we’re glad to have you!

Hexbear’s a years-old instance, we’ve developed a solid culture and genuinely care for one another, pseudoanonymity notwithstanding. We’re good people and better posters imo

yeah you can sit with us

If your free on friday, come to movie night

No idea what we’re watching yet but it’s usually pretty good

I personally love our new .ml friends

Careful, if you spend too much time here you’ll learn to speak our emoji language!

All of that type of propaganda carries with it a note that “they did it to their own people!”. There is in implicit understanding (or was, at least, when I was growing up in the US) that it is natural for militaries to kill people from other countries, a group which also conveniently includes minorities. Imo this was probably a deliberately crafted piece of cold war propaganda, since the US never really had to kill white people to suppress unrest.

Parenti’s “non-falsifiable orthodoxy” statement explains it. It really is just reflexive, deeply ingrained, and completely unexamined anti-communism. It’s not a real event to most of them, it’s an article of religious faith that proves the righteousness of their anti-communist beliefs. Trying to tell them “no one died in the square, about 300 people including unarmed pla soldiers died in fighting between the pla and insurgents several blocks away” is like telling someone that the tears leaking from the virgin mary are a rusted out sewer pipe. You’re not revealing the truth, or educating them. You’re attacking their religious convictions that form part of the foundation of how their world works, and they react accordingly by shutting down and denying.

You know it

Its considered authoritarian for the state to take housing and distribute it to the people.

Its not considered authoritarian for banks to kick people out of their home.

I’m starting to think this “authoritarian” word is bullshit.

When the verdict of the man who murdered George Floyd was being read, the Governor of Minnesota mobilized thousands of national guard troops and ordered them to occupy Minneapolis. There were thousands of armed soldiers, on foot and in armored vehicles, staged throughout the city. The implicit threat was that if Chauvin was acquitted and we tried to enact justice anyway we’d be machine gunned in the street for opposing a murderous white supremacist.

For those few days Minneapolis was the most heavily occupied city in the world.

say it again for the folks in the back: cringe is based and emotionally aware!

Last year i was going through some serious shit and folks here literally paid my rent for a month it was fuckin ridic i love the people here

personally, there are some rules and even some posters

my fave thing is the complete falling in line with each other we’ve done since federation. The party line, folks, it works

Nah we know you’re trots because there’s no mistaking that cocky swagger y’all have when you’re on the prowl to sell us newspapers

Thank you, i can lose myself in the sauce sometimes

Clearly I’m a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Bidenist

Thanks! And yes, it’s Reese from New Leaf!

I appreciate that a lot and am blown away by the effort people have put into this thread. I find it to be pretty classist to just tell people to “read a book”. Certainly it makes sense if you feel like someone is interested totally trying to play devils advocate/suck emotional labor out of you but I have definitely seen it in response to more well meaning questions.

Its fine, everyone starts from somewhere.

The fact that all property relations rest on violence or the threat of violence is intentionally made invisible by the ruling class under capitalism. This is done through propagation of ruling class ideology in education, movies, television, radio, newspapers etc. Marxists refer to this as the superstructure And that is a whole other rabbit hole… It comes in many forms, but within a society you will hear familiar arguments about why poverty exists alongside opulence, why poverty and its manifold problems are the result of individual moral failing or lack of proper work ethic etc. These are typically nebulous ideas that change over time to whatever will best allow the status quo to persist and they intentionally ignore the basis of these problems and their root cause within the organization of production within our world (the social basis of production). In the USA prior to the civil war, convoluted ideas of race science were created to support and justify an unjust system of chattel slavery and racial caste, for example. Today, emphasis is placed on individual moral failing: poor work ethic, drug addiction, lack of religion, or other vague but incorrect ideas that are often have their root in racism, ableism, sexism, classism etc. Typically ignoring that, for instance, some of the richest people in the world don’t work, use drugs with abandon, lack religion etc.

If you live in a well developed capitalist country, particularly in western Europe and the US/Canada, your “comfortable” lifestyle is created and maintained by violence in a number of ways, both historically and currently, domestically and abroad. All political economic systems rest on the authority of the state to maintain property relations through the state-sanctioned use of violence. When someone is evicted, for instance, the constable or sheriffs will show up and forcibly remove a tenant. Contracts are upheld and property itself is legitimized through the state, and so the state is able to set the terms of what type and means of acquisition and ownership are allowed. If they are not, or the state finds them illegitimate because it challenged their authority, then it can be met with violence (jail, beating, dispossession, displacement, ostracism, execution, to name a few current & historic means). Marxist-Leninists and other types of communists rightly point out that this is a feature of all states, and nearly every observed society, but they also point out that this violence has a class character that is determined by the social relations that underpin the dominant mode of production (i.e. the state is a device of the ruling classes to maintain the current order and subject the other classes to the current system) They seek to abolish this class system, and hopefully all oppressive systems with it… but that is something the current ruling class will resist, and so creating a political system where the oppressed classes use the state to repress the former ruling class (capitalists, landlords, petit-bourgeois reactionary types, etc) and maintain the ruling position of the working class in order to build a world without class domination and without opression

