this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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You have socialism. Then you have capitalism pretending to be socialism ahem People's Republic of China ahem.
Socialism is good, State Capitalism is trash.
Don't even get me started on the ones who try to argue that "North Korea is more free and democratic than the US".
You'd think that them having an absolute monarchy would be enough to make even tankies think twice.
don't count on it. back before i switched instances i had to read hexbear users unironically praising china's "democratic dictatorship." highly recommend reading the wikipedia article on it; it's actually incredibly uninformative.
edit, to be clear, it's a lot of describing the history of the phrase and vague ideas about the interactions between "the bourgeoisie, proletariat, and economy," with nothing at all about how it actually is implemented into the government and differs from a regular dictatorship in any way. probably because it doesn't. here
Again hearing more about tankies but never encountering them. There must be some sort of cream for all that butt hurt you people have.
lmao i wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that your instance defederated them. it's 90% of what they post
At the moment I’m writing this, 7 tankies have seen your comment
Well, that or Marx purists. Marx believed that the transition between capitalism and socialism would include a period where the state was fulfilling capitalist roles and run as the infamous "dictatorship of the proletariat."
He never quite seems to explain how democracy arises from said dictatorship, or the people's recourse when it inevitably corrupts.
also the people that say socialism is fascism are the ones slowly taking our rights away.
You want to read what book? No we don't like it. Who are you gonna have sex with? No we don't like that...
You want water while waiting in line to vote in the same state where we shut down polling locations and tried to ‘find’ nonexistent votes? Nope, don’t like that ether!
Ahh thanks for the great reminder for all the tankies about communism failing for China and all these nations so they had to incorporate capitalism and allowed privatization of industries.
USSR did it, China did it, Vietnam did it, Cuba is doing it.
hexbear users can't see this comment, so it falls on my sleep-deprived ass to point out that socialist nations essentially have two options: 1) ban all capitalism and be banned from trade in turn, like Cuba and the USSR, or 2) permit some measure of capitalism, give the west its profits, and use that as leverage to gain access to trade, like China and Vietnam. You either play ball or get strangled to death.
Socialism can be good if the government doesn't have to resort to totalitarianism to enforce it - and when has that ever happened? Rarely. Rarely.
Lol what, no that's just the standard for communism lol
The Democratic People's Republic of Korea has "Democratic" in it's name, but no reasonable person actually consider them democratic. Just because a country claims to be something, doesn't make it true.
If China was Communist or Socialist, they wouldn't have wealthy billionaires. It's just a cover for their authoritarianism.
That's not how communism ends up being, it looks great on paper but once a human element is added it goes it shit and some people will be richer than others. It doesn't make what they have capitalism by any stretch. It's got bits of the free market there but thinking they've got anything like capitalism in the West is a joke.
No, the countries you think are communist just were never actually communist they just claim to be or other people claim they are. There are very few actual communist countries, if there are any at all. To be communist you have to be classless with everyone equal to each other. China is not communist, Russia is not communist, Cuba is not communist.
Lol ahh yes the tankie excuse of "that's not real communism"...no it's real communism because that's how it always turns out. Stop trying to defend the shit.
“that’s not real communism” is something no "tankie" ever said. It is strawman set up exactly by the people like those the original meme mock, the white westerner pseudoleft idealists.
All the countries mentioned in the original meme were/are socialist and it was/is glorious. Westolefto can eat shit, their succdem and ultra movements didn't achieved even 1/1000 of what ML's did.
By all means please leave and move to these glorious places. I heard russia needs meat for their "glorious" fight against the "Nazi" Ukrainians and the evil west.
Fuckin' tankie shit.
Why aren't you dying for batko bandera right now?
There is a stage in the transition to communism called 'the oppression of the proletariat' aka 'dictatorship'. Supposedly it should be a temporary stage before transitioning into a more decentralized type of government. As far as I am aware, not any communist revolution got beyond the dictatorship stage as absolute power corrupts.
Specifically "dictatorship of the proletariat", which was basically an 1800s gothic way to say "direct democracy for workers". Marx is somewhat infamous for the way he makes his ideas sound scarier than they are
And to clarify, most revolutions fail or adopt bureaucracy primarily to defend themselves from outside, capitalist influence, power corruption probably plays a part too but state power used by socialists is actually part of the plot
Very informative. I read the summarised work here that someone send me. And I have missed that nuance.
I also made a mistake and said "direct democracy for poor people" instead of "workers" so I went and edited that. whoops
The vast majority of (Let's use Vietnam as an example) is proletariat. So the vast majority of people are dictating terms to a small subset with different class interests. It's nothing like the dictatorship in, let's say the Netherlands, where a small group of capitalists dictate terms to the large body of proletariat, and the bourgeois political apparatus mediates in favour of bourgeoisie class interests. There's no corruption taking place, just the necessities of market economics.
This dictatorship will naturally "dissolve" when there are no more other classes (bourgeoisie et all) to oppress, since it will no longer serve the proletariat's interests.
Other than Fascists lying and claiming to be socialists. Because that's something fascists do... they lie. All the time.
Or are you someone who thinks the "National Socialist Party" was socialists because the literal Nazis would never misrepresent themselves?
That hexbear instance is full of fascists claiming to be socialists LOL.
hexbear was unfederated for three years, are you saying they just sat around all that time pretending to be queer communists to each other with no audience? Would thousands of people really check in to a website daily or weekly for years just to do that?
I don't think they are pretending to be those things. They truly believe themselves and their interpretation of Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, communism and socialist projects to be true and just.
