this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2024
593 points (88.4% liked)

Lefty Memes

4476 readers
451 users here now

An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the "ML" influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.

Serious posts, news, and discussion go in c/Socialism.

If you are new to socialism, you can ask questions and find resources over on c/Socialism101.

Please don't forget to help keep this community clean by reporting rule violations, updooting good contributions and downdooting those of low-quality!

Rules

Version without spoilers

0. Only post socialist memes

That refers to funny image macros and means that generally videos and screenshots are not allowed. Exceptions include explicitly humorous and short videos, as well as (social media) screenshots depicting a funny situation, joke, or joke picture relating to socialist movements, theory, societal issues, or political opponents. Examples would be the classic case of humorous Tumblr or Twitter posts/threads. (and no, agitprop text does not count as a meme)

1. Socialist Unity in the form of mutual respect and good faith interactions is enforced here

Try to keep an open mind, other schools of thought may offer points of view and analyses you haven't considered yet. Also: This is not a place for the Idealism vs. Materialism or rather Anarchism vs. Marxism debate(s), for that please visit c/AnarchismVsMarxism.

2. Anti-Imperialism means recognizing capitalist states like Russia and China as such

That means condemning (their) imperialism, even if it is of the "anti-USA" flavor.

3. No liberalism, (right-wing) revisionism or reactionaries.

That includes so called: Social Democracy, Democratic Socialism, Dengism, Market Socialism, Patriotic Socialism, National Bolshevism, Anarcho-Capitalism etc. . Anti-Socialist people and content have no place here, as well as the variety of "Marxist"-"Leninists" seen on lemmygrad and more specifically GenZedong (actual ML's are welcome as long as they agree to the rules and don't just copy paste/larp about stuff from a hundred years ago).

4. No Bigotry.

The only dangerous minority is the rich.

5. Don't demonize previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.

We must constructively learn from their mistakes, while acknowledging their achievements and recognizing when they have strayed away from socialist principles.

(if you are reading the rules to apply for modding this community, mention "Mantic Minotaur" when answering question 2)

6. Don't idolize/glorify previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.

Notable achievements in all spheres of society were made by various socialist/people's/democratic republics around the world. Mistakes, however, were made as well: bureaucratic castes of parasitic elites - as well as reactionary cults of personality - were established, many things were mismanaged and prejudice and bigotry sometimes replaced internationalism and progressiveness.

  1. Absolutely no posts or comments meant to relativize(/apologize for), advocate, promote or defend:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
593
Politics venn (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
296 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 49 points 2 days ago (2 children)

"Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary" - Karl Marx

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (5 children)

This quote applies to Marx's time though. When armed workers would have had nearly the same arsenal as a professional military. When horse carriages and trains were the only way to move soldiers at all.

In the age of tanks, jets and missiles, do you seriously believe workers have the slightest chance against a military? It takes a single nuke to crush a revolution that is not supported by the military.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago

Leftists maintain that Revolution is necessary, and the past century has shown countless guerilla victories over Imperialists with better technology using asymetrical warfare tactics. War is evolving.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Nukes are, like, the worst example for counter insurgency (COIN). Any government that vaporizes a city of their own people will quickly have the rest of their population in open revolt as well.

And, as proven again and again, classical militaries are horrendously bad at fighting insurgencies that have popular support. There are no front lines, only fighters. Every attempt at suppressing a movement harms bystanders much more than militants, driving more people away from the government.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Nukes can be used in various ways though, vaporizing a city would be quite the way up the escalation ladder.

I don't have a study to cite, obviously, but I believe military threats can be extremely effective.

Start with detonating a nuke in the middle of nowhere as threat. If that doesn't have the desired result, an EMP blast above a target city could be the next step. And so on and so forth.

Whenever guns are mentioned, I'm just reminded of how the US usually acts in case a single cop is killed:

After Matthews stumbled out of the house, a SWAT team – unaware that Kahl was dead – began firing thousands of rounds at the house, eventually setting it ablaze by pouring diesel fuel down the house's chimney. Kahl's burned remains were found the following day.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Kahl

Sure, he was a far right extremist and his death has probably bettered the world. Yet it proves that the amount of firepower usually determines the result.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago

They can do that to individuals, or even small, localized organizations (MOVE bombing comes to mind). But overwhelming force fails to work once the enemy is organized, can change locations and hide with comrades, etc. That's why for any reasonable leftists guns are important, but not the be-all end-all. That's organization. Repression and COIN has many faces, and open mass violence is but the last of them.

Modern COIN (when done right) is all about eroding popular support for the revolution. As long as the majority of civilians sympathize with the cause, it's next to impossible to militarily defeat an insurrection. And bigger guns are of limited use for that, what matters is who you aim them at

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 days ago

Nukes didn't help that CEO. Asymmetric warfare is a thing. I want to think there is a totally peaceful solution, and maybe there is. But even peaceful solutions only work with a silent threat of armed revolt in the background.

[–] njm1314 1 points 1 day ago

If that's your opinion then why bother worrying at all? Just put the slave collar on yourself.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Who won the Vietnam War? It is not at all clear that the US military could defeat a committed domestic guerrilla force. Especially if the military was split on the nature of the conflict. A bloodless political revolution is possible and there's historical precedent for it wrt socialist movements, although expect a civil war of some kind. The fallacy that socialists just want to wage a bloody civil war in order to get free healthcare is so tired and fake and divorced from anything but liberal delusions.

Also the arms are needed to defend the political and social revolution, which will be directly attacked by armed thugs and reactionaries if it managed to gain traction toward actually upending the capitalist system. Look up The Deacons of Defense and the history of defending civil rights orgs and leaders, while kicking the Klan out of southern mainstream political life. Its not optional. However individuals armed is meaningless, there needs to be civil defense groups and left wing militias to be able to actually protect the people that need protected when they become targets of attack.

[–] roguetrick 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I wouldn't really call the NVA a guerilla force. They used those tactics somewhat, but the guerilla force was the Vietcong and they got wiped in the Tet offensive. It was the NVA that won the war.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Thanks for the correction, I hope to start studying the socialist history of Vietnam much more

[–] roguetrick 2 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

The best thing I would say is the NVA wanted to position itself where US ground forces had to engage with it directly and have a war of attrition, which the US could not politically do while similarly the south was an illegitimate corrupt state that nobody was interested in dying for in a war of attrition so pushing their conscripts to go die would just lead to defections. They did that by going into the jugle to make US air power and artillery less effective while also using Soviet air defense and jets. Guerilla tactics usually avoids massed fighting against your enemy, but that's actually what the NVA wanted.

If the US could march into North Vietnam that'd be a different story but they were entirely unwilling to do anything like that because it would've taken incredible manpower and casualties and the US public was not for it.