Not from midwest.social, but I did happen upon that thread that blew up. Is it ok if I ask some questions? I’d like to better understand the hexbear instance, so I understand how to consume the content that shows up in my feed. Before I go on, please note that I definitely do not mind seeing content from hexbear and you guys commenting on other instances. My instance is not planning on de-federating (AFAIK) and I am completely fine with that. I lean left myself.
Users on other instances say you guys are “tankies”, and from what I understand, that’s essentially the authoritarian version of the left; instead of being the more moderate-ish(?) leftists/communists. Which one do you guys identify under?
I see a lot of shitposts and edgy humor, which is fine; so I initially thought the instance was more of a shitposting community rather than a serious one advocating communism. Or is it?
Many comments I see from other instances are mainly complaining of you guys being the former (tankies) on the first bullet, saying you are basically just like the far-right, just on the opposite side. The other complaint is that all they see when they engage with you guys are memes and shitpost gifs, and that it doesn’t contribute to the conversation. I know that’s not everything, as I do see serious discussions on my feed from time to time, but is the shitposting and trolling done on purpose to antagonize other instances?
I’m happy to be educated/enlightened. Thank you!
Edit: I’m getting a ton of well thought-out responses and I need time to process them before I can respond. Thanks again! And please feel free to continue commenting if you have something more to say.
We are officially a left-unity community. Anarchists and Marxist-Leninists etc. all welcome, but we don’t tolerate right-wing/liberal ideology that contributes to the suffering of the exploited workers of the world.
It’s more so a place for leftists to hang out and chat and spread news/content. A bit of both ig.
The people calling us tankies and nazis simultaneously are mostly doing so out of a disingenuous liberal attempt to position anybody to the left of them as being on the right of them, while they are the truly enlightened ones. The shitposting is only ever a response to people who are being disingenuous with their arguments and refusing to have genuine discourse.
Hexbear’s a years-old instance, we’ve developed a solid culture and genuinely care for one another, pseudoanonymity notwithstanding. We’re good people and better posters imo
Check out the News Megathread. There’s a huge amount of analysis and discussion about current events in those threads, going back years and years. There’s shitposts, too, but we’ve got a huge body of analysis backed up with the best sources we can find, often dealing with important local, national, and geopolitical issues from a very different perspective than major media outlets and western governments. It can give you a lot of ammo to back up your points in disscussions of current events. And even if you don’t agree with some of it, you can look at the sources folks are pulling from and use those to test and reinforce your own positions.
I subscribed to most of your communities just to get more exposed to content from ML perspective. As much as I also love Lemmygrad, they don’t (yet) have the sheer number of people. I want the few hours/week I spend on Lemmy to be both entertainment and enlightening, and from what I’ve seen the content you guys put up has plenty of both~
Personally Identifiable Information. NSFW is fine(ish) provided it’s appropriately marked as such (content warnings, NSFW checkbox on posts, placing within spoiler tags etc.
Ah, I get it now, new acronym for me. Thanks a bunch, and I’ll be sure to be careful with the pics, place black bars over their eyes and erase metadata wherever needed.
Cytube is where I go when I’m incredibly drunk and my partner is asleep and my god it’s the greatest place to hang out and knuckle through the spins with my comrades
I’ll try my best to do so, can’t promise because currently the house’s on metaphorical fire (one hospitalized cat and another waiting for tooth extraction surgery), but I’mma try to at leas hang around ❤️
https://live.hexbear.net/ <- The hexbear cinema
Movies on Fridays & Sundays, Anime nights Saturday, and a random assortment of bullshit on occasionally. Anyone can queue a video, so if you want you can make a post and organize an impromptu movie night basically whenever. If you post it, they will come.
“Strawberry & Chocolate”(1993) & " Pumping Iron"(1975) & also maybe “The Barbarians”(1987) if @regularassbitch@hexbear.net doesn’t mind me stepping into the latenight slot.
I’m still getting the hang on how links and stuff on the fediverse works (and how Jerboa works with it as well since I basically only use Lemmy on mobile), but you guys have some YUMMY emojis over there!
Tankie has become a pretty useless word especially over the last 4 or 5 years.
Originally it meant people who supported the USSR in suppressing an attempted revolution in Hungary (which by the way was largely supported by Hungarian fascists who were literally fighting alongside the Nazis only 11 years prior, it was complicated)
Then it meant generally people who think socialist states should maintain their structure using violence when they see it as necessary to not collapse. As if every other type of state doesn’t obviously do that
Then it started to just mean “marxist-leninists”
Then pretty recently it got misused even harder, until it split and started to mean three things:
classic definition #2 up above
anyone to the left of me! (Most common now)
those weird “patsoc” grifters and/or fans of how capitalist Russia hates gay people (this is the stupidest version of all)
It’s mainly “anyone to the left of me” which is just the word “woke” but for liberals.
Give it 2 or 3 years, and republicans will be calling Joe Biden a tankie.
One thing I never can really grasp my head around is the framing of the Hungarian uprising or tiananmen square protests. There were much larger acts of state violence committed at the same time elsewhere. Like the French killing a million Algerians or the us proping up iraq in the Iran iraq war while they genocide kurds and launched chemical weapons at Iranian cities. There has to be some dissonance or just ignorance there. It’s the emphasis vs lies propaganda at its finest.
All of that type of propaganda carries with it a note that “they did it to their own people!”. There is in implicit understanding (or was, at least, when I was growing up in the US) that it is natural for militaries to kill people from other countries, a group which also conveniently includes minorities. Imo this was probably a deliberately crafted piece of cold war propaganda, since the US never really had to kill white people to suppress unrest.
Parenti’s “non-falsifiable orthodoxy” statement explains it. It really is just reflexive, deeply ingrained, and completely unexamined anti-communism. It’s not a real event to most of them, it’s an article of religious faith that proves the righteousness of their anti-communist beliefs. Trying to tell them “no one died in the square, about 300 people including unarmed pla soldiers died in fighting between the pla and insurgents several blocks away” is like telling someone that the tears leaking from the virgin mary are a rusted out sewer pipe. You’re not revealing the truth, or educating them. You’re attacking their religious convictions that form part of the foundation of how their world works, and they react accordingly by shutting down and denying.
Users on other instances say you guys are “tankies”, and from what I understand, that’s essentially the authoritarian version of the left; instead of being the more moderate-ish(?) lefties/communists. Which one do you guys identify under?
Hexbear is explicitly non-sectarian. There are leftists here from across the spectrum, and sometimes there are disagreements among us. There are Marxists-Leninists, anarchists, and people who simply believe that capitalism isn’t going to lead to good outcomes for people. The word ‘tankie’ has lost a lot of meaning in recent times, so it’s hard to say whether there are tankies here or not.
As an aside on this issue, the concept of “authoritarianism” is poorly defined and generally not that useful, imo. There are people in “free” countries being imprisoned, forced out of their homes, forced to work, forced to abandon their culture, forced to accept certain legal and cultural norms, prevented from organizing or protesting, etc. And there are people in “authoritarian” countries who have mechanisms other than representative democracy to engage in politics in ways that are materially more effective and representative of their interests. Authoritarianism, if only viewed from the lens of liberal democracy, is largely meaningless in a practical sense.
I see a lot of shitposts and edgy humor, which is fine; so I initially thought the instance was more of a shitposting community rather than a serious one advocating communism. Or is it?
I’m not trying to be clever when I say “it’s both.” Most people here are actually pretty well-studied in history, politcal theory, economics, etc., and they are also terminally irony poisoned and extremely online. It’s what it is.
Many comments I see from other instances are mainly complaining of you guys being the former (tankies) on the first bullet, saying you are basically just like the far-right, just on the opposite side.
Thinking that the far left and far right can be the same thing is called horseshoe theory, and it’s nonsense. There are numerous real, tangible, entirely understandable differences between the left and the right. Saying that they are both he same because both dislike the status quo is an example of a thought-terminating cliche. The left wants fundamentally the opposite of what the right wants, and the only way they’re similar is that there are people who believe that some amount of violence and coercion will be required to achieve those goals. But the goals are different. I can’t remember where I read it, but someone pointed out that an example of the difference between communism and fascism is that Stalin largely failed in achieving his stated goals, while Hitler largely succeeded. Way oversimplified, and my comrades will probably excoriate me for the clumsy analogy, but the point is that these are different things, and to say they aren’t is ignorant.
The other complaint is that all they see when they engage with you guys are memes and shitpost gifs, and that it doesn’t contribute to the conversation.
There is a lot of shitposting. However, one of the things a lot of people here have learned first-hand time and again is that a lot of people don’t want to hear what we have to say, regardless if it has merit, or is thoughtfully researched, or is based on personal experience. We’ve all heard the same tired, poorly-understood, cliche arguments over and over again about China and Cuba and the USSR, etc., and at some point you get to a stage where it’s clear that engaging in good faith is useless. And so, rather than write a wall of text with links to credible sources, people post a picture of a pig with poop on its balls. Is it contributing to the conversation? Arguably no. Was there a conversation to contribute to in the first place if a well-researched but heterodox argument is met with knee jerk, canned responses that don’t address the issue? Again, arguably no.
The intention from most people here is to troll and dunk and shitpost at people who are obviously willfully ignorant or outright bigoted. Any genuine inquiry will likely be met by a genuine response, as I am trying to provide you here. However, if someone is going to make transphobic or antisemitic comments while getting pissy about how we’re criticizing institutions like NATO or the IMF, they’re going to get dogpiled with shitposts. Critical support for China or Russia or Cuba or whomever is not blanket support of those things, and nor is criticism of NATO or the West or the big multilateral financial institutions a declaration of support for Putin.
Leftists are, if they believe what they say they believe, aligned with the interests of real people everywhere, and when you’re on the side of actual people, large institutions with power tend to be a mixed bag, simultaneously doing good and bad things. What we’re concerned with is the understanding of these large systems of power, and the mechanisms by which they can be challenged for the betterment of everyone. That’s not the status quo position, and it’s not entirely clean and easy to describe, so it’s likely going to get some of us into arguments.
That said, most people here aren’t just stirring shit to cause drama. We’ve been here as a community for three years prior to federation with other instances, and we’d still be here if every other instance defederated us. We’re trying to engage in a constructive way, but there are a lot of us, we’re aligned in our purpose, and we never log off. We’re going to come on a little strong at times.
People in this country think they’re the freest in the world. A couple of years ago, a cop was filmed murdering yet another black man. People protested and, all too frequently, cops initiated violence against peaceful protesters. Is that not authoritarian?
Always has been, mate. It’s basically a synonym for “I’m a hypocrite”.
“Authoritarianism” is everywhere, from the natural to the man-made. I obey the very material authority of mother nature here in Alaska by not driving like a jackass in winter when I’m going to work, then I’m forced to obey my shitty bosses in order to get enough of the wealth I make for them back in order to keep a roof over my head and not starve for a week and rinse and repeat while they watch their portfolios soar.
here’s hall-of-fame poster aimixin. he’s in conversation with a libsoc but don’t get hung up on that, the focus of the argument is on the nature of the state and how it reveals the emptiness of the word
Every government is authoritarian. You only consider it not to be “authoritarian” when you
support its use of authority. Anarchism is authoritarian as well, yes
I’ve read up on libertarian socialists. Do you think the anarchists in
Catalonia who had labor camps were not “authoritarian”? Were they
wholesome democratic labor camps?
Every state seeks to preserve itself and so every state will use
authority when it is faced with potential destruction. This is not
inherently a bad thing, it obviously depends on the government in
question, and who is trying to destroy it, and why. People always
justify the use of authoritarian means used by whoever they support, and
then those who are intellectually dishonest pretend that somehow their
use of authority isn’t “authoritarian”.
And obviously anarchism and libertarian socialism exists. I don’t see
how that contradicts with me saying “authoritarian” is a meaningless
buzzword that can always be replaced just with “something I don’t like”.
Is the US “authoritarian” when it bombed Vietnam back into the stone age
and Eisenhower himself said they refused to hold elections because they
knew the US occupiers would only get 20% of the vote? The Vietnam war,
the Afghanistan war, the destruction of Libya, or the US prosecution of
Julian Assange, or the Smith Act Trials, Operation Earnest Voice,
Operation Condor, Operation PBSUCCESS, Operation Ajax, Operation
Mockingbird, etc, etc, were not “authoritarian”?
