this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2024
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I've been seeing a worrying number of these people on Lemmy lately, sharing enlightened takes including but not limited to "voting for Biden is tantamount to fascism" and "the concept of an assigned gender, or even an assigned name, at birth is transphobic" and none of them seem to be interested in reading more than the first sentence of any of my comments before writing a reply.

More often than not they reply with a concern I addressed in the comment they're replying to, without any explanation of why my argument was invalid. Some of them cannot even state their own position, instead simply repeatedly calling mine oppressive in some way.

It occurred to me just now that these interactions reminded me of nothing so much as an evangelical Christian I got into an argument with on Matrix a while ago, in which I met him 95% of the way, conceded that God might well be real and that being trans was sinful and tried to convince him not to tell that to every trans person he passed, and failed. I am 100% convinced he was trolling -- in retrospect I'm pretty sure I could've built a municipal transport system by letting people ride on top of his goalposts (that's what I get for picking a fight with a Christian at 2AM) -- and the only reason I'm not convinced these leftists on Lemmy are trolls is the sheer fucking number of them.

I made this post and what felt like half the responses fell into this category. Am I going insane?

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[–] Silverseren@kbin.social 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Generally true, yes. In most cases, the leftists using that sort of terminology are tankies, meaning they are explicitly pro-authoritarian. They just want the dictators to be communists (or claimed communists) rather than capitalists (despite said dictatorial communism usually being about seizing all the money for themselves anyways and often results in full on capitalism regardless, China is a great example).

So you don't even need the word replacement thought experiment. Tankies are openly authoritarian.

[–] givesomefucks@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

People really don't want to acknowledge that politics is more than one axis.

Like communism is the opposite of capitalism, not democracy. The opposite of democracy is a dictatorship.

And when a dictator calls their government Communist, it's pretty much a guarantee it's not even a communist economy anymore than when North Korea or Russia claim to be democracies.

[–] Drivebyhaiku@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Very true. Reading a lot of Socialist lit has made me very critical about the regular framework I see regularly posited as Socialism being a direct opposite of capitalism and being some kind of inevitable slippery slope toward Communism.

Like as a system it is very distinct from Communist ideologically speaking and represents a sliding scale of public ownership versus private ownership but never fully occludes private ownership, currency or the very basics of capitalism systemically and any one person's veiw of where that balance should rest is itself an end point and fully formed political belief. You can believe a mix of liberal / capitalist and socialist things that are not strictly contradictory. Capitalism is a sliding scale we are just currently dealing with it's deep unstable and predatory end. Admitting some capitalism is okay and can be made more ethical doesn't disqualify you from the left nor does it nessisarily make you "centrist". It also doesn't make you automatically a fan of everything capitalist or the status quo.

The number of "That's not Socialism! Socialism means only (posit one potential facet out of the massive cloud of policies/stances of the ideology) or " That is only the secret aim of Communists to tip the teeter-totter towards our/their goals!" is a very paternalistic view. Socialism is DEEP and diverse. There's not a central author or even a neat handful of authors one can point to. The more you read the more internal variations you find.

People generally seem to just want an enemy to point and hiss at, they don't want to look at things as a potential series of sliding scales or people of mixed ideological stances as valid in their own right.

[–] areyouevenreal@lemm.ee 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Socialism requires that the workers own the means of production. So no it's not on a sliding scale with capitalism. Those are called hybrid economies and are a concept in their own right. In fact basically all modern economies are hybrid economies.

Socialism does include many systems, but none of them are capitalist, they are mutually exclusive. They can have markets, currency, and other things, or they might not. Communism is just a subcategory of socialist society. The reason people think socialism leads to communism is because of the marxists who use one as a platform to achieve the other.

[–] Drivebyhaiku@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Socialism requires no such thing - most of the rhetoric which treats worker owned production as the only definition of Socialism stems from Marxist frameworks and leaves any writing done on the subject since which has fleshed out the philosophic roots untouched. There has been a lot of writing on the subject in the 200 years since . Ownership of the means of production is by no means the only form of public or social property.

