To any lurking good faith lemmy users who want to ask questions about socialism, you may do it in this thread, I will protect you
To all full-grown hexbears, NO DUNKING IN MY THREAD...ONLY TEACH, criminal scum who violate my Soviet will be banned three days and called a doo doo head...you have been warned
I don't mean this as a dunk, but usually what has to get taught about leftist politics isn't the specific claims of Marxism or what socialism is. Usually what western people have to be instructed with is current/former socialist countries are legitimate places and not cartoonish dictatorships. The nationalism brain worm runs far deeper than the capitalist one. And it's that kind of sentiment that will entangle itself with their understanding of what western socialists advocate.
It's pretty normal to accept anti-capitalist sentiment, even right wingers will use that kind of rhetoric, but it's far less normal to praise the west's enemies or to even view them as valid human beings. It's why it's so common for western leftists to first and foremost condemn the west's enemies as doing socialism incorrectly.
That's just what I experience most of the time when I get curious questions about socialism. I might get the odd question about how you motivate people without money, but the bulk of questions are about stuff like what haircuts are illegal in the DPRK.
What’s it truly like to live in communist north korea right now? I know that most of the buzz around how it’s a failed state and they’re starving the people are mostly propaganda, but it’s so hard to tell fact from fiction especially since there’s propaganda within the state as well.
Both my husband and I are children of expats from former Soviet countries. And while I think I'm fairly open to socialist ideas, I do get caught up on the fact that the people among our relatives who are most nostalgic for the Soviet Union are also VERY racist, homophobic, terrible to animals and just generally mean to everyone around them. And their food, in all its hyper-processed mystery meat and mayonnaise glory, kinda sucks.
*** TO ALL NEW HEXBEARS OR LEMMT LIBERALS! THE FOLLOWING PASSAGE IS SOMETHING THAT MUST BE STEIVED TOWARDS, FKR IT IS PERFECTION ***
The last time I smiled was on August 19th, 1991.
I wear a dirty ushanka at all times, do not shave, and only take cold sponge baths because hot running water is bourgeoisie decadence.
Every day at exactly noon I have the same meal of an expired Maoist MRE I store in a pit covered in old issues of a revolutionary newspaper.
I sleep in a bed made of flags from every failed revolution so that they are never forgotten.
In the evenings I stare at a picture of vodka by candlelight, but I do not allow myself to drink because there is nothing to celebrate.
Every local org has banned me after I attempted to split it by assassinating the leadership.
There is no plumbing in my house I shit in a brass bucket with a picture of Gonzalo and Deng french kissing in the bottom of it.
My house is actually an overturned T34 in an abandoned junkyard in Wisconsin.
I have a single friend in this world and it is a tapeworm named Bordiga that I met after ingesting spoiled borscht on 9/11 in the ruins of building 7 (I blew it up after finding that a nominally leftist NGO inside of it wasn’t sufficiently anti-imperialist, the attacks on the world trade center were a perfect revolutionary moment for me to enact direct praxis against liberalism).
My source of income is various MLM schemes in the former soviet bloc that have been running for so long no one remembers who I am, they just keep sending money.
I have not paid taxes since McGovern lost the Democratic nomination for president and my faith in electoralism died more brutally than my childhood dog after it got into an entire jar of tylenol.
I own 29 fully automatic rusted kalashnikovs and three crates of ammunition entirely incompatible with them or any other firearms I own.
My double PHD in marxist economics and 18th century Swiss philosophy (required to understand Engels) sits over the fireplace of my home, my fireplace is a salvaged drum from a 1950s washing machine that was recalled for locking children inside of it.
I chose that washing machine model on purpose because I am anti-natalist.
During the latest BLM protests I firebombed a Nikes outlet in the middle of a peaceful candlelit vigil.
William F Buckley and I wrote hatemail to one another for 47 years until my final letter gave him an aneurysm. The only water I drink is from puddles.
George Lucas and I dropped acid together during an MKULTRA southern baptist summer camp and he went on to write the movie Willow about our time together.
The best way to test whether an electrical wire is live is to drool on it and shrimp salad is racist. You can make an IED out of potassium and the instructions are online thanks to Timothy McVey, who was actually a committed antifascist communist slandered by the deep state as part of operation condor.