Maybe you’d agree these things are “authoritarian”, but either way it
proves my point. Plenty of people like to insist the US isn’t
“authoritarian” not because it actually isn’t but because they support
what it does.
If you never desire to leave your cage, you might feel incredibly free.
Liberals who never genuinely try to challenge the authority of the
liberal state they live under have a tendency to believe that there is
no authoritarianism, because they have never once even desired to
challenge that state’s authority. (Yet, ironically, they will always
support the state’s authority when they see it used against those who do
try to challenge it.)
“Libertarian socialism” doesn’t escape this. “Authoritarianism” is a
meaningless buzzword, the only real tangible difference between
“libertarian” socialists and ordinary socialists is that “libertarian”
socialists prefer a higher level of decentralization. But
decentralization in no way inherently entails a lack of authoritarian
means, as they’ve always used them in practice to enforce their system.
part two:
You aren’t paying attention. Democracy is authoritarian. It is the
means by which the democratic will of the people express its authority,
by means of force. What happens if someone picks up a gun and tries to
oppose the democratic consensus? Do you just sit by and let the
democracy be destroyed? No, the democratic state uses its own authority
to oppress the opposition.
There is no such thing as a distinction between “democracy” and
“authoritarian”. It’s a meaningless buzzword. The opposite of a
democracy is an autocracy or an oligarchy, not “authoritarian”. That’s
just something westerners fling at other people’s democracies which they
don’t like for daring to vote for something against US interests and
want to see them blown up and millions killed and displaced.
When the verdict of the man who murdered George Floyd was being read, the Governor of Minnesota mobilized thousands of national guard troops and ordered them to occupy Minneapolis. There were thousands of armed soldiers, on foot and in armored vehicles, staged throughout the city. The implicit threat was that if Chauvin was acquitted and we tried to enact justice anyway we’d be machine gunned in the street for opposing a murderous white supremacist.
For those few days Minneapolis was the most heavily occupied city in the world.
I know you’ve received a lot of proper responses, but i just want to let you know that this is what we like to see as a community.
This is how we want to engage with posters - people with legitimate willingness to learn, to ask, to speak with an open mind, and to look inwards and do self-crit when necessary. We have spent 3 years doing this internally, and that has forged a community.
Anyone who comes to hexbear with this in mind, and not pre-conceived notions borne from thought-terminating cliches, will soon find out that we’re a lot kinder, more willing to have real meaningful discussions and more supportive that you’d think.
All political ideologies are authoritarian. People who don’t acknowledge this are just liberals who grew up in the west and assume everything that happens is natural, and not something forced upon them.
basically just like the far-right, just on the opposite side
I mean, all politics is about advocating for your positions…? thats the point of doing politics. Our positions are obviously what differentiate us from conservatives/liberals. Hexbear tends to be a bit more acidic about politics because most of us have been abused in some way by the current global order under neoliberalism.
I see a lot of shitposts and edgy humor, which is fine; so I initially thought the instance was more of a shitposting community rather than a serious one advocating communism. Or is it?
This is a general purpose forum for communists, anarchists, and fellow travelers. Site culture encourages both serious political discussion and shit posting. We are very earnest about our politics. Having been locked in this website with only each other for three years, we have developed lingo, in-jokes, and a posting style that can be easily misunderstood by outsiders.
It’s the only thing I’ve ever seen on the internet that feels like actually hanging out with friends. There are many users I recognize, but even the ones I don’t, I still get that vibing-with-like-minded-folks vibe.
Best description I’ve read so far. We talk a lot of shit, and are simultaneously super supportive of each other. Most disagreements end civily. Best place to ask for advice on just about anything on the planet.
People fucking care.
Personally there are some rules and even some posters I’m meh about. But the community is so good and so positive it’s not worth giving a shit about. Just move on.
Most Hexbears support a state that works for the interests of the people, referred to as a Dictatorship of the Proletariat that would be established after a revolution, as described by Marx. Then there are some anarchists who also support a revolution but not a Dictatorship of the Proletariat. The rest ideologies are far too minimal to notice
so I initially thought the instance was more of a shitposting community rather than a serious one advocating communism
It’s a shitposting community. Probably the most well read and informed shitposting community you’ve ever come across though I bet (not that that bar is particularly high). lemmygrad.ml is the serious and educational instance though only for Marxism Leninism and no other ideology
but is the shitposting and trolling done on purpose to antagonize other instances
Many people have stated they only shitpost and troll response to people who are bigoted, or commenting in bad faith and not looking to have an honest discussion or learn, unlike you
We’re a big-tent leftist instance, that means no sectarianism one way or another. We’ve anarchist, anarchobidenist and anarchostalinist comrades among us, though the site as a whole probably leans more ML. We don’t throw each other under the bus in order to be the ‘good leftists’.
It’s both serious and shitposty, it’s a safe space for trans people to just exist, we’re staunchly anticapitalist and anti american hegemony. We also like jokes about throwing nazis into pits (see pt. 1: tankies, for more)
Horseshoe theory is some Turning Point/PragerU false equivalence that attempts to paint leftist action and thought as “just as bad (if not worse!)” as those we stand against. There’s plenty of neolib talking points floating about, and once we’ve had our fun/you’ve stopped engaging in good faith, out come the pictures of a pig with shit on its testicles
This is my take, and thank you for asking these questions. I was initially against hexbear federation when .world was debating, but I’ve enjoyed ( though maybe not understood) most hexbear content since jumping to Midwest.social.
Many comments I see from other instances are mainly complaining of you guys being the former (tankies) on the first bullet, saying you are basically just like the far-right, just on the opposite side. The other complaint is that all they see when they engage with you guys are memes and shitpost gifs, and that it doesn’t contribute to the conversation. I know that’s not everything, as I do see serious discussions on my feed from time to time, but is the shitposting and trolling done on purpose to antagonize other instances?
many posts have been made on this forum as well about toning down the shitposting and trolling on other instances, and a few mods have made similar posts as well i believe. Usually the people who are complaining about it the most are bad faith posters or bigots that are getting dog pilled, but our mods are aware about the large amount of trolling and want our users to play nice, although moderation of our users on other instances is being left up to their mods.
Thank you. I admittedly was one of those people who found it obnoxious to open an interesting post to read, only to be flooded with a bunch of large emotes and gifs that it made me leave the thread without even reading them…unless that is the intention. I also just learned (although not sure if true) that apparently those emotes/gifs are only comically large when viewed from other instances, instead of the regular sized versions you see on your instance; which I guess contributes to why some people hate them.
I understand it gets frustrating to write a lengthy and proper response only to be met with a close-minded reply that disregards every point you made without a proper argument; but IMO responding with even more obnoxious trolling to “dunk” on them just makes it worse, especially from someone looking in from the outside. Just my opinion of course. For me, I would probably just respond with a short sentence that they aren’t responding in good faith and continuing the conversation is of no use, then leave. But I guess once the emote sizes are fixed it won’t be as bad.
“Tankie” doesn’t really mean much in practice. Many of us are communists who think that places like the ussr, n korea, cuba, vietnam, and china aren’t unremittingly evil, and we have exhaustive sources to back it up. We also know the history of events like the 1932 Soviet famine aka the “Holodomor”, the June 4th incident aka " Tianamen Square Massacre" and a bunch of other anti-communist shibboleths. A whole lot of people who think they’re leftists but aren’t completely uncritically accept anti-communist propaganda with no awareness whatsoever that it’s propaganda. And they hate being told that it’s propaganda, that it doesn’t relfect what happened and deliberately distorts history, often to the benefit of warmongers and fascists. So they call us tankies to indicate that we’re evil genocide deniers and you shouldn’t engage with us because we might start showing you well documented historical sources that contradict the propaganda and then you might become a genocide denier too! It’s all very silly but most Americans and many Europeans think they’re immune to propaganda and whatever the news and government says it 100% true.
“Authoritarians” is also mostly an empty accusation. There’s no realy consistency about how it’s used. People claim any government they don’t like is “authoritarian” but generally can’t explain how the features of the government they don’t like differ from the governments they do like. They also often have very naive or just flat out wrong ideas about how governments they like work.
We’re not trying to antagonize other instances specifically. We hate liberals and liberalism for making the world in to it’s current miserable state, and there happen to be a lot of liberals in the lemmyverse. We also post far, far, far more than almost any other online community. No one needs to tell us to brigade an instance, we all decided to get stuck in and start arguing on our own, no coordination needed.
I remember you, both because of your dune comment in that thread and your Scytale nickname, it’s one of my favourite characters in dune
I have little to add because other comrades already answered you better than I could (and I deeply encourage you to read what they linked), except I wanted to thank you for engaging honestly and curiously
Lol, I just realized the thread was probably deleted as I can’t find my comment. Anyways, hi fellow Dune fan! I’m definitely going through all the replies here and I’m trying to understand them as much as I can.
“tankies” in the way they’re using it is basically anyone they don’t like to their left (it was originally an intra-left sectarian insult, but the liberals using it don’t care about the history). But what usually sets them off is the assertion that US hegemony is an incredibly negative force worldwide, and that it’s so bad that consequently multi-polarity (ie increased influence by US enemies and non-aligned states, russia and china being especially controversial) would be a very good thing, even if the individual countries gaining power are imperfect, or outright “bad”, because it weakens US hegemony (which is a primary factor holding back socialism worldwide). In a multipolar world, non-aligned countries could do much better for themselves and their people rather than just be heavily exploited by the US and its allies, and no one power would be able to dictate terms unilaterally.
In terms of “authoritarianism”, sure, there are aspects of implementing communism that require ruthlessness, I think even anarchists would agree. The capitalists (people that own companies and hold power, not just people that “believe in capitalism”) will not let go of power without a fight. But our goal is a society that would actually encourage human flourishing and guarantee a good life to everyone, not one of wage-servitude to another just because they own the land, or the company, or tools. I would not really classify that as authoritarian in the way that word is commonly used, at least not when considered from a human perspective. There’s more to human freedom than freedom to accumulate and spend money unrestricted by the state or even the needs of other humans.
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to #2, shitposting/edginess
The shitposts and edgy humor are a mixture of things, some are venting/exaggerating, some are mocking liberals, fascists, etc., and some are just surreal/weird humor, but what they generally are not is ironic. People aren’t ironically in favor of the maoist uprising against the landlords, nor trans rights, nor guillotines, nor the soviet union, nor whatever else you’re seeing here. That doesn’t mean we support those things we meme about uncritically (see also: Chris Dorner memes), but the general disposition here is earnest, believe it or not, especially the part about advocating communism.
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#3, horseshoe theory, not contributing, emote spam, derision
As to tankies being just like the far right… I don’t know how people take that seriously unless their understanding of politics is so simple as “good thing/bad thing” and they hear “china bad” “cuba bad” “commies bad” so much on the news that they just believe it. They come to us saying things like " you’re communists? but commies are bigoted and don’t respect human rights" like it’s just a fact because they heard it a bunch of times, and it’s like, “well do you see that here? do you see us being racist or queerphobic?” We still criticise countries that we like on their policies when we disagree with them, and we do so with the understanding that unlike capitalist nations, which use minority rights as a bludgeon while not addressing the roots of inequality, communist countries have a lot more capacity to be genuinely responsive to their citizenry, and to nurture attitudes that attack the roots of bigotry too. The new family code in cuba is a huge transformation for a country that liberals love to slander as homophobic, for example, and it’s supported by their people.
As far as replying with emotes and memes… sure, we do that. It’s (usually) derision of the ill-considered liberal (or worse) ideas being espoused. But I don’t think it precludes having a deeper discussion if a couple stray emotes slip into the replies. Hopefully fixing the emoji sizing issue on federated instances (which our devs are contributing a patch for upstream) will reduce the perceived severity of this infraction upon the eyes of other instances. I’d say its also partly just a culture shock. We’ve been over here replying in emojis that we mostly all know the context and history of for 3 years now, whereas there’s no culture of replying with inline images on reddit that I recall.
But as for why some posts/comments get such a derisive response and some don’t: there is a line between someone who is asking a fair question in good faith, and someone who is hilariously ill informed and/or fishing for a gotcha, and generally liberals don’t come to conversations about, for example, communism or a certain ongoing war with an open mind at all because “putler and Xinnie the pooh are straight up evil how dare you even compare that to the merely flawed USA”. Our aim isn’t perfect, but the IMO the goal generally is to respond to the former with sources, criticism, and argumentation, and the latter with outright derision because they don’t deserve our good faith if they can’t offer the same.
