It's a joke, but "leftist" is such a wide term that it encompasses groups which don't really want to do much with each other, such as anarchists, bernie-bros, and ~red fash~ tankies marxist-leninists. Anarchists tend to not hate anarchists for example.
No I don't disagree with you! But you are still somewhat wrong! Hey social traitor, I'm splitting and creating my own leftist memes! These will be actual trotskyist memes, unlike your bourgeoisie-tainted memes!
oh fuck, this gif just made me realise now, after decades of knowing this movie, that they mistranslated this line in the Hungarian dub as "spitters" 🤦♂️ "Splitters" makes so much more sense.
Seriously though, I don't know how anarchists can look at the consequences of the Perestroika, Glasnost and eventual dissolution of the Eastern Block, the millions of lives lost to unemployment, alcoholism, drugs and suicide, and still use the word "tankie" (coined to degrade the communists in support of the intervention of the USSR in Hungary when it went down that very path).
It's precisely because we saw the path of the USSR. Because we can see that ML regimes always leads to oppression and capitalism. They're just another way to convert poor agrarian/feudalist societies to capitalism and have no socialist potential. Terrible system.
Because we can see that ML regimes always leads to oppression and capitalism
Marxism-Leninism saved Eastern Europe from Nazism, the level of genocide we would have seen in Eastern Europe if it hadn't been for the existence of the USSR is unimaginable. Anarchists, on the other hand, have been proven absolutely incapable of stopping fascism, as was the case of the Spanish Second Republic, with some Anarchist unions such as the CNT numbering ONE MILLION members, and refusing to take action against the growth of fascism because "taking action would make us as bad as them :(". The consequence were 40 years of fascist dictatorship. At least AES countries, flawed as they were, can claim to bring industrialization, wealth redistribution, meaningful fight against fascism, a stop to unequal exchange, solid and moral geopolitical positions and support for emancipatory movements elsewhere in the world. Anarchism doesn't have a single serious historical claim other than Rojava and Zapatistas, two extremely small movements without much potential for growth, with one of them directly supporting the regional interests of US imperialism.
You're buying the framework of the ruling class of your country, ask yourself why you reach the same conclusions about socialism than libs
Mhm, so we agree that "AES" is just capitalism yes? Sorry but I'm a socialist. I'm not planning to do a revolution just to get capitalism again, but painted red. Especially when it's just more oppressive and homophobic as well.
You're buying the framework of the ruling class of your country, ask yourself why you reach the same conclusions about socialism than libs
No, I dont agree that AES is capitalism, it's just that you don't have historical knowledge of the decision-making power of the working class over policy and the means of production in AES countries.
Strong unions with legal power and decision-making capabilities, local committees supervising political and administrative activity, extremely high social mobility, participation in state politics through the party and through discussion in the press, and most importantly, the absence of a capitalist class. There is no capitalism without surplus extraction from one class to the other, and without a receiving class to absorb whatever metric of surplus value you want to define, there isn't capitalism. It obviously was flawed, as all systems ever in humanity, but it's the best we've got so far in the struggle against capitalism.
Thank you also for not addressing how anarchism has historically consistently failed in creating an alternative to capitalism and to fighting fascism even in countries with strong anarchist tradition.
Most conservatives are able to band together regardless of whether another of them is too racist, or too capitalist. They're able to look past flaws in that regard.
Meanwhile, we lefties fight among ourselves for not being left enough, or for being too left. It's why there are very few leftist governments.
Nonsense. conservatives inflight and even kill each other all the fucking time. This is a myth promoted by "left unity" leftists, and "big tent" libs to force everyone to follow them.
Aye, they do, but when it comes to voting they unify.
Take the UK for example. Of our three main parties the Conservatives are, well, conservative, Labour are (ostensibly) leftwing, and Liberal Democrats are centre-left.
In the end, most of my 44 years have been spent under a series of Tory governments because leftists who don't see Labour as left enough don't vote out of protest, and leftists who see Labour as too left will vote Lib Dem. Meanwhile, those in the centre or on the right will vote Tory. Sure, there are far right parties here, but they're mostly cranks and outright racists.
We only have a Labour government right now because the Tories went too lunatic and Starmer's lot shifted enough to the centre to attract those who would vote LibDem.
Prior to our last election, I saw a whole bunch of fellow lefties going apeshite because Starmer isn't leftwing enough, and still crying that Corbyn was fucked over (which, to be fair, he was), so much so that I genuinely feared for five more years of Tories reaming us. There was very little room for pragmatism.
As somebody who was an EU immigrant in the UK for over a decade and also lived in other countries of Europe, lets just say that New Labour are plain Rightwing (so, not even Center-Left, although the original Labour definitelly were Leftwing) and the Liberal Democrats are pure rightwing (whislt the Tories have been Far Right since at least the Leave Referendum).
The ideology of "Thatcher's Greatest Achievement" - a "relaxed about wealth" ideology which loves privatisation and derregulation - which took over Labour is not Left of center and the LibDems have always been even more Neolibs than that.
The Overtoon Window in England (not as much the other UK nations) is way to the Right of the rest of Europe, so its understandable that many there think that when they neither grew up back in the days when Labour was actually a party of the Working Class and never saw politics elsewhere in Europe.
Leftists have never been the majority though so we can't rely on voting to adress our issues and interests. Last time I saw numbers more Ameicans wanted a party to the right of the Republicans than Americans who wanted a party to the left of Democrats. We're the absolute political minority yet many of our policies poll higjer than candidates from either party.
Direct action isn't directly "trying to overthrow the government" It's trying to improve one's own life directly, instead of begging the elites to do so for you.
Not voting allows bad actors to take over the government and impose authoritarian rule.
Example: USA and Project 2025
Democrats might be useless and doesn't do enough to help people, but Republicans are actively trying to make people's lives worse, not to mention, their climate denialism and disregard for the climate, which its effects could echo throughout the world, since why would other countries try to fix the climate when the most powerful nation in the world (in terms of military strength) doesn't even care about the climate. Everyone would follow the US's footsteps and just start ignoring any environmental damage.
Voting doesn't always bring immediate positive results, but its still important to vote, or else you end up with a society that goes backwards.
I don't know where you live, but suppose you were a US Citizen living in the US, and saw this shitshow of a fraudster trying to become the country's leader, would you refuse to vote in the election to allow the wannabe fascist to take over the country and ruin so many lives?
Voting doesn't cost you anything, and you can still do whatever "direct action" you need to do at the same time, it's not mutually exclusive.
Voting legitimizes the act of voting being helpful and therefore justifies the millions on manhours wasted on electoralism, which is leaving people practicing it burnt out and disappointed at the end and doesn't stop society sliding into fascism as is the final stage of capitalism.
You can disagree with me all you want. Voting doesn't work. It's a waste of time. Do literally anything else and don't even waste any time thinking about it.
The Republicans have bred a cult that makes up the core of their voting block, though. This is how Trump originally got into the primaries and then elected. He pulled the cultists away from their masters and they couldn't control the new MAGA cult.
Both my grandfather before he died and my first boss had the same exact reaction if you asked who they were voting for. They'd look at you like you'd grown an extra head and reply, "I'm a Republican. I vote for the nominee."