this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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Hmm glad I found this post and the comments. I recently came here from Reddit and joined some random communities just to have something in my feed. I was a bit shocked at hammer and sickle posted non-ironically in the meme group. Noting that communists weren't better than Nazis got me called an ungrateful shit for existing (which I apparently owe to Stalin) and banned. Moved to the second-biggest meme community the search found, where I'm not banned yet but being educated by Westerners that life in communist coutries was cheerful and Holodomor was an oopsie.
I'm glad to hear that this is not all that Lemmy stands for, but a bit disappointed learning that top developers are a part of the problem. I'm conflicted about donating to say the least, and it does not bode well for lemmy adoption in general. I'll stick around to see if other servers gain momentum, but I'll need to keep an eye open for other reddit alternatives I guess
Most of Lemmy is fine - just avoid the tankie triad of lemmygrad, lemmy.ml, and hexbear and you should be good to go.
Edit: And maybe also the instances that haven't defederated hexbear in particular, since when they show up threads tend to go to shit, as you're seeing here, unfortunately.
I can certainly see that Hexbear and the other two are very vocal and toxic here. Engaging in some discussion or getting my views challenged is fine, I'd rather not close myself in a bubble, but it's sad that they would be so quick to insult and ban you. It does worry that they have some of the biggest communities. I wish I could say "oh well the protocol is neutral" but I think that with most OSS projects it matters tremendously who is at the helm; also, another poster outlined quite well that these instances seem to be the showcase for the system.
They are only big by number because they are some of the oldest instances. So they have a lot of inactive accounts and communities. The number of actually active users is less than .world or .ee.
They only seem more active because they are terminally online and have communities that are specifically designed to brigade threads when they don't like what's posted.
Sadly that is not enough, blocking instances at user level leaves you forced to deal with their users who will spread propaganda in every comment.
Defederate? My instance already defederated those 3 but their posts still appear if someone from a sever that aligns with them (I can't see any other reason to keep a federation with them) crossposts to their instance, now that post will federate with the rest anyway. Defederation should be total, but they left loopholes by design.
And it still won't matter because not all countries have a no-bullshit instance/comm, so it's extremely easy to see someone post propaganda about a country without enough users on the fediverse and nobody will know, but if someone from that country challenges it, the users will pile on them (specially if it's a populist) and downvote them (I can safely say that the only news I've seen about my country are goverment propaganda, but lemmy users get MAD if it's pointed out).
Lemmy as it exists right now must dissapear, it's designed maliciously to keep the propaganda going instead of fighting it, it's just the other extreme of Reddit.
I am waiting for PieFed to get more developed to see if it gets better blocking capabilities, because I'm tired of the lemmy loopholes.
The roadmap contains a new feature for extended instance block, which also blocks all posts and comments from that instance's users. If some feature is not implemented in Lemmy thats not out of malice, but because we really dont have time to work in everything that people ask for.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5578
Its supposed to be tankie TROIKA 😤
Communism and fascism are entirely different, and conflating the two has roots in Double Genocide Theory, a form of Holocaust trivialization and Nazi Apologia. The Nazis industrialized murder and attempted to colonize the world, the Soviets uplifted the Proletariat and supported national liberation movements such as in Cuba, China, Algeria, and Palestine. I recommend reading Blackshirts and Reds.
Person1, since you're new here, this is Cowbee, our resident tankie apologist/propagandist.
The most reasonable-sounding genocide denier and authoritarian regime supporter this side of the gulags. I highly recommend their alt's comments on Hexbear if you're interested in their more "mask off" persona. Also, remember the number one rule when interacting with hexbears: never directly engage them.
Edit: Here are some of Cowbee's Uyghur genocide denial comments, for example, if anyone's interested. Note the hardline tankie talking points, but couched in the classic Cowbee "reasonable" rhetorical style.
To quote a popular hexbear aphorism present in this very thread, "'Omg rude online' like there's no worse sin".
Quite an introduction, and quite a lot of slander. I'm a Communist, Marxist, Marxist-Leninist, etc, regardless of how you want to call me. I'm certainly not a genocide denier, and I'd say all governments are "authoritarian," what matters is which class is exerting its authority. My goal is in fact to dispel myths surrounding Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, Communism, etc.
If they check my Hexbear account, they'll see more conversation surrounding gaming and casual conversation, haha.
Edit: here's Hakase attacking feminism and here they are defending the arrests of animal rights protestors. Even more, here's hakase defending transphobes.
You're not a communist, you're a state capitalist.
I'm a Communist, specifically a Marxist-Leninist. I'm not an Anarchist, but I'm not a "State Capitalist" either. I advocate for gradually building towards a fully publicly owned and planned global economy along democratic lines, ie Marx's conception of Communism.
So you're a revisionist.
drag refers to any Socialist system with a state as "State Capitalist," which is a misnomer I reject. I support the NEP and I support the PRC's Socialist Market Economy, I support Cuba, Vietnam, etc, but drag in particular is saying even a fully publicly owned economy is "state capitalist" if it has a government.
Well it certainly is capitalist if it's not democratic. You can have public ownership and worker control, or you can have public ownership and a dictatorship of people who are not workers. Like, bureaucrats, apparatchik, the nomenclatura, etc. Or the army. Or whoever who's not workers.
As such drag might operate under the Anarchist definition of state (which I, as an Anarchist, can't stand, because in it just causes pointless misunderstandings), which more or less bogs down to "hierarchical control", not "organisational structure of society". The latter definition is something perfectly neutral, the former is the face of evil itself.
For drag, any state running production is Capitalist. They denounce the PRC, USSR, Cuba, etc as Capitalist, despite robust democratic control.
Further, administrators of public property do not constitute a distinct class, just as managers within a company are not a distinct class from the workers. There exists intra-class hierarchy and inter-class hierarchy, and these are not the same.
You might want to calibrate your democracy-o-meter. At the very least, not conflate a disagreement about degrees of democracy in some specific state with a disagreement on principles.
Ah. So not revisionist enough to acknowledge the professional-manegerial class, I see. I mean it's not like the concept would break with Marxian analysis, it just re-analyses things with a more complete set of data points. So in this case you can choose between being a revisionist and giving up on materialism, I suggest the former.
I'm not conflating anything, drag quite clearly has stated that "Marx was an Anarchist." This is wrong.
As for the "Professional Managerial Class," it isn't a distinct class, but a subsection of the proletariat. You also see the term "Labor Aristocracy" used by Engels and Lenin, but crucially, you don't see the conflation of this substratum of a class with a class in and of itself. The insistence that managers make up a distinct class is more of an Anarchist thing than a Marxist one, as adopting such analysis would be similar to calling plumbers and electricians their own classes in and of themselves, rather than substratums.
Absolutely.
Plumbers are not in a power hierarchy relationship to electricians so that's a strawman.
Class isn't "power hierarchy" in Marxist analysis, though. That's an Anarchist interpretation, one I won't say you can't hold personally as valid, but that's not the Marxist critique. Engels and Lenin specifically called managers Labor aristocracy as they are necessary aspects of large industry, and not a class in themselves. Class instead is a social relation to ownership of the Means of Production.
In the "Administration of Things," as Engels puts it, there are to be administrators, and production along a common plan. It's through this that large industry under Capitalism paves the way for the transition to Socialism, and then Communism, socialized production requires an informed plan.
And the managerial class doesn't have that? Is it easier or harder for an MBA to get a loan to become a millionaire than it is for a worker coop? To furnish golden parachutes for themselves while leaving workers with not even the dole (heard of some nasty practices in the US, there, making people 'quit without cause' by bullying etc which would disqualify them from welfare).
