this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2022
41 points (100.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43831 readers
1205 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yes you are, you explicitly block the communist lemmy.
What are you going to do when Hexbear federates? It's a mixed communist and anarchist space 20x bigger than the rest of lemmy combined filled with people that explicitly adore China, defend, stand behind the position that NATO is primarily responsible for this war and that it has now reached a point at which the only way the war can end is for Russia to win because Ukraine's psychotic leadership has banned every anti-war party and closed every tv channel that had an anti-war lean. The outcome of this means the left opposes sending weapons to Ukraine because it prolongs the war and the suffering it causes.
This probably sounds wild to you as a liberal. But all of this isn't a controversial position among socialists, it's pretty standard here in Britain among the socialist left and if you take any time to go looking at what American socialists are saying you'd find it's also the case among them too. For example the DSA's current position.
I think really what's happening with you guys is that you don't realise how far right you are, you support Biden right? The fuckhead is to the right of the Tories. Over here you'd be a Tory and this is the British left's discourse on that.
I think you guys have absolutely no idea just how far right you are and how completely insulated from the REAL left in the world you actually are. You live in a media landscape completely captured by capital (which you support) that maintains a bubble that utterly deplatforms the organised and educated working class who know where their interests lie from any kind of participation. When you exit your corporate media bubbles and see the real left you undergo a considerable culture shock. I consider you, a Biden supporter, far right. You're fundamentally to the right of bloody Thatcher on every economic issue and my street celebrates her death with a fucking party every single year.
"The socialists are too mean so we block them!" is the most bullshit excuse ever. It is far more to do with blocking socialism and the left than it is to do with the way people speak, you're just blocking the left via the usual liberal methods of making up barriers that would defacto capture most of the left. This is the same tactic as the racists in America that don't explicitly target the black community but instead write policies that would overwhelmingly affect them and not white communities because the policies target issues that are prevalent within black communities.
What do I mean by this? Tone policing explicitly targets working class people. You want to control the manner in which I express myself, the manner in which I speak. You want to demand that I speak in your suitably middle-income white suburbanite american accepted manner of speaking. If I don't "speak right" then you want to kick me out of your spaces. This kind of policy OVERWHELMINGLY targets working class people because it is working class people that come from backgrounds where the way we are brought up is less privileged, where expression between one another is not a priority compared to figuring out how I'm going to pay the scumsucking landlord last month's rent which is now 6 weeks late while feeding the rest of the family while energy prices have risen 500%.
Don't police people for how they speak, you create bubbles that don't include working class people by doing this.
People should be policed for what they say, not how they say it.
By taking on the policy approaches that you have, you have built an explicitly anti-working-class space, which by extension is anti-communist because socialists are the real representatives of the working class. You've done exactly what spaces like /r/politics did to alienate the working class and create the most horrifically right wing liberal hellholes imaginable.
I have no interest in being called a liberal as a slur or by being told who I support when you've made no attempt to learn anything about me. This is precisely the kind of behavior we do not tolerate on Beehaw - you have a bone to pick with a certain kind of individual and you're taking it out on me without understanding the first thing about me. For the record, I think Biden is doing a terrible job and I'm an anarchist.
This isn't tone policing in the slightest, but I do not have the time to explain or iterate on the nuances relevant here when you're already painting us with broad strokes. Have a wonderful day.
Did you vote for Biden? Your wording here implies that you did. So you act as a liberal but wear anarchist aesthetics.
Most of this response is just you dodging the point. You want to block communists and anything that criticises policy allowing you to do so will be ignored because it's inconvenient. I don't consider you an anarchist if you vote for liberals, and I don't consider you an anarchist if you punch left instead of right. You're reinforcing the status quo of liberalism by doing so, you are functionally aiming to pull things rightwards rather than leftwards by punching left. And as I mentioned before your tone policing functions to suppress the working class, it actively suppressed anyone that doesn't speak right. What you demand of people is a middle-income culturally white manner of speaking. You hate the working class and your policy is actively classist.
EDIT: I'll just throw this in here for an example of how radically different "speech" is, on mainstream UK television, compared to the bullshit of this tone policing. https://twitter.com/GandPofficial/status/1545083158043000832
This just comes of as argumentative flaming. They didn't imply or even suggest they voted (at all), and you're just springboarding off that assumption to throw off-topic insults and guilt by association, before getting to this absolute troll phrase "You hate the working class and your policy is actively classist".
Read the lemmy.ml instance rules. Even just the first two.
Of course they did. A communist would say "I don't support Biden, I voted PSL or write-in. You've got me completely wrong."
