We’ve reached the second iteration. There isn’t a lot separating us from the third iteration. And the material conditions were bad enough, at the latest, sometime between the first and the second iterations.
People know socialism exists. People are experiencing sufficiently bad material conditions that they want change.
People have picked up neoliberal ideas from living in a neoliberal society. These ideas give people a framework to process their material conditions so that they do not rise up in sufficient numbers. People need to learn that these ideas are part of an ideology designed to enrich the owner class at the expense of the worker class. Things will continue to get worse unless people understand that everyone needs to own their work.
This education is work that still needs to be done after hypothetically defeating the current fascist dictatorships and is probably part of what will be needed to defeat them.
I keep having this conversation with people and seeing the accelerationist line of reasoning, so I wanted to address it with a visual.
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People know socialism exists
Most people are only vaguely aware of the word ‘socialism’, and they don’t know the difference between ‘socialism’, ‘marxism’ and ‘anarchism’.
And for many socialism simply means either “European style capitalism with free healthcare” or “USSR under Stalin”.
Mainly the second one and people saying the nazis were socialists. And cuba
Knowing that there are alternatives should, in theory, be enough for the purpose of getting their foot in the door to learn more. People do need to learn more, but the issue is that most people seem to have little interest in doing so despite knowing there is an alternative they could learn more about.
And for many socialism simply means either “European style capitalism with free healthcare” or “USSR under Stalin”.
This is the roadblock that stops people from going further and it’s not an accident. People have been subjected to neoliberal propaganda that pushes an owner class first economic model. There are underlying assumptions people have that the extractive economic institution of capitalism is the only model that can work. When, in the US, we have known since monopolies starting forming at the start of the 20th century that capitalism is a zero-sum winner take all system that isn’t sustainable. That’s why we regulate anti-competitive practices to try to prolong the inevitable. edit: typo
Wait, you think THAT’s the loop?
Nah, what’s happening is the edges of neoliberalism are moving right. They are absolutely checking out from the neoliberal agenda, they are just becoming fascists in the process.
The disaffection is there. They are rising up in sufficient numbers.
To vote for Trump and other fascists.
Accelerationism doesn’t make sense because the loop is pushing people right. Do that faster, they keep going right faster. There is no steam buildup for left-wing revolution here. If anything the left has been lazy and the longer this goes the more ground they have to make up. There is no socialist revolution coming, there is a fascist dictatorship takeover at the end of that process. Russia is the model, just… different year.
The question is why the left wing is failing to divert that flow of dissatisfaction towards its political side with anywhere near that amount of efficiency. Call it education if you want, I call it weak propaganda. Bad political action either way.
My point is even if you get a person to stop being a fascist, they don’t also lose the neoliberal ideas that they have in their head. Once a person rejects fascism they still have to reject neoliberalism.
You’re thinking of neofascism as a compound form of neoliberalism there, which I think is a mistake.
The people migrating from US-style neolib views into protofascist veneration for a strongman aren’t stacking one thing on top of the other. They are breaking with a neoliberal scheme that didn’t do much for them and into a fascist mindset that presents itself as revolutionary.
Had the left done a better job of channeling that disaffection they could have broken leftwards. They didn’t, so they abandoned neoliberal views for neofascist ones.
I am very skeptical that the conversion path for those fascists is back to neoliberalism and then from there to a more leftist stance. The left isn’t competing for the people already radicalized right, they are competing for the people that keep shedding off the husk of the liberal establishment.
And they’re losing.
Also, I should add, the loop I’m referring to is that no matter how bad it gets this acceleration principle always states things need to get worse. This is not the neoliberal to fascist pipeline. edit: although things getting worse is what’s pushing people to choose between fascism and socialism
And when a neoliberal becomes a fascist, they are adopting fascist ideas. However, those neoliberal ideas aren’t rejected. The neoliberal ideas are what lead the person to reject socialist and progressive ideas in favor of fascist ideas. It’s not that we failed to channel the dissatisfaction, but failed to challenge the underlying framework for internalizing their dissatisfaction. Instead of blaming the system people are blaming the people living in that system, like immigrants and trans people.
