[Reddit] starting to think communism isn’t as crazy as they say

The only good thing about republicans in charge is that it’s open season for radicalizing libs.

I have a couple accounts for trolling and this is what I do. Any time there’s a major fuckup, I try to say something along the lines of “maybe the rich were lying when they said lgbt people are the problem.”

The only good thing about republicans in charge is that it’s open season for radicalizing libs.

That was what I THOUGHT was gonna happen with Trumps first term but if anything it make progressives even bigger DNC simps. Biden was their hero who saved them from the cheeto.
- Speaking as someone who was radicalized during the 2016 elections - I think it's a little of both.
  
  I think we're at a moment where a lot of people will be driven from the center in both directions. Realizing that liberalism is incapable of stopping fascism is a strong catalyst for a lot of socdems/progressive liberals.
"maybe the rich are lying when they say sharing is bad"

I have been hearing this sentiment over the past three election cycles but let’s be honest, we went from single-payer healthcare being on the table to the getting zero concession over a global pandemic to literally silence over any healthcare related agenda through the years.

The fact is that even if 99% of the people support socialism, there is no left wing movement in America to transform these sentiment into actual political movement.

Despite all the talks about third party socialist movements, I literally have no idea what their strategies are to take political power at the heart of global imperialism. Where is the analysis of the principal contradictions of American capitalism? Where are your concrete strategies to take power beyond milquetoast anti-war protests? How are you going to leverage these contradictions to achieve your political goals?

If the American left cannot answer these questions, there will not be any movement so any kind of leftist rhetoric is going to be useless. Propaganda needs to work side by side with political actions.

Where is the analysis of the principal contradictions of American capitalism? Where are your concrete strategies to take power beyond milquetoast anti-war protests? How are you going to leverage these contradictions to achieve your political goals (real, not imagined/fantasized)?

Are you really going to see these concrete strategies if you're not part of the parties? It's not safe at all to be openly revolutionary in America as any flavour of socialist as can be seen by MOVE, BPP, hell even as someone who isn't openly revolutionary like MLK Jr.
- It wasn't safe for the Bolsheviks or the CPC's Red Army, either, and they still did it. The conditions were especially bad in China when the Japanese invaded. They massacred entire villages if they even suspected they were providing aid to communists.
  
  "If conservatives have the choice between abandoning conservatism or abandoning democracy, they will abandon democracy," applies to American liberals when given the choice between communism and reaction. MOVE, the BPP, and MLK were all opposed to by "white moderates" that would rather uphold white supremacy than allow black liberation if it means socialism.
- You are strategizing on an ideological level, what are your opponents going to do about it?
  
  If you go back and look at the days of the Russia and Chinese communist movements in the early 20th century, left wing intellectuals openly discuss and debate about political strategies and militant tactics, and it is this endless cycle of iterations that drove their movements forward.
  
  Let’s take Mao’s land reform, as an example. Once you have grasped the principal contradiction and its solution (the transformation of feudal peasant class into a revolutionary class, skipping over the proletariat stage), you unleash the full potential of the revolutionary fervor of the working class that even Chiang’s army that outnumbered the Red Army by many times was completely and utterly defeated.
  
  What was Chiang Kai-shek doing to do about it? Nothing - the CPC won because of its ideological superiority, not because it had the largest military or resources.
  
  You cannot cheat historical and dialectical materialism, just like you cannot defy the laws of physics. Marxism-Leninism is called scientific socialism for precisely this reason!
harsh truth tbh good post
Watch out, they’ll call you a doomer lib for this one

The way that this post is word, it makes me think a committed comrade wrote it pretending to be a questioning liberal. Good on them either way, we could probably do posting pretending to be liberals who are "just now" questioning capitalism.

Really unexpected top comments too, lemmy.world and the like have officially outfashed reddit-logo

I mean, it's /r/antiwork. It's like one step removed from something like /r/latestagecapitalism
- Surprised they let anti work stay tbh. I wasn’t really on reddit anymore by the time it came around but I remember hearing it was controversial and was maybe gonna get the cth treatment lol
Oh don't worry. Worldnews is currently making up for it by having a circle jerk over Milei because of a month to month inflation drop.

Tried to post parenti in that thread to combat pretty typical left anticommunism from an anarcho syndicalist and it didnt let me post 😭😭😭 i typed that shit up by hand from blackshirts and reds

The second top comment in the thread is recommending they read Capitalist Realism and Blackshirts and Reds so your comment might have gotten through, either that or some other cool person's comment did
- Read Blackshirts and Reds.
- Wasnt mine. I tried to write a long form post with a bunch of direct excerpts
consider drafting stuff locally or in a thread of your own and building your own library of pastas
o7

In terms of public sentiment I am pretty positive. Communism is becoming less and less of an effective Boogeyman each cycle and while GenZ does seem like a problem due to its reactionary gender/race identity politics I actually think there's reason to believe class based approach would gain some significant ground.

Here's the problem and why I remain not super enthusiastic and bordering on doomer: The last few election cycles have really showed that there are zero shortcuts here. The democratic party will straight up nuke itself before it allows an economically populist left movement take it over. If they didn't show that in 2016 or 2020 they hella fucking showed that in 2024.

