if you'll pardon me complaining about this publicly: some of the meanest mfs i've met online are internet-poisoned communists. If i weren't already a marxist-leninist, i would have some very unsavory ideas about what communists are like.
Lemmygrad and Hexbear are very nice places, thank you comrades _ … but elsewhere, even IRL, i've met incredibly rude people calling themselves communists and i need to stress this: if you want people on our side, you need to give good impressions of what we're like. Don't be hostile or dismissive or just violently anti-social. If you have to explain something for the millionth time to yet another liberal or anarchist… do it [insert Sankara quote], or at least find a nice way of saying you don't want to. Save your offensive capabilities for people who deserve it. And please, PLEASE, go outside occasionally. IRL interaction is healthy, and will quickly kill any terminally online behaviours you might have. Maybe join an org while you're at it ;)
i'll stop stating the obvious now. Have a great day, comrades.
I just recently saw a couple of posts on reddit that blew my mind with how condescending and downright hostile some folks were to someone asking an honest question on the fucking communism101 sub. Basically the person asking a question about if being a lawyer would be a good profession to get into to assist people and they were basically told that they just wanted to live a cushy life and were self serving, unethical, and basically gave the impression that whatever good they wanted to do was just liberal fantasy. I felt so bad for OP especially since it was a communism for beginners sub. There was a similar post on the regular r/communism where OP got their ass chewed out too. I can see getting annoyed with those types of questions but good lord did they leave a bad taste in my mouth.
One person did post a pretty interesting article that has made me shift my perspective a bit but even in that they called social workers pathetic and like, how is that constructive at all?
How can they be communists and not know that Castro and Lenin were lawyers?
The CIA even created a whole booklet about communist lawyers called "Communist Legal Subversion: The Threat of Communist Lawyers".
Damn I forgot that about Castro and I don't know much about Lenin (yet), that's wild that they would just ignore that to bully someone online. Pretty much everyone told him it's a self serving idea. Link it felt insufferable and I wanna read and post that booklet now
A Reddit link was detected in your comment. Here are links to the same location on Teddit and Libreddit, which are Reddit frontends that protect your privacy.
Huh, looks like all these links are dead. Does anyone know if these sites work since the Reddit changes? maybe this bot needs to be fixed, or the reddit part removed if these sites don't work anymore.
I remember a buncha Maoists dogpiling me on FB, referring to me as little more than a petit-bourgeois LARPer worthy of the same vengeant hatred we hold for all rentiers.
I had made a joke about which stock I should pump some money into after Ansarallah blew up a shit ton of Saudi oil. A joke. That then devolved into the worst nothing-ass struggle session you've ever seen over whether or not one can be proletarian and own stocks.
I had like $50 to my name at the time. I wasn't asking for genuine investment advice. Still, terminally online communists find a way...
No, everything has to be serious at all times and we cannot find any humor in the absurdity of hell world. 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 am very smart and people like being around me.
Cracks me up every time.
Why is shrimp salad racist? Is this more esoteric terminally online lore that I didn't know about or did this beautiful bastard just snatch that sentence out of the ether, wholly formed?
im sorry that happened to you, or well done idk im not reading all of that
lol you should it's a top tier copypasta from an actual comment in a thread from a hexbear post a couple years back.
☢️ 🌚 ☢️
Fr though, shorting US interests is going to turn that $50 into FALC one day. That's some payout.
Marx owned stocks, the fucking shitlib.
Do you havea link to the article?
These mfs need to read What is to be done? I'm sure it's in there. About how we basically need people in all professions. It's partly why I advocate for people getting any education and not worrying too much about whether a profession is pure enough (maybe don't join the police or military or work for an arms dealer).
It'd be great if we could all study Marxism and get employed at Revolution Inc but it's not an option. So in the meantime, we need to learn to think, to develop skills and learn how the world works, to be well placed for when things start to change, and to be doing whatever little good we can in our day-to-day lives. It doesn't hurt to get organised, either.
Here is the article
I haven't read the whole thing but it sure did make me wanna cry and quit my job lol
Also a lawyer is directly in a position to meaningfully help people
and someone considering becoming a lawyer is probably a teenager chosing their university and it's more wrong to bully them because they are children
You’re right.
Lenin was a lawyer and paralegal in the Russian Empire. People attacking others for their jobs (unless it’s something comically evil like CIA Agent) is bizarre, reductive and not helpful in any meaningful capacity. A lawyer is objectively a wonderful profession. Plus they are overworked, exploited, and pushed to the brink, all in trying to help others, as only 0.05% of lawyers are those extremely wealthy corporate capitalists, most are really poor.
communism101 has been toxic as hell for a long time now
What do you think makes people get so cynical? I just don't understand it.
I couldn't give you a definite answer but I have a quirky little theory of how the users there got to be that way. It's important to realize that most Marxist learning groups don't sprout from a place of everyone being given the same authority. Like Mao wrote, "NO INVESTIGATION, NO RIGHT TO SPEAK." /r/communism101 on the other hand has no such barrier to opinion and so revisionism and flawed analyses are abundant. There is nothing keeping this in check because the mods are absent at best and unprincipled at worst. It's essentially a breeding ground for debatebros.
The life cycle of a /r/communism101 debatebro goes something like this:
A promising socialist in the process of unlearning liberalism goes to /r/communism101 to get their questions about Capital answered.
They get their questions answered with likely revisionist perspectives and skewed applications of dialectics by flawed but well meaning comrades.
They lurk on the subreddit for a while until eventually they feel confident enough to carry on the game of telephone that is the amorphous ideology of /r/communism101. At this point their liberalism has likely not been filtered out yet, ideological purity, moral superiority, and an inability to receive critique are common traits found in a /r/communism101 debatebro. These traits inspire the toxicity you find in that community.