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!

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.

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

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.

Yes 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.

I didn’t see that coming

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

The

Marxism-Leninism hasn’t been shown to work

to

I’m a communist

Combo was crazy 💀

So 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.

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:

• A bloodless coup

• Genuinely anarchist

• Without counterrevolutionary forces

• Without the need to defend against the threat of outside attempts to destabilise or destroy socialism

• One where I had no concerns about whether I’d survive the revolution

• One where I wouldn’t need to consider the intricacies of managing uneven development, of enacting restorative justice for the peoples who have been subjected to imperialism and colonialism, of trying to balance competing demands like environmentalism, development, internationalism, and the allocation of scarce resources

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.

My comment’s in the highlights!

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