On stuff outside of lemmygrad, we are receiving a lot of hate, especially by those who just moved from Reddit. Guess they lost their hidden privilege at Reddit as their rhetoric used to be almost universal over there, while genzedong and our other subs get censored and banned. And now, on lemmy, their stuff isn’t universal, as we are more prevalent here. Seems like they really want that hidden privilege back
dear comrades living and dead, please help give me the self control not to try arguing with all the “Lemmy is anti human rights” takes polluting the fediverse rn 🙏
I deeply care about human rights
Must be one of the most nebulous and abstract things you can stand for. What rights? The right to die on the street? The right to monopoly?
The right to be airstriked by NATO peacekeepers, duh
The right to be forced to work to earn back the right to exist
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I have seen it all now. Someone citing the declaration of independence (to expand westwards) written by slaveowners as a holy scripture for human freedom.
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That one is completely useless because usa.
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Still useless
The New Echota Treaty of May 1836?
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outrage liberals are the worst
Just write one response and reuse it, and then don’t engage further unless it’s in good faith.
Yet they still join, are briefly outraged, and then do nothing but complain
My favourite Was the “Lemmy is committing human right abuses” take from mastodon libs.
I wonder if it’s struck them yet that, as their neoliberal platform fails, other platforms built on fundamentally better ideas and infrastructure are rising up. I wonder if this challenges their preconceived notions at all? Nah, it’s just a bunch of tankies.
It is definitely inducing cognitive dissonance. The developers are simply are communists trying to collectivize social media, and that will live in their heads rent free as long as they stick around.
I saw someone comment, in an almost gleeful manner “I didn’t even know of the word Tankie until today!” like a kid who just learned about the word “Fuck”. 🙄
nothing about the fediverse is inherently exclusively communist in design, and in fact actively goes against the authoritarianism that most examples of communism systems have seemingly inevitably adopted
actually authoritarianism is when my parents forces me to go to bed but china doesnt do that so…
Every server in the fediverse and everywhere else has an admin with unlimited power. How authoritarian!
unlike real life it takes about 3 button presses to leave and go somewhere with better management
unlike real life the management isnt liable to come for your ass even after you leave, cough china cough
You should get checked for brainworms, coughing fits are a symptom.
spicy
you a hanjian or just an ignorant white?
lmao, linking the fucking china police station scare story
you know the US openly has police stations, military bases and prisons (in which they repeatedly torture the prisoners, some of whom have never received a trial of any kind) in other countries against their will right? You know the NYPD openly advertise that they entrap and arrest political dissidents abroad?
are you expecting me to defend clearly unethical practices by a corrupt, authoritarian police state just for the sake of argument because thats what youd do?
or start, i dunno, listing off a bunch of crimes by entirely different countries exclusively to drive the conversation away because thats what youd do?
Euros live off of slavery loot.
can you explain the relevance of this comment to the article in detail
you really think the BBC is a credible source of information? they’ve been sourcing and promoting fake news since it’s foundation, paved the way to more wars than you can think of. please do some research before going to lecture people. you need it.
seemingly inevitably adopted
There’s no need to shy away from it. It’s by design: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm
Terror? Much. Excuses? None.
These sorts of platforms are extremely popular with communists for a reason.
They’re popular with nazis too, for the same reason
presumably relatively little chance of getting entirely removed from the greater federation, and little control by large corporations?
neither of those are exclusively communist things to want
It’s about the opposite of the nauseating neolib standard, though.
Just you wait until US newscorps start advocating to ban the entirety of lemmy and its source code from the USA.
obviously the Chinese are making us all think for ourselves and talk amongst ourselves… there could be no other answer
“China is a censorship dictatorship and we should ban all things that come from there to protect our free speech.” liberals probably
probablyactuallyThe regularity in which I have this exact conversation with my local friends group is exhausting. Admittedly, its only one out of the few, but they are by far the loudest. The same nonsense about “changes to movies” because they want to also be released in China. “Can’t say anything because CHINA has MONEY and the entertainment corporations want their money!!”
Silly you, you forgot that we’re both on the Chinese payroll and we’re Chinese bots simultaneously /s
If Imperial America suffers a crisis even severer than the one in the summer of 2020, that would become a serious possibility.
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You lost them at asking them to read. They do not read.
This is false. They can definitely read… Twitter and reddit and anything else pumped out by the feds that comes in short quips with no real background information or data backing it up.
Read Marx and Engels. Read Lenin.
Marx is a tankie, Engels is a tankie, Lenin is a tankie.
Stalin dunks on these types in Anarchism or Socialism it’s funny af, some say Marxism bad bc it’s materialism, some say it’s bad because it’s not materialism, some say it’s bad because they don’t understand the what type of materialism it is, and don’t even get him started on what Nobati and Sh. G. thinks of Dialectics😪
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you can’t possibly argue that his regime in the USSR was not authoritarian in nature
We don’t. We recognize that the State is a tool of oppression for one class over another, and will always be “authoritarian”.