If a fascist rejects those fascist ideas the neoliberal ideas will be what they fall back on. For example, if a person believes systemic change is unnecessary, then rejecting the fascist alternative, removing people, doesn’t mean they will question the underlying assumption that systemic change is unnecessary. The fact we need systemic change still needs to be learned.
It’s not a path. People do not need to go through neoliberism. People are, usually anyway, not purely a fascist or purely a neoliberal. It’s that people have a collection of ideas in their heads. In the case of our modern society, there are a lot of neoliberal ideas and increasingly fascist ideas in people’s heads. All of these neoliberal and fascist ideas need to be addressed one at a time before a person can start accepting the progressive and socialist alternatives to those ideas. edit: typo
We have distinctly different ideas on how this works. Both hypotheses are untestable, though (at least to us).
Or, you know, to put it differently, “agree to disagree”.
I think you both brought useful illustrations to the table.
I see the op as describing more of a layering of neoliberalism and fascism than an outright fusion.
it’s because fascism is easy, simple, and feels safer than stepping out of learned helplessness
Right, and if you have a minute I may tell you about the tragedy of Darth Plagueis.
This is not about the dark side being easier and more appealing, this is about them having weaponized social media. It’s a material problem, not a moral one.
I’m afraid some ideas really are just easier to accept. In every field I’ve studied or worked in, people very rarely accept unfortunate truths, instead believing that which is easier to stomach.
For example, you believe that leftists just aren’t “trying hard enough,” when the reality is that leftism doesn’t have access to the same tools that its opposition has. Fascists, tankies, or liberals can use the powerful forces of group identity and hierarchy to win. At the end of the day, they all function as similar machines that seek to gain the most amount of power and control for themselves as possible. They inevitably entangle with national identities, bureaucracy, religion and cultural values in whatever way they need to.
Social media is not the problem; you’re just blaming technology because it’s easier than thinking leftism is uniquely unsuited to take control in this ecosystem. It has the “authenticity” every system markets, but it can’t just allow itself to become a competitive machine without just becoming Marxist-Leninism. It can free people from the machine, but the machines compete better with each other by mechanizing us.
It’s not about morals holding leftism back, but morals being incompatible with welding power over your opposition. It’s the will to power of societal constructs making everyone’s lives hallow and miserable. Our happiness is instrumental in forces larger than ourselves and always has been. Our freedom isn’t at war with other people’s freedom, but the success of things that aren’t individuals.
I call BS. Leftism isn’t a minority stance by necessity. There have been plenty of popular and populist left wing movements. Many got to power. Some kept it. Some even did all of that under representative democracy.
There is no reason left wing stances should be harder to communicate over social media than they were through newsletters, often while being outright outlawed.
I refuse to be so self-indulgent to think my elders were able to put out left wing media with an illegal printer while being persecuted but mastering Facebook was beyond us.
You’re not wrong, but the game leftism needs to play isn’t gonna look the same as right wing ideologies. It can do things the right wing can only maintain off of hype, which is enough for the right to ascend, but not to maintain.
The biggest thing leftism can do is kneecap systems without the systems ever fully getting rid of them. It was heavily co-opted and redirected by liberalism, but with liberalism dying, it can reassert itself.
I’m sure the opportunistic tankies will waste a lot of time and energy, but anarchy is the real way forward. It probably can’t serve as a status to be reached, but as an ultimate check on the power of whatever system is in control. It needs to assert people as goal of society, not the means. Organizations cannot be seen as allies ever, only monsters to restrain and keep watch of forever.
Well, the idea is you ascend this way, you maintain by being actually competent at governing using solid policies that improve things for people.
That should be an advantage, you know? Actually having a solid framework for economics and social policy. It should take care of that whole “maintaining” part once the ascendancy is dealt with.
