Do you mean the german ones thrown in the camps or the soviet leadership who were the last of the eventual allied powers to do any sort of appeasement with Hitler (after exhausting all attempts to form an alliance with Britain and France) because communism is less aligned with fascist goals than liberalism is aligned with fascist goals, massive underexageration mine? Do you mean the communist low level officials who helped in a massive ethnic relocation program to move vulnerable minorities out of the way of the eventual german invasion? Or do you mean the population of the only communist nation which lost 26 million people, around 1/6th of their population, stopping the holocaust?
Or were you referring to the joke about racism? If so, you gotta look up how the population of the USSR was not considered white at the time. Emma Goldman for example basically called Stalin a slanty eyed conniving Asian, for example. Nowadays slavs are still called orcs and shit by westerners.
Always has been. Government taking control of every action of citizens is dictatorship. Theese people have total power of the country
The DPRK and China both don’t have parties that are in any way capable of controlling every action of their citizenry. They both have massive grassroots democratic institutions. Hell, look up whole process peoples democracy and the taean work system.
what
The initial meme made fun of being against those countries as a socialist. This meme is against that idea. Ergo… the meme is against all those socialist countries.
Why would you defend a guy who ordered deaths alongside Lenin then immediately left and cozied up to 1920s American fascism to make books about “The Betrayed Revolution” because he didnt get his share?
Trotsky was a socialist. After his defection, he did next to nothing to advance socialism, only to passively denounce the closest thing the world had then to a Socialist Order. And he did this by going to their enemies, objectively the least socialist-tolerant bloc on Earth. Archetypal example of a self-centered “leftist” who folds inward and exclusively talks about their own life/‘persecution’ after one falling-out with the organized left. Look at Trotskyists nowadays and tell me they aren’t walking parodies who talk like Broadway characters. It says a lot abt how off-kilter you have to be to throw yourself behind Trotsky’s weirdo ‘cause’
EDIT: To be clear, while I havent seen much of his work, I respect parts of his legacy. I’m sure there’s a lot of insight in his writing - reading criticism from a seasoned former Bolshevik is interesting, and the perspective is useful for making sense of the wider movement. I also understand he was under a lot of personal pressure at the time he fled the USSR. Despite any merit Stalin showed in WW2 or the Union’s massive industrialization effort, it must’ve seemed unfair to many party members that he was chosen to succeed Lenin (not sure of specifics on that event). I’d even say his assassination wasn’t necessary, and the graphic details aren’t something I take pride in. However, at the end of the day Trotsky’s decision to defect was a net negative for socialism in the early 20th century. He should’ve tried to be a different kind of conscientious objector, not a voice of anti-Soviet dissent.
Wow. I guess someone has never actually read Trotsky or anything from Trotskyist. Try some Tony Cliff. Also, how you think Trotskyist sound today is not an indictment of Trotsky. Being critical of a revolution that has failed and the leaders and politics that followed is not the crime you think it is.
Jesus fucking Christ this is not the revolutionary left we need. Grow the fuck up.
edit: That’s funny, either you posted your edit while i was typing my response or I didn’t see it some how. either way. I’m sorry for being such a dick. I’m just so fed up with folks online regarding, what i would call state capitalist countries as genuine socialism, and rejecting any criticism of said states, as capitalist loving trash. Somehow Marxism has become a ridged dogma for these people. With the campist and the tankies distorting revolutionary socialism so much i fell like i live in upside down world. again sorry comrade. I would suggest “the two souls of socialism”. side note Trotsky was Lenin’s pick as leader not Stalin. Had he not “defected” he would likely have been killed by Stalin much earlier, like many of the seasoned former Bolsheviks who lead and then tried to defend the revolution against Stalin.
Why would the Commissar of Military and Naval affairs under Lenin, who was instrumental in founding the red army and oversaw the purging of Mahknovists and other anarchist elements in the early USSR be less authoritarian than Stalin?
If you spent more time explaining things rather than “dunking on libs” maybe your movement would be less on the fringe. I don’t have an opinion on who is more authoritarian, which is why it was obnoxious that you matter-of-factly made your point without any substance.
Right, it’s not that there is something actively pushing hexbear to them, but because there are fewer places for them to go, it becomes more likely that they will end up in the remaining instances.
For example - let’s say 2 hexbear users like to look at memes. They were previously using the lemmy world meme community, but now, since they are defederated from there, they will go to different instances’ meme communities. But then, more defererate, and it funnels a higher concentration of them into the remaining instances’ meme communities.
This is the lemmy.ml memes community, so unless I am very mistaken about how things work, I don’t think you found your way here from hexbear all.
If lemmy.ml defederated from hexbear, you would no longer see this community on the “fediverse all” section, just like you cannot see communities from lemmy.world.
The point being, as available communities become fewer and fewer, hexbear users looking for meme communities will probably concentrate on the few remaining to them, instead of being spread out over the many otherwise available.
I wonder if half the agita about this comes from not understanding how federation works. Federated lemmy instances behave almost like a single website, your posts are our posts and vice versa.
Right I get that. Lemmy.ml is visible to you in your federated feed. It sounded like the person I responded to said that this was part of the hexbear feed, which I don’t think it would be, since that only displays hexbear communities.
All beside the point though - the point is that as more and more instances defederate from hexbear, the pool of meme communities dwindles, funneling more hexbear people into the few remaining to them simply by the lack of other options.
Libs are subconsciously uncomfortable thinking about real politics. Too many contradictions with their world view. Leftists are not. Hence a lot of us engage with these threads, it gets to the top of our all, and more engage.
They’re tankies, aren’t they? i.e. Red-coded fascists that don’t care about things like worker enfranchisement unless it’s a way of expressing American diabolism. That’s not the left.
Well they claim to be left but they are delusional. They are definitely fascists the support fascist regimes like North Korea. They claim it’s not a fascist country just a communist one, but anyone with a brain understands it’s also EXTREMELY FASCIST.
They historically have aligned with or created fascist movements to oppose communists around the globe. Read the Jakarta method, read about the contras.
The term originates from Soviet and aligned regimes sending in tanks to brutally crush protests and rebellions. E.g. The Hungarian Revolution, The Prague Spring Uprising, Tiananmen Square, etc. Some communists were disgusted at their fellows for cheering on said oppression (“Send in the tanks!”) and started calling them Tankies.
Tankies fellate oppressive regimes and dictators. They’re the smooth-brained “communists” that live in a binary world where anything “their side” does is good and anything the west does is “evil”. They’ll claim any criticism of historically “communist” countries like China and Russia is a CIA talking point … because they’re idiots.