If I kill the big capitalism boss I’m not gonna throw his OP sword away I’m using that thing constantly because I know for a fact he’s gonna show up again later
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You’ve missed the rest of the quote, and indeed the whole point of the complete text you are quoting:
Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm
Are you opposed to revolts against monarchies in favour of mass participation polities, like the French Revolution? Unfortunately, history shows that violent revolts are far more successful than peaceful ones, and if the goal is to establish a proletarian-led democracy, then the reactionary forces NEED to be contained by any means necessary.
Any attempts for peacefully enacting change against the ruling classes, have resulted in, either violent oppression from the ruling class and failure, or in successful change then an incremental regression back to the previous conditions.
Pacifist purists (Engels’ anti-authoritarians) are in essence supporters of the status quo.
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- If you’ve seen a self-proclaimed Marxist say that the state is wholly negative, they were not, in fact, a Marxist, but most likely an anarchist.
- Stalin being “one of history’s most brutal dictators” is imperialist drivel; even internal CIA documents stated that the USSR had collective leadership. If you’re talking about the leadership as a whole, there are certainly things to criticize – there were undoubtedly excess imprisonments and executions during wartime, because they were defending humanity against fascism, there were fascist collaborators in various republics (such as Solzhenitsyn, the liberal darling), and the survival of the USSR was at stake, but such excess could be found in many other countries (perhaps most prominently the concentration camps for Japanese people in the US, whose survival was very much not at stake). This propaganda has not been accepted by many countries in the Global South, and I would challenge you to provide some actual evidence (on par with that provided for Nazi Germany, the US, Israel, or other fascist regimes).
Stalin being “one of history’s most brutal dictators” is imperialist drivel; even internal CIA documents stated that the USSR had collective leadership.
Here is one such document for anyone that is curious: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80-00810A006000360009-0.pdf
I apologise if I have misunderstood the text
Then I suggest you read further through the link I provided, and furthermore educate yourself on what Marxists actually believe, before accusing them.
when one of the crucial figures of your ideology is known as one of history’s most brutal dictators.
I dismiss this claim whether you are referring to Lenin or Stalin. In both cases there’s ample evidence to the contrary. This perception is mostly formed by Western propaganda.
that you say that authority and the State is wholly negative
Anarchists say those sorts of things. Not me. Yes the goal of communism is to EVENTUALLY create a stateless society. But to do that, we first need to a) hold a revolution, b) supress counter-revolution, c) be able to defend the revolution from external enemies, and d) eliminate the bourgeoise as a class.
That last part doesn’t presuppose we eliminate them by killing them necessarily, but we need to curb their immense political and economic power, and to do that we need a state that can actually stop them from creating a counter-revolution. In the exact same vein, I’ll reuse the example of the French revolution, which eliminated the aristocracy as a class, so as to be able to actually found a democratic nation.
And of course the other function of the state is to be able to defend itself from external threats. To do that we need the most “authoritarian” structure of all, i.e. a functional army, with a functional industrial capacity behind it to support it.
We can sit back now and say that the Soviet Union was an “authoritarian” state, but we shouldn’t forget what it went through to survive. In its first 30 years of history, the Soviet Union went through 2 world wars (both devastating for it), 2 revolutions, a civil war (which had the added component of 8 major powers invading at the same time), 2 other wars, and a full economic blockade, and all that while trying to transform itself from a feudal empire into a socialist industrialized democracy. Without a state to protect itself, the Soviet Union would be a footnote in the history books right now, much like the Paris Commune and the Spanish Republic.
I’m not sure what you’re arguing, Engels’ quote supports my argument.
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We are “authoritarian”. We just don’t pretend that we’re not. “Authoritarian” is a meaningless word which is what I said originally, every State that has ever existed is authoritarian: it enacts authority against a specific class. If you agree with Engels’ quote then you agree with this.
I think you might mistook for anarchists, we’re not. We’re in fact what you calls not being.
I don’t understand you being downvoted, this is just some confusion.
It was a civil war where they fought internal belligerents and a ton of invading countries. These are some that are listed on wikipedia:
We all would love if we could enact a revolution by peacefully debating the oppressors and their lackeys in the free marketplace of ideas where they would humbly accept defeat and then everyone stands up and claps. Sadly reality is very different from this.
Most of these so called “libs” were probably just doing what they saw everyone else do. Now, “everyone else” means something different here. If I were them, I’d honestly pick up a book and skip the embarrassment. This is a learning opportunity.
Everyone click on the All button and start participating in federation.
Worst thing that can happen is the liberals complain.
But if you’re going to be participating on lemmy.ml please don’t make the admins’ job harder, respect the instance rules. They’re already working overtime to handle the influx of new users across the software.
I’ve been browsing lemmygrad near daily for over a year now and had never clicked the All button lol there is a whole lot going on out there, fediverse is pretty cool
If you’re going to throw around “liberals” as some sort of derogatory “us vs them” term then you should probably think twice before clicking all.
