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  • I just wanted to say that the Midwest is cool and not flyover country as some coastal liberals might believe. Cleveland, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, all cool cities. The Midwest is the breadbasket (ok, cornbasket) of the country too, and keeps me full with cheap processed foods, so thank you.

  • And while you're here, think about going into settings and customising your displayname with pronouns. Makes the English lemmyverse a more welcoming and diverse place while also benefiting yourself in the form of extra upbears when people see you out and about!

    • I wonder what your thought is about not having the pronouns, not because I don't want to be welcoming and supportive, but because I don't want people to know. I use them irl (email, zoom, conferences, etc), but on the internet, no one knows you're a dog. Would this be a case for they/them even if I don't use these irl or is this disrespectful?

      • One of my favorite usernames here has always been that of @GenderIsOpSec@hexbear.net, so i can relate.

        In my opinion it's perfectly fine if you pick a gender neutral option for the sake of anonymity. You should just go with something you're comfortable with. I know people who've tried to adapt they / them as secondary pronouns to normalize that and quickly dropped the idea because it actually made them feel dysphoric. I went with they / them for a few months when i started questioning my gender because i needed something more open-ended before i was certain i'm a girl and could go with she / her, and i tried that out using the tag system on here because i was still in the closet back then. Ultimately, pronouns are about a very basic right - having autonomy over how people gender you. That means it's up to you and nobody else to decide which pronouns you go with, and given how gender identity works, that can mean there's options that just feel very, very off, alienating or even hurtful when they're actually used on you. It's perfectly ok to experiment a bit with pronoun options and see what fits both you and your opsec needs. Hexbear even has comrade / them pronoun tags. We also have pronoun options like none / use name, and i actually know a couple nonbinary people who prefer that over pronouns IRL, particularly because neopronouns are even less common in my 1st language than in English (although they / them or our localized variant dey / dem / deren is by now established in queer communities here in Germany).

  • I'm startled by the specific shout-out to the instance i'm on, since:

    • I didn't think midwest.social was particularly big and,
    • having grown up around a lot of liberal and extreme reactionary politics, I would not have expected there to be a lot of overlap between the midwest and an ML community

    I am happy to be experiencing a little discomfort by all the "new" ideology, as I am well aware of the limited social and political bubble that is constructed around me. Specific political stances aside, I can say I do feel right at home with the somewhat irreverent tone of the comrades here. Hopefully midwest.social and lemmy/kbin at large can adopt the emoji implementation you have here so I can join the fun.

      1. We are officially a left-unity community. Anarchists and Marxist-Leninists etc. all welcome, but we don't tolerate right-wing/liberal ideology that contributes to the suffering of the exploited workers of the world.
      2. It's more so a place for leftists to hang out and chat and spread news/content. A bit of both ig.
      3. The people calling us tankies and nazis simultaneously are mostly doing so out of a disingenuous liberal attempt to position anybody to the left of them as being on the right of them, while they are the truly enlightened ones. The shitposting is only ever a response to people who are being disingenuous with their arguments and refusing to have genuine discourse.

    • All leftists (communists, anarchists, syndicalists, etc) agree that capitalism must be dismantled. The most moderate faction within leftists are democratic socialists, who believe that capitalism can be dismantled through democratic legislative action through existing parliamentary/congressional system. This means forcibly repatriating assets such as large tracts of land and companies from the rich through a majority vote. Of course, the rich will not agree to this but democratic socialists are going to do it anyways through electoral means.
      \
      \ This is the most moderate wing of leftism, but it is still considered authoritarian since it removes private property from the bourgeois without their consent. So to answer your first question, there is no moderate version of the left since all of them are authoritarian. Hexbear is a leftist unity instance in which all leftists are tolerated while Lemmygrad is a more limited marxist-leninist (tankie/communist) instance. So to answer your question, we're the tankies, but all of us are "authoritarian" here if they're leftist.

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      Edit: didn't like the wall of text, lets break it up by topic. Also of note: we are not a monolith. despite coming to a general consensus on a lot of topics over the years, there is plenty of disagreement, both politically and in behavior/optics as well.

    • Users on other instances say you guys are "tankies", and from what I understand, that's essentially the authoritarian version of the left; instead of being the more moderate-ish(?) lefties/communists. Which one do you guys identify under?

      Hexbear is explicitly non-sectarian. There are leftists here from across the spectrum, and sometimes there are disagreements among us. There are Marxists-Leninists, anarchists, and people who simply believe that capitalism isn’t going to lead to good outcomes for people. The word ‘tankie’ has lost a lot of meaning in recent times, so it’s hard to say whether there are tankies here or not.

      As an aside on this issue, the concept of “authoritarianism” is poorly defined and generally not that useful, imo. There are people in “free” countries being imprisoned, forced out of their homes, forced to work, forced to abandon their culture, forced to accept certain legal and cultural norms, prevented from organizing or protesting, etc. And there are people in “authoritarian” countries who have mechanisms other than representative democracy to engage in politics in ways that are materially more effective and representative of their interests. Authoritarianism, if only viewed from the lens of liberal democracy, is largely meaningless in a practical sense.

      I see a lot of shitposts and edgy humor, which is fine; so I initially thought the instance was more of a shitposting community rather than a serious one advocating communism. Or is it?

      I’m not trying to be clever when I say “it’s both.” Most people here are actually pretty well-studied in history, politcal theory, economics, etc., and they are also terminally irony poisoned and extremely online. It’s what it is.

      Many comments I see from other instances are mainly complaining of you guys being the former (tankies) on the first bullet, saying you are basically just like the far-right, just on the opposite side.

      Thinking that the far left and far right can be the same thing is called horseshoe theory, and it’s nonsense. There are numerous real, tangible, entirely understandable differences between the left and the right. Saying that they are both he same because both dislike the status quo is an example of a thought-terminating cliche. The left wants fundamentally the opposite of what the right wants, and the only way they’re similar is that there are people who believe that some amount of violence and coercion will be required to achieve those goals. But the goals are different. I can’t remember where I read it, but someone pointed out that an example of the difference between communism and fascism is that Stalin largely failed in achieving his stated goals, while Hitler largely succeeded. Way oversimplified, and my comrades will probably excoriate me for the clumsy analogy, but the point is that these are different things, and to say they aren’t is ignorant.

      The other complaint is that all they see when they engage with you guys are memes and shitpost gifs, and that it doesn't contribute to the conversation.

      There is a lot of shitposting. However, one of the things a lot of people here have learned first-hand time and again is that a lot of people don’t want to hear what we have to say, regardless if it has merit, or is thoughtfully researched, or is based on personal experience. We’ve all heard the same tired, poorly-understood, cliche arguments over and over again about China and Cuba and the USSR, etc., and at some point you get to a stage where it’s clear that engaging in good faith is useless. And so, rather than write a wall of text with links to credible sources, people post a picture of a pig with poop on its balls. Is it contributing to the conversation? Arguably no. Was there a conversation to contribute to in the first place if a well-researched but heterodox argument is met with knee jerk, canned responses that don’t address the issue? Again, arguably no.

      The intention from most people here is to troll and dunk and shitpost at people who are obviously willfully ignorant or outright bigoted. Any genuine inquiry will likely be met by a genuine response, as I am trying to provide you here. However, if someone is going to make transphobic or antisemitic comments while getting pissy about how we’re criticizing institutions like NATO or the IMF, they’re going to get dogpiled with shitposts. Critical support for China or Russia or Cuba or whomever is not blanket support of those things, and nor is criticism of NATO or the West or the big multilateral financial institutions a declaration of support for Putin.

      Leftists are, if they believe what they say they believe, aligned with the interests of real people everywhere, and when you’re on the side of actual people, large institutions with power tend to be a mixed bag, simultaneously doing good and bad things. What we’re concerned with is the understanding of these large systems of power, and the mechanisms by which they can be challenged for the betterment of everyone. That’s not the status quo position, and it’s not entirely clean and easy to describe, so it’s likely going to get some of us into arguments.

      That said, most people here aren’t just stirring shit to cause drama. We’ve been here as a community for three years prior to federation with other instances, and we’d still be here if every other instance defederated us. We’re trying to engage in a constructive way, but there are a lot of us, we’re aligned in our purpose, and we never log off. We’re going to come on a little strong at times.