Random observation but I find it kind of interesting how the talking points anti-tankies tend to bring up are things that, even if the worst allegations are accepted, are relatively minor compared to some other events you could bring up. I’ve heard so much about Tienanmen Square under Deng, but much less about the Cultural Revolution under Mao. And the Hungarian Revolution and the Prague Spring happened under Khrushchev and Brezhnev respectively, when there’s much worse stuff you could bring up about Stalin.
I can’t help but think that this conflicts with the supposed definition of tankie of just knee-jerk defending anything someone does if they wave a red flag. If that were actually true, wouldn’t you focus on the most extreme examples by the most extreme leaders? The fact that there’s so much focus on people like Khrushchev and Deng, who were both more moderate than their predecessors, seems more like the point of the word is specifically to attack people who might have a more favorable view of those more moderate figures, while being critical of their predecessors’ actions.
Which is to say, tankie isn’t actually meant to be directed towards someone who knee-jerk defends anyone with a red flag, but rather, it’s meant to be directed towards someone who defends anything at all about anyone at all with a red flag, by accusing them of being the former. In other words, it’s a word that demands the exact kind of knee-jerk response it’s supposedly criticizing, just in the other direction.
In fact, it’s particularly interesting that these accusations of ideological rigidity and blind loyalty are in reference to Khrushchev, who did nothing but criticize Stalin, and Deng who controversially said that Mao was “70% good, 30% bad.” I don’t think it’s even possible for someone to defend everything done by both Stalin and Khrushchev
“An actual communist is someone who hates any communist movement that has actually managed to successfully overthrow its country’s ruling class and take power,” I say without a hint of irony
Tankie is a social construct and is used to lazily discredit everyone to the left of bernie. It functions to libs the same way as “woke” functions for chuds. As a term it’s basically meaningless to anyone outside of the internet.
I love how you guys have decided that your definitions are the only correct ones.
You’re strawmaning hard here, because I never said it’s a definition or that it’s the only one. It’s just my understanding of the term. What part of it is wrong in your opinion? I want to consider it
It’s your primary weapon here, for obvious reasons.
Because it’s obvious that when you’re challenged on your understanding of words you have nothing to say?
I have only seen it used in reference to people who support dictatorial regimes with socialist aesthetics, mostly MLs. I have yet to see an anarchist be called a tankie. Also you can hear it IRL, not commonly though since most MLs are on twitter and the like and not IRL.
Pro Tip: Sort by Top All. Anarchists getting called tankie tends to get a lot of upbears because we have anarchist comrades on our instance. We’re a left unity instance
No idea what the first link is even about, seems incomprehensible. The second link seems true but I have no idea what was said prior. The third link is about programming. Seems there is one potential example of an anarchist being called a tankie. Seems like the vast majority of times it’s being used in reference to MLs still.
In all seriousness there are plenty of people who misuse words but tankie seems to have a very clear and easily defined definition, it has even remained the same historically. Comparing it to the crazies using ‘woke’ is dishonest at best.
lmao no it hasn’t. It originally referred specifically to people that supported the USSR putting down the Hungarian anti-communist protests. By the time “tankie” became a word (that only really ever had relevance in the UK) Stalin was long dead.
Dictatorship of the proletariat as Marx wrote has never been achieved and arguably(Depending on how naive you believe Lenin was) has never even been worked towards. MLs bastardization of that in the form of a vanguard party is just a different dictatorship of the bourgeoisie as it creates a ruling class.
Nah, first premise is false in more than one way. You are conflating the ideology Stalin made with Marxism.
The second error is that there has never been a dictatorship of the proletariat, every time it has been a political party that seizes power for themselves and not the workers. In doing so they become the ruling class with differing class interests than the workers.
Marx must be rotating in his grave with the speed to power the whole globe at this point.
I would say Lenin was more instrumental in the creation of Marxism-Leninism, Stalin was just the guy who happened to be in charge when they named it. It’s also a tendency that has evolved a lot from what it was in the 40s.
Do you believe capitalism is good because it helped some people? The whole point of socialism is to put the means of production into the hands of the workers and not a vanguard party. Yea, the USSR did quite a lot of imperialism which it used to reduce income inequality of the Russian people but it was never socialist.
Yeah, clearly the Soviet, Chinese and Cuban workers had completely different interests than being raised out of poverty and squalor. Damn those dastardly political parties and their… diligent work towards eradictaing poverty while promoting actual, decentralized democracy.
Well, Cubans still live in pretty close proximity to squalor. They can’t even afford to maintain their own buildings, don’t have a functional transportation system, and people live on what, $20 a month? The one saving grace is out there health care system is decent. And by that, I mean much more equitable than in the United States.
You didn’t do the reading :(. Dictatorship of the proletariat is a concept Marx and Engles adopted. Stalin didn’t create it.
I don’t know what you think the proletariat taking control of the state is suppose to look like, but there will always be a communist party involved. The mechanisms of power exist to be ruled by a party.
Communist parties should be judged by what they do for their poorest citizens. With that in mind, AES countries are doing a decent job. Things get better when they are in power, and get way worse if they are overthrown
You’re wrong, what Marx talked about was the whole class of workers being in power. Stalin perverted that idea to a vanguard party. Stalin’s system has always resulted in a ruling class composed of a class that was no longer the proletariat (if they even were to begin with). That system is not socialist, it is in fact no better than a capitalist system, as the hierarchies at work are equally unjust.
And about the democracy Sweden gets a 100/100 in the democracy index.
So, not only are you wrong about their socialism but also on the democracy. Ergo, you are a disinformation spreader and someone that under communism would 100% be an enemy of the state.
As a point of unhelpful pedantry: I feel the need to point out that social democracy, while far preferable to liberal democracy, doesn’t actually qualify as socialism since it doesn’t guarantee workers control over the means of production.
But also, that’s far less important than recognizing that Stalinism is fundamentally awful so you’re doing far better than anyone on Hexbear.
Edit: to Hexbear people, don’t reply. I don’t care about your opinion about anything. If anyone posts a Tankie meme at me I’m reporting you for harassment.
It was a rhetorical question, of course they don’t.
Hexbear’s preference for China and Russia have nothing to do with communism and everything to do with their alignment with and love for their dictators.
I understand that, but some people say “hey Scandinavia kinda socialist though” and you know what? Scandinavia is in general a decent place. Also, as another commenter said, Sweden got a 100/100 on the democracy index and there is a list of government owned enterprises in Sweden.
