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TLDR: they are right-wingers pretending to be left wing
Why would supposed right-wingers be holding Leftist theory reading groups, hosting mutual aid comms, donating to Palestinian gofundmes, and supporting trans rights to some of the highest degrees on the fediverse? Irony? Seems like a silly hypothesis.
posted from lemmy.ml
I've seen those posts (I have no filter).... "I need money for rent" 🦗 🦗 🦗
I like horseshoe theory. Basically far-left and far-right come to be same extremistic pieces of shit that are more alike than not, e.g. Hitler(right) and Stalin(left).
The left-right spectrum itself just isn't a useful model, but the mere existence of anarchists contradicts horseshoe theory.
What does the Y axis represent here?
Technically, the X-axis doesn't represent anything either, as the far-right plot point curves upward, rather than continuing.
"Y" is the name of one of the major meme/shitpost contributors on lemmy.ml
The amount of mental gymnastics being done to justify their ideology
Mental gymnastics is the term given to people who read books by the mental couch and potato chip crowd.
Separation from reality, maybe?
It looks like another way of drawing the political compass left/right (collective vs individual rights) on the x axis and authoritarian/libertarian (obedience to centralized authority hierarchy vs distributed political pluralism) on the y axis. Tankies and far right would be in auth q1 and q2, far left q3, and not representing q4 labeling the quadrants from top left clockwise.
If we read it as a political compass
Auth+
Lib-
I love this image. Something that always confused me is that they are communist, but support russia? An extremely far right government?
There's no support for the Russian Federation. Support for the USSR? Absolutely, but not the RF. There's critical support, as in the RF currently takes an antagonistic stance towards the United States, which many Leftists see as the greater global evil, but no leftist genuinely thinks the RF is doing that out of "good intentions" or has any model that Leftists should replicate.
That sums it up.
Wait, really? The ones responsible for, among other things, the Holodomor? Those guys? Why?!
Marxists support the USSR as the world's first Socialist State. They don't believe it was some perfect wonderland free from troubles, issues, problems, etc, rather, they acknowledge that the USSR was real Socialism with real victories, like free healthcare and education, an elimination of famine in a country where starvation was regular, doubled life expectancies, dramatically lowered wealth inequality while dramatically raising wages, and over tripled literacy rates to near 100%.
Hexbear aren't unique in general support for the Soviet Union, the overwhelming majority of Marxists see it as far better than Tsarist Russia and the modern Russian Federation.
"doubling" the life expectancy? Life expectancy was 30 years old prior to the USSR forming in 1922, so yes "doubling" to 67 took until 1967, and before they doubled it, they dropped it to 23.6 years old. Tens of millions of Soviet citizens died early deaths to get there. Starvation didn't end for many and rationing was commonplace. I suppose killing off a sizable portion of your population would mean less mouths to feed, but what a horrible approach to try to solve that problem.
Perhaps a better measure would be infant mortality. The USA, with its "worse" healthcare, has had consistently less than half infant mortality (or even lower) for every year the Soviet Union existed.
...in Russian. If you spoke a different language, like Ukrainian, it was forbidden by USSR law from teaching it in schools. This happened to dozens of languages in other Oblasts.
On the surface this looks good, but that would be with a Western view of what earned wages could buy. Even with money there was limited food to buy for decades at a time during the Soviet Union. Further, you couldn't just do something like go a buy a car. You had to get on a wait list for years to even have an option to buy one.
Better than the final Tsar or Putin, probably, but those are both really low bars to gauge a win by.
I'm not saying everything about the Soviet Union was bad, but holding it up as an example to aspire to would be rejected by most folks that would be forced to live that life (or die an early death under its heel as a consequence of actions of the state). Do the Marxists you're referring to really pine to live in 1940s or 1950s Soviet Union?
A bit dishonest to point to the drops in life expectancy and the general 1940s and 1950s period without mentioning World War II, where the Nazis waged a war of extermination and genocide on those they considered genetically inferior, don't you think? Same with comparing a highly developed country that saw no land fighting in World War II to the country devastated the most by it that was a feudal backwater only a couple decades prior when it comes to infant mortality. The bit on literacy is also misleading, the vast majority of all SSRs pre-Socialism were illiterate.
Outside of curiously leaving out World War 2 and the massive devastation it brought (80% of combat in World War 2 was on the Eastern Front), as well as comparing directly to the United States that never saw the same destruction and started the century several laps ahead, your only real criticism was a lack of consumer goods. This is true, light industry was lacking and being closed off from the Global Economy was indeed a contributing factor to its dissolution, but you could have pointed to that honestly.
No, most Marxists don't want to go back in time to the first Socialist state, they would rather learn from what worked and what didn't and be part of building a Communist future.
No I don't think so. For one reason part of the massive losses were Soviet Military tactics of meatwaves (which Russia still uses today) during WWII. For another, the Holomodor was an extra 10 million citizens of the USSR starved to death that occurred long before WWII when Stalin took all the grain from the people that grew it and let them starve to death. Starving your farmers to death is a monumentally stupid decision for a nation that struggles with food supply. This is the hypocrisy of Soviet Communism. Marx and Engels wrote about empowering the masses, equality in everything, and society without class or station. Yet the USSR was anything but that. History shows that the actions of the state saw massive numbers of dead citizens as a means to an end in both war and peace. Trotsky himself was a victim of the Stalin's USSR. Famous and brilliant Soviet orbital rocket designer Sergei Korolev, was another victim dying from complications from living in gulag. Do you think Marx and Engels would have seen their ideas at work in the Soviet Union?
The infant mortality was more than double the USA every year for the entire existence of the USSR. Or are you claiming WWII was still to blame for the higher infant mortality 45 years after Hitler ate a bullet ending war in the European theater?
Is there consensus in the Marxist community about any nation today practicing this Communism 2.0 or is it all just political theory at this point?
"Tankie" here, russia sucks
What makes you a "tankie" if you don't share their beliefs?
People usually call me a tankie
Authoritarians like authoritarian regimes. They'll perform extreme mental gymnastics to reconcile their preconceived notions with reality, like the tankies that declare China to be socialist. Also, most of them see the US as the Great Satan that is responsible for any and all evil in the world. Therefore anybody who opposes the Great Satan must be good.
I can't help but wonder if tankies are the political equivalent of flat-earthers. I should probably ask that on NSQ some time, when I can figure out a way of asking that won't get me banned.
One way forward is to ask them for evidence for their viewpoints and investigate their sources for errors. The problem of the flat-earther is that there is objective evidence of a 3D rounded Earth that they can't adequately counter with objective evidence.
Damn, that analogy is apt af
we don't, we just hate the us more.
It's obvious you hate yourselves most.
how so?
See, this is why capitalization matters.
im not a native speaker but wouldnt the word for this in this context be "ourselves"?
haha love that