Eugene V Debs, a communist that ran for US president from his prison cell, securing 3.4% of the vote. Also the former state representative of Indiana.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_V._Debs

I’m literally not reading anything from you anymore so as not to pop off. You’re full of shit and I have no interest in engaging with a bare faced liar spreading garbage for the quite obvious reason that you don’t want the socialists to be federated.

Hexbear? Yes after the ban a lifeboat discord was set up, then a week or so later the site Chapo.Chat was born after rushed dev work. It later rebranded to Hexbear because various socialist groups didn’t want to work with a site associated with the chapo podcast for a variety of minor mostly unimportant reasons, things like believing they’re grifters just seeking money or w/e.

“Authoritarian” doesn’t refer merely to the existence of authority. It refers to a system under which, on balance, individual liberty is secondary to governmental authority - a system under which there is more likelihood that an individual will be constrained by authority than that theybwill be free to act as they choose.

And note, before you even go there, that that doesn’t mean or imply no individual liberty. Again, the issue is the balance between individual liberty and governmental authority.

Individual liberty is secondary to governmental authority in ALL states. Your liberty ends exactly where it harms the ability of the state to exert its authority. The perceived liberty you believe any state gives only exists within strict boundaries where the use of that liberty does not threaten the state, as soon as it does threaten the state you become the subject of repression. This is true of all states, socialist or liberal.

Why are we suddenly talking about democracy?

We’re talking about liberal democracy because the implication you made was that “authoritarian” states should be opposed whereas the status quo should be maintained. The implication you made was not between anarchism and socialism, it was between what currently exists and what MLs would like to replace it with. You were placing yourself in defence of liberalism when you did this, not anarchism.

Not necessarily, but as a general rule, there is, simply because it’s more difficult for oligarchs in a representative democracy to enact their will. There’s a number of hoops that they have to jump through in order to maintain at least some semblance of serving the will of the people, and that specifically because the people still retain some significant freedoms (remember - it’s about the balance between freedom and authority).

In effect, oligarchs in a representative democracy have to trick or coerce people into not exercising their freedoms or exercising them poorly.

In an authoritarian system, the balance favors the government in the first place, so they’re far more likely to be able to simply issue decrees and then enforce them, without having to muck about with all of the pretending to be serving the will of the people stuff.

What system? You’re not naming a system, you’re vaguely saying “authoritarian system” with no real definition. Describe the authoritarian system. How do their elections work? What is its structure? How do their votes work? How do their courts interact? What is their constitution? Etc etc.

This vague “authoritarian system” is the culprit here for the problems. It’s “bad country” with no real material description or understanding of how “bad country” functions. This is the very point I tried to raise in my first comment, that this wordplay is used to denote “bad country” whenever it has chosen to do something that opposes US (or generally western) interests.

Actually, I would say that it is inherently a bad thing.

That’s an awful lot of why I’m an anarchist - I believe that institutionalized authority cannot be justified and is inevitably destructive.

Sure. I was an anarchist until not too long ago so I don’t actually disagree with you. States are bad. There’s a reason we all want to achieve their eventual abolishment, whether or not we disagree on how to get there. We generally agree that states do bad things. The liberal state does bad things in service of defending the liberal state and maintaining the status quo, the socialist state does bad things in service of defending the socialist state.

This reads like classic projection.

Pointing out the capitalist state does exactly everything that the socialist state does in one way or another is not projection. Come on now you’re better than this you don’t need to go to bat for liberalism as part of your opposition to socialism.

And in fact, I just wrote another post in which I pointed to what I believe to be the fundamental flaw at the heart of the tankie position, and it was pretty much exactly what you wrote here.

My position is that if you’re going to hold that authority is legitimate, then that means that you are legitimately subject to it. You don’t get to pick and choose, just as you wouldn’t allow those who would be subject to your authority pick and choose. Just as you hold that they’re rightly subjugated if those with whom you agree are in power, you’re rightly subjugated if those with whom they agree are in power.

So do you believe in using authority to kill fascists? Do you believe in using authority to prevent liberals from rebuilding a capitalist state in your newly stateless anarchist collective? What are you going to do when one part of the population decides to start a state? Let them or fight them? As an anarchist my understanding of authority was significantly more fleshed out than this, I knew full well that as anarchists we would be exerting authority on some part of the population during and after revolution until achieving what we wanted, and that we would then violently prevent its destruction. Are you opposed to Mahkno and his army violently overthrowing and instilling their ideology on their opposition? Are you opposed to the Spanish anarchists of revolutionary Catalonia violently fighting a civil war for their ideology? Why do you not consider these actions of violence to be the violent use of authority by one part of the population upon another? You can not be a revolutionary and also be against the use of authority, they are strictly in conflict, even as an anarchist if you ever see or take part in an anarchist revolution you will be directly oppressing the opposition through use of force at some stage or another.