I think a lot of leftists, and particularly terminally online lefitsts, have grown used to not having to deliver that part and are more comfortable feeling like morally superior underdogs. I have no interest in those. Like I was saying elsewhere, the only leftists that are real leftists are the ones that hold some political power.
The problem with “real political power” is how the power itself can do the thinking for you. Your tribe or ingroup as an inhuman entity has no desire for anything but winning. If you’re not careful, it convinces you to take the realist path to victory.
It doesn’t read much like she necessarily supports accelerationism. If she does then the post will be removed as it is a harmful ideology.
The left is growing worldwide, especially among the youth (I only included some stuff on the US, but you see similar trends in quite a few countries). Remember most people in the US would vote democrat if they voted, which while not socialism is certainly left of the republicans. They just have a major problem with believing that voting will not matter, with gerrymandering, and with anti voting schemes.
The statistics in my country aren’t quite the same in that we don’t have a geriatric fascist party, but there is a trend of polarization with people moving away from the center towards the left and the right.
Though I do agree that we really do need to be doing a better job of reaching out to people. Here in norway the left seems to be struggling because our arguments are less emotion based, because unlike the populists we aren’t throwing everything behind a small number of emotionally charged topics and we don’t have disingenuous gurus or other big social media influencers lying to kids on our behalf. We don’t do a good job of telling people the benefits of leftist policies in a way that really hits them and we don’t have enough outreach for what we say to reach them. There’s a clear bias in the news and in social media against the left which hampers us as well, both within norway but especially on international platforms.
This is an anti-accelerationist meme. I thought that was mostly self-evident, but I suppose I should have spelled that out. Any ideology can be susceptible to accelerationism. The point of this meme was that socialists seem to still arguing that the material conditions are not bad enough. They’ve been bad enough for a while and there’s not a lot of room left for them to get worse before we get death camps. edit: typo
I haven’t met a lot of socialists into accelerationism, but then I stay away from tankies
I was recently discussing this with a user who does not strike me as a tanky. I can link the comment chain to you if you want, but it’s in my comment history. It’s not so much a case of full blown accelerationism, but it’s largely the same principle. Like the material conditions do need to be bad for people to want change in the form of new ideas, but we reached that point awhile ago. edit: typo
I didn’t check out the convo, but being an accelerationist does not just require observing that different circumstances produce different societies, or that people tend to revolt when things go south, but requires actually wanting things to get worse so the conditions will change quicker and people are more likely to revolt.
They are arguing that the reason we aren’t experiencing a socialist revolution now is that people’s material conditions are insufficiently bad and that things need to get worse. It’s troubling because I think it leads otherwise leftist people to sit on their hands and wait when there is a need for anti-neoliberal propaganda.
Which I would like to try to take a crack at next. I was hoping to motivate others to do the same with this post. Looks like I could use some work though, this meme seems to be have been so-so at best. It inspired some discussion at least.
Then what they are saying is straight up accelerationism. I’ve never understood that belief, as you aren’t really guaranteed that people will join the revolution on the side of socialism. Fascism f.ex often feeds rather successfully on discontent people
Edit: Not to forget the suffering caused by making things worse as well.
That is a depressing chart, honestly. A few percentage points at best in the same timeframe when the neofascist US right went from a radical wing of the Republican party they were hesitant about tapping into and into running the entire country. Twice.
During Trump’s first term the positive view of socialism among Dems actually went down two points before recovering to five points up? That’s rookie numbers. Trump went from reviled to actually becoming an outright felon and then to a landslide victory handing him control of every branch of government in the same time period.
And that’s even more shameful once you remember that for Americans “socialist” includes “social democrats”.
There are left wing parties that have marginally better elsewhere, and some are even in government, largely as junior parties in colaitions within parliamentary regimes. The only exception would be Latin America where there have been bigger swings back and forth, but that wasn’t that rare there in the first place.
