Ah yeah, an enlightened centrist meme, coming directly from the deranged minds that think trying to take the middle road when one the sides is blatantly against human rights is a moderate position.
dyed purple hair is a right-wing dogwhistle for “SJW man-hating feminist”, who are more often leftists than they are liberals. You don’t have any issues with social justice or feminism, do you?
I’ve never seen someone with purple hair and thought “this indicates that they would have a problem with me calling for labor to seize the means of production”. Yeah there’s plenty of liberals with dyed hair, but plenty of communists too
I genuinely try to avoiding judging peoplr based on outward appearances, I know way to many hippies and people who generally look like what the right tries to characterize as leftists, that were hard core tRump supporters/forced birth hardliners.
Political cartoons are built on charactiture. Otherwise the mr monopoly man would simply be a giant who owns diaper companies and has captured two people and put them in a cage resulting in them shitting themselves.
It’s one of those memes that I can see from someone who thinks that the democrats are Marxists or from someone who gets really mad when you say that Marxism isn’t the end all be all of communism.
Either way, it comes with the failure to acknowledge that the culture war is one group trying to exist and the other being convinced to hurt them by the capitalist class.
This is obviously a leftist meme making fun of liberal and conservative fighting. It’s from the perspective of someone to the left of liberals, not between liberals and conservatives.
That makes more sense. I was wondering why they were both saying the same thing when typically you’d expect liberals and conservatives to be arguing. Those to the left of liberals see everyone as “liberal,” as in free markets and whatever, not political left/right, or at least the hexbear folks do.
Took me a bit longer than I’d like to admit to get what they were going on about when everyone was called liberal lol
I’m not sure why centrism is so hated here. As long as you acknowledge one side is more damaging I don’t see a problem with it. The other side might have less problematic views but they both subsist off of each other and thrive by creating vitriol between each other. It shouldn’t be taboo to not support either one. This meme doesn’t even really seem like its attempting to make that point anyway, although I understand how you could see it that way.
If you acknowledge one side as worse than another it isn’t centrist. That would be taking a position.
The fence sitting of centrists say both sides are bad and not dealing with issues is why centrists are hated. They don’t offer anything other than the ‘Both Sides’ argument.
At least that in what I have gathered my observations.
I understand the dislike for people that take no position whatsoever, but the hate for centrism I’ve seen extends beyond that. I’ve been called an enlightened centrist for simply not supporting either party, but I guess that might just mean those people were mistaken.
Being between two ideologies is not a virtue in and of itself. Refusing to align with either of 2 generally shitty Capitalist parties, and being a centrist, are completely different things.
It depends on why you aren’t supporting either party. If it’s because the libs are too radical and the conservatives are too fascist, then you’re a centrist liberal. If you’re legitimately outside the scope of those two, such as to the left (or somehow to the right), then you aren’t a centrist.
Being extreme isn’t wrong either. The strength of a position with respect to current society says nothing about the founding logic for said position. Climate change, for example, must be radically acted on to prevent even worse results from happening, and it must happen now or we will suffer even more.
I don’t support either one because in many ways I think they are effectively the same. My views are certainly more in line with liberals and I think they are much less directly harmful than conservatives, but the parties themselves are more or less the same to me.
Neither of them effectively push the policy I want, and both purposely create an unnecessary divide between each other. They both need the other to be the antagonist to continue creating this strange dramatic version of politics.
Parts of my family refuses to speak to one another purely because of this. Their views aren’t even that far off from each other, but neither of them actually understand each other’s views. All they understand is the manufactured hate between each other.
Again, I think conservatives usually cause the most problems, but the other party can’t exist in its current form without someone to be angry at. There is no actual motive to stop the problems from being caused, so they are only amplified and worsened.
Both are actively creating a worse place to live in, and I wouldn’t support either one regardless of whatever views they claim to have.
Okay, so it sounds like you’re a leftist, and likely to agree that the bourgeoisie deliberately pits the Proletariat against itself as a means to prevent unified action.
It’s not incorrect though. If we’re worried about the erosion of human rights, it distracts from the fact that corps own our government. Not that that means we shouldn’t fight the erosion of human rights as well. That’s the brain dead centrist take.
The problem is where you draw the line. It’s a fucking shame to democrats that Nancy “insider trading is OK when I do it” Pelosi is still politically relevant, but what are we gonna do when the alternate choice is a fascist?
Oh I’ll still be voting for the lesser of 2 evils dont get me wrong, i dont fuck with lemmygrad.ml at all anymore because they have deleted multiple comments ive made arguing for the necessity of voting for the lesser of 2 evils to protect the Prolitariat long enough for class conciousness to grow in America.
