This post came up in my feed and I stumbled in here, not really too knowledgeable of this instance except that a lot of people in my part of the lemmyverse don’t seem too fond of lemmygrad.ml. I often hear that “tankies” are “so far left they circled back around to the right” or similar claims, and I’m wondering, /do/ you all have any views/positions/ideals that align with the right or far right? I am asking as an outsider to this group who does not identify as liberal and would consider myself absolutely left of whatever you consider liberals to be.
The far right is sometimes correct for the wrong reasons. Lacking in dialectics and materialist analysis, the far right often identifies valid social ills yet has zero comprehension of where the problems come from, leading its followers to flail at the wrong targets.
For example, wages are suppressed and stagnated. The far right blame immigrants. The evidence is right, there: all that surplus value is stolen by the bourgeoisie. The far right complain about taxes because they’re ‘used’ to pay for the ‘lazy’ via welfare. As a general statement, it’s correct but only because the biggest recipients of state financing are the haute bourgeoisie. The amount spent on ordinary people struggling to pay bills is miniscule. (Also, that’s not quite how taxes work, and without state expenditure money doesn’t exist at all, but they’re more complicated issue.) Etc, etc.
Bear in mind, too, that we consider ‘liberals’ and conservatives to be in the same camp. They’re all liberals because they support capitalism. Liberalism being the ideology of capitalism. The difference between the far right and the ‘centre left’ is negligible. As the saying goes, scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds. Meaning that fascism is liberalism’s self-defence against inevitable progress towards socialism / communism.
So when you ask if our views align with the far right’s, the question is slightly misframed for implying that (a) there’s any significant difference between the right and the left within bourgeois politics (bourgeois being related to commodity production i.e. capitalism, i.e. liberalism) and (b) we wouldn’t be equally disgusted to find that our views align with ‘progressive’ liberals.
It’s a distinction without a difference. For example, the ‘progressive’ might agree that gender inequality is bad and propose more women promotions, etc. That’s not a bad start but the next question is what happens to the other billions of women who continue to be disproportionally oppressed? Having a woman CEO call the shots or put in the order for another military contract isn’t much consolation.
The liberal doesn’t see anything fundamentally wrong with capitalism, only the need for minor fixes towards an idealist ‘perfect’ capitalism. Applying dialectical materialism, two things are clear. One, capitalism is irredeemable and irredeemably the cause of 99% of current social problems. Two, anyone who supports capitalism is just as bad as anyone else who supports capitalism, notwithstanding their surface level decoration.
Worse, all those liberals with the decorative decorum drop the facade as soon as any oppressed person or group decides that they’re unwilling to wait for multiple more generations for the end of their oppression. In sum, any alignment between our views and the far right’s (a view sometimes called ‘horseshoe theory’) is merely incidental, and as incidental as any alignment between our views and those of more progressive liberals. ((Non-)alignment with ultras, leftcoms, Trotskyists, anarchists, etc, is a story for another day.)
If you’re left of liberal, please stick around. Having sampled what’s on offer, I can tell you that Marxism-Leninism has the answers you’re looking for. It’s the only successful revolutionary theory. It stopped the Nazis, lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, and helped liberate millions more from colonialism. We have reading lists and resources, if you’re interested.
One, capitalism is irredeemable and irredeemably the cause of 99% of current social problems.
A small clarification to this, Capitalism doesn’t cause 99% of social ills, but uses them to distract and manipulate the populace, as you mentioned earlier with conservatives blaming immigrants for high taxes.
Just so our visitors understand we don’t believe society will magically be perfect overnight if we got rid of capitalism. Problems will still exist, but the obstacle towards fixing them is capitalism, once it is gone we can actively start fixing these problems properly instead of just temporary bandaid solutions.
We’re irrevocably on the far-left. Overall we want things to get better for everyone and for the world. A world without colonialism, without imperialism, without exploitation for everyone.
Yes, sometimes we lump all “libs” in the same basket and need to vent about it, and fascists lump all the “normies” in the same basket and vent about it too.
But the thing about horseshoe theory, which the global network article in the OP is circling around, is that it seems to make the conclusions and then observe the behavior. In other words, is it that the far-left and far-right have similar ideas, or is it that ideological minorities tend to be more vocal about their beliefs?