Again: my only beef is with those who support Stalin and whatever the ccp is doing (putin supporters too) and I’m personally leaning probably more towards democratic socialism or ancom (not sure though)
And no offense, but you have no fucking idea what the the PRC is doing. You know nothing about their government structure, how policy is carried out, or the way the system functions at all. I guarantee you could not name the tiers of government, or even three government officials without looking it up. Your ignorance is shown right away by the fact that you say “CCP” (Chinese Communist Party) when the correct acronym is “CPC” (Communist Party of China). This is such a simple mistake that proves you have not read any media outside of the west regarding China.
Ugh horrible argument. No, you have to contend with the source I provided, not skip it and provide a different source, especially when the prolewiki page is a challenge to the Wikipedia page, and so citing the latter is like citing a work against which a polemic is directed at the polemic as an “alternative.”
Apparently Wikipedia is “not biased”, they just forbid certain sources, include U.S. government aligned sources by and large (this article you’ve cited sources Radio Free Europe, a CIA propaganda outlet; the New York Times summaries of situations in countries the U.S. is opposed to (this is done 10x), despite the source being a rubber stamp for the U.S. government; a Washington Post opinion article which completely obfuscates the nature of the press as a tool of class rule), and so on. Sorry, Wikipedia is biased.
It does give a definition: that there is none (lack of a definition is a definition). This is pretty clear if you read the whole page. Authoritarianism is just trying to distance itself from authority because all states wield authority in various ways, and so a word was created to separate the two and criticize the socialist bloc that also wielded authority, like the west did, but their authority was bad you see, not like ours which is good.
But why am I saying this; you didn’t read the page, you’re not gonna read this either.
In fact nobody has ever really been able to articulate to me why authoritarianism is bad beyond “I want my freedom”. It just inherently is undesirable, don’t ask too many questions, just accept it.
Nobody said it’s not; the concept of an unbiased party, like so many other liberal frictionless spheres, doesn’t exist and so is a useless hueristic for determining the veracity of information. The better question is what are this source’s biases?
But then what the other commenter said would basically be “Both Wikipedia and Prolewiki are biased, but Wikipedia is biased to the wrong direction. I like Prolewiki’s bias more than I like Wikipedia’s bias. Therefore, Wikipedia is not reliable on the topic of Authoritarianism.”
I like Prolewiki’s bias more than I like Wikipedia’s bias. Therefore, Wikipedia is not reliable on the topic of Authoritarianism."
Aand here you lose me. The fact that you have to assign them a frivolous reason to choose one definition over the other (I just like it lol) as opposed to this choice being the outcome of any assessment of their relative usefulnes as analytical tools kind of gives away your game here.
Oh well, I guess I should not have claimed that you chose to like ProleWiki more because you just like it. Now, how about I explain why I don’t trust ProleWiki on “Authoritarianism” because of its bias?
If you look at ProleWiki’s main page, it literally says that it is a communist (Marxist-Leninist) project. It leans towards Marxism-Leninism, which IMO makes its defense of those Marxist-Leninist socialist states heavily biased and unreliable.
Bias is important for credibility of a source, but not for the validity of the argument presented, and for the latter you actually have to understand and think about the argument presented.
The most important part of that page is its argument that all states wield authority and tend to tighten or relax the exercise of that authority in order to serve a given set of class interests. There’s nothing in this that relies on credibility, and dismissing it on account of bias makes as much sense as responding to someone in a debate by saying “you’re biased, so why should I believe you?”.
Authoritarianism is an idealist and loosely defined concept that is often used by liberals (liberalism being the ideology of capitalism) to demonize both past and present socialist states and dismiss any argument in support of these states.
In the very beginning of the article, ProleWIki equated liberalism with capitalism (they are very different), and also claimed them that liberals have “demonized” socialist states with this term. There is no denying that some liberals have demonized socialist states, but I would argue that this term was used properly in that context.
Have you ever noticed the most prominent difference between socialist governments and the governments of the rest of the world? In most socialist countries, you aren’t really allowed to publicly criticize the government. Ever noticed how much criticisms of the USA, the UK, France, or really any liberal country floats around the Internet? If you speak Chinese, I kindly ask you to go check out Weibo (Chinese Twitter), try posting something remotely critical of President Xi and watch your post get removed. Or try sending a message to a Chinese citizen with Weixin (Chinese Whatsapp), talk about the protest banner that someone hung on Sitong bridge in Beijing 11 months ago and see how your account gets disabled.
As you can see, the Chinese government exerts a lot more power on censoring Internet speech than the liberal countries do. I am not qualified to say whether the “western” countries are authoritarian, but in comparison, those socialist states really do enforce a lot more rules. Socialist states really are more authoritarian in comparison. It is more than fitting to call them authoritarian.
[that’s like saying] “you’re biased, so why should I believe you?” [in a debate]
Now that I think about it, I realize that that was indeed not a good argument. But that was also what another Hexbear user said to dismiss the Wikipedia article just a few parent comments above. They basically said “Wikipedia is biased, so why should I believe Wikipedia?”
It’s their go-to move. They’ll do it every time. Redefine the terms and words in ways that are favorable to their positions. It’s what one does when they have no objectively sound arguments. Again, pay attention, watch for it. They do it every single time.
The problem is that people throw around “fascism” like my 70 year old mom uses the word “communism.” She couldn’t even define the actual meaning of communism let alone her use of the word.
In the common internet usage fascism just means “anything authoritarian and to the right of where I stand.” It also has the issue of making people think that the problem is with left versus right politics when authoritarianism can and has existed everywhere in the political spectrum in history.
“I hereby appoint myself the final arbiter of all terms and definitions!”
All you guys do this, for obvious reasons.
In this context, in political science, “authoritarian” does in fact have a very specific and well-defined meaning. Pretending otherwise just excludes yourself from the conversation. Maybe that’s for the best.
As if Hobbes’ Leviathan isn’t a thing. Thanks, but no thanks. This is a pedestrian understanding of reality, and one with which I have zero desire to engage.
*authoritarian, not fascist. There is a difference.
When authoritarians are in power long enough, whatever ideology the revolution the previous generation had gets replaced by an emphasis of simply maintaining power through whatever means necessary. And fascism is the easiest way to accomplish that.
We can debate over whether Mao was really socialist or whatever, but he’s dead it doesn’t much matter now. The CCP today is accepting of billionaires, capitalism is legal, labour unions are illegal, the leadership is misogynistic, oppressive towards minorities, promotes the “century of humiliation” narrative. Oh and people live in fear of another Tienanmen Square style massacre. Whatever China was in the past, it’s fascist today.
And Russia? WTF are leftist (or so they claim) weirdos going on about there? The Soviet Union collapsed and was replaced with a capitalist democracy which became fascist under Putin’s regime.
