Man’s freaking out cos he just learned .ml stands for marxist-leninist 😂 Glad to find something we strongly agree on tho comrade.
Comment on Chinese propaganda is rampant on the fediverse
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 17 hours ago
There are a lot of people supportive of the PRC, both because the US Empire is declining and the PRC is positioned as an alternative to the US Empire’s naked terrorism, and because Lemmy has a lot of communists. Lemmy has a lot of communists because the lead developers are communists, FOSS attracts communists, and because as Reddit bans communist communities they are often suggested to come here.
There’s absolutely no credible evidence of CPC interference in Lemmy.
king_comrade@lemmy.world 37 minutes ago
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 35 minutes ago
To be clear, .ml stands for Mali, and it was allegedly chosen because it was cheap/free. Lemmy.ml is just the flagship, test instance, and happens to have a lot of communists because the devs are communists. Lemmygrad.ml is explicitly ML.
Hotznplotzn@lemmy.sdf.org 3 minutes ago
Lemmygrad. ml is explicitly ML.
Exploring Left-Wing Extremism on the Decentralized Web: An Analysis of Lemmygrad. ml
… findings reveal a substantial increase in user activity and toxicity levels following the migration of these subreddits to Lemmygrad. ml. We also identify posts that support authoritarian regimes, endorse the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and feature anti-Zionist and antisemitic content … Moreover, their support can extend beyond backing these authoritarian regimes, even cheering on their violent actions, as evidenced by their posts on the Russian invasion of Ukraine …
The whole study makes a good read.
JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
This seems right. Personally I’m not sure I could roll my eyes harder at the fact that so many people in 2026 are so ignorant as to be prepared to call themselves “communists” - after all the famines, the purges, the 40 years in which much of Europe was struggling to escape (literally) from communism… And then I saw that you, too, call yourself a communist! So I guess I’ll stop there.
Except to recommend you the Ones and Tooze podcast, in which the brilliant host (an ex-communist) recently did a whole series, in great and illuminating detail, on the various communist thinkers. Which I listened to… dutifully.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 13 hours ago
Communists govern the largest economy in the world by PPP, and capitalism is falling apart at the seams as the spoils of imperialism are beginning to be cut off. The global south is escaping underdevelopment, and this is forcing austerity in the west, explaining the surge to the right. In the US Empire, communists are more and more common than ever before:
Famine was ended by communists in Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, etc. These areas had woefully inefficient systems of agriculture, such as the kulak system, which served to enrich one group of people over the laborers they employed. Collectivization combined with industrialization is why food security was achieved after the introduction of socialism to these countries, and the famines commonly attributed by western historians to communism were the last of a long line of regular famines.
Similarly, purges in the largest majority of cases meant expulsion from the party or position, not execution, except in times of crisis, like the 1930s when fascism was on the rise. They were not done arbitrarily, but as a response to corruption, subterfuge, and sabotage.
It’s also a bit silly to suggest that people spent “40 years trying to escape communism.” Right up to the end, the majority of people in the USSR wished to retain both the USSR and the system of socialism. This is proven not just from eyewitness reports of support, but also vote totals:
Moreover, after the fall of socialism in Europe, the majority of people want it back or say they are worse off. This is compounded by the fact that over 90% of the Chinese population supports their government and system. Socialist countries run by communists have higher approval rates than capitalist states.
Looking at Adam Tooze, I don’t see much indicating him as a former communist. He grew up in West Germany in the height of the Cold War, is trained in liberal economics such as Keynesian economics, though his grandfather was allegedly a soviet recruiter, which is cool. I’m not really convinced I could find much out of his mini-series on Luxemburg, Trotsky, Stalin, or Lenin, considering I’ve already read works both by them and about them in greater detail than a podcast is going to cover.
JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
I don’t see much indicating him as a former communist
He talked about it - some variety of Trotskyism IIRC. A bit of a surprise but shouldn’t have been. Tons of former Maoists have been in high positions. Even a neoliberal head of the European Commission (Barroso).
On the supposed virtues of communism, you won’t convince me but I suppose you know that already. IMO the world would have done very well to listen to George Orwell, someone who saw through it all on the basis of up-front experience 90 years ago. That might have saved an awful lot of needless suffering. Or Orlando Figes, who wrote a book whose title says it all: “The USSR: A People’s Tragedy”.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 11 hours ago
To be fair, I don’t think many communists globally are fans of Trotskyism, considering it’s predominantly western and liberal-compatible. The vast majority of communists globally are Marxist-Leninists, Trotskyism is seen as more fringe, and distinguishes itself primarily in its rejection of existing socialism as such, on vague and idealist basis, rather than materialist. A former Trotskyist making loads of money off of denouncing communism is both entirely predictable and hardly compelling for those who’ve studied communism in theory and practice.
As for the rapist Eric Blair, also known as George Orwell, the western world listened to him too well. He didn’t see through anything, rather, his position as a British fed (known for keeping a journal of people he knew and suspected of being Jewish and/or communists) and propagandist was extremely useful to western intelligence agencies. On Orwell is a good essay going over his dreadfall past and role in propagandizing. Orwell has been taught in countless schools not because of any truth, but because of his utility.
As for Figes, another that earns an enourmous sum of money from preaching the bible of anti-communism to serve capitalist interests, better historians exist. Syzmanski’s Is the Red Flag Flying? The Political Economy of the Soviet Union today, Pat Sloan’s Soviet Democracy, Human Rights in the Soviet Union, Anna Louise Strong’s This Soviet World, Mary Stevenson Callcott’s Russian Justice, the recently deceased Dr. Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds, all the way up to Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance, there’s tons of academic resources to get a much better view of socialism in practice.
BrainInABox@lemmy.ml 11 hours ago
On the supposed virtues of communism, you won’t convince me
Just straight up admitting your anti-communism is an unshakable article of faith that no argument or evidence can change.
DSN9@lemmy.ml 11 hours ago
Their idol Mao killed approx 160 million humans.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 1 hour ago
Do you have a source on that? Even if you include landlords killed by the peasantry during land reform, all of the deaths by unintentional famine, and the excesses of the cultural revolution as deliberately killed by Mao, the numbers accepted by Historians are nowhere close to 160 million. This is such a fantastical number that even the famously debunked Black Book of Communism doesn’t go over 100 million, and that was including the entire history of the soviet union as well as PRC. The Black Book of Communism famously included both non-births as deaths, and Nazis killed by the Red Army as “victims of communism.”
BrainInABox@lemmy.ml 11 hours ago
Damn, out jerking the black book of communism by an order of magnitude. You’re really going for it
jerkface@lemmy.ca 2 minutes ago
okay but it’s also a normal thing for the CPC to monitor and influence online spaces