There are two sides to any coin. Check yourself before you shit on other people, to make sure you’re not just proving yourself to be at least as bad as them.
liberals is a derogatory term lol
You have the same pfp as @ParentiBot@lemmygrad.ml
The quote
In the United States, for over a hundred years, the ruling interests tirelessly propagated anticommunism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy than a political analysis. During the Cold War, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.
– Michael Parenti, Blackshirts And Reds
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the admins of this instance if you have any questions or concerns.
Yes, thank you, I’ve been posting on lemmy.ml for 4 years now.
Wait until the liberals find out that free and open source decentralized networks like Lemmy align with the general direction of communism.
( At least, I assume it does. I may be very wrong. In which case, I apologize. )
Wait until the liberals find out that free and open source decentralized networks like Lemmy align with the general direction of communism
This already happened and reading it was hilarious.
I don’t think you are wrong. I mean, we’ve somewhat siezed the mean of communication? I guess?
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most knowledgeable tankie
most literate liberal
Scientists: I’m not sure, this needs more tests.
Fascists: thIs iS a siGn of weAknEss me kiL
wait until the shitlibs find out that [info i pulled out of my whole, unwashed ass]
very scientific
Fascists:
jesus christ
Your earlier comment was already deleted so this is your second warning, don’t insult members here. Instance rule 3 is be respectful to your comrades.
can you point me to the insult in question, i cannot see it
I think you know which sentence I’m talking about.
no i genuinely do not
What else do you think you are? Colonialist? Ancap? Neocon?
can you point out one (1) opinion that is in line with any of the 4 ideologies youve mentioned
All of your posts here are
Ah yes. The big communist governments are known for * checks notes * their staunch, unmoving ideals of free speech.
“free speech” without consequence from the state has never existed, and certainly not in capitalist states
You should talk to Edward Snowden and Julian Assange about free speech.
What exactly do you think Lemmy has to do with free speech?
Please point to where I was talking about Lemmy.
Man… I haven’t been on reddit in quite a while but I don’t remember it being such a shitlibfest. It’s really bad and it pretty well overran lemmy.ml immediately.
Reddit tends to ban commies. It’s like a mini red scare: with the left removed, the right thrives.
It puts me in an odd spot because I care amd believe in Lemmy as a project and I want it to grow, but on the other hand it was kinda nice to not be called a fascist… because im a communist… because that somehow makes me the antithesis of communism
I think there will be an adjustment period, where the Reddit habits will continue to be exhibited. Most redditors have been heavily propagandized for years. Those that stick around and don’t end up in defederated instances will eventually grow more and more deprogrammed.
There’s currently a big push on reddit to keep the protesting communities away from a lemmy migration (downvotes, censored comments, highly upvtoed suggestions towards irrelevant alternatives that are owned by corporations and not part of the Fediverse). I suspect that the massive Western psyops mechanism is afraid to lose one of their most effective echo-chambers.
The only concern I have is that lemmy.ml is already leaning towards tone policing, which makes it somewhat susceptible to be taken over by the shitlibs and fascists.
How are they leaning towards tone policing?
I think we need to some easier ground for people to land and figure out an alternative to propaganda exists. That’s the role of main lemmy.ml, in my opinion, being a landing pad. I think it would be sensible to remind people that the place for talk between tankies is here, not there. And arguably, some general communities here should be more accessible to the “general” public than others.
People that give themselves the work to come check us out need to be happy to see sensible people, and sensible discussions, even though we know and are angry at seeing the same pattern and problem everywhere. There’s a path, a funnel to understanding that. And everyone is in their own personal journey. Our role is to feed them and give them directions.
We didn’t get here because someone though us. We got here because someone fed our curiosity. And there’s different food for different stages of curiosity.
How are they leaning towards tone policing?
The rules lean towards “civility” over the actual content of what is said, which left it vulnerable to “just asking questions” types. It’s being revised after a spat with a TERF who took advantage of those rules.
Well, if they are reviewing it, I hope they are able to learn and adapt.
That’s only what we can hope for, right? Not trivial to get everything right from the first go.
Yeah, I can’t fault them too much for that
Lemmy.ml mods/admins tend to remove heated discussions. That by itself is not necessarily bad, but it has been taken advantage of by various alt-right characters who were seeking to troll or propagandize under the guise of “asking questions in a civil manner”, then reported anyone who responded to them in an even slightly offensive manner. That will certainly be happening again with the massive migration from reddit.
As for the rest of it. I completely agree, and that was my original point: Be patient and engage the new arrivals. At the very least, it’ll help them grow out of the behaviours reddit has taught them.
The really good news is that all the communities on lemmy.ml have been created long before radlibs showed up, and are administered by sane people.
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They were in used that every time that they denounced our political-conscious content, reddit ultra-politicized mods acted in instants censoring and banning, but here there are not systematic persecution of ideas, at least in most of fediverse, so they have to cry a lot… Maybe in contemporary world liberalism is only a superficial denomination of anti-communism.
