So how many of you are going to ditch leftism by the time you're 30 and go back to being consumerist idpol neoliberals proving once and for all you were just an LARP'er the entire time.
So how many of you are going to ditch leftism by the time you're 30 and go back to being consumerist idpol neoliberals...
Gavin Watson
Blake Brown
...
Ayden Clark
Tbh I don't think that will be an option once most of the fags on here turn thirty
Caleb Green
I'm already over thirty, capitalism sure as hell hasn't any gotten less shit just because I aged. I'm technically unemployed after my cunt boss stopped giving me shifts and had to chase them for fucking payment for work I had done. Fuck this shit.
Nicholas Morris
Sorry, if I ever had plans on selling out I’d go right-wing—it just sounds like a lot more fun. If I’d be on the wall anyways as a neoliberal why not live it up? People trust an honest enemy more than a false friend—which is why I think I would have good odds of becoming a Gulag snitch post-rev being an ex-right winger while the neoliberals are typing up their hot takes for the WaPo in hell.
Michael Taylor
My estimate is 80%, maybe more.
The thing is, Zig Forums is particularly guilty of being the type of radical that changes his mind and thinks he has "matured" out of radicalism. I've engaged these people my whole life, and when they tell me that they too used to socialists when they were younger, I ask them what made them change their mind, and usually they say they no longer believe in something that you're not really supposed to believe in after your first reading session anyway. The common characteristic is an unwillingness to educate themselves past certain initial impulses, and Zig Forums happens to be exactly a place where people gather to tell themselves those impulses are the right interpretation of socialist theory.
And the result is what you have. A lot of memes about being some obscure socialist's G A N G and only a handful of people who are capable of giving an eloquent, convincing answer to the question "why is capitalism bad?". A lot of people giving pseudo-Marxist explanations defending some worldview or strategy that Marx and Engels themselves deemed idiotic (in fact, 80s and 90s Engels should be mandatory reading, because there's no shortage of articles or letters where he calls some attitudes that have been stereotyped as Marxist plain wrong and advocating a path most here would deem bourgeois, conservative and reformist).
In fact, our problem, not just in this board but in the Left in general, is that we're too tolerant of deliberate ignorance. People who don't read, don't get the concepts, don't get the theory (it's even worse when they don't do any of this but assume they already know it). Engels has a very interesting public exchange/debate with Paul Ernst, one of those Socialists who talk about how elections are bourgeois and fucking bullshit, maaan, and Engels had to explain him the nuances of historical materialism, but he also said something very interesting: that back in the SPD's creation, they were being taken over by childish radicals who never bothered studying and just wanted to say iconoclastic, incendiary stuff that had no practical implications whatsoever. You know what saved them, according to Engels himself? Bismarck's Anti-Socialist laws. Got all the posers to leave out of fear of consequences and get their petty rebellion out of their systems somewhere else. Only the true and strong stayed, educated themselves and took the party onto the right path. The fact all successful Socialist revolutions happened in autocratic countries where Socialism was deemed dangerous instead of cool makes me think that's no isolated incident. The solution would be for US to impose our own high standards on ourselves, tell posers and brainlets to leave, stop being tolerant of stupidity, tell people that our books are meant to be had, and that being a Socialist involves more sacrifices than rights, stop giving people credibility until they have something constructive to show. Stop accepting bullshit shit under the pretense that we're being open and democratic.
Carter Hill
I'll never ditch leftism. If I ever did, though, it would be to create some utopian system where women are the capitalist class and men the proletarian.
I think even if I got rich and became a porky, I'd still support socialism just for the pleasure of watching the status quo getting fucked. I'd probably just mock classcucks for letting me exploit them 24/7 in hopes that this would radicalize them.
And because I hate the way capitalism alienates everyone. Uuuuuuuuuh.
John Butler
I'm not even in my 20s and I'm already leaning towards the far right b80
Gavin Allen
That whole stereotype was pretty much only true for boomers, and even then that was only because boomers were never really "radicals" in the first place.
Luke Martin
Brainlet here.
So you're saying that 80% of Zig Forums is american?
Jayden Green
I'm sure as hell not. I read theory whenever I have spare time. Marxism is a fucking science. I would have to literally ignore reality to reject Marxism.
Michael Allen
t. grad student
Socialism isn't a book club.
Luis Ward
Lenin's Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder also goes in-depth on this phenomenon discussing the German communists and WWI. He also says that uncloaked repression actually benefited the Russian communists, while communism being "legal" was to the detriment of German communists because when communism became illegal, none of the German communists had the skills necessary to evade the police. His suggestion to solve this is that communists in "legal" countries should deliberately engage in a mix of legal/illegal work, so they get the training necessary to deal with cops/COINTELPRO. If they do so, their party won't have illusory gains that vanish at the first sign of repression.
Ian Rodriguez
Party members 100% absolutely have to be educated about Marxism. If they're not, then how the fuck are they supposed to know what to do?
Tyler Campbell
Why did that happen to Boomers anyway?
My mom used to be a Maoist and now shes an idpol neoliberal
Luis Butler
Most Western Maoists even today are just adventurist leftcoms.
