Once again @pluralistic has managed to distill into once sentence something I've had trouble finding the words to explain. I'll be stealing this one!
"The classic leftist distinction goes: leftists want to abolish a system where 150 white men run the world; liberals want to replace half of those 150 with women, queers and people of color." https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine
See also: Why I refuse to be labeled as a 'Liberal'. (I'm not a 'Leftist' either, exactly. But I'll leave that for another toot.)
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@jackwilliambell @pluralistic There's an irony there only Americans can appreciate.
They literally conflate their two political parties with the whole truth of politics.
They result in a mishmash where they can say anything about anything and appear sharp and witty, yet has no application beyond their particular economic power structure.
I'm glad Europe isn't yet as fucked up talking about politics as they are. But hey, Elon is trying to get us there too.
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@gimulnautti @pluralistic
The first thing to understand about USA politics is: everything is shifted one slot to the right.
Forex, Democrats aren't wishy-washy 'Liberals' really. They are more like a European Center Right party. What Europeans call 'Liberals', we call 'Socialists' and what Europeans call 'Socialists', we call 'Communists'.
The founding fathers of the USA tried to create a system hostile to political parties. In the end they created a system favorable to only two parties.
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@gimulnautti @pluralistic
The greatest trick Republicans ever pulled is convincing nearly everyone, including many Democratic Party members, that the Democratic Party is left-liberal and aligned with Marxism.
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@jackwilliambell
If only!
That this is bullshit, it's enough to look at how many Democrat congress(wo)men command at least an 8-figure fortune in stocks and shares.
None of those will ever be a Marxist.
@gimulnautti @pluralistic
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@mina @pluralistic @jackwilliambell @gimulnautti “As Marxist as Pelosi” seems to be the right measure here.
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@ildiavolorosso @mina @pluralistic @jackwilliambell @gimulnautti I've noticed Americans as a whole tend to be deeply ignorant about what Marxism even is.
For example, I would be willing to wager $100 that if you chose a group of 1000 Americans from across the country, at least half of them could not explain what "historical materialism" or "the labour theory of value" mean.
Or for that matter "bourgeoisie" and "proletariat".
Or even give a decent summary, even a critical one, of Marx and Engel's main arguments.
And I guarantee that at least half have never read even "The Communist Manifesto".
Heck, I could limit that bet to a random sample of 1000 people from the blue states who voted for Harris, and I'd still probably win.
Why it matters is informed critique.
Ask a Lithuanian, say, who's over 40 and critical of Marxism to give an explanation of what Marxism is, and what its issues are. You'll probably get a decent explanation of the theory, and then how Russia's implementation was used to justify occupation and violence.
Or a first-hand account of how the railways actually worked under Marxist–Leninist central planning during the Russian occupation.
Informed critique.
Ask an American, and there's a non-zero chance they'll say something about how communism is the government taking their guns.
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@ajsadauskas @mina @pluralistic @jackwilliambell @gimulnautti I live in that reality every day. Even in the middle of stark-blue San Francisco, you won't exactly find people in cafes talking dialectical materialism. Then again, you won't find many on the right quoting Adam Smith either (and those who do quote him selectively...most Econ majors never actually read the classics).
But I think lived experience of working people matters more than the ideological. The one thing most Americans share, whether they choose to accept it or not, is their class identity. And it's incredibly painful when grifter politicians (Harris included...we know her a bit too well here) fundraise on fearmongering of the "other" instead of doing the hard work of organizing the proles and representing our interests. At the end of the day, many of those MAGAs are so close to being socialist, prevented from realizing it only by cognitive dissonance and a political culture that teaches them that the infidel has cooties...
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@ajsadauskas @ildiavolorosso @mina @pluralistic @jackwilliambell @gimulnautti It is very important to draw a line between Marxism as the socio-economic theory, and the various offshoots like Leninism and Maoism which added, among other things, authoritarian rule/oppression of criticism.
I grew up in one of those countries, and Lenin was universally venerated next to Marx and Engels. But we can thank him for the fact that Marxism is often conflated with brutal authoritarianism and mass murder.
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@rainynight65 @ajsadauskas @ildiavolorosso @mina @pluralistic @jackwilliambell @gimulnautti Disagree. See e.g. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/sam-dolgoff-bakunin-vs-marx
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