Capitalism itself is an exploitive and extractive system. You are correct to point out your boss steals from you the full value of your labor for their own profit, and this level of exploitation may seems benign or relatively acceptable if you have a comfortable life, but it is still violent and your relationship with your boss also ignores the bigger picture. Outside of your job there are much more oppressive arrangements within that system and many people are homeless, living in poverty, hungry and sick, despite an abundance of labor and resources to stop all of these social ills. People in the “developed” economies mostly have that “development” at the expense of highly violent and exploitive methods that extract wealth and labor from others. western europe, the us, and others typically spent the past few hundred years pillaging the rest of the world and groups of people within their own borders as well.

Colonization and imperialism are imposed upon the world with great violence, and then once that order was set up, it was maintained in a transformative process that had to adapt to changing conditions and social movements that sought to break its control. None of this was non-violent on the part of the imperialists, but it has changed into a more abstract or indirect form through financial instruments, debt, or large clandestine efforts to shape governments abroad. Their relationship is still extractive and violent and imposes poverty, famine, war, and displacement on people throughout the globe. If you are in a comfortable job in a developed western nation, it is more than likely that you either benefit from this violence directly or indirectly. If you are in a country that is a willing subject to US imperialism, a junior partner, then often your lifestyle has come in the form of a bargain, where your political and economic system were shaped by the United States in exchange for favorable terms: but without it would be subject to violence or sanction.

I can afford rent, groceries, and utility bills.

It’s when you can’t afford those things that the society based on force comes into focus with perfect clarity.

What is the force or violence I used to attain and maintain ownership of this property?

The force or violence is what is used to enforce the property rights that you purchased. If I went to your property right now and claimed it as my own and started using it, what would you do to stop me? What tools are available to you to prevent that? The deed of ownership to that property is just a proxy for the violence.

Would the “society based on force” in play here be that I am being forced to work to afford and enjoy these necessities?

Kinda. You’re buying it in the first place because you don’t have a property to produce it yourself, which is also the reason we work, as there is no other way of getting what we need to survive. That’s also why you pay rent.

Think of this: who owns the food before you buy it, or who are you buying it from? How is it produced? Why can’t you just take it, and what happens if you do?

My point is: violence is inherent to property. Property can’t exist without violence or the threat of it.

And that the ideal society would be that I shouldn’t have to work to have those?

In Marxist communism, the question of what is a perfect society doesn’t matter, is counterproductive and should be repelled. The point is not to design a perfect society, but to develop the progressive forces of capitalism (the tools which develop scientific advancements, education, production capacity…) and get over the regressive forces (current relations of property, mostly). Communism will develop from capitalism, not made of thin air by a fairy. According to Marx himself, the initial stages of communism will be hardly distinguishable from capitalism, save for the property relations. Which brings us to:

I get that this is probably moving towards the more well known stance of “the workers should own the means of production”. Is that the case?

You should know what that means beyond the slogan:

You see, european and american capitalism started as progressive force, in the sense that it brought about a material development never before experienced in history. Now, we have the potential to do much much more than we currently are, but the way the system works gets in the way and keeps us from doing better. Just look at cars and climate change - why aren’t we ditching fossil fuels faster, if it’s for the surviving of the human race?

In Marx’s analysis, in the beginning stages of a form of society, their relations of property, specially the property of the means of production (land, tools, education), act as a progressive force, developing the productive forces (workers and their abilities, mostly). With time, these productive forces become too developed, and what once was a rocket launching society forward now becomes a cage that won’t let it go any further. These overdeveloped productive forces then dissolve the previous relations of property and a new relation of property arises, one that is based on that overdevelopment. Then rinse and repeat.

Science and productivity are now too developed for capitalism, which now ceases to be a factor of progress and becomes an impediment for further development. The natural next step of a society to progress is to abandon the current relations (who owns the land, tools, machines etc) and organize new ones based on the fact that workers are much more educated and we can now produce absurd quantities of useful products if we ditch the production of useless ones for financial market reasons (do you know the amount of energy humanity wastes mining bitcoin? 😬).