I had to remake an account on ml because I don’t want to see nazi places and nazi comments. Nazi federations unfederating ml is free filter for me. c:
It’s odd because some communities in lemmy.ml and in other instances that don’t block lemmygrad can’t be found from a lemmygrad account.
I just made a lemmy.world account to be able to browse as largely as possible, possibly engage in some agitational posting where we are outright filtered out, and keeping this one for mostly lemmygrad posting and eventually hexbear posting.
Edit: some posts I can’t even see from my lemmy.world account, like this one: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/715543 in worldnews@lemmy.ml despite the fact I can see content from lemmygrad when I subscribe to its communities…
Something is fucky or buggy ig, I saw someone hinting at low server capacity? IDK
I had troubles seeing stuff from ml on world all the time. I could sub to communities but I’d virtually never see the posts on my feed unless I went in directly.
See I can post here, altho it seems from this account I cant see my new pfp and handle on my lemmygrad account (it used to be zaratustash, I changed it today comrade boina to coincide with my twitter @) lol
See:
Lemmy.ml banned my account there lol. Why are they so concerned with a little bullying of liberals?
Lemmy is tone policed… apparently except when someone is calling us “red fash”, that’s not bannable.
You gotta get the normies on the network for the network effect to take off!
i hate to say it, but i don’t want the network effect taking off. in fact, that’s a sign it’s time to leave. is it possible to ever just have a smallish community where real discussion and ideas can flourish without the rest of the US dragging everything down to the lowest common denominator?
You can always just only stay here, the admins are great about banning the wandering reddit libs pretty quickly
seems like a lot of work for no gain
I guess you have to ask yourself, are we spreading ideas and looking to chip away at the predominant hegemony, or do we want to self isolate?
One of the nice things about lemmy.ml is that it starts from a far left perspective and as a result of reddits own unmaking, places normies in a position of no longer being the predominant opinion in the room.
This has two outcomes from what I can guess:
- Normies show up in droves, and their perspectives shift as a result of having to defend their point of view for once.
- Normies show up, but leave because they can’t handle not being able to call forth the shibaliths they’re so accustom to, and having their points of view challenged on equal grounds.
Or normies show up and take over?
You think they’re going to take over lemmygrad, or hexbear? The thing about federation is that you can avoid the outcome you’re talking about by only federating with communities that share our values.
It’s like those guys who say “I’m not joining fediverse because it’s full of weird people”. I mean, good riddance
Isn’t that what the entire federation point is? We can keep this community and keep it insular.
To expect that lemmy as a whole can remotely be the same as lemmygrad is delusional and indicative of being way too online. If anything having lemmy as a whole being more moderate and broader based is a propagandistic tool (not that it even matters that much, online is fake, join a party).
Gramscian hegemonic analysis with regards to the superstructural “war” is silly as fuck and a huge waste of time. We will never have hegemony offline or online under capitalism, the smart response is to adapt, propagate our ideas where it makes sense, and act strategically.
Honestly for me online is mostly a venting space, I see literally zero value over debating libs in that area. Pushing a counter narrative has some use yes, but even then that impact is minimal, and conclusive to at best the worst recruits you can possibly imagine.
edit: it’s also a dogshit habit when it comes to mass work where you have to interact with countless ideologically backwards elements in the organized working class. You will never find purity. Going full guns blazing on libs is a time and place and contextual situation and you need to learn how to not flip the fuck out over backwards and even reactionary ideas in those settings, because doing that will lead you to never be able to stamp them out amongst the masses.
“can i just have my little echochamber please”
Can you just not? One of the reasons I love this place other than for the marxism and such, is because they don’t allow transphobia and I am sick of constantly seeing transphobia everywhere, especially online. I’m trans, and just seeing the casual transphobia everywhere just like, it weighs me down, makes me depressed. I also don’t like being harassed either for being trans unless you think people wanting the right not to be harassed is an “echochamber” to?
youre entirely entitled to excluding them from your safe space, but arguing for the exclusion of any ideas and discussion right of stalin and then acting like youre doing it for the sake of preserving ideas and discussion is silly
in the exact same way that a rightoid site banning those damn libtards to preserve open dialogue would be moronic
People here have gotten and answered good faith questions over the past week. It’s when people roll in accusing us of being genocidal monsters and go for dunking over dialogue that the ban hammer gets used.
no, i distinctly didnt say anything about moderating transphobia___
Let me clarify a little. When you say “can i just have my little echochamber please” belittling, it makes me feel like you want anyone to come here, like reactionaries and for them to say whatever they want to more or less. In which it will just be used as an entry point by reactionaries and the rest to bring all that reactionary stuff over here, bog things down and bring transphobia or racism and such. I’m not exactly sure how to word exactly what I mean right now but I’ll quote Lenin since it feels relevant to what I am trying to poorly say. I think misterslime12 linked comic says it best to.
