Some highlights from a recent lemmy lib dunking on lemmygrad
Authoritarian - Lemmygrad
excellent thread all around. excellent work from our comrades on lemmygrad. thank you to our mod for putting up the firewall between us and lemm.ee
do check out the full thread, as always our comrades on lemmygrad are both intelligent and graceful.
it doesn’t matter if you lift billions of people out of poverty and they never have to worry about certain material conditions and therefore improve their quality of life, what makes a society better is being able to “view information contrary to the state”.
Wow. So posting on Hexbear is praxis.
Contributing to the activity of communist controlled spaces online? Yes.jpg
Don’t conflate liberals and the right. Liberals don’t actively try to fuck over workers like rightists are. Further, it doesn’t matter what liberals were 100 years ago, do you think Biden is as bad as Trump?
liberals are a gift
Liberals don’t actively try to fuck over workers like rightists are.
🚄👷🧑🔧🧑🏭🚃🚃
do you think Biden is as bad as Trump?
More and more I think Biden is worse than Trump. Here's why:
Now it is certainly possible points 2 and 3 would have been done under Trump too, just as badly. But I do not see any wag Trump could have done worse than Biden on these -- Biden has already been disastrous. But had it been Trump who were doing 2 and 3, Liberals would have had a kneejerk and performative opposition to them which could have resulted in at least materially better outcomes. When Trump embraced antimasking, liberals masked out of spite and that helped us collectively fight covid. When Biden embraced antimasking, liberals abandoned masking out of fear that acknowledging tbr pandemic was still going on would give Trump a political talking point, and they helped spread covid. Biden did more to normalize a forever plague than Trump did.
So yeah. Biden is materially worse than Trump and the only reason liberals can't see this is that they have been trained to only consider rhetoric, not material conditions.
it doesn’t matter what liberals were 100 years ago
The liberal rejection of history on full display. In an irl argument I had a few weeks ago, a guy I know tried to act like the KMT takeover of Taiwan 70 years ago was irrelevant to modern-day politics.
This China Has Billionaires article someone linked deep into the replies is great.
The party’s overarching aim, though, has remained consistent: to ensure that the private sector, and individual entrepreneurs, do not become rival players in the political system. The party wants economic growth, but not at the expense of tolerating any organised alternative centres of power.
This is a really interesting observation to me (and probably obvious to others here) because I hadn't thought of it that way before. Like how bourgeois governments eagerly put down leftist movements, a communist government needs to eagerly put down bourgeois movements.
I loved that he kept demanding I give him sources, but I already did, and he ignored them because I wasn't presenting them to him for him to slap away. Made his "you keep refusing to provide sources!" screeching hilarious, because he just didn't even notice.
Not just put them down but allow them exist on a leash just long enough to benefit the class in power. Each state gets something from the exchange, but what they get is very different. The capitalist state gets to control the labor movement and misdirect any left unity preventing any true left power to grow while using the unions as a carrot keeping workers from getting unruly. The pre-socalist state gets the rapid development of industry from their walled open market while enforcing strict market controls and acting as the working class enforcement mechanism, allowing the entrapanures to be empowered enough but not so empowered they begin controlling the levers of power.
I didn't see that comingYes it does. A name inherently defines the characteristics of whatever it’s being used for. For example, the names your mother calls me during sex defines the intrinsic nature of our relationship, that is me being the oppressive dom authority figure (because I’m a tankie), and her the submissive proletariat.
Love the Marx understander teaching us about Marx’s views on the state by pulling the first quote they could find from the communist manifesto
Strong
vibesSo what? They banned google as protectionism, this way their infant tech sector didn’t have to compete with an already established monopoly. Now China has their own alternatives to all these google services, and the profits of these industries don’t go to the West but stay in China. Plus the infrastructure is in China so it’s not a security risk.
I've been pretty lib in the past, and have been unsure at times of things like banning certain websites, but Google should be banned worldwide. This is a good rebuttal which could help open the minds of some libs. If a Chinese company was doing everything Google does and had their power, the western lib would support their banning unquestioningly.
Bit idea: get into a discussion about Tiktok with this lib, except in your mind substitute every mention of Tiktok for Google.
See what conclusions they arrive at, then drop the plot-twist on them and explain that everything that has been said applies directly to Google.
They'll say this shit and then turn around and then fawn over Biden for blocking Chinese microchip processors
The
Marxism-Leninism hasn't been shown to work
to
I'm a communist
Combo was crazy 💀
While this quote does not encapsulate marx’s entire view on the state, it shows that Marx sees that the state is bourgeois and therefore antagonistic to the proletariat.
I understood why the person made this mistake, but goddamn it was funny to watch them repeatedly double down on it.
It was like back in grade school when you had to present your book report in front of the class knowing you didn't read the book so you just Google the synopsis 💀 a shining example of why actually reading the material is important, and this was the fucking Communist Manifesto lmao 😂 hardly something that takes a long time to read
Speaking as an ex-anarchist, there's absolutely nothing that I'd love more for it to be possible to achieve socialism through non-"authoritarian" methods (whatever the fuck that means exactly) as long as it doesn't require demanding that the people in the developing world just sit tight for a couple of centuries while we sort our shit out.
As I went through my own existential crisis with my politics, I dug into the history of anarchist movements I came to the understanding that (at least for the ones which have a decent amount of scholarship in the English language) they engaged in a lot of authoritarian measures themselves but that there's a prevailing narrative amongst anarchists that whitewashes this history.
