It’s funny how extreme left and extreme right end up in very similar end result. Corrupt elite controlling the flow of information, wealth and industry while purging the undesired.
Stalinism was no extreme left. It was fascism, but with Marxist aesthetics.
Fascists are con men, and cons work on what’s popular with the masses. You can build an arbitrary dogma and cult of personality around anything, even Marxism.
I’d argue that Marxism is actually great for that purpose: it gets a lot of stuff right so it’s close to reality, there’s an us vs them dynamic already built in, and it’s just complicated enough to the average person that it makes it easy for an authoritarian con man to disingenuously simplify it, distort it and dogmatize it into basically a state religion. Then it’s just about pointing fingers to identify the enemy, i.e. who is burgeois/reactionary/etc and needs to go.
random_character_a@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It’s funny how extreme left and extreme right end up in very similar end result. Corrupt elite controlling the flow of information, wealth and industry while purging the undesired.
gabbath@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Stalinism was no extreme left. It was fascism, but with Marxist aesthetics.
Fascists are con men, and cons work on what’s popular with the masses. You can build an arbitrary dogma and cult of personality around anything, even Marxism.
I’d argue that Marxism is actually great for that purpose: it gets a lot of stuff right so it’s close to reality, there’s an us vs them dynamic already built in, and it’s just complicated enough to the average person that it makes it easy for an authoritarian con man to disingenuously simplify it, distort it and dogmatize it into basically a state religion. Then it’s just about pointing fingers to identify the enemy, i.e. who is burgeois/reactionary/etc and needs to go.
_stranger_@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The common denominator is greed.