However I find myself being disagreed with quite often, mostly for not advocating or cheering violence, “by any means possible” change, or revolutionary tactics. It would seem that I’m not viewed as authentically holding my view unless I advocate extreme, violent, or radical action to accomplish it.
Those seem like two different things to me.
Edit: TO COMMUNISTS, ANARCHISTS, OR ANYONE ELSE CALLING FOR THE OVERTHROW OF SOCIETY
THIS OBVIOUSLY ISN’T MEANT FOR YOU.
Lemmy has this weird point of view, if you aren’t extreme left then you are not left at all. I’ve seen people make comments like "just be honest you aren’t a liberal ".
They want to move the bar so they don’t have to claim they are extremist. I wouldn’t worry about it.
OTOH, USians have their Overton window so moved to the right, and it continues to move so fast, that it has a visible Doppler effect.
What in the US some people calls “radical ideas”, most of the world calls “common decency” or “human rights”.
Lemmy has this weird point of view, if you aren’t extreme left then you are not left at all. I’ve seen people make comments like "just be honest you aren’t a liberal ".
Generally, the non-Marxists and non-Anarchists on Lemmy are absolutely liberals.
They want to move the bar so they don’t have to claim they are extremist. I wouldn’t worry about it.
I don’t think Leftists here care about being labeled an extremist or not, the point is to pursuade more people to become Marxists or Anarchists by actually talking about their views openly.
According to your original comment, it is. Simply wanting results to fall out of the sky isn’t support, ie if someone says they want everyone to be a billionaire it isn’t genuine support.
Thinking an idea is good, but achieving it is bad, isn’t support.
Question: do you consider yourself a liberal?
Got this from queermunist earlier. Didn’t understand why the question was asked. I answered “Yes” though it seemed like a gotcha, but I don’t know what was going on there. I used the words I wanted to use.
It depends on your definitions, but many on the left, myself included, don’t consider liberals to be leftists. Liberals are primarily capitalists, and while they are left within the very pro capitalist mainstream, they are not “leftists”, which to me means anticapitalist.
In my experience most liberals at least have problems with capitalism, they just can’t imagine a better system. I think leftists need to be less shitty, and use less gotchas and jargon, especially to people who are allies on social issues. Though this is frustrating when some of you’re local queer elders are small business owners who underpay their employees and hoard property.
It’s a shame that Marxists have to always be nice, friendly and tolerant. We get tired and frustrated with it all too.
So, this is a very complex topic I don’t have the time to give the treatment it deserves, but to try to give a very summarized historical viewpoint on it -
Liberalism was a set of ideas that cohered around the 18th century as a reaction to monarchism that emphasized universal civil rights and free markets (there were a ton of weird things going on with noble privileges and state monopolies issued by royal administrations and mercantile economics this was a response to)
Socialism was a set of ideas that cohered around the 19th century as a reaction to liberalism (and the whole industrial revolution) that said universal civil rights didn’t go far enough and we needed to establish universal economic rights. Some socialists think the only way to achieve these things is by overthrowing or limiting the power of governments and ripping up contracts between private parties, which liberals tend not to like.
Progressivism was (sort of, I’m being very reductive here) an attempted synthesis of these traditions that cohered around the early 20th century, and (essentially) argued “ok, free markets but restricted by regulations (e.g. you can’t sell snake oil, you can’t condition the sale of property on the purchaser being a specific race), and open elections for whoever the voters want but with restrictions on the kinda of laws that can be passed” (e.g. no poll taxes).
Like I said, I’m simplifying a lot here and I’d encourage reading Wikipedia pages and other sources on all of these things (like, I’m eliding a whole very dark history progressives have where their attempts to perfect society had them advocating for eugenics and segregation early on because there was academic support for those ideas at the time, and there’s a lot more to be said on how a lot of the first anti-racist voices were socialist ones and why it took progressives and liberals time to get on the right side of that issue, and how fights for colonial independence tended to be led by socialists and against liberals), but the fact that liberals progressives and socialists are all ostensibly “on the left” is a big cause of the infighting we see.
Get outta here with your detailed informative answers
We’re supposed to be having a big partisan argument about who is the poopy head in this sandbox
Here’s a fun exercise: Ask queermunist what they think of some left wing issue that isn’t something that would be a good talking point for an outside adversary of the left to use to destabilize it, or make it lose.
They’re very vocal about wanting the left to use violence. They’re very vocal about wanting people not to vote for Biden. Foreign policy in Central and South America? Justice for farm workers? Prison reform? Fuck all that shit, let’s talk about some guns.
Idk, now that I have given the game away they may have a different reaction. 🙂 But that was my experience when I asked about it, and I made from that an inference about them and some other parts of the Lemmy left that may form a good potential answer to the original question you were asking.
how about you don’t engage in bad faith red herrings? instead, you could address the points other people raise in their comments.
this is some smug, manipulative bullshit.
