A linear scale and even the 2d “compass” is only useful for the most basic introduction to political parties but sometimes ya gotta meet people where they are at 🤷♀️
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The problem are the words we use. When some people say the right and letft are the same they don’t mean politics but type of person.
No we mean politics.
Democrats and Republicans don’t give a shit about working people. They bow to their capitalist benefactors the same, it’s just that one party openly hates the people it marginalizes and the other pretends to care about those people to the extent that it doesn’t cost them anything.
Which party came out swinging for Gaza in 2024? Which party rejected Israeli money? Which party bypassed the will of the people and said “vote for this cop or the bad guys will win?”
Okay, what is a right type of person and a left type of person?
Eta: I don’t know why this is being upvoted. I read their comment wrong. I don’t want to delete it because the thread won’t make sense.
The comment I was replying to was irrelevant to the thought behind the meme, which doesn’t make it a bad comment, just not something I would have replied to because I don’t think it was directed to me specifically 🤷♀️
The left and right have the same kind of person who exhibit the same kind of behavior, but believe in different things.
For example: There is a type of person that is quiet another kind of person is loud.
Both the left and the right have quiet and loud people.
No one ever said that, people define left and right in regard of political alignment
Do you even understand what I’m saying?
Thanks for clarifying, I did read your comment wrong. Brain hasn’t properly booted yet 😅
Yes, it is true that this is what people sometimes mean. What the meme is about is specifically when people say the politics of the “far right” and “far left” are similar.
If it’s USAmerican or Western imperialist power context, then often the fishook theory seems more applicable:
I was searching for those memes comrade.
Going off the fish hook theory I’ve only really seen it used by those using it as stethoscope theory but with those on the center somehow on the left
I am not familiar with the person on the right.
I think that’s Bukharin.
Trotsky, Stalin, Lenin in that order
No, it’s Trotsky, Stalin, Bukharin.
oh yeah it was tiny and blurry on my screen
‘Lemmitor’ is too much like ‘Redditor’. Why not something reflecting how Lemmy is better than Reddit, like … Lemmyst?
Lemmitor is used derogatively, the point is precisely to highlight how a bunch of users left reddit but try to shape Lemmy into exactly the sort of place they left (or were kicked out of) starting with its worst aspects. It’s mostly used to describe a user who engages in annoying redditisms such as that obnoxious John Oliver kind of shallow, terminally ironic outlook on politics.
‘Lemmitor’ is too much like ‘Redditor’.
Yes, that’s the joke.
God, I hate the political compas
It’s so lazy! I don’t have a better suggestion but the linear scale is effectively the compass with liberal in the centre, authoritarian on either end and lazy people decided that the more “left” or “right” you are the closer to authoritarian you are.
Idk if I’ve even seen anarchist on the scale but I’d like to see some justification for where it gets sat.
I always thought nationstates gets a bit closer (and it’s funny)
I did, in fact, lol.
Fun fact, if you meet someone who unironically uses the term “horseshoe theory”, it is morally incumbent on you to kick the shit out of them until they can literally see inside themselves. It is then, and only then, that you are to ask them: “are you capable of introspection now?”
Oh hey it’s Robert Evans
What about those who use _ stethoscope theory_?
Stuff goes straight up the butt.
Lemmy libs: “Smells like TANKIE!!!”
The more centrist you are, the more correct you are. So if you aren’t centrist enough, you need to centre even harder until the fence spike is poking right up your arsehole. Then you can feel smug as you look down on all the “extremists” and give a wink to the Nazi.
An anarchist walks in to a bar, sees the bartender missing, hops over and starts serving drinks.
A Nazi walks in to the bar and starts beating the shit out of a patron.
A centrist follows the Nazi in to the bar, sees what’s happening as the anarchist hops over the bar to try to stop the fight. The centrist insists on hearing the Nazi out, accuses the anarchist of being violent, and when the bartender finally comes back to run the bar, the centrist accuses him of stealing.
