:agony-4horsemen:
What kinds of names do these people toss out when you ask them a question like “if ‘far left’ is distinct from ‘tankie’ then who would you consider the quintessential example of ‘far left’?” Ralph Nader? AOC? Jagmeet Singh? Samantha Bee?
I know it’s pointless to expect the answer to reflect a coherent ideology, but I’m still interested.
“Marxists are the real far left but not these authoritarian red fash marxists, theyre far right like Stalin was” - reddit probably
Oh yeah RadLibs love to talk about how the Soviet Union “perverted Marx’s vision”
Marxists openly debated about whether Russia could do a communism because it lacked an industrial economy so even orthodox Marxian analysis said it was a risky move and might fail.
What radlibs fail to account for in all their handwringing is that the USSR was in a state of siege for 70 fucking years from the West. They then put the first man and first woman in space. What they accomplished is a feat of incredible tenacity.
Radlibs can fuck off.
They don’t consider actual anarchists to be leftists if they get to know them. I got called a red fash and a tankie and even a Caleb Maupin on reddit even when i was still a committed AnCom, simply because these confused children couldn’t handle opinions like “it’s ok and often even necessary to use violence against fascists if you don’t want marginalized people to get murdered” or “Amerika killing two million people in Vietnam was kinda genocidal, actually.” You may note these aren’t even particularly radical positions, there’s completely middle of the road socdems who wholeheartedly and openly share these sentiments (at least in places were socdems can be considered middle of the road), but many redditors, even those who like to claim the far left label for themselves, are so insanely drenched in right wing bs that they cannot wrap their head around anybody being to the left of Bernie. Their entire mental process just derails when they’re confronted with any position outside the nazi hellscape that is US politics.
“I’m as far left as you can go, but I think China is state capitalism and they’re doing imperialism in the the South China sea. I don’t hate the Chinese people, just the CPC and the government.”
I don’t hate the Chinese people, just the CPC and the government
They’ll say this and then anytime they see anything even remotely Chinese they’ll screech “WEST TAIWAN CHINA NUMBA TWO MINUS 100 SOCIAL CREDIT” or something, even if it’s just a picture of like Chinese countryside
I love how pictures of the DPRK are called dystopian no matter what is in the picture.
-Brightly coloured houses? Dystopian.
-People fishing on a pier? Dystopian.
-People having fun at a water park? Dystopian.
-A store? Wouldnt you know it, it’s dystopian.
I don’t think anything will ever top Chinese children having fun in costumes? Dystopian..
Fucking man the mission badge is right there on the arm.
Liberals struggling to cope with the existence of communists, failing, and coming up with toddler-level drawings
leftism is when you sing kumbaya and become a hippie, and the more crystals you have the more lefter it is
tankie is when you don’t want to personally burn down a vietnamese village
"This was another very difficult question I had to ask my interview subjects, especially the leftists from Southeast Asia and Latin America. When we would get to discussing the old debates between peaceful and armed revolution; between hardline Marxism and democratic socialism, I would ask: “Who was right?”
In Guatemala, was it Árbenz or Che who had the right approach? Or in Indonesia, when Mao warned Aidit that the PKI should arm themselves, and they did not? In Chile, was it the young revolutionaries in the MIR who were right in those college debates, or the more disciplined, moderate Chilean Communist Party?
Most of the people I spoke with who were politically involved back then believed fervently in a nonviolent approach, in gradual, peaceful, democratic change. They often had no love for the systems set up by people like Mao. But they knew that their side had lost the debate, because so many of their friends were dead. They often admitted, without hesitation or pleasure, that the hardliners had been right. Aidit’s unarmed party didn’t survive. Allende’s democratic socialism was not allowed, regardless of the détente between the Soviets and Washington.
Looking at it this way, the major losers of the twentieth century were those who believed too sincerely in the existence of a liberal international order, those who trusted too much in democracy, or too much in what the United States said it supported, rather than what it really supported – what the rich countries said, rather than what they did.
That group was annihilated." - Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method
**EDIT:
On a personal note, the big breakthrough for me when it came to some of this shit was learning about Colonia Dignidad in Chile.
CW Sexual Violence, disgusting
Something about learning that the capitalists would literally rather have people like me anally raped by dogs than grant basic social-democratic reforms, really outlined the stakes for me.
I think this outlines a crucial issue in leftism is that given it’s desire for human dignity, empathy, and designing a far more equitable world it forgets that the forces of capital are anathema to that and by their existence will do any and all deeds no matter how vile to continually perpetuate themselves as the dominant societal force. The bourgeois do not have souls nor empathy and will employ individuals that if not enjoy the suffering they commit will at minimum wordlessly conduct a genocide for scraps handed to them by western capital. This means that, when facing capital and those it employs one must not think of them the same way a leftist would view debating a individual human being, another leftist, or individuals bringing up logical systemic critics. This is not debate club nor a local town committee, it is the face of capital and it has come to murder everything you love.
The hardliners had their states implode (SU eastern europe), gradually opened up to capitalism (China, Vietnam, Cuba) or are stagnante with usually very low living standards (North Korea also Cuba). The whole 20th century is the history of the failure of social democracy as well as Leninism.
Many L’s have been taken, and compromises made, but at least socialism still has a foothold in those places. It will take a few more decades to see how that will translate to a global effect. It does seems that as imperialist structures are slowly chipped away at and weakend, there may be a bit of room for democratic socialist movements (Bolivia?), but it surely will take more than just that to usher in a global socialist economy of any kind.