      I hope that helps.

      • People in this country think they're the freest in the world. A couple of years ago, a cop was filmed murdering yet another black man. People protested and, all too frequently, cops initiated violence against peaceful protesters. Is that not authoritarian?

    • authoritarian version of the left

      All political ideologies are authoritarian. People who don't acknowledge this are just liberals who grew up in the west and assume everything that happens is natural, and not something forced upon them.

      basically just like the far-right, just on the opposite side

      I mean, all politics is about advocating for your positions..? thats the point of doing politics. Our positions are obviously what differentiate us from conservatives/liberals. Hexbear tends to be a bit more acidic about politics because most of us have been abused in some way by the current global order under neoliberalism.

    • This is my take, and thank you for asking these questions. I was initially against hexbear federation when .world was debating, but I’ve enjoyed ( though maybe not understood) most hexbear content since jumping to Midwest.social.

    • I see a lot of shitposts and edgy humor, which is fine; so I initially thought the instance was more of a shitposting community rather than a serious one advocating communism. Or is it?

      This is a general purpose forum for communists, anarchists, and fellow travelers. Site culture encourages both serious political discussion and shit posting. We are very earnest about our politics. Having been locked in this website with only each other for three years, we have developed lingo, in-jokes, and a posting style that can be easily misunderstood by outsiders.

      It's the only thing I've ever seen on the internet that feels like actually hanging out with friends. There are many users I recognize, but even the ones I don't, I still get that vibing-with-like-minded-folks vibe.

    • Which one do you guys identify under?

      Most Hexbears support a state that works for the interests of the people, referred to as a Dictatorship of the Proletariat that would be established after a revolution, as described by Marx. Then there are some anarchists who also support a revolution but not a Dictatorship of the Proletariat. The rest ideologies are far too minimal to notice

      so I initially thought the instance was more of a shitposting community rather than a serious one advocating communism

      It's a shitposting community. Probably the most well read and informed shitposting community you've ever come across though I bet (not that that bar is particularly high). lemmygrad.ml is the serious and educational instance though only for Marxism Leninism and no other ideology

      but is the shitposting and trolling done on purpose to antagonize other instances

      Many people have stated they only shitpost and troll response to people who are bigoted, or commenting in bad faith and not looking to have an honest discussion or learn, unlike you

    • "Tankie" doesn't really mean much in practice. Many of us are communists who think that places like the ussr, n korea, cuba, vietnam, and china aren't unremittingly evil, and we have exhaustive sources to back it up. We also know the history of events like the 1932 Soviet famine aka the "Holodomor", the June 4th incident aka " Tianamen Square Massacre" and a bunch of other anti-communist shibboleths. A whole lot of people who think they're leftists but aren't completely uncritically accept anti-communist propaganda with no awareness whatsoever that it's propaganda. And they hate being told that it's propaganda, that it doesn't relfect what happened and deliberately distorts history, often to the benefit of warmongers and fascists. So they call us tankies to indicate that we're evil genocide deniers and you shouldn't engage with us because we might start showing you well documented historical sources that contradict the propaganda and then you might become a genocide denier too! It's all very silly but most Americans and many Europeans think they're immune to propaganda and whatever the news and government says it 100% true.

      "Authoritarians" is also mostly an empty accusation. There's no realy consistency about how it's used. People claim any government they don't like is "authoritarian" but generally can't explain how the features of the government they don't like differ from the governments they do like. They also often have very naive or just flat out wrong ideas about how governments they like work.

      We're not trying to antagonize other instances specifically. We hate liberals and liberalism for making the world in to it's current miserable state, and there happen to be a lot of liberals in the lemmyverse. We also post far, far, far more than almost any other online community. No one needs to tell us to brigade an instance, we all decided to get stuck in and start arguing on our own, no coordination needed.

    • I know you've received a lot of proper responses, but i just want to let you know that this is what we like to see as a community.
      This is how we want to engage with posters - people with legitimate willingness to learn, to ask, to speak with an open mind, and to look inwards and do self-crit when necessary. We have spent 3 years doing this internally, and that has forged a community.