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Edit: didn’t like the wall of text, lets break it up by topic. Also of note: we are not a monolith. despite coming to a general consensus on a lot of topics over the years, there is plenty of disagreement, both politically and in behavior/optics as well.
The only thing I’d add to the other very good replies on here is to your last bulletpoint. Good faith and “civility” are not necessarily the same thing. Tensions run high around here sometimes because “downvote and move along” is not only against our ideology but our downvotes are also disabled for the same reason. In a lot of situations asking someone to “act civil” or “be nice” are akin to gaslighting. As MLK Jr. said “Peace is the presence of justice, not the absence of conflict”.
That said “fuck off and read this book” is the worst of the “bad faith” you can expect here, whereas in an alt-right instance you can expect to be dismissed with a slur if you go against the grain.
We also (thankfully) have much less of this than a lot of other leftist communities. People are usually willing to explain, for instance, how reductive a term like “authoritarian” is rather than just dropping a link to On Authority.
I appreciate that a lot and am blown away by the effort people have put into this thread. I find it to be pretty classist to just tell people to “read a book”. Certainly it makes sense if you feel like someone is interested totally trying to play devils advocate/suck emotional labor out of you but I have definitely seen it in response to more well meaning questions.
“Tankie” as a term like “red/commie” is meant to be a thought terminating catch all for those who do not conform to the pro-West, pro-US, and pro-NATO narrative. Online, to be labeled as a tankie means your opinions and arguments prima facie dismissed because they do not conform to pro-West political orthodoxy.
“Tankie” can be used to mean Marxist-Leninists, but it’s just a term that has come to mean “member of anti-capitalist/anti-West outgroup”
I think it’s mostly a shitposting successor version of r/chapotraphouse but there is an advocacy of socialism here. I think this site usually functions as a support network/safe space for people rather than a hub for organizing socialist activism.
From what I’ve seen people do genuinely engage in good faith and then when those types of discussions collapse does the shitposting start against those users in that conversation. I don’t think its policy or urged on in Hexbear to go actively antagonize and harass other instances just for the sake of it.
A person sees a post and goes into the comments. They talk to the commenters and then a slight occurs. Then the shitposts start.
essentially the authoritarian version of the left; instead of being the more moderate-ish(?) leftists/communists.
This distinction comes from a false problem posed by capitalists - liberals and conservatives alike. It is completely ideological and not real.
Every relation of property requires force/violence to be maintained. When you have to determine who gets what in a society, the distinction between getting
/not getting or having/not having is supported by violence or the threat of it, in whatever form it may take in a specific society.
Thus, every single form of society that is based on relations of property is maintained by force and violence. That includes modern western states, drug cartels, and even early socialism. The difference between capitalism (dictatorship of the bourgeoisie) and early socialism (dictatorship of the proletariat) is which class uses violence against which other class in order to control property.
This considered, it is impossible to have any sort of society (one without absolute abundance, that is) that is not based on force or violence. Pointing this out to capitalists gets you called a tankie because they would be on the side of “not having”, not because they abhor violence, as we already established their society is also based on violence.
Think of it this way and you’ll see most political discussions, specially ones about violence, boil down to property.
you’ll see most political discussions, specially ones about violence, boil down to property.
This statement is interesting and I will definitely think about it more and try to see things through this lens.
This considered, it is impossible to have any sort of society (one without absolute abundance, that is) that is not based on force or violence.
I’m trying to put this into perspective with my current situation to better understand it. I live relatively comfortably. I can afford rent, groceries, and utility bills. Would the “society based on force” in play here be that I am being forced to work to afford and enjoy these necessities? And that the ideal society would be that I shouldn’t have to work to have those? I get that this is probably moving towards the more well known stance of “the workers should own the means of production”. Is that the case?
every single form of society that is based on relations of property is maintained by force and violence
I own property back in my home country. The previous owner just didn’t need it anymore and put it up for sale. What is the force or violence I used to attain and maintain ownership of this property? On the other hand, I am also paying real estate taxes on the property, which means I am also being forced by the government to pay to continue having the property in my name and prevent it being taken away from me. What is the ideal scenario here?
Apologies if it appears I have an elementary understanding of these ideologies, but I’m trying to frame it to my level of living experience, so I can understand it better, since the premise of the argument is that it all boils down to property.
The fact that all property relations rest on violence or the threat of violence is intentionally made invisible by the ruling class under capitalism. This is done through propagation of ruling class ideology in education, movies, television, radio, newspapers etc. Marxists refer to this as the superstructure And that is a whole other rabbit hole… It comes in many forms, but within a society you will hear familiar arguments about why poverty exists alongside opulence, why poverty and its manifold problems are the result of individual moral failing or lack of proper work ethic etc. These are typically nebulous ideas that change over time to whatever will best allow the status quo to persist and they intentionally ignore the basis of these problems and their root cause within the organization of production within our world (the social basis of production). In the USA prior to the civil war, convoluted ideas of race science were created to support and justify an unjust system of chattel slavery and racial caste, for example. Today, emphasis is placed on individual moral failing: poor work ethic, drug addiction, lack of religion, or other vague but incorrect ideas that are often have their root in racism, ableism, sexism, classism etc. Typically ignoring that, for instance, some of the richest people in the world don’t work, use drugs with abandon, lack religion etc.
If you live in a well developed capitalist country, particularly in western Europe and the US/Canada, your “comfortable” lifestyle is created and maintained by violence in a number of ways, both historically and currently, domestically and abroad. All political economic systems rest on the authority of the state to maintain property relations through the state-sanctioned use of violence. When someone is evicted, for instance, the constable or sheriffs will show up and forcibly remove a tenant. Contracts are upheld and property itself is legitimized through the state, and so the state is able to set the terms of what type and means of acquisition and ownership are allowed. If they are not, or the state finds them illegitimate because it challenged their authority, then it can be met with violence (jail, beating, dispossession, displacement, ostracism, execution, to name a few current & historic means). Marxist-Leninists and other types of communists rightly point out that this is a feature of all states, and nearly every observed society, but they also point out that this violence has a class character that is determined by the social relations that underpin the dominant mode of production (i.e. the state is a device of the ruling classes to maintain the current order and subject the other classes to the current system) They seek to abolish this class system, and hopefully all oppressive systems with it… but that is something the current ruling class will resist, and so creating a political system where the oppressed classes use the state to repress the former ruling class (capitalists, landlords, petit-bourgeois reactionary types, etc) and maintain the ruling position of the working class in order to build a world without class domination and without opression
Capitalism itself is an exploitive and extractive system. You are correct to point out your boss steals from you the full value of your labor for their own profit, and this level of exploitation may seems benign or relatively acceptable if you have a comfortable life, but it is still violent and your relationship with your boss also ignores the bigger picture. Outside of your job there are much more oppressive arrangements within that system and many people are homeless, living in poverty, hungry and sick, despite an abundance of labor and resources to stop all of these social ills. People in the “developed” economies mostly have that “development” at the expense of highly violent and exploitive methods that extract wealth and labor from others. western europe, the us, and others typically spent the past few hundred years pillaging the rest of the world and groups of people within their own borders as well.
Colonization and imperialism are imposed upon the world with great violence, and then once that order was set up, it was maintained in a transformative process that had to adapt to changing conditions and social movements that sought to break its control. None of this was non-violent on the part of the imperialists, but it has changed into a more abstract or indirect form through financial instruments, debt, or large clandestine efforts to shape governments abroad. Their relationship is still extractive and violent and imposes poverty, famine, war, and displacement on people throughout the globe. If you are in a comfortable job in a developed western nation, it is more than likely that you either benefit from this violence directly or indirectly. If you are in a country that is a willing subject to US imperialism, a junior partner, then often your lifestyle has come in the form of a bargain, where your political and economic system were shaped by the United States in exchange for favorable terms: but without it would be subject to violence or sanction.
It’s when you can’t afford those things that the society based on force comes into focus with perfect clarity.
What is the force or violence I used to attain and maintain ownership of this property?
The force or violence is what is used to enforce the property rights that you purchased. If I went to your property right now and claimed it as my own and started using it, what would you do to stop me? What tools are available to you to prevent that? The deed of ownership to that property is just a proxy for the violence.
It’s ok! I’ll try to add a bit to what other already said, in simple terms. I’ll respond to punctual questions in another comment.
I’ll talk about two important ideas here: historicity and collectivity. This whole mode of thought is very complex and there is no shame in feeling overwhelmed at first and not getting it with just some short online comments. Marx took thousands of pages to develop all these ideas, and others still had to develop them further.
One important thing to keep in mind during an analysis is that, although things simply pop up on our mind when we experience them, that is not the case in reality outside our head - your land didn’t just pop up into existence the way you experience it right now. Sure, you simply bought it from another person, but that’s not where the land started existing. Assuming you are from the US, how did a piece of land in America become a market product in the first place? To understand that, you have to look into history. Way back then, someone had to take the land away from others (natives) using force and then keep it from getting taken away by others also using force. The state was created by these situations: as a mediator of ownership of the newly explored property. How is that mediation put into practice? To see it, let’s bring it a little closer to yourself: what would happen to you if, instead of buying the land, you simply got into it and said it’s yours? Best case scenario, you’d be dragged away by cops - that is, the state would use force to mediate property rights. Unless you have an army to fight the state, you are not keeping that land.
So, since things in reality develop through historical processes, it is wrong to not consider those in your analysis, you won’t get close to thinking something that is objective (ie. that exists outside your head).
Also, just reflecting about oneself and your own personal experiences will hardly deliver a correct analysis. The world is collective - everything around you and inside you were made by a long chain of producers scattered in space and time. Failing to add this consideration into your analysis won’t get you close to reproducing reality correctly inside your head either.
Hope this helps! Try the “primitive accumulation” chapter of Capital, it’s towards the end and will give you a great picture of all this, as it describes the political events that gave birth to English capitalism. It’s not a hard read, as it is not abstract as the initial chapters are. Then come back and tell us what you think 😄
If you’re feeling adventurous, read the introduction to Grundrisse, although that one is more complicated. The book lays down a lot of Marxist ideas, and also describes the method of analysis Marx used to reach them. My two comments were based on these two, respectively.
Would the “society based on force” in play here be that I am being forced to work to afford and enjoy these necessities?
Kinda. You’re buying it in the first place because you don’t have a property to produce it yourself, which is also the reason we work, as there is no other way of getting what we need to survive. That’s also why you pay rent.
Think of this: who owns the food before you buy it, or who are you buying it from? How is it produced? Why can’t you just take it, and what happens if you do?
My point is: violence is inherent to property. Property can’t exist without violence or the threat of it.
And that the ideal society would be that I shouldn’t have to work to have those?
In Marxist communism, the question of what is a perfect society doesn’t matter, is counterproductive and should be repelled. The point is not to design a perfect society, but to develop the progressive forces of capitalism (the tools which develop scientific advancements, education, production capacity…) and get over the regressive forces (current relations of property, mostly). Communism will develop from capitalism, not made of thin air by a fairy. According to Marx himself, the initial stages of communism will be hardly distinguishable from capitalism, save for the property relations. Which brings us to:
I get that this is probably moving towards the more well known stance of “the workers should own the means of production”. Is that the case?
You should know what that means beyond the slogan:
You see, european and american capitalism started as progressive force, in the sense that it brought about a material development never before experienced in history. Now, we have the potential to do much much more than we currently are, but the way the system works gets in the way and keeps us from doing better. Just look at cars and climate change - why aren’t we ditching fossil fuels faster, if it’s for the surviving of the human race?
In Marx’s analysis, in the beginning stages of a form of society, their relations of property, specially the property of the means of production (land, tools, education), act as a progressive force, developing the productive forces (workers and their abilities, mostly). With time, these productive forces become too developed, and what once was a rocket launching society forward now becomes a cage that won’t let it go any further. These overdeveloped productive forces then dissolve the previous relations of property and a new relation of property arises, one that is based on that overdevelopment. Then rinse and repeat.
Science and productivity are now too developed for capitalism, which now ceases to be a factor of progress and becomes an impediment for further development. The natural next step of a society to progress is to abandon the current relations (who owns the land, tools, machines etc) and organize new ones based on the fact that workers are much more educated and we can now produce absurd quantities of useful products if we ditch the production of useless ones for financial market reasons (do you know the amount of energy humanity wastes mining bitcoin? 😬).