The right is very good at adopting left arguments and repackaging them in their weird worldview. I attribute that to two components:
First, reality is dialectical and materialist. It follows then that some people will eventually reach a dialectical materialist POV on issues. Something as simple as “The US does wars for oil” counts; their material conditions (“we can’t exist as is without a rich bourgeoisie and oil makes the world go round”) leads them to their ideas (make war).
Second, they don’t believe in words and so it’s really easy for them to just say shit and have it stick somewhere. They don’t care about being antisemitic when talking about Palestine for example, and say whatever goes through their mind, which finds an audience. They don’t care about alienating some people with these statements because they’ll turn around in two minutes and say something completely different. If you fling enough paint at the wall, eventually, the whole wall will be painted.
If I want to write about Israel for example, I have to be careful about my language and properly explain Zionism every time and situate that the US is controlling Israel, and not the other way around. Right-wingers can just say “isn’t it weird that we keep sending 3 billion dollars to fund Israel every year???” and you see in that what you want to see.
Nowadays for example, more and more right-wingers are talking about anti-imperialism. But anti-imperialism was championed and carried out by communists. The USSR was the longest and most successful anti-imperialist project. Many communist parties in the West have now abandoned this stance, or that of the class struggle, which has let the right pick it up in their own chauvinist way which is still unfolding.
Accordingly to this diamat worldview we have let’s say “ideological enemies” and recognize them as such. This dates as far back as Marx and Engels, who reformed the Communist League into the First International, changing their utopian (idealist) slogan of “All men are brothers” to “workers of the world, unite!” because they realized that not all men are brothers; there is, in class society, a class of people who want to oppress you and do oppress you when they have the power to do so.
We’re very pragmatic because we understand how the material conditions drive historical change (which is not a blank check to do whatever we like under the justification that it’s just the logical conclusion, mind you). For example, we don’t want war. I think all the conflicts currently existing show that war is not something one should wish on themselves. But we understand it as part of the material world, as something that exists out of certain conditions. Clausewitz for example (who was dialectical but lived far before socialism was even a thing) said that “war is the continuation of politics by other means”; he saw war as part of a process, something that exists because this process had been allowed to reach a certain point. He didn’t see war as something people could talk themselves out of if they believed in peace hard enough, and accordingly war will not be solved by wishing for it to end. It needs pragmatic, real world conditions to stop.
I think this is what drives a wedge between the “moderate” left if I may call it that, and communists. We don’t want people to die needlessly and we want to build rather than destroy, but we understand that sometimes, stuff we don’t want to happen still happens.
We don’t share any values with reactionaries. We want to eliminate poverty, and make sure a group of parasites doesn’t control production, and the political system. And we know from history that ruling classes give up nothing without a fight, and will not let you vote away their power.
That alone is enough to get us banned from liberal spaces, whose members haven’t yet lifted the veil on the cradle-to-grave anti-communist indoctrination program still in full effect.
Thank you all for your well-thought out answers and for taking the time. You have definitely helped make things clearer. I have a lot to think about and look into.
They hate us 'cause they ain’t us; and being us requires introspection they either don’t have, or they have to construct thought-terminating phantasms to avoid engaging with that introspection.
I often hear that “tankies” are “so far left they circled back around to the right” or similar claims
This refers to the so called “horseshoe theory”, a “political theory” with 0 explanatory power but that liberal accept and like because it conveniently lump all political positions opposing them in the same box as the literal NAZIs which allow the very convenient conclusion that liberalism is the only acceptable and morally correct political position and everything else is evil.
I’m wondering, /do/ you all have any views/positions/ideals that align with the right or far right?
I invite you to check out the instance and be the judge of that yourself.
But to cite a few things. We (with hexbear) are the biggest LGBTQ+ instance on lemmy, even surpassing blahaj despite it being advetized specificaly as an LGBTQ+ friendly instance, to the point where trans peoples easily make up about half of our entire userbase. We have no tolerance of bigotry of any kind, including the bigotry with plausible deniability of “progressive” liberals, if someone is racist, ableist, transphobic or anything else, that person will have their problematic comment removed and will be banned as soon as any mod finds out, there is no warning and no second chance. We want free healthcare, education and housing for all, we want guarantied employment for everyone, democracy in the workplace, we want production according to need not to the whim of a market.
We do have views that are controversial and clash with we are told all our lives in the west from the internet to the classroom, but the accusation is superficial at best and crumble as soon as you start looking at why we hold these opinions.
I am asking as an outsider to this group who does not identify as liberal and would consider myself absolutely left of whatever you consider liberals to be.
