I’ve been trying to find a good Marxist instance, but Lemmygrad and Hexbear are widely hated. Why is that? Are there any good leftist instances?
Lemmygrad and Hexbear aren’t “leftist” in the confused sense that Americans usually mean “leftist.” They’re actually leftist in the original sense, meaning that they want to abolish private ownership of the means of production. To the extent they’re “widely hated,” it’s largely because the Anglosphere has been indoctrinated against real, actual socialism their entire lives.
More often than not, when Americans say leftist they really mean left-liberalism a la Bernie Sanders, which is really center-left at most, and not actually leftist in the original sense, a sense which Americans have forgotten thanks to two Red Scares and the first Cold War.
True, but leninists are not leftist in any significant sense either. They are more authoritarian/ totalitarian than they are left or right.
Removed by mod
That’s not the part people have an issue with, the part where their users deny genocides, call everyone that has a less extreme left opinion of politics Nazis, end up being so “anti-racism” that they’re racists themselves and take all critics as personal attacks, that’s what people have an issue with.
Lemmygrad isn’t “hated” by most of the wider lemmyverse. There’s just a loud and obnoxious minority of people that will rail and rant about lemmygrad. They loudly rant about lemmygrad because they aren’t used to seeing their worldview get challenged and by its very nature as a radical leftist community, lemmygrad is a challenge to the typical background liberal perspective.
It’s no surprise we all end up seeing a lot of threads about “those mean tankies at lemmygrad” (and hexbear too) made by people who can’t take their worldview getting questioned, or even shown to be flawed, or just not standing up to their own scrutiny, and who get mad when that happens. There are also of course people with ideological reasons to demonize leftwing politics and will spread shit for that reason alone. But overall, I don’t think most people care enough except to think “oh yeah that’s that instance with those radical lefties, they’re weird but they do make some great memes sometimes.”
There’s a difference between challenging other people’s opinions and calling them fascists or Nazis just because they’re not at the extreme left.
Even worse, in this very thread I’ve been called a fascist for the sole reason that my instance is sh.itjust.works, one of the bigger instances and one where your political opinion isn’t a criteria to subscribe (especially not when I subscribed, they didn’t even ask for an email!)
There are people who called the main lemmy.ml instance a community of tankies, so I’d take a lot of these claims with a grain of salt.
I’m pretty left/lean socialist. The tankies that annoy me from those instances are pro authoritarian communists who say shit like “Stalin did nothing wrong” with no irony whatsoever. It’s not really about bickering over ideological purity past a certain point, some of that shit makes a good case for the horseshoe theory
there are no good Marxist instances
Karl Marx had some great ideas. It’s too bad everyone who identifies as a Marxist has such a twisted worldview.
Please don’t speak of Marxism without understanding it