People may broadly be coming around to like the idea of socialism and communism...but I think most of those people probably still in the mindset that we need to run leftwing candidates and vote our way to socialism.

Maybe we'll get there eventually...but I think we are a long way from people being ready to actually do direct action...and it's clear to me that's what its gonna take.

I shouldn't look. lenin-rage I just want to throw books at these people. Read This Soviet World, Soviet Democracy, Russian Justice. Read Blackshirts and reds. Read cowbees Marxism intro

Never heard of Russian Justice, only book that comes up with that exact title doesn't seem pro-communist at first look. Can you link it?
- https://comlib.encryptionin.space/epubs/soviet-justice/

Some will get radicalized and peel away every time liberalism eats shit, but the empire has further qualitative phases of decay to go through before mass defections from settlerism becomes realistic

When have settlers ever radicalized in large numbers though? Usually they just have to be driven out, right?
- Latin America?

Between 1790 and 1920, every monarchy said democracy and republics were failures and paths to dictatorship, until all the monarchies collapsed or were reformed into bourgeois democracies. I think by 2047 something very similar will happen with bourgeois democracies and communism.

It didnt just happen spontaneously Napoleon crammed it down their throats

Stalin shouldn't have stopped at Berlin but unironically
I've been thinking the exact same thing, almost down to the year

Eh, Libs have been saying this shit since 2018, they don't ever end up doing shit.

They started saying this in 2018, two years later we got the George Floyd protests. The Democratic party had to work HARD to coopt the surge left. And now people have even less faith in the Democratic party, and our organizational capacity is better (still small, but better)
- Wish I had your faith buddy
- that was black people not libs
I was always sympathetic towards communism, but to tbf it took a global pandemic for me to actually embrace it.

I'm not reading the thread but being in favor of communism works in theory, but in practice (lol) all these settlers will actually lose their quality of life if we were to have a revolution since we would have to dismantle imperialism and the benefits it provides. Few westerners are going to accept that, and so they will choose the treat button 9/10 times. Revolution happens in places where they have nothing to lose but their chains, but losing brunch and U2 at the Vegas sphere is not gonna fly

I don't think this is so true. If the billionaire and high-multimillionaire class is liquidated, that's a lot of resources and more importantly political power that is back in the hands of the proletariat. The ability to (on average) live in a society that actually has policies like what you want instead of trudging on with a "this is what reality is" resignated sigh is valuable (especially since most people are minoritized in some way besides being proles). Resources being spent towards pro-social ends instead of on corruption and the vanity of billionaires is also a gain that's hard to fathom. Yeah, there will be petite-bourg fuckers who want to continue with their fiefdoms unchallenged by nasty things like labor rights, but that's always the case to some extent. There will be a fascist movement from them that needs to be crushed, but that doesn't override the huge amount that people have to gain from revolution.
- i agree. this map indicates that the median american's wealth is slightly below the mean global citizen's wealth, meaning any revolution that managed to redistribute resources more fairly on a global level would actually improve the living conditions of most americans. the data is pre-covid as well, so wealth is even more concentrated today than the map indicates.
  
  whether most yankkkees realize this or could be brought to think in these terms is a completely different question, however
  
  Death to America
- The debate is largely mute, climate change guarantees revolutionary conditions one way or another (whether that revolution is successful is another story)
  
  But for an American revolution to materialize in any way, shape or form the overseas empire has to fall FIRST, for the simple reason the overseas imperial complex empowers and materially sustains the overwhelming security state at home
  
  There is no American org (potential or actual) that can overcome the might of 18 intelligence agencies, 5 bloated military branches, 1,000,000 heavily armed police officers and a reserve of at least 100 million potential brownshirts
  
  It's ironic, the US is in this specific aspect firmly a one-to-one with Czarist Russia, only a catastrophic overseas defeat can open the path toward revolution and even then 50 White Armies will spring up to meet the revolution
- Over half the nation who voted chose for Trump and the other half chose Harris - these people need imperialism and will not give it up until the conditions get so bad due to economic collapse that they aren't getting the benefits of imperialism anymore
- If the billionaire and high-multimillionaire class is liquidated, that's a lot of resources and more importantly political power that is back in the hands of the proletariat.
  
  What resources and where do they come from? Because ultimately, even if the final product or design is extracted from the US proletariat, the inputs (and increasingly the final product and design) are being extracted from elsewhere. With few exceptions (mainly agriculture, oil/gas lol, and some mining/forestry) everything we do, buy, or design at its base is extracted from elsewhere. Agriculture is its own can of worms since the labor is mostly imported and we need to end oil/gas extraction yesterday to have a habitable planet.
U2 at the Vegas sphere is not gonna fly

Lol could’ve picked any other band
- No, it's perfect. It's the archetypical band whose live performances are bombastic and completely superfluous (therefore wasteful), in the dumbest, most unnecessary venue possible.
- It really felt like the perfect choice, I stand by it!

I see antiwork is starting to realize they need to be more... antiwork.

That's where I started my way into being a leftist ( instead of not caring about politics )

People saying communism has never worked while china exists and is owning everyone makes me feel a certain way

But you see when China is making money is not communism, is capitalism. But when China is the enemy on my narrative we switch back the label and call them communism.