'Lemmitor' is too much like 'Redditor'. Why not something reflecting how Lemmy is better than Reddit, like ... Lemmyst?
this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2026
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If it's USAmerican or Western imperialist power context, then often the fishook theory seems more applicable:
I am not familiar with the person on the right.
I think that's Bukharin.
Trotsky, Stalin, Lenin in that order
God, I hate the political compas
It's so lazy! I don't have a better suggestion but the linear scale is effectively the compass with liberal in the centre, authoritarian on either end and lazy people decided that the more "left" or "right" you are the closer to authoritarian you are.
Idk if I've even seen anarchist on the scale but I'd like to see some justification for where it gets sat.
The more centrist you are, the more correct you are. So if you aren't centrist enough, you need to centre even harder until the fence spike is poking right up your arsehole. Then you can feel smug as you look down on all the "extremists" and give a wink to the Nazi.
Fun fact, if you meet someone who unironically uses the term "horseshoe theory", it is morally incumbent on you to kick the shit out of them until they can literally see inside themselves. It is then, and only then, that you are to ask them: "are you capable of introspection now?"
If only the real world was a straight line, and there were nothing such as authoritarian coopting of collective efforts, resembling right wing fascist authoritarian, wearing the corpse of an attempted social movement.
Why animal farm exists
Why the 'national socialists' came for the communists and socialists first.
You're representing a high dimensional ecosystem with oversimplified boundings being flattened into a linear scale, and the 'horseshoe' is moreso adapting the simple heuristic to better represent the more complicated reality.
Sometimes the meaning of words is opportunistically changed, or the people directing a group change, and we actually have to comprehend and adapt to that.
A better representation of the political system is like a body where a bunch of organs seem to think cancer might be the best shape to be. Cancer as in 'defining wider boundings of surrounding systems as exploitable environment' usually ignoring how the surrounding body is literally necessary for sustaining life for the cancer itself. This is also where we would talk about things like instrumental convergence in natural/human systems.
So the linear line doesn't really explain the constant rugged individualism usurping spaces in our complex high dimensional social reality. Ergo horseshoe heuristic.
Why animal farm exists
Omfg if I hear these 2 books one more time being used instead of actual historical evidence
Read a fucking history book instead of pointing at literature and saying "see? this is why communism can never work, not even in a million years and we should all suffer under capitalism until no one is left"
Lmao right? A satire of a particular group of people that was considered kind of shallow even when it was first published, and was written by someone who really wanted (another) job with the government is hardly useful analysis.
you don't think that socialist efforts get de-railed or coopted by opportunistic oligarchs or figureheads?
'heterarchical systems need more advanced structure building to survive' =/= 'socialism bad.'
everyone is angrily lashing at their own misinterpretation of animal farm as a critique of animal farm.
like people who can't comprehend building solidarity over stupid media driven culture war bullshit. yelling angrily at other progressives for being a different shape, or defending actual intentional derailing of efforts are weirdly not the solutions to the famous fallibility of progressive efforts, which you should care about if you actually care about progressive efforts.
I'm not angry at animal farm, I just think it's a satire of what was going on in the USSR at the time it was written and can't be applied uncritically to anything vaguely left wing.
i think it's a really good tool for framing the different opportunistic tools that derail progressive efforts, even to this day.
divide-and-conquer is sure as hell working really well lately. do you remember the atheism feminism war not too long ago? or the gender war? or more race-wars than you can shake a stick at?
there's a reason why right-wing authoritarians and their neoliberal counterparts are currently dominating. animal farm is a really good simplified example showing how and why such a thing can happen, even when there's a lot of support for progressive efforts.
you could show tools like the motte-and-bailey creeping of the overton window in both animal farm, and real life examples of leftist efforts being damaged or derailed.
authoritarianism is by definition counter to progressive efforts, and heterarchical systems need to recognize this to scale and survive with any success verses other exploitative systems. there's no reason to ignore this message, even if it comes from a satire of the USSR.
also modern science is a good resource on how to accomplish this stuff. like building a big-stick resistant social immune system that doesn't fuck us all to death. or we can just keep yelling and screaming at each other, especially the people framing the necessary science around progressive efforts.
you even see a lot of tools such a slander being used against people like hasan or other progressives right now. animal farm has a lot of good examples of character assassination. great resource for people with basic reading comprehension.
I want to point out I didn't reply to the person who mentioned animal farm, because they were arguing with a point I didn't make. I agreed with someone suggesting it's very limited in scope. Which it is. I understand it's considered a shallow analysis of the specific era it was satirizing, but I don't know enough to provide my opinion on that aspect. It's okay that it is satirizing a very limited thing, that was the intent!
Maybe what I needed to add is that very rarely is any distinction made between a shift further left and a shift towards authoritarianism. I expanded in this in another comment where I talked about what I really hate about the political spectrum. If you design a spectrum where you put the authoritarian group on the end, it's not some lightbulb moment to be like, hey these guys on the end have some similarities in how they execute their plans! It makes my engineer brain fucking crazy.
