Forgive me for being a bit of an outsider, I thought socdem was essentially Democratic socialist, does it mean something else…?
Edit: just looked it up and it looks like a different thing than Democratic socialist but it certainly doesnt look fascism adjacent, am I missing something?
Ostensibly, social democrats believe in capitalism but want to borrow from socialist ideas to make it work. Democratic socialists are, ostensibly, anticapitalists who favor reform over revolution.
In practice, both groups protect capitalism. In practice, both groups side with fascism over socialism. In practice, you can ignore (especially Americans) those who call themselves demsocs and treat them as liberals.
Do you mean that of politicians who label themselves as demsocs, or anyone?
I don’t say this to try and start a fight, just talking about my experience, but as someone learning which versions of leftist political ideology I connect with, the purity testing by every different faction of leftist where anyone that isn’t their brand of leftist is a fascist is uhhh, challenging to try and navigate
I get the impression its because both both democratic socialist movements and non…Democratic socialist (what would be the term for the version of socialist you identify as? I feel like demsocs would say authoritarian but I don’t know how y’all would describe your own category, non-derisively. Marxist Leninist feels more specific than I mean) have betrayed eachother historically when enough momentum existed for one of them to succeed and it came time for one to win out over the other (is that a reasonable understanding?)
But it does make trying to navigate and engage with these spaces very hard 😅. Are there other brands of leftist that your faction sees as also legitimate leftists? (again, appologies for referring to y’all in this way it feels vaguely passive agressive, I just don’t have better language) Would the litmus test maybe be like a desire for revolution?
There’s a hazy progression that goes from demsocs, self-described Socialists and revolutionary communists. Most of us began as the former and, through experience and study, became the latter.
The difference between different groups purity testing is what they’re testing for. Liberals and liberal-adjacent people test your moral purity, or at least the moral purity of your rhetoric. Say all the right things, signal you’re on the good side, and don’t signal that you want the bad things. They do this because they are political idealists: that is, they have a fundamentally magical understanding of how power works, even if they don’t realize it. They think that if enough people hold The Right Opinions, then change will spontaneously follow. Their view of the world is a static one where everything fits into neat moral categories, and conveniently those moral categories just so happen to match what the person espousing it is comfortable with. To a liberal or socdem, violence against capital is morally unacceptable, no matter how many people it stands to save (and as of right now, it stands to save all of them). Their test is concieved as a test of abstract moral purity; in reality, it’s a test of how much atrocity you are willing to abide for the sake of being a good boy.
Marxists, communists, etc are materialists: we believe that the world is a constantly moving, ever evolving machine with a trillion moving parts that all change and are changed by one another. To make a long story short, dialectical materialism or “marxism” is simply applying the scientific method to all of reality instead of just formal science. That’s why the phrase “reality has a marxist bias” exists: because communists begin with the facts and build an understanding upwards, while liberals begin with the primacy of liberalism/capitalism and build an architecture of justification downwards, until they create friction with the uneven terrain of reality. “Blue maga” is an example of this phenomenon. Bill Maher is the spiritual avatar of this phenomenon.
When Communists purity test, we do so based on the effectiveness of your practices and the understanding that guides them. It’s basically peer review. We’re purity testing in a chemical way, to determine the potency of your shit and assess it for wider adoption.
To your last question, I respect anarchists. We fundamentally love humanity in the same way and want the same things for it, we just disagree on tactics. But they have a deep understanding of the urgent necessity of revolutionary change, and that makes them comrades.
You’re right. Marxist-Leninists understand the historical significance of revolution. When we push back against Social Democrats (and liberals disguised as reformist Socialists) we are making a choice based on study and history, not vibes. To MLs, your last sentence is crucial.
You can read about this topic. Beyond basic Marxist works, consider Rosa Luxembourg’s “Reform or Revolution” or Lenin’s “State and Revolution”.
There is a longer more complicated history around the term social democracy, but the short version is that beginning in the later 1800s, there arose two camps: reformist / pacifist / bourgeios socialists, and revolutionary ones. The reformist ones formed parties who, in every country they did so, ended up joining forces with capitalists to repress and put down the revolutionary ones. Every country has a long history of socdems doing this, as its been occurring since the 1800s when Marx and Engels noted this tendency.
checks out given that Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism
Forgive me for being a bit of an outsider, I thought socdem was essentially Democratic socialist, does it mean something else…?