If only the real world was a straight line, and there were nothing such as authoritarian coopting of collective efforts, resembling right wing fascist authoritarian, wearing the corpse of an attempted social movement.
Why animal farm exists
Why the ‘national socialists’ came for the communists and socialists first.
You’re representing a high dimensional ecosystem with oversimplified boundings being flattened into a linear scale, and the ‘horseshoe’ is moreso adapting the simple heuristic to better represent the more complicated reality.
Sometimes the meaning of words is opportunistically changed, or the people directing a group change, and we actually have to comprehend and adapt to that.
A better representation of the political system is like a body where a bunch of organs seem to think cancer might be the best shape to be. Cancer as in ‘defining wider boundings of surrounding systems as exploitable environment’ usually ignoring how the surrounding body is literally necessary for sustaining life for the cancer itself. This is also where we would talk about things like instrumental convergence in natural/human systems.
So the linear line doesn’t really explain the constant rugged individualism usurping spaces in our complex high dimensional social reality. Ergo horseshoe heuristic.
I, too, base my political and historical analysis on a piece of fiction written by a classic, rapist, snitch working for the British government, whose works were disseminated by the CIA. What would the alternative be? First hand sources?? A decent history book???
Instead of bending over backwards trying to justify an abstraction that only works sometimes when viewing politics through an incredibly limited perspective, read another book. Or, seek out people who have direct experience of whatever you’re investigating and, in good faith, tall to them, ask them questions, and think for yourself.
Expanding a heuristic to more dimensions does not aid understanding. It just confuses the subject by adding abstract complexity, when what is really needed in order to understand a social or political movement is direct experience in the conditions that create these movements. There is no abstraction that is a passable substitute for practical experience. Less fancy abstractions, more relatable concretions.
Why animal farm exists
Omfg if I hear these 2 books one more time being used instead of actual historical evidence
Read a fucking history book instead of pointing at literature and saying “see? this is why communism can never work, not even in a million years and we should all suffer under capitalism until no one is left”
Lmao right? A satire of a particular group of people that was considered kind of shallow even when it was first published, and was written by someone who really wanted (another) job with the government is hardly useful analysis.
you don’t think that socialist efforts get de-railed or coopted by opportunistic oligarchs or figureheads?
‘heterarchical systems need more advanced structure building to survive’ =/= ‘socialism bad.’
everyone is angrily lashing at their own misinterpretation of animal farm as a critique of animal farm.
like people who can’t comprehend building solidarity over stupid media driven culture war bullshit. yelling angrily at other progressives for being a different shape, or defending actual intentional derailing of efforts are weirdly not the solutions to the famous fallibility of progressive efforts, which you should care about if you actually care about progressive efforts.
The chief point of Animal Farm is that workers are stupid, helpless, and doomed to follow whatever the intelligent people of society say, and that these intelligent people will only ever work to prey on the masses. Orwell had to grapple with his own opposition to the USSR and Stalin, as well as the popular support both enjoyed internally. So, he did what he did best, take an aristocratic viewpoint and force it through allegory rather than center the working class as the maker of history.
I’m not angry at animal farm, I just think it’s a satire of what was going on in the USSR at the time it was written and can’t be applied uncritically to anything vaguely left wing.
i think it’s a really good tool for framing the different opportunistic tools that derail progressive efforts, even to this day.
divide-and-conquer is sure as hell working really well lately. do you remember the atheism feminism war not too long ago? or the gender war? or more race-wars than you can shake a stick at?
there’s a reason why right-wing authoritarians and their neoliberal counterparts are currently dominating. animal farm is a really good simplified example showing how and why such a thing can happen, even when there’s a lot of support for progressive efforts.
you could show tools like the motte-and-bailey creeping of the overton window in both animal farm, and real life examples of leftist efforts being damaged or derailed.
authoritarianism is by definition counter to progressive efforts, and heterarchical systems need to recognize this to scale and survive with any success verses other exploitative systems. there’s no reason to ignore this message, even if it comes from a satire of the USSR.
also modern science is a good resource on how to accomplish this stuff. like building a big-stick resistant social immune system that doesn’t fuck us all to death. or we can just keep yelling and screaming at each other, especially the people framing the necessary science around progressive efforts.
you even see a lot of tools such a slander being used against people like hasan or other progressives right now. animal farm has a lot of good examples of character assassination. great resource for people with basic reading comprehension.
