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.

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.

I always thought nationstates gets a bit closer (and it's funny)

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.

"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.

I did, in fact, lol.

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.

No, they were not.

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.

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.

Thanks for the book rec.

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.

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?"

Oh hey it's Robert Evans

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.

Stuff goes straight up the butt.

I’m unsure how that is a retort to any of that being left of United States policy…

LMAO

Fuck horseshoe theory

I can get behind that

does this mean plain right is further away from centrist?

I can get behind you, my friend.

None of it is left wing economic policy. Strength through Joy was funded by wage deductions and operating tourist facilities in occupied territories, not employer contributions.

The two things that could (at a stretch) be considered left wing social policy (Strength through Joy and maintaining the universal healthcare that existed prior to their rise to power) are fascist. Neither were for public benefit. Strength through Joy infiltrated all aspects of recreation and social life, enforced the states moral codes, and served as propaganda. The other was eugenics.

Mandatory labour programs are not economically left or right.

That leaves us with labour unions? The US allows them but Nazi Germany did not.

This is a pretty good example of how useless the political compass or scale are 🤷‍♀️

they are teaching that stalin is evil because he is rightwing?

Yes. That is essentially the lesson they derive from Animal Farm: that any communist/socialist revolution will ultimately devolve into "the same thing" or "just as bad" as fascist dictatorship. If you you don't recognize the incessant equating of Stalin with Hitler in both popular media and school curricula, then I don't know what to tell you. And when I say they derive that lesson from Animal Farm, that is not to let Orwell off the hook at all, because that is the most obvious and valid way to interpret it, as Orwell intended.

What's more, the lesson seems to be one you've absorbed and accepted, considering you're touting Animal Farm as if it has pedagogical merit instead of treating it as the silly, puerile rightist dreck that it is and even worse, insisting that fucking horseshoe theory is a useful heuristic. Oh and of course unironically using the epithet "tankie" to refer to other leftists in the same comment where you said you "just wish local efforts could connect to larger efforts, since we need multiple groups cooperating in solidarity, not isolated individualism" (and to be clear, that latter quote is good and correct but demonstrates unrecognized hypocrisy in someone who also talks about those ebil "tankies").

Any one of those things is enough to induce a huge facepalm in any leftist who has actually engaged with real leftist thought and theory. Yes, we are actually reading the words that you're typing and we can't help but wince.

Not specifically. I'm referring to the fact that any assigned reading in a public school is, by definition, assigned by the government.

Woah damn, sorry comrade I didn't even think of that!

My bad for procrastinating reading this for 23 days (it's been at the bottom of my unread inbox) If we're going to continue this conversation let's keep the messages short (if possible) so my adhd brain doesn't get overwhelmed. Also since it's been 23 days I won't be taken aback if you don't reply.

Thanks for telling me what you mean by neoliberal rugpulling.

Although I can understand the use of heuristics to simplify complex things (when the simplification is reasonably accurate) I just don't see the russian revolution turning out that way, and I think most Russians would agree.