“Like China, our struggle sessions will purify The Party and bring unity to our socialist utopia”
Also, isn’t Beehaw like, a bunch of fuckin’ hippies? Like the kind of people you’d have to be insane to call fascists?
Hexbear users are pretty stupid because they almost exclusively alienate would-be supporters, or at least close allies.
They fundamentally cannot see the difference between any non-communist liberals (left) and fascism.
Liberals? Fascists. Social democrats? Fascists. Democratic socialists? Fascists. Anarcho-communists? Fascists.
Communists?
Believe it or not, also fascists.
They just believe anyone who isn’t with them is against them. It’s a common human failing.
I’d like to point out that liberals are considered left in US, but center right pretty much anywhere else.
So calling Socdems “filthy liberals” and telling socdems they’re going up against the wall… is still a great way to scare off potential allies.
Hence the parenthesis saying “left”. Hexbear is exclusively full of American users that pejoratively use the term ‘lib’, so it’s important in this context.
Like the kind of people you’d have to be insane to call fascists?
Well, it is Hexbear…
Tankies have an incredibly black and white view of the world. Anyone that isn’t with them is a fascist. It’s also why they can’t accept that their favorite authoritarians have practiced imperialism, oppression of minority groups, and lots of killing. “Stalin believed in the same economic policy that I do, so therefore he never did a bad thing.”
Hexbears say that anyone who’s against them are fascists so I’m not really surprised.
Did Beehaw go the way I feared it would?
I didn’t join it because I was concerned it would do exactly what I saw happening on reddit; go so far i to the everyone’s valid uwu mindset that they wind up making people uncomfortable in their own supposed safe zones and making pride labels into meaningless collectables instead of practical, useful terms.
Things like sexual asexuals and transgender people who see it as a trend to try out. Large majorities jumping in and claiming a label without understanding it at all and then retroactively re-defining the label to fit what they want it to mean, pushing away the original users because they’ve been outnumbered, outvoiced, and bullied into discomfort in their own space.
Beehaw just… gave me those vibes on first glance so I didn’t bother looking deeper for my own sanity.
That’s not it. The instance’s entire schtick is “be nice.” They have rules about doing things like assuming good faith in people you’re talking to until proven otherwise. This makes it a tonally different place. It’s heavily moderated. That’s it. That’s why they’re not gonna fuck with Hexbear or Lemmygrad or whatever else because those places are too tonally aggro for what Beehaw is trying to do and be.
You can disagree, you can have crazy opinions there, but you have to voice them politely and certain flavors of bigotry are not welcome. It’s actually great for certain kinds of conversations. Pushing people away from writing to dunk on each other forces a different sort of interaction that was sadly missing in much of the Internet.
Interesting. I might take a look then.
I got so tired on reddit from the communities making labels mean literally whatever someone wants them to mean that I was just over the entire thing. Personally watched the one I was part of shift from a simple, easy to understand concept for a rare group sharing a single trait to a whole umbrella of anyone who feels like making up a microlabel for their particular feeling at that point in time.
It got uncomfortable fast and many of the original group gave up and left from discomfort. That’s the kind of thing I fear finding in lgbt groups now.
I respect Beehaw for striving against all the odds to make a non-toxic space for their users on the internet. They do come across like the the summer of 67 of the Fedi.
That said the communities I’ve subscribed to are large but the conversations aren’t that vibrant.
They are so desperate for validations they’ve managed to twist this into evidence of communism as a superior ideology.
It’s hard to argue that communism as imagined by the tankies is better in any way than the souless capitalism that we all suffer under. However, real communism as imagined by Marx (but not Lenin) is vastly superior.
See, Marx saw the workers owning the means of production on a local scale. The example being factory workers owning the factory they worked in. Workers would directly profit from their own labor.
Lenin envisioned the State owning the means of production. Workers would work for the good of the State, or else.
Marx postulated that economies followed a sort of progression, feudalism led to capitalism, which in turn led to communism.
Unfortunately, the real world doesn’t work in neat, linear progressions.
Marx imagined a utopia, and Lenin, in an attempt to create something like it, reinvented feudalism with different masters. Which is not surprising, as Russia was still living under feudalism when Lenin was born.
My prediction for the future of government is as follows; as the climate crisis and automation crisis progress, there will be four types of government.
The first are failed states. They will have lost the climate roulette. Their populations are either fled or dead.
The second are puppet states. These will exist mostly for resource extraction. Their populations will still exist, but many will have fled or died. The rest will toil in resource extraction to feed the last two categories.
The penultimate is the fascist police state. China and Russia are well on their way to this outcome, and the US is actively flirting with it. This is the end game of capitalism. A new feudalism where the serfs are disposable and interchangeable, instead of tied to the land and part of an inheritance. The only saving grace is that fascism always leads to an unstable mess of a government that almost inevitably crashes and burns when the strongman dictator dies.