There’s also the fact that the planet is dying and big companies won’t let us do anything about it or else they’ll lose profits, so that is another situation in which capitalism has become a cage and not the rocket it once was.
I recommend reading Critique of the Gotha Programme, which consists of Marx dunking on a communist party of his time. He exposes all these ideas much more eloquently than I can.
We’re not, unless your idea of “Tankie” includes people with pretty severe critiques of both the SU and Current (and pre-Deng) China. There are a lot of MLs and various Mao-associated tendencies, but I’m a Luxemburgist (less keen on strict party control than MLs, more sceptical of National Self-determination), and I’ve seen Council Coms, Bordigists, Gonzalists, Trots of Every Stripe, and anarchists here. Even a few reformists. You’ll have a good time if you understand that we tend to take Communist and Socialist states as acting, however flawed, in good faith, and act similarly to members of all tendencies as long as they’re socialist, internationalist, and LGBTQ+ positive etc, and, though sometimes a good Trot joke is hard to resist.
The answer to both options is yes, we are.
We very, very occasionally end up with the same positions as the far right sometimes, though from vastly different principles. Most of us support, with caveats, both the Soviet Union and Current China, as well as other states like Cuba, DPRK etc. Additionally we generally take an anti-imperialist stance here. Which means our opinions on Ukraine range from “A plague on both their houses” to “Revolutionary Defeatism” to “Putin deserves the wall even more than Zelensky, but a fast peace is preferable, preserves what remains of some pseudo socialist currents in the Donetsk Republics, and more importantly weakens the USA.” Some are even more sympathetic to Ukraine, but acknowledge that NATO is not their friend, and that Ukraine has a very real fascist problem. We also have opinions on US politics that acknowledge Bernie Sanders as the milquetoast Social Democrat that he is and the Democrats as incapable of substantive reform even if Biden declared the DIctatorship of the Proletariat tomorrow. There is a substantial diversity of views there as well, though.
We meme a lot because we have a lot of injokes here, and it’s a quick way of getting across a point that’s been done to death, or quickly dunking on an opinion in a way regulars will immediately understand. Also, we’re a pretty chill and jokey community here even when struggle sessioning.
Thank you. Apologies, but there are a ton of responses here that answer my questions many times over and I can’t respond to each and every bullet, so I will zero in on the unique ones instead. In this case, I’m curious about this one, specifically for the DPRK.
Most of us support, with caveats, both the Soviet Union and Current China, as well as other states like Cuba, DPRK etc
I can see the reasoning for current China and the Soviet Union based on the principles of the ideology, regardless if they practice what they preach; but what are the things the DPRK is doing right in your opinion? What I see from my (apparently limited and one-sided view) is Kim, his cronies, military leadership, and the elite class living comfortable to luxurious lives while the common people are serving in the military or living peasant lives without access to proper nutrition, healthcare, and the convenience of modern technology. To me, these are caveats, which sound eerily similar to capitalism, so what is the good side?
Follow up question: Does it ever come to a point where the caveats far outweigh what aligns with your views (more bad vs. good)? And does that change your view and support of that specific country?
I’m…very critical of the DPRK personally. I think Juche as an ideology, while it has some interesting points, is pretty idealist and departs far too far from Marxist principles. And yes, the Kim personality cult rubs me the wrong way. That said the American Civic Cult gives me the same vibes. As does the Australian Anzac Cult, Britains hard on for Churchill and Nelson and the Royals etc etc
The DPRK has many flaws; it’s over militarised. Its inner cadre is insular and often slow to adapt. Its relations with China could be a lot better if they’d roll back on the Juche just a bit. There’s a nasty stink of Neo-Confucianism all over some of its political organs (but then, we might say that western communist parties often adopt some of the negative aspects of Christian ideology like millenarianism and purity cults.)
But it’s not the starving absolute monarchy often depicted in western media (though like Cuba it did have a fairly severe famine in the 1990s, after the SU fell and before it could re-normalise Chinese relations (the DPRK was on the soviet side of the split, if you recall). Kim is mostly a figurehead, he has power as does his family, but less than Stalin or Mao did, and those too were not the dictators people make them out to be, frequently losing votes and having preferred policies blocked by the rest of the party. The Kim family live privileged lives, sometimes spoiled lives, but no more than the US president. They don’t actually own all those palaces, and if they step too far out of line the Party won’t hesitate to take them away and find a third cousin to pick up the torch of Kim il Sung’s legacy.
As for the inner party, yeah, it sucks and I’d prefer Sankara’s approach of making their upper officials drive second hand 30 year old rust buckets and live in studio apartments. But then you have headlines in the west “North Korea so poor, their ambassador can’t afford a car or proper clothes.” The unfortunate fact is that appearances need to be kept up, and also, upper officials in any nation tend to work 80+ hours a week under high stress conditions where loss of acuity is not an option. I know we laugh at Biden and Sunak, but they (or at least their handlers) are actually terrifyingly smart people who can work crunch for years at a time without flinching. They need the comfortable offices, drivers, and business-class flights to do their jobs effectively.
Yes, it has a lower standard of living, but like Cuba, it can’t trade with anyone (and no, trade with China isn’t easy when a company that trades with the DPRK cannot, at any point in any operation, use a single Western financial institution, business, or NGO in any transaction (even those with non DPRK companies) without getting hit by the sanction hammer.) People there live ok lives, they eat regularly, they buy consumer goods, they go to their jobs, which sometimes suck. There’s a robust health and welfare network, there’s pretty good education, and while the military take up too much GDP, there is opportunity for economic expansion and it has in fact been catching up. It is fairly easy to get involved with local political committees and the average citizen has more control over local and even national policy than in western nations.
There’s an old joke. In the USA you can choose your party, but not the policy. In China, you can choose the policy, but not the party. The same goes for the DPRK. By the time an issue reaches a caucus, it’s been passed back and forth through representatives a thousand times, and every sector of society has had its say. The parliament is a rubber stamp because all the arguing happens at a lower level where people have more direct involvement. It’s still not perfect, or even good, but I don’t think it’s worse than a Parliamentary republic, and better than a Presidential one.
Defectors are unreliable because they’re often paid better the more outlandish their stories are, which is where we get people like Park talking about the one train that Korea has that they have to get out and pull in the winter and if you fall down in the cold they shoot you with an anti aircraft gun and send your family to the mines to pay the cost of the bullet. Many defect because they were smugglers or black marketeers who found themselves on the run, which is how they had the connections to cross the border in the first place. Others are disaffected military personnel, or cadre that lost a political infight and may have pointed critique that is at least worth trying to pick through. Some just watch too many bootleg shows, and those ask for repatriation more often than you might think.
I’ve actually had the pleasure of knowing a couple of North Koreans as casual aquaintances, and they’re normal, if somewhat insular people, who live normal lives. They laugh, they get annoyed, they have an unfortunate addiction to Chilean Tempranillos of dubious quality…
Yes, it does come to a point where I won’t defend a nation or group, somewhere not too far beyond where the DPRK is. Unlike others here I don’t offer Russia as it stands critical support, nor do I offer it to any nation that doesn’t at least pay lip service to Socialism. Something like Pol Pot I unequivocally condemn, as masking a murderous agrarian reaction in a red flag. There are (mercifully small) factions in the CPC that could move China in a direction I could not follow.
PatSocs, Nasbols, etc are also not deserving of critique. In fact my standards for non ruling parties are far higher than for ruling ones. After all, no plan survives contact with reality.
they have an unfortunate addiction to Chilean Tempranillos of dubious quality
Of all the things i’ve learned about North Korea and its people from this post, a description of their wine tastes is the weirdest one. I can’t say i’ve tasted a Chilean Tempranillo, but I can’t imagine it being very good.
I’ve mostly known Chile for their french grapes, but it checks out that a heavy spanish red would do well in some regions there. I’ll be on the lookout for one next time the weather allows for me to drink a heavy red, i can’t do it with this heat.
Yeah, Chilean Malbecs are my favourite wines, except for some Malbecs from a very particular part of Basque country where they don’t have the slightly muddy flavour you often get from French Malbecs (which is why they’re generally blended into a Bordeaux, but here in Aus we tend not to blend outside of a GSM.)
I count myself lucky because I live in a place that has a lot of autochtonous variety diversity, so I rarely drink any French grapes. That being said I’ve always been a fan of right bank Bordeaux, and those have malbec in healthy amounts, so I’m no stranger to it. Most of my experience with unblended Malbec comes from Argentinian ones though, and those can be hit-or-miss.
it basically comes down to most of the media about the DPRK in the west using outright fabrications as the basis for their thesis that it’s an awful place. like take Yeonmi Park spouting literal gibberish and yet getting taken seriously by western media - yeah mate, no one in the DPRK poops, that’s definitely a real thing and not a shitpost to make this website blush, thank you for printing it. it’s got its problems - how could it not, given the sanctions and the brutal war with the US - but it’s in a similar boat to most of the other AES states like Cuba, China, and Vietnam.
In addition to the wonderful write-ups and materials shared on the DPRK, some important context can be found on Season 3 of the podcsat Blowback, which also happens to be a super fun and informative listen.
A good deal of relation of hexbear to the DPRK is to underline that being critical of western news is quite important. The opinions about the DPRK vary a lot, but in general the user base thinks a country will never be just good or just bad. They are also aware of violence, i.e. the US having more than 1% of their population in prison (4 million) and a multiple of that in other incarceration/parole settings (and then you often are not allowed to vote anymore!), we do not say that to say actions of other states are not a problem, but to work out standards and to analyze how power of states is yielded.
I’ll affirm that the people here are serious, they just like jokes, but wanted to particularly respond to this:
Users on other instances say you guys are “tankies”, and from what I understand, that’s essentially the authoritarian version of the left; instead of being the more moderate-ish(?) leftists/communists. Which one do you guys identify under?
I’m a Marxist-Leninist (ML for short) and most people here are either MLs or anarchists, but I’m making the comment because I wanted to share this video that is relevant to the question:
Without even looking, I have to imagine someone else hit you with “On Authority” by Engels, which is correct but I think used as a bludgeon too often. Short version of its relevance is that when capitalists own the state, diffusing “authority” into private interests who have state violence backing them up is no less “authoritarian.” That’s not actually what he says in the text – he was mostly writing contra-anarchist-critics – but that’s why I think people trot it out too much when they are usually just responding to neoliberals who don’t share the correct assumptions that Engels agrees anarchists do and then predicates his argument on.
Thank you for linking this video. A lot of the political compass stuff never really made sense to me but this articulates the feelings I had about it really well, and I learned a lot (esp. the comments about gun control, and how gun freedom serves the ruling class by creating terror in most cases)
That video is great! To add a small caveat to the gun control point, you’ll find a few users here who are into guns, own their own and/or attend a range with some regularity, and it’s not inconsistent with their socialist/communist principles.
While it is true that gun freedom, as it is spoused by most people who support it in the US mostly serves the ruling class, many leftist organizations or leaders have understood the power that having the means to defend oneself from the orchestrated violence of the state, or other actors who will not hesitate at using violence against leftists/racialized or LGBTQIA+ people has, and how it is sometimes necessary when trying to build power structures that attend to those same peoples’ needs outside of a capitalist system.
A key difference between a right-wing and a left-wing gun owner is that the left-wing one, given the conditions for it, will prefer those guns to be in collective control and ownership, and not at the service of an individual and their needs. Well, that, and that the left-wing one will be anticapitalist.
I just wanted to preemptively introduce this concept before you saw one of our gun fans in the wild and were confused by it.
Plenty of other good relevant replies, I just wanna express my admiration and love for being open and asking questions. I’ve seen a few people from other instances show genuine curiosity like this, and it’s quite heart-warming. Hope our instances can intermingle posts and ideas happily and constructively
i don’t have much constructive to say but as far as the site culture of dunking on people goes, it’s hard to take people seriously when this is how it goes nearly every time we talk to folks about this shit. how do you take señor wikipedia source seriously when they are so deliberately obtuse? you don’t, you spam PPB and dunk on them for being a nerd.
Libs love to say they’re open minded, rational, will entertain new thoughts, believe in the free market of ideas, etc., until you challenge the nonfalsifiable orthodoxy:
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.