There’s also the fact that the planet is dying and big companies won’t let us do anything about it or else they’ll lose profits, so that is another situation in which capitalism has become a cage and not the rocket it once was.

I recommend reading Critique of the Gotha Programme, which consists of Marx dunking on a communist party of his time. He exposes all these ideas much more eloquently than I can.

It’s ok! I’ll try to add a bit to what other already said, in simple terms. I’ll respond to punctual questions in another comment.

I’ll talk about two important ideas here: historicity and collectivity. This whole mode of thought is very complex and there is no shame in feeling overwhelmed at first and not getting it with just some short online comments. Marx took thousands of pages to develop all these ideas, and others still had to develop them further.

One important thing to keep in mind during an analysis is that, although things simply pop up on our mind when we experience them, that is not the case in reality outside our head - your land didn’t just pop up into existence the way you experience it right now. Sure, you simply bought it from another person, but that’s not where the land started existing. Assuming you are from the US, how did a piece of land in America become a market product in the first place? To understand that, you have to look into history. Way back then, someone had to take the land away from others (natives) using force and then keep it from getting taken away by others also using force. The state was created by these situations: as a mediator of ownership of the newly explored property. How is that mediation put into practice? To see it, let’s bring it a little closer to yourself: what would happen to you if, instead of buying the land, you simply got into it and said it’s yours? Best case scenario, you’d be dragged away by cops - that is, the state would use force to mediate property rights. Unless you have an army to fight the state, you are not keeping that land.

So, since things in reality develop through historical processes, it is wrong to not consider those in your analysis, you won’t get close to thinking something that is objective (ie. that exists outside your head).

Also, just reflecting about oneself and your own personal experiences will hardly deliver a correct analysis. The world is collective - everything around you and inside you were made by a long chain of producers scattered in space and time. Failing to add this consideration into your analysis won’t get you close to reproducing reality correctly inside your head either.

Hope this helps! Try the “primitive accumulation” chapter of Capital, it’s towards the end and will give you a great picture of all this, as it describes the political events that gave birth to English capitalism. It’s not a hard read, as it is not abstract as the initial chapters are. Then come back and tell us what you think 😄

If you’re feeling adventurous, read the introduction to Grundrisse, although that one is more complicated. The book lays down a lot of Marxist ideas, and also describes the method of analysis Marx used to reach them. My two comments were based on these two, respectively.

I’m…very critical of the DPRK personally. I think Juche as an ideology, while it has some interesting points, is pretty idealist and departs far too far from Marxist principles. And yes, the Kim personality cult rubs me the wrong way. That said the American Civic Cult gives me the same vibes. As does the Australian Anzac Cult, Britains hard on for Churchill and Nelson and the Royals etc etc

The DPRK has many flaws; it’s over militarised. Its inner cadre is insular and often slow to adapt. Its relations with China could be a lot better if they’d roll back on the Juche just a bit. There’s a nasty stink of Neo-Confucianism all over some of its political organs (but then, we might say that western communist parties often adopt some of the negative aspects of Christian ideology like millenarianism and purity cults.)

But it’s not the starving absolute monarchy often depicted in western media (though like Cuba it did have a fairly severe famine in the 1990s, after the SU fell and before it could re-normalise Chinese relations (the DPRK was on the soviet side of the split, if you recall). Kim is mostly a figurehead, he has power as does his family, but less than Stalin or Mao did, and those too were not the dictators people make them out to be, frequently losing votes and having preferred policies blocked by the rest of the party. The Kim family live privileged lives, sometimes spoiled lives, but no more than the US president. They don’t actually own all those palaces, and if they step too far out of line the Party won’t hesitate to take them away and find a third cousin to pick up the torch of Kim il Sung’s legacy.

As for the inner party, yeah, it sucks and I’d prefer Sankara’s approach of making their upper officials drive second hand 30 year old rust buckets and live in studio apartments. But then you have headlines in the west “North Korea so poor, their ambassador can’t afford a car or proper clothes.” The unfortunate fact is that appearances need to be kept up, and also, upper officials in any nation tend to work 80+ hours a week under high stress conditions where loss of acuity is not an option. I know we laugh at Biden and Sunak, but they (or at least their handlers) are actually terrifyingly smart people who can work crunch for years at a time without flinching. They need the comfortable offices, drivers, and business-class flights to do their jobs effectively.