Edit: just looked it up and it looks like a different thing than Democratic socialist but it certainly doesnt look fascism adjacent, am I missing something?
Ostensibly, social democrats believe in capitalism but want to borrow from socialist ideas to make it work. Democratic socialists are, ostensibly, anticapitalists who favor reform over revolution.
In practice, both groups protect capitalism. In practice, both groups side with fascism over socialism. In practice, you can ignore (especially Americans) those who call themselves demsocs and treat them as liberals.
Do you mean that of politicians who label themselves as demsocs, or anyone?
I don’t say this to try and start a fight, just talking about my experience, but as someone learning which versions of leftist political ideology I connect with, the purity testing by every different faction of leftist where anyone that isn’t their brand of leftist is a fascist is uhhh, challenging to try and navigate
I get the impression its because both both democratic socialist movements and non…Democratic socialist (what would be the term for the version of socialist you identify as? I feel like demsocs would say authoritarian but I don’t know how y’all would describe your own category, non-derisively. Marxist Leninist feels more specific than I mean) have betrayed eachother historically when enough momentum existed for one of them to succeed and it came time for one to win out over the other (is that a reasonable understanding?)
But it does make trying to navigate and engage with these spaces very hard 😅. Are there other brands of leftist that your faction sees as also legitimate leftists? (again, appologies for referring to y’all in this way it feels vaguely passive agressive, I just don’t have better language) Would the litmus test maybe be like a desire for revolution?
Warning, long:
There’s a hazy progression that goes from demsocs, self-described Socialists and revolutionary communists. Most of us began as the former and, through experience and study, became the latter.
The difference between different groups purity testing is what they’re testing for. Liberals and liberal-adjacent people test your moral purity, or at least the moral purity of your rhetoric. Say all the right things, signal you’re on the good side, and don’t signal that you want the bad things. They do this because they are political idealists: that is, they have a fundamentally magical understanding of how power works, even if they don’t realize it. They think that if enough people hold The Right Opinions, then change will spontaneously follow. Their view of the world is a static one where everything fits into neat moral categories, and conveniently those moral categories just so happen to match what the person espousing it is comfortable with. To a liberal or socdem, violence against capital is morally unacceptable, no matter how many people it stands to save (and as of right now, it stands to save all of them). Their test is concieved as a test of abstract moral purity; in reality, it’s a test of how much atrocity you are willing to abide for the sake of being a good boy.
Marxists, communists, etc are materialists: we believe that the world is a constantly moving, ever evolving machine with a trillion moving parts that all change and are changed by one another. To make a long story short, dialectical materialism or “marxism” is simply applying the scientific method to all of reality instead of just formal science. That’s why the phrase “reality has a marxist bias” exists: because communists begin with the facts and build an understanding upwards, while liberals begin with the primacy of liberalism/capitalism and build an architecture of justification downwards, until they create friction with the uneven terrain of reality. “Blue maga” is an example of this phenomenon. Bill Maher is the spiritual avatar of this phenomenon.
When Communists purity test, we do so based on the effectiveness of your practices and the understanding that guides them. It’s basically peer review. We’re purity testing in a chemical way, to determine the potency of your shit and assess it for wider adoption.
To your last question, I respect anarchists. We fundamentally love humanity in the same way and want the same things for it, we just disagree on tactics. But they have a deep understanding of the urgent necessity of revolutionary change, and that makes them comrades.
You’re right. Marxist-Leninists understand the historical significance of revolution. When we push back against Social Democrats (and liberals disguised as reformist Socialists) we are making a choice based on study and history, not vibes. To MLs, your last sentence is crucial.
You can read about this topic. Beyond basic Marxist works, consider Rosa Luxembourg’s “Reform or Revolution” or Lenin’s “State and Revolution”.
There is a longer more complicated history around the term social democracy, but the short version is that beginning in the later 1800s, there arose two camps: reformist / pacifist / bourgeios socialists, and revolutionary ones. The reformist ones formed parties who, in every country they did so, ended up joining forces with capitalists to repress and put down the revolutionary ones. Every country has a long history of socdems doing this, as its been occurring since the 1800s when Marx and Engels noted this tendency.
What about social democracy / democratic socialism / the Nordic model? Isn’t Sweden socialist?
Some more links: