Like ok. When I was a lib, I had a lot of communist values already. I was already socdem leaning (though an Obama supporter because I foolishly believed he stood for those values). The vast majority of times I moved left involved some sort of confrontation with a person to my left on an issue. Sometimes there was resistance on my part, but that usually involved just like, a single argument, me realizing they were right, and moving left on the issue. Other times it was just... receiving information I didnt previously know. The closer to ML I got, the harder the struggles were, as some of the current geopolticial issues and also historical issues involved in that were the hardest to deprogram and the most hard coded. But I still got there.
Even simply openly calling myself as a communist was as simple as seeing someone else on Tumblr openly do so and realizing "oh wait thats an option?"
Oddly, "lesser evilism is not actually the correct way to approach electorally" was kind of my final gate? Despite being a poster here I sort of secretly still was a lesser evilist up until the recent stuff with Gaza. So it wasnt a straight line admittedly, but what it did do was give me a certain line of thinking about what the mindset of people who vote Democrat were.
In the midst of autistic myopia, I sort of for a long time believed that most libs were "communists in waiting" too. I sort of assumed you just had to spread the word, and they'd get there. Maybe they'd struggle on some of the same points I did, like not automatically believing a protest movement is good because its a protest movement, or that "America bad" isnt actually a bad way of thinking and critically supporting anti-American forces in the world is in fact the correct thing to do, and of course as I mentioned lesser evilism. But for the most part, you just had to give them permission to be communist. You just had to normalize it.
So seeing liberals like, be presented with the option to move left and slamming the door closed violently. Even on the most basic and obvious things. It was disheartening. I really thought it would be easier than that!
Theres this recent awful trend on TikTok (one Ive mostly only just heard of, because I'm not on that platform) of people "turning in their leftist card" over real leftists not flocking to support Harris and being principled about opposing genocide. One particular one, the only one I've seen with my own eyes, was a guy saying he "just found out he's not a leftist, he's a liberal, and [he's] turning in [his] leftist card". Like, whats happening there is a liberal is learning for the first time that he's a liberal. But like, my experience with that realization was to go "oh, so THATS what leftism is? OK. let me travel there" (yaknow, like I said, on average lol, it wasnt always that easy). So seeing the door slam for me is kinda weird? Still to this day despite being somewhat used to it now?
I relate to a lot of this, and I do wonder if it's an autism thing. Because like, I see a lot of lefties complain about libs as if they know they're thinly veiled fascists and are just pretending/virtue signaling etc, and they're always linking roderic day's thing about propaganda. But my experience was just nothing like that. It's like.... no, I literally just did not know lol. I always had good egalitarian-like values, and I was fed so much bullshit that I was just naively a liberal. I was a radlib for sooooo long because of all the other western 'leftists' being stuck in electoralism, defeatism, 'human-nature'-ism etc. The final thing that pushed me here was:
Wait, you mean communism ISN'T when no food?
Wait, you mean communism actually DID work and wasn't just a 1984 animal farm dictatorship ???
Wait, you mean it wasn't us libbies on the "right side of history", it was always the socialists, and basically every good historical 'great man' idol that we look up to (MLK, helen keller, einstein etc) was a socialist too??
THE COMMIES WERE RIGHT THIS WHOLE FREAKIN TIME????
Because my entire life I've been taught commie = evil, like, they're just The Bad Guys. It's drilled into your head. And then when you come up with something like "hey why don't we provide for everybody and make things fair?" it's always: "Nah, that doesn't work, it's been tried, and human beings are just too selfish to make it work."
And that had younger me like "Oh, okay... :( "
And our entire culture, media, news, history education etc is SUCH A FUCK that it took THIS LONG for me to finally get some real facts and be like wtf are you kidding me?!?!? The "villains" were right this whole time?!?!
Maybe it is like an autistic myopia for us. Maybe most people aren't like this...? I know it's more accurate that people's ideology follows their material interests, and for most of us westoids, our material interests are the empire staying an empire. And you could say that because I'm disabled, that means my material interests 100% align with the abolition of capitalism, therefore here I am. But there's definitely an element of like, bruh I did not KNOW. I wish somebody had told me sooner. But it's a wasteland out here in the west. I ultimately had to figure it out for myself.
And I'm glad I did, because unknowingly being a "communist waiting for permission to be one" is depressing as HELL man. I saw the BS of electoralism, reforms obviously were not working, I knew the necessity of revolution but I could NOT believe that it was ever possible, like the belief that humans are selfish and it just never works was so ingrained. So I literally felt like there was no hope. Absolutely nothing. We're just fucked and this is it and we're powerless to do anything about it. Total capitalist realism. The bleakest view of reality. Did you also go through this phase of utter despair like I did?
