A leftist is stuck in a room with another leftist and a fascist.
The leftist has one gun and two bullets, and they must be used.
What does the leftist do?
Shoot the other leftist twice.
… then claim the other leftist making an edgy joke at the age of 14 is a proof they were the real fascist.
I mean it says the bullets must be used. You could just shoot the wall
I use my two bullets to shoot the concept of this political thought experimentp. Let me out now puzzle master, we had a deal you can’t keep
Is it a US liberal, or a “rest of the world” liberal (which typically means the opposite)?
Of course they started with 6 bullets but the liberal and the fascist liked to pass the gun around and take pot shots at the marxist every so often so the marxist couldn’t ever influence or overpower them. This is just the moment the liberal realized there were only two bullets left.
Nah, the fascist and marxist work together to kill everyone else
That would never happen in a million years
Removed by mod
My political positions are somewhere on the left outskirts of Social Democracy, so I’ve no love for liberals. That said, when I look at the US, it was not the liberals that just gave a fascist not only a gun but an entire army.
“Do you know why people don’t like liberals? Because they lose. If liberals are so fucking smart, how come they lose so god damn always?” - Will MacAvoy, Newsroom
Reminds me of a joke on a Bright Eyes song.
“There’s a Communist and an Anarchist in a car who’s driving? The cop.”
It’s not a joke if it’s true
More like spot themselves in the foot and drop the gun at the fascist’s feet.
What’s a liberal according to Lemmy? Economically liberal and socially liberal? Social democrat? Obama or Bernie?
It kind of has a double meaning. One side is someone who believes in like democracy, freedom, human rights, and the other side is someone who believes in private property. For historical reasons, the two tendencies are like joined together on most things, but there are differences.
A lot of leftists don’t like liberals because they defend private property and capitalism, but a lot of liberals see themselves as leftists because of those progressive values.
Whether or not a liberal is left wing very much depends on the liberal. Every socialist was once a liberal, whether they were political or not. Conservatives are a kind of liberal, but with the progressive parts removed so it only defends private property.
capitalism is really good at like hiding away its injustice behind contracts and laws, a socialist would see those laws as unjust and want to do radical reforms up to and including overthrow of the ruling billionaires. a liberal might not see the injustice, or if they do, tend to want to stick to courts and reforms because it does contain elements of fairness and justice. liberal justice is more fair than feudal justice, but less than what many socialists would like.
The meme is a reference to the idea that social democracy, liberalism and fascism are all different aspects of capitalism.
I would use the terms as they mean depending on the context of the conversation and who the audience is. If I know that my audience is American and probably less knowing of the original meaning of the terms, I would use the words liberal and conservative as they mean in American mainstream sense. But if I know that the audience is knowledgeable enough to know what the word liberal means in the classical sense, I would use the term in such a way.
I’m just curious. How long would you consider a reasonably quick read expressed in hours?
Depends on how quickly you have to read. It’s not a very dense book because like half of it is restating history and context you can just skim by if you’re already familiar with the time period, and it uses very accessible language.
Yeah that’s why I’m curious. I read at about 350WPM so what I consider a fast read may be slow for some.
It also depends on the density of the text. I’ve been struggling through Imperialism by Lenin for like a month.
Sorry, I literally don’t have an answer, I have never timed how long it takes to read something. All I can say is how quick it feels to read something.
So rich people? 18th century bourgeois were probably quite liberal but I bet a lot of current bourgeois are more conservative than liberal, so it’s hard to understand.
I don’t agree that liberal people are the same as bourgeoisie. Liberalism is a bourgeois ideology, but not every liberal is a member of the ruling class.
Political definitions are historically and contextually dependent. I would agree with your assessment down to the letter, in the 18th century there were revolutionary liberals who wanted to overthrow autocratic feudal systems to implement universal private property ownership. This was a progressive development in society because feudalism was the primary mode of social reproduction for centuries and centuries. One of Karl Marx’s mentors, Ludwig von Westphalen, was a good example of these historic conditions in practice.
Westphalen was a Prussian civil servant and reformer. He was technically a noble, his father was made nobility, but Ludwig believed in all those progressive values: he was an educated reformer, who believed in truth, justice, equality, achievable by seizing control of common lands, and through a legal system and other measures, allow land (and other assets used to make profits) to be owned by private individuals. This had basically already proven to crush the power of nobility in several places, England for example was like the first capitalist country having deposed the power (but not the form) of their aristocracy in the 17th century. French and american bourgeois revolutions in the 18th century made liberal capitalism quite popular, especially since the bourgeoisie, at that time and under feudalism an administrative middle class that had developed basically everywhere, could overthrow the kings and queens and run things themselves. This was progress.
But once bourgeois revolutions were carried out everywhere and the bourgeois ruling class were in control, they stop being revolutionary and become the status quo, which means they defend liberal capitalism with the powers and violence of the state. Marx works out the fundamental conflict of interests between the ruling bourgeois class and the toiling peasants and developing proletarian “working” class, proving that the working class who operate the machines and do the work for the capitalists have the potential to overthrow the bourgeoisie and make a new more fair and just society.
Experiments in 20th century socialism proved this to be a fairly complicated matter, since socialism is internationalist, many problems arise when socialists try to create a socialist state – as Engels says about the bourgeoisie and their lofty ideals, “these great thinkers were constrained by the limitations imposed on them by history.”
But basically the bourgeois class during revolutionary times, pulled a switcheroo when seizing power. They sold their ideas to the toiling masses who very much were done with their despotic kings and queens, and took them up as their own. But once seizing power the bourgeoisie set about establishing capitalism, not truth, justice, and liberty, as the ruling dictate.