Is an Engineer a class? They make better money than assembly workers. The answer is no, Engineers are a substratum of the Proletariat, worthy of their own analysis, but not as distinct from the rest of the Proletariat. That's why Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc all viewed managers as proletarian, doing a separate kind of labor, and even distinct living conditions on average, but retaining the same labor relations to the Means of Production.
So you're saying that there's no difference in things like capital access. "Same relations" implying "no difference, nada, zilch". I don't find that assessment compatible with the material conditions we live under.
One proletarian has the strength of two average proletarians. Does he constitute his own distinct class, as he can leverage that for somewhat higher pay, and therefore eventually become petty bourgeois? No. Again, we can see specialized labor as a substratum, but to confuse it for a class in and of itself goes against the Marxist conception of class.
Now, if you define class as relations of hierarchy, there's no dissonance, and we can consider managers their own class. But at that point, we have to be careful not to trip over each other's understanding of class when discussing Marxism vs Anarchism.
That's a relationship to a crate or to barbells, not to capital or the means of production.
I already explained how this can cascade into a different relationship at a rate more advantageous than the average proletarian, as you already saw fit to distinguish classes.
You want a "socialist" revolution, and would turn your nose up at a communist revolution creating communism immediately. Drag thinks you have to support the idea of a communist revolution in order to be a communist. Unless you already live in communism.
I wouldn't turn my nose up if the creation of a fully publicly owned and planned global economy along democratic lines was possible to do immediately. It isn't, so I don't "support" that just like I don't "support" unicorns.
Now, I'm sure you're actually using Communism to speak of Anarchist-style Communism, but I'm not an Anarchist, I'm a Marxist, I want Marx's conception of Communism, not the Anarchist conception.
And the fact that you don't want the anarchists to win is why we say you have no belief in left unity and aren't a leftist. We ancoms, syndicalists, soulists, mutualists, trade unionists, anarcho-pacifists, transhumanists, market socialists, egoists, and so on will sit over here in our big leftism tent and actually get work done while you guys argue about theory and try to fracture the movement apart.
I'm all for Left-Unity, and believe Leftists can all work together. Discussing correct theory and practice is important, just like the work Leftist groups like PSL, the PFLP, and more are accomplishing, as well as Socialist states like Cuba and the PRC. I don't think I've ever said I don't believe in Left-Unity, and I've never once said Anarchists aren't Leftists, just that I myself am a Marxist, not an Anarchist.
Here in the communist movement, we use actually existing communism, or AEC, as a model. You guys emulate failed states like the USSR that collapsed without ever achieving communism due to administrative mismanagement. We emulate economies that successfully did communism for thousands of years.
Emulating tribal societies is good if that works for you, though I think it's a bit myopic if you think Socialist states haven't learned from what went right and what went wrong in the USSR. Modern Socialist states like the PRC have adapted to modern conditions and are steadily building higher and higher stages of Socialism, eventually Communism in the Marxist sense.
Nobody wants to argue with Cowbee
Drag is an anarchist and banned from lemmy.ml for being left wing, so drag hopes you will listen with an open mind to this:
Karl Marx said that communism is stateless. That means in communism, the government has no authority to coerce people. Authoritarianism isn't communism. In fact, Joseph Stalin never claimed that the USSR had achieved communism. He said they'd achieved socialism, and he made empty promises that it would be communist at some point in the future.
You know where communism was actually successfully implemented? America and Australia. Karl Marx and his friends were inspired by the Haudenosaunee people of North America. Marx called it "primitive communism".
You are not banned from lemmy.ml
Huh. Drag misremembered. It was just a community ban performed by the lemmy.ml admins, and it's expired
Drag will have to unblock that community and post more leftist history until the ban is permanent. Shouldn't take long.
Every state burns oil. Therefore every state is oppressing drag. You logic would only work if they weren't harming everyone. Besides, the Palestinians and the Ukrainians have asked for our help.