The "human nature" shit is such BS, too. Like we know a lot about how humans lived in prehistoric times. They were not, in fact, selfish assholes lol. And it turns out children are naturally prone to be empathetic and will share things almost instinctively. We just beat those instincts out of them by the time they reach kindergarten.
Well same! I remember after first reading Marx as a teen I was like "well all this makes complete sense and this is what I want the world to be" only to be told from left and right that "sure sure sure, but all that is just UtOpiaN!" That you can sure be this utopian idealist, but none of it will work "in the real world" and nobody will take you seriously. This weird invalidation of my utopian idealist wordview just got to me for a long time, very long, but I still moved left consistently. I should have examined what this was a lot sooner tbh. But I had not read any real theory or heard real history, not really.
I see a lot of lefties complain about libs as if they know they're thinly veiled fascists and are just pretending/virtue signaling
Yeah I admit my past makes this very frusterating to me. And also like, the freinds I have that are still libs and I know are fairly well meaning people overall, just misguided on some points. Ive never been as much of a fan of that kind of rhetoric.
I think the fact that my life experience makes me more empathetic to on the ground liberals and why they are the way they are is actually a useful trait that I shouldnt kill, because it gives me an angle people in your position dont have. What troubles me are people here who are themselves ex-liberals and have completely forgotten that in their rhetoric about liberals. Also, I didnt really go into this in my OP, but its not like my experience is that all liberals slam the door. Just certain types of particularly dug in very online liberals on social media. Irl experiences are usually very different, as well as experiances with people online with whom you have personal relationships.
There are people on this forum from countries where “liberals” cozy up with fascist death squads. It isn’t a rhetorical game to them like it is to you.
A lot of online liberal spaces have accepted "ACAB" wholeheartedly so idk if that applies to my experience really. And the fact that like, my acutal lived situation makes that not particularly relevant to my life would seem to matter to how I approach the issue of how to interact with liberals in my life? And remember, I'm not talking about liberal politicians, I'm talking about regular people who arent in positions of power.
And my final point is. If regular liberal by default people are irredeemable, then we've already lost. There is no hope in that line of thinking. I fail to see how we can win if thats the case. That's too big a percentage of the population. We don't have to win over /r/NeoLiberal to win, but we do have to win over a lot of people who are liberals toughtlessly because thats just normal for them. We do have to win over a lot of people who were where I was once.
Liberals aren’t going to be convinced in the marketplace of ideas.
So what happened with me lol.
There’s always been the odd class traitor. There’s never been a revolution composed entirely of them. Liberals have no interest in revolutions and only the odd exception (like you) will slip through. You have to look at aggregates and populations, not individuals.
Your disability may have lead you to be more empathetic and open to leftwing ideas than otherwise. Or perhaps you had a uniquely open and analytical mind. Most Liberals do not and will never have this and won’t join us until it’s in their interests to (when their status quo has gone to shit).
The floor is falling out on capitalism gradually. Some “liberals” fall through into the meat grinder and wake up. The way towards revolution requires a whole lot more of them falling out of the treat system.
I think there is some hope for normal liberals but blue maga lanyard libs are way too far gone
There is no hope for either in aggregate until their conditions deteriorate. Individuals from either group can wake up, but the masses won’t until they are forced to
Depends on the subject really. The hardest bars to cross for me are also the ones I find are hardest for liberals (or baby leftists who havent totally dewormed) in my experience. That being China/Russia type geopolitics stuff that ISNT Palestine (that ones actually fairly easy for them to get in my experience, sometimes you get both sides are bad but you can only see so much suffering before you break on that one I think) because the brainworms on that one are VERY settled and sometimes the stuff you have to get through isnt super intuitive, as I've described before. Thats why you get so many self-described anarchists who repeat state department propaganda about those countries and Venezuela and The DPRK and such. Because the brainworms on these subjects trigger the well meaning part of their brain. "Oh China is bad because Hong Kong/The Uighers/its a police state" ect. There are similar things for other countries. Its also why they tend to support protest movements that turn out to be color revolutions, because the propaganda behind manufacturing consent for those movements is extremely effective to well meaning brains.
And then there's lesser evilism on voting, which tbh I still think you can sorta make arguments within the realm of leftism about voting strategy I guess, but still like, that one is also hard to deworm like I said that was my final gate not even a year ago. I know people who are "there" on most subjects, but still think that Democrats are the lesser evil and you have to vote for them. And their reasons for believing that? Entirely well meaning.
