DictatrshipOfTheseus [comrade/them, any]

Same. Deeply grateful for the pushback on it, though.

I know it was deployed against Iraqis during the first Gulf War, with Hillary Clinton claiming Saddam was issuing his troops with Viagra specifically so they could [redacted] more.

I don’t doubt r**e was a claim made against Iraqis too, but it’s the absurd claim about soldiers taking babies from incubators that most sticks out in my memory when it comes to Iraq and the first Gulf War. However, Hilary Clinton talking about soldiers being given viagra was definitely about Gaddafi. Keep in mind who was in power when those respective conflicts were happening.

I don’t mean to refute that but they do have somewhat strict laws around nazi apoligia.

Yeah, about that…

https://hexbear.net/post/720421

1. Mostly it was about fooling you into thinking that, as a worker, you have even an iota of power within that company.

2. You: “The owners deserve all the value that results from owning the company and not the workers because the owners own the company, duh.” Reread what you said and note the ridiculous circular logic.

3. The company would continue to function perfectly fine without the owner(s), yet would immediately cease to function or even exist without the workers. The only role the owner plays in the company (that the workers operate), is to siphon the value away from the workers who made it and unto themselves.

Alright, like I said, maybe I need to learn more about MMT, but as I’ve understood it so far, it’s a way of understanding the nuts and bolts of what’s actually going on with things like inflation, dollar hegemony, etc. It’s not contradicting Marxism at all, just delving into the ridiculous cult-religion of neoliberal economics and attempting to materially explain all those things that are taboo to classic western economists. It’s not a refutation of a Marxist concept of economy and it’s not advocating for social democracy. Do you think Michael Hudson is lying or do you think he’s confused, or is what he talks about not actual MMT?

I think all of that is a gross mischaracterization of what he’s doing. Have you watched his videos or listened to The Deprogram podcast? None of what you said is required to meet people where they are at. As I said upthread, I think it’s best to have a multitude of different approaches. But to act like going immediately from “socialism is when the government does stuff” to “Death to America” is the only correct way of introducing people to concepts and realities that they have been taught to despise and reject since they were old enough to speak, is naive at best. (Btw, they often say “Death to America” on The Deprogram, only it gets bleeped just barely enough that they won’t get instantly banned from every podcast platform.)

I don’t see the utility in convincing a bunch of people in the imperial core that they should be investing more into the long term interests of the western bourgeoisie. That they should be concerned about stabilizing capitalism and reforming it.

I completely agree. I just don’t think that the dude who runs Second Thought is doing that. That channel is among the best there is, if not the best, for getting liberals to start considering things outside of their bullshit worldview. The guy is as at least as radical as most people here, but he’s cognizant of the fact that the typical western libs aren’t capable of going from supporting “the lesser evil” blue team to calling for a protracted people’s war against the US. Pipelines are real, and JT as well as the other Deprogram boys have made an excellent opening for people to jump into it, people who would otherwise just scoff at anything that seems to resemble gommulism.

I admit I don’t know enough about MMT and am willing to learn about where I’m wrong. But from my limited understanding, MMT is narrowly just theory about how economics works without anything prescriptive to say about revolution. You can recognize that MMT explains a lot of the things that western “economists” are utterly blind to (and outright refuse to look at) and still be a dedicated Marxist/ML. Doesn’t even Michael Hudson talk a lot about MMT? Should we write him off as not worth paying attention to because of that?

I don’t know what JT’s views are on MMT, and I am skeptical it even matters. But I do know he’s not a social democrat, he’s a radical Marxist and has openly and frequently said so. If I remember right, even said so here during the last AMA.

people just get trained in Marxism right away. Why can’t we just do that and skip the cringe stage?

A multitude of strategies is a good thing. Different tactics work on different people.

We’ve been trying the succ dem slow pipeline for 200 years in the West and it hasn’t worked.

Tell that to all the people here who started their journey to radicalization because of . Also, JT doesn’t advocate for succdemery, he explicitly states it’s not socialism and actual socialism is what’s needed. The fact remains, one of the best strategies for getting people in the core to even begin questioning the water they’ve been swimming in their entire lives is to meet them where they’re at, then go from there.

I guess I’m trying to understand what makes this a liberal viewpoint or why do you classify it as such?

I guess I am just trying to understand the viewpoints of my communist fellow humans

I’m not the person you’re responding to, but… A liberal viewpoint (in this context) is one that is idealist, not materialist. A liberal will point at a policy ostensibly drawn up to address some given issue, and whether that policy is effective or not, or even whether the policy is enforced, will claim that “something is being done” to address that issue. In a liberal framework, it is the policy itself that satisfies the condition that the issue has been addressed, not any actual action that makes a real material difference to solve or change the issue. Again, it’s just idealism vs materialism. Liberalism is a philosophy based on the former, communism is (among other things) a philosophy based on the latter.

I’m not the person you’re replying to, but I think you missed the whole point of GarbageShoot asking you specifically about Allende.

just based on a small snippet of reading about them, I think in general […]

I think this is the main problem here: a lack of knowledge about the historical context of “authoritarian” socialist projects, but nevertheless making generalized statements about them without even considering the material reasons why they were by necessity “authoritarian.” Read up more about the history of Chile and consider what happened to Allende and the hope of a socialist Chile. Who came after Allende (and almost as important, who installed that successor)? Why do these events seem so familiar when learning about every other attempt, successful or not, to bring about a communist society? When you’ve done that, you will at the very least have a leg to stand on when criticizing so-called tankie authoritarianism.

I’d also suggest reading The Jakarta Method. Here’s a somewhat relevant quote from it:

This was another very difficult question I had to ask my interview subjects, especially the leftists from Southeast Asia and Latin America. When we would get to discussing the old debates between peaceful and armed revolution; between hardline Marxism and democratic socialism, I would ask: “Who was right?”

In Guatemala, was it Árbenz or Che who had the right approach? Or in Indonesia, when Mao warned Aidit that the PKI should arm themselves, and they did not? In Chile, was it the young revolutionaries in the MIR who were right in those college debates, or the more disciplined, moderate Chilean Communist Party?

Most of the people I spoke with who were politically involved back then believed fervently in a nonviolent approach, in gradual, peaceful, democratic change. They often had no love for the systems set up by people like Mao. But they knew that their side had lost the debate, because so many of their friends were dead. They often admitted, without hesitation or pleasure, that the hardliners had been right. Aidit’s unarmed party didn’t survive. Allende’s democratic socialism was not allowed, regardless of the détente between the Soviets and Washington.

Looking at it this way, the major losers of the twentieth century were those who believed too sincerely in the existence of a liberal international order, those who trusted too much in democracy, or too much in what the United States said it supported, rather than what it really supported – what the rich countries said, rather than what they did.

That group was annihilated.

I’m curious what aspects of that comment you thought were fantastical. Will you elaborate and be specific?

Good explanation.

Just last night I also found myself explaining the misunderstanding around the term “liberal” to someone else who was talking as though they thought we were using conservative talking points because we were using anti-liberal language. I would bet we’ll be seeing a lot of that now. Here was my attempt to clear up the misconception:

Just so it’s clear, OP isn’t drawing a distinction here between amerikkkan liberals and conservatives. A lot of times when leftists complain about liberals or liberalism, people who aren’t exposed to leftism will mistakenly take this to mean that we’re pro-conservative. We are NOT pro-conservative.

When we talk about liberals, we mean in the broader sense of people who subscribe to the philosophical tenants of liberalism, or in other words, people who think that capitalism is a good and/or natural thing. To us, conservatives are pretty much just a subset of liberals who have even more reactionary opinions about certain social issues than the standard liberal. This misunderstanding isn’t the fault of the people who misunderstand, mainstream media depicts all politics as being a binary battle between the dems and the GOP, a sport where two teams face off and that’s it. But in much of the world, “liberal” is actually synonymous with right wing and that’s how we use it. In the US, liberal tends to mean “left wing” but only because the overton window is so grotesquely far to the right, and anticapitalism isn’t even a consideration in US politics.

Forgive me if you already know all this, but because we’re seeing new people around here due to federation, I think it’s a good idea to point this out and avoid the possibility of conflating our utter contempt for liberalism with any sort of positive view of conservatism.

