However I find myself being disagreed with quite often, mostly for not advocating or cheering violence, “by any means possible” change, or revolutionary tactics. It would seem that I’m not viewed as authentically holding my view unless I advocate extreme, violent, or radical action to accomplish it.
Those seem like two different things to me.
Edit: TO COMMUNISTS, ANARCHISTS, OR ANYONE ELSE CALLING FOR THE OVERTHROW OF SOCIETY
THIS OBVIOUSLY ISN’T MEANT FOR YOU.
Hey OP. Please look up the “Stonewall riots”.
Directly fighting against the forces that are making & enforcing laws that can & will do harm is the right thing to do. If the people in power / enforcing unfair practices see they are unopposed, they will become stronger in their positions. Complacency allows imbalance.
Will I break windows for Gaza? No. I will not. Who will that help? Who am I fighting? That kind of thing is nonsense.
Will I fight police that are attacking students for protesting? YES. YES I WILL. Because if you fight back, they will understand that you will not allow yourself to be walked all over by unjust enforcement. They will think twice about attacking students next time, because they know people are willing to fight back. If they do not encounter opposition, they know they are safe to do whatever they want.
In short: once a bully realizes that you will hit back, they are less inclined to bully you. Even more so if you are backed up by more people who also hate the bully.
EDIT: To be fair, I don’t hope for “collapse”. However, I do understand why people do. The corrupt system goes so deep that collapse may be the only way to dismantle it, as it is beyond any kind of reform.
Do I want collapse? No. But, unfortunately, it may be necessary. The system cannot be fixed without being dismantled, and I’m not optimistic that we will experience a miracle.
Good sane take, to my understanding
This is everyone’s take here.
I think it’s all about how it’s said. The simpler, the better. Phrasing is important, too.
Labels don’t matter. Stop worrying about whether people think you are left or right wing. Your beliefs are yours and will continue to evolve and thats all that matters.
Sincerely, A pro revolutionary tactics man.
Change never comes without a fight. In the shadows, blood is spilled, and it will continue to flow. Today, it’s not yours, but tomorrow it might be. Some saw the suffering of others and chose to sacrifice, so others wouldn’t have to. At least be thankful for their sacrifice.
What “change” are we taking about here?
Slavery, Decolonization, worker rights, women rights, black people rights, “Put any word here” rights,etc…
Many of those have been accomplished by protests, that led to changes in law, that led to changes in society. Some by war, yes.
None by revolution, that I’m aware of. None by anarchy, that I’m aware of. In most cases revolution seems to throw things the other way, back into slavery, back into repression.
This is ahistorical, really. Revolution has historically happened in progressive movements beyond brutal previous conditions, whether it be the Haitian Slave Revolt, the French overthrow of the Monarchy, the Russian overthrow of the brutal Tsarist regime, the Cuban revolt against slavery and fascism, and more.
I think you would do well for yourself by studying history of revolutionary movements.
So you’re telling me none of those lead to more brutal oppression than before?
Some have, yes, but of the ones I listed, absolutely not.
Revolution isn’t an action, it’s a consequence of failing and unsustainable conditions. You don’t do a Revolution, it happens and you can participate in it.
I think you are vastly underestimating the horrors of most pre-revolutionary societies, and probably also overestimating what you describe as oppression in post-revoltionary governments.
On the first point, here’s an excerpt from a JFK speech where he describes pre-revolution Cuba:
The third, and perhaps most disastrous of our failures, was the decision to give stature and support to one of the most bloody and repressive dictatorships in the long history of Latin American repression. Fulgencio Batista murdered 20,000 Cubans in seven years - a greater proportion of the Cuban population than the proportion of Americans who died in both World Wars, and he turned Democratic Cuba into a complete police state - destroying every individual liberty.
And JFK was no friend of Castro; he greenlit the Bay of Pigs invasion! Revolutions are born from the most brutal forms of exploitation and violence. Not even the wildest anticommunist propaganda about post-revolution Cuba comes close to the reality of what the revolution replaced.
Ye think slavery, worker rights, and decolonization was done merely by protests and by the mere will of liberalism?
This is historically completely false. I challenge you to find a single historical case where a ruling class has given up their power and wealth without violence or the threat of violence.
Meanwhile I recommend you read the links we’ve given you.
Question: do you consider yourself a liberal?
Yes?
Liberals have never been leftists.
This isn’t really a new thing. You can read about leftists a hundred years ago denouncing liberalism.
I mean, academically speaking you’re totally right, but because Americans discuss politics in extremely simplistic terms a lot of people use the word “liberal” when they mean progressive or socialist or just anything to the left of center, so it would probably be helpful to define these terms a bit
No socialist uses “liberal” when they mean socialist. Isn’t that interesting?