There’s this weird thing where so-called leftists think that if some kind of socialism existed on a patch of earth then they need to carry water whatever fascist that’s ruling over that patch of earth today.
I agree. Fascist countries like Denmark, Germany and Canada often get called “socialist” and they have been disastrous for the reputation of socialism.
Of course /s. Germany, with Fuhrer Schultz, Denmark with Grand Admiral Frederiksen (I had to look it up lmao), and Canada with Supreme Commander Trudeau. All of them are actively involved in passing legislation against socialists and Muslims. All of them are involved in gathering Muslims into re-education camps. When socialists protested their respective governments for starting to become capitalist, they were run over by tanks. Also, all of these governments prevent their citizens from accessing the internet outside their own countries. Agreed! Very fascist indeed!
Dayum… That’s shameful for Denmark. As for the German far right, polls tell many different stories. The German government is still very democratic. What about Canada? You also accused them of fascism.
To be fair, I would agree that the German government is the most decent in Western Europe. But the far right and anti-refugee sentiment in Germany has risen dramatically, and it wasn’t that great to begin with.
But just to add a few more examples, you have places like Italy, Spain (the current government is still a direct descendant of Franco’s fascist monarchy) and France (see latest laws against Muslims and Arabs, and just the rising hatred in general).
The point is, Western Europe is always painted as this morally superior place, when it is very much not. People are quick to shit talk third world countries as if we’re the only ones dealing with fascistic governments. At least we acknowledge it. So many Europeans do not.
Set up all the groundwork for funding the Mujahideen terrorists in Afghanistan, the funding of the dictatorship and death squads in El Salvadore, setting up the groundwork for the fuckery Reagan did with Iran-Contra.
Supplied arms to support genocide in Indonesia, among other crimes. Him building homes now is just some light penance before he’s shipped off to hell. fair.org/…/jimmy-carter-and-human-rights-behind-t…
Westerners deciding who’s doing real socialism or not. Westerners expressing their most vile sentiment for foreign countries rather than their own imperialism. Westerners praising the words of their own imperialist intelligence agencies. Westerners unironically praising their own nations for civil liberties like the freedom of fascists to assemble, freedom of racists to express themselves, freedom of parents to own their children, and freedom of school districts to continue racial segregation. Westerners praising imperialist nations like Norway as socialist while using bold language like fascism to describe places under that same exact threat of imperialism, like Cuba and Vietnam.
Westerners claiming foreign governments are merely pretending to be socialist, while claiming unorganized misinformed chauvinistic westerners are the true heirs to socialism, despite all they do is post online and complain about foreign nations.
Westerners praising anarchist movements from 100 years ago despite having no common cause with those movements, no connection to the circumstances within them, and probably no actual admiration of them. Westerners praising a bastardized, sectarian, perverse form of anarchism rather than attempting unity with organizations in their areas. Westerners refusing to speak with actual anarchists in their area, who by and large don’t give a shit and just want to hand out food or help at shelters. If Buenaventura Durruti were alive today he’d be regarded with scorn by western chauvinists.
Westerners continuing to bring up Trotsky of all people, who wasn’t relevant to world affairs for the last 15 years of his life and certainly not the past 80 years. Westerners not reading a single word of Trotsky’s work, westerners focusing entirely on Trotsky’s feud with Stalin, westerners not knowing that Trotsky was a literal military commander. Westerners calling themselves Trotskyists in 2023 for some reason. Westerners deciding they have a feud with Joseph Stalin, a man who died in 1953.
Westerners attempting to praise their own socialist leadership, who happen to be a scattered group of imperialist-aligned social democrats, Twitch streamers, and actual antisemitic grifters such as in the case of Caleb Maupin.
Said no one. Except you. You either know what a Gish gallop is, or you don’t. A long comment is not necessarily a Gish gallop. In this case the charge is entirely accurate.
As if it’s somehow impossible to make a long comment in support of a single argument? As if Gish galloping comments don’t actually exist? Do I follow your logic properly? What part about this do I not understand?
Their argument was that so called Western socialists are mostly just Western chauvinists who make their determination on what movements are “real socialists” based on how closely they align, racially and culturally, to the West.
Yes, because engaging with hexbears is a waste of time. They are not here in good faith. Either that or they don’t know any better, which in practice amounts to the same thing.
That’s a fair question and in all honesty the answer is no, because based on what I can easily see and understand of hexbears, they aren’t intellectually serious people and to the contrary are more akin to a kind of 4-chan trolling community than anything worth actual intellectual engagement.
I could be wrong, but so far I have yet to see any evidence as such.
That it’s fun to do and informative to others. It might be fun for them too.
The reason I was asking morality yesterday was because that was the main question of the post. America bad and Russia bad are moral questions, so I was asking them as such.
But is your fun the morally justifiable kind? I’m trying to get to the bottom of this in a truely high-level idea discussion with the morality understander important-high-level-ideas
It’s actually axiomatic. I can’t really prove or justify why one should be good or bad, or why they should be good or bad to one another. But that good is good and to be strived for is the staring point of the philosophy.
I don’t define axioms. It is the general definition commonly used, as recorded (but not decided) by the dictionary. Do you in fact have a different definition?
They have the actual meaning that the majority or community gives them. But that isn’t necessarily static. But you’ve shown no evidence that it’s changed in this case. That’s what I’ve always been saying.
What do you mean settled? Do words meaning change? Absolutely. Quick examples from Google are awesome, egregious, awful, terrific, smeart->smart, nice, wicked, presently, etc
So if someone told you that you were using a word or words incorrectly, because the agreed upon usage of that term was decided, you would accept it and wouldn’t pedantically argue that point instead?
That’s precisely the point. These guys have a toolbox of fallacious arguments and techniques that they regularly trot out. The Gish gallop is one of them. Another, that you see being put to wide use in this thread, is redefining words and terms to fit their narrative.
I dont want to be a victim of hexbear road rage thanks. You guys just vomit out material in hopes that you can string it together to form a cogent argument. Then you come back smug as ever asking why i didnt respond to the 10k talking points as if I was a human encyclopedia.
How would I distinguish you, based only on your reply, from someone who took one look at two whole paragraphs and decided you weren’t going to read that but had to keep arguing no matter what and spewed out some sour grape nonsense?
I dont read very good. Im just a brown person from Guatemala sitting in an internet cafe. I dont want paid 30 quetzales to read shit. I want funny hahas
How should we frame our arguments in response to a meme that paints every single prominent socialist and socialist country as fascist without addressing each one?
Really the burden of proof should be on the one making the claim, shouldn’t it?
