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this post was submitted on 08 May 2025
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politics
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Social accountability (meaning being called out on social media, being fired from a job, or being boycotted) for unapologetically spewing hate speech or sexual harassment and whatever else "wokism" is against.. is not the same as inflicting violence on people. Your failure to understand the difference between accountability and violent authoritarianism says a lot about your character.
These are not effective means of achieving social progress because they result in incredible reactionary counter movements. As is evidenced by the success of Trump/Republicans/Fox weaponizing woke as an attack.
The median American hates scolds and prudes (despite, hypocritically, largely being a scold and prude themselves.)
If the goal is to achieve social progress through popular support and democracy, then these tactics of scolding and ostracization are counter productive. Other methods must be used
If the goal is to achieve social progress through more revolutionary means, then Lenin offers a roadmap. But American liberals are still seemingly opposed to that.
In any event, it seems clear given our current political realities that the "woke" tactics of the past decade have been a tremendous counter productive failure that has contributed to our present fascist regime. Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences; the consequences of 2010s social justice online scolding is the Trump regime and the collapse of American liberal democracy
The problem with Lenin's failed roadmap (and Marx's, for that matter) was that neither considered the intrinsic corruption and selfishness of humanity. The "dictatorship of the proletariat" is not supposed to be an actual dictatorship, but a kind of democratic power where a minority of wealthy capitalists can't simply use their wealth and power to supersede the will of the people. Hence why neoliberal capitalists are so happy to misuse the term "tyranny of the majority" in regards to direct democracy. Instead, following communist revolutions, a new ruling class emerged, composed of selfish, self-centered bandits. Not "The People" writ large, but a small controlling class of party members. That was never supposed to happen, and even Lenin tried to warn of this in his final days. There was also the matter of international isolation... where powerful, wealthy imperialist countries cut them off as a risk to their own rulers authority.
My point is... there is no roadmap. The American experiment failed, and for exactly the reasons founders like John Adams, George Washington, John Hamilton, et al warned about. Incidentally, the same reason Lenin's experiment failed as Stalinism took it over... power was allowed to be concentrated into the hands of a small ruling class or singular political party. I don't have a solution. I wish I did. There is just no way for any major movement to survive individual human ambition, greed, and selfishness. It will always be tainted and that taint will always eventually metastasize. Unless we already have a stateless, classless society where everyone shares a cultural and moral system where greed, selfishness, and preying on others for personal gain is immediately and staunched stamped out, the system cannot be sustainable... and that means there is no path to such a system at a national scale.
Such a system would need to start small and be protected from without. It would need to grow organically over multiple generations and be accepted broadly by it's own merits. And how likely do you think that is given the realities I just discussed? The rich and powerful would never let such an experiment survive. Just look at current culture. If you don't buy into neoliberalism aggressively and religiously, you get called "communist" and "marxist" and "woke" and any number of emotionally-loaded pejoratives.
So... no roadmap. Not yet.
This is not an informed opinion on Marx or Lenin