You can also sometimes have trouble with other stuff, like you might not be able to convince a well meaning person that revolution is good because they may be hyperfocused on the people that will get hurt as collateral damage and not be able to look at the whole picture. Looking at institutions structuraly rather than collectivly can be tough too, with things like convincing people that cops are a blanket bad thing. Speaking of which, it can also be hard to deworm people on things that have ALWAYS been there and seem like an essential part of existance, when it comes to things like police and prison abolition.
I don’t know if it’s an autism thing because I’m basically neurotypical but I felt this way too. My experience was pretty much a mirror of what you and OP said. In fact, I think I’m going through the despair part at the moment.
I’m trying to radicalize my partner, and they do the “human nature” thing, and I think arguing against it is helping me flesh out my own thinking on it. I’m still on my journey into leftism, but I’m on solid ground knowing it’s the morally correct path.
Thank you both for sharing. It helps to know that others have walked this path before me.
In fact, I think I’m going through the despair part at the moment.
It really had to happen for me at that point because
CW: suicide
I could not tolerate being alive if the truth was that a better world simply isn't possible, and I will be forced to live in this horrible dystopia until I die. In that state, I figured why should I live in this wretched, wicked world of capitalist realism? Why not expedite my death, then? I should just simply die now and spare myself the inevitable endless suffering. It was the realization that: yes, a better world is possible, because it HAS been done before!! (USSR etc) that saved my mental state and gave me a more solid foundation for coping with life.
In marxist terminology, I could no longer tolerate the contradictions of liberalism in my mind.
Yeah honestly I don't understand how any adult can be paying attention to how the world works and not be a communist, but I guess people like to believe in comforting fairy tales like liberalism. Lately I've been getting into arguments with liberals when I criticize Harris, and they act like I've insulted them personally.
you have insulted them personally by making them say the rest of the phrase "I'm as left as they come, but"
a liberal cannot allow space to his left to exist. those are all bots and paid trolls over there.
Any political strategy other than Sorkin-like reasonable debate and compromise is scary and probably Russian
For a USian liberal, voting for Harris is like receiving absolution from your sins, like going to a confessional on Sunday then continuing to sin on Monday. You cannot remove this absolution from them or they will be forced to confront their unearned privilege of existing in an evil neocolonial empire.
This is wild to watch. I have seen this several times now in covid cautious circles. The same people who expected Biden to be better than Trump now say that Harris will be better, like it's magic. The ones that have been extremely vocal on how shit Biden has been on covid and say how that has radicalized them...
Afaik Harris has taken no clear stances on the issue. These people honestly have been beaten down once already and now expect different results from the same establishment. Harris is not bringing back masking or protections.
Something not being the worse option doesn't make the option good.
I had a similar phase when I was a lot younger. My turning point was probably working construction out of high school. This was further reinforced the following summer when I did work on an assembly line and a wrecking yard. The thing I noticed was how little "liberals" actually cared about the people I worked with. They'd say they supported immigrants, but then the immigrants I worked with had jobs outside of what we were doing. I'd be exhausted at the end of my shift, would go home, shower, eat, then go to sleep. But there were motherfuckers out there who were going to their next gig
I'd try to explain this to people (white people especially) what others were going through. And so-called progressives would look at me in disbelief. Or use terms like "unskilled." Made me realize "Oh...we are not actually the same. You're just upset you're not on top of the food chain, not that the food chain exists."
It was very similar for me.
I became a communist the day I found lemmygrad.
Then I told everyone about it. I thought they would also become communist if they knew the same I knew.
There are a lot of anti-capitalist people who call themselves liberals because they have not realised that they should be calling themselves communists.
Like a shitload of them.
The barrier is permission and brainworms.
A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact:
I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.
II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.
that I seriously believed that evil simply did not exist, and the closest thing to evil was just ignorance.
Yeah I believed essentially this for a long time. Like I'm pretty sure bullshit like "Hitler thought he was doing the right thing" came out of my mouth at some point.
I mean to some extent I still struggle with it. I have a hard time believing that "regular people" that I meet and can interact with can just be straight up evil. I still can only feel that way about historical figures and politicans and famous sex pests (and even then, only the worst ones) and such. I prefer to believe people are misguided in most cases. My mind tends to relate to why people think that way. And I mean, I am a stubborn rehabilitation and restoration guy when it comes to justice to this day, but now thats somewhat curtailed by the knowledge that some people cant be rehabilated, its just better to stick to it as a policy for a state.