“Authoritarianism” is an abstraction that sees the state as outside and above class struggle. All states are tools for whatever the ruling class is, and the degree by which it is used depends on the sharpness of the class struggle in a given society. The USSR was run by the working classes, and has to work to combat bourgeois and fascist elements left over from the Tsarist era and through infiltration, black markets, etc.
Taking a scientific view is the very advantage of Marxism.
animal farm(…) great resource for people with basic reading comprehension.
I was in the middle of typing out some kind of “couldn’t have said it better myself” type joke, but honestly it’s not even true. There are much better resources out there for people with only basic reading comprehension.
Animal farm made me a trot until I read a bit of actual history and political texts and by the end of the year I was a materialist kind of Marxist. Consider doing that.
Please tell me you’re doing a bit
I want to point out I didn’t reply to the person who mentioned animal farm, because they were arguing with a point I didn’t make. I agreed with someone suggesting it’s very limited in scope. Which it is. I understand it’s considered a shallow analysis of the specific era it was satirizing, but I don’t know enough to provide my opinion on that aspect. It’s okay that it is satirizing a very limited thing, that was the intent!
Maybe what I needed to add is that very rarely is any distinction made between a shift further left and a shift towards authoritarianism. I expanded in this in another comment where I talked about what I really hate about the political spectrum. If you design a spectrum where you put the authoritarian group on the end, it’s not some lightbulb moment to be like, hey these guys on the end have some similarities in how they execute their plans! It makes my engineer brain fucking crazy.
I’m also not screaming at anyone? I made a meme because I think it’s funny that this near useless concept (the political spectrum) gets turned into gotcha moments. I’m poking fun at this absurd thing people are happy to say while maintaining the status quo. Any criticism of the status quo is met with accusations of wanting the fascists to win. It’s always “the far left”. What does that even mean?
do you remember the atheism feminism war not too long ago? or the gender war? or more race-wars than you can shake a stick at?
I don’t? Do you mean online discourse?
I didn’t answer your question in your last reply so I will now: I’m an anarchist, so yes, I do think we can prevent authoritarianism in the shift left.
you even see a lot of tools such a slander being used against people like hasan or other progressives right now. animal farm has a lot of good examples of character assassination. great resource for people with basic reading comprehension.
Or, this shit doesn’t happen IRL in the leftist spaces I exist in, and if it does it’s discussed and we get to the root of the issue. I don’t think you can shift the US (or any country for that matter) away from capitalism by voting. So shit talking in electorial spaces has no impact on my interests.
never said you were screaming, i was suggesting that as the alternative form of communication people choose outside of scientifically figuring out how to communicate across different systems.
i agree that associating the left as specifically authoritarian is bad and wrong, and i heavily disagree with that interpretation of animal farm. again, the ending of the book is that they became capitalists, not leftists. but i do think authoritarianism is bad, and associating it with the left is bad, even when leftists (tankies) do it.
and the atheism/feminism war was online and general media. it bled into a bunch of things like ‘gamergate,’ but the SJW framing was really big in the media, amongst other things. there were a lot of groups that were organizing against groups like the heritage foundation, which got discouraged or derailed by the culture war crap. lots of weird stuff, but just one of the more recent examples. you can use similar tools for other recent things like the anti-hasan campaigns painting him as a dog-abusing terrorism lover, or media campaigns against BLM/ANTIFA a while back.
anywhere you try to find progressive efforts, you see weird shit on fire for no reasonable reason, other than progressive groups still haven’t found a way to successfully communicate and cooperate, and probably a lot of intentional fire-starting from the assholes with money that the groups are generally aligned against, such as the heritage foundation, or their global counterparts.
