I see no evidence that calling 90%+ of the U.S. population fascists will do anything to advance any leftist cause. It certainly doesn’t help grow any sort of American left-wing movement.
Neither does allowing people to believe that fake shills like AOC represent any kind of actual leftist movement. At this point, this type of politician is an active hinderence to advancing any real left politics, with the exception of their actions and stances disillusioning people.
I don’t disagree. My point is we can get all that across without flattening it to “AOC is a fascist,” which sounds like crank shit to everyone who is not already a communist.
This is a communist forum if you can’t quote Stalin here then where?
If libs are checking this out then good. Hopefully they’ll learn something. If not then they’ll engage with something else until they’re ready. This really isn’t a space where we should be concerned with optics and what libs might think of they’re even looking to learn
Quote Stalin all you want, but his word isn’t gospel, especially when he himself later allied with nations that would (at best) fall under his “moderate wing of fascism” umbrella. The CPC’s line on Stalin is something like 70% good, 30% bad, so there’s plenty of room for disagreement.
I’m not overly concerned with optics on this site, but what we meme about here pops up elsewhere, and if we want people to agree with us we do have to put thought into how to present our ideas.
Once again you misquote “social fascist” as “fascist” despite being corrected on this very error in another conversation. You are here in bad faith. Social fascist is a specific thing.
Fascists shouldn’t be shot, they should be re-educated. Only those who engage in crimes should be shot. I explained this to you and you still regress back to your liberal baseline
It’s repeating the same objectively incorrect argument over and over, changing the definitions of terms to twist it into what you want. Social fascism is not just simply “fascism”. This is a fact that you ignore. All fascists don’t deserve to be shot, not even the most hardline Stalinists shot every single fascist - they re-educated them if possible
You refuse to use the accepted definition of social fascists among communists and instead jump to a different term. Even when you know you shouldn’t and have been corrected on this leap, you do it again and again because you are a Liberal incapable of processing new information
I don’t think that he is truely here in bad faith, but they do seem to get hung up about optics for a wide general audience over things we say on a communist forum for reasons i don’t understand. I argued with him before about how he took some issue with how we use the word cracker here, and it was more or less the same thing as this.
There’s such a thing as knowing your audience. If you want to get your message across you have to do it differently to different people. Stating that social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism should only be done to an audience that already knows what fascism and social democracy is, such as here on this forum.
This doesn’t mean that it is not true though, it just means that if you were to say those exact words to a general audience they would believe you were some crank who thought AOC was itching to put on an armband and do the goose-step. A more general audience would be more perceptive to hearing about how the system corrupts even the most well-meaning individuals, how politicians all end up doing the same shit etc.
This is a public forum that’s federated with plenty of non-leftist instances, and that’s well known to even more non-leftist instances we aren’t federated with. We have occasional efforts to direct more people back here, including lifeboat comms for reddit communities. There are even more ties to the much larger reddit through shared users and the whole history of the CTH sub.
We’re not speaking to the most general of audiences, but there is a benefit to not looking like cranks. This isn’t even a particularly good hot take to cling to, as Stalin himself eventually allied with social democracies against fascists.
I wouldn’t be too worried about what the imagined liberals in the walls might think. There can’t be too many of them and bad faith actors will always be able to find something and take it out of context. And if you can’t speak freely as a communist on a communist niche forum where can you?
Stalin, unlike any of the morally pure western leftists, actually held power and had to defend it and he did so successfully. It’s not like aligning the USSR with “moderate” imperialist nations didn’t have it’s downsides but the alternative was to be overrun and slaughtered by the more radical fascists.
A pragmatic alliance made for lack of better alternatives doesn’t change the analysis of the nature of social democracy. They serve the same master as the fascists. Where the social democrats wants to preserve capitalism by bribing a select labour aristocracy into complementary the fascists use more direct violence but ultimately they will both tend to side with capital if it’s rule is threatened.
How are they imagined? They comment here regularly. Our threads show up in their feeds. Their threads show up on ours, and we comment on them. We talk to mods of reddit communities looking to move somewhere better. None of this is hypothetical.
