Being comrades with someone with a Soviet ushanka sounds like a great way to have workers’ protests violently suppressed.
I second this, coming from a person living in one of the former Soviet Bloc countries, we do NOT want that kind of comradeship again. Nonono. Textbook Socialism (a k.a. not Stalinism) with a basis in secular humanism and friggin’ empathy, yesyesyes!
it looks slay tho 😔
It does, unironically. Soviet aesthetics are pretty cool, a shame the Soviets ruined them by being the ones to use it.
Hey, nobody says ushankas should carry the sins of humans! We can reclaim ushankas as a symbol of empathy and… uuh… general goodness, I guess!
interestingly, china propagandized this peacetime soldier who died in an accident, lei fang, into this model citizen of kindness and selflessness, and thus the chinese call the hat the “lei feng hat” after propaganda depictions. whether that (and the fact that northeasterners usually wear the hat regardless of politics to combat cold) means it has shed communist symbolism is up to you
I believe Anarchist Batman from the Redsun Supperman comic used one.
Remove the Soviet cockade?
That’s just it. It’s fetishism, really. Tankies ignore the modern revolution for the aesthetic trappings of a failed one.
It depends on the status of your government. If your country isn’t totally controlled by fascism, yes, those optics will make things harder. You can’t mince words and avoid making your demands bold, but fuck the Soviets. They’re libs in a funny hat at best.
In the US on the other hand, any type of protest is effectively done with on January 20th. Do not protest next year. We’re legit past that stage; the law is already dead. Work on keeping people safe from the state, because it will only represent the desires of POTUS.
Oh, I didn’t mean as a matter of optics for the public, just as a general “Association with repressive Soviet shitheads is undesirable”
It is. They’re a cringe cult, but people are looking for answers rn and are vulnerable to cringe cults. I don’t love when people trade MAGA hats for Ushankas, and I think that’ll be a bigger problem in the future.
Telling people not to protest is a great way to accept fascism.
Trying to protest when freedom of speech doesn’t exist is a great way to die. Where we would have protested peacefully, we must riot. Where we would boycott, we must sabotage. Where we would advocate, we must work the railroad. Where we would commit sit ins, we must use strategies from declassified military manuals.
Fascism only understands force. Words are useless as weapons against them. We’re in their endgame; it is not time to be nice. They’re taking their gloves off, so we must as well. Fawning and freezing will not work, only fight or flight.
The point is to make it hard for them. If they are going to go full Tiananmen Square then make them do it with a spotlight and a backing track.
I will definitely be out there. And if my bloody corpse is crushed into paste and washed down the drain with a hose, my parents and friends and some of my coworkers will stand up and say “yo this person was not a terrorist they were actually pretty patriotic, thoughtful and an engaged citizen who volunteered and was active in local government and fostered dogs and shit.”
This is how you break down the mythology. I won’t hold it against anyone who is afraid to step up, but people need to step up.
" I am asking you to fight. To fight against their anger, not to provoke it. We will not strike a blow, but we will receive them. And through our pain, we will make them see their injustice, and it will hurt, as all fighting hurts. But we cannot lose. We cannot. They may torture my body, may break my bones, even kill me. Then they will then have my dead body, not my obedience."
I’m saying we need to do more than get crushed if we’re willing to. You should make it hard for them by ensuring innocent people don’t starve to death when the economy crashes. Give people healthcare and get them to see hope in the world. You’d be working at an NGO in a 3rd world country, not giving up your life to a meat grinder.
This situation won’t be as stable as China in the late 80s. The economy will be falling, systems collapsing, all while the fascists try to pretend that they’re the solution instead of the problem. Be a real solution, not a martyr.
And i am saying that forcing people to confront the evil they voted for in no uncertain terms is part of the solution. People will find it much harder to bury their head in the sand if that means choking on blood.
I personally do not think the average voter who was upset that eggs cost $4 will stomach even a small amount of violence, and if there is actually a path back it requires snapping these people back to reality. But I don’t intend to be a martyr. I don’t think Trump actually has the balls to mow down peaceful protesters on the national mall, and I don’t think anyone who takes orders from him does either.
I think you’re in denial. He will round up undocumented immigrants and Latino citizens alike. He will commit organized violence against his Republican enemies, let alone any Democrats that stand in his way. He will create a special unit in the FBI to serve as his personal Gestapo. He’s planning to do this all without any help from the House or Senate. If you’ve been paying attention to Project 2025 or his current cabinet picks, you should know this already.
