Communists are being pretty explicitly anti-liberal, and they make that a point pretty often.
And is becomes clear eventually as you see their posts and read their comments that these people aren’t misunderstanding liberals, they’re pretty aware that both in the meaning of the word and in practice, “liberals” generally want people to be free from shackles and free to do most anything. Typically summarized along the lines of “as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone, do what you want”.
Communists don’t agree with liberalism.
Communists want to demand much more of people and permit much less. They have much more in common with Putin’s extant but inflated voterbase than they like to admit. Even with Putin not being a communist.
Just go ahead and conflate outright tankies and ML’s with the entire communist space, sure, whatever. You ended up with “Communists want to take your toothbrush” level of analysis just because you paint too broadly.
The problem with liberalism isn’t that they champion liberty, it’s that they are woefully incapable of challenging systems of power, and that just enables the present biases and power imbalances in the system, ultimately always leading to fascist tendencies and sometimes an actual slip into fascism.
And that’s the beef the communist community at large has with liberals. They would theoretically be an ally, but will actually align with the fascists more often than with socialists/communists because they know fascists will ultimately still preserve upper class business interests.
I won’t say that your critique isn’t salient, it does fit in with what a lot of tankies seem to believe, as they regularly champion state power, but it always irks me when people only interact with online jackasses and then assume that all people who subscribe to a similar ideology share in those opinions.
Communists regularly act like they couldn’t be militant for liberal ideas. That the very act of getting serious requires dropping the tricolore banner and shedding the rainbow cloak to wield the hammer and sickle.
As if specific allyship to the repestedly failed methods of communism is necessary for the fight, but fighting to reimplement and expand on the occassionally very successful methods of liberal, welfare focused, regulatory and tax heavy Europe and America is seen as completely nonviable.
Spitting on pre-Reagan nation builders and embracing miserable failures whose only success was rallying and overthrowing, with no intelligent followup. Communism is dogmatic, it is stupid. It is technically bad at solving the problem of inequality.
As if everyone else who has given much thought to solving it was wrong, unless they embrace Marx specifically, and embrace him wholly, not just in part for a few important controbutions in an otherwise not very useful body of literary works.
This almost reads like satire in the context of my previous comment. I say you paint with too broad a stroke and don’t engage with communist ideas but only with a subset, you double down. I say liberals can’t grapple with the inherent flaws of the system and are unwilling to think outside it, you demonstrate it.
Where do you think you got the ideas for worker’s rights and heavy taxation of the wealthy? You think social democracy isn’t just one facet of the socialist critique of capitalism? You think you just fell out of the coconut tree?
I have no interest in adjuticating your point of view seeing as you’re unwilling to enage with mine, but the fact that you think all communists are marxist-leninists is comical. Even more, there are plenty of communists who aren’t even marxists. And not just communists, the whole left of liberal space is far more diverse than that. There’s anarchists, there’s anarcho-communists, there’s mutualists, syndicalists, on and on we go. There have been decades upon decades of work and thought put into the current, and it looks far more different than you could apparently fathom.
Once again, I ask you to stop looking at what internet ML chambers and anti-communist propaganda claims communism to be. There’s a lot more out there that you might perhaps agree with, if you were willing to engage in anything more than milquetoast tweaks to an inherently unjust system.
I say specifically Marx gets credit, but he is not a man with endless brilliant solutions.
And the communists I talk about are the ones I see. The core of the movement. That includes the majority that are much more ignorant than I, whose main interest in these ideologies is purely vibes and aesthetics with a couple of arguments stored away in the back of their mind.
Not the niche thinkers who most of them haven’t read.
These are our letters to eachother. Conversations that may as well find an audience of one as a million. Those who print their words on paper are not nearly as prolific as those who share them freely in this environment.
You lose modern politics reliably because you do not understand them. Your only surviving stock to champion the cause are either small and struggling, or they are no longer your champions at all. The movement never lasts, because it’s passionate, but stupid.
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Communists are being pretty explicitly anti-liberal, and they make that a point pretty often.