Yeah, say what you will about free market acolytes, they know how to jump on to a successful brand
In the United States, in the general public (not talking academia here) both ‘liberal’ and ‘leftist’ currently mean ‘not conservative’. There’s really not much more to it than that. Before reading Lemmy comments about it, I wouldn’t have been able to name a distinction between the two terms.
Yes, but OP is deliberately asking Leftists on a platform built and maintained by Communists, not the general American public.
OP may be American and genuinely not know what answering yes to “do you consider yourself a liberal?” implies to said communists. I still don’t have a firm grasp on it myself.
What don’t you understand? Liberalism is a Capitalist ideology, ergo it is right wing. Socialists, Anarchists, Communists, etc. would be left wing.
Yeah, wildly different language. Here pretty much anything short of trying to put women back in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant, with the minorities out in the cotton fields, is left wing. Left-right is much more about social policy than economic, although the conservatives claim to want smaller government and lower taxes. (While building a giant military, etc.)
So ‘Liberal’ means ‘left wing’ here, and those other terms don’t even have a collective word that comes to mind besides stuff like ‘extremist’. (Also most of us Americans probably conflate socialism and communism anyway)
Edit: TO COMMUNISTS, ANARCHISTS, OR ANYONE ELSE CALLING FOR THE OVERTHROW OF SOCIETY
THIS OBVIOUSLY ISN’T MEANT FOR YOU.
So… Why are you asking questions about what ‘left’ means if you don’t want answers from the left???
Here’s an excellent overview on why pacifism doesn’t work, and has never worked.
Red Phoenix - Pacifism - How to do the enemy’s job for them. Youtube Audiobook
No way.
Anyone who calls for collapse or revolution is playing out a survivor fantasy where they hope they (and their ideology) will come out on top.
Eventually you’ll realise that voting for the least bad option just makes things worse and never better, and you’ll have to deal with the fact that you can get what you want through the system.
Yes and no. The answer isn’t straightforward, so let’s unpack it. Primarily, the qualifier “validly” needs investigation.
What is “validity” when it comes to political positions? Is validity a measure of correctness? Is validity a measure of intention?
If validity is a measure of correctness, then yes, you must be revolutionary if you are a Marxist or Anarchist, the two dominant trains of Leftist thought. Fringe positions like Social Reformists exist, though they have never been successful in achieving anything that can be considered long term leftward progress.
If validity is a measure of intention, then no. Not every progressive-minded person has done thorough research into leftist history, theory, and practice. Progressives can have an idea of what end result they want, without yet putting in the work to understand how to get there.
In the body of your text, there are loaded statements. To be Revolutionary isn’t to “celebrate violence,” or believe “by any means necessary.” Revolutionaries do not oppose Reformism, but believe it a lost cause. For a US-centric example, Reformism would be possible if PSL, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, could win elections consistently, but they cannot because of the two-party duopoly, created by Capitalist investment.
By and large, whether someone is a Revolutionary or Reformist doesn’t come down to purity, but knowledge and positions.
I should have just stuck with Democrat, and gotten rid of the whole idea of leftist and liberal.
You can, if you want. If you generally agree with the DNC, labeling yourself a Democrat is a useful label to quickly get your views across. You wouldn’t be a Leftist, since the goals and views of the DNC are a maintaining of the Capitalist status quo, but you would be a Liberal, if you want a non-party label to use instead.
I do think familiarizing yourself with Leftist theory would help you make sense of where Leftists are coming from.
Becoming familiar with other ideas is beneficial. There is nothing wrong with being a Democrat, Social Democrat or Libertarian. Real people hold these political ideas. My transition over years was Democrat since I opposed hawkish Republican imperialism, but I rejected corporate power, so Social Democrat, but I rejected hierarchical power, so Anarchist. Through reading I know Pacifism meshes with any of these ideas. I have never been a Pacifist, but I applaud anyone that takes the time to explore politics even if we do not agree.
Being able to have conversations with people around you is important. Reading theory from other politics helps. Most people around me consider themselves conservative. They say talking points like “I’m for small government”. Having read Libertarian texts like Nozick’s “Anarchy, State and Utopia”, I can discuss the minimal state as a Libertarian idea. I can then transition to “Nozick’s minimal state is not small enough”. In my area this approach opens conversation more than banging a drum about being a Democrat, Leftist, Communist or Anarchist.
Someone on here told me earlier I wasn’t left enough when I posted a Karl Marx quote lol
Oof. That’s a tough audience.
I liked the (long) piece over here: https://slrpnk.net/post/11395506
tldr;
You can’t blow up a social relationship. The total collapse of this society would provide no guarantee about what replaced it. Unless a majority of people had the ideas and organization sufficient for the creation of an alternative society, we would see the old world reassert itself because it is what people would be used to, what they believed in, what existed unchallenged in their own personalities.
