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
some highlights
I haven’t only read Wikipedia, I’ve read things such as interviews from former Chinese citizens saying that Google was banned, and on their search engine the tiennamen square never existed. Also, how is China becoming more communist? The government getting profits from wage-slavery isn’t becoming more communist, it’s becoming the center of capitalism. Even if the government weren’t making direct profits from wage-labor, they still make profits from things like taxes and corporations buying land. When the government is making profits from capitalism, they won’t go socialist.
You do know the Tiennamen square is the literal most famous place in China right? It’s the place where there is this super famous building that is one of the country’s symbol and that almost every content about China ever can’t help but have at least one picture of.
So saying that the name of the place is censored in China is completely ridiculous.
As pointed out by others, the event that you are referring to is known in China as the june 4th incident so yes, of course if you type Tiennamen in the search bar you won’t find it, when you look up something on a non-english website maybe try to look up how the thing you’re looking for is called in the site’s language instead of assuming it’s called the same way in english you westernbrained monkey.
Why do you enjoy sucking your own dick?
Because I don’t have the reading comprehension skills of a fucking carrot.
Why do you not have the reading comprehension of a fucking carrot?
Marx said that the state was inherently oppressive. But I guess I missed the part where he said that it doesn’t matter if the party brands itself as communist.
If you bake a cake and you have this magnificent idea in your head; do you gather all the ingredients and then presto magic you have a beautiful cake in front of you? Or is there some sort of process that’s missing? Some sort of transitionary period?
There’s a reason it’s called Marxist-Leninism too, older works can be superseded or reanalyzed by newer works in a more refined context.Baking doesn’t cook down the ingredients and claim it’s heating them up.
In that case, why do they call it oven when you of in the cold food of out hot eat the food?
You could call any machine anything, yet it doesn’t become the thing.
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.
Marx said that the state was inherently oppressive. But I guess I missed the part where he said that it doesn’t matter if the party brands itself as communist.
Where did he say that? Can you quote the passage?
The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
-the Communist manifestoWhere in that quote does it say that, to use your words, ‘the state was inherently oppressive’?
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.
chatgpt answer if I’ve ever seen one.
The state is inherently antagonistic to the proletariat, because their controlling society gives rise to them creating their own class within the bourgeoisie.
Ehhhhhhhht wrong. What did Engles say about the state in On Authority? There’s literally a whole ass book called State and Revolution that you definitely haven’t read.
Lol “creating their own class within the bourgeoisie” 😭 I bet the smug was on a milli when you typed that outPower = authority is wild. Was freeing slaves authoritarian because the majority didn’t support it?
READ THE BOOKS MOTHERFUCKER 🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️
I personally view [freedom of a populace] as that if you can’t allow people to see other viewpoints, then material conditions don’t matter. As John Stuart Mill said in On Liberty, the person’s ability to choose for themself is more important than an alleged better living condition. Furthermore, I see that if China were so much better, they would let their people see the alternative. By not letting their people see something they allege is worse, they prove it is better.
Said by someone who has never really been hungry,
Ha yes, I’m sure having fucking google make the homeless in NY city sooo much better off than the peoples living in nice cheap apartments in Beijing. Tell me you’ve never been poor without telling me you’ve never been poor. 🤡
Again, I do not argue for capitalism, I agree with Stalin on this quote. I’m saying that I can go into whatever forum I want, and say that Joe Biden is committing genocide, and I don’t disappear, I don’t “kill myself” in my hotel room. I’m not defending capitalism, as I am a communist. The condition in which the worker lives is irreconcilable the universal liberty, however if China is socialism, in terms of liberty, they would be the same. I believe that socialism could be so much better. I believe that China could be so much better and it will be someday. But the state will not allow it.
You have to be a troll. But - you’re a pretty funny one. A Boeing whistleblower ‘killed himself in a hotel room’ literally just last week. You can yell at Joe Biden however much you want, he’s still gonna commit genocide without blinking.
for context, the Stalin quote: "It is difficult for me to imagine what ‘personal liberty’ is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment. Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible" (https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/03/01.htm)
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.
Hey y’all 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”.
“This society is great. I’m glad every source is monitored by the Chinese government, that’s how you know they’re factual.”
This but unironically
do check out the full thread, as always our comrades on lemmygrad are both intelligent and graceful. 
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.
it became a meme but it started as an unironic tweet
Considering Polish name of that guy, he was either talking bullshit since socialist Poland eliminated illiteracy, or his grandpa retained his purity of thought because he fled Poland in 1945.
"Hey, look! A castle!
....
Hey, look! A castle!"
- Liberals
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:
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When Biden started his presidency, he was already a war criminal with the blood of at least a million Iraqi people and idk how many Yemeni people on his hands. While Trump continued the murderous US foreign policy, he didn't have time to kill as many people. Biden has the higher body count when it comes to war and imperialism
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While in office Biden has started a proxy war in Ukraine, greenlit a coup in Pakistan, and waged a genocide in Palestine. Trump didn't do those during his term.
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Under Trump, we had halfassed covid safety measures -- partial lockdowns, covid unemployment, mask mandates, free and accurate tests. Under Biden, we lost all of those in order to go to a once-a-year vaccine-only strategy even when it became clear that the virus was mutating too quickly for that to work. More people have died of Covid under Biden than under Trump, and even more have contracted debilitating Long Covid.
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.
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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.
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.
ShowI 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 💀
It's like my cat screaming his lungs out at me to give him the AAA batteries that I bought from the store
I know what you meant but my brain read AAA batteries as "AHHH batteries" 😭
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
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.
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
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:
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A bloodless coup
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Genuinely anarchist
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Without counterrevolutionary forces
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Without the need to defend against the threat of outside attempts to destabilise or destroy socialism
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One where I had no concerns about whether I'd survive the revolution
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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:
Show
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".
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This is one of the funniest responses in the thread:
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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!
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.
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
I believe it was originally squatted on by some maga communist type. Kinda like how magacommunist.com redirects.
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.