Grad is full of tankies. They stan just about every adversary to the US because their whole belief system is “American imperialism bad” so they’ll unironically defend north Korea, China, Russia, USSR, etc. Hell, a few of em have “Stalin” in their name. Last month they were celebrating the hamas attack on Israel. They support Russia in the Russia-Ukraine war. Check meanwhileongrad for more interesting tidbits.
I feel like half the stuff posted there is to disenfranchise young leftists enough to keep them from voting for Democrats in 2024 inorder to allow mask off fascism to take hold of American politics, but not enough to get them to practice any real praxis and keep them regualted to having purity politics circle jerks while doing nothing to challenge the status quo. Putin is the biggest Imperial threat on the planet. While Stalin also holds the lions share if the blame for forcing revolutionary Marxism to stall out in the dictatorship of the Prolitariat stage. They also aren’t defending the actions of those countries as much as they are recontexualizing them. We should learn from previous socialist experiments and take what was good from them into the future as much as we should recognize and strive to leave their failures in the past. Eithet way we must recognize that the Capitalist Status quo is not working out what so ever for tge vast majority of humanity and something has got to give.
You got it pretty much spot on, though I’ll nitpick here
They also aren’t defending the actions of those countries as much as they are recontexualizing them.
They’re whitewashing history. Yes, if you want to try communism, it’s critical to understand where previous attempts failed. They don’t, and they don’t want to.
Putin is the biggest Imperial threat on the planet.
And yet they still support him. I got banned from grad for 3 years for telling a mod to stop throating putin’s cock. I’ll see if I can pull up the exchange, it was pretty funny. He immediately whatabouted the US working with nazis after wwii. Like, yeah bud that was bad, I agree, tell me how that justifies invading Ukraine right now though?
Lemmygrad doesn’t deny real genocides or celebrate genocide AFAIK. Please let me know if that’s not the case; I wouldn’t want to be a part of a community that does that.
Well, the rich seems to like the stuff the batshit insane right are spewing. Plus, they also benefit from those policies, like abortion bans, child labor law regressions, and of course tax cuts for those earning 6 figures at minimum.
America’s “left” is also not fighting these insane policies effectively. It’s like they’re pointing fingers at the GOP and going “Hey, that’s bad.”
From the left perspective in the US it’s basically the Democrats who are the “enlightened centrist” position, if not center-right, because they think capitalism is redeemable if it has the right branding etc, and success in the system is at least in theory available to everyone. The right faction are more honest in how they embrace and take joy in how this system runs on exploitation, and are obviously more dangerous in the current climate. The Democrats have to be dishonest because they have to take an inherently exploitative economic arrangement and give it a positive spin.
Bruh whoosh much… the meme is quite literally from the prospective of the Ruling class and saying that both issues are the same to the Ruling Class as long as it doesnt threaten the Status quo of their strangle hold on Wealth and their ability to extract it from the Working Class…
Not worth engaging with the “centrist are evil” people. They just cant accept other pov’s that arent theirs, specially if it implies their side should make a compromise. Im pretty sure they hate even more non partisan people rather than the team party they are suposed to hate because that is thinking outside the box and they dont like that very much.
Imo thats just a result of the partisan american culture war bullshit doing its intended purpose: divide and conquer.
To bad most of the media comes from hollywood and a lot of us non american people get indirectly involved in their bullshit.
In order to believe that the “culture war” is somehow obfuscating class in a way that tricks workers into superfluous concerns you have to believe that the “culture war” is outside of the class interests of most Americans. IT IS NOT.
The “culture war” is a manifestation of tensions within the class structure of the US. Colonized peoples are making their voices heard and so the ruling classes along with the metropolitan and white working classes, are responding by arguing amongst themselves, once again, what is to be done with the colonized? Should they be silenced? Assimilated? Enfranchised? These are questions as old as settler-colonialism and are natural to class structures with global stratifications.
The cultural questions are emergent from structure and superstructure of capitalist and colonial relations. They were not invented by the fucking boogyman at Chase Manhattan who then forces the helpless poor to be racist or woke. Routinely the voices of the colonized are co-opted by working people on either side of the “culture war” for their own ends, to protect their class status. The subsequent contradictions then fuel the development of colonial political discourse.
The “culture war” and its vulgarity absolutely doesn’t just protect the rich, it protects white people and metropolitan workers from having to reckon with their own class character for the benifit of their class, which is stratified fundamentally differently from that of colonized nations within their own apparent borders, or the “4th world,” or from the rest of the world beyond their borders.
Not everything is about the dastardly rich people tricking the stupid workers into working against their own interests. What reductive thinking! Working people in the core are fine to argue with their uncle at thanksgiving, and ultimately advance colonial discourse, to assert an identity that can distract from the fact that THEY HAVE MORE TO LOSE THAN THEIR CHAINS.
By participating in the “culture war” they can ultimately engage in class struggle AGAINST the global proletariat, AGAINST the 4th world, and uphold the stratification that they enjoy. The “culture war,” therefore, is not a distraction, it is the redirection and co-optation of colonized class antagonisms by the American colonial project for its own purposes, including for its lesser classes.
