Disagree, it’s pretty far left. Reddit was center-left, this is where those too far left for Reddit came as it shifted a little to the right with the top-down reaction to the API change.
You refer to .ml, but that’s not really left, it’s a tankie instance, which is closer to fascism than socialism. I see far more people on Lemmy idolizing communism/socialism than any other extreme ideology.
You’re oversimplifying (and so was I, to be totally fair). The Reddit exodus has lots of reasons. I think it has more to do with one’s thoughts on corporatization and technocultural knowledge which does correlate with left-leaning politics. I’m sure there are many who are just sick of platforms giving Trumpists tacit approval (I think this is the primary driver for people leaving twitter) but that Venn diagram is not a perfect circle.
.ml has tankies, and there’s plenty of fair criticism to direct at Dessalines and the mod team for generally cultivating a culture of knee-jerk anti-Western thought (and the inverse, more importantly) but it’s not “closer to fascism” because it leans authoritarian and drapes itself in USSR/CCP aesthetic. But it’s mostly a FOSS instance with well-deserved bashing of US imperialism and state-sponsored terrorism.
Tankies are pretty close to fascism, and tend to support regimes like in Russia the same as regimes in China. For them, the motivation doesn’t seem as motivated by economics as itvi government structure, since modern Russia is very far from socialist ideals. Basically, anything that goes against US interests is the priority, not economics as it would for your average socialist.
I think you’re losing some nuance but yeah “anything that goes against US interests is the priority” is a real problem in some leftist spaces (I was banned from /r/latestagecommunism for suggesting that maybe the things we hear about North Korea aren’t just Western lies to discredit a true Communist state.) Of the “big three” I see the most of that on lemmygrad so I don’t bother.
But there’s a scale of uncritical support and I think people use “tankie” a little too broadly to dismiss people rather than consider the different facets of belief. Online discourse sucks.
Agreed 100%. People also use “Nazi” way too liberally, and it’s really off-putting and cheapens the term for actual Nazis.
And there’s only so much nuance I’m going to put into a comment, but for “tankie,” I generally mean those who support authoritarian regimes because they stand up to the US, not because of their actual ideology. Supporting China, Russia, and NK in the same breath is nonsensical, especially since only one of those is actually somewhat communist and one is explicitly not. I get it, there are a lot of reasons to dislike the US, but that doesn’t make Russia and NK “good.”
And yeah, online discourse sucks, probably because we self-organize into echo chambers. Reddit was less bad when I joined, but pretty much any reasonably popular SM is problematic now.
Democratic market socialism is a perfectly moderate ideology (too moderate, because often it lets the market win over and the democracy decay). You can also consider weekends, paid leave, women’s vote, public education, healthcare, public media and social security as socialist policies. It is one of the main political currents founding the EU and in South America. Only in the US is it used to describe radicals or as an insult.
I’m even reluctant to point this out to magats now, because they never get the point and may even get it in their head that these are the things to destroy wherever they exist, just because they’re socialist in origin.
Sure, democratic socialism is center left, I’m talking about actual socialism, which gets promoted here quite a bit. Reddit was mostly dem socs and welfare state proponents, Lemmy takes it a bit further.
Democratic socialism isn’t socialism though, it’s capitalism with lots of government services.
The authoritarian part is pretty much baked in to “real” socialism since you need something to control the means of production until society is ready, and that hasn’t yet happened. Yes, there are other theorized structures, but they’re unproven.
Tankies (i.e. many of those on .ml) are into the authoritarian part, whereas people here are more into democratic socialism, which is another thing entirely.
Yes, indeed, socialism is an intellectual offshoot of capitalism/liberalism/enlightenment (not neoliberalism, of course) that emerged as a reaction to the industrial revolution (and the French revolution, or you could go as far back as the English civil war, with the levellers) as a reaction to the wealth inequality it creates and it predates Marxism, but communism coopted the term and made it seem exclusively authoritarian (because that was supposedly the only way to beat capital).
