Cowbee [he/him]

Actually, this town has more than enough room for the two of us

He/him or they/them, doesn’t matter too much

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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: December 31st, 2023

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  • Yes this is what I believe as well but to many people Socialism is synonymous with authoritarianism. Many of those people are amenable to Socialist ideas if not able to be won over completely as you and I have been.

    That’s fair, but can backfire and delay radicalization, giving rise to “left” anticommunists that ultimately help contribute to antisocialism more than they do to pro-socialism, as their anticommunist views are magnified by bourgeois media. Chomsky, for example, is guilty of this.

    Also, (not to begin the debate about AES) but I think its fair to say that where many socialist projects have failed is in the arena of democracy. Maybe its just a feature of the tradition I come from, but to me that commitment to democracy has to be constantly renewed. Not bourgeois democracy but worker democracy. The working class has to learn real democracy in order to engage in political struggle in preparation to overthrow the ruling class.

    This is where idealism and practical realism need to reach a balance. Unfortunately, in the face of international Capitalist and Imperialist dominance has forced stronger measures.

    Lenin was constantly stressing and renewing his commitment to democratic process, which was one of the reasons he was able to create the revolutionary party after 1905 that was able to seize power in 1917. And while he had no illusions about the limitations of democratic process within his historical moment, he always “bent the stick” in that direction which in my opinion was one of the things that made him such an effective leader prior to and up through the civil war period ending in 1921.

    Yep, but Lenin also banned factionalism. He tried to combine worker participation and democracy with unity. I’m a Marxist-Leninist, of course, I just want to stress that even Lenin made concessions, and had to.

    So I will always stress the importance of democracy, not only for the historic necessity and precedent but also because it is not enough to be good materialists (and there certainly has been a history of bad ones) but also good dialectitians, which means contextualizing our project through unificatiokn of the subjective and objective; and to fail to do so is to fail to be dialectical Marxists. If I have to work and debate with some Harringtonites in the process well that is just a necessity of the historical moment.

    I understand, I just want to stress that you risk playing into anti-Marxist hands, which is the entire reason for DemSocs.


  • Cowbee [he/him]@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlPolitical mindset evolution
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    48 minutes ago

    In theory yes. In reality all socialist systems had surprisingly few changes of leadership after one guy rose to power of the “socialist” movement or party

    There are numerous reasons for this. Stability in protecting revolution and genuine popular support are among the larger and more important reasons.

    And they don’t really seem to trust their citizens to be socialist without a lot of fear, censorship, spying, silencing critics…

    Neither are Capitalist states, and neither was Marx. Combatting international Capitalist influence was and is key for retaining Socialism.

    It’s almost as if the majority of humans reject socialism. Which is weird but true.

    Not true at all, actually. Those controlling the media want you to think it though.


  • Cowbee [he/him]@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlPolitical mindset evolution
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    51 minutes ago

    DemSoc itself is a bad term. It either is used to refer to Reformist Socialism (which is an impossibility and thus akin to astrology) or to pretend Marxist Socialism isn’t democratic, advocating for factionalism and other possibilities of Socialism itself being destroyed by international moneyed interests and domestic wreckers.





  • Alright, next we have the blue team, which is the opposite of all those things, at the exceedingly high cost of… getting cockblocked by the red team when they try to implement those things… and… well there was that time Bill lied about getting a blowjob- outrageous! Surely the red team does a better job of keeping it in their pants… *checks* …uhh, nope! Fuck, I’m starting to become aware of my own cognitive dissonance and it feels like absolute shit.

    The DNC isn’t to the opposite of the GOP, they are aligned on the vast majority of issues and use the rest to yap loudly in disagreement. Dems aren’t left.

    During all ^that I wandered into the military which gave me access to all kinds of socialized resources which have enabled me to get where I’m at now and have made a pretty significant improvement on my life.

    Social programs aren’t socialized, that’s a bit of a misnomer.







  • No, I have a lot of experience in liberal organizations and they are not, despite the memes, closer to conservatism than progressivism.

    Perhaps if you redefine progressivism.

    The major differences between a liberal and a social democrat or progressive comes down largely to deciding when a market has failed and when to use government intervention, both Liberals and progressives are fine with intervention, only the threshold changea. We want the same things, mostly, but disagree on how to get them.

    Yep, you redefined it.

    Conservatives, philosophical Conservatives anyway, won’t typically even consider such a thing, and often do not even want the same things as Liberals or progressives.

    Conservatives often do, and the distance between genuine progressivism and liberalism is shorter than liberalism and conservativism.

    This both sides same stuff just hurts progressive causes, because it sours mushy people with little to no real philosophy on voting for liberal parties. Those people flip flop back to Conservatives when they get angry and we lose the progress we’ve made, as is about to happen in Canada.

    Electoralism will not save you.