Comradeship // Freechat

2583 readers

115 users here now

Talk about whatever, respecting the rules established by Lemmygrad. Failing to comply with the rules will grant you a few warnings, insisting on breaking them will grant you a beautiful shiny banwall.

A community for comrades to chat and talk about whatever doesn't fit other communities

founded 4 years ago

MODERATORS

felipeforte@lemmygrad.ml

I feel like former socialists never believed in socialism that much (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 1 week ago by KrupskayaPraxis@lemmygrad.ml to c/comradeship@lemmygrad.ml

26 comments fedilink hide all child comments

For former socialists, there's one argument I see them use for why they are not socialist anymore.

That argument is that they felt guilty about wanting to push their ideology onto others and so they started believing in parliamentary politics again where every opinion is valuable. My dad who used to be an anarchist as a teenager used this reasoning, as well as one of my teachers.

But this argument doesn't make sense to me, because it makes politics into something which only revolves around opinions, while we communists and the capitalist class know it's about power.

I feel like these people never learned much about their ideology when they were socialists. I think I will never stop being a communist, I know too much.

Have you seen this reasoning yourself?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] burlemarx@lemmygrad.ml 8 points 1 week ago

The thing you described is the beauty and cruelty of the ideology. Ideology is not about a fixed body of thought, like the liberals like to explain, but ideology is always evolving, adapting and changing. Ideology is necessary for the maintenance of a given society, and it's a set of beliefs we collectively develop to justify and explain the things we see.

So the liberal ideology says we live in a democracy, with free speech, with different opinions to be respected, with the ability of the people to choose their representatives, with separation of powers, where people are able to ascend socially based on merit and skill. So if society is so good, why do we want to change it with a violent revolutionary process?

However, the reality shows a ton of cracks in this ideology. As we are seeing with the recent persecution Charlie Kirk event and Palestine genocide, free speech is conveniently ignored when it touches a nerve. The free press and social media are owned by big corporations, hedge funds or banks, making the media a big marketplace where narratives circulate based on interests of capital. Democracy, which means government of the people, don't actually confers any power to the people. Representatives have no accountability, they can promise all sweet things when campaigning, but do the opposite after elections. Separation of powers is a big lie, oligarchs, legislators, top brass officials and judges go to the same social spaces, exchange favors and close agreements without any oversight of the people. Law finds all kinds of obstacles to be enforced when the powerful are involved, but has a lot of leeway to shut inconvenient protestors.

So, why do we sustain the ideology, when knowing that most of it is a big lie? Because not following it has material consequences. Our jobs can be taken away. Our personal property can be taken away. Our freedom can be taken away. Our family can be taken away. So we prefer to believe in the lie rather than facing the consequences of going against it. We prefer fiction to not suffer from reality. We prefer many times to blame the powerless for the failure of the system, so we cowardly take comfort in our little power syndrome to crush the people below us.

The only way to crush ideology is by building power outside of the superstructure. Only when we have power to materially crush capital, we will have power to crush ideology.