Engels wrote that in 1848, when The Communist Manifesto was published, socialism was respectable in Europe while communism was not. The Owenites in England and the Fourierists in France were considered respectable socialists while working-class movements that “proclaimed the necessity of total social change” denoted themselves communists.[54] This branch of socialism produced the communist work of Étienne Cabet in France and Wilhelm Weitling in Germany.[55] British moral philosopher John Stuart Mill discussed a form of economic socialism within free market. In later editions of his Principles of Political Economy (1848), Mill posited that “as far as economic theory was concerned, there is nothing in principle in economic theory that precludes an economic order based on socialist policies”[56][57] and promoted substituting capitalist businesses with worker cooperatives.[58] While democrats looked to the Revolutions of 1848 as a democratic revolution which in the long run ensured liberty, equality, and fraternity, Marxists denounced it as a betrayal of working-class ideals by a bourgeoisie indifferent to the proletariat.[59]
The API changes were the last straw for me too, but I had been searching for a while because it felt very much like an echo-chamber. Lemmy does too, but at least the API is open.
It depends on where you draw the line for “the center.” I’d agree it’s leftist for America, but it’s center-left on a global scale. You’ll usually get some push back if you promote true leftist politics. Usually more agreement than dissent, but still some.
Sure, the US does skew right. I do think Lemmy is pretty far left even compared to areas like Europe that are further left from the US. It’s kind of hard to gauge whether people are serious about things like “guillotine the rich” (or Luigi references) or exaggerating, but you don’t see that type of talk on popular subreddits (even before the crackdown), at least I didn’t, and coming to Lemmy was a bit of a shift left from what I already saw as “center left.”
I am a bit left of center in the US and pretty centrist on a global scale, and I lean fairly libertarian. I’m left of most libertarian candidates in the US, supporting things like UBI as an alternative to welfare programs. So I think I have a decent perspective on what’s left and right.
I am a bit left of center in the US and pretty centrist on a global scale, and I lean fairly libertarian. I’m left of most libertarian candidates in the US, supporting things like UBI as an alternative to welfare programs. So I think I have a decent perspective on what’s left and right.
I started at your position a long time ago, when I was a teenager. I realized libertarians are full of shit, and eventually discovered a better descriptor of my beliefs was anarchist (in particular, social anarchist). I think the government shouldn’t be telling people how to live or what they can or can’t do. It should be there to protect people (emphasis; not corporations).
Libertarians (in the US at least) are really just anarcho-capitalists. They want freedom for businesses, but usually at the expense of freedom for people. They don’t want protection for people from exploitation. They want businesses with enough money to be able to exert their authority as far as possible, to the extent of blocking competition and effectively creating slaves. (They’ll argue they don’t agree with slavery, but what’s the difference between your employer owning your ability to live and slavery?)
Disagree, it’s pretty far left. Reddit was center-left, this is where those too far left for Reddit came as it shifted a little to the right with the top-down reaction to the API change.
You refer to .ml, but that’s not really left, it’s a tankie instance, which is closer to fascism than socialism. I see far more people on Lemmy idolizing communism/socialism than any other extreme ideology.
You’re oversimplifying (and so was I, to be totally fair). The Reddit exodus has lots of reasons. I think it has more to do with one’s thoughts on corporatization and technocultural knowledge which does correlate with left-leaning politics. I’m sure there are many who are just sick of platforms giving Trumpists tacit approval (I think this is the primary driver for people leaving twitter) but that Venn diagram is not a perfect circle.
.ml has tankies, and there’s plenty of fair criticism to direct at Dessalines and the mod team for generally cultivating a culture of knee-jerk anti-Western thought (and the inverse, more importantly) but it’s not “closer to fascism” because it leans authoritarian and drapes itself in USSR/CCP aesthetic. But it’s mostly a FOSS instance with well-deserved bashing of US imperialism and state-sponsored terrorism.
Tankies are pretty close to fascism, and tend to support regimes like in Russia the same as regimes in China. For them, the motivation doesn’t seem as motivated by economics as itvi government structure, since modern Russia is very far from socialist ideals. Basically, anything that goes against US interests is the priority, not economics as it would for your average socialist.
I think you’re losing some nuance but yeah “anything that goes against US interests is the priority” is a real problem in some leftist spaces (I was banned from /r/latestagecommunism for suggesting that maybe the things we hear about North Korea aren’t just Western lies to discredit a true Communist state.) Of the “big three” I see the most of that on lemmygrad so I don’t bother.