I don’t think it’s about “telling people about the benefits” or “outreach”. I think traditional powers have what’s left of the information gatekeepers, the alt right has dominance of online discourse and the left has no idea how to use the Internet for anything other than arguing amongst themselves and no idea how to pierce the old media in any reliable fashion.
It is genuinely depressing, and threads like these show zero self-awareness and very little self-criticism. Ascendant neofascists come from some mix of hostile propaganda and radical actors prodding at the information weaknesses of liberal regimes very consciously and very aggressively. The left has never been able to keep that sort of decentralized coordination going for any amount of time without decomposing into niche groups all over again.
It could be better yes, but most right wing parties are doing rather well because of old (read dying) people, while young people are overwhelmingly leftist.
the left has no idea how to use the Internet for anything other than arguing amongst themselves
I disagree heavily with this. That’s mostly a thing pushed by tankies, the ones we argue with. But then arguing with tankies isn’t productive either, it is a distraction at best.
It is genuinely depressing, and threads like these show zero self-awareness and very little self-criticism
What exactly do you propose if not outreach? You seem to criticize the idea of spreading awareness in general. Did you read the parts where I also said the same stuff about what you call information gatekeepers? I should note I am also heavily in favor of direct action and unionization, but doing those things also requires outreach. I think really the best thing to do is irl word of mouth, irl political participation, and establishing good leftist spaces online (without tankies).
It’s not just tankies, beyond Lemmie’s specific local rift.
It’s left leaning liberals with social democrats, social democrats with gramscian leftists, gramscian leftists and classic marxists, all of the above with tankies, or with whatever cosplay anarchists dwell in places like these. And much more, depending on the local political landscape.
Neofascists don’t even feel the need to agree with themselves, they’ll argue one thing and the opposite as long as they get to stir some stuff up online, “own the libs” and win some arguments. There is nowhere near that level of propaganda discipline and willingness to row in the same direction at any point of the left. They broke feminism in two (three or four, really, but a few of those chickens are still to get home) with the slightest of propaganda pressure. They didn’t even need that much to make most left and center-left political coalitions crumble. At this point I assume they’re trying to be gentle when making frustrated leftists stay home in elections because there’s no challenge in it.
My proposal? Take a page from their book. Prioritize wining arguments and mobilizing over practical policy, get to the policy once you’ve consolidated power. Complain that you’re not allowed to deploy the full policy because of the other guys and the establishment all the way up. Never disagree with anybody willing to agree with you on anything. Never agree with a political rival. Never own the failures of the system. Find a scapegoat that works and push it.
None of those things are ideological. But nobody on the left will suspend their purity tests to play in the playground we’ve built for ourselves.
I’m all for dismantling that playground. It’s toxic and grotesque. But you won’t do that with “outreach” and “spreading awareness”. You do that with hard, consolidated institutional power. They know. The left doesn’t.
Me oh my. Yeah no there are other ways than “consolidating power” and lying to people. You can engage people emotionally without being manipulative and still push good policies.
Also, that all sounds very US centric and honestly a bit wrong. It is usually the libs that deplatform and refuse to cooperate with socialists. That’s certainly the case within the democratic party. Same here in norway, with liberals not working with socialists (and rather the populists instead), and with the soc dems only ever reluctantly cooperating with us. It was announced, to my joy, a few days ago that LO (a big union) will finally give some money to the red party (a socialist party) because the reds getting enough votes is the only way the social democrats will win.
Edit: This is also my general understanding of politics everywhere. That centrists and right wingers (libs) have no interest in working with anyone left of them. It’s certainly how fascists have won elections all around the world.
I’m not in the US, let’s start there. I am in a territory that is generally left-leaning and has a left-leaning government, let’s set that next.
And no, there are no other ways than consolidating power because a leftist without a government position is not useful to me at all. A leftist without a seat does not push good policies. They don’t push any policies at all. Governments push policies. The only leftists who push good policies are in government.
There is no need to lie to be engaging, but you do need to convince people. You need to present arguments and you need to win those arguments in the eyes of the people. You need to show the alternatives are doing poorly and create an image that they are incompetent and the cause of the current set of issues. Which should be easy, because they are, by and large.
But that’s not being done. The perception is that the left is deluded, splintered and naive. Those are all perceptions pushed by the right onto the left that the left sucks at dispelling. The implication in your response that popular, effective campaigning and grassroots political action is inherently immoral or requires immoral behavior is itself part of that problem. Hell, we are doing the thing right now. If we were on the fascist spectrum we wouldn’t bother with this nitpicky argument and would just wait for whatever point of contention we can agree on and rally around it. We just suck at this.
Look, it’s ultimately a technical problem. The other side saw the communication tools had a flaw and exploited it. Not because they’re smart, but because they had a million monkeys on typewriters tucked away online and they randomly figured out they could influence real world events for a laugh. And then the nazis caught wind.
We missed that boat and then bought into their narrative that this was something they own that is evil and only they get to do, and so we’re laying out a red carpet for them to own mainstream culture. It’s excurciating to watch.
You need to show the alternatives are doing poorly and create an image that they are incompetent and the cause of the current set of issues. Which should be easy, because they are, by and large.
Well yeah. This we agree on, but it really did not sound like this is what you meant by what you wrote earlier.
The implication in your response that popular, effective campaigning and grassroots political action is inherently immoral or requires immoral behavior is itself part of that problem.
No? You read me wrong then.
The perception is that the left is deluded, splintered and naive. Those are all perceptions pushed by the right onto the left that the left sucks at dispelling.
You were pushing this earlier on in the convo
Here’s a party doing exactly what you suggest. Notice how the party isn’t exactly soaring in the statistics and is disliked by leftists as a result of all the bigotry.
No, see, there’s a difference between being good at using communication tools and being a bigot. That is part of the left’s issue, too. The goal isn’t to scapegoat the same people the right does, that typically does not work. The idea is to scapegoat the same people that are already being targeted (right wing politicians, large corporations, billionaires) effectively.
You keep using the word scapegoat ? I find the way you speak rather iffy in general
People know socialism exists
I’m not sure they do. I think most people have heard the term and think that it basically means high taxes and high govt intervention (basically social democracy). Or they think it means that the government controls the economy and all companies would become nationalized. I was effectively a socialist for a couple of years before I realized I was. A lot of people need to know what socialism even is before they can erase the stigma in their minds.
They at least know it exits enough to learn more about it in theory. The issue is that when trying to explain socialism to other people, it is often rejected out of pocket. Neoliberalism is a major culprit in this. People often say things like, socialism doesn’t work or the Soviet Union collapsed.
People will still need to learn about socialism in more detail, that’s not in dispute. But neoliberal ideas are acting as a blocker for people to even want to learn more about other ideas like socialism. People can be placated by the incremental progress offered by neoliberals, when they don’t realize we need systemic change and wealth redistribution if we are going to fix problems like climate change and wealth inequality. edit: typo
Absolutely. And even worse people often believe it is incompatible with democracy or is somehow otherwise innately authoritarian :/
I really am rather tired of how well capitalists and tankies have ruined peoples perception of the term
it’s great, because they really are saying the opposite of the truth often enough that people take it as common sense. Capitalism is incompatible with democracy, yet democracy creates the stability capitalists crave. They want a free lunch; constantly trying to get rid of the foundations while expecting to be properly sheltered.
The problem with knowing what socialism means is that it’s a linguistic battleground of sorts, where the word has multiple meanings depending on who uses it. For instance:
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A liberal and conservative would likely think that it’s when “government does stuff” like you described - higher taxes, more public services etc.
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ML’s believe that the ‘socialism’ described above is just liberalism and actual socialism is when means of production are nationalized, private capital is abolished but the state becomes state capitalist and develops that way.