also just a note, when i talk about ‘heterarchical systems’ i’m basically talking about anarchism.
we need to grow a whole new culture out of the corpse of a political system most of us or currently trapped inside of.
and you’re lucky if you’ve found the one anarchist/progressive space that works for you, but try to grow that effort into one that can affect the existing systems, and you’ll suddenly find your group is either a terrorist organization, or that the group hates women, and now you have to prove to a bunch of angry public reaction to any association with that woman hating group. it is constant for anyone actually being noticed as a danger to the status quo.
i’m usually trying to talk about anarchistic efforts that affect more than one small community, as individualized and isolated communities aren’t gonna do much the moment the big imperial body notices the potential for actual social change happening.
thank you though for an honest response to my words. posting in online spaces has only gotten more stifling over the years. just wish local efforts could connect to larger efforts, since we need multiple groups cooperating in solidarity, not isolated individualism.
didn’t say “this is why communism can never work” i was saying how collective efforts get coopted. the entire point of animal farm is that the pigs end up like the human ‘capitalists’ they were supposed to replace, by changing the rules and languages opportunistically, against the wishes or best interest of the people. this isn’t an argument against communism or collective efforts as a whole calm down.
Have you ever read a history book that wasn’t assigned to you by your government?
what government history book is teaching how right-wing style movements or oligarchical power are used derail socialist efforts? which history books are you suggesting be salient?
I think they are referring to the fact that the CIA financed the 1954 animated adaptation of Animal Farm after buying the film rights.
So no, you haven’t
Do I need a list? Come on, I’m sure you learned in school how eeeeevil Stalin is and how he was just as bad as Hitler. Or worse than Hitler! Then you just kept on believing the Animal Farm narrative, because you trusted the lies your teacher told you.
So speaking of, I recommend Lies My Teacher Told Me as a primer, so you can understand how woefully miseducated a bourgeois education will leave you. It has plenty of examples of the lies that the ideological state apparatus pumps into its schools.
And if you want to actually learn some real history about Stalin, there’s now an English translation of Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend. That’s definitely a heavier book than Lies, though, I’m still working through it.
Thanks for the book rec.
they are teaching that stalin is evil because he is rightwing?
is anyone here actually reading the words that i’m typing before responding?
Stalin was left wing. I second the recommendation for Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend. Losurdo uses near-exclusively western sources, including the Nazis, to counter the legend surrounding Stalin.
Why the ‘national socialists’ came for the communists and socialists first.
Do you actually think nazis were on the left? Because that’s what horseshoe theory you are defending is all about. The centrist social democrats are the ones that facilitated the nazis rise to power because they didn’t want to side with the communists and socialists.
“Do you actually think nazis were on the left?”
if i thought that, i wouldn’t have said that they came after the left.
everyone thinks i’m anti-left because of the weird american interpretation that animal farm = ‘communism bad,’ and not that collective efforts can be derailed by failures of communication or education.
the failure of progressive efforts is that most progressive groups can be turned on each other because they can’t communicate or separate patterns from substrate.
‘divide and conquer’ is really successful, whether in animal farm or in basically every historical example of oppression.
again the ‘first they came for’ poem i alluded to with “Why the ‘national socialists’ came for the communists and socialists first.”
what this means is that the name ‘national socialist’ was obviously completely removed from the concept.
again, like the pigs in animal farm becoming removed from the concept of animals by the end of the book. why the book is an apt reference to actual systems, although more specifically around the unfortunate failures of early russian efforts.
again, the oversimplified american interpretation of ‘communism bad’ mostly comes from a thorough lack of reading comprehension, and memetic/socialized reification of that misinterpretation.
so again, stating that i was not calling the nazis progressives when suggesting that their name was being misused through blatant oppression of socialists.
Read. Another. Book.
Why? The hamfisted, black and white children’s book fits perfectly with what i already believe about politics, this isn’t concerning in the slightest.
are you even human? did you comprehend any of the words being said?
By your western shitlibs standards? No I’m not human
The Nazis we’re economically left of the US in many ways, for what it’s worth.
