the_dunk_tank

15917 readers

11 users here now

It's the dunk tank.

This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes.

Rule 1: All posts must include links to the subject matter, and no identifying information should be redacted.

Rule 2: If your source is a reactionary website, please use archive.is instead of linking directly.

Rule 3: No sectarianism.

Rule 4: TERF/SWERFs Not Welcome

Rule 5: No ableism of any kind (that includes stuff like libt*rd)

Rule 6: Do not post fellow hexbears.

Rule 7: Do not individually target other instances' admins or moderators.

Rule 8: The subject of a post cannot be low hanging fruit, that is comments/posts made by a private person that have low amount of upvotes/likes/views. Comments/Posts made on other instances that are accessible from hexbear are an exception to this. Posts that do not meet this requirement can be posted to !shitreactionariessay@lemmygrad.ml

Rule 9: if you post ironic rage bait im going to make a personal visit to your house to make sure you never make this mistake again

founded 4 years ago

MODERATORS

KiaKaha@hexbear.net

itsPina@hexbear.net

MiraculousMM@hexbear.net

corgiwithalaptop@hexbear.net

VILenin@hexbear.net

replaceable@hexbear.net

EmmaGoldman@hexbear.net

InsidiousTrackers@hexbear.net

CARCOSA@hexbear.net

111

The most amazing mental gymnastics (hexbear.net)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by NoLeftLeftWhereILive@hexbear.net to c/the_dunk_tank@hexbear.net

25 comments fedilink hide all child comments

This is just next level.

I too always like it when I get to choose who oppresses me, makes it feel so much better./s

(No links, because not sure how big or small of an account this Harris lib has. Screenshotted from Mastodon.)

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] MeowZedong@lemmygrad.ml 7 points 3 months ago

I like this quote, but I think a bit more context drives the point home even better.

Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich--that is the democracy of capitalist society. If we look more closely into the machinery of capitalist democracy, we see everywhere, in the “petty”--supposedly petty--details of the suffrage (residential qualifications, exclusion of women, etc.), in the technique of the representative institutions, in the actual obstacles to the right of assembly (public buildings are not for “paupers”!), in the purely capitalist organization of the daily press, etc., etc.,--we see restriction after restriction upon democracy. These restrictions, exceptions, exclusions, obstacles for the poor seem slight, especially in the eyes of one who has never known want himself and has never been inclose contact with the oppressed classes in their mass life (and nine out of 10, if not 99 out of 100, bourgeois publicists and politicians come under this category); but in their sum total these restrictions exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics, from active participation in democracy.

Marx grasped this essence of capitalist democracy splendidly when, in analyzing the experience of the Commune, he said that the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!

But from this capitalist democracy--that is inevitably narrow and stealthily pushes aside the poor, and is therefore hypocritical and false through and through--forward development does not proceed simply, directly and smoothly, towards "greater and greater democracy", as the liberal professors and petty-bourgeois opportunists would have us believe. No, forward development, i.e., development towards communism, proceeds through the dictatorship of the proletariat, and cannot do otherwise, for the resistance of the capitalist exploiters cannot be broken by anyone else or in any other way.

Rings as true today as it did in his time.