If we’re lucky, the cops in blue states like California might not do his bidding because the corprocrats pay them well. If we’re unlucky, they’ll just do what he wants because they’re already MAGA. In the situation where we’re lucky, the cops in blue states will resist the national guard and federal agents, leading to a weakening of both sides. If we’re unlucky, they’ll be as ruthless against protesters as the cops in red states.
In those crackdowns, fascist brown shirts will make the pro Israeli vigilantes that attacked pro-Palestinian protesters look benevolent. They’ll lynch people without mercy, wearing white hats and swastikas, while the police generally let them. We must confront the evil, but peaceful protests will be off the table.
People will unfortunately learn that the hard way, and the news will not reach many Trump voters. They’ll just think it was the “usual antifa nonsense,” seeing us as the instigators regardless of what we do. Even liberal outlets can’t be counted on, as Trump will convert or go after them to the cheers of his supporters.
Aren’t you tired of being labelled?
Don’t you want to stop dividing people?
This.
The ramp up of anti-liberal propaganda around here is concerning. If the enemy is the right, why are we targeting the centrists?
Liberalism has become unpopular after repeatedly failing to hold back the right, while letting our problems only get worse. There are parts of liberalism we should carry on, but we should still leave it behind. MLs aren’t the answer, as they limit themselves by clinging to the identity more than the praxis. They’re both flawed in how they believe their own bullshit, giving evil a pass while believing things will get better.
That said, liberals deserve all the shit they’re getting, as their apologetics for parasites cannot be tolerated. Let the wealthy flock to the right. They’ll soon realize that they gave up more power than they thought by endorsing fascism. They needed liberalism more than we do. If we survive fascism burning itself out, we’ll need to fight those fuckers to let us rebuild a functioning society.
Tldr: liberalism helped the right. We need to let go.
The only thing I’d temper this with is that MLs are literally not a problem beyond terminally online spaces, particularly the sectarians you mention.
Like yeah they can suck but I’m much more afraid of Proud Boys and the liberals that enable them.
Ultimately I agree with you 100 percent it’s just an exhausting thing to always have to be like “yeah sure fuck tankies I guess” when discussing matters of actual life and death.
I’m just worried about how they hold back the left to terminally online spaces. We need to get out there more, not waste time cosplaying dead empires! Do that for a larp, but not as your identity.
Liberals are not an economic ideal
Economic ideals and political philosophies are a circular ven-diagram. The economy is inherently political, as politics are fundamentally about who gets what, when. The division between economic and social issues is a dangerous myth. Civil rights are economic issues, and stock markets are political.
Liberalism is the philosophy that incorrectly decouples these two opposing views in your mind. Civil liberties and private ownership; human rights and capitalism. The two will ultimately come into conflict, and one must be sacrificed to maintain the other. Capitalism requires the liberal state, as it becomes feudalism without it. The rules based system of ownership is fundamental to capitalism’s existence.
Most lefties on here are complaining about laissez-fair liberals(economic, let the free market do its thing. Neoliberals), which are more closely related to libertarians IMO.
Most people who identify themselves as liberals are simply pro civil rights and freedoms(the economy does it thing as long as it stays the fuck out of civil rights and doesn’t oppressthe lower/middle class. Pro regulation. Monopolies and insider trading are bad). Closely related to social democrats and the labor party
I’m not just complaining about the laissez-faire liberals, but the self identified liberals who remain ignorant of how far we actually needed to go into democratic socialism to stand a chance. I even underestimated how much radical reform was needed to sustain liberal democracy. Even self identified liberals and progressive did not push hard enough. As someone who felt the urge to shy away from radical reform, I now know that it was necessary yesterday.
We needed business owners OUT of conversations as owners of businesses; no more entrepreneurship or private interests. We needed DEprivatization and regulations that STARTED at the Green New Deal. We needed the stock market to perpetually remain stagnant as wages rose. We needed effective wealth redistribution, not so we could reach communism, but so people would continue to buy into the system. We needed an FDR, but got a party of Herbert Hoovers.
We refused to dream big enough out of fear of being filthy commies, but that’s what would have been necessary to hold back fascism and keep liberalism. Now we have the unenviable task of surviving fascism, clawing back control from the rich out of the remains of an empire, and suffering from an apocalyptic climate crisis for the rest of our lives. We’re not doomed, but we are cursed.
