351
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 19 May 2024
351 points (88.9% liked)
Ask Lemmy
27281 readers
1702 users here now
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
"Libertarian" became popular in the US when it started being incorporated into various science fiction novels. Probably the most famous is "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress." I love the book as science fiction, but the society the author creates depends on so many caveats that even the author has the old style 'free' system fall apart as soon as an actual government [as opposed to prison regulations] is formed.
They got their que from right-wing economic grifters like Rothbard and Hayek - people whose beliefs wouldn't be out of place in Nazi Germany. That's why olden days US sci-fi writing was a festering hole of fascism - nothing else could have produced people like Heinlein.
Heinlein was a huge friend to Philip K. Dick, and any number of Jewish science fiction writers. He was one of the first writers to have an African woman as a hero, one of the first to have a transman character. Stop using the word 'fascist' for anyone on the Right. It dilutes the term.
And?
And?
Again... and?
All right-wingers walk the same path. If you write fascist drivel, you are a fascist. Heinlein was a fascist. Stop making excuses for him.
And then you wonder why the Left loses pretty much every election.
What left, liberal?
Exactly my point.
Call me when you actually win an election.
If you can't win an argument without using foul language, you probably don't have many good ideas.
Bye bye.
Dawg, you just fabricated your idea of what the other dude thinks in that second paragraph. Touch grass, call someone, go outside.
We are not close enough for endearments.
No, I didn't. If you think there's anything "leftist" about the formal political establishment it indicates a very specific form of brain-rot that is childishly easy to trace to the mass misrepresentation of political concepts one can easily find simply by turning on a television. Both liberals and their fascist fellow-travellers suffer from this brain-rot... and it's symptoms are perfectly predictable.
Not all that difficult to understand, no?
Would you deny that Canada's NDP, the CPUSA, or US Greens are leftist?
Yes.
You're saying that the wp:Communist Party USA is not leftist?
What are you?
a Maoist?
a Hoxhaist?
a Gonzaloist?
How many socialistic writers wrote sci-fi that included Africans and the TG?
Was it back when Stalin outlawed homosexuality and allying with Hitler?
Plenty.
Could you name me one?
How far back do you want to go?
let's say before 1950.
Then click the link.
Sorry about that: I didn't realize there was a link; and thanks for making it.
Neither the words "socialist" nor "leftist" appears in that article.
They don't have to because...
...sounds perfectly radical to me.
We have a biological kinship with all mammals.
You have to be more specific.
This is not to denigrate her work, and she might have had at least some sympathies with socialists and leftists, but it's probably neither socialist nor leftist in the same way that Rand was ideological, much less "Fascist."
...and deep down we're all just stardust. What is your point?
That's because it's utterly impossible to be "socialist" or "leftist" in the same way Rand was ideological - being an unhinged bootlicker has decidedly never been the point of leftism.
Do socialism and leftism have definitions, and if so, what are they, and did Pauline Hopkins, or her fiction, fit those definitions?
*Leftism" doesn't have a hard and fast definition. An idea can be considered leftist if it threatens the status quo - as opposed to an idea that enforces it (which would be considered right-wing).
Socialism does - a condition wherein the working class controls the means of production. An idea that supports this end can be considered socialist (in our current state) whether the holder of such an idea labels it "socialist" or can even spell the word. Therefore, Christ rejecting the idea that people must go hungry by dividing fish and bread - socialist. Hopkins rejecting the tenets of white supremacism - socialist.
So according to your definitions, Javier Milei is a leftist because he threatens the status quo, and those who oppose him are rightists.
I agree: it doesn't have a hard and fast definition.
wt:socialism#English
(my bold)
Your definition seems to apply more to syndicalism.
wt:syndicalism
Your definition of socialism is so general as to be a bit vague.
Christ wasn't being a socialist as much as philanthropic.
He told the rich man to give everything he had to the poor and follow him, or his remark of the camel through the eye of the needle was anti-rich.
He also had the parable of the 3 people with their talents.
As for rejecting white supremacism, this might be the case of any POC billionaire—presumably Oprah Winfrey rejects the tenants of white supremacism.
FAIK, the US under Jefferson might have been America at its most socialist. Perhaps most of the people were independent farmers and artisans; slaves didn't but presumably they were a minority. Presumably the Indigenous were socialist too. As for women, they might have had more de facto independence and control over their means than de jure.
