Is there an instance for Democratic Socialists rather than Communists?
I fled Reddit due to the authoritarian mod craziness, but Lemmy.world seems infested with too much Communist craziness. I'm leftist, but communism is idiocy. Is there an instance that leans more democratic socialist but refrains from going off the deep end?
I'm surprised you see a ton of that on lemmy.world, always found that instance rather tame and moderate, at least by lemmy standards. Certainly compared to Hexbear, ml and Lemmygrad. Are you sure those weren't federated posts from those instances? Anyway, lemm.ee is pretty neutral, lemmy.dbzer0.com leans more anarchist. But you could also just stay on .world and subscribe to communities that align with your views on whatever instance. Unless you have an issue with the moderation on .world specifically, it doesn't really matter.
Replying uselessly to comments you don’t like just to defend a censorship-happy neoliberal hivemind hotbed makes you look like a petty, bored, very gullible person.
lemmy.dbzer0.com is anarchist and stongly hates all states, both USA and the Russia, China types.
lemmy world is neoliberal, I mean, tankies do post there, but the moderation is mostly neoliberal and are anti-violence absolutists, even if its directed towards nazis
Pretty much everyone else on lemmy are anti-authoritarian and pro- socialist policies, some are social democrats, others are democratic socialists, some are anarchists.
piracy community is blocked on lemmy.world btw, so you might as well joine us, or any of my recommended ones.
TLDR: lemmy.world is not "communist", just just a few tankies that love to post thinnly veiled authoritarianism.
Edit: Also, you are probably seeing federated posts from lemmy.ml, I block most of those communities except like a few non-political ones like c/privacy
What do you consider going off the deep end?
What do you consider leftist?
Which ideas do you consider idiocy?
What is your idea of a society worth living in?
I personally am open to any ideas that exclude discrimination of identity. For me the tolerance paradoxon applies.
I'm also looking for a place without edgy or crazy people.
For me its:
Democratic: yes
Socialism/social net/sharing/helping: yes
Dictatorial: no
Tankie: no
Undemocratic: no
China or CCCP/URSS worship: no
Soviet whitewashing: no
That's about it.
Edit: I was looking for a community not an instance (I have my own but I still uses .world as I had some trouble, time to migrate back home I guess :-) ) but thanks for all helpful comments!
I think thats valid. You don't have to accept or look at everything.
Do you mind sharing what your ideal society looks like? I think a lot of folks share common ideas but have vastly different labels for them.
I'll go ahead:
I personally want to work. It can be fun. I want to do things I'm actually good at. I want to be able to afford food and housing. I want to know that i wont starve if I become sick or disabled. I want to be able to survive when I'm too old to work regularly. I want my family to be safe no matter what.
I think those are pretty understandable goals. I want to live in a world where this applies to as many people as possible.
You could replace the socialism with communism and it would be the perfect party.
We need democratic communists. Too many of these so-called “communists” are just bad faith actors who ignore Karl Marx’s teachings, worship dictatorships and play dirty.
Democratic Socialists are the next best option at the moment.
Bingo. Making a new account somewhere else likely won't help. The only way it would is if all the content OP objects to comes from a single instance and they find another instances that's defederated frrom that source instance.
adding my voice to the mix. I have always advocated blocking. My experience with mmo chat taught me that a cesspool can turn into a pretty nice place with some blocking. My basic rule is subscribe to what I like and block what I don't and everything else im indifferent to. don't like sports then block those communities. like comics and subscribe to those. indifferent to animal pictures then let it lie and you will see them when you browse all.
.world is hardly the home of the tankie, what you see might be posts from lemmy.ml
There are two other places known as lemmygrad and hexbear that are outright communist/tankie that you'll see occasionally brigade when someone posts anything positive about the USA.
This and most others are pretty sane. One that comes to mind for what you're asking particularly might be https://slrpnk.net/signup who seem kind of left but not Stalin left.
Otherwise there's the join Lemmy link at the bottom of any given instance to look through.
