[dude with glasses in a communist t-shirt, arguing] I’m the only leftist here, your opinions are TRASH
[dude holding a theory book on smug, arguing] Read theory you losers, you’re all WRONG
[dude in an anarchist hoodie, arguing] Nuh-uh, I’m the only leftist here, you’re SHITLIBS
[the three dudes are now caught in a cartoon fight, glasses gone flying, punches everywhere, while a firing squad of nazis are targeting them with rifles]
[a confused nazi asks] Why… why are they still arguing?
A professor in college once said something that stayed with me. He said that “bad ideologies will always find ways to self implode”.
This stuck with me because it’s true. Good ideologies tend to be pragmatic and flexible, and so they’re able to adapt and evolve. However, bad ideologies tend to be more rigid and focus mostly on theories and ideals, and therefore they’re unable to adapt or evolve. Far left ideologies firmly fall in the latter category which is why they are where they are.
Now make a comic about the redfascists shooting anarchists, or the (I am assuming leftcom) shooting anarchists.
Why are you all trying to have a serious discussion under a comic strip?
Where else should we have a serious discussion?
You can try to have a serious discussion where you want but don’t expect to get anything much serious out of comic strips and memes.
In a comic strip club.
The nice thing about the two party system is that there is no one else to vote for. Its how we got here. But at least we will have a chance of putting someone who has an idea how to run a country in charge
You should try the every time somebody gets unhappy they splinter off and form their own party political system. It essentially amounts to the two-party system in any case but provides more entertainment.
Such an american comment. So indoctrinated into the two-party system that it’s impossible to even imagine anything else.
Have you heard of the concept of coalitions?
Americans informally create coalitions. That’s why you hear the term “caucus” a lot more often, like Bernie Sanders “caucusing” with Democrats. Many libertarians may not like Trump and the fascist Republicans, but they still caucus together. The problem with caucusing with Democratic party is that they sideline the left, especially Bernie Sanders, in favour of more corporate friendly candidates. As for the Republican party, well the right always act right and value group cohesion and appeasing the rich more, even if they become fascist.
Caucusing is hardly working and here is the hard to swallow pill for Americans: organise grassroots campaigns and plant actual progressives into primaries. Americans used to be good at doing that. That’s how they got the Roosevelts, ended the first Gilded Age, and third party candidates being elected more. The duopoly system became entrenched sometime after the early 1900’s, probably when Theodore Roosevelt ran third party and split the vote of progressives, which handed the presidency to the racist Woodrow Wilson.
Caucausing isn’t really comparable to coalitions in my opinion, because all the formalisms are missing.
Bernie Sanders has no actual power within the party, no matter how many people voted Democrats because of him.
Compare the situation to an actual multi-party system with coalitions. Sanders would have his own party and there would be 1-3 other parties that are currently part of the Democratic party. Each of these parties would collect separate vote shares which would lead to some of these parties being larger and others smaller. Voters would have to choice to express which exact political direction they prefer instead of just having a binary choice.
After the election, coalitions would be formed. These coalitions wouldn’t have to be along the current party lines, but e.g. moderate republicans and moderate democrats could form a coalition with eachother. This way, coalition-based multi-party systems tend towards moderate compromises, while two-party systems tend towards extremism.
In a multi-party system centrists represent reason and compromise, whereas in a two-party system they represent boring blandness.
In a coalition, each of the coalition partners hold power, because everyone of them can end the coalition. This means, more compromise is necessary and someone like Sanders cannot just be ignored for decades.
If you’re throwing the word “liberals” around, you’re an authoritarian, which is no better than being a fascist.
This is why I can’t stand Tankies and establishment Democrats. You can’t claim to be a champion of human rights, while simultaneously supporting the governments that egregiously violate peoples’ human rights. Complete and utter hypocrites.
Perhaps you should broaden your horizons somewhat. Tankies are an international group whereas democrats only exist in the US, so you can’t really compare the two. For one thing, they have different ultimate goals and motivations.
idk man, looks to me like Liberals (the political ideology, not the US term for leftwing people) seems to side with the Nazis almost as a rule whenever the faschists come about
Edit: See what I mean?
No. Using the word for a any political group does not make you anything. Also, your comment is extremely US centric, (neo-)liberalism has done a lot of damage on the other side of the pool.
If you’re throwing the word “liberals” around, you’re an authoritarian, which is no better than being a fascist.
Deeply fucking unserious person
I feel like the nazis should be congratulating themselves on sowing discord, distracting those that could resist with bullshit
The infighting amongst the left is entirely self inflected
Actually maybe we shouldn’t call it “left politics”, just “human politics”, because it’s politics for the human, not for some mega-corps.
Are you continuing the comic, or making an actual aside?
The People’s Front of Judea vs the Judean People’s Front
People, people, people, we can kill each other AFTER the fascist are gone, please and thank you.
Chinese civil war be like:
This thread keeps popping up and it just clicked and I had to ask:
Is the guy in the red shirt supposed to be Vaush?
It’s the factory preset look for these pseudo-tankies that show up in my local activism group every now and then.
