It’s about 50k active users. Communities are generally less important than instances.

Varies wildly from instance to instance. At this point, most instances have their own “culture” and ideological leanings, if you go against your instance’s grain then you will run into more friction. I can help if you give a broad overview of your political leanings and interests, or you can browse the major instances and see which most appeals to you.

Only a few people are actually pushing back, though. I wouldn’t call that controversy, for such a context that is usually far worse.

It isn’t that controversial actually, seems pretty unified with only a couple people getting upset.

Nobody denies that hundreds died all over Beijing that day, what’s called into question is using the “Tank Man” image out of context and telling everyone that he was run over. It’s a mythologizing of another country’s tragedy for the purpose of twisting events in the favor of Western interests.

Think about it another way: why is it that the US, BBC, etc readily and repeatedly report on a mythologized version of the events when they know that the truth is closer to what you say?

Bore-zhwah-zee

Lenin was one of the most important figures in creating the first Socialist State, I think we should at minimum learn from his experiences and thoughts to see what we should copy and what we need to change.

Leftists do have solutions, though. Usually Leftists are revolutionary, the idea that they don’t have a solution just because they don’t support voting as a legitimate tactic is flawed.

Generally, the DPRK is seen similarly to Cuba, they would be doing far better if the US Empire wasn’t sanctioning them directly to cause harm. As for Stalin, it depends on what you’re talking about, the Great Purge had no more than 700,000 condemned to death, and that doesn’t mean every one of them was actually executed. Stalin certainly wasn’t a saint, but at the same time he wasn’t worse than Hitler and killed 10-20 million like the Black Book of Communism would have you think.

Ultimately though, Marxism isn’t “become DPRK” or “be Stalin.” I think you have to study Marxism more to understand why those questions largely don’t matter for building Socialism. I suggest you read Blackshirts and Reds.

…what?

I’m not Dessalines, but as the curator of the other list, I can do my best to answer.

When you say that Marxism has become “brutal and distorted,” I think you’re operating from a mindset and understanding rooted in Western culture and education. I would say, based on my research and reading into AES (Actually Existing Socialism), these countries such as Cuba, the PRC, and the former USSR all apply Marxist understanding and methods to amazing effect.

The Red Scare never ended, and being aware that it existed isn’t enough to actually understand what AES is like. The history of AES, and the conditions within those countries, is not reported faithfully or honestly in the West, so it is very difficult. That doesn’t mean they are perfect, but it means they are real, and come with real victories for the Working Class.

That’s why the opening sections of my reading list include Blackshirts and Reds as well as Dr. Michael Parenti’s 1986 lecture, these 2 really give an eye-opening look into the mythology and demonization of AES in the west, and how that process is intentional and persists to this day.

To circle back to your question, Marxists are hopeful because Marxism works, we know this and see it happening. We learn from the mistakes our predecessors made and we promise to carry their work forward.

As a final side-note, regarding the Nazis: it was the Red Army that did 80% of the fighting against the Nazis. We have Marxists to thank for the defeat of the Nazis, and we can do it again.

Ideas don’t create matter, matter creates ideas. The human being is special because it recreates matter which recreates ideas in an endless spiral. Capitalism wasn’t invented but arose especially once industrialization took off with the steam engine. Organization of society really started with agriculture, feudalism with the ability to store the gains from agriculture, Capitalism with factories aided by steam engines and machinery, and Socialism has already cropped up around the world with the rise of mass industry and international Imperialism.

The human mind exists in the context of its environement. We don’t really consciously employ a system as it was designed, rather, the system emerges due to physical laws of development of technology and new capabilities, and humans can do their best to tweak or guide that process. Socialism is a critical step because under Capitalism, profit is the prime motivator and that works against a common goal, while in Socialism humanity has understood the laws of social development and can make Capital work towarda a common, cooperative goal.

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific is a great and far more thorough overview of what I just described, a brief overview of Historical and Dialectical Materialism.

🫡 thanks comrade!

Your error is in combining Capitalism the system with the ideologies that support it, like Liberalism. These are separate, and combining the two leads to unhelpful errors that obfuscate understanding of how they work. The base is not the superstructure, but they reinforce each other.

Concisely, Capitalism the system of Political Economy and Socialism (eventually Communism) the system of Political Economy are raw material processes, or the Base. The ideologies concerning each and the other aspects of society are the Superstructure. Here’s an infographic:

Communists believe private and public ownership are tools better suited for different levels of development. At low development, markets can be a useful tool, see the NEP or the PRC’s Socialist Market Economy. Markets, however, necessarily centralize and erase their foundations, Public Ownership becomes more and more efficient in comparison along this process. The only time you could say Public Ownership will not eventually be the future of production is if you think production will no longer improve and no longer increase in complexity.

When I say that I don’t think you understand Communism, I say that because it’s abundantly clear to me that you haven’t engaged with the why of Communism from Communists themselves, just moralistic arguments and not the actual materialist analysis Communists work off of. It has nothing to do with morality, and everthing to do with how production functions in the real world.

For what it’s worth, I’m confident time will prove me correct as well.

Deeply silly. Will we see the return of plague doctors?

Wait for the Bubonic Plague to drop 🔥