This is me being completely earnest but I think that when it comes to things like the famine that the USSR faced (all of the USSR, not just the Ukrainian thank you very much) or the way that the gulags or the purges were administered, things could have been handled better. That's not to engage in armchair quarterbacking but to simply acknowledge that there were excesses and that mistakes were made. I have found that principled communists are very willing to engage in good-faith discussions about this stuff but, on the other hand, I found it very perturbing that when I would take my concerns or criticisms about actually-existing anarchism to anarchists, even ones whose opinions I respected, they would almost always reflexively dismiss historical facts as Soviet propaganda/liberal propaganda or they would engage in that deep sorta skepticism that's reserved only for when things go against a preferred narrative. Either that or there was the sort of tactical retreat in an ideological sense where the response was that if such-and-such happened then that's an example of an unjust hierarchy and thus they categorically denounce it, and that pretty much signalled the end of the discussion.
Obviously this only deepened my political crisis of faith because I wanted to understand how authoritarianism was dealt with internally and in what ways that we could learn from history to mitigate this but it seemed like everyone around me either didn't want to believe it, didn't want to know about it, it didn't want to talk about it. (I think that Kwame Ture's bit about the man who hates snakes is very relevant here.)
It made me realise that there's a necessary degree of hierarchy and "authoritarianism" that is required to achieve and defend a revolution successfully, and it made me reflect upon whether my politics amounted to personal preference or whether they are grounded in what I believe needs to happen.
If the revolution kicked off in my country tomorrow, I can just about guarantee you that I wouldn't survive to see it take root because I truly am not cut out for surviving a civil war. That's not to say that I wouldn't try to make it through but I certainly wouldn't count on it happening.
I don't think that outsiders really understand that about my politics.
I'm not power hungry, I'm not fighting for state capitalism where I can sit comfortably high up in the bureaucracy to live a lavish lifestyle, I don't relish violence nor do I want to see more of it in the world.
In a political sense the only things that I truly want are an end to capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism. Everything else flows from that point and what I see as being necessary to achieve those outcomes.
If it was just about what I wanted the revolution would be:
But I don't get to choose any of that. The only thing I get to choose is what I believe has the best chances of abolishing capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism.
I find it pretty galling when people tell me that I don't understand anarchism or that I'm a Soviet larper or that I'm power hungry. Imagine telling someone that the only reason they are a communist is because of self-serving interest when in reality my political struggle, if it ever manages to achieve anything, is one where the outcome is basically:
Of course no lib is ever going to listen to my story because they will have already made up their mind as soon as they hear the word "communist" or "ML".
This is one of the funniest responses in the thread:
chatgpt answer if I’ve ever seen one.
I've seen quite a few threads now where I'd swear libs are just having chatgpt write their answers for them.
Back in the olden days, I used to insult libs by telling them that their comment wouldn't pass the Turing Test.
Nowadays the effort of writing replies that would score a D on the Turing Test can be outsourced to language-learning models. Truly, we are living in the future!
My comment's in the highlights!
I had two entries 😎👌🏿
This person is the most confidently incorrect one I've seen in a while, declaring things so confidently yet has clearly no idea wtf they're talking about. My favorite is how they think China blocking google is censorship because they think google is an information repository lol.
Let me simplify it for you. It doesn’t matter if they allegedly have better material conditions when they can’t view information contrary to the state.
it doesn't matter if things are objectively better if I can't be a contrarian.
everybody knows that true socialism is when you stick up for the rights of surveillance search engine corporations like google
Can I participate on Lemmygrad with the same login I use here? I'm not really an active user anymore, but I'm trying to get away from FB and still need a little bit of online interaction with other communists.
Yeah, there's nothing stopping you from just subscribing to various lemmygrad channels that you like, though lemm.ee is blocked by Hexbear, but not Lemmygrad, which means you probably won't be able to see responses from libs like this one, which may actually be a benefit, not a negative for you.
I was trying to find where you can see the non-Hexbear lemmy communities, and that's when I noticed that the Communities section has "local" and "all" options now. That's really cool, thanks for letting me know!
though lemm.ee is blocked by Hexbear, but not Lemmygrad, which means you probably won't be able to see responses from libs like this one
federation works in mysterious ways
you can subscribe to any lemmygrad community and interact with lemmygrad posts using your hexbear account on hexbear.com. you can't login to lemmygrad.ml using your hexbear account. you can't see posts or comments made on lemmygrad by accounts from instances that aren't federated with hexbear (ex. lemmy.world, lemm.ee)
for example, here's the original thread, but on hexbear: https://hexbear.net/post/2113646
you'll notice you can't see the funny stuff, because of federation.
you can freely interact with our comrades from lemmygrad, though!
Lemmygrad.com leads to some weird zionist site btw, some domain squatter bought it some time ago. lemmygrad.ml
Cool, thanks for taking the time to explain that! I haven't been active on Hexbear since before federation was a thing, so all of this is new to me.
Get they ass Lemmygrad
god I hate lemm.ee
the fediverse is shit
They really quoted the Manifesto and said:
While this quote does not encapsulate marx’s entire view on the state, it shows that Marx sees that the state is bourgeois and therefore antagonistic to the proletariat.
But this guy is probably like 14 and definitely banned, so there's no need to spend much time worrying about their sophomorism
Libs; the most stupendously ignorant, easily debunked propaganda that western anti-communist governments even admit is bullshit*
Marxists: hundreds of pages of text explaining what really happened in excruciatingly granular detail
Libs: nu-uh!
Imagine how smart liberals would be if they had an attention span longer than that of a goldfish
That meme about the person's grandpa being immune to communist propaganda because he couldn't read was so fucking on the nose it hurts.
"Hey, look! A castle!
....
Hey, look! A castle!"