OP didn’t need to compare every socialist movement to fascists but they did, we didn’t need to reply to most of them, but we did. But we’re supposed to tailor our arguments to you, someone admits to not actually caring about any of it? No thank you
Thanks for sharing, believe it or not I am a communist myself and I agree with most of what the video said. I just don’t see how communism can ever emerge from authoritarianism, because if the defence against imperialism is authoritarianism are we not still dancing to the imperialist tune?
Comunism can only emerge from authoritarianism, by definition, because every single class society is authoritarian, and thus every state is. And as Engels noticed, revolution is the most authoritarian thing that is.
Imperialism is not the same as authoritarianism. To know what we mean by “imperialism” read Lenin’s “Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism”.
And you might noticed how authoritarianism in my first sentence is used incredibly wide, it’s not a mistake, it’s one of those terms that have no useful meaning, it wasn’t even useful to start with, and especially not when it went through the liberal media and social media mill which had tendency to either purposefully or acidentally (or both) twist definitions to the point they are unrecognizable. Therefore to broadly talk about “authoritarianism” is meaningless, that word is unhelpful as definition and can be used at most as the cliche to deflect discussion (and note it’s been used in this thread in this characer extensively by liberals who sure as hell aren’t opposing it because they support authoritarian societies as well).
True communism is stateless, so how can this emerge from authoritarianism?
Because history and society exist? States exist? Regardless if you are for transitional socialist state or you are some kind of utopist wanting to implement instant communism on a press of a button, that communist society will be necessarily build on a base of the current one.
as tankies for justifying their repressive ideology
What lack of dialectic materialism does to a mfer.
You do always discuss by asking questions this loaded? Especially after making completely outlandish claim that new society can’t be build on base of the old one? Not even posadists went that far, that sounds more like some apocalypse preaching.
We don’t ignore it when a socialist country takes security measures, we say they’re an unfortunate reality of steps a country has to take in order to defend itself against external and internal aggression. Having your country go socialist earns you a lot of enemies and having a lot of enemies means you have to build up things like intelligence agencies, military apparatuses, and centralized agencies for combating sabotage and spying. These are things every country does, but western nations like to paint the security measures that socialist nations take as purely authoritarian, or needlessly tyrannical, or whatever other word gets thrown around. The nations yelling at socialist countries to change their domestic policies are usually the most imperialist and have the most to gain from socialist states being dismantled.
When your enemies are the global capitalists who operate global finance and industry, you should probably build up something to defend against it. Nukes tend to work as a deterrent, but they only go so far when you’ve also got an internal population that can present a security problem.
China’s taken the smartest strategy of all honestly. They’ve intertwined their economy with the imperial powers to the point it’s impossible to disentangle. The west can’t take violent action against China, since that’s where the industry is.
Also, so called authoritarian measures against our enemies are a good thing. It’s good when fascists, racists, and imperialists lose civil liberties like the freedom to express themselves, organize, fund politicians, or operate businesses.
Do you think that we will see true communism ever arise from authoritarianism? I don’t think that is possible.
I think that authoritarianism is a lot more palatable to the imperialists than actual communism would be, I worry that, quite apart from it being wrong to curtail civil rights, by being authoritarian a socialist state is simply dancing to the tune of the imperialists.
I don’t think I’m comfortable with a central power having the authority to decide that certain groups don’t have rights, that power is too often abused widely.
Personally I don’t believe the term authoritarianism is a useful description of anything. It’s too vague. I’ve seen one definition that’s like “a system that rejects the involvement of certain groups or interests from the political process.” Well that would be all socialist nations by default, since socialist countries by definition have denied political representation for the capitalist class in some way.
A better question is: How is a socialist country supposed to defend itself? It may not be possible for a country to achieve what Marx called upper-phase communism. It may not be possible for money, states, and all property to be abolished. That’s a question for the future. But when a country tries to curtail the power of capitalists, even attempts to create what’s known as true communism, they find themselves on the receiving end of an entire world against them. Sanctions, invasions, sabotage, spying. The shape that a socialist country will take is the result of its conditions. We’re living in a world dominated by capital and socialist countries represent a resistance against capital. If socialist movements are threatened, they either defend themselves or collapse.
You’re right that countries are dancing to the imperialists, because the imperialists hold the most power right now. That’s why an anti-imperialist movement is important, why a multi-polar world is important. Once the threat of imperialism subsides or is defeated, then I’m going to guess socialist countries will begin to express their policies differently.
I don’t think I’m comfortable with a central power having the authority to decide that certain groups don’t have rights, that power is too often abused widely.
Is there any society that isn’t this? A central authority deciding how to distribute rights is a governing body.
Socialism is a movement about denying the right of property to capitalists. That’s the entire purpose of the movement, to elevate working class people to the point of dominating society and to restrain or abolish the capitalist class. Landlords and capitalists shouldn’t be able to exercise the same rights they have in a liberal capitalist nation. Fascists, racists, transphobes, imperialists, etc shouldn’t have any civil liberties and should be subject to arrest, reeducation, or worse.
It’s ok if the joke goes over your head, comerade. The Lubyanka administration doesn’t give you enough resources to comprehend Western sarcasm. One day
I honestly have never seen a pleasant conversation with a hexbear. I am looking forward to when hexbear and all chapotraphouse leninistas are purged from these forums so you guys can fester in your own bile. Im crossing my fingers.
Because you walk into threads about issues you barely understand and say stupid shit. If you were less ignorant maybe you’d get the convos about backyard farming and cats
We got told to cool it with the emojis on other instances, because there’s a Lemmy bug that makes our emojis look giant when we’re not on Hexbear. A lot of us think it’s funny though that our pig shit image takes up the whole screen. I want it to be larger.
I dont think you could find someone who hates America more than an American
If your hypothetical American had a button that would sink the entire country to the bottom of the ocean, would they press it without a moment’s hesitation?
If not, then they do not hate America more than me.
That is a wild take. People have seen there kids burned to death in an American drone strike. Or had their family executed in front of them by special forces death squads.
The people who hate America the most are probably Iraqis with dead children, or American indigenous people kept in poverty.
I know there are westerners who have a better conception of socialism and are more amenable to international working class efforts. I know a lot of them. I’m from Texas lol. I don’t like it when westerners, like fellow Americans, look down their nose at other countries. Calling a nation fascist because it doesn’t meet your western ideas of what socialist utopia is supposed to be? It’s bizarre to me. It always seems racist.
Westerners have a strong tendency towards national chauvinism and it’s rare to meet someone more internationally minded unless you go looking for them. You can probably agree with that.
-America: Disrupts country to dispose leader.
-Success: Country no longer Socialist.
