Has anyone else noticed how prevalent Hexbear posters have suddenly become? Maybe sometime last week I noticed nearly every political post had at least one long thread of Hexbear users that do nothing but repeat CCP talking points while waving anyway anything even remotely reliable as Western propaganda. That or getting all excited about trolled libs. The way they tell it, you’d think everything from DW, to Fox, to Propublica, to straight up AP News articles, are all written by the same people.
Not to mention, their info on the Fediverse observer is either straight up wrong or there’s some serious botting going on. According to that, the instance is less than a month old, yet somehow they already have one of the largest, most active userbases, along with far and away the most comments of any instance.
Seems to me like Lemmygrad on steroids. Considering we defederated from them, seems like a no-brainer to block Hexbear as well.
So glad this thread could become such a perfect microcosm of why we need to defederate.
No I don’t want a revolution, I want people to try to work together instead of fighting.
Yeah, us too. Unfortuntely society is currently managed by a bunch of literal sociopaths who are more than willing to throw their stolen wealth into militarized police, private deathsquads, and good ol’ normal armies.
We dont get to dictate the escalation of force, the bourgeoisie have and will do that for us.
STATE AND REVOLUTION
You know, I am reading Rabinowitch’s book on the July-October 1917 period and what really strikes me is how all the leading Bolsheviks-including Lenin-really wanted the transfer of power to the soviets to be peaceful. They pretty much exhausted every option until the right-SRs/right-Mensheviks and Kerensky types gave them no possible alternative to violent insurrection. There were differences over the timing and tactics of this insurrection (on one hand, those like Lenin and later Bubnov and Sverdlov who wanted insurrection immediately, those in the ‘centre’ like Stalin, Trotsky, Volodarsky who supported insurrection soon but wanted to shore up support in the provinces + at the front more, and those on the party right like Zinoviev and Kamenev who wanted to create a democratic worker’s republic with the SRs and Menshevik internationalists before beginning any violence to ensure full peasant support).
I didn’t know that at all. It shows how these guys-especially in 1917-did not like violence, did not glorify it, and did not fetishise it. They tried to avoid it and were all scared of unleashing the horrific civil war that eventually did come to pass. It’s something to remember.
Violence is bad and scary and should be only be wielded with immense caution and respect, but at the same time, when the time comes, you have to be ready for the decisive confrontation. Maybe Kamenev or Zinoviev, or maybe Volodarsky and Podvoisky, were actually right and it would have been better to wait longer until the correlation of forces was more on their side and the civil war could have been lessened at the very least. Maybe they were wrong and the revolutionary moment would have passed and the ProvGov would’ve re-gathered its strength. I don’t know. I’m still reading the book!
Very interesting write up. I’ll have to put that book on my to-read list. Thank you for sharing this kernel of knowledge!
Don’t forget the stochastic violence they do to us with their control of media and culture
That’d be nice. Unfortunately the bourgeoise have class solidarity with each other and not with us, they will prevent change from happening peacefully.
A smooth, voluntary, nonviolent transition to peace and harmony would be every leftist’s dream, but there are institutions with power who have used, are using, and will continue to use violence to prevent it from happening in order to maintain their material interests. Call it whatever you want, but the process of transitioning from our status quo to something better will require dismantling institutions that are capable of defending their existence with violence. It sucks.
Do you think the capitalists will work with you? Do you believe that their sense of fraternity and human decency will lead them to throw down arms and accept more radical change to the system than the strikes, protests, and abolition movements that the capitalists have met with mass murder for centuries?
The capitalists are not your friends. Their power will not be voted away, it won’t be argued away, it won’t be negotiated away. It can only be removed by force, and removing it is the only way to keep them from using it to sculpt society into an ever-crueler engine of profiteering.
Please tell me how you’re imagining getting people like Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk to “work together instead of fighting” and give up their hoarded wealth. What short of sheer force would compel them to do that?
Utopian socialism would be nice if it worked but it patently does not. The bourgeoisie have a very fine time controlling the wealth of the world and they have nothing to gain by accepting democracy. Socialism, like any economic order, is only going to be a reality if it is enforced with violence. If somebody tries to undo the collective ownership to the means of production they will have to be stopped by force, just as force is applied today to stop people from violating bourgeois property rights.
Did you have the opportunity to see what the state does in the face of nonviolent resistance when the BLM protests were happening?
our literal entire platform is that the people should work together as much as possible and efforts to divide the people should be met with the harshest punishment
hundreds of thousands of volumes of literature spread across every nation, every language, every race, every gender, every sexuality, spanning centuries, and this is like the one thing we agree on the most
so you gonna work with us or
I think this response is really necessary for this type of person. Work with us and we will try our best to avoid any violence, just like Lenin or most of the historical socialist revolutionaries. We figure out how to less-violently or even non-violently remove the power of the bourgeoisie and we will gladly do it. But the fact is that for libs the discussion of possible needs for strategic violence is itself proof of the impossibility of working together, and for some it’s because they know that this removes all possibility of actually winning and for others it’s because they’re blinded by their ideology and think that reformism hasn’t been tried hard enough.
Bring some new ideas not based in self-defeating liberalism about how we can avoid violence. I’ll listen and try to apply them. But don’t tell us we’re dumb for realizing it hasn’t worked yet, no matter how many people claim it’s the best
I think a lot of post-Bernie socialists started out at the same thought and aspiration: “*I just wanted some help starting my life. I don’t want to worry about increasing costs of living, rent, food, clothes, food, healthcare, education and job training. I want my opinion and voice to matter to my company, my community, my society.”
Some people went further with it, deciding in their mind: *And I’m willing to fight for it through political activism, protesting, mutual aid".
Then others also think in a lateral but not perpendicular way: *But I don’t want to fight for it, risk prison, or give up my comforts. I’ll stick to canvassing for Berniecrats".
I can appreciate being averse to the fetishization and valorization of political violence as form of entertainment or coping mechanism, but eventually society’s dysfunction becomes untenable and unmalleable that a catharsis must come to pass: revolution or fascism.
Not all revolutions are violent. They don’t have to be repeats of the revolutions of a century ago. Revolutions manifest when the administrators of the state - not necessarily it’s enforcers - just lose faith in the state and start defecting. These types of non-violent revolutions can happen.
If thinking about the process of revolution is unpleasant, then imagine a society after a revolution.
Who would you be and what would you do when you are free?
Yeah that would be great, unfortunately the world we live in doesn’t work like that. Asking for cooperation when the other side is perfectly fine using violence and manipulation then you are effectively just advocating for subservience to the bourgeoisie.
I am descending into madness.
We’re trained not to see the violence all around us, because we’re swimming in it all the time. Here’s a quote about the topic from Mark Twain that got me thinking years ago when I was starting to move left. Maybe it’ll speak to you too:
I love Monty Python, but I’ll never forgive them for turning “Come and see the violence inherent in the system” into a joke. Dennis was spitting FACTS.
That sounds great but how do you purpose we get there?
People who use violence for their own benefit can not be stopped without violence or a credible threat of violence.
On the 3rd of November 1970, Salvador Allende peacefully and by popular consent established a socialist government in Chile. By the 11th of September 1973 he had been overthrown and killed, his democratic government replaced with the fascist regime of Augustus Pinochet.
The revolution is necessary because the ruling class will fight to the last human to defend their unequal distribution of wealth.
Call it authoritarian if you will, but this is the struggle that must occur if you want to build a better world.