We are marching in a compact group along a precipitous and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and we have to advance almost constantly under their fire. We have combined, by a freely adopted decision, for the purpose of fighting the enemy, and not of retreating into the neighbouring marsh, the inhabitants of which, from the very outset, have reproached us with having separated ourselves into an exclusive group and with having chosen the path of struggle instead of the path of conciliation. And now some among us begin to cry out: Let us go into the marsh! And when we begin to shame them, they retort: What backward people you are! Are you not ashamed to deny us the liberty to invite you to take a better road! Oh, yes, gentlemen! You are free not only to invite us, but to go yourselves wherever you will, even into the marsh. In fact, we think that the marsh is your proper place, and we are prepared to render you every assistance to get there. Only let go of our hands, don’t clutch at us and don’t besmirch the grand word freedom, for we too are “free” to go where we please, free to fight not only against the marsh, but also against those who are turning towards the marsh!
From “What Is To Be Done?” by Lenin.
if reactionaries are what you lot are actually talking about im perfectly sympathetic
im less than convinced that thats the case though considering the response this place has had to anything right of china and russia have done no wrong ever
- someone who came from reddit (imagine coming from reddit and calling anywhere at all an echochamber im fucking dying lmao)
-Yankees
i am in fact european
jank eens wat luider
@TranslatorBot@lemmygrad.ml English
howl louder
This text was translated using DeepL.
really makes you wonder about the proclivities of the devs tbh
…anti bullying?
Bullying transphobes is cool and good.
sure is, too bad they didnt say “transphobes”
yup bullying transphobes is solid, seems weird that theyd ban you for-
sending an image of a pig shitting
ah
Sending pigpoopballs to chuds is an old cth/hexbear tradition.
Sending that was a generous response to what they wrote
the people who wanted to leave the most turned out to be fash, shocking!
I came across this comment today, and it really makes me wonder how people just dismiss intellectual curiosity outright.
yes!!! they’re everywhere and anytime I see someone bring it up someone comments some shit about having an open mind… uhhh no???
Unlike the side many of them seem to blindly and militantly defend, the side they rage against is not asking for blind adherence to beliefs. You have to open yourself up to questioning your beliefs; there is no value in a closed mind.
This and curiosity have led me to where I’m now, I consider those most important virtues.
Yeah they have the audacity to invade our space and then complain, and when we try to tell them to have an open mind, they respond with “tankes”.
I don’t really consider myself a liberal or a communist. Maybe some mixture of both? I have my own ideals that probably align mostly with eastern philosophy, and maybe some more “esoteric” practices. Id like to think im well read, for being a mostly uneducated person, and I’m very accepting of just about everyone outside of violence or blind hatred, but I have never heard the term “tankie” until reddit. Is it a reference to Tiannemen Sq or something? Just curious as I like to know as much as I can. Thanks.
Also, as someone who’s coming from reddit as of yesterday, it’s kinda cool seeing more than one political ideal, as I really don’t think there is a “perfect” system. Humans are flawed in their very nature, and tbh, we’re a little late to “get it right”.
Is it a reference to Tiannemen Sq or something? Just curious as I like to know as much as I can. Thanks.
No, it’s a reference to Khrushchev sending tanks into Hungary during the 1956 revolt. Leftist supporters of this policy within Western nations were referred to as “Tankies” since then the term came to generally just refer to Marxist-Leninists. That is until more recently when Tankie has come to mean just any leftist a person disagrees with.
If you’re interested in leftist theory then go to Marxists.org, it has plenty of free literature. I suggest starting with the communist manifesto just to get a general idea of the principles of communism before delving deeper into Marx and Engel’s work. (And maybe sprinkle in some Lenin too cause he’s sassy and a great read.)
OK thanks for clarification (:
I read the manifesto in h.s. I was super into it back then, im very out of the loop though. Now if I’m gonna read some russian lit gimme some dostoyevsky. (;
Politics are kinda, I dunno, empty feeling to me anymore. I’m jaded AF though lol. I have some communist writings in my little library, maybe I’ll dig through it for fun…but notes from the underground has my name on it. I read crime and punishment for the first time about 9 months ago and Whew what a doozy. Love that fever dream style.
That emptiness is a very common feeling. Learning and doing more absolutely helps with it, though. Look into the concept of revolutionary optimism a little bit if you start reading again.
I’m not a huge fan of folks reading The Communist Manifesto as their first forray into socialism/communism. It was a pamphlet for workers in the 19th century and has some weaknesses if you’re not part of that audience.
I would recommend Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti to most people instead. We live under a more advanced stage of capitalism and it does a great job of explaining a lot of how “the reds” worked, who opposed them, and dispels common myths.
I figured as much. I was young lol.
I think The Communist Manifesto is on liberal curricula specifically because it doesn’t teach the core ideas very well to a modem audience. Not your fault!