Always the big earring, unkempt beard, this specific shape of glasses, and the cheap aliexpress t-shirt with a political message on it.
Not my fault Vaush stole the look!
pseudo-tankies
I’m not even sure whether this is supposed to be an insult anymore. Is a “tankie” better or worse than a “fake tankie”?
In a thread complaining about leftist infighting, there’s a special irony in liberals singing out a leftist who is simultaneously too far left and not far left enough.
It’s a specific type of leftist we have in my country, french communists are a… special breed, let’s say.
In the 1980s our communist party bulldozed a migrant worker dormitory because they hated migrants that much. Red MAGA or something. The party recovered from that era, but french communists are still chauvinistic, xenophobic, and strangely not that much into anti-imperialism (which is meant to be the redeeming quality of tankies). They do however share with tankies the traits of applying “class first” logic to a lot of conversations, which makes them deathly allergic to intersectionality, and being terminally online and way into infighting. Thus they usually end up booted from actual activist groups, since they tend to hold us back and prevent us from actually getting shit done in the streets.
Hence me calling them pseudo-tankies because it’s hard to label them. We just call them tankies here: they’re members of a party that supported the crushing of the hungarian uprising with soviet tanks, and is ambiguous about tienanmen (no denying it happened but very alt-history about it), so pro-tanks they are.
I have an easier time getting along with the average online american tankie than with our local communist party’s members.
chauvinistic, xenophobic, and strangely not that much into anti-imperialism
Sounds like Nazbol to me.
The party recovered from that era, but french communists are still chauvinistic, xenophobic, and strangely not that much into anti-imperialism
Yeah, that’s been a problem in the US as well, under “Patriotic Communism”. But it’s also largely artificial - a product of party decay to the point that fascists can sock puppet the leftist labels without actually pursuing leftist policy.
Hence me calling them pseudo-tankies because it’s hard to label them.
One problem that really does plague leftist organizing is state espionage. It has become almost a running joke that half your local DSA meeting is going to be NYPD and FBI informants fighting for front row seats.
But that’s also more a legacy of Nixon/Reagan Era COINTELPRO, with the modern state security forces scrambling to invent incidents to thwart from whole cloth.
What I see labeled “Tankie” in the modern moment is anyone championing AES. For some reason, the greatest betrayal of any kind of revolution is… winning? So every socialist politician from Fidel Castro to Hugo Soto-Martínez is doing authoritarian stateism by being inside the halls of power, rather than outside waving a paper placard.
. I have an easier time getting along with the average online american tankie than with our local communist party’s members
That’s a shame.
I looked it up, and yep, looks like the PCF abandoned Marxism-Leninism in 1979 and adopted Eurocommunism, which is a vulgarization of Marxism that upholds western imperialism. MLs would consider them to be patsocs, same as the American Communist Party which espouses “MAGA Communism.”
I thought maga communism was a joke.
We all wish it was…
Would be funny considering how much Vaush hates Marxism-Leninism.
bLuE nO mAtTeR wHo unless it’s an actual progressive 😮💨
I don’t care what someone calls themselves as long as they oppose fascism and understand that the only place where Pedophiles are welcome is the inside of a wood chipper.
I can understand the emotional impulse, but i would change it to “active pedophiles”. They can’t really choose what arouses them, but they can choose not to act on those impulses - that is what counts. This distinction is important, because i would very much prefer if inactive pedophiles (who probably beat themselves up constantly, leading to emotional instability, depression and therefore a higher risk of becoming active) had easy access to ressources to help them stay inactive like therapy or the equivalent to Narcotics Anonymous.
The only thing that matters is policy, I’ll work with anyone as long as it’s toward an egalitarian society with wealth redistribution.
Labels are nice for classifying, but not for executing. I don’t care if you identify as leftist, or liberal, or progressive; I care if you support good policies.
The issue is that you’re a minority in your camp. Broadly speaking, the left sees compromise as weakness, neutrality as cowardice, working with opposition towards a common cause as treachery. These are all symptoms of purity testing, and it’s the reason why the left in so many places is completely paralyzed.
How do you know that isn’t confirmation bias? We have no idea how many leftists there are that see purity testers and decide to not engage.
It’s a similar to MAGA in a way. MAGA’s biggest problem, as an ideology, is that it revolves around blind loyalty to a single idiot and therefore the entire movement starts and stops with his whims, no matter how contradictory, damaging, or nonsensical. You could say it’s confirmation bias that I have this opinion, but I think given recent events, this opinion does have a basis of fact to it. The same applies to the left when it comes to purity testing. It’s really not hard to see how prominent purity testing is in leftist discourse.
I’ll work with anyone as long as it’s toward an egalitarian society with wealth redistribution.
Okay, but here me out? What if we just privatize the mechanism of wealth redistribution? Also we’re going to be spending a bunch of money on foreign wars, but don’t worry - this time the people were fighting are ontologically evil, we promise. Yes, we will have to make deep cuts to social services in order to pay for the war (while still running enormous deficits because haha, psych, deficits don’t matter), but it will be vital to get the Moderate Conservative on board with our program.
