Actually, this town has more than enough room for the two of us
He/him or they/them, doesn’t matter too much
Marxist-Leninist ☭
Interested in Marxism-Leninism, but don’t know where to start? Check out my Read Theory, Darn it! introductory reading list!
It’s one of those things where if we treat socialism as something wholly different from all previous modes of production, or as just the next mode of production. No socialist state has ever had a pure economy, yet they’ve all delivered consistent results entirely different from capitalist economies.
“Tankie” is a strawman. It’s a pejorative for Marxists and anti-imperialists, filled with falsehoods and contradictions. The purpose of calling someone a “tankie” is to turn them into this strawman in the eyes of onlookers, it terminates the conversation. An example of this is you claiming so-called “tankies” think Russia is still a socialist country governed by a communist party, which is absurd. Russia does maintain strong ties to socialist countries like China, does oppose the western Empire, and does have rising socialist sentiment in the broader population, but absolutely isn’t socialist.
The PRC is socialist, though. Public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy, and the working classes are in control of the state. Huge state owned industries are the backbone of the economy, while mixed forms of ownership make up the small and medium firms. Socialism isn’t the absence of private property, even under Mao and the Gang of Four there were still large numbers of private firms.
As for what you call “authoritarianism,” what we communists support is the working class using state authority against capitalists. Authority should be used by the working classes. This confusion of yours is why you misunderstand China. The PRC is by no means “late stage capitalist,” rather it’s relatively early in socialist development:
All in all, I suggest you listen more to these so-called “tankies,” rather than letting your imagination run wild.
Usually confronting your biases takes a catalyst, you don’t just do true passive introspection without prompting.
Depends on the instance, but generally revolutionary socialism is supported.
Lemmy is filled with people who are newly radicalized or generally progressive, but haven’t really confronted their internal biases yet.
Hexbear is explicitly pro-vegan, and takes care to make it a space where you can avoid seeing meat consumption if you wish. That’s why there are CWs for meat.
You can criticize China, there’s just good ways and bad ways of doing that. Overwhelmingly, “critique” just means dogmatically repeating red scare-style nonsense seeing China as an enemy, and not genuine critique.
Liberalism is the dominant ideology of capitalism.
Marxism and anarchism are the most comprehensive umbrellas in the socialist side, and there are very few non-Marxist-Leninist Marxists on Lemmy in my experience. Don’t really know what you mean by “socialist” that isn’t already covered.
By ratio, there are way more communists than on Reddit. There are three major groups, anarchists, Marxist-Leninists, and liberals, and each instance tends to have more of one or maybe 2 than the others. Getting a feel for instance culture goes a long way.
In general, you can’t normally convince your interlocutor, but instead onlookers. I talk a lot about Marxism-Leninism, and in my experience it isn’t the ones I talk with that change their minds, but those who see the convo as an outside observer.
They just signify if a comment or post is good or bad. They do have some impact on how high up a post or comment is displayed within their list, ie a lot of upvotes will show up better on active or hot sorting, but that’s about it. Some instances like Hexbear.net disable downvotes, to force discussion if you disapprove something.
Probably could even buy something with those.