Im saying people generally are deeply mistaken about culture and class formation in the US, and from that ignorance a multitude of mistakes are made, including the idea that the culture war is a distraction made up by the rich.
Bro, it literally doesn’t matter because both MAGA and the ruling class are the two major hurdles for the left.
Take the ruling class out and the left and the right will still go to war against each other.
It’s not the ruling class making them fight. They’re choosing to fight with each other, and scapegoating the situation on the ruling class is a factually incorrect thing to do.
You are not entirely wrong, but it is the conditions that the ruling class created that lead to their systemic disenfranchisement from the political systems in America resulting in the left versus right dichotomy.
My whole point and goal with the leftist agiprop I post is to prevent a war between left v right by showing the hypocrisy of the lies the right has entrenched themselves in. I dont want any war but class war and that cant be won in America without left and right reconciling as comrades against the ruling class.
Saying that the ruling class hasn’t stoked yhe left v right culture war is also factually incorrect. The Maga movements figure head is literally a Landlord, the Koch Brothers fund countless rightwing think tanks and media organizations that actively push a culture war narrative. They are actively waging a class war in America against the Middle and lower class because they cant exist without robbing the value of their labor, and they will do ANYTHING to prevent class conciousness from forming on US soil.
Honestly, I used to feel the same way until I saw what MAGA and the right are really about – genocide, and because of that, it’s impossible for the U.S. left and right to reconcile.
Like I get why people want that – we really should just be Americans again – but the things the factions have done to each other, from the left supporting and helping the ruling class impose the lockdowns on everyone else which destabilized the U.S., to the centuries of racism and abuse the right and their ancestors have inflicted on everyone else, are too severe and too reprehensible for the sides to ethically reconcile.
It’d be better if the left pushed to form an independent country, honestly. They almost did when western states threatened to secede from the U.S. because Trump wasn’t enforcing the lockdowns to the left’s liking. They could wield that power and do it again, and they’d be able to form a military and keep the MAGA cultists away from them, and if the right tries to commit genocide anyway, fight back.
Doing that would also really, really fuck over the ruling class as most of their assets are in U.S. stocks, bonds and dollars which would collapse from such a thing happening, given there’d be no more U.S.
That’s just how I feel on the matter given everything I’ve seen in my life, which is a lot. A lot more than anyone should fairly have to.
Minimizing human rights issues to further the cause for socioeconomic ones doesn’t make you an enlightened anticapitalist, it makes you ideologically pro-CCP.
Systemic Racism is denying People of Color their Constitutional and Human Rights in America.
Palestinians are having their Human Rights trampled on by Israle.
ALL of these issues are deeply important to me, but all of them arise as symptoms of Class Warfare and are stoked up as culture war issues to keep the Prolitariat divided and distracted from the Ruling Class that holds the reigns of power. We must recontexualize these issues as what they are, distractions being used to take the ire off of the Ruling Class and getting the Working Class to punch down instead of punching up. We need Class Conciousness and the only way to form it is by redirecting the ire of the Working Class to the Ruling Class that has been robbing them of their labor for decades upon decades. You arent gonna get the disenfranchised Conservative working class on your side with moral arguments or it would have happened by now. We must demonstrate that the Ruling class doesnt give a fuck about them and that is from where their problems stem, not from folks struggling just as much if not more than them.
ALL of these issues are deeply important to me, but all of them arise as symptoms of Class Warfare
A society that achieves socialism might still be homophobic, transphobic, racist, ableist and sexist. These things persist in culture even if the socioeconomic system might promote them, you cannot just will them out of existence because the conditions that made them sprout no longer exist.
A society that achieves socialism would most certainly have those sentiments lingering, but eliminating the socioeconomic system that causes the symptoms is the first place is the obvious first step to permanently riding society of those sentiments. A good doctor uses the symptoms to diagnose and treat the underlying disease with the appropriate medicine. A bad doctor just prescribes medicine to help a patient live with the disease without addressing the underlying cause that lead to the symptoms in the first place. We can fight the sentiments you listed by raising class conciousness and eliminating the status quo that allows said sentiments to thrive and multiple.
But fighting Culture Wars is only fighting symptoms, the root cause is Class oppression. Fighting symptoms is not wrong but cant be the end goal. The goal should be to use the Culture Wars to make people realize that.
It’s a class war. It always has been. The 1 percenters use their control of the media to keep the poor and middle classes fighting with each other, so that they . . . the rich, can run off with all the f*cking money.
Class gets its significance from the process of surplus extraction. The relationship between worker and owner is essentially an exploitative one, involving the constant transfer of wealth from those who labor (but do not own) to those who own (but do not labor). This is how some people get richer and richer without working, or with doing only a fraction of the work that enriches them, while others toil hard for an entire lifetime only to end up with little or nothing.