That makes sense ig. It wasnt on any curriculum though. I sought this stuff out. I was pretty political at one time, but i was pretty young. I think i understand the tenants of communism fairly well at a basic level but don’t know the lingo and am out of the loop and would probably need a refresher (:]】
One of the main knocks, or at least an opinion or attitude I’ve developed towards communism is that it makes a whole lot of sense, and is quite possibly a “perfect” system, but humans themselves are extremely flawed, and don’t lend themselves to the common good for the most part. Hence why you end up with heavy handed tactics for everyone to fall in line and stuff like oligarchy.
If you have any thoughts on that, feel free to jab at my little thought. For real I’m not that knowledgeable about it. I am into history and pretty much everything and try to self teach as much as I can yknow.
Understandable. Socialists need a glossary, lol. We use a bunch of terms basically nobody else does.
Communism, in terms of a state of being described by Marx, isn’t utopia. It’s just a predicted transformation of how humans relate to each other, and thr economic system under which they live, created through a basic liberation: what if the people who work to make all the stuff got the reins of power? And while the logic is more complex, the basic idea is that they would make their own lives easier and they would prevent other classes from taking over, and because of the nature of how stuff is made, that would result in the abolition of economic classes and high levels of production that sustain rich lives with less work over time.
Marxist thought attempts to reject idealistic thinking and instead ground its ideas in what is truly possible relative to how power and economic relations really work. It does not require any assumptions that humans are purely altruistic or anything like that.
With that said, humans have far more capacity for mutual cooperation and sharing and equitable justice than is commonly believed. Under capitalism, there is a cult of greed that tries to depict the extractive and violent relationship its own ruling class has with the others as a natural and even beneficial thing, and this cult of greed is very popular for a variety of reasons, the most important of which is that it keeps people from directing their frustrations at the party responsible for the aforementioned extraction and violence (the ruling class). This cult of greed is conflated with “human nature” despite the fact that both current and past societies exhibit all kinds of variation in how people relate to one another, and the most common forms for the longest periods of time were built on mutual giving and soft debts that were often communally written off.
Buy communism doesn’t even really depend on societies becoming particularly altruistic like a light switch gets flipped or anything like that.
Finally, I should mention that communism is framed more as a long-term eventuality, and one that requires work and struggle to achieve. No communists expect to see it in their lifetimes. Instead, we expect that we can instead achieve socialist revolutions, which put the working class on top, a necessary precondition and also a massive intrinsic good in itself, as you can see in how peoples’ lives are improved in countries run by socialists.
I think the historical impact of the text is probably the larger factor, though it certainly would be more likely to have been struck in the intervening time if it was more effective.
The Manifesto was written initially in German by two Germans, though Engels was a polyglot so he probably did several translations himself, at least the English and French ones.
That is until more recently when Tankie has come to mean just any leftist a person disagrees with.
While there are undoubtedly people that use the term like that, I think there is a general understanding that it refers to people that can excuse or support authoritarian or oppressive actions
But the terminology ‘authoritarian and oppressive’ doesn’t really make sense in leftist circles where all states are understood to be just that by definition. I mean, that’s why people are socialists. Tankie is lib terminology referencing anything that undermines liberal democracy. It only makes sense when coming from anarchists.
You’ve never had the pleasure of interacting with someone that can produce endless excuses for the USSR or PRC?
Found the lib
Sure 🙄
Yes, but that doesn’t make them more authoritarian or oppressive because no matter what every state is using what it deems the most effective path to enforcing its will and if that means violence it will always resort to violence. It makes them bad communists.
It’s not a matter of oppression or no oppression but a matter of oppressing the right people. If the USSR and PRC were perfect they would be a contradiction to their own purpose, no?
Look amigo, I get there is a lot of depth to be had in a discussion like this, but I’m just explaining what people generally mean when they say tankie.
I would agree they are bad Communists, but unfortunately they are extremely visible and influence how non-Leftists see Communists, which is why many Leftists are quick and eager to disavow any connection with them.
They are bad because they oppress the privileged, I assume. The privileged do not need communism. Leave communism to the unprivileged people.
Hey, I am one of them. The usa is always 100x worse, arguing does not change this reality.
Nobody was arguing that, two things can both do bad.
There is a world war going on and I have picked the side that fights against the usa.
Words that can only be spoken by someone who’s never tried to get together with others to change things for the better. You don’t get to take an entire society and immediately make it equitable and free it of centuries of hangups. You do the revolution with the people in your country, warts and all, and struggle to make them better at the same time. You do not have the luxury of only organizing people that already 100% agree with you, nor will you be “in charge”. And, let’s be honest: any of us in charge would bring our own hangups, because all of us look back on ourselves 5-10 years ago and say, “wow that person believed some problematic things”.
For example, the October Revolution and Russuan Civil War were fought by, believe it or not, Russians born (mostly) in the 1800s in a semi-feudal country without universal education and a large peasantry. The communists were incredibly progressive in comparison to the rest of thr country. But because they retained some of the harmful biases of their culture at the time, you write off the whole project and carry around little lists in your head about how actually they were also just “bad”.
Only that it is almost never the case. And never when people start giving your talking point.