Dismissing mixed and hybrid economic theory as "not Socialist enough" is more or less what I am talking about with the nature of false dichotomies. So often socialists are dismissed on this platform directly because they don't buy into every binary maxim of all Socialism through the lens of Communist philosophy. Socialism works in mixed systems because it is kind of the political overlap of a lot of things. Where it can and does integrate into "hybrid" economies because it is not fully "anti capitalist". It is it's own sphere of political thought and buying in to one specific "hybrid" branch still makes one socialist. While Socialism certainly isn't capitalist in itself and does curtail capitalism somewhat by existing in the same space it's no more "anti" than two roomates sharing an apartment and divvying up responsibilities and resources mutually would be considered "anti-roommate".

I am quite frankly tired of Marxists or even other Socialists trying to impose their own overly narrow definition to what amounts to a range of different socialism factions or treating hybrid socialist ideologies like liberal socialism or ethical socialism like they aren't socialism.

Communism is also not strictly socialism. The two ideologies may be related but the definition of Communism leaves no real space for hybrid systems hence the ideological distain for "hybrids" ane why calling Communism "just a subsection" of Socialism is misguided. Marx may have coined and popularized the term but early writers who adopted the label socialist very quickly became something unique and the term essentially became the safe space of at least partial criticism of Marxist/Leninist revolutionary anti-capitalist ideology. The difference between the two that eventually emerged as literally one having a tolerance for mixed systems and one not. Only one of them is strictly anti-capitalist.

[–] areyouevenreal@lemm.ee 1 points 2 years ago (16 children)

Anarchists are anti-capitalist and have little to do with Marx.

Why would you want any form of a destructive and exploitative system like capitalism to remain? I think you just aren't happy people are calling out your pro-capitalist and reformist bullshit.

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[–] SolNine@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago (14 children)

I have a friend who has come to reflect this exact behavior to an extraordinary degree of accuracy.

It's interesting because the near puritanical nature of their responses to nearly anything has become more extreme than even the most devoutly religions individuals. Obviously the focus of their evangelizing is very different, but it has become difficult to even have a conversation.

I'll give you an example: I saw a new game called Pal World, which looked absurd, mentioned and was instantly met with the fact that the game was unacceptable because it supports forced labor.

Additionally, there seems to be an immense amount of hypocrisy in regards to what is good and what is bad, largely driven by what best I can refer to as their "leftist Zeitgeist." As bad as I can tell now, according to them, I am a liberal, and apparently liberals are bad, and the only true salvation is being a leftist?

Of course, I have a much more varied and complex set of moral and political values that likely don't fall under a singular label... But what do I know about anything.

[–] Cqrd@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

This is kind of like saying Helldivers 2 is bad because it's about forcefully spreading "democracy" (pretty obviously it means capitalism) to other planets.

Yeah, it is, but it's hugely satirical and makes blatant political statements through satire.

Pal World isn't that deep, I don't think there's much depth to their forced labor system other than parodying Pokémon and slightly highlighting how the Pokémon universe is full of forced labor and isn't that kind of funny

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[–] Ledivin@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (6 children)

Outside of the word "capitalist," literally nothing presented in the top half of the image is even political, let alone authoritarian 🙄 it kinda seems like you're just using popular negative words against things you dislike.

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[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (29 children)

Marxism and Christianity only share the fact that they contain frameworks for analyzing material reality(Marxism through Materialism and Christianity through representing reality as though it is divine, and thus explainable via the divine), and this post seems to not be willing to honestly engage with Marxism as a concept.

  1. Marxists do not oppose incremental change. Marxists believe that minor concessions under Capitalism are insufficient to actually fix the underlying problems, and this point of view is built on a thorough understanding of the Marxist critique of Capitalism.

  2. Marxists do not oppose reform, they just believe it is impossible to do successfully without sliding backward, because the state is built in a manner that supports Capitalism and resists change.

  3. Marxism is an economic critique of Capitalism, a philosophical framework, and a call to action. It is a complete set of tools to look at the world, analyze it, and how to fix it. In this manner, it can be superficially compared to Christianity, but only on the surface.

That's really it.

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