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submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by Salamence@lemmy.zip to c/leftymemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/10508286

(Stats that show boosting ICE funding is a bipartisan policy)

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[-] webadict@lemmy.world 3 points 11 hours ago

But that's the thing. That isn't the primary task. That's your primary task. Some people just need to get out of their struggle before they can help others. And if you think that will create more enemies than allies to you, then... I think you are grossly misinformed or you are lying about what you actually want.

Like, you might as well say we shouldn't have freed the slaves unless we destroyed the institutions that created slavery. Incremental progress is still good, even if it's not preferred, and people's lives benefit from it.

[-] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 2 points 11 hours ago

We can fight for benefits, but as long as we remain trapped by bourgeois ideology like liberalism, rather than proletarian ideology like dialectical materialism, then we will be hopelessly trapped by their cultural hegemony. The reason liberalism is propogated is because it rationalizes and justifies the present capitalist system, and we cannot actually move on to a better world as long as we hold to its ways of thinking except by accident. When we take a more serious approach, and actually analyze society as it truly exists, we find that overthrowing the present state of things is necessary and unavoidable.

Abolition of slavery was absolutely a good thing, but we have to know why it happend. It was mostly due to the north's desire for more proletarians for industrial labor, it was a war between agricultural slavery and industrial wage labor. In the present moment, the largest contradiction is between imperialist countries and the imperialized, as well as domestically the issue of settler-colonialism. If we don't actually take steps to combat these, we will be left wondering why conditions keep deteriorating despite putting more liberals in office.

[-] webadict@lemmy.world 4 points 10 hours ago

Ah... I think I see your problem now. You think nothing can happen unless the bourgeois will it. I, frankly, don't agree with that. I think you think the world is a lot more chess-like when it's really a lot more like poker with mostly idiots. That does explain why MLs want to go authoritarian to fix the problems, though.

Anyway, the reason why you're a fucking biscuit is you don't seem to be expressing ideas to convert liberals to your cause. You have written them off as unfixable, and, well, that sort of gives you fewer allies. How silly.

[-] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 3 points 10 hours ago

Ah… I think I see your problem now. You think nothing can happen unless the bourgeois will it.

No, not at all. My point is that liberalism itself supports the system of capitalism, and as such we need to shed it in order to make progress, as it's essentially how the bourgeoisie legitimizes itself.

I think you think the world is a lot more chess-like when it’s really a lot more like poker with mostly idiots.

The world isn't chess nor is it poker. Classes generally act rationally, in their own interest, and proliferate class ideology to protect their interests. Ruling class ideology is meant to perpetuate that ruling class, which is why proletarian ideology needs to replace bourgeois ideology.

That does explain why MLs want to go authoritarian to fix the problems, though.

I don't know what you mean by this. Marxists do agree with using states run by the working classes as a transitional phase to communism, but that doesn't mean "going authoritarian," but changing the class with authority from bourgeois to proletarian.

Anyway, the reason why you’re a fucking biscuit is you don’t seem to be expressing ideas to convert liberals to your cause. You have written them off as unfixable, and, well, that sort of gives you fewer allies. How silly.

I don't, though. I was a liberal once. I write off liberalism itself. As I explained elsewhere in this thread:

I'm not attacking people that aren't yet radicalized enough, or have been newly radicalized but haven't yet organized and/or read theory. It's important to attack liberalism itself, so that the radicalized liberals are freed from the shackles of that ideology. I'm more than aware of my liberal past, and I have to kill the liberal in my head every day.

It’s extremely common for people to combine their pre-existing biases from growing up and being educated in, working in, and living within the confines of bourgeois cultural hegemony with newly radicalized left-wing politics. Without going back and confronting our pre-existing stances, we actually end up warping our new radicalized beliefs to conform to our deeply instilled beliefs about existing socialism. This is how people that genuinely believe themselves to be socialists perpetuate liberal lines of logic and historical narratives.

Instead, we combat this through long periods of self-criticism and confrontation. We have to take our new knowledge, such as that of dialectical and historical materialism, and intentionally confront our pre-existing beliefs that came from liberalism. We all have this process to go through, and it’s never “complete,” either. It took me a long time to actually come around to supporting existing socialism, even after I began reading theory, because my frame of analysis was ultimately still liberal, and therefore my interpretations of theory were forced to fit in neatly with my existing world view, rather than uprooting the weeds and planting new seeds.

This process of dialectical growth and inward reflection is difficult and lengthy, which is why those that are in support of socialism tend to be far more knowledgable, well-read, and aren’t typically strangers to real political organizing. It takes tremendous energy to not only learn new information, but re-analyze existing conclusions that had faulty logic.

A handy analogy is looking at it through a computer program. If you have version 1 of a program spit out a bunch of outputs, and then fix a critical bug for version 2, you can’t just only rely on the new outputs, you have to confront the old outputs made with bad code and go through the new process. This is where people get tripped up ideologically.

We aren't at all immune to this, though, we aren't special people for having overcome it, and we aren't ever fully free of liberalism. We have to fight it daily.

This is the point I'm actually making. Radicalized liberals are comrades that have not yet become so, because they haven't yet shed their liberalism and as such ultimately go back to supporting the very system that oppresses them.

this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2026
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