Try to challenge that and suddenly the time for debate has long passed, all the answers are right there on Wikipedia, which is now authoritative, and even the meekest skepticism of that orthodoxy is soon equated to genocide denial.
This. A lot of how we ended up in the old chapo subreddit was extreme frustration with liberals who care far more about civility, manners, institutions, and the American Civic Religion than any actual liberation or effective action in the real world. A lot of the vulgarit is a deliberate response to the empty and often violent use of civility rhetoric to shut down views that don’t strictly conform to the liberal world view.
In regards to the second, communists and working class people are human, we are all over the place, there is no correct distinguished way to be a communist. So it can be both as others wrote. I remember having a Marx study circle with like 10 students, 2 PhDs and 1 - extremely funny and smart guy - who worked in a factory producing Trafos (very cliche I know) and whose parents were communists in South America and fled, and quite a few of us academics were pretty much shutting down the experience of him, cause it wasn’t the German academic study circle style.
This site instead would’ve laughed with him and tried to incorporate the jokes and experiences into Marx exegesis.
Not from midwest.social, but I did happen upon that thread that blew up. Is it ok if I ask some questions? I’d like to better understand the hexbear instance, so I understand how to consume the content that shows up in my feed. Before I go on, please note that I definitely do not mind seeing content from hexbear and you guys commenting on other instances. My instance is not planning on de-federating (AFAIK) and I am completely fine with that. I lean left myself.
Users on other instances say you guys are “tankies”, and from what I understand, that’s essentially the authoritarian version of the left; instead of being the more moderate-ish(?) leftists/communists. Which one do you guys identify under?
I see a lot of shitposts and edgy humor, which is fine; so I initially thought the instance was more of a shitposting community rather than a serious one advocating communism. Or is it?
Many comments I see from other instances are mainly complaining of you guys being the former (tankies) on the first bullet, saying you are basically just like the far-right, just on the opposite side. The other complaint is that all they see when they engage with you guys are memes and shitpost gifs, and that it doesn’t contribute to the conversation. I know that’s not everything, as I do see serious discussions on my feed from time to time, but is the shitposting and trolling done on purpose to antagonize other instances?
I’m happy to be educated/enlightened. Thank you!
Edit: I’m getting a ton of well thought-out responses and I need time to process them before I can respond. Thanks again! And please feel free to continue commenting if you have something more to say.
We are officially a left-unity community. Anarchists and Marxist-Leninists etc. all welcome, but we don’t tolerate right-wing/liberal ideology that contributes to the suffering of the exploited workers of the world.
It’s more so a place for leftists to hang out and chat and spread news/content. A bit of both ig.
The people calling us tankies and nazis simultaneously are mostly doing so out of a disingenuous liberal attempt to position anybody to the left of them as being on the right of them, while they are the truly enlightened ones. The shitposting is only ever a response to people who are being disingenuous with their arguments and refusing to have genuine discourse.
I guess I’m gonna hang out a lot with you guys, sounds like you’re “the actual cool kids” while I’m just a .ml normie :'(
Also, the lemmyverse is a much happier place (for me at least) with you guys around!
we’re glad to have you!
Hexbear’s a years-old instance, we’ve developed a solid culture and genuinely care for one another, pseudoanonymity notwithstanding. We’re good people and better posters imo
I’mma stick around and learn a lot (especially on how to pester and dunk on libs) ✨✨
Check out the News Megathread. There’s a huge amount of analysis and discussion about current events in those threads, going back years and years. There’s shitposts, too, but we’ve got a huge body of analysis backed up with the best sources we can find, often dealing with important local, national, and geopolitical issues from a very different perspective than major media outlets and western governments. It can give you a lot of ammo to back up your points in disscussions of current events. And even if you don’t agree with some of it, you can look at the sources folks are pulling from and use those to test and reinforce your own positions.
I subscribed to most of your communities just to get more exposed to content from ML perspective. As much as I also love Lemmygrad, they don’t (yet) have the sheer number of people. I want the few hours/week I spend on Lemmy to be both entertainment and enlightening, and from what I’ve seen the content you guys put up has plenty of both~
I’ll bring some cat pics over~
just make sure there’s no PII in said photos
Everything is gonna be SFW, my darlings are precious~
Personally Identifiable Information. NSFW is fine(ish) provided it’s appropriately marked as such (content warnings, NSFW checkbox on posts, placing within spoiler tags etc.
We want our users Safe For Wliving
Ah, I get it now, new acronym for me. Thanks a bunch, and I’ll be sure to be careful with the pics,
place black bars over their eyesand erase metadata wherever needed.If your free on friday, come to movie night
No idea what we’re watching yet but it’s usually pretty good
The movie nights are a total blast
Cytube is where I go when I’m incredibly drunk and my partner is asleep and my god it’s the greatest place to hang out and knuckle through the spins with my comrades
I’ll try my best to do so, can’t promise because currently the house’s on metaphorical fire (one hospitalized cat and another waiting for tooth extraction surgery), but I’mma try to at leas hang around ❤️
Good luck with the kitties
Thank you, dear 💖✨
https://live.hexbear.net/ <- The hexbear cinema Movies on Fridays & Sundays, Anime nights Saturday, and a random assortment of bullshit on occasionally. Anyone can queue a video, so if you want you can make a post and organize an impromptu movie night basically whenever. If you post it, they will come.
Ooohh, sweet. Gotta dig up some old VHS anime now to plant there~
Thank you, sweetie 💖
Sending good vibes to you and the cats
Thanks a bunch 💖✨
“Strawberry & Chocolate”(1993) & " Pumping Iron"(1975) & also maybe “The Barbarians”(1987) if @regularassbitch@hexbear.net doesn’t mind me stepping into the latenight slot.
Pure Himbos lol
works for me!
DOG i need to come back to a movie night, last one i went to was when we were watching terminator (which was like 2021 i bet)
I personally love our new .ml friends
It’s a lovely day to meet new friends and laugh at libs ✨
Careful, if you spend too much time here you’ll learn to speak our emoji language!
I’m still getting the hang on how links and stuff on the fediverse works (and how Jerboa works with it as well since I basically only use Lemmy on mobile), but you guys have some YUMMY emojis over there!
The
is the magic of hexbear. We love our anarchist comrades 
Tankie has become a pretty useless word especially over the last 4 or 5 years.
Originally it meant people who supported the USSR in suppressing an attempted revolution in Hungary (which by the way was largely supported by Hungarian fascists who were literally fighting alongside the Nazis only 11 years prior, it was complicated)
Then it meant generally people who think socialist states should maintain their structure using violence when they see it as necessary to not collapse. As if every other type of state doesn’t obviously do that
Then it started to just mean “marxist-leninists”
Then pretty recently it got misused even harder, until it split and started to mean three things:
It’s mainly “anyone to the left of me” which is just the word “woke” but for liberals.
Give it 2 or 3 years, and republicans will be calling Joe Biden a tankie.
One thing I never can really grasp my head around is the framing of the Hungarian uprising or tiananmen square protests. There were much larger acts of state violence committed at the same time elsewhere. Like the French killing a million Algerians or the us proping up iraq in the Iran iraq war while they genocide kurds and launched chemical weapons at Iranian cities. There has to be some dissonance or just ignorance there. It’s the emphasis vs lies propaganda at its finest.
All of that type of propaganda carries with it a note that “they did it to their own people!”. There is in implicit understanding (or was, at least, when I was growing up in the US) that it is natural for militaries to kill people from other countries, a group which also conveniently includes minorities. Imo this was probably a deliberately crafted piece of cold war propaganda, since the US never really had to kill white people to suppress unrest.
Parenti’s “non-falsifiable orthodoxy” statement explains it. It really is just reflexive, deeply ingrained, and completely unexamined anti-communism. It’s not a real event to most of them, it’s an article of religious faith that proves the righteousness of their anti-communist beliefs. Trying to tell them “no one died in the square, about 300 people including unarmed pla soldiers died in fighting between the pla and insurgents several blocks away” is like telling someone that the tears leaking from the virgin mary are a rusted out sewer pipe. You’re not revealing the truth, or educating them. You’re attacking their religious convictions that form part of the foundation of how their world works, and they react accordingly by shutting down and denying.
You know it
Hexbear is explicitly non-sectarian. There are leftists here from across the spectrum, and sometimes there are disagreements among us. There are Marxists-Leninists, anarchists, and people who simply believe that capitalism isn’t going to lead to good outcomes for people. The word ‘tankie’ has lost a lot of meaning in recent times, so it’s hard to say whether there are tankies here or not.
As an aside on this issue, the concept of “authoritarianism” is poorly defined and generally not that useful, imo. There are people in “free” countries being imprisoned, forced out of their homes, forced to work, forced to abandon their culture, forced to accept certain legal and cultural norms, prevented from organizing or protesting, etc. And there are people in “authoritarian” countries who have mechanisms other than representative democracy to engage in politics in ways that are materially more effective and representative of their interests. Authoritarianism, if only viewed from the lens of liberal democracy, is largely meaningless in a practical sense.
I’m not trying to be clever when I say “it’s both.” Most people here are actually pretty well-studied in history, politcal theory, economics, etc., and they are also terminally irony poisoned and extremely online. It’s what it is.
Thinking that the far left and far right can be the same thing is called horseshoe theory, and it’s nonsense. There are numerous real, tangible, entirely understandable differences between the left and the right. Saying that they are both he same because both dislike the status quo is an example of a thought-terminating cliche. The left wants fundamentally the opposite of what the right wants, and the only way they’re similar is that there are people who believe that some amount of violence and coercion will be required to achieve those goals. But the goals are different. I can’t remember where I read it, but someone pointed out that an example of the difference between communism and fascism is that Stalin largely failed in achieving his stated goals, while Hitler largely succeeded. Way oversimplified, and my comrades will probably excoriate me for the clumsy analogy, but the point is that these are different things, and to say they aren’t is ignorant.
There is a lot of shitposting. However, one of the things a lot of people here have learned first-hand time and again is that a lot of people don’t want to hear what we have to say, regardless if it has merit, or is thoughtfully researched, or is based on personal experience. We’ve all heard the same tired, poorly-understood, cliche arguments over and over again about China and Cuba and the USSR, etc., and at some point you get to a stage where it’s clear that engaging in good faith is useless. And so, rather than write a wall of text with links to credible sources, people post a picture of a pig with poop on its balls. Is it contributing to the conversation? Arguably no. Was there a conversation to contribute to in the first place if a well-researched but heterodox argument is met with knee jerk, canned responses that don’t address the issue? Again, arguably no.
The intention from most people here is to troll and dunk and shitpost at people who are obviously willfully ignorant or outright bigoted. Any genuine inquiry will likely be met by a genuine response, as I am trying to provide you here. However, if someone is going to make transphobic or antisemitic comments while getting pissy about how we’re criticizing institutions like NATO or the IMF, they’re going to get dogpiled with shitposts. Critical support for China or Russia or Cuba or whomever is not blanket support of those things, and nor is criticism of NATO or the West or the big multilateral financial institutions a declaration of support for Putin.
Leftists are, if they believe what they say they believe, aligned with the interests of real people everywhere, and when you’re on the side of actual people, large institutions with power tend to be a mixed bag, simultaneously doing good and bad things. What we’re concerned with is the understanding of these large systems of power, and the mechanisms by which they can be challenged for the betterment of everyone. That’s not the status quo position, and it’s not entirely clean and easy to describe, so it’s likely going to get some of us into arguments.
That said, most people here aren’t just stirring shit to cause drama. We’ve been here as a community for three years prior to federation with other instances, and we’d still be here if every other instance defederated us. We’re trying to engage in a constructive way, but there are a lot of us, we’re aligned in our purpose, and we never log off. We’re going to come on a little strong at times.
I hope that helps.
People in this country think they’re the freest in the world. A couple of years ago, a cop was filmed murdering yet another black man. People protested and, all too frequently, cops initiated violence against peaceful protesters. Is that not authoritarian?
Its considered authoritarian for the state to take housing and distribute it to the people.
Its not considered authoritarian for banks to kick people out of their home.
I’m starting to think this “authoritarian” word is bullshit.
Always has been, mate. It’s basically a synonym for “I’m a hypocrite”.
“Authoritarianism” is everywhere, from the natural to the man-made. I obey the very material authority of mother nature here in Alaska by not driving like a jackass in winter when I’m going to work, then I’m forced to obey my shitty bosses in order to get enough of the wealth I make for them back in order to keep a roof over my head and not starve for a week and rinse and repeat while they watch their portfolios soar.
