Reduce or eliminate private ownership of capital.

Seize the means of production.

Fuck tradition.

Fuck economics.

Kill the people who resist or disagree, or sometimes also if you just feel like killing them. For the rest, strip away basic rights so that they won’t rise up to dismantle the system.

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As someone pointed out, perhaps things are a bit different in America, but this is how I see far left generally from Europe.

Jesus Christ.

What gets me is that socialism and communism are totally different things. They’re different means to a similar goal of an end.

Because hyperbole sells.

I consider myself a Centrist simply because both sides can fuck right off. The Left can’t barely manage to do 3 things right before fumbling everything. The Right traded the former guise of fiscal responsibility for LARPing as Nazis. “Sides” are a false choice forced on voters to give two brands of dickbag a duopoly to their benefit.

It sure is progressive though. That’s such a weird word to use as a pejorative. I mean I can get the theory behind being against a big nanny state, but why call it an unambigously positive term then?

It’s because Marxists/Communists and Capitalists like to pretend Anarchism isn’t half of socialism because it hurts their arguments.

Many of us would disagree with that, but in aggregate we’ve just elected “burn this motherfucker down with us inside” instead of the alternative who was still way too far to the right for most of us here on Lemmy, so you are unfortunately correct.

If you proposed children not going hungry to some of my conservative relatives, even in a room of mixed company they would say out loud something like “why should I have to pay to feed the kids they can’t afford because they can’t close their legs or put down the crack pipe long enough to get a job?” (Racist dog whistle very much intentional)

I am responding according to the context of the original statement. Yeh, you could go even further left and have anarchy, but that would be utterly impractical in today’s world.

The biggest party in the Netherlands is called the freedom party, their mainly anti-immigrant and against the freedom of religion and the freedom of education. Totally agree they’re great at marketing (though it’s more about being loud and talking about social problems than it is about having ideas of how to solve them). They’re considered to be far-right populist, their leader (Geert Wilders) is aligned with Marine Le Pen and Georgia Meloni. The left has lost their working class-base traditional base to them because of them being more relatable (and less high-brow) than the labour party, the socialists and the greens.

The word you’re looking for is pluralism.

If there is anything the current “left” parties absolutely suck at its marketing.

You mean to tell me endless purity tests and screaming “you’re a literal nazi” at everyone who disagrees slightly with your position aren’t effective tactics to change someone’s mind? No waaaaaaay.

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I don’t look at one person saying “Murdering 5 year olds is bad”, look at another person saying “Murdering 5 year olds is good!” and try to find a way where both are right.

This is literally what centrists all over the world (well, the parts that show up in English-language news anyway) think about Palestine, though.

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Fascism is not the same as capitalism. For capitalism to work properly, it is required that market power is minimized and that companies cannot influence politics. The fact that they have been able to do so is not capitalism.

Milton Friedman – In Capitalism and Freedom (1962), he argues that government intervention should be minimal and that businesses should focus on profit rather than lobbying for special advantages. While he doesn’t explicitly state that capitalism requires private companies to stay out of politics, he warns against corporate influence leading to cronyism.

Adam Smith – In The Wealth of Nations (1776), he warns against “the merchants and manufacturers” using their influence to gain monopolies and special privileges, which distort free competition. He emphasizes that capitalism works best when businesses do not manipulate laws in their favor.

James Buchanan (Public Choice Theory) – Buchanan and other public choice theorists (like Gordon Tullock) argue that when businesses influence politics, they engage in rent-seeking, which distorts market efficiency. They emphasize that government should limit corporate lobbying to prevent economic inefficiencies.

Luigi Zingales – A more recent economist, Zingales argues in A Capitalism for the People (2012) that corporate political influence undermines free markets and leads to a system of “crony capitalism,” where economic power translates into political power.

That’s your opinion, not a fact.
And the issue with that is you’re only seeing it as two sides and a fence-sitter.
Centrists form their own views and positions, independent of the parties on either side.

There’s no forcing them to take a position, they already have one.
And when they have to vote for/against legislation changes, they’ll side with whichever option aligns most closely with their views.

US pseudo-centrism is right wing though, which might be what you’re confusing real centrism with.

They are relative to global politics which most Americans know nothing about, it seems.

Republicans have always been pretty hard right and as of the Trump administrations they are pretty much extreme right. Democrats seem to randomly oscillate between centre right and right.

Some issues are not relative or negotiable. Rape, murder, war crimes, pedophilia, etc. If you want to be soft on that stuff then you lose my vote, period. Now and in the future. If that means we collectively burn this place to the ground, well if thats what it takes, thats what it takes-- lets get it over with.

