Do you agree with this meme and consider yourself part of “the Left”? Just curious

They’re tankies, aren’t they? i.e. Red-coded fascists that don’t care about things like worker enfranchisement unless it’s a way of expressing American diabolism. That’s not the left.

The_Donald is when you believe the opposite of The_Donald

Why the fuck do both authoritarian sides use “liberal” as an insult?

It’s because they both think the common man should be submissive or forced to submit to their brand of authoritarianism.

Have fun worshipping the machinery of enslavement and death. As it crushes you, I hope it comforts you knowing at least you weren’t a tankie.

Too bad instances can’t defederate HB.

Can you please elaborate?

They seem to not understand that they’re tankies.

Tankie is a social construct and is used to lazily discredit everyone to the left of bernie. It functions to libs the same way as “woke” functions for chuds. As a term it’s basically meaningless to anyone outside of the internet.

What is a tankie?

I support crushing fascists with tanks.

Nooo not tankies! Don’t they know it’s illegal to be a communist

Not how federation works.

Misuse of the term genocide is considered soft-holocaust denial.

not a genocide by any reasonable definition of genocide, and calling non-genocide things “genocide” dilutes the term in a way that is beneficial to nazis.

none of us cheer the invasion, we shit on boris johnson for sabotaging peace talks you dolt.

You’re the one doing holocaust denial by crying crocodile tears over nazis

https://jewishcurrents.org/the-double-genocide-theory

war=genocide now

So the Us did a Genocide in

Lybia Cambodia Iran Iraq Afghanistan Nazi Germany Japan The United States

to name a few

Do you seriously not see how degranged it is to change the definitions of words based on vibes to try to win an argument online?

Fuck ooooooff

Literally no such thing. The Holodomor is a fiction created by Nazi propagandists to paint the failures of Soviet agricultural policy in dealing with a famine as a deliberate attempt to exterminate Ukranians.

Important to note, this was merely the latest in a long series of famines which had historically plagued this part of eastern Europe. It was also the last.

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The nordic model is a hybrid of social democracy (liberal, not socialist) and corporatism (definitely not socialist).

All forms of socialism, from anarchism / libertarian socialism to democratic socialism to marxism-leninism, are fundamentally anti-capitalist. The sooner you get this the sooner you’ll stop making a fool of yourself.

As a point of unhelpful pedantry: I feel the need to point out that social democracy, while far preferable to liberal democracy, doesn’t actually qualify as socialism since it doesn’t guarantee workers control over the means of production.

But also, that’s far less important than recognizing that Stalinism is fundamentally awful so you’re doing far better than anyone on Hexbear.

Edit: to Hexbear people, don’t reply. I don’t care about your opinion about anything. If anyone posts a Tankie meme at me I’m reporting you for harassment.

They’re the type of socialism (social democracy) that I approve of.

Social democracy is not socialism, it is social-fascism, class collaboration leeching off the wealth of the global south like a settler vampire from the hill of the imperialism. Look at how social democratic settlers treat immigrants, or minorities/natives. You fundamentally do not understand what socialism is.

And no offense, but you have no fucking idea what the the PRC is doing. You know nothing about their government structure, how policy is carried out, or the way the system functions at all. I guarantee you could not name the tiers of government, or even three government officials without looking it up. Your ignorance is shown right away by the fact that you say “CCP” (Chinese Communist Party) when the correct acronym is “CPC” (Communist Party of China). This is such a simple mistake that proves you have not read any media outside of the west regarding China.

Lmao how many people own the means of production in Scandinavia?

It certainly isn’t a democracy, given that they’re a capitalist country where the oligarchy of wealthy companies get more say than the average person.

Again, what do you think socialism is? What do you think fascism is for that matter?

You can’t just swap words out and assume the framework is the same. It literally makes no sense. Changing one word can, and does, have a huge effect on overall meaning of a sentence.

“Replace the word ‘pollution’ with the word ‘jews’ and captain planet looks pretty fascist!”

Replace the word race with party and you’ve got an incomplete yes, but not necessarily inaccurate description of Stalins USSR.

Replace the Sodium in Sodium Chloride with Hydrogen and OH GOD IT BURNS IT BURNS OW OW OW OW!

Personally I like the definition that the historian Robert O. Paxton uses. Now, he’s a liberal, but he does have good insight into fascism and he doesn’t fall into that trap of deciding that communists and fascists must be the same thing. His definition isn’t materialist, but it’s a good start.

To paraphrase, his definition is “a suppression of the left among popular sentiment.” By left he means things like socialists, labor organizations, communists, etc. Fascism is a situation where a country has found its theater of democracy has failed and the capitalists need anything at all to keep themselves in power, even if it means cannibalizing another sector of capitalists. The fascists are the ideological contingent of this, who put forward a policy of class collaboration between working class and capitalist, instead of what socialists propose, which is working class dominance in the economy. Fascists exalt nationality or race because that extends through class sentiments. It brushes aside concerns like internal economic contradictions. I once had a comrade say something like “Fascism is capitalists hitting the emergency button until their hand starts bleeding.”

Communists using a vanguard party is to defend their own interests against capitalists or outside invaders. The praise of the CPSU in Stalin’s era was precisely because it acted as a development and protection tool for the working class. It did its job and people were wary of any return to the previous Tsarist or liberal governments. Women began going to school, women were given the vote for the first time. Pogroms ceased. In less than one lifetime of the CPSU administrating the country, people went from poor farmers to living in apartments with plumbing, heating, and clean medical care. That’s why there was such praise of the party, because they actually did things people liked, and they didn’t want anything to threaten them.

Also, what does it matter if there’s one party or two? The working class have a singular, uniting interest to overthrow capitalism. Why are multiple parties needed? Anything the working class needs to negotiate for can be handled within a socialist, democratic structure, not two or three competing structures against one another. Take a look at Cuba, which has one party, but doesn’t use their party to endorse candidates. Everyone’s officially an independent in the National Assembly.

A different response, which comes from a different angle to those pointing out that Marxism-Leninism is not fascist:

The word ‘fascism’ is used so fast and loosely outside of a technical context that I wouldn’t say one interpretation is necessarily right or wrong. It depends on context. (Incidentally, same for ‘socialism’, even principled well-read communists can’t agree on a definition.)

For example, if we’re talking about the actual Fascist ideology (think of Mussolini and associates) then I would even hesitate to include Nazism due to the very different roots: they’re both nationalist anti-liberal anti-democratic, anti-socialist ‘third way’ ideologies and they did ally in the war, sure, but to group them both as ‘fascism’ trivializes core differences in how they formed, why they successfully formed, how they appealed to their followers (fascism actually recruited many self-identifying socialists in Italy and its important to recognise why to prevent it), and why they were ultimately antisocial and unsuccessful in their goals.

This isn’t just some academic masturbation nitpicking or anything: I believe that the ignorance of Classical Fascism by lumping it in with the far more obvious and baseless idiocy of Nazism makes it harder to recognize and counter, especially when neo-Nazis are such ridiculous cartoonish farces. Fascism stemmed from National Syndicalism and has core economic ideas like corporatism (from ‘corpus’) that could fool people, and sounds much less stupid that Hitler’s bizzare esoteric fantasies about Aryan racial supremacy: even Mussolini considered Hitler crazy.

The point of me making this distinction is that the dictionary definition you gave isn’t even wrong in describing fascist ideologies, but, I don’t think that list of common traits should be mistaken for a definition. Those traits are the results, not the foundation of the ideology, and a neo-liberal state like the USA can easily match many of those traits despite being a very distinct ideology. Any you will absolutely see people saying ‘USA is fascist’ as a shorthand for nationalist, racist, imperialist, oppressive, blah blah blah, but it’s definitely not post-National-Syndicalist faux-socialist corporatist collectivism. We should obviously fight both but they are not the same and manifest differently.

I don’t want to dogpile and axont already pointed out a pretty good scholar who talks about the subject, but I did want to add for clarity the reason that it’s important to have a precise definition: We could look at, say, Victorian Britain, Ancient Egypt, the Roman Empire and Suleiman the Magnificent and argue that they were all unquestionably ruled by either a single or a small handful of rulers with no real checks on their power, that they oriented the economy and society around themselves, that they suppressed dissent etc. and conclude, from Webster there, that basically every government except modern American government is fascism. Simply in historical terms that would be an enormous problem, because it collapses all the nuance and distinctions that exist, obviously, between these extremely diverse forms of government.

When people talk about fascism, there’s a reason they think of Hitler and Mussolini (who self-described, which makes that a bit easier I guess) even if it’s hard to put a finger on exactly what the unifying factors are. Very clearly, Mussolini and Hitler thought their projects were incompatible with communism/socialism, it’s why their first steps upon achieving power in their countries were to purge the left and ensure that left resistance couldn’t be organized against them. Even if you have critiques of Stalin (I certainly do) I think there are pretty obvious differences between the USSR and the fascist axis that it ended up fighting against, reasons that were ultimately persuasive to Roosevelt and Churchill despite their own misgivings about communism. Everyone at the time understood there was a difference, and we need to be able to distinguish if we’re going to talk intelligently about forms of government that western countries don’t themselves use.

So in short, I’d say that definition from Webster is too vague to be useful, I’d say there are factors like palingenetic ultranationalism and hostility to the left that seem to be constant in any real fascist regime that should really be a part of a definition of the term. Otherwise ‘fascist’ just means ‘mean’ or ‘bad’ because all of its distinctives are gone.

I’m sure a lot of people will chime in, I just want to add this short vid with Domenico Losurdo.Here.

Replace the word race with party

That’s a pretty significant difference, don’t you think? Exalting racism and exalting a political organization that opposes racism are diametrically opposed things, not equivalent.

Are violent revolutions not a form of democracy? They generally require popular support to succeed.

OK, that’s as good an answer as any.

Salvador Allende got couped three years after his election. Are there any ways you can think to prevent a foreign power from undermining future hypothetical socialist governments that wouldn’t be authoritarian?

I don’t think I’ve seen this position before and it sounds pretty wild ngl. Let me just lay out my understanding.

Mao disagreed with the party on the basis that he felt the peasants had more revolutionary potential than the small, new proletariat working in what few factories existed in China. Mao’s arguments were rejected, and the party’s commitment to rigid ideology over analysis of the specific material conditions of China led to them being crushed by the Nationalists and massacred. It’s the whole reason that the Long March happened.

The few surviving members of the party regrouped, though they were hunted to the ends of the earth and had extremely little manpower or resources. Despite this, because they used Mao’s approach of appealing to the peasants, who reflected the majority of the working poor, the communist revolution spread like wildfire, gaining more and more supporters everywhere it went.

I don’t deny that the party before Mao had good intentions, but it seems to me that history has proven their approach wrong in an incredibly decisive way. They tried their approach when the party was in a better position and failed miserably, they tried Mao’s approach after that miserable failure and it succeeded on an enormous scale. I’m pretty curious to know where you disagree with that.

Chinese socialist revolution before Mao’s leadership is pretty legit. Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, are all real socialists, they truely cares about the worker and envisions a better future for China.

So no revolution at all? 95% of the critical mass and anything that can be called a large scale revolution (with organizational successes of the masses) happened in China in the 30s and had little to do with Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao previous work ,no matter how admirable. The CPC almost died and was built back up multiple times by the time Mao succeeded and Mao was vital in that. You cant get more legit than revolution under Mao. Under probably the worst odds and situation any communist party and revolution had to face they endured, made correct and miraculous choices and political and military manuvers at every turn and won, uplifting and liberating hundreds of millions of peasants and women. No Mao, no successfull revolution in China and no emancipation of the masses. Good luck doing the long march and outmanuvering the KMT from the countryside by amassing immense support with Chen Duxiu’s ideas about the peasantry.

Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao may have envisioned a better socialist future for China but they were and would have been unable to make it happen. They lacked both the military genius, the correct analysis on the peasantry or the rhetoric and vision of mass politics that Mao had that allowed the CPC to pull through against all odds and win

why is everything there a decaying flashback to the 1950s where everything is falling apart?

It might be that the capitalist world power next door has had an embargo on them since the 1950s. And look at all they’ve accomplished despite that. Now imagine what they’d have accomplished had they been allowed to thrive.

“Why is everything manufactured in other countries from before the embargo started”

Lmao, that’s a testament to communist Cuba’s success. No other form of government could withstand a US embargo for a year and not collapse. Cuba has withstood for DECADES and has surpassed the US in life expectancy. The buildings are kinda shabby, but homelessness, infant mortality, illiteracy are all LOWER than the US, the richest country in the history of the world.