Those who occupy the higher circles of wealth and power are keenly aware of their own interests. While they sometimes seriously differ among themselves on specific issues, they exhibit an impressive cohesion when it comes to protecting the existing class system of corporate power, property, privilege, and profit. At the same time, they are careful to discourage public awareness of the class power they wield. They avoid the C-word, especially when used in reference to themselves as in "owning class;’ "upper class;’ or “moneyed class.” And they like it least when the politically active elements of the owning class are called the “ruling class.” The ruling class in this country has labored long to leave the impression that it does not exist, does not own the lion’s share of just about everything, and does not exercise a vastly disproportionate influence over the affairs of the nation. Such precautions are themselves symptomatic of an acute awareness of class interests.
Yet ruling class members are far from invisible. Their command positions in the corporate world, their control of international finance and industry, their ownership of the major media, and their influence over state power and the political process are all matters of public record- to some limited degree. While it would seem a simple matter to apply the C-word to those who occupy the highest reaches of the C-world, the dominant class ideology dismisses any such application as a lapse into “conspiracy theory.” The C-word is also taboo when applied to the millions who do the work of society for what are usually niggardly wages, the “working class,” a term that is dismissed as Marxist jargon. And it is verboten to refer to the "exploiting and exploited classes;’ for then one is talking about the very essence of the capitalist system, the accumulation of corporate wealth at the expense of labor.
The C-word is an acceptable term when prefaced with the soothing adjective “middle.” Every politician, publicist, and pundit will rhapsodize about the middle class, the object of their heartfelt concern. The much admired and much pitied middle class is supposedly inhabited by virtuously self-sufficient people, free from the presumed profligacy of those who inhabit the lower rungs of society. By including almost everyone, “middle class” serves as a conveniently amorphous concept that masks the exploitation and inequality of social relations. It is a class label that denies the actuality of class power.
The C-word is allowable when applied to one other group, the desperate lot who live on the lowest rung of society, who get the least of everything while being regularly blamed for their own victimization: the “underclass.” References to the presumed deficiencies of underclass people are acceptable because they reinforce the existing social hierarchy and justify the unjust treatment accorded society’s most vulnerable elements.
Seizing upon anything but class, leftists today have developed an array of identity groups centering around ethnic, gender, cultural, and life-style issues. These groups treat their respective grievances as something apart from class struggle, and have almost nothing to say about the increasingly harsh politico-economic class injustices perpetrated against us all. Identity groups tend to emphasize their distinctiveness and their separateness from each other, thus fractionalizing the protest movement. To be sure, they have important contributions to make around issues that are particularly salient to them, issues often overlooked by others. But they also should not downplay their common interests, nor overlook the common class enemy they face. The forces that impose class injustice and economic exploitation are the same ones that propagate racism, sexism, militarism, ecological devastation, homophobia, xenophobia, and the like.
Why is the purple hair causing so many folks to get hung up on this meme calling out the Capitalists that pit the Prolitariat against one anothet in order to distract them from the class war being waged against them? Yall are automatically assuming that purple hair makes the person’s takes similar to your own. Like wtf?
Like the most scene chick I knew in high school grew up to be a prolife tRumper, who still dyes her hair a different color every couple of months. Y’all get way too hung up in optics. Fr fr.
Nah fam, race and social issues VERY much matter to me, but we must contexualize them as issues being used to divide the Prolitariat who at the very root of the matter have very similar goals politically, but are very easily distracted from them by right wing grifters using them to keep the Prolitariat divided. I 100% agree that bigots need to be called out and corrected, but i dont believe that is capable of being achieved by arguing against their view in the cultural war. The only way to get them to change their views is by pointing out logical hypocrisies on very root issues they care about, such as Corporations robbing the working class, and thereby slowly building their class conciousness and letting them realize their enemy isnt a liberal/leftist that cares about social issues or refuges seeking a better life, but the Corporations and 1% that have kept their rage misdirected for decades.
It is also meant to be from the point of view of the Capitalist ruling class, who very much dont care about social or political issues, and view them the same as long as they dont threaten their ability to continue to grow their wealth and power.
They most certainly are not equivalent, but both are actively defending the Capitalist Status quo by not acknowledgeing that they are both fundamentally a part of the same Class. This meme is very much supposed to be a gross oversimplification to point out that Capitalists are the greater evil. Fascism must be fought and I will vote for a liberal to keep mask off fascism out of office, but I wont stop trying to point out how culture war issues are being actively used to misdirect the Prolitariats palpable wrath. Because arguing from the point of morality aint doing jack shit to change anyones minds on the right. Pointing out how they have been actively taken advantage of by the Burgouis to maintain power feels like the only way to stop the rising tide of fascism from a philosophical standpoint outside of open conflict.
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