this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2025
9 points (73.7% liked)
Socialism
6384 readers
46 users here now
Rules TBD.
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
i DON'T wanna call you a hypocrite (like the kind of person who says "you said we should improve society, yet you live in it"), but assuming english is among these languages, you're posting in english. if we CAN'T use these four languages, can we use esperanto (a universal conlang)?
oh and also, i heard that cowbee's method on studying socialist/communist theory is simply taking each paragraph and boiling them down in simple layperson's terms. can i study that article you linked with that method? do you have anything on what you said that i should study with that method?
You'll get no argument from me. I wouldn't say it's hypocritical to acknowledge reality. I am a colonizer, I speak one of the colonizers languages. My family brought their language here from Europe. I live on the lands of genocides peoples. I was raised to worship genociders, slavers, rapists, and tyrants as beacons of justice, goodness, and freedom
I never said we can't use English. What I am saying is that when we speak of fascism, we talk about how brutal, violent, and totalitarian it is, out to including forcing everyone to speak their language.
You are asking about the potential for future fascist government in the USA and I am saying the US has been a fascist government since its founding - concentration camps by race, enforced racial hierarchy, enslavement, working slaves to death, profiting off of slaves, stealing children and stripping them of their culture and forcing them to live like us. These are all things the US has done and is doing.
what if the us becomes a socialist country during the great depression? would that solve the hierarchy problems?
The US didn’t become a socialist country during the Great Depression, so while there might be value in trying to understand ways people might have worked towards it in that moment, theorizing about how things might be different now if someone had managed to seems pointless.
i'm just asking what would the us be like if it becomes a socialist country during the great depression. seriously!
Then the world would be a better place. The end.
Why does your historical revisionism fantasy matter?
do you think i should study socialist/communist theory a bit more, and if so, do you have anything that you can recommend to me?
Since you’ve expressed that it can be hard to stay focused on reading, I gave you a long list of podcast links previously to help with both-siding genocide in hopes that it would be an easier format for you to get introduced to some theory with. Have you listened to them yet?
If so, maybe read through this post. It’s got a long list of sources to other articles and videos that are a bit shorter than reading theory, and might help out with some aspects of supporting AES countries that you’ve also struggled with.
what about texts about bothsides-ing active genocide, and struggling with supporting aes countries? oh and i really wish aes countries would be a bit more progressive (especially when it comes to lgbtq people and non-binary people such as myself). seriously!
Here’s an article, which I have read
A book, which I have not: Perfect Victims, by Mohammed El-Kurd
No, the US is a white supremacist settler colony built on genocide and slavery. Socialism is insufficient for reparations. Reparations would require accepting the self determination of the indigenous nations still present, and the self-determination of the African diaspora in the country, as well as the dissolution of the boundaries between the US and Canada and between many of the states, and many other preconditions for reparations to proceed effectively. Then it would take decades, likely a century, of very difficult work advancing a collaborative strategy for thorough decolonization of the continent.
oh and i DON'T wanna be the kind of person who goes "you said that capitalism is bad, yet you're using products of capitalism" (which if you can ask me i consider as a fallacy), but you live in the us. the first amendment allows for the freedoms of religion, of the press and of speech, and to assemble peacefully and to redress grievances. you're exercising your right to express yourself and to redress grievances by stating something critical of the us, especially when the us became a country back in the 1770s and such.
I said that. I live in the US. I am a settler colonist. What of it?
Yes. Lots of German fascists were allowed to express themselves. You may not realize this but the stories that every single critic was murdered are actually just stories and not true.
What was true was that the government spied on everyone they could. Guess that the US has been doing? Spying on every single digital communication for the last 25 years.
So, yeah, what are you arguing?
you went a long way to godwin's law - "as an online discussion goes on, it becomes more and more likely for someone to do comparisons to fascism."
if i can give an example spying on everyone, it'd be the nsa.
You literally opened the thread with a hypothesis about fascism. How am I the one to blame here? You can't be serious.
That's correct, the US has been spying on its citizens for a long time, just like the fascists did. That would be evidence that the US might be fascist, despite the fact that they don't punish everyone who speaks out against them, and the reality is that the fascists also did not punish everyone who spoke out against them. This particular line of reasoning was raised when you said that I was in America posting online in critique of my government as potentially evidence for how the US is not yet fascist, but as I said, fascists didn't punish everyone who critiqued them either but what they did do was spy in everyone so they could figure out who they wanted to punish, which the US is definitely doing
do you think i should study socialist/communist theory a bit more?
oh and this is my 600th comment here on this lemmy instance, a lot more than how many comments i've posted on hexbear. seriously!
Of course! We all should! Until we die. We should never stop learning and there is never an end to the things we can learn. Study more theory, but also study more history, and study literary critique and the history of literary critique, and study philosophical theory and history, and study political theory and history, and study economics and the history of economics as a field of study.
Study forever. Your positions will constantly be updating. Eventually you will have a bunch of good evidence for positions that you can rely on and build from, while always recognizing that new evidence could undermine those positions and you should be open to that.
Stop trying to establish what you support and what you oppose and start trying to identify what you are ignorant of and how you can fix that.
what about the civil rights movement from the 1950s and 1960s? also, i support reparations. seriously!
Why are you worried about virtue signaling. I don't care what you support. You might be a little wrapped up in useless frameworks of value and meaning.
What about the civil rights movement? It was because the US was a fascist government that harmed black folk. And then the USA police forces killed the leaders of the movement.
Sure, there were a few laws passed to stop some of the bad things, but they didn't amount to much - black folk still lived in ghettos, they still lost most of the wealth they managed to build, they still didn't get reparations.
So, yeah, I mean, the civil rights movement doesn't disprove the US is a fascist nation
is there any reason why you said "virtue signaling"?
also, i support the actions of civil rights leaders during the 1950s and 1960s and such.
if the us becomes a socialist/communist country during the great depression (after a period of socialism/communism becoming mainstream in the us), there'd be less poverty and such.
Because you told me what you emotionally support. What you support is irrelevant to an analysis of whether the US is fascist.
And there you go supporting things. I am happy for you. But it adds nothing to our mutual understanding
Poverty alleviation would be a great thing, yes, but it would not make it less fascist if it maintained racial hierarchy, the Indian reservation system, and did not engage in reparations of the harm that the European colonial movement visited upon the continent and its peoples
are you a more hardline marxist-leninist? can one still be marxist-leninist while opposing the bureaucratic actions of stalin in the ussr government?
I don't think that question has much meaning without context. There's no such thing as a hard line ML. Ask specific questions and you'll get specific answers.
Of course one can be an ML while opposing anything. But you have to oppose it as a process, not as an emotion. What do you specifically oppose? Why do you oppose it? What do you think gave rise to the phenomena to which you are referring? Where is your evidence for your claims? What would make you change your mind? Etc.
There are very few things that MLs just oppose because that's "the line". Marx, for all the complexity in his analysis, gives us a very simple framework:
Our job is to assert that we value human life, that we support it. Everything else comes from that. We do not need to support Stalin to be MLs, nor oppose him to be MLs. To be MLs we must engage in the analytical and empirical process of discovering how history has preceded us, how that has produced the present moment, and what we are to do now in our present context to bring about a future state that results in the continuation of human society and avoidance of the foreseeable collapses of that society.