Correct, and this is the real issue I am identifying when I point to this anti-liberal discourse as of late.
Most of your common liberal voters are not in support of the things we are fighting against. They are poorly educated and mislead, and continuing to paint them as the enemy is making the problem worse and giving the far-right more power. “You’re either with us or against us” mentality isn’t conductive to genuinely solving socio-political problems.
Fuck libertarians and neo-liberalism. They are not liberals, nor the centrists I was pointing to in my earlier post.
I’m not blaming any liberals voters; I’m blaming liberalism and CAPITALISM™. I often forget that people don’t view the world like I do. I don’t blame most Trump supporters for Trump. I don’t even blame people who are rich as a whole, only how the laws of the economy drive them to evil. I don’t inherently care for retribution, but I know people automatically think that way.
I am saying that liberalism, as an ideology, needs to amputate capitalism and imperialism from itself. Capital must be secondary to people, always and forever. Unless we are absolutely clear on that, fuck liberalism. It’s dead weight as a brand. The old system is politically toxic, so we need to rebuild from humanitarian ideals and critical thought. Ownership means nothing anymore. The social contract withered away already.
liberals are right wing
They are not. Neo-liberalism is a plague on the moderate liberal centrist voters that we should be appealing to and educating instead of painting them all with the broad-stroke brush of “enemy.” The majority of liberal voters are left-aligned on social issues, and we should be appealing to that.
Now there’s some sexy talk
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Yeah, most normal people doesn’t live under a single ideal. Labeling people as A or B is literally the way that British Empire used to rule the world and Hitler rises to power. The obsession on alignment is gonna move the world further to the right.
I’m tired of tankies telling me I need “leftist unity” when I want freedom
I think the whole authoritarian vs antiauthoritarian split is kinda BS - IMO it’s more about who’s dictating terms to who. We really badly need land reform, and landlords aren’t going to willingly give that up, so we have to be a bit “authoritarian” in order to make them do so. Same thing goes with wealth redistribution, and land back. If you give up on using force to get what you want, how do you get land back to indigenous populations, or stop the genocide in Gaza?
I think we’ll be more free if we work together to build socialism than we would be if we keep shitting on each others approaches towards building it. Then we’ll just keep refining it until there’s a minimum amount of hierarchy or control in society that’s used to prevent re-privatisation, exploitation, and the re-establishment of Capitalism.
Signed, a “tankie”
You can have revolution without authority, the true question is should the workers truly own the nation they built or a self appointed “vanguard”? Do the ends truly justify the means? Also we shit on auths because for most of history they felt no need to truly work with us unless they were desperate (and then they proceed to backstab us when they get comfortable).
So, I think the workers should own the nation and that power should be held at the level of workplace unions and community organizations. I see being “the vanguard” of communism as similar to a 1st place designation in Mario Kart - it’s a floating title that depends on who’s doing the most for the effort and who other people look to. That vanguard shouldn’t get any extra privileges, they’re workers just like anyone else.
In my opinion at that point why even have a vanguard when the power can be held exclusively by syndicates (just to clearify though I do respect your position).
Agreed, power should be held by syndicates, ideally with those syndicates/groups/unions/etc working together by sending delegates to a Congress and then abiding by the democratic decisions made by that Congress.
I think deciding who is or isn’t the vanguard is something you can only do when you look back at history - you can point at different groups at different times when they were leading the movement, but if you were living through it things might not be clear. It’s pointless trying to figure out who the vanguard is right now, instead we should be organizing.
My problem is there’s an assumption that you know what’s best for people, rather than self determination of peoples.
You think it’s a BS line because even in US and Canada at least (where I’m most familiar with). We’re still under (though to a much lesser extent) authoritarianism.
The Government knowingly executed a probably innocent man.
The victims family, and even the prosecution, admits they got it wrong.
How is this not authoritarianism if the state can execute innocent people?
Just because you can vote, doesn’t mean you have power.
First of all, yes, we’re living under a shitty authoritarian government in the US. It’s basically a dictatorship of the richest in society. I want to invert that, where the workers have all the power. It’ll flatten out the power hierarchy eventually because everyone will become workers like everyone else. Just, in order to get there, we’ve gotta do some things which will smack of authoritarianism, such as forcibly redistributing wealth and converting businesses to being worker-owned.