I'm also not screaming at anyone? I made a meme because I think it's funny that this near useless concept (the political spectrum) gets turned into gotcha moments. I'm poking fun at this absurd thing people are happy to say while maintaining the status quo. Any criticism of the status quo is met with accusations of wanting the fascists to win. It's always "the far left". What does that even mean?
do you remember the atheism feminism war not too long ago? or the gender war? or more race-wars than you can shake a stick at?
I don't? Do you mean online discourse?
I didn't answer your question in your last reply so I will now: I'm an anarchist, so yes, I do think we can prevent authoritarianism in the shift left.
you even see a lot of tools such a slander being used against people like hasan or other progressives right now. animal farm has a lot of good examples of character assassination. great resource for people with basic reading comprehension.
Or, this shit doesn't happen IRL in the leftist spaces I exist in, and if it does it's discussed and we get to the root of the issue. I don't think you can shift the US (or any country for that matter) away from capitalism by voting. So shit talking in electorial spaces has no impact on my interests.
never said you were screaming, i was suggesting that as the alternative form of communication people choose outside of scientifically figuring out how to communicate across different systems.
i agree that associating the left as specifically authoritarian is bad and wrong, and i heavily disagree with that interpretation of animal farm. again, the ending of the book is that they became capitalists, not leftists. but i do think authoritarianism is bad, and associating it with the left is bad, even when leftists (tankies) do it.
and the atheism/feminism war was online and general media. it bled into a bunch of things like 'gamergate,' but the SJW framing was really big in the media, amongst other things. there were a lot of groups that were organizing against groups like the heritage foundation, which got discouraged or derailed by the culture war crap. lots of weird stuff, but just one of the more recent examples. you can use similar tools for other recent things like the anti-hasan campaigns painting him as a dog-abusing terrorism lover, or media campaigns against BLM/ANTIFA a while back.
anywhere you try to find progressive efforts, you see weird shit on fire for no reasonable reason, other than progressive groups still haven't found a way to successfully communicate and cooperate, and probably a lot of intentional fire-starting from the assholes with money that the groups are generally aligned against, such as the heritage foundation, or their global counterparts.
also just a note, when i talk about 'heterarchical systems' i'm basically talking about anarchism.
we need to grow a whole new culture out of the corpse of a political system most of us or currently trapped inside of.
and you're lucky if you've found the one anarchist/progressive space that works for you, but try to grow that effort into one that can affect the existing systems, and you'll suddenly find your group is either a terrorist organization, or that the group hates women, and now you have to prove to a bunch of angry public reaction to any association with that woman hating group. it is constant for anyone actually being noticed as a danger to the status quo.
i'm usually trying to talk about anarchistic efforts that affect more than one small community, as individualized and isolated communities aren't gonna do much the moment the big imperial body notices the potential for actual social change happening.
thank you though for an honest response to my words. posting in online spaces has only gotten more stifling over the years. just wish local efforts could connect to larger efforts, since we need multiple groups cooperating in solidarity, not isolated individualism.
and you're lucky if you've found the one anarchist/progressive space that works for you, but try to grow that effort into one that can affect the existing systems, and you'll suddenly find your group is either a terrorist organization, or that the group hates women, and now you have to prove to a bunch of angry public reaction to any association with that woman hating group. it is constant for anyone actually being noticed as a danger to the status quo.
Here's the thing. It's not one space. And it's not all explicitly labeled as political or leftist. I'm rural, and there is a lot of mutual aid and community efforts that certainly fit with my ideals even if the people doing it wouldn't consider themselves left wing.
I also don't waste time arguing with the public. I'm not trying to convince people to believe in what I believe. I'm interested in building systems where we can support each other outside of the formal economy and police state. I don't think it makes sense to expand these projects to huge geographical areas. Needs are different in different places. We can learn from each other and adopt things that are useful, but it shouldn't be one org.
There is an anarchist collective in a nearby city who's only public activity is boosting the efforts of various progressive initiatives. Hopefully that gives you some idea of how little interest there is putting one label on someting.
i'm usually trying to talk about anarchistic efforts that affect more than one small community, as individualized and isolated communities aren't gonna do much the moment the big imperial body notices the potential for actual social change happening.
They build community security to reduce deoendance on the state, which free people to resist in meaningful ways.
didn't say "this is why communism can never work" i was saying how collective efforts get coopted. the entire point of animal farm is that the pigs end up like the human 'capitalists' they were supposed to replace, by changing the rules and languages opportunistically, against the wishes or best interest of the people. this isn't an argument against communism or collective efforts as a whole calm down.
Have you ever read a history book that wasn't assigned to you by your government?
what government history book is teaching how right-wing style movements or oligarchical power are used derail socialist efforts? which history books are you suggesting be salient?
Do I need a list? Come on, I'm sure you learned in school how eeeeevil Stalin is and how he was just as bad as Hitler. Or worse than Hitler! Then you just kept on believing the Animal Farm narrative, because you trusted the lies your teacher told you.
So speaking of, I recommend Lies My Teacher Told Me as a primer, so you can understand how woefully miseducated a bourgeois education will leave you. It has plenty of examples of the lies that the ideological state apparatus pumps into its schools.
And if you want to actually learn some real history about Stalin, there's now an English translation of Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend. That's definitely a heavier book than Lies, though, I'm still working through it.
they are teaching that stalin is evil because he is rightwing?
is anyone here actually reading the words that i'm typing before responding?
Animal Farm is a fictional narrative based off George Orwell's interpretations of the events surrounding the Russian revolution, not an accurate piece of political history or theory.
History is much more accurately depicted through nonfiction texts, not fictional narratives. You should read actual political theory if you want to learn about the Russian revolution. It was a very interesting event with many complexities and it liberated so many people.
Although I do agree with some of your later points. Although I think horseshoe theory is unjustified as well, and you seem to agree. Politics is much more complex than a line or even a bent line.
Politics is a complex web of ideas that form as a result of certain conditions. The far left and far right do share some values, but usually for completely different reasons. For example both Nazi Germany and the USSR had very strong centralisation of power in the state, although that power in the USSR stemmed from the workers to oppress the bourgeoisie but in Nazi Germany the power stemmed from the Bourgeoisie to oppress the working class.
i just enjoy the use of animal farm/1984 as little heuristic environments to convey simple ways that collective efforts are derailed, with a great simple short set of events that show how a movement can be slowly converted into something antithetical to the original collective effort.
a problem that still hasn't been solved, despite any elaboration that could be had on the specific happenings in the USSR.
i care about the heuristics because they do map really well to other and current happenings, in ways that are useful for framing to people things such as the decades of neoliberal progressive rugpulling, or how the heritage foundation and types have been slowly reshaping the environment to benefit them, in a recursive corruption of existing systems.
it's definitely more complicated than shown in animal-farm, but people already react as if this is the deep-end, and trying to copy and paste a textbook on USSR specifics would also have me back explaining the difference between patterns and substrate, which honestly shouldn't be the case with animal farm, but it seems even (american?) leftists seem to have read it as 'commuism bad.'
Why the βnational socialistsβ came for the communists and socialists first.
Do you actually think nazis were on the left? Because that's what horseshoe theory you are defending is all about. The centrist social democrats are the ones that facilitated the nazis rise to power because they didn't want to side with the communists and socialists.
"Do you actually think nazis were on the left?"
if i thought that, i wouldn't have said that they came after the left.
everyone thinks i'm anti-left because of the weird american interpretation that animal farm = 'communism bad,' and not that collective efforts can be derailed by failures of communication or education.
the failure of progressive efforts is that most progressive groups can be turned on each other because they can't communicate or separate patterns from substrate.
'divide and conquer' is really successful, whether in animal farm or in basically every historical example of oppression.
again the 'first they came for' poem i alluded to with "Why the 'national socialists' came for the communists and socialists first."
what this means is that the name 'national socialist' was obviously completely removed from the concept.
again, like the pigs in animal farm becoming removed from the concept of animals by the end of the book. why the book is an apt reference to actual systems, although more specifically around the unfortunate failures of early russian efforts.
again, the oversimplified american interpretation of 'communism bad' mostly comes from a thorough lack of reading comprehension, and memetic/socialized reification of that misinterpretation.
so again, stating that i was not calling the nazis progressives when suggesting that their name was being misused through blatant oppression of socialists.
Read. Another. Book.
are you even human? did you comprehend any of the words being said?
The Nazis weβre economically left of the US in many ways, for what itβs worth.
What?
Nazis spent a lot of money on military because they wanted to do imperialism to grow their economy. They ran deficits to fund war industries (kind of like the US) and were betting on winning to pay them off (US oil wars?)
There was certainly centralized planning, but the US isn't exactly a free market. The government subsidizes industries in the states too.
The Nazi government developed a partnership with leading German business interests, who supported the goals of the regime and its war effort in exchange for advantageous contracts, subsidies, and the suppression of the trade union movement. Cartels and monopolies were encouraged at the expense of small businesses, even though the Nazis had received considerable electoral support from small business owners.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Nazi_Germany
Sounds pretty familiar, and I haven't even mentioned the use of prison labour.
The big public works projects were already planned by the time they took power and were beneficial for the war effort anyways. The states were embarking on similar projects at the time as well, so I wouldn't say they were further left even if we do credit them with continuing.
Nazis banned trade unions. Nazi Germany sought to eliminate foreign completion. They supported privatization. Banks were privatized under them. Utilities, manufacturing, railways, public services etc all had at least some privatization.
Companies traded contributions for favor (sound familiar?)
What am I missing that makes them more economically left wing?
Hitler was inspired by the US mostly successful genocide of native peoples.
I don't really get my politics from naming conventions or middle school books yall stay safe tho πβοΈ