Also, we control every branch of government, but we still need to compromise with fascists in the opposition.
Okay, why are you leaving? You’re clearly not serious about progressive reforms.
And STOP SAYING NICE THINGS AND CHINA! This is a red line we will not tolerate!
You know what? You’re not serious. We’re forming a coalition with Liz Cheney. See you in the losers bracket next year.
…
You’re the reason we lost control of the government.
…
Okay, now stop voting for a popular leftist mayor, or we’ll burn this whole party down.
hear, hear
Yeah, but the question ultimately lies in how many bad and straight up harmful policies are worth the small step toward an egalitarian society? Where does it become ignoble to vote for one policy, when there are ultimately many more harmful ones outweighing the positive? Because it’s kinda rare that we get to vote on policy. We vote for people, with the vague promise of policy ideas that face an uphill battle and watering down— not to mention the straight up bastardization of those good policies, turning them into terrible ones.
I wish it were so black and white as us getting to vote on policy. The policymakers surely seem to be unable.
Yeah, pretty much this.
Going over the comments I already see boat loads of people completely missing the point where right wing extremism is taking hold thanks in part due to the constant bickering.
Good old “divide and conquer”.
This is an odd take just considering World War 2 is like the example of unity against a common genocidal threat: the Nazis.
Yeah and that only happened after years of the Nazi party being in power in Germany. And they even got Sudetenland as appeasement by France and Britain without the consent of Czechoslovakia. France and Britain only gave a fuck after Poland was invaded while the rest of Europe tried to stay neutral. And later Italy joined the Nazi. Europe wasn’t very united against the Nazi. Unity of the allies only happened after hundreds of thousands civilians were already executed. Before the invasion of Poland the Nazi executed political opponents and rounded up the Jews in Germany and the world didn’t do shit about it.
There were no anarchists left in the USSR.
And the Soviets allied with Nazi Germany and carved up Poland with their new buddies.
The communists were never “buddies” with the Nazis. The communists spent the decade prior trying to form an anti-Nazi coalition force, such as the Anglo-French-Soviet Alliance which was pitched by the communists and rejected by the British and French. The communists hated the Nazis from the beginning, as the Nazi party rose to prominence by killing communists and labor organizers, cemented bourgeois rule, and was violently racist and imperialist, while the communists opposed all of that.
When the many talks of alliances with the west all fell short, the Soviets reluctantly agreed to sign a non-agression pact, in order to delay the coming war that everyone knew was happening soon. Throughout the last decade, Britain, France, and other western countries had formed pacts with Nazi Germany, such as the Four-Power Pact, the German-French-Non-Agression Pact, and more. Molotov-Ribbentrop was unique among the non-agression pacts with Nazi Germany in that it was right on the eve of war, and was the first between the USSR and Nazi Germany. It was a last resort, when the west was content from the beginning with working alongside Hitler.
Harry Truman, in 1941 in front of the Senate, stated:
If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.
Not only that, but it was the Soviet Union that was responsible for 4/5ths of total Nazi deaths, and winning the war against the Nazis.
Not gonna mention the Secret Protocol in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that enabled the partition of Poland and the Baltics?
Or that Stalin actually fell for it all, trusted Hitler, disregarded all evidence of Nazi troop buildup until the day of Operation Barbarossa? Then Stalin spent weeks disappeared from public view.
Credit to the Soviets for defeating the Nazis. WW2 would have been lost without them. But they also acted as imperialists in reattaching Tsarist colonies to Russia, dividing Poland and the Baltics with Hitler, invading Finland, not to mention all the puppet states created postwar.
Liberals will never forgive the USSR for not letting the Nazis have all of Poland.
No, because there was never an agreement about partitioning. It was about spheres of influence, which Nazi Germany broke, and further the USSR entered Poland weeks after the Nazis invaded in order to prevent the entirety of Poland from falling to the Nazis, largely sticking to areas only a few decades prior Poland had invaded and annexed.
There’s also no evidence the Soviets didn’t expect the Nazis to invade. They didn’t get the timeframe right, but they expected it the entire time. And no, the Soviets weren’t imperialist.
0·3 days agoIt’s interesting to read that article on sci-hub. It’s giving more specific details on what happened in 1939, but is otherwise in line with The Cold War & Its Origins. You don’t need access to classified documents to understand the world, you can sit there in 1961 and get shit more or less right.
Yep! Just having a fairly consistent and coherent understanding of the world is usually sufficient to get things more right than not, not everyone needs to be a grandmaster-level Marxist-Leninist with decades of reading and practice to view the world in a constructive way. Theory and practice is still necessary, but even liberals can acknowledge reality.
The Soviet Union was established before the Nazis existed. There was no need to ally with anarchists against them when they didn’t exist yet and waged war.
A better example would be the Spanish civil war where communists, liberals and anarchists did fight on the same side until infighting broke out due to an ineffective and non-authorative government. Meaning they failed to establish a leading ideology which could have prevented this.
Yeah that’s why they’re stupid. I think it’s more of an astroturf op
