By my understanding, the left seeks to diffuse political power as widely and evenly as possible, while the right seeks to consolidate it.
No, that discounts the Auth-Left, who consolidates power in the form of a Vanguard Party and/or autocrat.
Communism works only if there’s a mechanism to assure that the command economy actually serves the public and not the political class. So when we look at USSR, it was authoritarian since Stalin.
It was authoritarian before that, but Stalin was definitely the cherry on top.
The rest of your comment is true; capitalists have an extensive history of installing pro-capitalist dictatorships.
This is why I don’t understand what Tankies are, unless they’re to the left what Christian Nationalists are to Christianity.
To me, a “tankie” is more or less the Auth-Left, more or less a Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist, in the sense that they believe that as long as the goal is ostensibly some form of socialism (or “socialism”), no amount of brutality, cruelty, or immorality can be too far.
On lemmy.world, they hail from @lemmy.ml 99% of the time, and you’ll see them doing mental gymnastics to defend Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and denying things like the Holodomor and the Uyghur genocide. You’ll also see them making moves to take down the USA rather than reform it for the better, no matter how many people suffer and die in the process. There’s a lot of overlap with accelerationism in my opinion, as I suspect a lot of the people in this thread and others are trying to convince people the DNC isn’t worth voting for because it will help the GOP win, bringing on a second US civil war and/or a massive and bloody world-wide class-war/revolution, killing millions or even billions but possibly resulting in a socialist government faster.
Tankies will claim that any non-tankie slaps “tankie” on any socialist or communist, but that’s not true for any reasonable person, hopefully myself included.
Surprising no one, the tankies were very upset by being described here, including one whom I’ve blocked that replied something below.
Go ahead, ask them if Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is imperialist or if China’s oppression of the Uyghurs is a genocide, and watch the definition of “imperialism” and “genocide” change before your very eyes.
The common theme is “as long as it somehow opposes western capitalism, nothing can be immoral.”
Well, the classic definition of right and left is in accordance with or opposition to the king, respectively.
I think it moved from there to pro- / anti-monarchism when the notion of monarchy was challenged in the 19th century.
After the French revolution, foreign neighbors demands France select a new king under threat of war. The War of the First Coalition results and Napoleon shows them what’s what. Then Napoleon declares himself emperor and declares a bunch of civil rights to get everyone on board. Later, during the Bourbon restoration, Charles X rolls those rights back necessitating a second revolution. It’ll take about seventy years or so before France establishes a proper republic, and another thirty-ish years to re-establish rights. And there are some controversies today, such as the right to practice Islam and wear a burqa.
These days, we see multi-party democracies as the most liberal, but voters can be manipulated, as per the Southern Strategy. Today, a massive far-right propaganda machine runs in the US 24/7 using the same brainwashing techniques used on US soldiers in Korea. So it’s possible democracy is already obsolete due to modern communications and… well, they call it messaging.
One option is sortition, that is, election by lottery. This drastically increases the odds we won’t get officials like Ted Cruz or JD Vance (fhat is, shapeshifters who have no principles but can say anything, feigning confidence and sincerity to stay adjacent to power). We’ll need redundant checks against corruption and incompetence. We might also need a system that sorts experts from lobbyists, to provide our citizen-officials complete information and a public-serving mandate.
That said, I can’t imagine what else leftism can mean. It certainly doesn’t refer to command economics such as socialism or communism, since those, on their own, more authoritarian than a free market.
Tankies will claim that any non-tankie slaps “tankie” on any socialist or communist
Except they do. I don’t know which of you taught the liberals that word, but it was a very very bad move. Now it means “anyone who criticized Joe Biden while he tried to start WWIII”.
No, that discounts the Auth-Left, who consolidates power in the form of a Vanguard Party and/or autocrat.
It was authoritarian before that, but Stalin was definitely the cherry on top.
The rest of your comment is true; capitalists have an extensive history of installing pro-capitalist dictatorships.
To me, a “tankie” is more or less the Auth-Left, more or less a Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist, in the sense that they believe that as long as the goal is ostensibly some form of socialism (or “socialism”), no amount of brutality, cruelty, or immorality can be too far.
On lemmy.world, they hail from @lemmy.ml 99% of the time, and you’ll see them doing mental gymnastics to defend Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and denying things like the Holodomor and the Uyghur genocide. You’ll also see them making moves to take down the USA rather than reform it for the better, no matter how many people suffer and die in the process. There’s a lot of overlap with accelerationism in my opinion, as I suspect a lot of the people in this thread and others are trying to convince people the DNC isn’t worth voting for because it will help the GOP win, bringing on a second US civil war and/or a massive and bloody world-wide class-war/revolution, killing millions or even billions but possibly resulting in a socialist government faster.
Tankies will claim that any non-tankie slaps “tankie” on any socialist or communist, but that’s not true for any reasonable person, hopefully myself included.
Surprising no one, the tankies were very upset by being described here, including one whom I’ve blocked that replied something below.
Go ahead, ask them if Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is imperialist or if China’s oppression of the Uyghurs is a genocide, and watch the definition of “imperialism” and “genocide” change before your very eyes.
The common theme is “as long as it somehow opposes western capitalism, nothing can be immoral.”
Well, the classic definition of right and left is in accordance with or opposition to the king, respectively.
I think it moved from there to pro- / anti-monarchism when the notion of monarchy was challenged in the 19th century.
After the French revolution, foreign neighbors demands France select a new king under threat of war. The War of the First Coalition results and Napoleon shows them what’s what. Then Napoleon declares himself emperor and declares a bunch of civil rights to get everyone on board. Later, during the Bourbon restoration, Charles X rolls those rights back necessitating a second revolution. It’ll take about seventy years or so before France establishes a proper republic, and another thirty-ish years to re-establish rights. And there are some controversies today, such as the right to practice Islam and wear a burqa.
These days, we see multi-party democracies as the most liberal, but voters can be manipulated, as per the Southern Strategy. Today, a massive far-right propaganda machine runs in the US 24/7 using the same brainwashing techniques used on US soldiers in Korea. So it’s possible democracy is already obsolete due to modern communications and… well, they call it messaging.
One option is sortition, that is, election by lottery. This drastically increases the odds we won’t get officials like Ted Cruz or JD Vance (fhat is, shapeshifters who have no principles but can say anything, feigning confidence and sincerity to stay adjacent to power). We’ll need redundant checks against corruption and incompetence. We might also need a system that sorts experts from lobbyists, to provide our citizen-officials complete information and a public-serving mandate.
That said, I can’t imagine what else leftism can mean. It certainly doesn’t refer to command economics such as socialism or communism, since those, on their own, more authoritarian than a free market.
Except they do. I don’t know which of you taught the liberals that word, but it was a very very bad move. Now it means “anyone who criticized Joe Biden while he tried to start WWIII”.