Cowbee

@Cowbee@lemmy.ml

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⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨alternatives to lemm.ee?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
You too!
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨alternatives to lemm.ee?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
It’s important to contextualize, though. Restrictions of some speech in Socialist countries is usually a defense against outside influences, where Capitalists dominate. Capitalist systems don’t appear to restrict speech as much because the only ones that control it are wealthy Capitalists, you can speak out as much as you want but none of that has any power.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨alternatives to lemm.ee?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
What do you mean by “directly auth?” If people have a greater degree of political freedom in one party proletarian states than in multiparty states where the bourgeoisie is in control, it seems freedom is greater for more people in the proletarian states. I think the whole “auth” concept is flawed to begin with.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨alternatives to lemm.ee?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
I’ve been reading a bit of Hegel and authors like Plekhanov’s The Significance of Hegel. If liberals genuinely grasped dialectics to the level of Hegel, they’d most likely just be Marxists and drop the idealism. Hegel’s thought was a specific product of his conditions and his time, to the point where looking back at him and his thought the jump to Materialism feels obvious, but Marx’s advancements were quite revolutionary at the time.

Basically, there are a very small number of people who accept dialectics and follow Hegelian thought over Marxist thought, as compared to Marxism. Would be an interesting stance to take in a world after Marx.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨alternatives to lemm.ee?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
The struggle with such a standpoint is that both Marxists and Liberals have (to a varying degrees) coherent systems of values and understandings. For Marxists, as an example, Dialectical and Historical Materialism is the baseline, while liberals tend to be more idealist and deny aspects of class struggle. If you agree with either premise, then other conclusions necessarily follow.

Plus, I don’t really think labeling Marxists as “auth” makes sense. All states are “auth,” as all states are instruments of class oppression, but the class in charge is what makes the biggest impact on how society is run. Liberalism is “auth” as the bourgeoisie rules, Marxism is “auth” as the proletariat rules. It is only by abolishing class that the state can be abolished, and class can only be abolishef by sublimating all forms of property ownership into common, public ownership.

Either way, tangent aside, I recommend finding instances that match your interest, rather than strictly broad federation. Mander.xyz is a great example of an instance based on science, but it also has broad federation. Check Join-Lemmy.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨alternatives to lemm.ee?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
I didn’t see any of that when glancing through your comments on Hexbear, mind providing an example with the context?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨alternatives to lemm.ee?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Doesn’t seem to be the case, looks like you got into one fight regarding electoralism but you’ve even been upvoted on Hexbear in numerous other occasions.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨alternatives to lemm.ee?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
It’s a Left Unity space, plus historically Anarchists and Marxists work together more often than not. The Anarchists on Hexbear can speak for why they enjoy it.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨alternatives to lemm.ee?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
That’s why I said at the end that it’s a very different instance than lemm.ee. I was pushing against the idea that Hexbear is filled with the worst types of people, which is wrong.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨alternatives to lemm.ee?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
It wasn’t criticism of the CPC alone. This was the comment:

[Dont need to travel to see that chinese people live in poverty, anything can be done when you are a dictatorship, its corrupt and everything is a scam. Fake meat, fake tofu, tofu drag constructions, 4 billion on a road and all the village got was a gravel path. Where a state teaches kids to hate other nations and disrespect everything for something that happened 80 years ago instead of making sure this does not ever happen again. Where its a national sport to go abroad and harass others. Where the state doesnt care about your stolen things, but if you speak out publicly against it, you will be warned with a kind “take that down, or else”.

If their electric cars are anything to go by, i dont even want to step on their most modern trains even if they give me trillions of GBP.

If the regime is supposed to be an example of progress, well guess then we all should go back to european monarchy and imperialism. Europe thrived in the 19th century afterall. Just look at all those rich people living luxurious lifes. All the advancements in science, medicine, transportation, literatur, architectur, social policies, unification of people split appart and more.

If i were to travel to china they would arrest me on the airport for critisising china and not seeing the CCP as legitimite and supporting taiwan, that being if i would even be allowed to enter the country.

The USA train system is shit, yes, thats not even on debate. Against that even the russian train system is amazing.

Also china didnt build its high speed trains on their own. They used EU and japanese tech.

Japan has the best train system in the entire world, and that without being a supressive, all survaling dictatorship. OP here is comparing shit, scooped from the toilet, to a microwave meal, that got a mediocer plate up. Ofc then in comparison the microwave meal will look better.](lemmy.ml/post/31027125/18999614)

The majority of the comment is baseless chauvanism of Chinese people themselves, not their government, such as when they say that the “national sport is to harrass other nations” or that “they eat fake tofu, fake mear, etc.”
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨alternatives to lemm.ee?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Yep, someone was being genuinely racist, talking about how Chinese people live in filth and their infrastructure is held up with duct tape, that they eat fake meat and fake tofu, etc. There’s a difference between critique of the CPC and veering off into racism, which is why I reported the comments, and then got banned for it for a day.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨alternatives to lemm.ee?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Strong disagreement there. Hexbear users frequently brush against liberals and anti-Communists, but as an actual space it’s not toxic at all, in my experience. If you consider yourself a Marxist or Anarchist, you’ll probably fit in well, if not then you won’t, simple as that.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please consider supporting Lemmy development⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
The quantity and quality with respect to how de-Nazification was handled in the West vs the East was entirely different, and you are erasing that because the East still had some Nazis, while the West was infested with them. This is affirmed by the links I sent, to which you merely read the titles. The lawyer piece, for example, talks about the entire process of de-Nazification with an emphasis on how the Nazi lawyers were treated.