-Failure: Strongman comes to power to resist. Resists disruption, becomes dictator. Country no longer Socialist.
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
You literally can not view Hexbear comments and posts because .World defederated from them. You replied asking where the tankies everyone is complaining about are and got your response. I don’t even know what you’re trying to say.
Just so you know, they are posting here but you can’t see their comments. Make an account in an instance that hasn’t defederated with them (like lemm.ee) and you’ll see their comments here.
You don’t get it. I don’t care about hexbear because it’s not as big a deal as of all lemmy makes it out to be. What I don’t understand is if everyone has a problem with them why they choose to stay on an instance that doesn’t defederate them. Obviously their instance will be smaller giving communities like hexbear an even larger voice. If users actually cared they would simply move to an instance where they don’t have to encounter them. I’m not going to ee or some shit just to upset myself. Absolutely not going to one-on-one a bunch of ideologues, lol.
Can you fucking understand it is so fucking annoying to see people complain constantly about tankies when it’s a totally contrived conflict?
Which to me, screams FSB and I’ve seen this propaganda in 1990s textbooks. It’s all contrived to fabricate anti-communist sentiment.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
they’d rather post PPB and “liberals get the wall”.
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.”
they are fucking obnoxious
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?
not immediately look for reasons to take the least charitable interpretation of someone’s point
look at how your own instance talks, this is absurdly hypocritical.
I don’t care what comes after this. I still read it, but I don’t care.
Cool, I suppose I shouldn’t take any of your arguments seriously then.
“You knew some people, therefore hexbear is those people.”
No, I knew some people who showed bad behavior, and Hexbear users are showing similar behavior.
what do you say about the guy I linked to in the last comment?
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.
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?
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.
look at how your own instance talks, this is absurdly hypocritical.
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.
often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
Replace the word race with party and you’ve got an incomplete yes, but not necessarily inaccurate description of Stalins USSR.
Seriously not trying to just be a troll or shill here, so if you feel I’m wrong please let me know how and why. I am legitimately, in good faith, curious about the perspectives of some communist here. It is an ideology I am somewhat interested in.
A different response, which comes from a different angle to those pointing out that Marxism-Leninism is not fascist:
The word ‘fascism’ is used so fast and loosely outside of a technical context that I wouldn’t say one interpretation is necessarily right or wrong. It depends on context. (Incidentally, same for ‘socialism’, even principled well-read communists can’t agree on a definition.)
For example, if we’re talking about the actual Fascist ideology (think of Mussolini and associates) then I would even hesitate to include Nazism due to the very different roots: they’re both nationalist anti-liberal anti-democratic, anti-socialist ‘third way’ ideologies and they did ally in the war, sure, but to group them both as ‘fascism’ trivializes core differences in how they formed, why they successfully formed, how they appealed to their followers (fascism actually recruited many self-identifying socialists in Italy and its important to recognise why to prevent it), and why they were ultimately antisocial and unsuccessful in their goals.
This isn’t just some academic masturbation nitpicking or anything: I believe that the ignorance of Classical Fascism by lumping it in with the far more obvious and baseless idiocy of Nazism makes it harder to recognize and counter, especially when neo-Nazis are such ridiculous cartoonish farces. Fascism stemmed from National Syndicalism and has core economic ideas like corporatism (from ‘corpus’) that could fool people, and sounds much less stupid that Hitler’s bizzare esoteric fantasies about Aryan racial supremacy: even Mussolini considered Hitler crazy.
The point of me making this distinction is that the dictionary definition you gave isn’t even wrong in describing fascist ideologies, but, I don’t think that list of common traits should be mistaken for a definition. Those traits are the results, not the foundation of the ideology, and a neo-liberal state like the USA can easily match many of those traits despite being a very distinct ideology. Any you will absolutely see people saying ‘USA is fascist’ as a shorthand for nationalist, racist, imperialist, oppressive, blah blah blah, but it’s definitely not post-National-Syndicalist faux-socialist corporatist collectivism. We should obviously fight both but they are not the same and manifest differently.
That’s a pretty significant difference, don’t you think? Exalting racism and exalting a political organization that opposes racism are diametrically opposed things, not equivalent.
I would not be surprised if legitimately not a single person on hexbear has ever actually been to China. It’s an extremely racist place. The vast majority of hotels in China will not even rent a room to anyone without a Chinese passport. Even if you are traveling with Chinese people - if you look foreign, they will deny you service at a glance.
I have been all over the world, and China is the only place where this happens.
Not saying it is a fair exchange, you are correct. But do keep in mind the wording in the definition is “often”. My suggestion of replacement was to emphasize that race is not a requirement to the definition, it’s just pointing out that it is usually the characteristic used to define who is the most loyal or desired type of citizen. From what I understand party loyalty could be definitely be applied there.
There’s a reason that race is included though, and that reason is that fascism aims to strengthen and reinforce existing hierarchies. That generally includes race, gender, sexual orientation, class, disabilities, etc. Theoretically it’s conceivable that you could have a political project that includes all of that except for race, but in practice it’s extremely unlikely that a fascist project would exclude it, which is why it’s mentioned in the definition.
Communists (esp. Marxist-Leninists) believe in using political power to reduce or remove these hierarchies, even if it requires the use of force. For instance, I think it’s good that slave owners in the US were forcibly suppressed and the people they enslaved were liberated. Does that “willingness to forcibly suppress the opposition” make me (and Lincoln) a fascist, even though my goals and values are completely opposite to those of fascists?
If “the opposition” in your definition is taken to include groups that would also forcibly suppress their opposition given the opportunity, then it seems that Webster’s has unintentionally baked in assumptions from which the only conclusion is something like anarcho-pacifism, while labelling all states as inherently fascist. This is either a bad definition, or a bad interpretation of the definition.
That is a good point. It’s a really interesting application of the tolerance paradox. This is some good perspective I’m getting, glad I made this comment thread.
I don’t want to dogpile and axont already pointed out a pretty good scholar who talks about the subject, but I did want to add for clarity the reason that it’s important to have a precise definition: We could look at, say, Victorian Britain, Ancient Egypt, the Roman Empire and Suleiman the Magnificent and argue that they were all unquestionably ruled by either a single or a small handful of rulers with no real checks on their power, that they oriented the economy and society around themselves, that they suppressed dissent etc. and conclude, from Webster there, that basically every government except modern American government is fascism. Simply in historical terms that would be an enormous problem, because it collapses all the nuance and distinctions that exist, obviously, between these extremely diverse forms of government.