      Anyone who comes to hexbear with this in mind, and not pre-conceived notions borne from thought-terminating cliches, will soon find out that we're a lot kinder, more willing to have real meaningful discussions and more supportive that you'd think.

    • Many comments I see from other instances are mainly complaining of you guys being the former (tankies) on the first bullet, saying you are basically just like the far-right, just on the opposite side. The other complaint is that all they see when they engage with you guys are memes and shitpost gifs, and that it doesn't contribute to the conversation. I know that's not everything, as I do see serious discussions on my feed from time to time, but is the shitposting and trolling done on purpose to antagonize other instances?

      many posts have been made on this forum as well about toning down the shitposting and trolling on other instances, and a few mods have made similar posts as well i believe. Usually the people who are complaining about it the most are bad faith posters or bigots that are getting dog pilled, but our mods are aware about the large amount of trolling and want our users to play nice, although moderation of our users on other instances is being left up to their mods.

    • Plenty of other good relevant replies, I just wanna express my admiration and love for being open and asking questions. I've seen a few people from other instances show genuine curiosity like this, and it's quite heart-warming. Hope our instances can intermingle posts and ideas happily and constructively

    • Hello!

      essentially the authoritarian version of the left; instead of being the more moderate-ish(?) leftists/communists.

      This distinction comes from a false problem posed by capitalists - liberals and conservatives alike. It is completely ideological and not real.

      Every relation of property requires force/violence to be maintained. When you have to determine who gets what in a society, the distinction between getting /not getting or having/not having is supported by violence or the threat of it, in whatever form it may take in a specific society.

      Thus, every single form of society that is based on relations of property is maintained by force and violence. That includes modern western states, drug cartels, and even early socialism. The difference between capitalism (dictatorship of the bourgeoisie) and early socialism (dictatorship of the proletariat) is which class uses violence against which other class in order to control property.

      This considered, it is impossible to have any sort of society (one without absolute abundance, that is) that is not based on force or violence. Pointing this out to capitalists gets you called a tankie because they would be on the side of "not having", not because they abhor violence, as we already established their society is also based on violence.

      Think of it this way and you'll see most political discussions, specially ones about violence, boil down to property.

    • I'll affirm that the people here are serious, they just like jokes, but wanted to particularly respond to this:

      Users on other instances say you guys are "tankies", and from what I understand, that's essentially the authoritarian version of the left; instead of being the more moderate-ish(?) leftists/communists. Which one do you guys identify under?

      I'm a Marxist-Leninist (ML for short) and most people here are either MLs or anarchists, but I'm making the comment because I wanted to share this video that is relevant to the question:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nPVkpWMH9k

      Without even looking, I have to imagine someone else hit you with "On Authority" by Engels, which is correct but I think used as a bludgeon too often. Short version of its relevance is that when capitalists own the state, diffusing "authority" into private interests who have state violence backing them up is no less "authoritarian." That's not actually what he says in the text -- he was mostly writing contra-anarchist-critics -- but that's why I think people trot it out too much when they are usually just responding to neoliberals who don't share the correct assumptions that Engels agrees anarchists do and then predicates his argument on.

    • In regards to the second, communists and working class people are human, we are all over the place, there is no correct distinguished way to be a communist. So it can be both as others wrote. I remember having a Marx study circle with like 10 students, 2 PhDs and 1 - extremely funny and smart guy - who worked in a factory producing Trafos (very cliche I know) and whose parents were communists in South America and fled, and quite a few of us academics were pretty much shutting down the experience of him, cause it wasn't the German academic study circle style.

      This site instead would've laughed with him and tried to incorporate the jokes and experiences into Marx exegesis.

      • Libs love to say they're open minded, rational, will entertain new thoughts, believe in the free market of ideas, etc., until you challenge the nonfalsifiable orthodoxy:

        During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime's atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn't go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.

        Try to challenge that and suddenly the time for debate has long passed, all the answers are right there on Wikipedia, which is now authoritative, and even the meekest skepticism of that orthodoxy is soon equated to genocide denial.

