Communism is when you declare individual moral culpability for their role as cogs in an oppressive machine and the more you declare it the more communister it is. In fact, Marxism is 100% about the moral veracity of individual actions. That's why Engels was an evil counterrevolutionary for continuing to manage a factory his father owned despite claiming to be a """Communist""" and Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai were reactionaries since they are products of the exploitative Chinese landowning class.
Main, home of the dope ass bear.
THE MAIN RULE: ALL TEXT POSTS MUST CONTAIN "MAIN" OR BE ENTIRELY IMAGES (INLINE OR EMOJI)
(Temporary moratorium on main rule to encourage more posting on main. We reserve the right to arbitrarily enforce it whenever we wish and the right to strike this line and enforce mainposting with zero notification to the users because its funny)
A hexbear.net commainity. Main sure to subscribe to other communities as well. Your feed will become the Lion's Main!
Good comrades mainly sort posts by hot and comments by new!
State-by-state guide on maintaining firearm ownership
Domain guide on mutual aid and foodbank resources
Tips for looking at financials of non-profits (How to donate amainly)
Community-sourced megapost on the main media sources to radicalize libs and chuds with
Main Source for Feminism for Babies
Maintaining OpSec / Data Spring Cleaning guide
Remain up to date on what time is it in Moscow
You dumb fuck. Can you read? Where is the talk of "counterrevolutionary" or "reactionaries". Engels, Mao and Enlai wouldn't fly into mad rage like you if someone insulted them for being landlords or capitalist. They'd probably join in.
Lol literally all of my comments have been sarcastic, why do you think I'm raging? I'm not a troop, never have been one and never will be one and I've even cucked troops on more than one occasion lol. I just think it's funny as fuck that people on twitter dot com love stirring the pot and think making moral judgements is praxis.
Answer my question, what is the goal of a left wing movement in your mind?
Answer my question, what is the goal of a left wing movement in your mind?
I'm not taking the bait. If you have something to say say it.
I mean I can't respond to you unless you tell me what the goal of a left wing movement is, and how you think it can be achieved. Otherwise I can only assume you don't care about the end result and only the moral purity of the movement itself
People forget that one of original lines of the Internationale were "Our bullets are for our own generals"
EDIT: You know what, no, that's not the post. Does anyone remember who the most effective activists against the Vietnam War. The Vietnam Veterans Against War. The conservatives literally had to concoct a mythology that anti-war activists fucking hated the troops to the point that they spit on returning veterans.
Bourgeois professional militaries literally have their own inherent class divide in officers vs enlisted.
The entire reason historical wars became so unpopular was because of drafts and conscription, which is inherently polarizing due to affecting different segments of society unequally based on class. Conscripted armies are literally a means of socialization and consciousness-forming for the working class in the exact same way concentrated industrial enterprises are. Conscript armies become pressure cookers for class-based social unrest and dissent. This is precisely the reason they abolished the draft after Vietnam and will never actually reinstitute it. Just like police, professional volunteer-only militaries inevitably become hotbeds of reaction and hubs for reactionary indoctrination, pitting the professional soldiers and professional cops against cowardly, soft "civilians".
Should we be so accepting of IDF veterans fresh from shooting civvies on the border fence?
I dunno. I guess only if said veteran was fully repentant and acknowledging of the crimes they were part of...and most importantly were now actively agitating against them.
I guess I don't believe in condemning people forever - neither the cop in Baltimore nor the grunt in Mogadishu, if they're on the bottom rungs of such fucked up hierarchies. We need allies and if they've come around, that's better than nothing.
Forgive, never forget.
This is true, but that's wholly distinct from pulling our punches on troops out of the desire to attract them to the left, which seems to be the stance a lot of people take
I'm perpetually fascinated by people here who tout ACAB while also twisting themselves into pretzels to excuse soldiers. I guess being complicit in a system that terrorizes the poor, minorities, and marginalized groups while acting as armed forces of capital is bad on US soil, but excusable overseas? Am I understanding this right?
That would only be a fair comparison with veterans and ex-cops.
And be honest, how likely is it that an ex-cop has actually reformed?
The only ex-cops that I might trust are those that quit as whistle-blowers; or that were minorities policing minority neighborhoods in attempts at harm reduction or something like that.
Does anyone have real problems with ex-cops who have cut ties with cop culture? The problem with that DSA guy was that he was still organizing cop unions and apologizing for cops.
Yeah, that's all I'm really commenting on here. This site seems to reject cops pretty quickly but puts a lot of effort into embracing vets and I'm asking what real difference is between the two groups, outside of average age
One difference is the people they’re trained to oppress.
Cops are trained to oppress their own countrymen. Soldiers are trained to oppress people on the other side of the world.
It’s why in revolutions we see the military flip long before cops do. Cops are always the last holdouts.
1.) Cops can quit
2.) Cops are a completely separate class of petty landless warriors who are distinct from American society. They have class interests that differ from both the working class and bourgeois due to their unique position as the only habitually armed class in society.
3.) Vets are almost all working class upon leaving the military.
I don't know if it is a great strategy to antagonize everyone with actual military training, for the sake of "not forgiving" them.