Proponents of terrorism and guerrilla-ism are to be opposed because their actions are vanguardist and authoritarian, because their ideas, to the extent that they are substantial, are wrong or unrelated to the results of their actions (especially when they call themselves libertarians or anarchists), because their killing cannot be justified, and finally because their actions produce either repression with nothing in return or an authoritarian regime.
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Lemmy has this weird point of view, if you aren’t extreme left then you are not left at all. I’ve seen people make comments like "just be honest you aren’t a liberal ".
They want to move the bar so they don’t have to claim they are extremist. I wouldn’t worry about it.
Lemmy has this weird point of view, if you aren’t extreme left then you are not left at all. I’ve seen people make comments like "just be honest you aren’t a liberal ".
Generally, the non-Marxists and non-Anarchists on Lemmy are absolutely liberals.
They want to move the bar so they don’t have to claim they are extremist. I wouldn’t worry about it.
I don’t think Leftists here care about being labeled an extremist or not, the point is to pursuade more people to become Marxists or Anarchists by actually talking about their views openly.
If wanting equality for all people is extremist, then I’m an extremist.
Nothing extremist about wanting equality
According to your original comment, it is. Simply wanting results to fall out of the sky isn’t support, ie if someone says they want everyone to be a billionaire it isn’t genuine support.
Thinking an idea is good, but achieving it is bad, isn’t support.
Interesting take. Not sure how you got there though.
How do you achieve equality for all people?
Still not sure how asking for equality makes one extremist
How do you achieve equality?
Question: do you consider yourself a liberal?
Got this from queermunist earlier. Didn’t understand why the question was asked. I answered “Yes” though it seemed like a gotcha, but I don’t know what was going on there. I used the words I wanted to use.
So, this is a very complex topic I don’t have the time to give the treatment it deserves, but to try to give a very summarized historical viewpoint on it -
Liberalism was a set of ideas that cohered around the 18th century as a reaction to monarchism that emphasized universal civil rights and free markets (there were a ton of weird things going on with noble privileges and state monopolies issued by royal administrations and mercantile economics this was a response to)
Socialism was a set of ideas that cohered around the 19th century as a reaction to liberalism (and the whole industrial revolution) that said universal civil rights didn’t go far enough and we needed to establish universal economic rights. Some socialists think the only way to achieve these things is by overthrowing or limiting the power of governments and ripping up contracts between private parties, which liberals tend not to like.
Progressivism was (sort of, I’m being very reductive here) an attempted synthesis of these traditions that cohered around the early 20th century, and (essentially) argued “ok, free markets but restricted by regulations (e.g. you can’t sell snake oil, you can’t condition the sale of property on the purchaser being a specific race), and open elections for whoever the voters want but with restrictions on the kinda of laws that can be passed” (e.g. no poll taxes).
Like I said, I’m simplifying a lot here and I’d encourage reading Wikipedia pages and other sources on all of these things (like, I’m eliding a whole very dark history progressives have where their attempts to perfect society had them advocating for eugenics and segregation early on because there was academic support for those ideas at the time, and there’s a lot more to be said on how a lot of the first anti-racist voices were socialist ones and why it took progressives and liberals time to get on the right side of that issue, and how fights for colonial independence tended to be led by socialists and against liberals), but the fact that liberals progressives and socialists are all ostensibly “on the left” is a big cause of the infighting we see.
I already dropped one wall of text on this post, but something you might find interesting - there was a history podcast called Revolutions that looked at revolutionary periods in history, when it wrapped up the host did a whole series of appendix episodes on different recurring themes he saw in the different periods he looked at, and in one of those he talked about how the word “radical” can be hard to define because throughout history there were people who had radical goals they wanted to achieve through moderate means and people who had moderate goals they wanted to achieve through radical means and the inverse of both of those
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=0nukt_9HmLE&t=2m21s
So yeah, I think it’s helpful to separate out how big a transformation in society you want to see from how far you’re willing to go to get them
If you’re talking about Lemmy specifically, remember this is a left-wing echo chamber, so of course you’ll be shunned if you’re not willing to man the guillotine.
In the real world people understand that change is progressive and requires compromise to avoid the violence of the extremes. I’d suggest touch some grass and put some distance between you and keyboard-leftists that speak like they are playing a video game.
Volunteer in your community, it’s a great way to meet people who are more than Internet posers.
In the real world people understand that change is progressive and requires compromise to avoid the violence of the extremes. I’d suggest touch some grass and put some distance between you and keyboard-leftists that speak like they are playing a video game.
Genuinely, when has major change happened without violence, or the threat of violence? Slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, various anti-fascist and anti-monarchist revolutions, all have happened with either violence or resulted in concessions to avoid violence.