Here’s Engel’s little blurb on Authority too if you want to read more.
Say it again louder for the people in the back!
based
here’s hall-of-fame poster aimixin. he’s in conversation with a libsoc but don’t get hung up on that, the focus of the argument is on the nature of the state and how it reveals the emptiness of the word
part two:
When the verdict of the man who murdered George Floyd was being read, the Governor of Minnesota mobilized thousands of national guard troops and ordered them to occupy Minneapolis. There were thousands of armed soldiers, on foot and in armored vehicles, staged throughout the city. The implicit threat was that if Chauvin was acquitted and we tried to enact justice anyway we’d be machine gunned in the street for opposing a murderous white supremacist.
For those few days Minneapolis was the most heavily occupied city in the world.
I know you’ve received a lot of proper responses, but i just want to let you know that this is what we like to see as a community.
This is how we want to engage with posters - people with legitimate willingness to learn, to ask, to speak with an open mind, and to look inwards and do self-crit when necessary. We have spent 3 years doing this internally, and that has forged a community.
Anyone who comes to hexbear with this in mind, and not pre-conceived notions borne from thought-terminating cliches, will soon find out that we’re a lot kinder, more willing to have real meaningful discussions and more supportive that you’d think.
this is possibly the wankiest thing i’ve ever written out, but that speaks volumes.
we love our comrades here, legitimately.
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fleeting moment of clarity, i can assure you
thank goodness that’s over
say it again for the folks in the back: cringe is based and emotionally aware!
thesis: this post is cringe
antithesis: this post is based
synthesis: cringe is based
A cringe a day keeps reactionaries away
Last year i was going through some serious shit and folks here literally paid my rent for a month it was fuckin ridic i love the people here
All political ideologies are authoritarian. People who don’t acknowledge this are just liberals who grew up in the west and assume everything that happens is natural, and not something forced upon them.
I mean, all politics is about advocating for your positions…? thats the point of doing politics. Our positions are obviously what differentiate us from conservatives/liberals. Hexbear tends to be a bit more acidic about politics because most of us have been abused in some way by the current global order under neoliberalism.
This is a general purpose forum for communists, anarchists, and fellow travelers. Site culture encourages both serious political discussion and shit posting. We are very earnest about our politics. Having been locked in this website with only each other for three years, we have developed lingo, in-jokes, and a posting style that can be easily misunderstood by outsiders.
It’s the only thing I’ve ever seen on the internet that feels like actually hanging out with friends. There are many users I recognize, but even the ones I don’t, I still get that vibing-with-like-minded-folks vibe.
Best description I’ve read so far. We talk a lot of shit, and are simultaneously super supportive of each other. Most disagreements end civily. Best place to ask for advice on just about anything on the planet.
People fucking care.
Personally there are some rules and even some posters I’m meh about. But the community is so good and so positive it’s not worth giving a shit about. Just move on.
my fave thing is the complete falling in line with each other we’ve done since federation. The party line, folks, it works
Most Hexbears support a state that works for the interests of the people, referred to as a Dictatorship of the Proletariat that would be established after a revolution, as described by Marx. Then there are some anarchists who also support a revolution but not a Dictatorship of the Proletariat. The rest ideologies are far too minimal to notice
It’s a shitposting community. Probably the most well read and informed shitposting community you’ve ever come across though I bet (not that that bar is particularly high). lemmygrad.ml is the serious and educational instance though only for Marxism Leninism and no other ideology
Many people have stated they only shitpost and troll response to people who are bigoted, or commenting in bad faith and not looking to have an honest discussion or learn, unlike you
There’s us Trots too, who the anarchists assume are stalinists and the stalinists assume are anarchists
Nah we know you’re trots because there’s no mistaking that cocky swagger y’all have when you’re on the prowl to sell us newspapers
We’re a big-tent leftist instance, that means no sectarianism one way or another. We’ve anarchist, anarchobidenist and anarchostalinist comrades among us, though the site as a whole probably leans more ML. We don’t throw each other under the bus in order to be the ‘good leftists’.
It’s both serious and shitposty, it’s a safe space for trans people to just exist, we’re staunchly anticapitalist and anti american hegemony. We also like jokes about throwing nazis into pits
(see pt. 1: tankies, for more)
Horseshoe theory is some Turning Point/PragerU false equivalence that attempts to paint leftist action and thought as “just as bad (if not worse!)” as those we stand against. There’s plenty of neolib talking points floating about, and once we’ve had our fun/you’ve stopped engaging in good faith, out come the pictures of a pig with shit on its testicles
To clarify for our new friend, the first one doesn’t exist and the second is a joke-corruption of ML
Clearly I’m a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Bidenist
Thank you, i can lose myself in the sauce sometimes
This is my take, and thank you for asking these questions. I was initially against hexbear federation when .world was debating, but I’ve enjoyed ( though maybe not understood) most hexbear content since jumping to Midwest.social.
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Thanks! And yes, it’s Reese from New Leaf!
you’ve gotten some great responses already but wrt “tankies” please check out these two short essays
many posts have been made on this forum as well about toning down the shitposting and trolling on other instances, and a few mods have made similar posts as well i believe. Usually the people who are complaining about it the most are bad faith posters or bigots that are getting dog pilled, but our mods are aware about the large amount of trolling and want our users to play nice, although moderation of our users on other instances is being left up to their mods.
Thank you. I admittedly was one of those people who found it obnoxious to open an interesting post to read, only to be flooded with a bunch of large emotes and gifs that it made me leave the thread without even reading them…unless that is the intention. I also just learned (although not sure if true) that apparently those emotes/gifs are only comically large when viewed from other instances, instead of the regular sized versions you see on your instance; which I guess contributes to why some people hate them.
I understand it gets frustrating to write a lengthy and proper response only to be met with a close-minded reply that disregards every point you made without a proper argument; but IMO responding with even more obnoxious trolling to “dunk” on them just makes it worse, especially from someone looking in from the outside. Just my opinion of course. For me, I would probably just respond with a short sentence that they aren’t responding in good faith and continuing the conversation is of no use, then leave. But I guess once the emote sizes are fixed it won’t be as bad.
“Tankie” doesn’t really mean much in practice. Many of us are communists who think that places like the ussr, n korea, cuba, vietnam, and china aren’t unremittingly evil, and we have exhaustive sources to back it up. We also know the history of events like the 1932 Soviet famine aka the “Holodomor”, the June 4th incident aka " Tianamen Square Massacre" and a bunch of other anti-communist shibboleths. A whole lot of people who think they’re leftists but aren’t completely uncritically accept anti-communist propaganda with no awareness whatsoever that it’s propaganda. And they hate being told that it’s propaganda, that it doesn’t relfect what happened and deliberately distorts history, often to the benefit of warmongers and fascists. So they call us tankies to indicate that we’re evil genocide deniers and you shouldn’t engage with us because we might start showing you well documented historical sources that contradict the propaganda and then you might become a genocide denier too! It’s all very silly but most Americans and many Europeans think they’re immune to propaganda and whatever the news and government says it 100% true.
“Authoritarians” is also mostly an empty accusation. There’s no realy consistency about how it’s used. People claim any government they don’t like is “authoritarian” but generally can’t explain how the features of the government they don’t like differ from the governments they do like. They also often have very naive or just flat out wrong ideas about how governments they like work.
We’re not trying to antagonize other instances specifically. We hate liberals and liberalism for making the world in to it’s current miserable state, and there happen to be a lot of liberals in the lemmyverse. We also post far, far, far more than almost any other online community. No one needs to tell us to brigade an instance, we all decided to get stuck in and start arguing on our own, no coordination needed.
Good post
I remember you, both because of your dune comment in that thread and your Scytale nickname, it’s one of my favourite characters in dune
I have little to add because other comrades already answered you better than I could (and I deeply encourage you to read what they linked), except I wanted to thank you for engaging honestly and curiously
Lol, I just realized the thread was probably deleted as I can’t find my comment. Anyways, hi fellow Dune fan! I’m definitely going through all the replies here and I’m trying to understand them as much as I can.
Re: bullet #1, tankies/authoritarianism
“tankies” in the way they’re using it is basically anyone they don’t like to their left (it was originally an intra-left sectarian insult, but the liberals using it don’t care about the history). But what usually sets them off is the assertion that US hegemony is an incredibly negative force worldwide, and that it’s so bad that consequently multi-polarity (ie increased influence by US enemies and non-aligned states, russia and china being especially controversial) would be a very good thing, even if the individual countries gaining power are imperfect, or outright “bad”, because it weakens US hegemony (which is a primary factor holding back socialism worldwide). In a multipolar world, non-aligned countries could do much better for themselves and their people rather than just be heavily exploited by the US and its allies, and no one power would be able to dictate terms unilaterally.
In terms of “authoritarianism”, sure, there are aspects of implementing communism that require ruthlessness, I think even anarchists would agree. The capitalists (people that own companies and hold power, not just people that “believe in capitalism”) will not let go of power without a fight. But our goal is a society that would actually encourage human flourishing and guarantee a good life to everyone, not one of wage-servitude to another just because they own the land, or the company, or tools. I would not really classify that as authoritarian in the way that word is commonly used, at least not when considered from a human perspective. There’s more to human freedom than freedom to accumulate and spend money unrestricted by the state or even the needs of other humans.
–
to #2, shitposting/edginess
The shitposts and edgy humor are a mixture of things, some are venting/exaggerating, some are mocking liberals, fascists, etc., and some are just surreal/weird humor, but what they generally are not is ironic. People aren’t ironically in favor of the maoist uprising against the landlords, nor trans rights, nor guillotines, nor the soviet union, nor whatever else you’re seeing here. That doesn’t mean we support those things we meme about uncritically (see also: Chris Dorner memes), but the general disposition here is earnest, believe it or not, especially the part about advocating communism.
–
#3, horseshoe theory, not contributing, emote spam, derision
As to tankies being just like the far right… I don’t know how people take that seriously unless their understanding of politics is so simple as “good thing/bad thing” and they hear “china bad” “cuba bad” “commies bad” so much on the news that they just believe it. They come to us saying things like " you’re communists? but commies are bigoted and don’t respect human rights" like it’s just a fact because they heard it a bunch of times, and it’s like, “well do you see that here? do you see us being racist or queerphobic?” We still criticise countries that we like on their policies when we disagree with them, and we do so with the understanding that unlike capitalist nations, which use minority rights as a bludgeon while not addressing the roots of inequality, communist countries have a lot more capacity to be genuinely responsive to their citizenry, and to nurture attitudes that attack the roots of bigotry too. The new family code in cuba is a huge transformation for a country that liberals love to slander as homophobic, for example, and it’s supported by their people.
As far as replying with emotes and memes… sure, we do that. It’s (usually) derision of the ill-considered liberal (or worse) ideas being espoused. But I don’t think it precludes having a deeper discussion if a couple stray emotes slip into the replies. Hopefully fixing the emoji sizing issue on federated instances (which our devs are contributing a patch for upstream) will reduce the perceived severity of this infraction upon the eyes of other instances. I’d say its also partly just a culture shock. We’ve been over here replying in emojis that we mostly all know the context and history of for 3 years now, whereas there’s no culture of replying with inline images on reddit that I recall.
But as for why some posts/comments get such a derisive response and some don’t: there is a line between someone who is asking a fair question in good faith, and someone who is hilariously ill informed and/or fishing for a gotcha, and generally liberals don’t come to conversations about, for example, communism or a certain ongoing war with an open mind at all because “putler and Xinnie the pooh are straight up evil how dare you even compare that to the merely flawed USA”. Our aim isn’t perfect, but the IMO the goal generally is to respond to the former with sources, criticism, and argumentation, and the latter with outright derision because they don’t deserve our good faith if they can’t offer the same.
–
Edit: didn’t like the wall of text, lets break it up by topic. Also of note: we are not a monolith. despite coming to a general consensus on a lot of topics over the years, there is plenty of disagreement, both politically and in behavior/optics as well.
The only thing I’d add to the other very good replies on here is to your last bulletpoint. Good faith and “civility” are not necessarily the same thing. Tensions run high around here sometimes because “downvote and move along” is not only against our ideology but our downvotes are also disabled for the same reason. In a lot of situations asking someone to “act civil” or “be nice” are akin to gaslighting. As MLK Jr. said “Peace is the presence of justice, not the absence of conflict”.
That said “fuck off and read this book” is the worst of the “bad faith” you can expect here, whereas in an alt-right instance you can expect to be dismissed with a slur if you go against the grain.
We also (thankfully) have much less of this than a lot of other leftist communities. People are usually willing to explain, for instance, how reductive a term like “authoritarian” is rather than just dropping a link to On Authority.
I appreciate that a lot and am blown away by the effort people have put into this thread. I find it to be pretty classist to just tell people to “read a book”. Certainly it makes sense if you feel like someone is interested totally trying to play devils advocate/suck emotional labor out of you but I have definitely seen it in response to more well meaning questions.
“Tankie” as a term like “red/commie” is meant to be a thought terminating catch all for those who do not conform to the pro-West, pro-US, and pro-NATO narrative. Online, to be labeled as a tankie means your opinions and arguments prima facie dismissed because they do not conform to pro-West political orthodoxy. “Tankie” can be used to mean Marxist-Leninists, but it’s just a term that has come to mean “member of anti-capitalist/anti-West outgroup”
I think it’s mostly a shitposting successor version of r/chapotraphouse but there is an advocacy of socialism here. I think this site usually functions as a support network/safe space for people rather than a hub for organizing socialist activism.
From what I’ve seen people do genuinely engage in good faith and then when those types of discussions collapse does the shitposting start against those users in that conversation. I don’t think its policy or urged on in Hexbear to go actively antagonize and harass other instances just for the sake of it.
A person sees a post and goes into the comments. They talk to the commenters and then a slight occurs. Then the shitposts start.
Hello!
This distinction comes from a false problem posed by capitalists - liberals and conservatives alike. It is completely ideological and not real.
Every relation of property requires force/violence to be maintained. When you have to determine who gets what in a society, the distinction between getting /not getting or having/not having is supported by violence or the threat of it, in whatever form it may take in a specific society.
Thus, every single form of society that is based on relations of property is maintained by force and violence. That includes modern western states, drug cartels, and even early socialism. The difference between capitalism (dictatorship of the bourgeoisie) and early socialism (dictatorship of the proletariat) is which class uses violence against which other class in order to control property.
This considered, it is impossible to have any sort of society (one without absolute abundance, that is) that is not based on force or violence. Pointing this out to capitalists gets you called a tankie because they would be on the side of “not having”, not because they abhor violence, as we already established their society is also based on violence.
Think of it this way and you’ll see most political discussions, specially ones about violence, boil down to property.
Thank you.
This statement is interesting and I will definitely think about it more and try to see things through this lens.
I’m trying to put this into perspective with my current situation to better understand it. I live relatively comfortably. I can afford rent, groceries, and utility bills. Would the “society based on force” in play here be that I am being forced to work to afford and enjoy these necessities? And that the ideal society would be that I shouldn’t have to work to have those? I get that this is probably moving towards the more well known stance of “the workers should own the means of production”. Is that the case?
I own property back in my home country. The previous owner just didn’t need it anymore and put it up for sale. What is the force or violence I used to attain and maintain ownership of this property? On the other hand, I am also paying real estate taxes on the property, which means I am also being forced by the government to pay to continue having the property in my name and prevent it being taken away from me. What is the ideal scenario here?
Apologies if it appears I have an elementary understanding of these ideologies, but I’m trying to frame it to my level of living experience, so I can understand it better, since the premise of the argument is that it all boils down to property.
Its fine, everyone starts from somewhere.
The fact that all property relations rest on violence or the threat of violence is intentionally made invisible by the ruling class under capitalism. This is done through propagation of ruling class ideology in education, movies, television, radio, newspapers etc. Marxists refer to this as the superstructure And that is a whole other rabbit hole… It comes in many forms, but within a society you will hear familiar arguments about why poverty exists alongside opulence, why poverty and its manifold problems are the result of individual moral failing or lack of proper work ethic etc. These are typically nebulous ideas that change over time to whatever will best allow the status quo to persist and they intentionally ignore the basis of these problems and their root cause within the organization of production within our world (the social basis of production). In the USA prior to the civil war, convoluted ideas of race science were created to support and justify an unjust system of chattel slavery and racial caste, for example. Today, emphasis is placed on individual moral failing: poor work ethic, drug addiction, lack of religion, or other vague but incorrect ideas that are often have their root in racism, ableism, sexism, classism etc. Typically ignoring that, for instance, some of the richest people in the world don’t work, use drugs with abandon, lack religion etc.
If you live in a well developed capitalist country, particularly in western Europe and the US/Canada, your “comfortable” lifestyle is created and maintained by violence in a number of ways, both historically and currently, domestically and abroad. All political economic systems rest on the authority of the state to maintain property relations through the state-sanctioned use of violence. When someone is evicted, for instance, the constable or sheriffs will show up and forcibly remove a tenant. Contracts are upheld and property itself is legitimized through the state, and so the state is able to set the terms of what type and means of acquisition and ownership are allowed. If they are not, or the state finds them illegitimate because it challenged their authority, then it can be met with violence (jail, beating, dispossession, displacement, ostracism, execution, to name a few current & historic means). Marxist-Leninists and other types of communists rightly point out that this is a feature of all states, and nearly every observed society, but they also point out that this violence has a class character that is determined by the social relations that underpin the dominant mode of production (i.e. the state is a device of the ruling classes to maintain the current order and subject the other classes to the current system) They seek to abolish this class system, and hopefully all oppressive systems with it… but that is something the current ruling class will resist, and so creating a political system where the oppressed classes use the state to repress the former ruling class (capitalists, landlords, petit-bourgeois reactionary types, etc) and maintain the ruling position of the working class in order to build a world without class domination and without opression
Capitalism itself is an exploitive and extractive system. You are correct to point out your boss steals from you the full value of your labor for their own profit, and this level of exploitation may seems benign or relatively acceptable if you have a comfortable life, but it is still violent and your relationship with your boss also ignores the bigger picture. Outside of your job there are much more oppressive arrangements within that system and many people are homeless, living in poverty, hungry and sick, despite an abundance of labor and resources to stop all of these social ills. People in the “developed” economies mostly have that “development” at the expense of highly violent and exploitive methods that extract wealth and labor from others. western europe, the us, and others typically spent the past few hundred years pillaging the rest of the world and groups of people within their own borders as well.
Colonization and imperialism are imposed upon the world with great violence, and then once that order was set up, it was maintained in a transformative process that had to adapt to changing conditions and social movements that sought to break its control. None of this was non-violent on the part of the imperialists, but it has changed into a more abstract or indirect form through financial instruments, debt, or large clandestine efforts to shape governments abroad. Their relationship is still extractive and violent and imposes poverty, famine, war, and displacement on people throughout the globe. If you are in a comfortable job in a developed western nation, it is more than likely that you either benefit from this violence directly or indirectly. If you are in a country that is a willing subject to US imperialism, a junior partner, then often your lifestyle has come in the form of a bargain, where your political and economic system were shaped by the United States in exchange for favorable terms: but without it would be subject to violence or sanction.
It’s when you can’t afford those things that the society based on force comes into focus with perfect clarity.
The force or violence is what is used to enforce the property rights that you purchased. If I went to your property right now and claimed it as my own and started using it, what would you do to stop me? What tools are available to you to prevent that? The deed of ownership to that property is just a proxy for the violence.
It’s ok! I’ll try to add a bit to what other already said, in simple terms. I’ll respond to punctual questions in another comment.
I’ll talk about two important ideas here: historicity and collectivity. This whole mode of thought is very complex and there is no shame in feeling overwhelmed at first and not getting it with just some short online comments. Marx took thousands of pages to develop all these ideas, and others still had to develop them further.
One important thing to keep in mind during an analysis is that, although things simply pop up on our mind when we experience them, that is not the case in reality outside our head - your land didn’t just pop up into existence the way you experience it right now. Sure, you simply bought it from another person, but that’s not where the land started existing. Assuming you are from the US, how did a piece of land in America become a market product in the first place? To understand that, you have to look into history. Way back then, someone had to take the land away from others (natives) using force and then keep it from getting taken away by others also using force. The state was created by these situations: as a mediator of ownership of the newly explored property. How is that mediation put into practice? To see it, let’s bring it a little closer to yourself: what would happen to you if, instead of buying the land, you simply got into it and said it’s yours? Best case scenario, you’d be dragged away by cops - that is, the state would use force to mediate property rights. Unless you have an army to fight the state, you are not keeping that land.
So, since things in reality develop through historical processes, it is wrong to not consider those in your analysis, you won’t get close to thinking something that is objective (ie. that exists outside your head).
Also, just reflecting about oneself and your own personal experiences will hardly deliver a correct analysis. The world is collective - everything around you and inside you were made by a long chain of producers scattered in space and time. Failing to add this consideration into your analysis won’t get you close to reproducing reality correctly inside your head either.
Hope this helps! Try the “primitive accumulation” chapter of Capital, it’s towards the end and will give you a great picture of all this, as it describes the political events that gave birth to English capitalism. It’s not a hard read, as it is not abstract as the initial chapters are. Then come back and tell us what you think 😄
If you’re feeling adventurous, read the introduction to Grundrisse, although that one is more complicated. The book lays down a lot of Marxist ideas, and also describes the method of analysis Marx used to reach them. My two comments were based on these two, respectively.
Kinda. You’re buying it in the first place because you don’t have a property to produce it yourself, which is also the reason we work, as there is no other way of getting what we need to survive. That’s also why you pay rent.
Think of this: who owns the food before you buy it, or who are you buying it from? How is it produced? Why can’t you just take it, and what happens if you do?
My point is: violence is inherent to property. Property can’t exist without violence or the threat of it.
In Marxist communism, the question of what is a perfect society doesn’t matter, is counterproductive and should be repelled. The point is not to design a perfect society, but to develop the progressive forces of capitalism (the tools which develop scientific advancements, education, production capacity…) and get over the regressive forces (current relations of property, mostly). Communism will develop from capitalism, not made of thin air by a fairy. According to Marx himself, the initial stages of communism will be hardly distinguishable from capitalism, save for the property relations. Which brings us to:
You should know what that means beyond the slogan:
You see, european and american capitalism started as progressive force, in the sense that it brought about a material development never before experienced in history. Now, we have the potential to do much much more than we currently are, but the way the system works gets in the way and keeps us from doing better. Just look at cars and climate change - why aren’t we ditching fossil fuels faster, if it’s for the surviving of the human race?
In Marx’s analysis, in the beginning stages of a form of society, their relations of property, specially the property of the means of production (land, tools, education), act as a progressive force, developing the productive forces (workers and their abilities, mostly). With time, these productive forces become too developed, and what once was a rocket launching society forward now becomes a cage that won’t let it go any further. These overdeveloped productive forces then dissolve the previous relations of property and a new relation of property arises, one that is based on that overdevelopment. Then rinse and repeat.
Science and productivity are now too developed for capitalism, which now ceases to be a factor of progress and becomes an impediment for further development. The natural next step of a society to progress is to abandon the current relations (who owns the land, tools, machines etc) and organize new ones based on the fact that workers are much more educated and we can now produce absurd quantities of useful products if we ditch the production of useless ones for financial market reasons (do you know the amount of energy humanity wastes mining bitcoin? 😬).
There’s also the fact that the planet is dying and big companies won’t let us do anything about it or else they’ll lose profits, so that is another situation in which capitalism has become a cage and not the rocket it once was.
I recommend reading Critique of the Gotha Programme, which consists of Marx dunking on a communist party of his time. He exposes all these ideas much more eloquently than I can.
We’re not, unless your idea of “Tankie” includes people with pretty severe critiques of both the SU and Current (and pre-Deng) China. There are a lot of MLs and various Mao-associated tendencies, but I’m a Luxemburgist (less keen on strict party control than MLs, more sceptical of National Self-determination), and I’ve seen Council Coms, Bordigists, Gonzalists, Trots of Every Stripe, and anarchists here. Even a few reformists. You’ll have a good time if you understand that we tend to take Communist and Socialist states as acting, however flawed, in good faith, and act similarly to members of all tendencies as long as they’re socialist, internationalist, and LGBTQ+ positive etc, and, though sometimes a good Trot joke is hard to resist.
The answer to both options is yes, we are.