The point there is not that the USA is bad but that it is order of magnitudes worse, which means that opposing its enemies must be considered through the lens of “Does this help the US?”
To say nothing of the incredible amount of State Department propaganda that many western so-called leftists readily accept at the same time as “disavowing” the US as “also bad”. If you believe the same things about the US’s enemies that the US is actively campaigning to make you believe, that is a red flag.
It’s good to endlessly excuse the USSR and PRC, as most criticisms of them are bullsit that is only believable by people with poor knowledge of history and zero capacity to critically engage with the media. Unfortunately, this is basically everyone under capitalism.
It’s good to endlessly excuse the USSR and PRC
It really isn’t
I suggest you read the entire argument before responding to it.
Usually it means someone that actually reads history and will specifically debunk common anticommunist myths about it, i.e. historical revisionism.
The term “authoritarian” is also used selectively by anticommunists and this pervades capitalist societies, who continue to teach cold war nonsense. It is implicitly reserved for actions of the state, for example, but this is a false distinction made solely because after any kind of a left takeover, the state is the most powerful tool the people have. Universal government healthcare is authoritarian by this selective definition. On the other hand, the assertion of massive control over people’s lives is not described as authoritarian when it comes from the private sector. Workers spend 8-16 hours per day working in petty dictatorships, working around the personalities and whims of business owners and managers, just to ensure some kind of steady income lest they lose basic human security. They are forced to migrate by poverty forced by capitalism, this system creates marginalised groups and then (sometimes slowly) treats them genocidally. Much of it was built on colonialism and neocolonialism, with the richness of the West built on uneven exchange with everyone else, a system set up at gunpoint. None of this is described as authoritarian.
Please read more widely.
Much of it was built on colonialism and neocolonialism, with the richness of the West built on uneven exchange with everyone else, a system set up at gunpoint. None of this is described as authoritarian
I would agree those are authoritarian
After being prompted, sure
I would gladly recognize the American empire’s atrocities, I just didn’t think it was necessary since most left-leaning spaces are up to date on them, and it would largely be preaching to the choir.
My point is about the unconscious selective use of language, in this case to vilify communists. It’s not a coincidence that the term pops up so often in the imperial core to crap on (usually BIPOC-led) successful revolutions and their theory, usually anti-imperialist struggles. Double standards and uneven emphasis are the primary tools of propaganda and they’ll have you doing their work for them for free.
Tankie is a meaningless term now, the deprogram just did an episode on it:
It’s also on other platforms like spotify etc.
I really loved Hakim’s take on it being a very privileged position within the imperial core to scold those who see the state as crucial to sustained revolution.
yes! Same thing for how I came to understand the hatred for American soldiers. A lot of the cheering for the bad shit that happens to them comes from people who actually suffer from their actions, and made me examine how I viewed the military
That discussion was halfway identical to my own commentary on the term four years ago. It’s a vague buzzword about 90% of the time and I’m ashamed to say that I said it unjokingly in my Fedbook days. After I understood why the people’s republics were appealing to so many (rather than dismissing the defenders as mindlessly desperate), I let go of my grudge and quit using the term for anything other than comedic purposes.
Hearing that podcast made me wish that I could have a live conversation with Hakim. Although at this point I’d be interested in having a live conversation with any communist. In that format they’d be likelier to offer active feedback on the history that I share.
It’s funny, I remember reading a takedown of this same article from criticalresist, https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/400717
Guess great minds think alike lol.
I agree, talking to other communists is awesome!
Honestly you might be able to contact him and have that conversation if you show him your commentary.
Lots of empty words these days. Lots of empty people too.
There’s the etymology of tankie and there’s the actual ways it’s used. The etymology is rolling tanks into Hungary in 1956, which caused a solit (among many) among UK communists (who came up with the term). The usage varies wildly because liberals don’t understand politics very well and slap it on anything to the left of Obama.
Communista understand politics through a series of criticisms of capitalism and a framework by which to understand those within it, namely economic classes whose interests align/do not align depending on the material context. You might find that some of this appeals to you, as a material grounding is more common in Eastern traditions than Western. Also we are super duper correct, so we’ve got that going for us.
Re: flawed humans, there are of course a variety of people out there and we all make mistakes. However, it’s also important to recognize tgatva lot that is attributed to “human nature” is actually fairly recent and is either a consequence of living under the capitalist system (which came into being over a period of about 1000 years) or is just a myth spread to justify the violences done by that system to the common person.
And re: perfection, you might like us there, too. We view the political economic system as an evolving thing that changes relative to material conditions. There is no perfext system, but there are valid struggles to replace the current one with systems that prioritize people over profit. For example, no communist would say that socialism is the solution to hunter-gatherers in Crete because hunter-gathering Crete isn’t capitalist - the idea would have no meaning. We also know and expect that the fight doesn’t stop even after a revolution, that there will still be struggles for a long time - but at least we could fight them together and with greater agency.
Hey thanks for writing that… OK so you’ve confirmed my general understanding of the idealogy.