Lucas Clark
Won't ditch leftism, as it won't stop me from analysing my material conditions through that lense also having a YT channel kind of cements you but I am becoming very bitter with socialist organisations. At this point, discussions within this group merely boils down to an analysis of the problem, no concrete solutions, and some leftist groups won't join out of drama etc. The only group that I've seen promise in is groups like Solidarity or the anarchists, but the latter is in a different state, and the ones in my state basically boil down to a once a month reading club with the occasional visitor from an IWW. member telling folks how to organise in the workplace to an audience of 20 people.
I dare say it, but the theory of spontaneous revolution seems more promising, though I might just be embracing this out of my own pessimism.
Also, a challenge that leftists face is convincing people to not have faith in a system that may benefit them. I feel a genuine sense of excitement when people start to recognise the corruption in the government, and how corporations wind up pulling the strings from within, that feeling quickly sours. Because as opposed to revolution, or an insurrection that may bear fruits to it, they genuinely believe that by passing reform or ""voting"" will be the change we need. Fuck it, even groups like socialist alliance, though I do share some of their views, still believe in signing petitions and electing members into government who may be able to "democratically" install socialists into parliament. I'd like to think that we could get the next coming of Allende or Bela Kun in my country, but I still remain brutally cynical. In a way, they're a less liberal and secretarian version of Socialist Alternative.
At this point, least how I see it, it's an almost unbearable waiting game, but the longer I wait, I start to have the gut wrenching feeling that Fukuyama may have been right after all.
Brody Sullivan
Boomers were never really all that radical to begin with. A couple of polls taken at the height of the anti-war movement even suggest that the youth at the time were more supportive of the war than their parents. These kids grew up completely immerse in imperialist propaganda and bourgeois values. They also were the only beneficiaries of the late American "socdem" experiment which collapsed during the 70s with stagflation due to the inherent contradictions of capitalism. However most went with the DC consensus which said that it was unions and foreigners that ruined everything, thus reinforcing their now firmly entrenched reactionary beliefs. They are uniquely reactionary and cannot be saved. The only saving grace here is that there will never be another "boomer"-like generation in America since its material conditions are only going to get more and more degraded as its empire slowly decays.
Samuel Lopez
I'd like to see one of those polls.
Nathan Allen
Kys slowly you gave me eye tumors.
Asher King
i'm going to ditch leftism as soon as marx gets disproved
Eli Powell
The older i get and the more i learn the more i become a nuke everything and kill everyone nick land crazy guy though
Leo Thomas
You have to grow up sometime.
Cooper Roberts
I will have killed myself by then
Parker Price
With any luck by the time I'm 30 I'll have carried Madam Zeroni up the mountain, found the treasure under Camp Green Lake, made like a billion dollars keeping feet smelling fresh, and finally donating the proceeds to Israel to turn them into a world super power. I'll be immortalized as a hero to the Jewish people and they'll erect monuments to Stanley Yelnats IV, better known as Caveman
Camden Nelson
autism
Jace Stewart
How old do you have to be for that image to seem relevant?
Jaxon Collins
You have to have a bit of a brain to understand that man is not a fallen angel, but rather a rising beast. To poke at your representation of Christian Anarchy: we are citizens of nature, and nature is our one true God. Marxists believe that the state is their God and Christians believe that YHWH is their God. You are all fools, and to combine the two is even funnier.
Jordan Ramirez
Well look at Mr. Moneybags over here, not having to work full time while in university just to scrape by.
He'll probably respond with "yeah but it wasn't a REAL job"
Angel Bennett
depends on the economy tbh
also the more of a larper you are the less likely you are a serious person
Ie, keep it limited to your book collection
Daniel Jones
Also these days, simply getting a degree doesn't guarantee you a good job (i.e. a job that can provide you with enough income to pay your insane rent and student loans while still leaving you with enough extra funds to save every month.)
Gabriel Powell
hi bat'ko
Henry Ward
By a bit of a brain, do you mean bat shit and mentally ill
Gabriel Davis
Chase Brown
Christopher Jenkins
Adrian Moore
Bentley Williams
Leo Price
Austin Gutierrez
hippies are fucking shit tier
Josiah Sullivan
.
Adrian Morales
Not as bad as whatever fucking meat grinder created the current wave of white supremacists
Dear fucking God
Ian Evans
College is a scam and you shouldn't go unless you're going to be a scientist, an engineer or a doctor. Communism just makes it to where everyone suffers your fate without getting an education to begin with.
Lucas Myers
Hey, this sounds like capitalism, because everyone is fucking broke
Benjamin Collins
But…everyone suffers in capitalism………….more
In fact here's my evidence for claiming such a fact.
What's PQL you may ask? The PQLi measures
Physical Quality of Life
Socialist nations have had
higher
Physical Quality of Life indices compared to America
John Bell
America is the only place where doctors are petty bourg fucktards and even that is changing. These days only engineers and some programmers are making a good living straight out of college and that is likely to change as capitalism progresses in the US.
Blake Martinez
Source: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Juan Scott
Don't be stupid, in order for Fukuyama to be right a stable steady state capitalism that never advances would need to be possible. Even a cursory glance at long term trends in the economy shows that this isn't true. Not even Fukuyama believes Fukuyama is right any more.
Cooper Sanchez
Jordan Stewart
Bat'ko, if you are as young as you think you are and already think Fukuyama was right then you are a hopeless case. I'm a bit older than you and I can tell you that the way things are going, there have to be considerable changes in society till 2030 but when we look at who's in power, it's very unlikely the current ruling caste is actually being able to pull those necessary changes off. Now what happens then? I grew up in the 90s and I can tell you that things used to be better in the 2000s. The 2010s have been a dumpsterfire so far. We literally got a war in Europe in the Ukraine and the US empire is failing everytime it tries to do something, people are literally getting poorer in the West which wasn't the case since the fucking 30s.
Of course, you live in Australia, a country in which most social securities and standards have not yet been cut, where wages are decent, and where you are isolated from most global crisis. But don't fool yourself: Things are shaking up.
Evan Murphy
College is a scam mostly in Anglo countries. Where I live, you can go to a decent public uni for like 400€ a year, or 10€ if your family is poor, which was my case, and now I'm able to get access to comfier jobs than what my parents worked at thanks to my """useless""" degree.
There is absolutely no sensible reason why getting an education and a basic degree should cost tens of thousands, yet when Bernie Sanders proposed to lower tuition fees and shit, a lot of you said in one voice "dude that's impossible lmao".
Your federal reserve currently holds a trillion in student debt, and somehow that's more sensible than having affordable education to you, I don't understand. (source: advisorperspectives.com
That's not true.
Nolan Robinson
Correctly pointing out that there's been a restoration of capitalism in China, doesn't necessarily make you a left communist.
Lincoln Miller
I agree, it is absolutely fucking criminal what America gets away with. Schools cost tens of thousands because we have to pay for these dumbass football teams and stadiums, state of the art gyms, fucking Subways and McDonalds on campus, and of course millions for the admins. And of course the fucking idiots repeat the same old brainwashing "dude big government is bad and stuff, it's socialism, it's impossible" etc, yet many of these same people don't say shit when we spend $200B on military budget increases.
Josiah Lee
At worst I'll probably just turn into a socdem at like age 40.
**implying I live that long but still*
I don't think I'll ever "ditch leftism". I don't think leftism is like a hairstyle, that you can just pick, keep for a short period of time and move on. Because if you really are a leftist, your brain is, so to say, "programmed" to be that way. That's why I reall hate people who just come here like "hey guys, I was a literal nazi until last week, but then trump bomved syria and now I'm a socialist you yeah that's cool". People like that will just "follow" some other ideology in a month and then go back to being a boring ass do-nothing armchair liberal by the time they get a job.
Joseph Jones
lol
Michael Perry
What did OP mean by this?
Cameron Butler
As I said in the other thread, even though I'm only in my mid-20s, I have always been more or less a leftist since I became politically conscious, so I don't see myself straying from that path any time soon.
That said, sometimes I fear becoming a complacent liberal after potentially having a relatively comfy job/stable financial situation for a decade or two, but so far, my few friends who have such things are still fairly leftists, including the one who is in his mid-30s and own a house in a nice neighborhood.
I'm pretty sure global capitalism will soon face another 2008-style crisis anyway, and probably another one in a dozen of years after that, and it will remind the increasingly polarized masses of people that something is definitely wrong with the current state of things, and shit will happen.
Society in general has been less complacent towards the Western establishment during the last decade, and this trend is likely to continue for the years to come, so it isn't very plausible that we, anons, will go against the current.
Personally, I think I will just read more Marx and Engels, and become either more convinced they were onto something big, or get more apathetic as time goes by and let my inner socdem take control of me, or at worst have a Nick Land-style mental breakdown and start to believe that people deserve brutal social-darwinist shit happening to them because they are fucking retards, therefore promoting the dialectical intensification of the contradictions inherent to capitalism and accelerating its demise.
Also this.
Grayson Turner
I'm already there, except instead of being a consumerist idpol neoliberal I am more of an apathetic individual looking out for my own interests. But I think that deep down I will always be red.
There is just no incentive to delude myself into being emotionally or in any way invested in leftism.
Ian Hill
(Hey Bat'ko) Socialist Alliance doesn't stand parliamentary candidates because we think socialism can be won in parliament. Instead, like Marx and Engels and whoever else, we believe that a parliamentary strategy provides an opportunity to
c) take what workingclass socialist representation we might have and use it to fight for reforms which will have concrete positive effects on workers' lives
Nathaniel Hall
user, if they did all that, then they wouldn't be socialists.
Adam Green
Can't believe anons caught for this obvious bait. Well done, OP.
Cooper Stewart
...
Nathan Parker
...
Leo Howard
Bat'ko, where I am right now, I can literally smell the class consciousness. People are waking up, slowly but surely. The only thing that could defeat us is good people losing hope. So keep that in mind, comrade.
Cooper Price
...