But there’s a scale of uncritical support and I think people use “tankie” a little too broadly to dismiss people rather than consider the different facets of belief. Online discourse sucks.
Agreed 100%. People also use “Nazi” way too liberally, and it’s really off-putting and cheapens the term for actual Nazis.
And there’s only so much nuance I’m going to put into a comment, but for “tankie,” I generally mean those who support authoritarian regimes because they stand up to the US, not because of their actual ideology. Supporting China, Russia, and NK in the same breath is nonsensical, especially since only one of those is actually somewhat communist and one is explicitly not. I get it, there are a lot of reasons to dislike the US, but that doesn’t make Russia and NK “good.”
And yeah, online discourse sucks, probably because we self-organize into echo chambers. Reddit was less bad when I joined, but pretty much any reasonably popular SM is problematic now.
I just hate their app and refuse to use it
Oh it’s a terrible app, just the worst.
Democratic market socialism is a perfectly moderate ideology (too moderate, because often it lets the market win over and the democracy decay). You can also consider weekends, paid leave, women’s vote, public education, healthcare, public media and social security as socialist policies. It is one of the main political currents founding the EU and in South America. Only in the US is it used to describe radicals or as an insult.
I’m even reluctant to point this out to magats now, because they never get the point and may even get it in their head that these are the things to destroy wherever they exist, just because they’re socialist in origin.
Sure, democratic socialism is center left, I’m talking about actual socialism, which gets promoted here quite a bit. Reddit was mostly dem socs and welfare state proponents, Lemmy takes it a bit further.
Yes, but that is no reason to disparage socialism itself. In authoritarian socialism, it is the authoritarian part that sucks.
Democratic socialism isn’t socialism though, it’s capitalism with lots of government services.
The authoritarian part is pretty much baked in to “real” socialism since you need something to control the means of production until society is ready, and that hasn’t yet happened. Yes, there are other theorized structures, but they’re unproven.
Tankies (i.e. many of those on .ml) are into the authoritarian part, whereas people here are more into democratic socialism, which is another thing entirely.
Yes, indeed, socialism is an intellectual offshoot of capitalism/liberalism/enlightenment (not neoliberalism, of course) that emerged as a reaction to the industrial revolution (and the French revolution, or you could go as far back as the English civil war, with the levellers) as a reaction to the wealth inequality it creates and it predates Marxism, but communism coopted the term and made it seem exclusively authoritarian (because that was supposedly the only way to beat capital).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism#Etymology
I left because of the api changes and the excessive censorship (rip r/watchpeopledie my beloved) and it’s general hatred towards ita mobile website
The API changes were the last straw for me too, but I had been searching for a while because it felt very much like an echo-chamber. Lemmy does too, but at least the API is open.
It depends on where you draw the line for “the center.” I’d agree it’s leftist for America, but it’s center-left on a global scale. You’ll usually get some push back if you promote true leftist politics. Usually more agreement than dissent, but still some.
Sure, the US does skew right. I do think Lemmy is pretty far left even compared to areas like Europe that are further left from the US. It’s kind of hard to gauge whether people are serious about things like “guillotine the rich” (or Luigi references) or exaggerating, but you don’t see that type of talk on popular subreddits (even before the crackdown), at least I didn’t, and coming to Lemmy was a bit of a shift left from what I already saw as “center left.”
I am a bit left of center in the US and pretty centrist on a global scale, and I lean fairly libertarian. I’m left of most libertarian candidates in the US, supporting things like UBI as an alternative to welfare programs. So I think I have a decent perspective on what’s left and right.
I started at your position a long time ago, when I was a teenager. I realized libertarians are full of shit, and eventually discovered a better descriptor of my beliefs was anarchist (in particular, social anarchist). I think the government shouldn’t be telling people how to live or what they can or can’t do. It should be there to protect people (emphasis; not corporations).
Libertarians (in the US at least) are really just anarcho-capitalists. They want freedom for businesses, but usually at the expense of freedom for people. They don’t want protection for people from exploitation. They want businesses with enough money to be able to exert their authority as far as possible, to the extent of blocking competition and effectively creating slaves. (They’ll argue they don’t agree with slavery, but what’s the difference between your employer owning your ability to live and slavery?)