I don’t know what’s best for people, other than that we should make society more democratic. But thing is, we can’t let everyone act in their own self interest when doing so harms others. Like, it’s in a landlord’s individual self interest to charge as much money as possible and to refuse to redistribute their property.
Also, if you let everyone act in their own self interest, how do we solve the problem of getting land back to indigenous populations? For example, I’m certain that many white people in the US won’t want to give land back, and there could be a democratic majority that opposes doing the right thing. What do we do then?
We build real community. That’s the answer to all of it.
If we all feel we own the park, we’ll start taking care of it more. Rather than it being the cities (i.e. someone else’s) problem.
How do we give land back? We decide as a community to do that.
Also, land back isn’t about ownership, it’s about stewardship. If we were community focused, we’d understand that, and maybe even participate in it.
How do we do justice? We let community decide what’s best.
Fuck these countries. We should be caring and looking out for our neighbours. Not these nation states.
How do we deal with wealth redistribution? Support community. Spend as local as you can. Give your wealth to community.
It’s not about heorarchy, it’s about being mutually invested in eachother. Not just “friends”, not just hanging out, but sticking through tough times. Calling out BS. Trying out best to bring our the best in eachother.
Giving power to people is not the same as democracy. People have a right to be governed however they want to be. If a community wants a king, sure. That’s their right as a people. There’s a difference between intervening on something like a genocide, and imposing democracy on a people that don’t want it.
So I’ve been thinking about this for a bit. Yeah, fuck countries, nation states, etc. Power should be at the level of communities of workers, similar to how the original Soviet system was before it got so fucked up.
Tbh I think we’ll just have to agree to disagree, I think wealth should be redistributed by force because I believe that the rich won’t redistribute it otherwise. But I can respect where you’re coming from - I wish it wasn’t necessary but I just don’t have faith that the rich will do it out of their own free will and kindness of heart. Also, even more than the local rich we need to expropriate the wealth of the billionaires and other shitheads that just suck the money out of areas and people, leaving them destroyed.
Also - what happens when the community is full of bigots? Like let’s take Odessa TX, where they’ve just functionally banned trans people from using their correct bathroom. The community there decided on that, does that make it right? There’s a similar argument with what happens when you’ve got a community of racist white people who decide that all POC are less than their equals.
It’s not that violence is never okay, it’s more a tool in the tool chest that has its uses.
Well likely need violence to redistribute wealth yes, but violence is more than physical and still involved in community policing. But the difference is it’s mean to serve the community, not hold them in check.
There’s a fine line to draw between letting people self govern and ensuring the safety of peoples.
But again, this is up to communities to decide what is best. Sometimes violence and intervention are necessary. But those tools are reserved for extremes.
Given the amount of tankies running around on Lemmy, the “liberal” in question is likely an anticapitalist, anarchist, socialist, radical leftist, and the “comrade” is just an authoritarian who wishes they were born in time to lick Stalin’s boots and calls everybody who doesn’t deepthroat Putin’s hairy balls for breakfast a liberal.
But that’s just how it feels in this context. In general, yes, communism > capitalist liberalism.
why would any socialist alligned person like putin. that man is the furthest you could get from a commie
Exactly!
In my experience tankies are just people for whom being communist or leftist boils down to “west bad” and therefore everything else must be good. I know, it doesn’t make sense.
Empire is empire.
aren’t you tired of being a liberal?
don’t you want to be a liberal who doesn’t understand the point of politics?
free your mind from pesky knowledge and political context, all it does is get in the way of forming autocratic groups and exploiting the people around you!
Aren’t you tired of posting?
You have made 1990 posts and 3993 comments in a year.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qcipCQalzA
Your point being?
Just wondering where you get the time and energy.
I usually browse for memes at night as a way to decompress, and post the good ones here.
Ew not that kind.
I’d much rather take the long road through democracy than give a single ounce of support to half baked autocracy.
No thanks. Rather companion than comrade.
both are shit, support the environment instead.
This is the way
MLs aren’t leftists.
Machine learning?
No.
What then?
“Marxist”-Leninists. People who read up on the guy who subverted the democratic process, dissolved the worker’s councils, seized power for himself, and made every citizen a mandatory employee of the state and think “yeah, that seems like a great idea!” It’s about as far from socialism as you can get.
Lol it’s hard to imagine being in a space where I write marxist-lenin(ists) so often I need to turn it into an initialism. God help me if I ever am. Thanks for decoding.
No