Neither side has tolerance for people who don’t see things exactly the way they do. Someone who doesn’t ascribe to either ideology is vilified by both. So from that person’s perspective both sides are the same – intolerant.

Most of the responses here are a perfect demonstration.

I made a choice. It just doesn’t conform to your worldview, and you just can’t accept that someone else looks at things differently than you, can you? Thanks for demonstrating my point!

“You must conform to my worldview”. QED.

They do. The problem is that the far left wants the same.

The meme is comparing the far right with the moderate left.

I think they want to expunge groups because a monoculture is easier to control. If everyone fits into a couple of narrow boxes that all speak the same language, fulfill the same roles, have the same hard limits on expression and are all able-bodied, mentally tuned to function as desirable cogs in a machine you get an easily exploitable force. It’s why they want all costs of maintenance and risk borne by the individual and more specifically the family unit which has the power to ostricize and disenfranchise on a micro scale. Pluralistic societies mean that the individual is supported by a culture of acceptance and those groups all run off of different rules which make demands of society. They want a society that makes very few demands but feels catered to thus earning higher levels of compliance.

Well the far left (tankies) are actively supporting genocidal authoritarian regimes. Comparing extreme right wingers to non extreme left wingers is just complete shit.

I’m not even sure capitalism is the right word, at least not in the US. I’d almost describe their ideology as neo-feudalism.

The republicans have always paid lipservice to the idea of meritocracy, of an even playing field, and fair competition. But that isn’t what we’re seeing from them - they’re merging economic and state power in a way that serves to lock in the existing class structure and remove what little social mobility remains. They may pay lipservice to the idea of a free market liberal democracy, but that isn’t the government they’re creating.

If you want a good example of how much they hate it and are apparently even affraid of mentioning it in the US, just go to the US holocaust memorial museum website.
They have the Martin Niemöller poem on the wall… more or less.
Less actually since they omitted the first sentence: First they came for the communists.
Not even mentioned in the article on the website.
Imagine that, jews doing revisionism.
Now if you click on the German version of the article you get the right version.
They knew what they were doing.
Americans can not see or hear the C word under any circumstances.

More people die every year due to the lack of food, medicine and clean water than whatever made up number you can come up with for “far left” policies.

I’m not sure that’s fair. The “death toll of communism” has more to do with authoritarianism and political maneuvering than economic policy. Also, the people quickest to point out this fact don’t seem to be using the same measuring stick to tally up the equivalent “death toll of capitalism.”

It’s just propaganda that doesn’t hold up to serious scrutiny. All governments - including ‘centrist’ ones - have an awful lot of blood on their hands. Enough blood that I wouldn’t say there’s a significant difference due to economic policy alone.

Indeed, studying it is the best way to learn that the huge numbers that get thrown around in pop-history are completely made up cold war propaganda.

You’re right except that my (EU) view of Lemmy is that it’s not really left leaning.
The large amout of anti-Trump/Musk post doesn’t make it so.
A large part of it is US dems/libs making those posts. They are center-right at best.
And I should know since I point that out to them and see the reaction.
Massive downvotes and an avalanche of vicious comments.

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My point, simple and plainly put is that wishing for an egalitarian society (or whatever it is called) isn’t an extremist believe (as in far-x) and most people would usually agree with it.

I just think it is just how much mass media controls most people’s perception, and how is that the key factor antagonizing with finding common ground.

To add a voice to the choir, I was raised like this too. We went the other direction of feeling guilty for needing aid though.

Like they weren’t completely wrong, you really should be able to raise a family off a single full time job, the problem is that said jobs don’t pay enough for that. But the broken system is good at defending itself, and politicians are quick to point out all the ways it does work, so you wind up with a ‘well, it works for them, guess I just have to try harder’ mindset. Like, I spent hours each week as a teenager helping mom do the extreme couponing and do stuff like take a cart through another line to get around limits on sale items.

I’ve been shit at math for my whole life, so maybe I’m just hoping I’m not alone in this, but I really think a lot of people are number illiterate. I’ve spent so much time learning to be grateful for my shoe-string budget, I have a hard enough time envisioning double my salary, and that’d just make me middle class. I literally don’t have a way of conceptualizing what 200x my salary would be like.

Nice cherry picking chef. Might try career in confectioning 💩

sarcasm tags are for the weak willed, we don’t do such things even in the autism central online. What happens, happens

I have unironically read my comment 10 times already just to savor how perfectly and tastefully it is composed. Truly a masterpiece of some kind.