That point about tear gas is good though.
Depending on your definition of evil, I still think evil doesn't exist. I think people are products of their circumstances, and that's the end of it really. Many people of course are malicious, but only because their ape brains learned from the world to be that way. Improving those circumstances for everyone is consequently the most important pursuit to reducing what would be the closest thing I'd label as 'evil'.
And if we really got stuck arguing the "human nature" topic with someone there's plenty of evidence of sharing in nature when own needs are met. If people's (shared of course) subjective experience of most humans = selfish dicks is evidence at all, it is equally evidence of human nature being subject to the environment it lives in. Yaknow, a fucking hellhole
Also, the more harmful and dangerous kinds of Cluster-B personality disorders, the kind that tend to be associated most closely with what literature has called "evil" for millennia, have a genetic component as well as an environmental one.
The potential for people to be - even partly - innately evil is a painful concept to grapple with.
...[T]he only thing that does exist is disorders that can lead people to have a higher capacity for evil...
That's probably the crux of it. It's hard to figure out both why people who went through similar experiences and people with similar neurotypes turn out good or bad. I find it hard not to veer into either extreme of everyone being innately good and some people being innately bad. I'm nowhere close to being equipped to reckon with the messy reality of morality we live in.
I'm convinced those former leftist types on tiktok are an op. The discourse on there is infuriating rn.
For me, I realized I wasn't liberal when "More and better democrats" quickly turned into "just more democrats" on DailyKos. I tended to agree with the general opinion that the left had a bunch of unserious hippies with unviable ideas, and that others like me just wanted liberals with those ideas but pursued with better political acumen.
Sanders was that liberal for me. He seemed like an obvious slam dunk fir liberal values and with the sort of career and and political acumen to make a real impact. When other libs just went in on this guy, I realized that their politics were a very shallow sort of us vs. them mentality vs. relublicans.
I quit DailyKos and found myself to what I call liteleft, which includes like Cenk Uyghur and Jimmy Dore and other cranks like that.
But those places were full of transphobes and tended to fall for fascist recruitment strategies based around that ("This PC identity politics shit is splitting the left. Check out this alt-right grifter who will onramp you to more radical shit!").
Around then, I saw some posters in r/WayOfTheBern who mentioned a place called r/chapotraphouse who were chill about trans people, and the rest was just slowly being weaned off of capitalist talking points
Sorta similar for me, once Bernie ran in 2016 socialism became kinda non-taboo and once I started looking it was very fast to just go "oh yeah capitalism does suck" after seeing the issues for a while but never really having it click. Still had a lot of brain worms to work through and still have a bunch that I probably haven't even noticed yet, but I feel like once I went anti-capitalist it took a long time for me to find out where I was in the giant pile of leftist labels. Kinda just picked up anarchism because when I still watched breadtube it seemed like the least offensive since it didn't challenge a lot of brain worms. Also I was chatting a girl up that said she was a leftist and when I self identified as an MLM she ghosted me. Then after kinda running with it, learning more and doing more self crit and reading theory COVID happened. The correct response to COVID was displayed by China and required "authoritarianism" to enact, and then it was just kinda like the last piece fell out and now I'm what I would've called a tankie back in 2018.
Its always interesting what issue is people's breaking point. For me it was Mike Brown and the Ferguson protests. That it was Covid for you is really interesting to me. Makes sense though.
Interesting thread. There are a few different discussions happening but I'll just put my thoughts in one spot.
Discussion 1: There are no real liberals, they are either secretly fascist or secretly communist
Maybe this conversation was more between-the-lines than explicitly stated in this thread. But I sense it's there, so... against this potential strawman, I will claim that liberalism is in fact a valid third position, regardless of whether an individual liberal is ultimately more sympathetic to fascism or communism when contradictions force a conflict.
Part of the allure of liberalism, as contrasted with fascism and communism, is that it reaffirms a world governed by abstract laws. The basic assumption of liberalism is that humans are irrational, and therefore must be rescued by the dispassionate rule of laws, institutions, and processes. Fascism and communism reject this basic assumption because both involve human intervention over these abstractions which can run afoul (depending on one's perspective, of course). This opposition between humans and abstractions is why horseshoe theory is so easily accepted by liberals.
In those moments of history when liberals are forced to pick a side between fascism and communism, they have a few options. First, they can "go down with the ship" and fight for liberalism until they are killed or otherwise made irrelevant. Second, they can side with fascism temporarily in order to protect the institutions which they hold most important. Third, they can side with communism if they realize that their liberal ideas were only ever in service to humanist ideals, ideals which experience demonstrates are not achievable through liberalism, but possibly so with communism.