Here is what we mean by liberal, just for future reference:
Liberalism is one of the ideologies of capitalism (the other being fascism), it’s core principles are, the enshrinement of private property as a fundamental right in liberal society, and capitalism as the mode of production.
Under this definition, Democrats, Republicans, right wing libertarians, social democrats and so on are all liberals, their disagreements are superficial and changing depending on what is politically convenient at the time for each particular brand of liberalism.
You’ve received several answers now, so I don’t know if you want more.
do you all have any views/positions/ideals that align with the right or far right?
Yes, definitely. A nationalist might be strongly opposed to imperialism because they want their country to be self-reliant. A libertarian might be strongly opposed to nationalism.
Libertarians actually kinda move left as they get more principled in their beliefs so it’s a bit of a cheat. But my point is that as long as people generally strive for what they believe is best for the most people, then they’ll identify a lot of the same issues and potentially come up with similar solutions.
Not to be too disparaging of the right, it’s easy to sit on my high horse and claim I have everything figured out, but I think the major discriminator for Marxists Leninists is that we’re pretty strict about requiring everyone read theory and come to any discussions with the same knowledge and word-definitions. It does mean there’s a big grind to overcome to even be listened to, but ultimately I think it helps us better identify problems and evaluate solutions than those on the right. The theory isn’t a bible by the way, it’s just the best analysis of our predecessors. As the world evolves, and as people are able to disprove old ideas, new ideas need to take their place.
I don’t believe in horseshoe theory, but I believe everyone is good at heart and smart. They just don’t have the right environment and education to foster those values under capitalism.
Marxists and Fascists are both opposed to Liberalism, so we sometimes arrive at similar positions but because of our opposition to Liberalism from opposite directions. Mostly, these would be positions/traits favored by a fringe group over the mainstream.
For example:
Both Marxists and Reactionaries are sometimes censored by media (incl. social media), so both are sometimes anti-censorship (though usually not for any speech other than their own).
Both Marxists and Reactionaries oppose big tech conglomerates for spreading Liberal propaganda.
Both Marxists and Reactionaries believe in gun rights, to oppose an unjust (Liberal) government.
Both Marxists and Libertarians are (at least on paper; I think most Libertarians are more cynical) anti-war. Marxists because we should always oppose Bourgeois wars, and Libertarians because at least the principled ones believe in non-interventionism.
This post came up in my feed and I stumbled in here, not really too knowledgeable of this instance except that a lot of people in my part of the lemmyverse don’t seem too fond of lemmygrad.ml. I often hear that “tankies” are “so far left they circled back around to the right” or similar claims, and I’m wondering, /do/ you all have any views/positions/ideals that align with the right or far right? I am asking as an outsider to this group who does not identify as liberal and would consider myself absolutely left of whatever you consider liberals to be.
It depends what you mean by align.
The far right is sometimes correct for the wrong reasons. Lacking in dialectics and materialist analysis, the far right often identifies valid social ills yet has zero comprehension of where the problems come from, leading its followers to flail at the wrong targets.
For example, wages are suppressed and stagnated. The far right blame immigrants. The evidence is right, there: all that surplus value is stolen by the bourgeoisie. The far right complain about taxes because they’re ‘used’ to pay for the ‘lazy’ via welfare. As a general statement, it’s correct but only because the biggest recipients of state financing are the haute bourgeoisie. The amount spent on ordinary people struggling to pay bills is miniscule. (Also, that’s not quite how taxes work, and without state expenditure money doesn’t exist at all, but they’re more complicated issue.) Etc, etc.
Bear in mind, too, that we consider ‘liberals’ and conservatives to be in the same camp. They’re all liberals because they support capitalism. Liberalism being the ideology of capitalism. The difference between the far right and the ‘centre left’ is negligible. As the saying goes, scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds. Meaning that fascism is liberalism’s self-defence against inevitable progress towards socialism / communism.
So when you ask if our views align with the far right’s, the question is slightly misframed for implying that (a) there’s any significant difference between the right and the left within bourgeois politics (bourgeois being related to commodity production i.e. capitalism, i.e. liberalism) and (b) we wouldn’t be equally disgusted to find that our views align with ‘progressive’ liberals.
It’s a distinction without a difference. For example, the ‘progressive’ might agree that gender inequality is bad and propose more women promotions, etc. That’s not a bad start but the next question is what happens to the other billions of women who continue to be disproportionally oppressed? Having a woman CEO call the shots or put in the order for another military contract isn’t much consolation.
The liberal doesn’t see anything fundamentally wrong with capitalism, only the need for minor fixes towards an idealist ‘perfect’ capitalism. Applying dialectical materialism, two things are clear. One, capitalism is irredeemable and irredeemably the cause of 99% of current social problems. Two, anyone who supports capitalism is just as bad as anyone else who supports capitalism, notwithstanding their surface level decoration.
Worse, all those liberals with the decorative decorum drop the facade as soon as any oppressed person or group decides that they’re unwilling to wait for multiple more generations for the end of their oppression. In sum, any alignment between our views and the far right’s (a view sometimes called ‘horseshoe theory’) is merely incidental, and as incidental as any alignment between our views and those of more progressive liberals. ((Non-)alignment with ultras, leftcoms, Trotskyists, anarchists, etc, is a story for another day.)
If you’re left of liberal, please stick around. Having sampled what’s on offer, I can tell you that Marxism-Leninism has the answers you’re looking for. It’s the only successful revolutionary theory. It stopped the Nazis, lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, and helped liberate millions more from colonialism. We have reading lists and resources, if you’re interested.
A small clarification to this, Capitalism doesn’t cause 99% of social ills, but uses them to distract and manipulate the populace, as you mentioned earlier with conservatives blaming immigrants for high taxes.
Just so our visitors understand we don’t believe society will magically be perfect overnight if we got rid of capitalism. Problems will still exist, but the obstacle towards fixing them is capitalism, once it is gone we can actively start fixing these problems properly instead of just temporary bandaid solutions.
We’re irrevocably on the far-left. Overall we want things to get better for everyone and for the world. A world without colonialism, without imperialism, without exploitation for everyone.
Yes, sometimes we lump all “libs” in the same basket and need to vent about it, and fascists lump all the “normies” in the same basket and vent about it too.
But the thing about horseshoe theory, which the global network article in the OP is circling around, is that it seems to make the conclusions and then observe the behavior. In other words, is it that the far-left and far-right have similar ideas, or is it that ideological minorities tend to be more vocal about their beliefs?
The right is very good at adopting left arguments and repackaging them in their weird worldview. I attribute that to two components:
First, reality is dialectical and materialist. It follows then that some people will eventually reach a dialectical materialist POV on issues. Something as simple as “The US does wars for oil” counts; their material conditions (“we can’t exist as is without a rich bourgeoisie and oil makes the world go round”) leads them to their ideas (make war).
Second, they don’t believe in words and so it’s really easy for them to just say shit and have it stick somewhere. They don’t care about being antisemitic when talking about Palestine for example, and say whatever goes through their mind, which finds an audience. They don’t care about alienating some people with these statements because they’ll turn around in two minutes and say something completely different. If you fling enough paint at the wall, eventually, the whole wall will be painted.
If I want to write about Israel for example, I have to be careful about my language and properly explain Zionism every time and situate that the US is controlling Israel, and not the other way around. Right-wingers can just say “isn’t it weird that we keep sending 3 billion dollars to fund Israel every year???” and you see in that what you want to see.
Nowadays for example, more and more right-wingers are talking about anti-imperialism. But anti-imperialism was championed and carried out by communists. The USSR was the longest and most successful anti-imperialist project. Many communist parties in the West have now abandoned this stance, or that of the class struggle, which has let the right pick it up in their own chauvinist way which is still unfolding.
Accordingly to this diamat worldview we have let’s say “ideological enemies” and recognize them as such. This dates as far back as Marx and Engels, who reformed the Communist League into the First International, changing their utopian (idealist) slogan of “All men are brothers” to “workers of the world, unite!” because they realized that not all men are brothers; there is, in class society, a class of people who want to oppress you and do oppress you when they have the power to do so.
We’re very pragmatic because we understand how the material conditions drive historical change (which is not a blank check to do whatever we like under the justification that it’s just the logical conclusion, mind you). For example, we don’t want war. I think all the conflicts currently existing show that war is not something one should wish on themselves. But we understand it as part of the material world, as something that exists out of certain conditions. Clausewitz for example (who was dialectical but lived far before socialism was even a thing) said that “war is the continuation of politics by other means”; he saw war as part of a process, something that exists because this process had been allowed to reach a certain point. He didn’t see war as something people could talk themselves out of if they believed in peace hard enough, and accordingly war will not be solved by wishing for it to end. It needs pragmatic, real world conditions to stop.
I think this is what drives a wedge between the “moderate” left if I may call it that, and communists. We don’t want people to die needlessly and we want to build rather than destroy, but we understand that sometimes, stuff we don’t want to happen still happens.
We don’t share any values with reactionaries. We want to eliminate poverty, and make sure a group of parasites doesn’t control production, and the political system. And we know from history that ruling classes give up nothing without a fight, and will not let you vote away their power.
That alone is enough to get us banned from liberal spaces, whose members haven’t yet lifted the veil on the cradle-to-grave anti-communist indoctrination program still in full effect.
Thank you all for your well-thought out answers and for taking the time. You have definitely helped make things clearer. I have a lot to think about and look into.
https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Portal:Marxism check out this portal and associated reading list if you’re interested in learning more
Thanks!
They hate us 'cause they ain’t us; and being us requires introspection they either don’t have, or they have to construct thought-terminating phantasms to avoid engaging with that introspection.
This refers to the so called “horseshoe theory”, a “political theory” with 0 explanatory power but that liberal accept and like because it conveniently lump all political positions opposing them in the same box as the literal NAZIs which allow the very convenient conclusion that liberalism is the only acceptable and morally correct political position and everything else is evil.
I invite you to check out the instance and be the judge of that yourself.
But to cite a few things. We (with hexbear) are the biggest LGBTQ+ instance on lemmy, even surpassing blahaj despite it being advetized specificaly as an LGBTQ+ friendly instance, to the point where trans peoples easily make up about half of our entire userbase. We have no tolerance of bigotry of any kind, including the bigotry with plausible deniability of “progressive” liberals, if someone is racist, ableist, transphobic or anything else, that person will have their problematic comment removed and will be banned as soon as any mod finds out, there is no warning and no second chance. We want free healthcare, education and housing for all, we want guarantied employment for everyone, democracy in the workplace, we want production according to need not to the whim of a market.
We do have views that are controversial and clash with we are told all our lives in the west from the internet to the classroom, but the accusation is superficial at best and crumble as soon as you start looking at why we hold these opinions.
Here is what we mean by liberal, just for future reference:
Liberalism is one of the ideologies of capitalism (the other being fascism), it’s core principles are, the enshrinement of private property as a fundamental right in liberal society, and capitalism as the mode of production.
Under this definition, Democrats, Republicans, right wing libertarians, social democrats and so on are all liberals, their disagreements are superficial and changing depending on what is politically convenient at the time for each particular brand of liberalism.
A good overview is this video.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
You’ve received several answers now, so I don’t know if you want more.
Yes, definitely. A nationalist might be strongly opposed to imperialism because they want their country to be self-reliant. A libertarian might be strongly opposed to nationalism.
Libertarians actually kinda move left as they get more principled in their beliefs so it’s a bit of a cheat. But my point is that as long as people generally strive for what they believe is best for the most people, then they’ll identify a lot of the same issues and potentially come up with similar solutions.
Not to be too disparaging of the right, it’s easy to sit on my high horse and claim I have everything figured out, but I think the major discriminator for Marxists Leninists is that we’re pretty strict about requiring everyone read theory and come to any discussions with the same knowledge and word-definitions. It does mean there’s a big grind to overcome to even be listened to, but ultimately I think it helps us better identify problems and evaluate solutions than those on the right. The theory isn’t a bible by the way, it’s just the best analysis of our predecessors. As the world evolves, and as people are able to disprove old ideas, new ideas need to take their place.
I don’t believe in horseshoe theory, but I believe everyone is good at heart and smart. They just don’t have the right environment and education to foster those values under capitalism.
Marxists and Fascists are both opposed to Liberalism, so we sometimes arrive at similar positions but because of our opposition to Liberalism from opposite directions. Mostly, these would be positions/traits favored by a fringe group over the mainstream.
For example:
Both Marxists and Reactionaries are sometimes censored by media (incl. social media), so both are sometimes anti-censorship (though usually not for any speech other than their own).
Both Marxists and Reactionaries oppose big tech conglomerates for spreading Liberal propaganda.
Both Marxists and Reactionaries believe in gun rights, to oppose an unjust (Liberal) government.
Both Marxists and Libertarians are (at least on paper; I think most Libertarians are more cynical) anti-war. Marxists because we should always oppose Bourgeois wars, and Libertarians because at least the principled ones believe in non-interventionism.