I could do the same low-effort character assassination you levied against me, but if you’re not even going to read the abstracts or intros of the articles I link, this conversation was never going to go anywhere in the first place.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please consider supporting Lemmy development⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
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.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please consider supporting Lemmy development⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
Some do, they just claim Hamas is equally evil for resisting genocide, the good 'ol “two wrongs don’t make a right” adage.

As for East Germany, would you mind stating how your thesis about the government taking an active role in rooting out Nazis somehow made the East more open to fascism isn’t a statement on East Germans being incapable of ruling themselved, and just going along with whoever? You linked literature, sure, but avoided addressing that the West never de-Nazified yet East Germany was thoroughly purged of Communists? Rather than blaming the rise of fascism in modern eastern Germany on the previous antifascist government and the dull acceptance of the eastern Germans due to alienation from politics, why not take an active look at the dynamics at play as the West took over the East?

As for Psychology, no, it isn’t idealism, but your analysis was. In the absence of materialist analysis, you shifted to an assertion that existing in different modes of production shuts off the higher instincts of man. It is true that material conditions shape the ideas of man, but you pivoted that to the idea that existing in a Socialist state dulls the mind, which doesn’t have materialist backing.

Socialism is not “the same fucking river” as Nazism, not to any capacity. I recommend reading Blackshirts and Reds, it’s a good introductory book and a quick read.

As for Nazi Germany’s approval ratings, that’s not really true, as clearly Holocaust victims weren’t polled. Support for Socialism both within post-Socialist states and currently Socialist states is best explained by the real material achievements they made for the Working Class, as one western study said of China:

“Although state censorship and propaganda are widespread in China, these findings highlight that citizen perceptions of governmental performance respond most to real, measurable changes in individuals’ material well-being. Satisfaction and support must be consistently reinforced. As a result, the data point to specific areas in which citizen satisfaction could decline in today’s era of slowing economic growth and continued environmental degradation.”

I’ll leave you with a Parenti quote I think is fitting, from the same book I recommended:

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.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please consider supporting Lemmy development⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
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.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please consider supporting Lemmy development⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
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.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please consider supporting Lemmy development⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
People claiming simply to have an “understanding of the cultural context” when speaking of the Palestinian Genocide often do so to avoid criticism for not condemning Israel. What this does is run cover for the IDF. We aren’t on Feddit, we aren’t in Germany, we are in an open space where such a phrase has been used by Zionists plenty, hence why I gave you a warning.

Secondly, your point is that East Germans simply have been culturaly underdeveloped and are incapable of ruling themselves, as an explanation for why demographics shifted so far to the right. Again, this is avoidance, I quite clearly pointed to the rooting out of Communists in the East and the regular fostering of Anti-Communists in the West leading to current conditions.

As for fascism, it’s best described as Capitalism in decay. It’s the same system of Capitalism, only when conditions are dire and the bourgeoisie needs to rely on violence to protect its own interests. All this talk of “shutting off higher mammalian and human insticts” is more Idealism than anything else, it fronts the idea of “fear states” as a genuine mechanism when the fear comes with the fascism.

Further, Communism isn’t to be grouped in with fascism and Capitalism, it’s diametrically opposed. The nostalgia for Socialism is very high in the overwhelming majority of post-Socialist states, and the approval of government in current Socialist states is high. There’s no evidence that they were and are run by “fear.”
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please consider supporting Lemmy development⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
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.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please consider supporting Lemmy development⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
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 elictricians their own classes in and of themselves, rather than substratums.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please consider supporting Lemmy development⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
I didn’t call you a fascist Zionist, I said the whole of Germany is infested with fascist Zionists. I didn’t even know you were German. Though, “understanding the cultural context” is often a dogwhistle, so you may wish to drop that language.

It’s convenient to blame the people for not being “culturally developed enough” to oppose fascism, and it blunts the active role of Nazis in the West, and erases the de-communization of the East following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fascism wasn’t “erased” from West Germany because children askdd hard questions, Nazis were key figures and great effort was made to make it appear as though West Germany was truly distanced from fascism. Lo and behold, Germany unwaveringly supports Israel and the ethnic cleansing campaign.

Fascism can only be truly beaten by advancing to Socialism.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please consider supporting Lemmy development⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
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.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please consider supporting Lemmy development⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
That’s a poor assessment, and looks down upon the people of East Germany as “stupid” and “compliant.” The West was never truly de-Nazified, but the East was absolutely de-“commiefied” after the fall of the Berlin Wall. East Germany was purged of its Nazis, and then purged of its Communists. In purging the Communists, the resurging fascists go unopposed.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please consider supporting Lemmy development⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
You could be more specific than that, but when I say Nazi collaborators, I do mean them.

“On the other hand, in the Soviet occupation zone and later East Germany, denazification was considered as a critical element of the transformation into a socialist society, and the country was stricter in opposing Nazism than its counterpart.”

The Soviets took anti-fascism seriously.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please consider supporting Lemmy development⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
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.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please consider supporting Lemmy development⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
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.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please consider supporting Lemmy development⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
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.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please consider supporting Lemmy development⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
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.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please consider supporting Lemmy development⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
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.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please consider supporting Lemmy development⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
Concentration camps were mass execution factories for Jewish people, LGBTQ, Communists, Socialists, disabled people, Slavs, and more.

The prisons in the GULAG system were genuine prisons, and the political prisoners were largely Tsarists, Fascists, Nazi collaborators, war criminals, and more, and political prisoners were a minority of those imprisoned in the USSR.

That’s like saying a fish and a tree have some similarities. It’s true, but at the same time fundamentally tries to draw far more similarities than implied.