I’ve made the the exact “Stalin actually held power and had to defend it against hostile empires and genocidal fascists” argument online and in person many times. From those conversations I’ve learned that calling (for instance) FDR and everyone to his right (including all modern Democrats) “moderate fascists” comes across as crank shit, and most people tune out when they hear crank shit. Even people who stick it out and eventually become leftists clock it as crank shit! It doesn’t work, so why are we so dug in on it? (My guess: a mix of contrarianism and residual “he was a Great Man so his word is infallible” thinking.) It’s not even a good point to go to the mat on; see below.
pragmatic alliance made for lack of better alternatives
This is “if 99% Hitler and 100% Hitler are on the ballot, you should pragmatically vote for 99% Hitler.” We rightly point out the problems with this logic when libs tell it to us. There are two ways to resolve this contradiction:
Argue that WWII was a more dire situation than we face today, so more compromises were necessary. This has some merit, but is undermined by the USSR seeking anti-Nazi alliances well before the war and seeking continued peace with the Allies in its immediate aftermath. It’s further undermined by how bad the Allies were (the “99% Hitler” countries’ genocides were the blueprint for the Holocaust, and they had recently invaded the USSR), and how dire the situation is today (climate change is on track to be more destructive than WWII).
Argue that Stalin was not infallible, and got some things wrong, and that his “moderate wing of fascism” take was not his best work. Argue that as bad as social democracies are, there is some meaningful difference between them and Nazis (what Stalin actually did).
The second approach is at least as theoretically sound as the first, and it does not cause most people to think “oh I’m dealing with a crank, I can disregard.”
The quote that social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism, doesn’t mean the same thing as saying social democrats are fascist. The quote acknowledges the subjective difference, the fact that social democrats view themselves differently. What the quote neans is that, despite this subjective difference, despite the intentions of social democrats, their efforts ultimately only serve to help and enable fascism, because it accepts capital and the liberal democratic framework.
Repeating the quote now, today, is not the same thing as saying AOC is a fascist. You are misunderstanding the quote. And are further misunderstanding the history, and using a misunderstanding of that history to justify your misunderstanding of the quote
I get that you care about optics on this site and think that it should be the same as irl organizing. I don’t agree with that, but if that’s your point, okay. I can accept that’s what you think and you care about it even if i don’t. But i want to point out how you are misinterpreting the quote. Not because i think Stalin is a “great man” or “infallible”, and not because I’m “contrarian,” but because i think the quote is right, and important for communists or peoole who want to be on an actual left to understand. If you want our optics held to the same standard as irl organizing, then i insist we hold our education to the same standard. Because if we’re organizing, it should be with people that are capable of understanding this quote - otherwise we’ll end up organized with the kind of people this quote refers to who will betray and destroy any real left efforts
Calling someone a moderate fascists is calling them a fascist the same way calling someone a moderate Democrat is calling them a Democrat. We don’t make any real distinction when we add “moderate” (“if the time ever comes understand she’ll advocate the same insane violence against us that the fascists will”), people don’t hear a distinction, and it’s ridiculous to try and retroactively try and create some thin theoretical difference when this is pointed out.
The only reason people (sometimes) add the “moderate” modifier is they’re memeing about a Stalin quote they haven’t actually interrogated, and it seems most people haven’t even read:
Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism… They are not antipodes, they are twins. Fascism is an informal political bloc of these two chief organisations; a bloc, which arose in the circumstances of the post-war crisis of imperialism, and which is intended for combating the proletarian revolution.
We can’t say “if you sit down at a table with fascists you’re a fascist” all day then pretend “moderate fascist, fascism’s twin” means “not fascist.”
think that it should be the same as irl organizing
I never said anything like this. I said this place is useful for moving people left, and that it will be less useful for that if we get so up our own online asses that we can’t tell when we’re saying crank shit that doesn’t even have a good theoretical basis.
Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism… They are not antipodes, they are twins. Fascism is an informal political bloc of these two chief organisations; a bloc, which arose in the circumstances of the post-war crisis of imperialism, and which is intended for combating the proletarian revolution.
Even with the full quote you still misunderstand it. I’m not sure how you can look at that and not see hiw what i just told you is correct.
We can’t say “if you sit down at a table with fascists you’re a fascist” all day then pretend “moderate fascist, fascism’s twin” means “not fascist.”
They are “Twins” because they were “born” at the same time from the same material conditions. He’s not using twin to mean “identical.” They aren’t identical, but they both exist to serve capital and defebd it from proletarian revolution. That’s why social democracy is “objectively tge moderate wing if fascism.” This is not saying “AOC us a fascist” its not even saying “AOC is a moderate fascist.” Its saying that social democracy serves the same purpose. Conflating it with the “sit down with fascists…” saying is just you running with your misinterpretation and justifing yourself.
it’s ridiculous to try and retroactively try and create some thin theoretical difference when this is pointed out.
