certain stuff (e.g. state run age verification system).
There isn't a single person in that image that should ever be in charge of anything. Just... fucking... awful... Ranging from edgy keyboard warriors to legitimately life-threatening dictatorship enthusiasts
Maybe the left right dichotomy is false and creates a presumption of two camps that doesn’t align with reality.
One of the two camps will be given power, so.
Yes and no?
You don’t understand if I create a party that’s never existed and get a lot of people who historically don’t vote to vote for it, it can be as big as a party as the two main ones.
Suggesting anything different means you love corporations, billionaires and genocide.
Touché
really struggling to understand wtf this means??
if I create a party that’s never existed and get a lot of people who historically don’t vote to vote for it, it can be as big as a party as the two main ones.
so IF you create a party thats never existed (fairly easy), and IF you get non voters to vote for it (basically fucking impossible without corporations, billionaires and genocide), then it could be another major party?
is this what you meant? are you suggesting it is actually a simple process anyone can do because freedom or something?? go do it! go make the next major party, no one else has realised how simple it is for the last how many decades?
Suggesting anything different means you love corporations, billionaires and genocide
now because i think the systematic pressures of western imperial government are nearly impregnable to crack without mass movement of the people, you think i support genocide??
seriously, ive been struggling to understand the POV of this comment for about 10 minutes and it just seems like a mess of proto-ideology.
or is it just bullshit maggotty cum you spewed from your ass and i shouldn't think about garbage?
The problem I have with this argument is that some people, that call themselves leftist aren't actually. They are just pro red-facism. And even if we just went along with them, they would eventually find a way to backstab us. Lennin killed all the anarchists.
I am really against working with these people, because you can't trust them to have basic principles. I am not saying, that we should actively fight them, as long as they are useful in fighting facism. But we should still critique them actively and not let them invade genuinely leftist spaces. Not only because they are not to be trusted, but also because they could scare of other reasonable people and / or make them think that leftism is when you like the Soviet Union.
There's a MASSIVE difference between average Marxists, anarchists, and people who praise literal red fascists like Stalin.
This smuggie was brought to you by @Bad@jlai.lu, creator of !thebadwebsite@lemmy.world / thebad.website
Most of the infighting I see are between libertarian and authoritarian leftists. The difference between a left authoritarian and MAGAts is only a matter of degrees really.
Just said the same thing to this dude.
Horse shoe theory.
Ahh, that works a lot better!
I mean you have people who are pro-police and pro-military yet justify owning guns so they can overthrow the government.
The trick is to base your belief system on hating things you don’t like. That way you can ignore the completely contradictory tenets of the things you’re apparently fighting for.
Missing the faux-leftist righty maga hidden in anonymity, the Israeli bot, the China bot, and Russian bot stoking the majority of the flames to make genuine consensus unpalatable.
Don't forget the American bot cosplaying as all three and doing its best to make all of them look as bad as possible.
Nothing has ever made more sense in the history of fiction than Andor's "fuck this shit, I'm done."
Leftists aren’t infighting it’s the got-danged lie-burls!
They keep voting!
/s
Usually it's just some white supremacists/greedy hedonists in denial. Most "infighting" would die if they were just honest but they lie to everyone, themselves included ofc, so they can avoid the "evil/uncaring cunt" label.
They used up all of their critical thinking.
Because they're good enough to tolerate each other's opinions
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