The only issue is that they come from a specific strain of western leftist that got into the "uwu dank Soviet club" meme of the mid-10s and never evolved past that understanding of the people, projects, policies and states they stan like a fandom. They could take some lessons from the anarchists tbqh, but they'd rather post PPB and "liberals get the wall". Very annoying.
what do you want from them, a good faith response? when half the people they talk to are people like this guy? or people like you, who dismiss their views from a distance and respond with with superficial vibes-based criticisms while having little or no understanding of what they actually think or why?
I dismiss their views out of hand because I have history with people who espoused very similar views and they showed themselves to have a very superficial understanding of leftism, socialism, communism, and various leftist writers. They exalt historical figures of communist movements to apostolic, sometimes even deity-like status, and throw theory at people like it's scripture. They take the counter to the west's propaganda against communism to be full-throated propagandists for communist projects, even for valid criticisms.
But really, even if their political lens was the truest and freest, I still would not like them because they are fucking obnoxious and utterly insufferable. They larp on their local instance about "performing coups on other instances" and "doing the emotional labor of educating Lemmy users" when in reality they are abrasive, unpleasant people hamfistedly applying leftist social and economic critiques as a cudgel to dunk on people if they don't automatically agree with them, be they fascist, racist, liberal or even leftist.
I saw the debacle with Blahaj and how Hexbear users acted. Whatever critique of their adminship could have been made is completely drowned out by the manipulative yet dense behavior of their accusers during and after.
What I want from them is to not immediately look for reasons to take the least charitable interpretation of someone's point and derail threads, stop acting as if they own every single instance, stop larping as if they are building a leftist revolution across the fediverse and go outside, and to stop posting obnoxiously large server emojis all over every fucking thread.
It's a distinct blend of the worst of Reddit communists and Twitter users and I don't appreciate it when they decide to pull that nonsense in other instances beyond their own.
I don't care what comes after this. I still read it, but I don't care. "You knew some people, therefore hexbear is those people."
what do you say about the guy I linked to in the last comment? You don't think hexbear's obnoxiousness might be a reaction to years of talking to people like that? You don't think maybe at this point they expect it and that's why they're flippant?
look at how your own instance talks, this is absurdly hypocritical.
Cool, I suppose I shouldn't take any of your arguments seriously then.
No, I knew some people who showed bad behavior, and Hexbear users are showing similar behavior.
Yeah, they're somewhat obnoxious. It's annoying to see communists lumped in widely with fascists. They aren't 14-year-old Stalin-fancam sea-lion-posting-in-every-Lemmy-instance obnoxious though.
Maybe it is a reaction to to people like that. I do not give a fuck. Unless they're picking beef with long-storied rivals, everyone else has been here for 2-3 months, maybe less. We are not the collective animus of every anti-communist they've ever met. We're people here to form link aggregator communities, and it's unacceptable for them to treat people here as punching bags for their past frustrations just because they have a bit of social power here.
There's a wide range of people with political opinions here, and left-wing populism is quite popular here. If they changed their engagement, more people would be amenable to their community. But if they insist on acting the fool, they will eventually be sent back to the circus.
Talk like what, furries? They're mostly nerds, not much political discourse there. Small twinge of liberalism/leftism maybe.
they're not past frustrations. look around. In fact, look at yourself, with your "I already know what hexbears think and why without ever talking to them" dismissal. That is frustrating, right now in the present, because you don't know what you don't know. Hexbears are well-read and have detailed, serious takes, which they generally do not post outside their own instance because no one gives a shit and no one will read them. You actually can't just understand them at a glance based on vibes and some people you knew once. And it's obviously arrogant to think you can. And that arrogance is fucking frustrating, especially since you don't even realize you're being arrogant and you're bewildered that people react poorly to it.
Sure. Fellowship is an important part of maintaining a weird cult-like ideological stance.
Also we can't ignore the fact that there's some national interest juice behind this. China being a fascist country that's claiming to be communist to maintain legitimacy (and maintain power for the elites in that country) means there's significant resources that can be used to maintain the narrative that fascism branded as socialism is a good thing.
And dumb people love the idea that they're the small group that is getting things right, it's just the rest of the world that's wrong. See flat earthers, qanon, etc. They get in their little community where (unlike the rest of the world) no one tells them they're an idiot when they say their stupid bullshit. All they have to do is conform to the overall narrative the community is centered around and they don't need to do any critical thinking, and gain a sense of acceptance despite being an idiot.
imagine how awful it would be to spend hours in a long back and forth with someone like this trying to convince them that you have a nuanced perspective and justifications for it and you are not a stupid, monstrous, cult-like fanatic, all while they do not listen to you because they already know you are those things and therefore nothing you say is worth considering
Kind of what political discourse is on social media. Saying things to appease with the network your account is in so you can continue to accepted by them. Most prominent social media "personalities" don't care about the issues, but only want to appear to care about the issues.
I'd much prefer to talk to someone that honestly disagrees with me rather than someone who's disagreement is performative in order to please their friend network. It's possible (though maybe still unlikely) to convince someone who is honest about their views. Someone that's performative will continue to disagree because you aren't the one they're really talking to. It's the "friend" network they're always speaking to regardless of who's comment they're placing theirs under.
Such is social media.
it's not performative when hexbear disagrees with you, that's just you assuming things again.
tell that to mao and stalin
As long as you properly label China and Russia fascist authoritarian because they have a boner for racism and bigotry.
Venezuela would like a word