Every time a liberal files a restraining order against me, I carve a mark into the wall.
I am running out of walls.
When Amerika finally collapses I will be ready to lead the revolution.
I have to admit I'm a little nervous asking this. But how can one read more truthfully about what happened in Soviet Union with regards to gulags with forced labor and purges or executions of innocent people? I say 'innocent' because I know reactionaries got 'caught up' in that and, frankly, I don't care. But it's hard to know how far that went and how it impacted innocent people, as many people have said that it did and Khrushchev mentioned in his (in)famous speech.
For the record, I don't think Stalin was total evil Communist bad guy and that the 'wrong enemy' was defeated in WW2 and other crypto-fascist interpretations. I'm not saying that because some innocent people were killed under Stalin that therefore Stalin is evil, the same critique can be laid against the US (the suffering of innocents in its own prison system, for example) and it is more than likely far more guilty. I also don't really think Holodomor was an 'intentional genocide' or whatever, I know that is overblown by fascists. And I know lots of good happened in Soviet Union for common people but I also see it as a flawed system (only natural given its context in the world, no hate there) with a flawed leader (also natural given human beings) but how can Leftists better understand what happened with regards to the use of violent repression by the USSR? Or how is it reconciled, for lack of a better word, with Stalin as a leader to still uphold?
Among anarchists it's easy to just dismiss, and sometimes there is truth in the critiques, but I'm trying to also grow politically after many years so understanding what happened to dissidents and non-reactionaries is important to me in my understanding of how to view Stalin, in particular. When I was a kid I had a flag of the USSR in my room, then I found myself in anarchist spaces and highly critical of USSR, now I'm older and less idealistic and I know things are messy and it's honestly a miracle that Communism even had the chance it did with USSR despite flaws so I'm trying to understand it and honor it better.
I don't know if that was a clear question, sorry, kinda not doing great right now so I'm having a hard time formulating this while also assuring that I'm not a raging ultra (not anymore anyway) nor lib about it but would love to hear about this.
I have a question that I hope some of you will entertain. This is not meant as a criticism, but rather a sincere curiosity on my part. While there are numerous examples of how things can or could function in socialist societies, I am curious about anarchist societies. There appear to be various instances where there is no common answer, even within anarchist circles (as far as I know). Please note that I am not an anarchist (yet), so I would love to be enlightened.
How does healthcare look under anarchism, especially on an industrial large scale? How do you decide what gets build like lets say you need more energy how do you take care of that.I understand that this might seem like an abstract question, but when looking at socialist societies, there are examples of how things 'could' be done. However, I have no idea how things like that might look in an anarchist commune of California, for example.
Are there any reading materials on concrete ways how anarchist societies could function in modern times? I am aware that we have anarchist comrades, and I would love to learn more about it. Basically I think Anarchism sounds really cool but I have a hard time wrapping my head about how a functioning anarchist society would/could look and operate. Like are there books about bureaucracy under Anarchism ?
Where can I learn about China's recent economic history? I'm particularly interested in Deng Xiaoping's reforms and how they managed to resist being exploited like Africa is being right now despite opening up its markets.
How does a socialist system regulate the distribution of goods that cant be distributed, like lakefront housing. There's only so much room for it and more people want it than could have it
I am pretty solidly a communist but still pretty hung up on general leftist aversion to freedom of expression.
I've read a little bit about the Paradox of Intolerance and it does make sense (as much as a paradox can I guess), but it just bugs me that at the end of the day, whoever is in power gets to define "intolerance" and their definition might not match the majority's. And the majority might not be right either...
Some people would consider me intolerant for being against circumcision and piercing of infants' ears, because those are deeply-held cultural traditions for some people.
Reactionary and hate speech makes me fuckin sick. Yet I'm terrified that attempts to officially ban it just fuel persecution fetishes in people who practice it, and cause them to go further down their rabbit holes and drag more uncertain people with them.
Why do Hexbear socialists look at everything as all or nothing? It's like any movement towards the left that isn't an actual revolution is unacceptable. Personally I want to have more rights day to day even if it can't go all the way.
How can I get better at understanding contradiction? Specifically identifying contradictions, I'm still struggling a bit with the dialectical part of dialectical materialism.