When people talk about fascism, there’s a reason they think of Hitler and Mussolini (who self-described, which makes that a bit easier I guess) even if it’s hard to put a finger on exactly what the unifying factors are. Very clearly, Mussolini and Hitler thought their projects were incompatible with communism/socialism, it’s why their first steps upon achieving power in their countries were to purge the left and ensure that left resistance couldn’t be organized against them. Even if you have critiques of Stalin (I certainly do) I think there are pretty obvious differences between the USSR and the fascist axis that it ended up fighting against, reasons that were ultimately persuasive to Roosevelt and Churchill despite their own misgivings about communism. Everyone at the time understood there was a difference, and we need to be able to distinguish if we’re going to talk intelligently about forms of government that western countries don’t themselves use.
So in short, I’d say that definition from Webster is too vague to be useful, I’d say there are factors like palingenetic ultranationalism and hostility to the left that seem to be constant in any real fascist regime that should really be a part of a definition of the term. Otherwise ‘fascist’ just means ‘mean’ or ‘bad’ because all of its distinctives are gone.
Mussolini and Hitler thought their projects were incompatible with communism/socialism, it’s why their first steps upon achieving power in their countries were to purge the left and ensure that left resistance couldn’t be organized against them
I think something liberals trip on is that Hitler and Mussolini didn’t just attempt to suppress leftists. They did that after gaining power. Before gaining power they did any number of weasel-like things to convince the average person that fascists were in fact better socialists than the socialists. They appealed hard to working class interests, especially the ones with national chauvinist tendencies. They appealed to racism and scorned international cooperation. It didn’t help that the average person in this was often confused, coming out of the problems of post WW1 Europe, and mainly wanted a party that would put food on the table. The so called “beefsteak nazi” was a type of person who’d join the Nazis believing they’d put forward more genuine socialist policies. Beefsteak, red on the inside, brown on the outside. Then you had people like Ernst Röhm and Strasser, who identified publicly as socialist. Then once gaining power in 1934, they were killed.
Fascists don’t really have beliefs so much as they’re an emergency tool for capital to rid itself of its primary internal enemies.
You can’t just swap words out and assume the framework is the same. It literally makes no sense. Changing one word can, and does, have a huge effect on overall meaning of a sentence.
Personally I like the definition that the historian Robert O. Paxton uses. Now, he’s a liberal, but he does have good insight into fascism and he doesn’t fall into that trap of deciding that communists and fascists must be the same thing. His definition isn’t materialist, but it’s a good start.
To paraphrase, his definition is “a suppression of the left among popular sentiment.” By left he means things like socialists, labor organizations, communists, etc. Fascism is a situation where a country has found its theater of democracy has failed and the capitalists need anything at all to keep themselves in power, even if it means cannibalizing another sector of capitalists. The fascists are the ideological contingent of this, who put forward a policy of class collaboration between working class and capitalist, instead of what socialists propose, which is working class dominance in the economy. Fascists exalt nationality or race because that extends through class sentiments. It brushes aside concerns like internal economic contradictions. I once had a comrade say something like “Fascism is capitalists hitting the emergency button until their hand starts bleeding.”
Communists using a vanguard party is to defend their own interests against capitalists or outside invaders. The praise of the CPSU in Stalin’s era was precisely because it acted as a development and protection tool for the working class. It did its job and people were wary of any return to the previous Tsarist or liberal governments. Women began going to school, women were given the vote for the first time. Pogroms ceased. In less than one lifetime of the CPSU administrating the country, people went from poor farmers to living in apartments with plumbing, heating, and clean medical care. That’s why there was such praise of the party, because they actually did things people liked, and they didn’t want anything to threaten them.
Also, what does it matter if there’s one party or two? The working class have a singular, uniting interest to overthrow capitalism. Why are multiple parties needed? Anything the working class needs to negotiate for can be handled within a socialist, democratic structure, not two or three competing structures against one another. Take a look at Cuba, which has one party, but doesn’t use their party to endorse candidates. Everyone’s officially an independent in the National Assembly.
This was an enlightening comment and I appreciate it. I may not agree with all of it but it definitely shows there are some perspectives I haven’t considered. A parliamentary or council type system could definitely provide enough representation of different working class communities within a single party. I wonder if they had term limits, or if their representatives would fall into the same hole as the US Congress.
You might be interested in Cuba’s representative system then. Politicians there aren’t allowed to propose policy or platforms, instead they act purely as representatives from community interests. Cubans can initiate votes of non-confidence in their politicians as well, at any point to have them removed from office. They don’t make great salaries either, and if they’re party members they’re required to pay regular dues. There aren’t term limits. I remember there was some kind of referendum a while ago about Cuban term limits and they were declared undemocratic, plus they didn’t make sense in regards to Cuba’s long term economic plans.
Cuba has one of the most robust democracies in the world. Their constitution was rewritten in 2019 and it was a countrywide effort, starting at things like local union halls and referendums sent to people’s homes.
See that’s how you fuckin do it. I’ve always been angry with the US for holding Cuba back. I would love to see where they would be now without the sanctions.
Not sure how Cuban party dues work, but I do know there’s an application process and not everyone gets membership. Not sure how it works in regards to income level either
The common socialist position is that term limits are anti-democratic not just because they keep people from voting for who they want to but, more significantly, it tilts the scales in favor of structures that do not have term limits. In the US, for example, elections are essentially completely controlled by private companies from the media to the National Conventions, and term limits check the power of popular candidates (and therefore popular sentiment) versus capital, which does not expire in 8 years.
He was a professor at Harvard most of his career, if that explains anything. He’s also on record calling the January 6th capitol thing a fascist coup attempt.
I do think it was an attempt. They just didn’t even know that a coup attempt involved more than walking in the door and demanding Trump be president. The next one in America will involve mass killing, and it will be from a similar demographic.
Yeah we’re still in a position where American fascism doesn’t even recognize itself in the mirror. It doesn’t realize it’s a movement that needs coherent aims. It’s still stuck in the American paradigm of politics as consumerism. A comrade the other day here said the explicit kind of American fascism is having a hard time getting off the ground because they refuse to adopt socialist rhetoric, like European fascist movements in the past.
Yea that’s well said, also American fascists luckily have no history to look back to that’s before the US state formation. So instead of wanting a new system, they just want their guy to play President as they sit on the couch.
If i remember his book correctly, at start he explicitly denies marxist definition of fascism, and then in course of the book his research lead straight to it being correct on at least two separate occasions, them makes full stop and end the topic when he realise what would he have to write next.
I don’t know if thats merely ritually exorcising communism in order to have his book accepted by liberal academia (like in case of Geza Alfoldy for example) or he really is this intellectually dishonest, because he clearly did realised. Anyway it was funny as hell and the book isn’t even bad.