It is true that there are plenty of people who use reddit that are not racist (setting aside the idea that everyone who lives in a racist society, which we in the west do, has at least some internalized racism). Some people on reddit even actively fight against it, to their credit. That said, as a platform, both in terms of the people who run and administrate it, as well as the larger majority mass of users, definitely tends towards racism. This can be seen in all kinds of ways, from admins always siding with of racists over bipoc to the frothing-at-the-mouth hatred of the “orcish hordes” that dominates in every popular subreddit (and the silencing of those who offer even the mildest criticism of it), to the understandable yet very telling rabid defense of the privilege so many of them insist they earned when it is nothing more than old fashioned white privilege. You seem to agree that reddit is bad for its corporatist bullshit and its laser focus on profit at the expense of people. We agree. But that alone is inherently systemically racist for sociological reasons that I’m assuming you’re aware of, given some of your other comments. For all these reasons, it is hardly an overreaction or unfair to refer to reddit as “a racist website.”

As for “authoritarian” communists, all I’ll say here is that I hope you can learn to seriously, genuinely question a lot of what you have learned from what amounts to an ocean of propaganda deliberately spread for decades (even over a century) to demonize any successful socialist revolution. I’d encourage you to ask some of us “tankies” in good faith about some of that propaganda in other appropriate threads.

It’s a criticism of liberal democracy, and a fair one at that, because those will always be ultimately ruled by the wealthy elite. Hence the term dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. It’s why abortion is once again illegal in much of the US, it’s why the US doesn’t have universal healthcare despite it being very much wanted by a large majority of the population. It’s why France is still upping the age of retirement despite essentially no one wanting that and has become a de facto police state to suppress that population from protesting it. Nazis absolutely do not have to be a majority for a liberal democracy to quickly become a fascist state.

Surprise surprise, libs arrogantly assuming they’re the default and pearl-clutching about being “brigaded” because they got exposed to ideas that don’t fit the narrative they’ve swallowed, exactly the way they always do. Vapid, self-centered actors through and through.

I mean… yes. Here’s the response I got:

from A_truth_warrioress

sent 2 hours ago

YOU CALL HEXBEAR

then,

Look.

I had an account but was banned for QUESTIONING the tenets of MARXISM like

1.) Accepting the new normal.

2.) Desiring a globalist communist hegemon.

While I may not agree with the current president he is not the communist or even socialist he is put out to be.

I see how you treat A O C and A N T I F A looter types there.

When Van Spronson died … I wept.

I was banned when I questioned this Gates - Soros - Clinton - Epstein plan to m4$K and in00cul4t3.

I have an account and many more, I am writing a paper to read at CPAC (my dad goes every year) blowing the lid off this cabal of INFLUENCERS you can hexbear.

In their post history they mention their therapist telling them to stay off social media.

Specifically because we are apparently targeting them:

Seriously, thanks whoever sent this to me from here. I also lost my phone (fuck you Cindy) and I restarted therapy. She said I need to stop using social media so much since that is where the hexbear-tankies target me.

I didn’t see that until after I invited them here.
If it’s not a bit, I probably just totally confirmed that delusion.

Hey. I am a regular person who also frequents hexbear.net. I’m not sure if you’re a “bit” account - that is, I don’t know if you’re actually also a hexbear.net person who is saying this stuff as a bit/joke, maybe even as a way of giving us notoriety or something.

If so, awesome! But if not… if you’re actually concerned that me and the other hexbear.net people have some dark agenda… please come talk to us. I mean, yeah, we have the pie in the sky hopes that capitalism will finally succumb to it’s inherent contradictions and socialism->communism can be built in its stead, but “that’s just like our political view man.” I mean, capitalism is killing the planet and needs to go, yes?

But seriously, come on the site and have a discussion with us. Air your grievances with us and what you think we’re wrong about, or what we’re doing wrong. I dunno, I’m just some drunk leftist guy who wants left unity, and has seen your posts and laughed (not in a mean way, but in like… that’s hilarious someone thinks that of the site I post on kind of way).

I don’t know. Obviously, it’s up to you. But I for one promise not to be an asshole to you, assuming the sentiment works both ways.

There is also the very unlikely and amusing 1 in a million chance you’re a fed. And if that’s the case… keep doing what you’re doing. You’re making hexbear look cooler than it is. But if that is indeed the case that you’re an op, my invitation to come talk with us is rescinded. heh

I just sent them, u/A_truth_warrioress a PM on :reddit-logo:, inviting them here to come discuss the situation with us.