I’m not doing anything retroactively. I’m just telling you what Stalin meant when he wrote it, and what we mean when we say it. Once again you’re misinterpreting it and calling us cranks based on your misinterpretation
I never said anything like this. I said this place is useful for moving people left, and that it will be less useful for that if we get so up our own online asses that we can’t tell when we’re saying crank shit that doesn’t even have a good theoretical basis.
This isn’t crank shit. Your misinterpretation definitely is though. And you’ve been corrected on this multiple times it sounds like, and you really want to die on this hill over some kind of optics argument that we’re “cranks” when the crank opinion your argueing against is just your own misinterpretation.
I’m sorry if you think the niche communist internst forum is “too online” if we read Stalin, understand him, and quote him about things he was correct about.
Neither does allowing people to believe that fake shills like AOC represent any kind of actual leftist movement. At this point, this type of politician is an active hinderence to advancing any real left politics, with the exception of their actions and stances disillusioning people.
I don’t disagree. My point is we can get all that across without flattening it to “AOC is a fascist,” which sounds like crank shit to everyone who is not already a communist.
This is a communist forum
if you can’t quote Stalin here then where?
If libs are checking this out then good. Hopefully they’ll learn something. If not then they’ll engage with something else until they’re ready. This really isn’t a space where we should be concerned with optics and what libs might think of they’re even looking to learn
Quote Stalin all you want, but his word isn’t gospel, especially when he himself later allied with nations that would (at best) fall under his “moderate wing of fascism” umbrella. The CPC’s line on Stalin is something like 70% good, 30% bad, so there’s plenty of room for disagreement.
I’m not overly concerned with optics on this site, but what we meme about here pops up elsewhere, and if we want people to agree with us we do have to put thought into how to present our ideas.
Once again you misquote “social fascist” as “fascist” despite being corrected on this very error in another conversation. You are here in bad faith. Social fascist is a specific thing.
Fascists shouldn’t be shot, they should be re-educated. Only those who engage in crimes should be shot. I explained this to you and you still regress back to your liberal baseline
Good faith is phrasing your side of a disagreement as “I corrected you”
It’s repeating the same objectively incorrect argument over and over, changing the definitions of terms to twist it into what you want. Social fascism is not just simply “fascism”. This is a fact that you ignore. All fascists don’t deserve to be shot, not even the most hardline Stalinists shot every single fascist - they re-educated them if possible
You refuse to use the accepted definition of social fascists among communists and instead jump to a different term. Even when you know you shouldn’t and have been corrected on this leap, you do it again and again because you are a Liberal incapable of processing new information
I don’t think that he is truely here in bad faith, but they do seem to get hung up about optics for a wide general audience over things we say on a communist forum for reasons i don’t understand. I argued with him before about how he took some issue with how we use the word cracker here, and it was more or less the same thing as this.
You know what, i ending up argueing more with them and you’re right lol.
They refuse to accept what the quote actually means, but we’re all “cranks” and “too online” for understanding it. Just total liberal bullshit.
Some people may think I go to hard but I’m quite good at smelling these people out
Disengage
There’s such a thing as knowing your audience. If you want to get your message across you have to do it differently to different people. Stating that social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism should only be done to an audience that already knows what fascism and social democracy is, such as here on this forum.
This doesn’t mean that it is not true though, it just means that if you were to say those exact words to a general audience they would believe you were some crank who thought AOC was itching to put on an armband and do the goose-step. A more general audience would be more perceptive to hearing about how the system corrupts even the most well-meaning individuals, how politicians all end up doing the same shit etc.
This is a public forum that’s federated with plenty of non-leftist instances, and that’s well known to even more non-leftist instances we aren’t federated with. We have occasional efforts to direct more people back here, including lifeboat comms for reddit communities. There are even more ties to the much larger reddit through shared users and the whole history of the CTH sub.
We’re not speaking to the most general of audiences, but there is a benefit to not looking like cranks. This isn’t even a particularly good hot take to cling to, as Stalin himself eventually allied with social democracies against fascists.
I wouldn’t be too worried about what the imagined liberals in the walls might think. There can’t be too many of them and bad faith actors will always be able to find something and take it out of context. And if you can’t speak freely as a communist on a communist niche forum where can you?
Stalin, unlike any of the morally pure western leftists, actually held power and had to defend it and he did so successfully. It’s not like aligning the USSR with “moderate” imperialist nations didn’t have it’s downsides but the alternative was to be overrun and slaughtered by the more radical fascists.