Possibly because of the way he’s found his career. Paxton is very popular in France and was very instrumental in introducing liberal historiography into French WW2 history. For him to throw a bone to Marxists would be undermining how he earned a name for himself in the first place.
Yeah i see that in polish social sciences too, especially by older authors, it’s hard here to keep position in the academia without paying at least lip service to anticommunist witchhunt. Unfortunately even those people are already dead and the new ones are not even shy about being opportunists, most books publish nowadays are almost worthless since it’s either anticommunist propaganda, pophistory or bland compilations from older ones.
The pure (libertarian) socialists’ ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.
Look, I agree that it’s dumb to call yourself a socialist and have zero respect for most attempts at socialism, especially when your critique doesn’t come from anything serious but just parroting of cold war propaganda. I agree that these countries weren’t literally the devil, nor fascist, not “pretending”, that’s all fine.
But it’s still so dishonest of MLs to dig for quotes and smugly boastbout how “libertarians never succeed”. Even if we completely ignore all the very explicit and deliberate attempts at sabotage anarchists had to endure from their statist “comrades” (which we shouldn’t but we always casually seem to be forced to do in the name of “unity”), it doesn’t change the fact that vanguardist revolutions have all been incredibly flawed too.
You all are very often willing to recognize your failures, most of the people like you I have talked to seem to agree that at some point the revolution was “hijacked”, usurped, corrupted, lost aim, usually coinciding with a figure they don’t like taking over the revolutionary government and messing things up.
The supposed “strong state that crushes all opposition” being taken over by the reformist opposition and then the capitalist one in the case of the USSR and Leninists. The market reforms of Deng in the case of China and Maoists. But you all never seem to ask yourselves the question “Why was that allowed to happen?”. Why am I supposed to put my trust in some authoritarian bullshit solution specifically justified as a means to protect the revolution when it failed at doing so? Why do you have to be so smug and condescending at me for not trusting in things that didn’t work?
Why do you instead of learning from the mistakes in your methods that most of the time you yourself recognize and trying to come up with new ideas and systems for the current age, insist on still clinging to material analysis of the world of a hundred years ago as the gospel, the sole undying and absolute truth on how to Make Socialism, merely saying “it’ll totally work right this time” instead? Why do you insist on mocking and “”“dunking”“” on anyone who refuses to do that?
They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted.
This is all completely false. It genuinely is just lies. You can disagree with the explanations, but to claim there literally aren’t any is just ignorance and a complete lack of good faith. Look, if you’re a socialist in the internet, you probably have dealt with confidently incorrect liberals whining about strawmen that you don’t believe, because they haven’t read anything about it - and it’s probably been incredibly frustrating. So why do you never think twice before doing the same thing with anarchists?
I’m always told to read Lenin and a ton of authoritarian essays and I always do in good faith, but it’s extremely rare for me to ever be afforded the same honour, and then all the conversations I have end up with people telling me shit like this and me having to explain anarchism 101 to them because they genuinely don’t actually know anything.
No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.
I am also always told to be charitable and nuanced about the failures and mistakes of vanguardist revolutions, but no one ever has the same honour with anarchist ones.
Sorry to disappoint. I don’t have hard opinions about anarchists vs MLs. I generally think Engels was more convincing on authority, but I’m not well read enough to have a formed opinion on it and haven’t read anything from the last decade or so. I especially don’t think the things that you’re asking here because I didn’t write the statement, Parenti did, and he did so for rhetorical effect against western leftists putting ideology over AES. I’m happy to receive some recs I can follow up on.
I am sorry for being agressive. I mostly assumed you thought the same things as the person you were quoting. I appreciate that you at least admit you aren’t well read enough, that’s more than most people I talk to.
I’m happy to receive some recs I can follow up on.
I really appreciate this too. Thank you. I think as a direct expanding on what I’m talking about, this essay is very good:
Cheers pal, I’ve favorited this post to come back too. I’ve read Bakunin before, but I haven’t read the rebuttal on On Authority or the other essays you linked. Looking forward to it! Appreciate the time you put into this
At least it’s something new instead of a method that has failed to bring about socialism time and time again through history. All those transitory government systems just end up being dictatorships that give as much power to the workers as the fucking US, less even.
You will never achieve socialism if you just prop up a ruling class with vastly different class interests, they will never cede power to the workers.
What I support is workers organising. What I don’t support is Stalinist strongmen oppressing workers. Socialism without power of the workers is meaningless and not worth achieving, that’s literally the current system. If I wanted capitalism with socialist aesthetics I can just move to China, that already exists. What I want is actual power to the workers and nothing else.
You attributed some failed strategy to me and then accused me of purity testing states that are only aesthetically socialist. That response had nothing to do with what I said.
You attributed the failed strategy to yourself, and I accused you of it because that’s exactly what you were doing. That’s a response, to your comment.
As you yourself said: it’s untainted by existing practice, there is no existing strategy as in its new. In relation to the numerous failed attempts at socialism through dictatorship it’s better to try something new and not keep shooting the working class in the foot.
Currently our group has been working on raising avereness of unions since there are a lot of white collar workers that aren’t a member of any union. We are also trying to popularise the coop business model especially in the public sector. We are also advocating for wealth redistribution reforms. The USSR kinda ruined calling yourself a socialist(And calling yourself a communist here will more likely get you punched here) so a lot of advocacy has been about pushing for socialist ideas with different wording.
For more long term we are hoping to get unions more involved in government and possibly form a worker’s party with the union members.
Workers had more power and say in democracy in the USSR then they have ever had in a Western capitalist country, and American police are more brutal, more violent, more repressive, and kill more people than any “strong men” under Stalin. You’ve consumed too much anti-communist propaganda.
No, me and my family lived under Soviet rule in an annexed satellite state. Workers had no power here, people who were friendly to high ranking party members had power and if workers did not comply they got sent to slave camps in siberia where they were not likely to return.
I really don’t care about the US and it’s quite weird how literally everyone who is trying to paint the USSR in a good light says that with no prompting. Like lung cancer is also bad but bringing that up in every single conversation about anything is weird.
Was Stalin the president of the US? Is the US the leader of socialism or something? The US has nothing to do with socialism, like I have been part of my local anarchist group for years and no one has ever even mentioned the US.
Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle.
No, it’s pretty simple. It’s called “profit sharing” where workers get the lions share of profits. It’s more realistic than alternatives in a country that thinks Joe Biden is a communist.
Neocolonialism in the streets, social welfare in the sheets. Social democracy is neither democratic nor social (except if we’re talking about socialising the rampant exploitation of the developing world, I guess?)
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