We very, very occasionally end up with the same positions as the far right sometimes, though from vastly different principles. Most of us support, with caveats, both the Soviet Union and Current China, as well as other states like Cuba, DPRK etc. Additionally we generally take an anti-imperialist stance here. Which means our opinions on Ukraine range from “A plague on both their houses” to “Revolutionary Defeatism” to “Putin deserves the wall even more than Zelensky, but a fast peace is preferable, preserves what remains of some pseudo socialist currents in the Donetsk Republics, and more importantly weakens the USA.” Some are even more sympathetic to Ukraine, but acknowledge that NATO is not their friend, and that Ukraine has a very real fascist problem. We also have opinions on US politics that acknowledge Bernie Sanders as the milquetoast Social Democrat that he is and the Democrats as incapable of substantive reform even if Biden declared the DIctatorship of the Proletariat tomorrow. There is a substantial diversity of views there as well, though.
We meme a lot because we have a lot of injokes here, and it’s a quick way of getting across a point that’s been done to death, or quickly dunking on an opinion in a way regulars will immediately understand. Also, we’re a pretty chill and jokey community here even when struggle sessioning.
Thank you. Apologies, but there are a ton of responses here that answer my questions many times over and I can’t respond to each and every bullet, so I will zero in on the unique ones instead. In this case, I’m curious about this one, specifically for the DPRK.
I can see the reasoning for current China and the Soviet Union based on the principles of the ideology, regardless if they practice what they preach; but what are the things the DPRK is doing right in your opinion? What I see from my (apparently limited and one-sided view) is Kim, his cronies, military leadership, and the elite class living comfortable to luxurious lives while the common people are serving in the military or living peasant lives without access to proper nutrition, healthcare, and the convenience of modern technology. To me, these are caveats, which sound eerily similar to capitalism, so what is the good side?
Follow up question: Does it ever come to a point where the caveats far outweigh what aligns with your views (more bad vs. good)? And does that change your view and support of that specific country?
Thank you!
I’m…very critical of the DPRK personally. I think Juche as an ideology, while it has some interesting points, is pretty idealist and departs far too far from Marxist principles. And yes, the Kim personality cult rubs me the wrong way. That said the American Civic Cult gives me the same vibes. As does the Australian Anzac Cult, Britains hard on for Churchill and Nelson and the Royals etc etc
The DPRK has many flaws; it’s over militarised. Its inner cadre is insular and often slow to adapt. Its relations with China could be a lot better if they’d roll back on the Juche just a bit. There’s a nasty stink of Neo-Confucianism all over some of its political organs (but then, we might say that western communist parties often adopt some of the negative aspects of Christian ideology like millenarianism and purity cults.)
But it’s not the starving absolute monarchy often depicted in western media (though like Cuba it did have a fairly severe famine in the 1990s, after the SU fell and before it could re-normalise Chinese relations (the DPRK was on the soviet side of the split, if you recall). Kim is mostly a figurehead, he has power as does his family, but less than Stalin or Mao did, and those too were not the dictators people make them out to be, frequently losing votes and having preferred policies blocked by the rest of the party. The Kim family live privileged lives, sometimes spoiled lives, but no more than the US president. They don’t actually own all those palaces, and if they step too far out of line the Party won’t hesitate to take them away and find a third cousin to pick up the torch of Kim il Sung’s legacy.
As for the inner party, yeah, it sucks and I’d prefer Sankara’s approach of making their upper officials drive second hand 30 year old rust buckets and live in studio apartments. But then you have headlines in the west “North Korea so poor, their ambassador can’t afford a car or proper clothes.” The unfortunate fact is that appearances need to be kept up, and also, upper officials in any nation tend to work 80+ hours a week under high stress conditions where loss of acuity is not an option. I know we laugh at Biden and Sunak, but they (or at least their handlers) are actually terrifyingly smart people who can work crunch for years at a time without flinching. They need the comfortable offices, drivers, and business-class flights to do their jobs effectively.
Yes, it has a lower standard of living, but like Cuba, it can’t trade with anyone (and no, trade with China isn’t easy when a company that trades with the DPRK cannot, at any point in any operation, use a single Western financial institution, business, or NGO in any transaction (even those with non DPRK companies) without getting hit by the sanction hammer.) People there live ok lives, they eat regularly, they buy consumer goods, they go to their jobs, which sometimes suck. There’s a robust health and welfare network, there’s pretty good education, and while the military take up too much GDP, there is opportunity for economic expansion and it has in fact been catching up. It is fairly easy to get involved with local political committees and the average citizen has more control over local and even national policy than in western nations.
There’s an old joke. In the USA you can choose your party, but not the policy. In China, you can choose the policy, but not the party. The same goes for the DPRK. By the time an issue reaches a caucus, it’s been passed back and forth through representatives a thousand times, and every sector of society has had its say. The parliament is a rubber stamp because all the arguing happens at a lower level where people have more direct involvement. It’s still not perfect, or even good, but I don’t think it’s worse than a Parliamentary republic, and better than a Presidential one.
Defectors are unreliable because they’re often paid better the more outlandish their stories are, which is where we get people like Park talking about the one train that Korea has that they have to get out and pull in the winter and if you fall down in the cold they shoot you with an anti aircraft gun and send your family to the mines to pay the cost of the bullet. Many defect because they were smugglers or black marketeers who found themselves on the run, which is how they had the connections to cross the border in the first place. Others are disaffected military personnel, or cadre that lost a political infight and may have pointed critique that is at least worth trying to pick through. Some just watch too many bootleg shows, and those ask for repatriation more often than you might think.
I’ve actually had the pleasure of knowing a couple of North Koreans as casual aquaintances, and they’re normal, if somewhat insular people, who live normal lives. They laugh, they get annoyed, they have an unfortunate addiction to Chilean Tempranillos of dubious quality…
Yes, it does come to a point where I won’t defend a nation or group, somewhere not too far beyond where the DPRK is. Unlike others here I don’t offer Russia as it stands critical support, nor do I offer it to any nation that doesn’t at least pay lip service to Socialism. Something like Pol Pot I unequivocally condemn, as masking a murderous agrarian reaction in a red flag. There are (mercifully small) factions in the CPC that could move China in a direction I could not follow.
PatSocs, Nasbols, etc are also not deserving of critique. In fact my standards for non ruling parties are far higher than for ruling ones. After all, no plan survives contact with reality.
Of all the things i’ve learned about North Korea and its people from this post, a description of their wine tastes is the weirdest one. I can’t say i’ve tasted a Chilean Tempranillo, but I can’t imagine it being very good.
They are generally very good, south american grapes make the best heavy reds…just not this one.
I’ve mostly known Chile for their french grapes, but it checks out that a heavy spanish red would do well in some regions there. I’ll be on the lookout for one next time the weather allows for me to drink a heavy red, i can’t do it with this heat.
Yeah, Chilean Malbecs are my favourite wines, except for some Malbecs from a very particular part of Basque country where they don’t have the slightly muddy flavour you often get from French Malbecs (which is why they’re generally blended into a Bordeaux, but here in Aus we tend not to blend outside of a GSM.)
I count myself lucky because I live in a place that has a lot of autochtonous variety diversity, so I rarely drink any French grapes. That being said I’ve always been a fan of right bank Bordeaux, and those have malbec in healthy amounts, so I’m no stranger to it. Most of my experience with unblended Malbec comes from Argentinian ones though, and those can be hit-or-miss.
some links where people have written up stuff on the DPRK before:
it basically comes down to most of the media about the DPRK in the west using outright fabrications as the basis for their thesis that it’s an awful place. like take Yeonmi Park spouting literal gibberish and yet getting taken seriously by western media - yeah mate, no one in the DPRK poops, that’s definitely a real thing and not a shitpost to make this website blush, thank you for printing it. it’s got its problems - how could it not, given the sanctions and the brutal war with the US - but it’s in a similar boat to most of the other AES states like Cuba, China, and Vietnam.
In addition to the wonderful write-ups and materials shared on the DPRK, some important context can be found on Season 3 of the podcsat Blowback, which also happens to be a super fun and informative listen.
Here is a youtube video by some australian socialist shit posters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BO83Ig-E8E
A good deal of relation of hexbear to the DPRK is to underline that being critical of western news is quite important. The opinions about the DPRK vary a lot, but in general the user base thinks a country will never be just good or just bad. They are also aware of violence, i.e. the US having more than 1% of their population in prison (4 million) and a multiple of that in other incarceration/parole settings (and then you often are not allowed to vote anymore!), we do not say that to say actions of other states are not a problem, but to work out standards and to analyze how power of states is yielded.
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I’ll affirm that the people here are serious, they just like jokes, but wanted to particularly respond to this:
I’m a Marxist-Leninist (ML for short) and most people here are either MLs or anarchists, but I’m making the comment because I wanted to share this video that is relevant to the question:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nPVkpWMH9k
Without even looking, I have to imagine someone else hit you with “On Authority” by Engels, which is correct but I think used as a bludgeon too often. Short version of its relevance is that when capitalists own the state, diffusing “authority” into private interests who have state violence backing them up is no less “authoritarian.” That’s not actually what he says in the text – he was mostly writing contra-anarchist-critics – but that’s why I think people trot it out too much when they are usually just responding to neoliberals who don’t share the correct assumptions that Engels agrees anarchists do and then predicates his argument on.
Thank you for linking this video. A lot of the political compass stuff never really made sense to me but this articulates the feelings I had about it really well, and I learned a lot (esp. the comments about gun control, and how gun freedom serves the ruling class by creating terror in most cases)
That video is great! To add a small caveat to the gun control point, you’ll find a few users here who are into guns, own their own and/or attend a range with some regularity, and it’s not inconsistent with their socialist/communist principles.
While it is true that gun freedom, as it is spoused by most people who support it in the US mostly serves the ruling class, many leftist organizations or leaders have understood the power that having the means to defend oneself from the orchestrated violence of the state, or other actors who will not hesitate at using violence against leftists/racialized or LGBTQIA+ people has, and how it is sometimes necessary when trying to build power structures that attend to those same peoples’ needs outside of a capitalist system.
A key difference between a right-wing and a left-wing gun owner is that the left-wing one, given the conditions for it, will prefer those guns to be in collective control and ownership, and not at the service of an individual and their needs. Well, that, and that the left-wing one will be anticapitalist.
I just wanted to preemptively introduce this concept before you saw one of our gun fans in the wild and were confused by it.
Cheers!
Thanks for the response. I’m only scratching the surface on these ideas, and I’ll give your response some thought. I appreciate it.
no problem! We’re pretty eager to share whatever little we know, so it can be a lot at once… just take it easy and ask all the questions you need
Plenty of other good relevant replies, I just wanna express my admiration and love for being open and asking questions. I’ve seen a few people from other instances show genuine curiosity like this, and it’s quite heart-warming. Hope our instances can intermingle posts and ideas happily and constructively
And feel free to peruse our fine selection of emojis!
i don’t have much constructive to say but as far as the site culture of dunking on people goes, it’s hard to take people seriously when this is how it goes nearly every time we talk to folks about this shit. how do you take señor wikipedia source seriously when they are so deliberately obtuse? you don’t, you spam PPB and dunk on them for being a nerd.
Libs love to say they’re open minded, rational, will entertain new thoughts, believe in the free market of ideas, etc., until you challenge the nonfalsifiable orthodoxy:
Try to challenge that and suddenly the time for debate has long passed, all the answers are right there on Wikipedia, which is now authoritative, and even the meekest skepticism of that orthodoxy is soon equated to genocide denial.
This. A lot of how we ended up in the old chapo subreddit was extreme frustration with liberals who care far more about civility, manners, institutions, and the American Civic Religion than any actual liberation or effective action in the real world. A lot of the vulgarit is a deliberate response to the empty and often violent use of civility rhetoric to shut down views that don’t strictly conform to the liberal world view.
Yeah, I wasn’t on the old subreddit but that exactly describes my mentality when I found Hexbear (then chapo.chat)
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In regards to the second, communists and working class people are human, we are all over the place, there is no correct distinguished way to be a communist. So it can be both as others wrote. I remember having a Marx study circle with like 10 students, 2 PhDs and 1 - extremely funny and smart guy - who worked in a factory producing Trafos (very cliche I know) and whose parents were communists in South America and fled, and quite a few of us academics were pretty much shutting down the experience of him, cause it wasn’t the German academic study circle style.
This site instead would’ve laughed with him and tried to incorporate the jokes and experiences into Marx exegesis.