No, they were not.
What?
Nazis spent a lot of money on military because they wanted to do imperialism to grow their economy. They ran deficits to fund war industries (kind of like the US) and were betting on winning to pay them off (US oil wars?)
There was certainly centralized planning, but the US isn’t exactly a free market. The government subsidizes industries in the states too.
The Nazi government developed a partnership with leading German business interests, who supported the goals of the regime and its war effort in exchange for advantageous contracts, subsidies, and the suppression of the trade union movement. Cartels and monopolies were encouraged at the expense of small businesses, even though the Nazis had received considerable electoral support from small business owners.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Nazi_Germany
Sounds pretty familiar, and I haven’t even mentioned the use of prison labour.
The big public works projects were already planned by the time they took power and were beneficial for the war effort anyways. The states were embarking on similar projects at the time as well, so I wouldn’t say they were further left even if we do credit them with continuing.
Nazis banned trade unions. Nazi Germany sought to eliminate foreign completion. They supported privatization. Banks were privatized under them. Utilities, manufacturing, railways, public services etc all had at least some privatization.
Companies traded contributions for favor (sound familiar?)
What am I missing that makes them more economically left wing?
They had paid vacation time enshrined in law. Free or highly subsidized vacation programs that allowed workers to go on real vacations. There were massive infrastructure jobs programs which led to almost zero unemployment. Nationalized health insurance.
There were massive infrastructure jobs programs which led to almost zero unemployment.
Lmao! They had low unemployment because trying to conquer Europe takes a lot of work. Notably, in spite of the low unemployment, the working conditions were shit and the workers could not organize due to violent suppression.
You might as well argue that slavery is progressive since it means low unemployment.
I’ve never heard of the paid vacation time enshrined in law, especially as work contacts were overseen by labour trustees appointed by the DAF (German Labour Front). I don’t know everything, of course.
They did have the Strength Through Joy program where they provided incentives like vacations, and Beauty of Labour which was supposed to make work places better, but
While it encouraged Germans to view cleaner work environments as important and provided guidance on how to make improvements, it did not provide funds to make necessary changes. Paying for improvements remained the responsibility of factory owners and managers, or workers themselves.
These were programs designed to get buy-in despite the deterioration of workers rights, including hours of work and pay after the Nazis came to power.
The infrastructure program was the Reich Labour Service. It was a mandatory program, and workers lived in camps working long hours with low pay.
Unemployment was illegal, not abolished through the creation of good jobs. In 1938 Aktion Arbeitsscheu Reich arrested the “work shy” and send them to camps.
Germany had nationalized health insurance since 1883.
Hitler was inspired by the US mostly successful genocide of native peoples.
I don’t really get my politics from naming conventions or middle school books yall stay safe tho 😗✌️
Animal Farm is a fictional narrative based off George Orwell’s interpretations of the events surrounding the Russian revolution, not an accurate piece of political history or theory.
History is much more accurately depicted through nonfiction texts, not fictional narratives. You should read actual political theory if you want to learn about the Russian revolution. It was a very interesting event with many complexities and it liberated so many people.
Although I do agree with some of your later points. Although I think horseshoe theory is unjustified as well, and you seem to agree. Politics is much more complex than a line or even a bent line.
Politics is a complex web of ideas that form as a result of certain conditions. The far left and far right do share some values, but usually for completely different reasons. For example both Nazi Germany and the USSR had very strong centralisation of power in the state, although that power in the USSR stemmed from the workers to oppress the bourgeoisie but in Nazi Germany the power stemmed from the Bourgeoisie to oppress the working class.
i just enjoy the use of animal farm/1984 as little heuristic environments to convey simple ways that collective efforts are derailed, with a great simple short set of events that show how a movement can be slowly converted into something antithetical to the original collective effort.
a problem that still hasn’t been solved, despite any elaboration that could be had on the specific happenings in the USSR.
i care about the heuristics because they do map really well to other and current happenings, in ways that are useful for framing to people things such as the decades of neoliberal progressive rugpulling, or how the heritage foundation and types have been slowly reshaping the environment to benefit them, in a recursive corruption of existing systems.
it’s definitely more complicated than shown in animal-farm, but people already react as if this is the deep-end, and trying to copy and paste a textbook on USSR specifics would also have me back explaining the difference between patterns and substrate, which honestly shouldn’t be the case with animal farm, but it seems even (american?) leftists seem to have read it as ‘commuism bad.’