Sorry sweaty L E F T I S M is about guilt and innocence, not about achieving material goals
So here’s a question: There are vets in our ranks, is this good or bad?
Good
Okay, struggle session over!
we are all victims of our circumstances. if you repent and grow to understand what you did then there's no need to inflict further pain on you.
I occasionally see posts from here with army recruiters sending texts to schoolkids and the weird troop worship you have.
If I'd grown up as skint and fucked up as I was in the UK at 16 in the US instead with your lack of healthcare and in a really shit environment I would have taken the first genuine shot of escaping I could.
That would probably have been the army tbh.
Not directly about this particular struggle session, but just throwing this out there because it's relevant:
There are various groups that help soldiers leave the military by offering legal or other counseling (like mental health), and by sometimes offering legal representation. This is a big deal, since it allows troops to leave the service usually without getting screwed by their command and getting a negative discharge that will negatively effect them throughout the rest of their lives. I know some veterans anti-war groups do things like this, and the GI Rights Hotline also offers a lot of resources for general navigation of the military legal system.
If the left really organized behind this in some form, they could remove soldiers from the ranks by helping them get themselves kicked out, while also providing a pipeline to bring them leftward. Not a whole lot of people are aware of this kind of thing, so I thought it was worth mentioning as potential praxis.
The Bolsheviks took power on the backs of soldiers in the imperialist Russian army. Soldiers are not some special section of the working class that gets to decide to just not work, we accept that workers are essentially forced to work for bosses under capitalism, that's why we don't let capitalists get away with the "just get another job if your boss is bad" argument, it is a matter of life and death. These people made a terrible decision just as they got out of high school, they fought or served for the fascist army of the US, regardless of what they did or didn't do they objectively were on the wrong side of any war they fought in. They have to live with that for the rest of their lives but the fact is they're here now, they're in our country and members of our class with the same fundamental interests as us, this isn't even mentioning the overrepresentation of colonized people in the army. We can talk about some moral reckoning where we ask them to wear a dunce cap and self crit after we've actually had a revolution. At the end of the day, we aren't fighting people, we're fighting systems, I don't think we should go out and attack Lee Carter or Spencer Rapone or Mike Prysner just because they joined the army if they acknowledge that imperialism is something we have to struggle against.
Would you do the same to an ex-cop who shot an unarmed black man?
I didn't say forgive war criminals. I'm talking about people haven't committed war crimes and have spent the time after they finished their service working to oppose that system they upheld. Christopher Dorner was a veteran and a cop, I would gladly welcome him into any party.
I’m talking about people haven’t committed war crimes
Every troop who was in Iraq is a criminal. That pure vet who was in the army but didn't contribute directly to US imperial violence is figment of your imagination.
Well now you're moving the goalposts, you asked about a cop killing an unarmed black man and now you're logically extending that to every single ex-cop, even paper pushers and IT guys. Were they complicit in a violent system? Yes. Is there an equivalent value between the guy who spent all his time repairing shit and guarding a base to the people working in Abu Ghraib? No.
Lemmie dunk on any leftist who joined the army when there was virtually no left in america and it can be argued there’s still no left now.
Left Twitter is so bad right now. Bernie was the only thing uniting us.
Certain segments of left Twitter was too okay with bipolars and other people with mental and emotional issues dictate the conversation. No offence to those dealing with such shit but their emotional volitility and blatant uncoolness prevents anyone from seeing the far left as anything besides a pack of diseased LARPers crying about their lack of popularity inbetween the 80th party split that day
Bad post. You don't have to have mental issues to be an asshole. And many people with mental issues aren't assholes. Saying "no offense" doesn't excuse stuff that is needlessly offensive.
yikes
Hi I'm bipolar fuck Yooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooou
Exhibit A has arrived I see
banned
lmao owned
:crab-party:
bigotry against people with mental health issues by accusing everyone whose takes you don't like of being mentally ill is good and helpful and will advance the cause of bringing justice to the world.
Bruh
Considering a popular sentiment in this thread is that we need troop help bc they "know how to fight", how many skills the average US soldiers develops would actually be relevant to the resource scare guerilla war likely to happen in a revolution? As far as I know most grunts don't get much tactics training and even those who do would be used to massive support infrastructures that revolutionaries obviously wouldn't have.
Being paid to be in shape, being able to fire a gun, and having knowledge of effective command structures would all be useful af.
Anything on top of that is a bonus, and comes from specialisation. Bomb disposal very quickly can become bomb creation, etc.
I re-read the thing again
If you or someone you love has been war crimed you can yell at the troops
If you are performatively hand-wringing on behalf of an imaginary person you have created in your mind who has been war crimed please shut the fuck up.
"Advocacy and empathy regarding issues that do not personally affect you is bad, actually"
Are we talking about advocacy and empathy or are we talking about extremely online people trying to score points on twitter by being more woke than thou?
Contributing to orgs that actually do things is advocacy, listening to people who have experienced the sharp end of imperialism is empathy.
Deliberately poking a sleeping shark in the ass on twitter because you know it'll do something exciting is neither of those.