Like ok. When I was a lib, I had a lot of communist values already. I was already socdem leaning (though an Obama supporter because I foolishly believed he stood for those values). The vast majority of times I moved left involved some sort of confrontation with a person to my left on an issue. Sometimes there was resistance on my part, but that usually involved just like, a single argument, me realizing they were right, and moving left on the issue. Other times it was just… receiving information I didnt previously know. The closer to ML I got, the harder the struggles were, as some of the current geopolticial issues and also historical issues involved in that were the hardest to deprogram and the most hard coded. But I still got there.
Even simply openly calling myself as a communist was as simple as seeing someone else on Tumblr openly do so and realizing “oh wait thats an option?”
Oddly, “lesser evilism is not actually the correct way to approach electorally” was kind of my final gate? Despite being a poster here I sort of secretly still was a lesser evilist up until the recent stuff with Gaza. So it wasnt a straight line admittedly, but what it did do was give me a certain line of thinking about what the mindset of people who vote Democrat were.
In the midst of autistic myopia, I sort of for a long time believed that most libs were “communists in waiting” too. I sort of assumed you just had to spread the word, and they’d get there. Maybe they’d struggle on some of the same points I did, like not automatically believing a protest movement is good because its a protest movement, or that “America bad” isnt actually a bad way of thinking and critically supporting anti-American forces in the world is in fact the correct thing to do, and of course as I mentioned lesser evilism. But for the most part, you just had to give them permission to be communist. You just had to normalize it.
So seeing liberals like, be presented with the option to move left and slamming the door closed violently. Even on the most basic and obvious things. It was disheartening. I really thought it would be easier than that!
Theres this recent awful trend on TikTok (one Ive mostly only just heard of, because I’m not on that platform) of people “turning in their leftist card” over real leftists not flocking to support Harris and being principled about opposing genocide. One particular one, the only one I’ve seen with my own eyes, was a guy saying he “just found out he’s not a leftist, he’s a liberal, and [he’s] turning in [his] leftist card”. Like, whats happening there is a liberal is learning for the first time that he’s a liberal. But like, my experience with that realization was to go “oh, so THATS what leftism is? OK. let me travel there” (yaknow, like I said, on average lol, it wasnt always that easy). So seeing the door slam for me is kinda weird? Still to this day despite being somewhat used to it now?
Interesting thread. There are a few different discussions happening but I’ll just put my thoughts in one spot.
Discussion 1: There are no real liberals, they are either secretly fascist or secretly communist
Maybe this conversation was more between-the-lines than explicitly stated in this thread. But I sense it’s there, so… against this potential strawman, I will claim that liberalism is in fact a valid third position, regardless of whether an individual liberal is ultimately more sympathetic to fascism or communism when contradictions force a conflict.
Part of the allure of liberalism, as contrasted with fascism and communism, is that it reaffirms a world governed by abstract laws. The basic assumption of liberalism is that humans are irrational, and therefore must be rescued by the dispassionate rule of laws, institutions, and processes. Fascism and communism reject this basic assumption because both involve human intervention over these abstractions which can run afoul (depending on one’s perspective, of course). This opposition between humans and abstractions is why horseshoe theory is so easily accepted by liberals.
In those moments of history when liberals are forced to pick a side between fascism and communism, they have a few options. First, they can “go down with the ship” and fight for liberalism until they are killed or otherwise made irrelevant. Second, they can side with fascism temporarily in order to protect the institutions which they hold most important. Third, they can side with communism if they realize that their liberal ideas were only ever in service to humanist ideals, ideals which experience demonstrates are not achievable through liberalism, but possibly so with communism.
Discussion 2: Is it a sign of autism to believe other people are by default altruistic/leftist/communist?
I’m not autistic (to the best of my knowledge) and I am the same way. And unless 100% of lefties are autistic, I think it is not unique to autistic people to have this default assumption about other people. I would argue that everyone assumes that others think in the same way as them, until proven otherwise. This is the basic premise of many a TV drama and also real-life relationship troubles. Everyone thinks differently and has different life experiences, this is true without invoking neurodivergence at all.
Maybe it’s true that autistic people are more empathetic on average. If that is true, I would wonder if that is directly caused by the “autistic mind” so-to-speak, or is it just that marginalization tends to make people more empathetic? (I’m assuming that most autistic people have at some point felt marginalized due to their autism, apologies if this offends someone)
Discussion 3: Is it a waste of time to recruit liberals?
I agree with @autismdragon@hexbear.net on this. If liberals can’t be recruited, then who the hell is going to make up a revolution?
There are two similar but distinct issues here, and they are worth separating:
To keep this brief, I’ll simply say that it is important to take the long view. For those of us who de-liberalized, it’s easy to forget just how gradual the transition was, and probably how frustrating it would have appeared to leftists at the time. This is just part of the process of developing consciousness among the working class. It doesn’t happen overnight. Neither is class consciousness automatic. There are those Marxists who believe that revolution is inevitable given worsening material conditions, but I believe that it is the confluence of both worsening conditions and revolutionary action which causes change. One without the other is ineffectual.
One more thought on this actually. Precisely how much worse must be the conditions of the average liberal before they convert, then? There is no bottom to the conditions of the working class, and there is no ceiling to exploitation. Things are ok in many places but they’re becoming bad in a lot of the Western world, even in America, for average middle-class families.
An insightful question. A comparison of the conditions of the western working class (as we’ve observed in our lives and studies) to those of the English proletariat in Engels’ and Marx’s time would be illustrative as to “how much worse must be the conditions” before the liberals stop liberalling so successfully among the workers.
Mostly from Engels, Conditions of the Working Class in England. I’ll type up some highlights in addition to the full images.
Living conditions: Literally bailing the river water out of your dwelling every morning
20 people to a 2room+attic+basement residence. 120 people to a sometimes nonfunctional privy. Ireland was even more crowded.
food in stores: Old, rancid, rotting meat. Rotting vegetables. Mouldy cheese.
Soap-refuse mixed in with sugar. Dirt and sheep fat mixed with cocoa.
From Capital; cobwebs, cockroaches, sand and alum in bread.
Vagrants, tramps, homeless, beggars and the like Poor rounded up and thrown into workhouses with conditions similar to or worse than prisons. Families broken up. Hard labour (harder than regular wage labour) but useless (so as not to distort the market). No visitors, gifts, leaving, etc without permission from the inspector.
Some choice examples of conditions in the workhouses include children being locked in dark rooms with corpses as a punishment for bedwetting
Such punishments were common, and the rooms crowded, cold, filthy, and the punished youths often stripped naked
As for treatment of the old and the dead?
As for working conditions, I’ll just post one screenshot from working class bc this is getting long
GOOD post.