The wording he chose was specifically "I don't like what Biden is doing" which comes with the implicit "but I voted blue no matter who because I'm a fucking liberal that supports capital".
Yes I'm well aware of their recent application of this, we've had conversations about it. It upsets me more that Lemmy got dragged into this mindset when it could do it better.
I don't know what your problem is with me saying you hate the working class if you engage in classism. If you engage in racism you hate marginalised races. Same shit, different hierarchy. Classism is prejudice and bigotry directed at the working class.
No, it doesn't come with that. Any of it. You invented an enemy that doesn't exist.
Someone said: "I think Biden is doing a terrible job and I’m an anarchist."
The rest is all you making assumptions that most likely aren't true. It's as nonsensical as me saying that you just said a communist would have voted in a US federal election, so you're clearly a social democrat reformist with faith in the bourgeois system and therefore an anti-communist. The extrapolation is tenuous, inflammatory and probably completely wrong.
This is explicitly wrong though. Communist theory actively endorses participation in bourgeoise democracy but NOT to support bourgeoise parties, Lenin is extremely clear about this in “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder. We socialists participate in bourgeoise democracy to support explicitly socialist candidates as a means of using the electoral platform as a space to spread socialist messages to more people. Not to win, because that would be stupid to believe in for a system explicitly designed from top to bottom to produce a bourgeoise outcome.
Anarchist theory on the other hand is explicitly opposed to participation in bourgeoise democracy. Such participation, especially in the case of voting for bourgeoise parties, is just explicitly functioning as a liberal within society, upholding the system, accepting and participating in it, subordinating yourself to it. It is the exact polar opposite of being ungovernable. There is a huge trend among liberal americans lately to pretend they are further left than they actually are, they participate in the system as liberals while calling themselves anarchists, the anarchism is functionally just an aesthetic to them. I only have to talk to my fellow wobblies to know shit is dire over there.
Nah I'm standing by it being correct. They would have denied it instead of downvoting and running away, because the accusation would have been offensive.
Meanwhile over here the socialist left looks at Keith fucking Starmer and is ready to not participate at all. Fuck the Labour party and fuck the liberals that have taken it over. We'll shut down the entire country via union agitation instead until we get our way. The very idea of voting for a shitty socdem like Starmer offends the entire left. Let alone voting for someone to the right of fucking Boris and Thatcher while pretending to still be a leftist. It's a literal joke. I'm willing to accept it when people own up to it and admit that it was a complete mistake to do so but anyone that stands by doing so and claims they are not functioning as a liberal is just lying to themselves.
I just want people like this to take the point seriously. As a british ( yes I know 🤢) socialist I see American ""left"" discourse and it's fucking wild to me how many people want to deradicalise the left. How you want to pander to liberals. They live in such an incredibly right wing capitalist culture (I'm not oblivious to British problems) where the working class has been so heavily pushed out of sight and deplatformed EVERYWHERE that they think they need to do the same fucking thing in order to pander to the liberals.
The solution to the American problem isn't to pander to fucking liberals it's to drag them left kicking and fucking screaming. It's to build your own spaces with a working class culture that actively promote the working class and suppress the upper classes.
The "we need to enact policies that suppress the working class to grow" concept is just functionally "we need to be liberals".
I don't think Americans seem to be aware of just how radical speech is outside of their own country either. I don't think they understand that the above is the baseline of the left in Europe. That's the level of radical discourse that achieves shitty capitalism with social safety nets and healthcare. That level of discourse is what America needs to achieve as normal within the left in order to get to European shitty welfare, let alone to achieve revolution for anarchism, socialism or whatever. And yet these people that THINK they're ""left"" while voting for people to the right of margaret fucking thatcher stand by policies that deradicalise speech and suppress the working class.
How people speak isn't the problem. What people say is the problem. Someone can be rough around the edges like I am but have significantly valid things to say. There are a lot of us, educated, principled working class socialists who are rough around the edges, we speak how we speak, we come from many countries and backgrounds. I grew up in squats ffs. Suppressing people for how they speak when so many people come from such a broad range of backgrounds ultimately just shuts down huge swathes of the poorest section of society from participation, it actively suppresses real left wing voices who had to truly fucking struggle just surviving childhood let alone learning how to fucking speak right so as not to upset some moderator that thinks it's necessary to shut me out because I say some swear words here or there.
I just don't want to shut out working class people. You can talk like fucking Cuno from Disco Elysium for all I care as long as you actually have something to say and you're saying it in good faith.