Right-wingers don't threaten the status quo - they enforce it. Milei is a capitalist - and he is making capitalists inside and outside Argentina very happy. So how is he leftist, again?
Here's your problem...
...those are already two violently incompatible forms of ownership, a fact the people writing these kind of definitions constantly gloss over. And that's just the start... these pop definitions only become less and less useful from there on in.
As a purely propagandistic buzzword, socialism served the same purpose in the USSR as the term "democracy" serves in the west - an empty word, with accompanying empty definitions, that purely exists to justify the power and privilege of the people at the top. The majority of the "definitions" you posted can be classified as this.
No. It isn't. Political ideology doesn't get less vague than this. It's very, very easy to see if the working-class actually controls anything in any given society - this is why the Bolsheviks and their descendents scrambled to make sure the term socialism means "whatever we want it to mean."
But they don't get to change the basic idea behind it.
Christ was never philanthropic - he wasn't some capitalist laundering his public image, and he never separated himself from the class of people he was born into. What Christ was doing is more accurately described as mutual aid.
You'd be surprised how many non-white people embrace the hierarchies that enable and require white supremacism while pretending to reject it - just look at people like Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas.
from an Argentine view (if not quite a Latin American or world POV)
Yes, and many on the far right and far left don't like Wikipedia, and presumably wouldn't its sister Wiktionary, but I tend to defer to the authority of WMF projects more than to those I know even less about.
I suppose they might say something like that they got things done.
Russia in 1916 was a dying empire with much suffering, while in, say, 1978, all, or nearly all, Russians, and others in the USSR, were fed, clothed, housed, medically cared for, educated, and had higher life expediencies. Ditto China. Ditto Cuba. Ditto Yugoslavia. Maybe even ditto Albania and North Korea. As for Cambodia, Chomsky says it wasn't 2 million, and they lasted only a few years. What if the Khmer Rouge lasted, say, 20 years? How would Cambodia be in, say, 1996? It's been run for over 40 years by one who was in the Khmer Rouge.
Meanwhile Western bourgeois supposed-leftists spend much time arguing or doing ineffective things.
Noam Chomsky and Fidel Castro were both born around the same time.
Who has accomplished more for leftism and socialism?
Whatever, Western bourgeois pseudo-anon individualist: the USSR and PRC did great things, while you still live in a shitty capitalist empire. 😁🙂
wt:philanthropy#English
He was supposedly God incarnate performing a miracle.
What he did, no one could do, i.e. feed to their fill 5000 people with only 5 loaves and 2 fish, with 12 baskets of leftovers.
Again, your analogy is a poor one: it doesn't prove Jesus was a leftist or socialist.
We also don't know what he did in his later teens or 20s.
Presumably the people he hung out with most were his disciples who saw him as divine.
True, but I don't think billionaire Winfrey would endorse either.
I got mine from the Libertarian party, a few decades ago.
They didn't seem too fascistic back then.
Of course they didn't, eh? Of course.
They didn't wear brown, black, or blue uniforms.
They wore no uniforms.
One seemed to like Dead Kennedy's and Black Flag.
Most fascists don't.
And up until very recently a whole bunch of them thought Rage Against The Machine was theirs, too.
They seem most powerful in uniform—I guess that's what helps ties those little sticks together into their mighty hammer, FWIW.
I don't like Rage Against the Machine.
Part of it is musical, I suppose.
Part of it is they support tankies and a group that massacred indigenous peasants in Peru.
Sure. But it also makes knowing who to shoot a whole lot easier, too.
I'm not sure what RATM's deal with the (so-called) "Shining Path" lot was... there's nothing unique about leftists having shit takes or throwing their weight behind the wrong cause. It comes with the territory.
Yes, it does make fascists better targets.
RATM's previous support of Shining Path, or for that matter the USSR, would probably be quite forgivable if they admitted that they made mistakes—confessions, if you will.
Have they written anything about their beliefs, and explaining such, besides very generalized stuff like "fuck capitalism," "fuck imperialism," "fuck fascism," "fuck American foreign policy," "fuck this," "fuck that," whatever?
It's why I'm still ticked at Cat Stevens/Yusef Islam, and his endorsement of the attempted murder of Salman Rushdie, and his later denials of such.