The final category is the automated utopia. Automation takes off fast enough to put everyone out of work, and the governments realize that money is just something we made up and decides to just let anyone have whatever they want (within reason) because it takes no human effort to produce anything.
The automated utopia is a dream, I hope it happens. It would look sort of like a cross between Marx’s dream of communism and UBI with no strings attached.
See, Marx saw the workers owning the means of production on a local scale. The example being factory workers owning the factory they worked in. Workers would directly profit from their own labor.
Yeah, that’s fucking stupid and based entirely on Marx’s completely unrealistic view of the world being divided in “the workers” and “the bad people who exploit them”.
Tell me this: If I am a repairman, and I want to “own the means of production” what do I do?
Are my means of production my tools? If so, then every and all self-employed workers are already living the communist dream, and no revolution is necessary.
But then, if I improve someone else’s means of production, and they are therefore able to produce more value, are they not stealing my surplus value? Am I now somehow a co-owner? Do they owe me royalties until they replace the machines? Would them changing the machines make any difference, since one could argue they were able to upgrade at least in part thanks to my intervention?
Also I fundamentally disagree that simply turning every business into a co-op takes us away from a fundamentally capitalist system. It just makes the “capitalists” into companies instead of single individuals.
Capitalism according to Marx isn’t bad because individuals create this relationship of value-theft with the proles, it’s bad because these relationships are allowed to exist and fundamental to the system’s survival and function.
But in a world where workers own the entirety of their businesses, companies/outfits/co-ops will still produce surplus value and that value will still need to be re-circulated in the economy in order for new enterprises to be created.
This has to be the case because if the non-vital productive endeavors didn’t produce surplus, there would be no way for society to compensate the labour of the producers of necessary goods like food or maintainers of vital infrastructure like acqueducts and electrical grids, whose work is necessary no matter what, unlike say a factory making lava lamps somewhere.
So then you have 2 options, either:
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this surplus exists and will need to be allocated somehow, and no workers would waste it without some return, since the alternative is to just pay themselves more and be done with it, hence returning straight back to the concept of capital injections and investments or,
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this surplus is requisitioned and redistributed by some central authority, and that’s how you become a tankie. Doesn’t matter how many layers of “democractic” decision making you tack onto how this central authority works or is selected, at the end of the day you are giving a specific group the power to decide who eats and who doesn’t, by virtue of deciding the allocation of society’s surplus into different endeavors.
If I want to go out and create something, I’ll need resources to do it. In a capitalist world all I need to get that done is to find someone willing to believe my idea can make them back the money they invested plus some interest. This is to offset the risk of losing the money in case their assessment is wrong.
In a world where “the workers own the means of production” I will have to convince a group of people of the same basic contention and will probably have the same deal with them instead than a single person. Probably harder as groups tend to be slower at making decisions and less likely to take big risks.
In a world where a single entity controls the allocation of surplus I still have to convince them, and if they don’t see value in my idea, I have to either give up on it and do whatever they assign me to do, or starve (no communist society is a work-free society).
Automation takes off fast enough to put everyone out of work, and the governments realize that money is just something we made up and decides to just let anyone have whatever they want (within reason) because it takes no human effort to produce anything.
My guy, did you just erase the second law of thermodynamics from reality?
Entropy is inescapable. All this premise does is make labour worthless, it does nothing to provision resources to actually make the “whatever they want (within reason).”
That shit would still be valuable even if it were endless, and most of what we use daily is made with finite resources (petrol, metals) anyway so you would still need to trade in some way, which means you will still need to make surplus to compensate, or worse you’ll need to conquer the regions that have the materials your society needs to be able to fulfill the needs of this society.
Ancient Rome had free food and free circus shows for everyone, it did it by exploiting an entire continent and parts of others. Resources are finite, labour among them. Making labour infinite (or rather a byproduct of a different resource, power as opposed to food) doesn’t make the other resources less scarce.
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It’s hard to imagine the Utopia imagined in the chronicles of Narnia could be worse than what we currently have under capitalism.
But like Carl Marx and what his followers imagine it’s not real. its made up fantasy. Real societies function on proven functioning principles. Not made up nonsense.
You can say
I want everyone to be equal
But they never can be because everyone is different and so by definition of their own individual existence cannot be. They only way to make everyone equal is to kill everyone. And that’s what communism does best.
You’re confusing Marx and Lenin. They had two vastly different ideas about what communism should be.
We have a century of Lenin, and yes, it came with death and destruction, including Leninist communists murdering Marxist communists.
You also don’t seem to understand that capitalism is so much worse. If you have no value in a fully capitalist society, you die far faster than even in a Leninist feudal society pretending to be communist.
The two East Indies Companies are prime examples of what capitalism run rampant get you. Murder and genocide in the name of profit, and the thing is, that shit is still going on. People elsewhere in the world are being exploited and murdered on a daily basis, so that you can live in a happy capitalist society.
Shit like this is why I don’t get (some of) the LGBTQ community’s fascination with communism and tankies.
They have proven themselves just as anti-LGBTQ as the fascists.