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Marxists believe that both ‘socialisms’ above are just liberalism and actual socialism is when the capitalist mode of production is abolished, so commodity production is replaced with production for use and people pay for goods using something like their labor time with vouchers. This is Marx’s definition in Critique of Gotha Programme.
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Some anarchist/marxist sects believe that the ‘socialisms’ above are just liberalism, that this kind of ‘wage’ system is a needless concession and yap yap yap you get the idea.
It’s often genuinely difficult to know what the writer means when they use the word “socialism”
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I am too dumb to understand what this means.
I’m always arguing about this topic with people. It definitely isn’t going to make sense without that context.
I prefer to think OP didn’t put enough thought or effort in the comic, making it hard to understand/follow
Job done.
I genuinely thought this comic was mocking leftists for not making good points and just wishing things would get worse until neoliberals convert to their like of thinking. Imagine my shock when I read that OP is a leftist and not mocking them in this post. It’s like when someone makes propaganda that ends up supporting the other side.
It’s mostly a critique of the accelerationist streak I see in other socialists. So it’s supposed to anti-accelerationist. When people talk about median-voter syndrome I think the ideas that most of those people have in common are neoliberal ideas. Of course that’s not to say it’s exclusively neoliberal ideas, just that it’s probably the most common. So neoliberals are probably the largest pool of people to recruit from.
As socialists we should be working to figure out the propaganda that will help to get people to reject neoliberalism en masse. That’s what I wanted to start working on with future memes, but it felt like it was important to explain why. I was hoping this would be a useful starting place to point people to if they ask me why I’m trying to make anti-neoliberal memes in the future.
But yeah, this my main critique of the arguments I encounter from socialists on lemmy. I think it benefits us to really examine this assumption, because the material conditions are really bad, but people are still saying they need to get worse.
Given the options of being beaten to death by fascists or being chastised by a communist while you beat them to death, people choose the latter. You will face severe hardship by moving left, but will face less hardship by moving right. Naturally, then, people will shift in the direction that makes their lives the least difficult in a given moment.
I wouldn’t argue it’s a case of least resistance materially, in terms of physical hardship, when choosing between socialism and fascism. I think neoliberalism does set people up to fail in the sense that fascism is ideologically the path of least resistance. Neoliberalism says we don’t need to change systems only the people in charge of those systems. Fascism says we should, in addition, change the people living in the system, mainly by removing them.
This is an easier change in thinking than fundamentally restructuring economic and political institutions to be inclusive instead of extractive. Thus socialists and progressives have to work harder than the fascists do because neoliberalism does most of the work for the fascists. Neoliberalism leads to fascism.
I am mostly talking about where we currently are, now that fascists are in power. People will start having to make that mental decision. ‘Do I keep my head down, do I stand up and die, or do I just join the fascists and try to have a good life?’
Neoliberalism doesn’t have any bearing on how things go next, IMO.
People will start having to make that mental decision.
While that’s true that doesn’t necessarily mean a person is a fascist if they keep their head down. What I mean is that neoliberals are more susceptible to becoming fascists who terrorize other people.
Although, I think there are a lot of people who have consumed a decent chunk of anti-fascist propaganda. These people are effectively awkwardly stuck as neoliberals. They’ve rejected fascism, but they still can’t bring themselves to really be socialists or even progressives.
Getting these people to reject neoliberalism is crucial to building grassroots movements to build a political revolution. We need people to rise up against the systems that have enabled this fascist takeover. As long as a majority of people have neoliberal ideas in their heads, they’re unlikely to do that. People need to learn that systemic change and wealth redistribution are essential. Otherwise we are going to be victims to a larger fascist movement later and/or climate change even if we somehow defeat this fascist dictatorship.
So not only is neoliberalism how we got here, as neoliberalism leads to fascism, but rejecting neoliberalism is going to be crucial to getting rid of the current fascist regime. It’s not enough to only be against fascism, we also need to be for something too. And neoliberalism is getting in the way of being for something for a lot of people.