So today there are sort of different kinds of liberals: progressives, who IMO share (or once shared) the progressive “spirit” of change and development with socialism, and capitalists who will dispose of those ideals if it allows them to accumulate more private capital.
So the definition is contradictory, but to Marxists every “thing” is made up of two other things in contradiction to each other. In Marxism change occurs when a contradiction is resolved. So its not unusual to look at Marxist conceptions of “things”, such as a liberal in this instance, as being very strange and wrong. The method we use, dialectical materialism, which is a terrible name but w/e, takes a long time to understand, but it is much better at describing history, where one change leads to another, and another, forwards and backwards through time.
Yes.
Meme-maker probably didn’t vote.
Yeah, Kamala lost because of that one vote. It’s all op’s fault.
Lemmy.world is such a weird place, man. I also like how in the propaganda version, LW is like this crazy liberal place where you will get banned for saying what based on this comment and voting is clearly the majority view.
So this story actually happened, in 1932 Germany. No one had the gun at the beginning. The liberal said to the Marxist, “Holy shit that guy is really dangerous, let’s stop him.” The Marxist said “FUCK YOU YOU’RE REALLY DANGEROUS” and started swinging his fists in every direction. The liberal was still trying to talk with the establishment conservative, to gang up on the fascist, while the Marxist was still windmilling to no particular purpose, when the fascist got the gun. The first one he shot, of course, was the Marxist. The anarchist stood in the corner, facing away from the room, and said that turning around would be giving consent to what was going on, and so he refused to do it.
The Marxist, wounded, left the room, what was left of him, and found the communist room. When he got there, the communists shot him, and killed him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_Germany and search for “KPD leaders purged by Stalin”
The liberal said to the Marxist, “Holy shit that guy is really dangerous, let’s stop him.”
The liberal in question had spent the last decade handing military equipment to the freikorps to massacre communists before staffing the cabinet with fascists and making Hitler chancellor.
The liberal in question had spent the last decade handing military equipment to the brownshirts to massacre communists
Citation?
They also hadn’t been massacring, that I know of, it was street fighting, almost all non-fatal. You can show me if I’m wrong, though, that’s just my impression.
before staffing the cabinet with fascists
and making Hitler chancellor
Incorrect. The conservatives did both of those things. The liberals had gotten castrated by the refusal of the KDP to work with them in any respect, and so they couldn’t really do anything against either the KDP or the fascists, and so the left went down as did the liberals as did the rest of the establishment, without any unified front against the fascists. But the liberals had tried very explicitly to ally with the KDP against the fascists, and the KDP refused, calling the social democrats “the main enemy.”
I am sure there is some portion of blame to go to the SDP as well. Pointing fingers after a catastrophe is a time-honored tradition and maybe not a useful one. My point was that in the one real-world example of this that I know of, the Marxists absolutely refused to form a coalition against the fascists, if it meant they would have to work with the liberals, and the fascists were able to win amongst all the leftist infighting. So the particular brand of finger-pointing that exists in OP’s meme definitely has a real-world counterexample.
I actually don’t think there is a strong enough left in the US for this to be a useful model of what just happened in the recent election here. But it wasn’t for lack of trying, by the portion of the supposed far-left that is on Lemmy.
citation
https://annas-archive.org/md5/c483c46aa433ad04d44312e860111d6f
It references descriptions from 1919 where the bodies overwhelmed the city’s capacity to store them, and were rotting in the streets, and egbert’s use of the freikorps and other right-wing paramilitaries to kill communists (including Rosa)
There was also a massacre of sailors with one survivor I can’t seem to find any reference to.
The conservatives did both of those things
Egbert is the one who nominated Hindenburg, who made the actual handover.
the liberals had tried very explicitly to ally with the KDP against the fascists
They held a rally calling for unity, in which they called for everyone to vote for Hindenburg in the name of unity. That is not an attempt at unity, that is an attempt to make themselves seem like reasonable moderates.
Naturally the KDP ran on the slogan “A vote for Hindenburg is a vote for Hitler is a vote for war”
Wait: So after the KDP tried to do a violent revolution against the fragile post-first-revolution government of 1919, including explicitly rejecting the idea of holding elections because they might not go the KDP’s way, they were still so butthurt about the fashion in which the rest of the government had defended itself against getting shot and overthrown, that a generation later they still couldn’t stomach the idea of getting together with the SDP even to ally against literal Hitler. Even though the SDP by that point didn’t give a shit about their own attempted overthrow anymore, and just didn’t want the Nazis. And in your mind, that’s all the SDP’s fault for not just getting shot or exiled, like the KDP had in mind in 1919.
Like I said: The real life example is very different than the meme. The Marxist tried to shoot the liberal 13 years before, and was still so upset about the shooting-back that they got, and so, the windmilling and FUCK YOU. Great. Sounds like a fun bunch to interact with. Oh, and also, when they finally DID get in charge of things in the East, after the war, it was a fucking nightmare that lasted for decades. Which was part of the SDP’s objection to it in the first place. Great stuff.
Wow that’s deep
I mean its also what happened.
Only if you replace liberal with self-proclaimed leftist. It’s fucking hilarious how similar leftist are to the right wing. You’ve even got the projection thing going.
It’s fucking hilarious how similar leftist are to the right wing
They are not actually. You simply don’t know the difference
See, the problem is that a Marxist and an anarchist stuck around a liberal and a fascist. Not only that, they spent all that time doing nothing, even though there was a gun in the room and two bullets. Looks to me like the Marxist and the anarchist were kinda dumb.