These days I’m not sure how much they’ve dropped off in popularity or not. A lot of people recommend /r/TrueAnon or /r/TheDeprogram, I hear CitationsNeeded mentioned quite often as well. If you’re looking for more leftist pods with varying styles/seriousness. Pretty much all of them crossover with Hexbear and the former userbase of the CTH sub.

Whether I agree with the narrative or not, forced narratives and censoring dissenting discussion is bad for communities and breeds extremism and echo-chamers.

You are advocating for doing that by advocating for defederation. This completely lacks any self awareness.

Stop calling it a troll instance ffs. It’s been here for 3 fucking years and as of like one week ago represents 25% of all content ever posted from a lemmy platform. It has a culture and community that exists for far more than that and is far more established and unique than a bunch of redditors that are mad at reddit and can’t stop posting about reddit instead of actually making this place somewhere unique and fucking interesting with its own cultural stamp and reasons to be here.

What you’re doing is just slander and it’s going to make me very hostile very fucking soon. You are throwing insults at not just me but at thousands of people that I like very very much.

Putinistas

Please don’t give the libs new words.

That’s not really a good-faith response. You’re not engaging with what “authority” actually means, or why one state that murders and imprisons people for trying to overthrow the state is different to another state that murders and imprisons people for trying to overthrow the state, these happen under both. What is the country with the largest prison population in the world? Do you not consider that authoritarian? Why not? The US operates Guantanamo on land that Cuba doesn’t want it on, and refuses to close Guantanamo and return the land to the Cuban people, is that not authoritarian? Why not?

What specific part of Cuba’s electoral system is authoritarian?

Just ban the individuals that do end up being a problem it’s not fucking hard. Christ. Lemmyverse is fucking tiny I moderate bigger individual subreddits than lemmy has registered total users, with fewer mods. Handling the load from a few problem individuals is a non-issue.

Yeah that’s fair. I work with some trots myself over union efforts, kinda impossible not to in the UK. I am perhaps overselling the position by overemphasising the historic conflict between the two. With that said I’m still baffled by the “I only mean tankies not communists” point. I can only imagine it comes from a place of not really understanding communists, or being deliberately misleading in that what they actually mean by “communist” is “anarchist” and that’s why there has been no further response.

“Authoritarian” is fairly meaningless in this context. All societies and political structures rely on authority to maintain social control to greater or lesser extents. What is the difference between a tax collector and an armed robber? Both demand money from you and threaten violence if you don’t give it to them. The main (and some would say only) difference is in authority. The tax collector has authority, the robber does not.

Where does liberal “democracy” derive its authority from? Most liberals will claim that it comes from the approval of the people or the democratic mandate (same thing, really). Why then do studies repeatedly show that there is no correlation between popular opinion and policy? Why do the majority of Americans want public health care and yet it never passes?

There is no democratic mandate in liberal democracy, it certainly doesn’t result in policy that represents the real will of the people. The people can vote a guy out? And what? Replace him with a different dude who won’t do what the people want?

What happens if someone picks up a gun and tries to oppose the “democratic” consensus anyway in a liberal democracy? Do you just sit by and let the state be destroyed? No, the democratic state uses its own authority to oppress this opposition.

There is no such thing as a distinction between “democracy” and “authoritarian”. It’s a meaningless buzzword. The opposite of a democracy is an autocracy or an oligarchy, not “authoritarian”. That’s just something westerners fling at other people’s democracies which they don’t like for daring to vote for something against US interests and want to see them blown up and millions killed and displaced. Every state seeks to preserve itself and so every state will use authority when it is faced with potential destruction. This is not inherently a bad thing, it obviously depends on the government in question, and who is trying to destroy it, and why. People always justify the use of authoritarian means used by whoever they support, and then those who are intellectually dishonest pretend that somehow their use of authority isn’t “authoritarian”.

That won’t happen and you know it. Once this is established there will never be any movement on it. Your position just functionally means it’ll always be defederated.

Eugene V Debs. The best president the US never had.

o7

Their first rule is that you can’t criticize communism…

No it isn’t. That’s literaly not Hexbear’s rules. The closest thing to that in Hexbear’s rules would be this one:

We are a platform that welcomes anyone who wants to be here in good faith. With that said, we are also an intentionally leftist platform; conservative and reactionary ideologies will not be tolerated here.

Replace with lemmy or w/e

Ya I agree. Harmless enough. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

No they’re not lmao.

It’s literally just “be nice to people when visiting other instances, don’t behave like a dirtbag leftist unless you’re actually on Hexbear”. Because the culture of Hexbear is… Dirtbag left. Making sure that the userbase doesn’t behave that way off Hexbear is pretty important. Hexbear users are lovely most of the time but get vicious with each other and are prone to extremely hostile fighting over topics they disagree on, this would be a massive shock to most normal people off-Hexbear. They’re just trying to mitigate that.

I think so too, it’s just a bit muddled.