Discussion 2: Is it a sign of autism to believe other people are by default altruistic/leftist/communist?
I'm not autistic (to the best of my knowledge) and I am the same way. And unless 100% of lefties are autistic, I think it is not unique to autistic people to have this default assumption about other people. I would argue that everyone assumes that others think in the same way as them, until proven otherwise. This is the basic premise of many a TV drama and also real-life relationship troubles. Everyone thinks differently and has different life experiences, this is true without invoking neurodivergence at all.
Maybe it's true that autistic people are more empathetic on average. If that is true, I would wonder if that is directly caused by the "autistic mind" so-to-speak, or is it just that marginalization tends to make people more empathetic? (I'm assuming that most autistic people have at some point felt marginalized due to their autism, apologies if this offends someone)
Discussion 3: Is it a waste of time to recruit liberals?
I agree with @autismdragon@hexbear.net on this. If liberals can't be recruited, then who the hell is going to make up a revolution?
There are two similar but distinct issues here, and they are worth separating:
- The average liberal is not going to switch sides the moment they are given license to be communist, if ever
- The average person's ideology is determined by their material conditions, so there is no impulse for liberals to change their world view until material conditions deteriorate further
To keep this brief, I'll simply say that it is important to take the long view. For those of us who de-liberalized, it's easy to forget just how gradual the transition was, and probably how frustrating it would have appeared to leftists at the time. This is just part of the process of developing consciousness among the working class. It doesn't happen overnight. Neither is class consciousness automatic. There are those Marxists who believe that revolution is inevitable given worsening material conditions, but I believe that it is the confluence of both worsening conditions and revolutionary action which causes change. One without the other is ineffectual.
One more thought on this actually. Precisely how much worse must be the conditions of the average liberal before they convert, then? There is no bottom to the conditions of the working class, and there is no ceiling to exploitation. Things are ok in many places but they're becoming bad in a lot of the Western world, even in America, for average middle-class families.
Precisely how much worse must be the conditions of the average liberal before they convert, then? There is no bottom to the conditions of the working class, and there is no ceiling to exploitation. Things are ok in many places but they're becoming bad in a lot of the Western world, even in America, for average middle-class families.
An insightful question. A comparison of the conditions of the western working class (as we've observed in our lives and studies) to those of the English proletariat in Engels' and Marx's time would be illustrative as to "how much worse must be the conditions" before the liberals stop liberalling so successfully among the workers.
Mostly from Engels, Conditions of the Working Class in England. I'll type up some highlights in addition to the full images.
Living conditions: Literally bailing the river water out of your dwelling every morning
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20 people to a 2room+attic+basement residence. 120 people to a sometimes nonfunctional privy. Ireland was even more crowded.
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food in stores: Old, rancid, rotting meat. Rotting vegetables. Mouldy cheese.
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Soap-refuse mixed in with sugar. Dirt and sheep fat mixed with cocoa.
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From Capital; cobwebs, cockroaches, sand and alum in bread.
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Vagrants, tramps, homeless, beggars and the like Poor rounded up and thrown into workhouses with conditions similar to or worse than prisons. Families broken up. Hard labour (harder than regular wage labour) but useless (so as not to distort the market). No visitors, gifts, leaving, etc without permission from the inspector.
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Some choice examples of conditions in the workhouses include children being locked in dark rooms with corpses as a punishment for bedwetting
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Such punishments were common, and the rooms crowded, cold, filthy, and the punished youths often stripped naked
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As for treatment of the old and the dead?
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As for working conditions, I'll just post one screenshot from working class bc this is getting long
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One particular one, the only one I've seen with my own eyes, was a guy saying he "just found out he's not a leftist, he's a liberal, and [he's] turning in [his] leftist card".
It sounds like the kind of ratcheting-right rhetoric the DNC would put out there if they wanted to paint genocide concerns as not coming from "real" liberals. It kind of tries to reframe "liberal" as positive too. Pretty effective idea. Yaknow if would be a good astroturf campaign, if that's what it was.
My astroturf alarms didnt go off with this one, largely because of the production values being too jank lol. But youre right, it would be effective. And I think there's something inorganic about it becoming so popular on that platform.
Yeah, the impulse to push as hard and as far left as humanly possible (then just kind of keep pushing indefinitely) always existed
No yeah I appreciate that. I wasnt sure anyone else could relate.
jumping on the "also autistic, this describes my experience" bandwagon