Yes, it has a lower standard of living, but like Cuba, it can’t trade with anyone (and no, trade with China isn’t easy when a company that trades with the DPRK cannot, at any point in any operation, use a single Western financial institution, business, or NGO in any transaction (even those with non DPRK companies) without getting hit by the sanction hammer.) People there live ok lives, they eat regularly, they buy consumer goods, they go to their jobs, which sometimes suck. There’s a robust health and welfare network, there’s pretty good education, and while the military take up too much GDP, there is opportunity for economic expansion and it has in fact been catching up. It is fairly easy to get involved with local political committees and the average citizen has more control over local and even national policy than in western nations.

There’s an old joke. In the USA you can choose your party, but not the policy. In China, you can choose the policy, but not the party. The same goes for the DPRK. By the time an issue reaches a caucus, it’s been passed back and forth through representatives a thousand times, and every sector of society has had its say. The parliament is a rubber stamp because all the arguing happens at a lower level where people have more direct involvement. It’s still not perfect, or even good, but I don’t think it’s worse than a Parliamentary republic, and better than a Presidential one.

Defectors are unreliable because they’re often paid better the more outlandish their stories are, which is where we get people like Park talking about the one train that Korea has that they have to get out and pull in the winter and if you fall down in the cold they shoot you with an anti aircraft gun and send your family to the mines to pay the cost of the bullet. Many defect because they were smugglers or black marketeers who found themselves on the run, which is how they had the connections to cross the border in the first place. Others are disaffected military personnel, or cadre that lost a political infight and may have pointed critique that is at least worth trying to pick through. Some just watch too many bootleg shows, and those ask for repatriation more often than you might think.

I’ve actually had the pleasure of knowing a couple of North Koreans as casual aquaintances, and they’re normal, if somewhat insular people, who live normal lives. They laugh, they get annoyed, they have an unfortunate addiction to Chilean Tempranillos of dubious quality…

Yes, it does come to a point where I won’t defend a nation or group, somewhere not too far beyond where the DPRK is. Unlike others here I don’t offer Russia as it stands critical support, nor do I offer it to any nation that doesn’t at least pay lip service to Socialism. Something like Pol Pot I unequivocally condemn, as masking a murderous agrarian reaction in a red flag. There are (mercifully small) factions in the CPC that could move China in a direction I could not follow.

PatSocs, Nasbols, etc are also not deserving of critique. In fact my standards for non ruling parties are far higher than for ruling ones. After all, no plan survives contact with reality.

some links where people have written up stuff on the DPRK before:

• Democracy in the DPRK
• a history of the Koren War/formation of the DPRK
• megapost with a ton of resources

it basically comes down to most of the media about the DPRK in the west using outright fabrications as the basis for their thesis that it’s an awful place. like take Yeonmi Park spouting literal gibberish and yet getting taken seriously by western media - yeah mate, no one in the DPRK poops, that’s definitely a real thing and not a shitpost to make this website blush, thank you for printing it. it’s got its problems - how could it not, given the sanctions and the brutal war with the US - but it’s in a similar boat to most of the other AES states like Cuba, China, and Vietnam.

In addition to the wonderful write-ups and materials shared on the DPRK, some important context can be found on Season 3 of the podcsat Blowback, which also happens to be a super fun and informative listen.

Here is a youtube video by some australian socialist shit posters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BO83Ig-E8E

We Went To North Korea To Get A Haircut

A good deal of relation of hexbear to the DPRK is to underline that being critical of western news is quite important. The opinions about the DPRK vary a lot, but in general the user base thinks a country will never be just good or just bad. They are also aware of violence, i.e. the US having more than 1% of their population in prison (4 million) and a multiple of that in other incarceration/parole settings (and then you often are not allowed to vote anymore!), we do not say that to say actions of other states are not a problem, but to work out standards and to analyze how power of states is yielded.

That video is great! To add a small caveat to the gun control point, you’ll find a few users here who are into guns, own their own and/or attend a range with some regularity, and it’s not inconsistent with their socialist/communist principles.

While it is true that gun freedom, as it is spoused by most people who support it in the US mostly serves the ruling class, many leftist organizations or leaders have understood the power that having the means to defend oneself from the orchestrated violence of the state, or other actors who will not hesitate at using violence against leftists/racialized or LGBTQIA+ people has, and how it is sometimes necessary when trying to build power structures that attend to those same peoples’ needs outside of a capitalist system.

A key difference between a right-wing and a left-wing gun owner is that the left-wing one, given the conditions for it, will prefer those guns to be in collective control and ownership, and not at the service of an individual and their needs. Well, that, and that the left-wing one will be anticapitalist.

I just wanted to preemptively introduce this concept before you saw one of our gun fans in the wild and were confused by it.

Cheers!

Yeah, I wasn’t on the old subreddit but that exactly describes my mentality when I found Hexbear (then chapo.chat)