I didn’t interpret it as communism bad, although that’s how we were taught it (because of course I studied it in school). I think Orwell’s take is that power corrupts and no one should be able to hold power for a significant period of time.
I disagree with Orwell’s opinion because he places too much emphasis on great man theory. It’s not realistic for any individual to truly dictate an entire country like a farmer or pig might dictated over the farm.
Does it really map current events accurately? Animal Farm doesn’t really consider the fundamental difference between different states with different class dynamics. Animal Farm can’t explain how socialist states, modern and historical, always continue to improve living conditions for workers as much as possible despite having strong centralisation of power. Meanwhile, conditions are getting worse for workers in capitalist states despite having generally lower (albeit increasing) levels of government involvement.
Also I’m curious by what you mean by neoliberal progressive rugpulling.
by neoliberal progressive rugpulling i’m talking about democrats/liberals running on progressive platforms, only to rugpull and basically be a more moderate version of rightwing corporatism.
a good example here in canada is when smaller progressive parties started gaining traction on voter reform to avoid the 2 party extreme of this context as we see in the united states. the liberal party (basically democrats) started running on the same voter reform platform, as well as the ‘responsible’ vote for ensuring that conservatives aren’t in charge, in our near two-party system.
after winning they said “oh that’s what voter reform means? oh we didn’t mean that at all lol bye.”
also like how carney got an easy win by not being an openly psychotic fascist, but is still pushing hyper conservative and pro-corporate political changes.
so it’s the same kind of ‘corruption’ of collective effort, in a different ecosystem.
we need ways to recognize and respond to this type of exploitation of shared environments and efforts, which is made difficult due to high populations with low reading-comprehension or ability to make sense of complex or contradictory environments.
people need to recognize when the body they are using to achieve a collective goal is being usurped or changed for usually antithetical reasons, and animal farm is all about the different ways this can happen.
the casual silencing of dissent, or obscuring/changing of wording or rules, or outright lies. again, the point of animal farm is that the system can be gutted or changed in essence, into the same oligarch serving capitalist system, despite being the ‘revolutionaries’ that escaped from their capitalist overlords.
you could even make the parallel to MAGA, since half of MAGA seems to think their movement is going to do [socialist policy,] just with the depth of obscuration needed to fool flat-earthers. so they will sign up for a direct crypto rug-pull i guess. no veils needed.
yeah, a lot of it is just that humans are dumb and can’t fucking communicate, or comprehend text past a socialized misrepresentation which most people just accept is the context i guess.
nobody else in this thread seems to comprehend how that doesn’t mean ‘communism bad.’ i wouldn’t really know, because the dogpiling comes mostly with “BAD BOOK, NO READ,” rather than any actual reasoning.
not every heuristic or example will always be useful in every situation, but i find animal farm and 1984 do a good job conveying certain tools or framings that are extremely relevant to current corruption and political happenings. whether it’s character assassination like hasan or other progressives, or direct assassinations like MLK. misrepresentations of people or their motives, which you see with basically every group that defends themselves from imperialist aggression, or even mild dissidents being framed as ‘terrorists.’ many academics and anarchists are bringing up polysemy and exploitations of context/system framing and other things, but shitty vague groupings like liberal/progressive/left make it hard to draw the clear boundaries of where systems start being treated like exploitable environment, which is the more general shape of the problem. we can actually model this stuff with modern academic framing, but the heritage foundation and types are actively in the government trying to burn and scorn as much progressive academia as possible.
again, you’re appreciated for actually interacting with my words, even if i still haven’t convinced you. thank you.
Did you read the post text tho