After I wrote that I knew you were gona come back with something about capitalist perspective and long term goal. So that was a good refresher for me I appreciate it.
I feel like there is too many people still tbh lol.
Capitalism doesn’t work. I’ve been through it and it’s underbelly enough to know that. I do think the wealthy west has distorted our view of ourselves. I’m aware of that. I try to come at things as objectively as possible, though sometimes I fail.
I sort of agree with the main tenants of communism absolutely. I do consider myself somewhat of a socialist, tho I’m more a broad strokes type person, hence I sort of default to self betterment and mindfulness, while trying to bring a base understanding of our nature through my interactions to others as a way to better the world. My perfect system would be living close to the land, hunter gather style. Im kind of a hermit tbh (: there too many people for me lol.
I bookmarked your comment. I’m gonna revisit it later. Appreciate the talk.
Edit: fwiw, I do believe at a fundamental level, people are good, and we are in agreement about things more than we disagree. We just have a track record of complicating the simple ime. Im guilty as well.
Thanks for being open-minded!
I might say that capitalism does work, but only for the ruling class (business owners) and those they can rope into doing their anti-worker dirty work. The system isn’t broken and need fixing, it’s working exactly how they want it to and it must be destroyed.
Being vaguely socialist is 100% cool btw. No need to get too deep into labels. The most helpful thing is to be class conscious and be active in your community in a way that’s cognizant of that. Helping people get better wages, win unions, support politicians antithetical to capital (they’re very rare and nobody in the squad would count), support strikes, support social housing, oppose war that your country supports, and so on. Never supporting cops in capitalist countries. Diving deep into left theory is handy for doing those things better and having clear eyes about what is coming next, but it’s less important than doing some of these clearly good anti-capitalist things. It can also help you choose a group to organize with, as some groups are do-nothing orgs.
Also nothing wrong with wanting to live in a smaller community or even a reclusive life. Alienated city life is an imposition that violates the connection and community most people want to have. Folks can’t plant roots long enough to know their neighbors, let alone create a community. That’s a consequence of real estate, rent, and unemployment, a whole other can of worms.
There’s a recent book you might enjoy called The Dawn of Everything. It’s co-written by David Graeber, who had anarchist leanings but respected Marxist thought. It has many examples of societies defining and redefining themselves relative to material conditions snd relative to one another.
It warms your heart when you see Liberals actually coming here with an open mind and actually wanting to learn more. Wish we could have more of that. Too tired of all the bickering.
Sounds like a good book, i definitely have anarchist leanings, though i do acknowledge that prob wouldnt work atm lol. ive bookmarked your comments. It’s hard not to be class conscious when your a victim of class warfare, tho some have definitely had it worse than me. It’s becoming less about racial lines, and more about rich poor.
I’d like to think I do my part day to day in what little way I can, even if it’s just making one person a little bit more conscious of their own situation yknow.
Enjoyed the discussion so far thanks.
There’s plenty of value in reading anarchists, of course. Reading widely is the best bet, as one can become limited and engage in bad practice if they become too embedded in factionalism. Not that it’s always wrong to have fights, just that it tends to end up being pointless and based on the people picking fights having their ignorance exploited by ruling class propaganda.
The ruling class under capitalism had and rediscovers many weapons for combatting class consciousness, unfortunately. Living as a worker under capitalism tends to breed a nascent class consciousness through (Marxist term) exploitation, but it needs shaping through education. Unfortunately the ruling class can redirect that nascent class consciousness into a false consciousness of division, condescension, and hate. As an example, whiteness and blackness, and particularly anti-black racism, were literally invented as a form of social control to divide European bonded laborers from African slave bonded laborers and then later exploited to phase out bonded labor of Europeans entirely while still maintaining control over black slaves. An often-ignored fact is that Bacon’s Rebellion was an integrated, class solidarity action of a variety of people in bonded labor, European and African and more, and that the ruling class’s response to this was to invent racial economic rules and guarantee societal race privileges as a substitute for economic ones.
We can see the same thing play out today, where bosses and management point the finger at “illegal” immigrant labor (a proxy for the predominantly brown labor underclass) for (usually white) workers’ ills, when it’s of course the bosses picking all workers’ pockets.
Same game plan had worked for about 400 years and it requires resistance and organization, the bedrock of communists’ work. It’s also not restricted to race - the ruling class applies this tactic and tries to split based on:
- Gender
- Age
- Nation of origin
- Language
- Religion
- Job class
Basically… we’ve got work to do in order to avoid increasingly fascistic outcomes, as fascism is just a particular form of false consciousness imposed by the ruling class to deal with crises of capitalism, and it is increasing in visibility with every crisis.
PS not trying to get you to go do commie things, just wanted to add some context on how class consciousness is not inevitable from our working conditions. We are all in our own states of mind and at different points of how we can and want to do extra work.
I’ve also enjoyed the discussion.
Now see what your saying here just comes off as common sense to me lol
Your preaching to the choir with that one (:
