The Midwest has something of a history of leftists. A bunch of German socialists moved out to Ohio in the mid 19th century. Minnesota is the only state where the Democrats operate as an affiliate, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, who tend to be better than the national level Democrats.

Lots of other stuff too

The emojis are the best part

And the Midwest has a lot of promising (for the U.S.) leftist history, and there are echos of that even today. The MN Democratic Party is actually the Democratic Farmer Labor Party, and their governor just passed a bunch of legitimately good stuff. Pretty sure DSA is very prominent in Chicago politics as well.

Hexbears can correct me if I'm incorrect but, my understanding is that the instance is not necessarily M-L but more "leftist and anti-capitalist unity" (M-L, anarchists, etc.).

In addition to the discomfort here, we are a very varied group. We have some set of rules, but the opinions expressed are all over the field, that includes ongoing news events, but also older things.

Those kind of differences are completely good and acceptable in a social space in which we try to create a community in which differences can remain. If we would act differently we would lose quite a bit of diversity and quite a few users that often are representing voices and perspectives that you don't hear often in the west/imperial core outside of marginalized groups.

Think how various groups come together for anti fascist actions, there you will have a ton of groups with ideological differences, and how sometimes we celebrate afterwards together.

I for one am happy to have you here :)

Mostly an average day of fighting with my ADHD so that I can effectively sell my labor.

ain't that the truth lmao

an average day of fighting with my ADHD so that I can effectively sell my labor

Posting is both the cause of and solution to so many problems

PPB stands for "Pig Poop Balls". It's a picture of a pig with poop on its balls. It's an old joke from reddit days and was typically posted in response to reactionaries who wandered into the subreddit to cause trouble.

Also, welcome!

Hello anarcho syndicalist! Nice to see you around

1. We are officially a left-unity community. Anarchists and Marxist-Leninists etc. all welcome, but we don't tolerate right-wing/liberal ideology that contributes to the suffering of the exploited workers of the world.

2. It's more so a place for leftists to hang out and chat and spread news/content. A bit of both ig.

3. The people calling us tankies and nazis simultaneously are mostly doing so out of a disingenuous liberal attempt to position anybody to the left of them as being on the right of them, while they are the truly enlightened ones. The shitposting is only ever a response to people who are being disingenuous with their arguments and refusing to have genuine discourse.

Users on other instances say you guys are "tankies", and from what I understand, that's essentially the authoritarian version of the left; instead of being the more moderate-ish(?) lefties/communists. Which one do you guys identify under?

Hexbear is explicitly non-sectarian. There are leftists here from across the spectrum, and sometimes there are disagreements among us. There are Marxists-Leninists, anarchists, and people who simply believe that capitalism isn’t going to lead to good outcomes for people. The word ‘tankie’ has lost a lot of meaning in recent times, so it’s hard to say whether there are tankies here or not.

As an aside on this issue, the concept of “authoritarianism” is poorly defined and generally not that useful, imo. There are people in “free” countries being imprisoned, forced out of their homes, forced to work, forced to abandon their culture, forced to accept certain legal and cultural norms, prevented from organizing or protesting, etc. And there are people in “authoritarian” countries who have mechanisms other than representative democracy to engage in politics in ways that are materially more effective and representative of their interests. Authoritarianism, if only viewed from the lens of liberal democracy, is largely meaningless in a practical sense.

I see a lot of shitposts and edgy humor, which is fine; so I initially thought the instance was more of a shitposting community rather than a serious one advocating communism. Or is it?

I’m not trying to be clever when I say “it’s both.” Most people here are actually pretty well-studied in history, politcal theory, economics, etc., and they are also terminally irony poisoned and extremely online. It’s what it is.

Many comments I see from other instances are mainly complaining of you guys being the former (tankies) on the first bullet, saying you are basically just like the far-right, just on the opposite side.

Thinking that the far left and far right can be the same thing is called horseshoe theory, and it’s nonsense. There are numerous real, tangible, entirely understandable differences between the left and the right. Saying that they are both he same because both dislike the status quo is an example of a thought-terminating cliche. The left wants fundamentally the opposite of what the right wants, and the only way they’re similar is that there are people who believe that some amount of violence and coercion will be required to achieve those goals. But the goals are different. I can’t remember where I read it, but someone pointed out that an example of the difference between communism and fascism is that Stalin largely failed in achieving his stated goals, while Hitler largely succeeded. Way oversimplified, and my comrades will probably excoriate me for the clumsy analogy, but the point is that these are different things, and to say they aren’t is ignorant.

The other complaint is that all they see when they engage with you guys are memes and shitpost gifs, and that it doesn't contribute to the conversation.

There is a lot of shitposting. However, one of the things a lot of people here have learned first-hand time and again is that a lot of people don’t want to hear what we have to say, regardless if it has merit, or is thoughtfully researched, or is based on personal experience. We’ve all heard the same tired, poorly-understood, cliche arguments over and over again about China and Cuba and the USSR, etc., and at some point you get to a stage where it’s clear that engaging in good faith is useless. And so, rather than write a wall of text with links to credible sources, people post a picture of a pig with poop on its balls. Is it contributing to the conversation? Arguably no. Was there a conversation to contribute to in the first place if a well-researched but heterodox argument is met with knee jerk, canned responses that don’t address the issue? Again, arguably no.

The intention from most people here is to troll and dunk and shitpost at people who are obviously willfully ignorant or outright bigoted. Any genuine inquiry will likely be met by a genuine response, as I am trying to provide you here. However, if someone is going to make transphobic or antisemitic comments while getting pissy about how we’re criticizing institutions like NATO or the IMF, they’re going to get dogpiled with shitposts. Critical support for China or Russia or Cuba or whomever is not blanket support of those things, and nor is criticism of NATO or the West or the big multilateral financial institutions a declaration of support for Putin.

Leftists are, if they believe what they say they believe, aligned with the interests of real people everywhere, and when you’re on the side of actual people, large institutions with power tend to be a mixed bag, simultaneously doing good and bad things. What we’re concerned with is the understanding of these large systems of power, and the mechanisms by which they can be challenged for the betterment of everyone. That’s not the status quo position, and it’s not entirely clean and easy to describe, so it’s likely going to get some of us into arguments.

That said, most people here aren’t just stirring shit to cause drama. We’ve been here as a community for three years prior to federation with other instances, and we’d still be here if every other instance defederated us. We’re trying to engage in a constructive way, but there are a lot of us, we’re aligned in our purpose, and we never log off. We’re going to come on a little strong at times.

I hope that helps.

"Tankie" doesn't really mean much in practice. Many of us are communists who think that places like the ussr, n korea, cuba, vietnam, and china aren't unremittingly evil, and we have exhaustive sources to back it up. We also know the history of events like the 1932 Soviet famine aka the "Holodomor", the June 4th incident aka " Tianamen Square Massacre" and a bunch of other anti-communist shibboleths. A whole lot of people who think they're leftists but aren't completely uncritically accept anti-communist propaganda with no awareness whatsoever that it's propaganda. And they hate being told that it's propaganda, that it doesn't relfect what happened and deliberately distorts history, often to the benefit of warmongers and fascists. So they call us tankies to indicate that we're evil genocide deniers and you shouldn't engage with us because we might start showing you well documented historical sources that contradict the propaganda and then you might become a genocide denier too! It's all very silly but most Americans and many Europeans think they're immune to propaganda and whatever the news and government says it 100% true.

"Authoritarians" is also mostly an empty accusation. There's no realy consistency about how it's used. People claim any government they don't like is "authoritarian" but generally can't explain how the features of the government they don't like differ from the governments they do like. They also often have very naive or just flat out wrong ideas about how governments they like work.

We're not trying to antagonize other instances specifically. We hate liberals and liberalism for making the world in to it's current miserable state, and there happen to be a lot of liberals in the lemmyverse. We also post far, far, far more than almost any other online community. No one needs to tell us to brigade an instance, we all decided to get stuck in and start arguing on our own, no coordination needed.

Tankie has become a pretty useless word especially over the last 4 or 5 years.

1. Originally it meant people who supported the USSR in suppressing an attempted revolution in Hungary (which by the way was largely supported by Hungarian fascists who were literally fighting alongside the Nazis only 11 years prior, it was complicated)

2. Then it meant generally people who think socialist states should maintain their structure using violence when they see it as necessary to not collapse. As if every other type of state doesn't obviously do that

3. Then it started to just mean "marxist-leninists"

4. Then pretty recently it got misused even harder, until it split and started to mean three things:

• classic definition #2 up above
• anyone to the left of me! (Most common now)
• those weird "patsoc" grifters and/or fans of how capitalist Russia hates gay people (this is the stupidest version of all)

It's mainly "anyone to the left of me" which is just the word "woke" but for liberals.

Give it 2 or 3 years, and republicans will be calling Joe Biden a tankie.

In regards to the second, communists and working class people are human, we are all over the place, there is no correct distinguished way to be a communist. So it can be both as others wrote. I remember having a Marx study circle with like 10 students, 2 PhDs and 1 - extremely funny and smart guy - who worked in a factory producing Trafos (very cliche I know) and whose parents were communists in South America and fled, and quite a few of us academics were pretty much shutting down the experience of him, cause it wasn't the German academic study circle style.

This site instead would've laughed with him and tried to incorporate the jokes and experiences into Marx exegesis.