u/InevitableCold686

I don't know much about them and would like to heal y'alls perspective, since in my opinion the SPD has steered away from social democracy a bit too much and maybe die linke is a good alternative to the SPD.

What I do know already is that after Sahra Wagenknecht left they have deradicalized and pretty much stopped being stupid because if u look at her views she is pro-russian and all that, she is just odd.

I recommend History of Everything he is very cool and has actual qualifications to talk about Russia/USSR.

A few years ago I used to call myself a democratic socialist, mainly because back then I associated leftism with social progress and I knew I was queer since I was quite young (like 9-10), so naturally I drifted to progressive spaces which have shifted left since probably 2020?

Since then I identified with leftism quite strongly and stood strongly against far-right shit on the internet, I was naturally against that stuff because i was a Furry and i encountered a lot of edgy kids making nazi anti-furry memes on youtube and I was a steadfast defender of furries in Youtube comments. This then evolved to me defending queer people to me defending leftism, not just in yt comments but personally I believed that.

Then when i grew up a bit the rise of the far-right impacted me directly so i felt an obligation to push back against disinformation and so on, this put me in a position where i sometimes defended china because conservatives were attacking the wrong things about china or about communism and so on, but that made me think communism in the way the Soviets or China practice it is misunderstood. Normally that would make me a tankie but I became moreso a democratic socialist, i simply believed that everything the far-right touches is shit and everything is on this ideological axis which is "if you say china or communism is bad = you are right wing" it's a simple way of thinking that reduces everything to false dichotomies and thought-stopping cliches, because if china is communist it means it's socially progressive and can not possibly be nationalist! The only country i didn't dispute is actually bad is North Korea, but with middle eastern countries i still had that grass greener on the other side attitude because of far right disinformation about brown people.

Thankfully i don't think like that anymore, somehow, i am a person who dislikes china, russia and the soviet union and also support queer people and shit. I consider myself apolitical/humanist but I believe people should have enough money to live a comfortable life on a single paycheck and all that, we had that stuff before reaganomics took over the west, it's not a distant dream at all. And now after figuring out many things already, why should i be anti-capitalist or a leftist at all? The most friendly countries to queer people and with good living standards in general are mixed (capitalist) economies, I also know that people here aren't pro-USSR but in my opinion we can't fully seperate the soviet project from marxism, marx's work still played a huge role in shaping these totalitarian states and we must dissect exactly why that happened.

I don't feel safe in leftist spaces anymore because of course tankies are becoming very popular sadly, but also because i don't think they can build anything meaningful outside liberal democratic structures and that puts any minorities lives in danger

And as a closing thought I am way more comfortable with anarchists than i am with probably any other leftist (not in-person but as an ideology i guess) because they give good criticisms against authoritarian communism unlike conservatives (because conservative criticisms are sometimes as dumb as "too much equality is bad", like that is a big point i hear about the soviet union. Look at the fuckin soviet union and tell me there is any equality there, are youstupid?).

So it all comes down to why should I reject mixed market economies and liberal democracies when they produce the best outcomes compared to other systems despite its flaws, and other ones that promise to be better are only theoretical and have never been put in practice.

I believe that colonialism, fascism and imperialism are not inherent to capitalism, just that modern colonialists took a capitalist form, we had proto fascists way before capitalism was conceived, it was present ever since civilization started and capitalists cozying up to fascists is not a feature of capitalism because it is a feature of humans

The arguments against capitalism and for whatever alternative the speaker wants to offer in exchange always assumes that capital produces racists and wars, we had both thousands of years before capitalism and they were often just as brutal if not more brutal than capitalist wars.

Many criticisms of capitalism focus on problems like war, imperialism, racism, inequality, or exploitation. Those are real problems, but they also existed long before capitalism and under non-capitalist systems as well. Human societies have been waging wars, conquering each other, and creating hierarchies for thousands of years.

I even think that colonialism could definitely be „communist“ or leftist in some way, one thing I remember is people saying how to deal with really strong national identities when we’re trying to build a socialist world republic or whatever, they said as anti authoritarian leftists that these nationalists need to be oppressed so long until they stop believing in that national identity, and I don’t assume that every leftist thinks this but I think if we want to have a workers super state (or non state) it is something we will need to think about, and I don’t think getting rid of capitalism will solve that many issues which are more so issues with the human condition rather than capital causing it all

I don’t think most people working within liberal democracies who lean left want to empower capital, or that liberal democracy exists only to solve capital. Yes if we empower capital, all of the Marxist arguments make sense, but I don’t believe some even mainstream left parties (though for example the current state of German SPD is not quite good or social democratic) within liberal democracies are hopelessly serving the interests of capital without their knowledge in a system designed to do so and have at least done something to better the lives of workers in practice, while Marxism thought is now confined to the online left and theory

I posted this on another subreddit but I guess it wasn’t adequate to it.