A pragmatic alliance made for lack of better alternatives doesn’t change the analysis of the nature of social democracy. They serve the same master as the fascists. Where the social democrats wants to preserve capitalism by bribing a select labour aristocracy into complementary the fascists use more direct violence but ultimately they will both tend to side with capital if it’s rule is threatened.
How are they imagined? They comment here regularly. Our threads show up in their feeds. Their threads show up on ours, and we comment on them. We talk to mods of reddit communities looking to move somewhere better. None of this is hypothetical.
I’ve made the the exact “Stalin actually held power and had to defend it against hostile empires and genocidal fascists” argument online and in person many times. From those conversations I’ve learned that calling (for instance) FDR and everyone to his right (including all modern Democrats) “moderate fascists” comes across as crank shit, and most people tune out when they hear crank shit. Even people who stick it out and eventually become leftists clock it as crank shit! It doesn’t work, so why are we so dug in on it? (My guess: a mix of contrarianism and residual “he was a Great Man so his word is infallible” thinking.) It’s not even a good point to go to the mat on; see below.
This is “if 99% Hitler and 100% Hitler are on the ballot, you should pragmatically vote for 99% Hitler.” We rightly point out the problems with this logic when libs tell it to us. There are two ways to resolve this contradiction:
The second approach is at least as theoretically sound as the first, and it does not cause most people to think “oh I’m dealing with a crank, I can disregard.”
The quote that social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism, doesn’t mean the same thing as saying social democrats are fascist. The quote acknowledges the subjective difference, the fact that social democrats view themselves differently. What the quote neans is that, despite this subjective difference, despite the intentions of social democrats, their efforts ultimately only serve to help and enable fascism, because it accepts capital and the liberal democratic framework.
Repeating the quote now, today, is not the same thing as saying AOC is a fascist. You are misunderstanding the quote. And are further misunderstanding the history, and using a misunderstanding of that history to justify your misunderstanding of the quote
I get that you care about optics on this site and think that it should be the same as irl organizing. I don’t agree with that, but if that’s your point, okay. I can accept that’s what you think and you care about it even if i don’t. But i want to point out how you are misinterpreting the quote. Not because i think Stalin is a “great man” or “infallible”, and not because I’m “contrarian,” but because i think the quote is right, and important for communists or peoole who want to be on an actual left to understand. If you want our optics held to the same standard as irl organizing, then i insist we hold our education to the same standard. Because if we’re organizing, it should be with people that are capable of understanding this quote - otherwise we’ll end up organized with the kind of people this quote refers to who will betray and destroy any real left efforts
Calling someone a moderate fascists is calling them a fascist the same way calling someone a moderate Democrat is calling them a Democrat. We don’t make any real distinction when we add “moderate” (“if the time ever comes understand she’ll advocate the same insane violence against us that the fascists will”), people don’t hear a distinction, and it’s ridiculous to try and retroactively try and create some thin theoretical difference when this is pointed out.
The only reason people (sometimes) add the “moderate” modifier is they’re memeing about a Stalin quote they haven’t actually interrogated, and it seems most people haven’t even read:
We can’t say “if you sit down at a table with fascists you’re a fascist” all day then pretend “moderate fascist, fascism’s twin” means “not fascist.”
I never said anything like this. I said this place is useful for moving people left, and that it will be less useful for that if we get so up our own online asses that we can’t tell when we’re saying crank shit that doesn’t even have a good theoretical basis.
Even with the full quote you still misunderstand it. I’m not sure how you can look at that and not see hiw what i just told you is correct.
They are “Twins” because they were “born” at the same time from the same material conditions. He’s not using twin to mean “identical.” They aren’t identical, but they both exist to serve capital and defebd it from proletarian revolution. That’s why social democracy is “objectively tge moderate wing if fascism.” This is not saying “AOC us a fascist” its not even saying “AOC is a moderate fascist.” Its saying that social democracy serves the same purpose. Conflating it with the “sit down with fascists…” saying is just you running with your misinterpretation and justifing yourself.
I’m not doing anything retroactively. I’m just telling you what Stalin meant when he wrote it, and what we mean when we say it. Once again you’re misinterpreting it and calling us cranks based on your misinterpretation
This isn’t crank shit. Your misinterpretation definitely is though. And you’ve been corrected on this multiple times it sounds like, and you really want to die on this hill over some kind of optics argument that we’re “cranks” when the crank opinion your argueing against is just your own misinterpretation.
I’m sorry if you think the niche communist internst forum is “too online” if we read Stalin, understand him, and quote him about things he was correct about.