And is becomes clear eventually as you see their posts and read their comments that these people aren’t misunderstanding liberals, they’re pretty aware that both in the meaning of the word and in practice, “liberals” generally want people to be free from shackles and free to do most anything. Typically summarized along the lines of “as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone, do what you want”.
Communists don’t agree with liberalism.
Communists want to demand much more of people and permit much less. They have much more in common with Putin’s extant but inflated voterbase than they like to admit. Even with Putin not being a communist.
Just go ahead and conflate outright tankies and ML’s with the entire communist space, sure, whatever. You ended up with “Communists want to take your toothbrush” level of analysis just because you paint too broadly.
The problem with liberalism isn’t that they champion liberty, it’s that they are woefully incapable of challenging systems of power, and that just enables the present biases and power imbalances in the system, ultimately always leading to fascist tendencies and sometimes an actual slip into fascism.
And that’s the beef the communist community at large has with liberals. They would theoretically be an ally, but will actually align with the fascists more often than with socialists/communists because they know fascists will ultimately still preserve upper class business interests.
I won’t say that your critique isn’t salient, it does fit in with what a lot of tankies seem to believe, as they regularly champion state power, but it always irks me when people only interact with online jackasses and then assume that all people who subscribe to a similar ideology share in those opinions.
Communists regularly act like they couldn’t be militant for liberal ideas. That the very act of getting serious requires dropping the tricolore banner and shedding the rainbow cloak to wield the hammer and sickle.
As if specific allyship to the repestedly failed methods of communism is necessary for the fight, but fighting to reimplement and expand on the occassionally very successful methods of liberal, welfare focused, regulatory and tax heavy Europe and America is seen as completely nonviable.
Spitting on pre-Reagan nation builders and embracing miserable failures whose only success was rallying and overthrowing, with no intelligent followup. Communism is dogmatic, it is stupid. It is technically bad at solving the problem of inequality.
As if everyone else who has given much thought to solving it was wrong, unless they embrace Marx specifically, and embrace him wholly, not just in part for a few important controbutions in an otherwise not very useful body of literary works.
This almost reads like satire in the context of my previous comment. I say you paint with too broad a stroke and don’t engage with communist ideas but only with a subset, you double down. I say liberals can’t grapple with the inherent flaws of the system and are unwilling to think outside it, you demonstrate it.
Where do you think you got the ideas for worker’s rights and heavy taxation of the wealthy? You think social democracy isn’t just one facet of the socialist critique of capitalism? You think you just fell out of the coconut tree?
I have no interest in adjuticating your point of view seeing as you’re unwilling to enage with mine, but the fact that you think all communists are marxist-leninists is comical. Even more, there are plenty of communists who aren’t even marxists. And not just communists, the whole left of liberal space is far more diverse than that. There’s anarchists, there’s anarcho-communists, there’s mutualists, syndicalists, on and on we go. There have been decades upon decades of work and thought put into the current, and it looks far more different than you could apparently fathom.
Once again, I ask you to stop looking at what internet ML chambers and anti-communist propaganda claims communism to be. There’s a lot more out there that you might perhaps agree with, if you were willing to engage in anything more than milquetoast tweaks to an inherently unjust system.
I say specifically Marx gets credit, but he is not a man with endless brilliant solutions.
And the communists I talk about are the ones I see. The core of the movement. That includes the majority that are much more ignorant than I, whose main interest in these ideologies is purely vibes and aesthetics with a couple of arguments stored away in the back of their mind.
Not the niche thinkers who most of them haven’t read.
These are our letters to eachother. Conversations that may as well find an audience of one as a million. Those who print their words on paper are not nearly as prolific as those who share them freely in this environment.
You lose modern politics reliably because you do not understand them. Your only surviving stock to champion the cause are either small and struggling, or they are no longer your champions at all. The movement never lasts, because it’s passionate, but stupid.
I’m not a liberal by any stretch.
I’m sure you’re not. Conservative and authoritarian is the way the middle of this century is going.
LOL you live in a different reality. Also, MLs are authoritarians. Do you believe otherwise?
Communists don’t even agree with communists