Being better at violence doesn’t make you more left
Being better at violence against fascism and imperialism definitely makes you more left, though. The lack of proper violence against such regimes leads to a destruction of the left wing.
Your argument boils down to “might makes right” and could be expanded to classify social democracy as “more left”
Social democracy also regularly turns to fascism when it needs to, it’s definitely lacking violence against fascism, amazing that you’d say this in 2026. I fucking wish our mighty social democracies in Europe fought against Israeli fascism and USA fascism, unfortunately they’re buddies!
(after all, it’s left of the global status quo and its citizens are the happiest on average)
By excluding imperialism from the measure of average happiness, you’re committing a sampling error. That would be like polling monarchs of medieval Europe to ask whether monarchy is the system making people happier. Ask the people in India and Sri Lanka and Peru extracting the resources of the goods social democracies consume and sewing the clothes we wear how happy they are with social democracy.
Sure, it frequently decays into fascism, but so did the USSR
So, we have one example of a Marxist-Leninist state decaying to fascism (after saving Europe from Nazism) and several examples of countries not doing this (China, Laos, Vietnam, Cuba). How about we engage in honest criticism of the flaws of the Soviet model that led to its dissolution in order to prevent that from happening again?
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 14 hours ago
Social democracy in the imperial core is to the right of the global status quo, because it depends on imperialism, neocolonialism, and unequal exchange. The USSR, on the other hand, supported anti-imperialist and decolonial movements materially, and set up a socialist economy. Being able to both establish and maintain socialism is a necessary first step for anything that can be considered left, because it’s the only leftism that’s actually real. No, socialism isn’t fascism, and equating the two is a form of Holocaust trivialization with ties to Double Genocide Theory.
kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 hours ago
The global status quo is liberalism. Social democracy is to the left of liberalism.
And I never said that socialism was fascism, I said that the USSR gave way to fascism. Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation is fascist. The USSR collapsed, and fascism followed, much like the Weimar Republic collapsed and was replaced by the Nazis. That doesn’t mean that the liberals in the Weimar Republic were fascists.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 14 hours ago
Liberalism and social democracy in the imperial core are imperialist. This is to the right of liberalism and social democracy in the global south. Erasure of imperialism in the question of whether or not a society is progressive historically or reactionary is a mistake, as the imperialist countries are the ones holding back global progress right now. It’s kinda like saying landlords are progressive and tenants are reactionary.
As for the USSR bit, I misread you. Saying it descended into fascism I took to you meaning that it was progressive in the first few years or so but then turned fascist, not that the RF was that fascism. I disagree with the idea that the RF is fascist, it’s certainly run by nationalists and is an utter tragedy how far they’ve fallen from their soviet roots, but that’s a different discussion.
kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 hours ago
India is well to the right of e.g. Norway. Brazil only recently moved to the relative left. Argentina is also very right-wing (and also a lot more settler-colonialist than most of the countries not allowed into the White Countries Club). Iran and Afghanistan are about as far-right as they come, despite being very much opposed to the global order as it stands today. I wasn’t discounting the so-called “Global South,” I just also don’t think that an imperialist past is the only factor in determining whether a country is right-wing.
In fact, I’d potentially go so far as to say that the majority of poorer countries are farther right than wealthier ones. The exceptions that come to mind are Cuba, Vietnam, Burkina Faso, Bolivia, and Mexico, but on the other side you have the ones I’ve already mentioned, plus Qatar, Lebanon, El Salvador, Pakistan, and more. Not doing imperialism is good, and refusing to do it is better (as opposed to simply being unable), but it doesn’t singlehandedly make an extremist theocracy leftist. If your country does not interact with others at all but is still an absolute monarchy with laws that explicitly discriminate against marginalized groups, it’s an isolationist right-wing state, not a leftist one.