    • Tankie has become a pretty useless word especially over the last 4 or 5 years.

      1. Originally it meant people who supported the USSR in suppressing an attempted revolution in Hungary (which by the way was largely supported by Hungarian fascists who were literally fighting alongside the Nazis only 11 years prior, it was complicated)
      2. Then it meant generally people who think socialist states should maintain their structure using violence when they see it as necessary to not collapse. As if every other type of state doesn't obviously do that
      3. Then it started to just mean "marxist-leninists"
      4. Then pretty recently it got misused even harder, until it split and started to mean three things:
      • classic definition #2 up above
      • anyone to the left of me! (Most common now)
      • those weird "patsoc" grifters and/or fans of how capitalist Russia hates gay people (this is the stupidest version of all)

      It's mainly "anyone to the left of me" which is just the word "woke" but for liberals.

      Give it 2 or 3 years, and republicans will be calling Joe Biden a tankie.

      • One thing I never can really grasp my head around is the framing of the Hungarian uprising or tiananmen square protests. There were much larger acts of state violence committed at the same time elsewhere. Like the French killing a million Algerians or the us proping up iraq in the Iran iraq war while they genocide kurds and launched chemical weapons at Iranian cities. There has to be some dissonance or just ignorance there. It's the emphasis vs lies propaganda at its finest.

      • We're not, unless your idea of "Tankie" includes people with pretty severe critiques of both the SU and Current (and pre-Deng) China. There are a lot of MLs and various Mao-associated tendencies, but I'm a Luxemburgist (less keen on strict party control than MLs, more sceptical of National Self-determination), and I've seen Council Coms, Bordigists, Gonzalists, Trots of Every Stripe, and anarchists here. Even a few reformists. You'll have a good time if you understand that we tend to take Communist and Socialist states as acting, however flawed, in good faith, and act similarly to members of all tendencies as long as they're socialist, internationalist, and LGBTQ+ positive etc, and, though sometimes a good Trot joke is hard to resist.
      • The answer to both options is yes, we are.
      • We very, very occasionally end up with the same positions as the far right sometimes, though from vastly different principles. Most of us support, with caveats, both the Soviet Union and Current China, as well as other states like Cuba, DPRK etc. Additionally we generally take an anti-imperialist stance here. Which means our opinions on Ukraine range from "A plague on both their houses" to "Revolutionary Defeatism" to "Putin deserves the wall even more than Zelensky, but a fast peace is preferable, preserves what remains of some pseudo socialist currents in the Donetsk Republics, and more importantly weakens the USA." Some are even more sympathetic to Ukraine, but acknowledge that NATO is not their friend, and that Ukraine has a very real fascist problem. We also have opinions on US politics that acknowledge Bernie Sanders as the milquetoast Social Democrat that he is and the Democrats as incapable of substantive reform even if Biden declared the DIctatorship of the Proletariat tomorrow. There is a substantial diversity of views there as well, though.
      • We meme a lot because we have a lot of injokes here, and it's a quick way of getting across a point that's been done to death, or quickly dunking on an opinion in a way regulars will immediately understand. Also, we're a pretty chill and jokey community here even when struggle sessioning.

    • We're a big-tent leftist instance, that means no sectarianism one way or another. We've anarchist, anarchobidenist and anarchostalinist comrades among us, though the site as a whole probably leans more ML. We don't throw each other under the bus in order to be the 'good leftists'.

      It's both serious and shitposty, it's a safe space for trans people to just exist, we're staunchly anticapitalist and anti american hegemony. We also like jokes about throwing nazis into pits

      (see pt. 1: tankies, for more)

      Horseshoe theory is some Turning Point/PragerU false equivalence that attempts to paint leftist action and thought as "just as bad (if not worse!)" as those we stand against. There's plenty of neolib talking points floating about, and once we've had our fun/you've stopped engaging in good faith, out come the pictures of a pig with shit on its testicles

  • Thanks! I had assumed that to be the case due to federation, but I suppose that may not always be a reasonable assumption. Doing pretty well. Mostly an average day of fighting with my ADHD so that I can effectively sell my labor. How about you lot?

  • chillin, bit worried about college finances but played some vr with the homie

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