I fled Reddit due to the authoritarian mod craziness, but Lemmy.world seems infested with too much Communist craziness. I’m leftist, but communism is idiocy. Is there an instance that leans more democratic socialist but refrains from going off the deep end?
I’m not an academically trained scholar regarding left-wing theory, but I’d assume that communists and social democrats are still part of the same group, with one naming themselves after a shorter-term goal-state, and the other naming themselves after a longer-term goal-state.
When we talk about state models such as republic, democracy, autocracy, we’re either describing a current status, or a model we might want to follow or avoid. When we talk about ideologies (conservatism, liberalism, communism, feminism, etc.) they assert specific values and presumptions that might or might not be true or workable. For instance, in the communist ideal, every participant has exactly the same amount of political and material power; influence is perfectly distributed. But we have no idea how a state like that would look, or work, or if we could ever get there.
Every model and every ideology has problems and concessions we don’t understand and have to correct for. The one-person = one-vote thing seems intuitive for democracy, but has terrible side effects, and we’re still sorting out alternative election models that might work better.
All this is to say it’s a really bad idea to treat any one of them as a racehorse or football team or a banner under which to rally and consolidate political power. None of the models or ideals we have are perfect or absolute, and we have to be prepared to adjust them on the fly, especially as we content with corruption and bad actors who exploit vulnerabilities.
I suspect everyone on the left ultimately seeks a society in which everyone is materially provided for, in which liberties are as extensive as possible while providing for protections and considering human biases towards certain abberant behavior (e.g. drunk driving) in which there are as few social strata as possible and power is as well distributed as possible. The models that accommodate all these, even to partial degrees, are still very fuzzy. (Western civilization has been working on them for only three hundred years or so.)
So we’re at least in the same book, if not on the same page.
Lemmy.world is actively opposed to Marxism and Communism (from moderator and admin POV).
As a side-note, all Communists support democracy, “democratic socialism” is usually ill-defined and meaningless, to one person it means the Nordics and to others it means Marxism without revolution, it only really hurts description.
They’re not opposed to communism. Just tankies like yourself.
“Tankie” is a caricature. The idea of a tankie is the ideal vision of a McCarthyian Communist. In reality, the overwhelming majority of people labeled as such don’t actually fit that label, it’s more of a way to cast an image of someone’s positions based on, say, support for AES countries, and twist that into the evil Commie Pinko that haunts the dreams of 1960s children in the US.
Lol Cowbee is a well known Tankie, .world is anti-tankie, which are authoritarian “communists”
deleted by creator
To be fair, most people don’t support “Democratic Socialism” as a thing to begin with. Socialism is democratic, period, the idea that there’s a special subset of an already democratic system that’s especially democratic isn’t helpful.
Marxists, for example, already support democracy. The so-called “democratic Socialists” tend to support reformism, which is wrong and not any more democratic than regular Socialism.
i’d like to hear your take on “communism is idiocy”.
OP didn’t respond so I will take a shot. My understanding is that under communism, the economy has to be planned by the government. Under capitalism, the price of shoes (for example) is usually determined by the demand for shoes and the amount of shoes that can be manufactured. If demand falls, the price falls. If manufacturing capacity increases, the price falls more, etc. This mechanism has feedback loops that make it efficient. In theory, companies never make more shoes than they can sell, because if they do make too many, they can sell the excess by cutting prices. Under communism there is no free market, so the mechanics of supply and demand don’t work. Some communist bureaucrat conducts a study and estimates that the country will need 100k pairs of shoes next quarter. The government then makes those shoes in a state-owned factory. Suppose, though, that it turns out that the country needed more. With no free market, there is no competitor to step in and meet the demand for shoes - now you have a shortage. Similarly, you can have considerable waste if you grow too many apples or whatever. In true communism, there is no price to adjust - you either have an apple voucher or you don’t. Thus there is generally more problems meeting demand efficiently. This is, in fact, exactly what we saw under the Soviet Union - the stores were often stuffed with unwanted items while long lines developed for items that were in high demand. Without any consideration of authoritarianism etc., this is an often-cited reason for the failure of communism.
I am not a political theorist or an economist, so please correct me if I am wrong.
if all humans could plan for the future and wished inherently to make world into better place for others too instead of just themselves communism might work. But as it is, the idea needs some heavy reworking to adjust for human defiencies to be worth even considering. I dont understand how they even came up with something like this and thought its good idea as it is. And naively thought no one would abuse their power or even could manage it all efficiently. Maybe it wasnt idea born out of wanting to make better world but instead just counter reaction to capitalism.
its so annoying, i have this vague idea of something like world without exploitative private property. Like, money would be replaced with actual value of work you have done, you could reasonably use tools and resources without being gatekept by private ownership while still being allowed to have your own things as long as it doesnt cause harm to others. When someone wants more than they can have, its solved instead by working towards improving things for everyone instead of just yourself.
but its just that, a vague idea; mostly fit to taunt me like dangling bottle of water out of reach of someone dying of thirst. And its seeming more and more like wishing one could do magic. It doesnt seem like humans could ever be capable of having a world like that or even want to .
I don’t really know what your problem with Communism is, nor why you think it requires humans to want to make the world a better place. I recommend reading Marx’s actual words on the subject.
only thing that inherently has worth to me is making world better place. Communism is just a tool, if it doesnt work correctly then it ought to be fixed or abandoned for something else that works better. And evidently it doesnt work correctly considering how china or soviet union turned out to be for those not in power.
Marxism is just a tool, sure, though I think doubling life expectancy, over trippling literacy rates to 99.9%, lowering wealth disparity while increasing GDP dramatically, and democratization of society and the economy prove that Socialism does work. I think you have a very narrow view of the history of AES states and need to do more research, as it seems like you just have the default western viewpoint.
You’ve got the general critique from Mises right, but that’s an extremely outdated critique that has long been debunked. The article Prices in a Planned Economy helps show how prices in a fully publicly owned economy could be planned, including what you are describing as “price signals.” The fact is, the USSR’s economy did work, and worked rather well, but issues like having to spend a huge portion of GDP on the defense industry just to keep up with the US starved the rest of the economy for growth, and the Soviets planned by hand rather than by computer. Neither of these issues need to be taken by any Socialist state going forward.
They’re almost certainly conflating communism with the authoritarian flavor so enjoyed by the tankies of .ml/hex/grad
it’s either that, or attributing anything related to social welfare to communism or at least a slippery slope to communism.
.world is the most liberal place on the lemmy lmao. If they are too left for you idk what to tell you
I’m surprised you see a ton of that on lemmy.world, always found that instance rather tame and moderate, at least by lemmy standards. Certainly compared to Hexbear, ml and Lemmygrad. Are you sure those weren’t federated posts from those instances? Anyway, lemm.ee is pretty neutral, lemmy.dbzer0.com leans more anarchist. But you could also just stay on .world and subscribe to communities that align with your views on whatever instance. Unless you have an issue with the moderation on .world specifically, it doesn’t really matter.
“Authoritarian mod craziness”? What communities were you hanging in where this was such a widespread problem?
Also .world is definitely not overwhelmingly communist. You need to start subscribing/blocking just like you probably did on Reddit. There’s no underlying algorithm making decisions for you here. You have full control of what you see. If you don’t like what you see, you can fix it!
I mean let’s not pretend that there aren’t a lot of psychotic mods on world. It’s gets pretty bad. Hell I got banned from a community for criticizing a New York Post article once. Which I mean shit, how do you not?
I never pretended otherwise. But I gotta tell you the same thing I said in another comment where someone was allegedly banned for basically nothing: I highly doubt that’s the entire story
You can go look it up if you want it was like I don’t know 8 months ago. Literally all it was. That’s why it’s stuck in my craw. Didn’t give two shits about the community, I wasn’t a member of it. Just so weird that that Jeff guy banned me for criticizing the New York Post.
I don’t give two shits about the community. I wasn’t a part of it
That’s another red flag right there 🤷♂️
TBF, I got banned from Reddit after RvW for saying riot police should quit their jobs en masse. Reddit likes to quench any kind of dissent
I hate the shithole site and Spez but I’m struggling to believe that’s all there is to the story
The thread it was on was an absolute shit show. Right wingers were out en masse reporting every left leaning comment. Eventually the mods and admins showed up and began deleting or banning every left leaning comment, even relatively mundane ones.
If the de facto gatekeepers of the genocidal liberal death cult status quo on the fediverse aren’t liberal enough for you, I think you’d feel right at home at https://shitlib.cuck/
🤔
lemmy.dbzer0.com is anarchist and stongly hates all states, both USA and the Russia, China types.
lemmy world is neoliberal, I mean, tankies do post there, but the moderation is mostly neoliberal and are anti-violence absolutists, even if its directed towards nazis
lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, and hexbear.net (now chapo.chat) are tankies, avoid those
Pretty much everyone else on lemmy are anti-authoritarian and pro- socialist policies, some are social democrats, others are democratic socialists, some are anarchists.
If you don’t like tankies:
lemmy.dbzer0.com (we have [email protected] 😉)
sh.itjust.works
sopuli.xyz
piracy community is blocked on lemmy.world btw, so you might as well joine us, or any of my recommended ones.
TLDR: lemmy.world is not “communist”, just just a few tankies that love to post thinnly veiled authoritarianism.
Edit: Also, you are probably seeing federated posts from lemmy.ml, I block most of those communities except like a few non-political ones like c/privacy
lemmy.world
is too communist for you?!?!?
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Spamming emojis just makes you look ridiculous and like your opinions don’t matter
Replying uselessly to comments you don’t like just to defend a censorship-happy neoliberal hivemind hotbed makes you look like a petty, bored, very gullible person.
I’d call .world default liberal instead of neoliberal personally. A lot of demsoc types.
That’s fair. However, I’d say anyone that is just fine with the deaths of >50,000 innocent people because of some tenuous revenge premise fall closer on the politicial spectrum to Reagan or Bush than anyone I’d even consider labelling a “liberal”.
Guy, you need to get outside more. This person’s reaction matches about 95% of people in the world.
Are you an American?
I am. I’ve traveled internationally some amount. I am sure it varies by country, but the people who have a notable reaction to China/USSR-style communism, from outside the US, have a much stronger hostility to it than the US people I know. Because generally they have more experience with it.
US people don’t like socialism, and think it is “communism.” That part is true, but that wasn’t what I was talking about.
The idea that so many of the people on Lemmy are communists is what led me to think you’re an American. I am too, which is why I know the bias of the American political spectrum starts way more to the right than most of the world. So Americans tend to label ideas more left leaning than they really are.
The communists and tankies are about 90% on the lemmy.ml instance. The rest of Lemmy is left but most as are not communists.
The communists and tankies are about 90% on the lemmy.ml instance. The rest of Lemmy is left but most as are not communists.
Yeah. In case it wasn’t clear, I was talking about being able to encounter overt authoritarian communists at all on lemmy.world, not saying that most of the lemmy.world users themselves are communists. My reaction was very specifically to the word “communist” and not referring to the existence of anarchist / general working-class oriented stuff on Lemmy.
I think most of the lemmy.world users fall pretty much in the sensible region of opinion: Israel is bad, the CCP is bad, Russia’s war in Ukraine is bad. Gay people are ok. Unions are good and the US state is oppressive. Just normal stuff (within my own personal Overton window). Of course a lot of US people would see that as some horrifying communism, but that’s not at all what I was saying, although I can see maybe it came across that way.
Mostly I was saying that I can sympathize with this person coming to lemmy.world and seeing federated content that says “yay China, Tienanmen Square was exaggerated, all this stuff about North Korea is just giving them a bad rap because imperialism” and having this shocked reaction because of it. Whether or not it originates from lemmy.world, it’s weird to see it on lemmy.world or on the modern internet at all. Usually the free exchange of ideas can educate people out of that pretty quickly. I think it’s a symptom of (a) Lemmy having particular features which enable someone to create an echo chamber specifically for proliferating that stuff (b) the world as a whole has gotten more unhinged from reality and so it’s easier for counterfactual stuff to find a solid footing.
I’m leftist, but
classic lol
.world is about as anticommunist as you can expect, if that’s not enough for you maybe you could relocate to one of the Nazi servers
Nah, .world is anti-tankie, but since you are a known Tankie it’s unsurprising you would conflate the 2
says the .ml person commenting on .world. it does not matter what any particular places people is like unless they defederate from each other. @[email protected] is talking about his experience and is likely not seperating out where users come from. in addition anyone can make a user on any open instance. I actually would like to see more closed instances that are about a particular local groups like sci fi conventions or makerspaces and such.
You should use Hexbear. There aren’t any communists there. Just posers who think communism means supporting dictatorships.
Hexbear supports AES, that’s nowhere near the same as thinking “communism means supporting dictatorships.” It’s far easier to find people that have actually read theory on Hexbear than in most other instances on the fediverse.
I’m so sorry to hear that tankies support the Advanced Encryption Standard.
Actually Existing Socialism. Cuba, the PRC, Vietnam, Laos, the former USSR, etc.
Why aren’t the Haudenosaunee on that list? Isn’t that a bit racist?
Tribal societies that don’t have advanced industrialization have a separate Mode of Production from “Socialism” in the Marxian sense. No racism at all.
Yeah, but on the other hand, socialism is when the people own the means of production, and the Haudenosaunee have/had way more of that than USSR and China.
I disagree, tribal societies could only have that kind of relation by virtue of being small. In the age of modern industry, this is no longer feasible while maintaining large-scale manufacturing.
.world is hardly the home of the tankie, what you see might be posts from lemmy.ml
There are two other places known as lemmygrad and hexbear that are outright communist/tankie that you’ll see occasionally brigade when someone posts anything positive about the USA.
This and most others are pretty sane. One that comes to mind for what you’re asking particularly might be https://slrpnk.net/signup who seem kind of left but not Stalin left.
Otherwise there’s the join Lemmy link at the bottom of any given instance to look through.
seconding solarpunk, it’s a beautiful movement in general
Let’s talk about this in a little more detail.
What do you consider going off the deep end? What do you consider leftist? Which ideas do you consider idiocy? What is your idea of a society worth living in?
I personally am open to any ideas that exclude discrimination of identity. For me the tolerance paradoxon applies.
I’m happy to hear your thoughts.