OP didn't respond so I will take a shot. My understanding is that under communism, the economy has to be planned by the government. Under capitalism, the price of shoes (for example) is usually determined by the demand for shoes and the amount of shoes that can be manufactured. If demand falls, the price falls. If manufacturing capacity increases, the price falls more, etc. This mechanism has feedback loops that make it efficient. In theory, companies never make more shoes than they can sell, because if they do make too many, they can sell the excess by cutting prices. Under communism there is no free market, so the mechanics of supply and demand don't work. Some communist bureaucrat conducts a study and estimates that the country will need 100k pairs of shoes next quarter. The government then makes those shoes in a state-owned factory. Suppose, though, that it turns out that the country needed more. With no free market, there is no competitor to step in and meet the demand for shoes - now you have a shortage. Similarly, you can have considerable waste if you grow too many apples or whatever. In true communism, there is no price to adjust - you either have an apple voucher or you don't. Thus there is generally more problems meeting demand efficiently. This is, in fact, exactly what we saw under the Soviet Union - the stores were often stuffed with unwanted items while long lines developed for items that were in high demand. Without any consideration of authoritarianism etc., this is an often-cited reason for the failure of communism.
I am not a political theorist or an economist, so please correct me if I am wrong.
You've got the general critique from Mises right, but that's an extremely outdated critique that has long been debunked. The article Prices in a Planned Economy helps show how prices in a fully publicly owned economy could be planned, including what you are describing as "price signals." The fact is, the USSR's economy did work, and worked rather well, but issues like having to spend a huge portion of GDP on the defense industry just to keep up with the US starved the rest of the economy for growth, and the Soviets planned by hand rather than by computer. Neither of these issues need to be taken by any Socialist state going forward.
if all humans could plan for the future and wished inherently to make world into better place for others too instead of just themselves communism might work. But as it is, the idea needs some heavy reworking to adjust for human defiencies to be worth even considering. I dont understand how they even came up with something like this and thought its good idea as it is. And naively thought no one would abuse their power or even could manage it all efficiently. Maybe it wasnt idea born out of wanting to make better world but instead just counter reaction to capitalism.
its so annoying, i have this vague idea of something like world without exploitative private property. Like, money would be replaced with actual value of work you have done, you could reasonably use tools and resources without being gatekept by private ownership while still being allowed to have your own things as long as it doesnt cause harm to others. When someone wants more than they can have, its solved instead by working towards improving things for everyone instead of just yourself.
but its just that, a vague idea; mostly fit to taunt me like dangling bottle of water out of reach of someone dying of thirst. And its seeming more and more like wishing one could do magic. It doesnt seem like humans could ever be capable of having a world like that or even want to .
I'm not an academically trained scholar regarding left-wing theory, but I'd assume that communists and social democrats are still part of the same group, with one naming themselves after a shorter-term goal-state, and the other naming themselves after a longer-term goal-state.
When we talk about state models such as republic, democracy, autocracy, we're either describing a current status, or a model we might want to follow or avoid. When we talk about ideologies (conservatism, liberalism, communism, feminism, etc.) they assert specific values and presumptions that might or might not be true or workable. For instance, in the communist ideal, every participant has exactly the same amount of political and material power; influence is perfectly distributed. But we have no idea how a state like that would look, or work, or if we could ever get there.
Every model and every ideology has problems and concessions we don't understand and have to correct for. The one-person = one-vote thing seems intuitive for democracy, but has terrible side effects, and we're still sorting out alternative election models that might work better.
All this is to say it's a really bad idea to treat any one of them as a racehorse or football team or a banner under which to rally and consolidate political power. None of the models or ideals we have are perfect or absolute, and we have to be prepared to adjust them on the fly, especially as we contend with corruption and bad actors who exploit vulnerabilities.
I suspect everyone on the left ultimately seeks a society in which everyone is materially provided for, in which liberties are as extensive as possible while providing for protections and considering human biases towards certain abberant behavior (e.g. drunk driving) in which there are as few social strata as possible and power is as well distributed as possible. The models that accommodate all these, even to partial degrees, are still very fuzzy. (Western civilization has been working on them for only three hundred years or so.)
So we're at least in the same book, if not on the same page.
If the de facto gatekeepers of the genocidal liberal death cult status quo on the fediverse aren’t liberal enough for you, I think you’d feel right at home at https://shitlib.cuck/
Lemmy.world is actively opposed to Marxism and Communism (from moderator and admin POV).
As a side-note, all Communists support democracy, "democratic socialism" is usually ill-defined and meaningless, to one person it means the Nordics and to others it means Marxism without revolution, it only really hurts description.
“Tankie” is a caricature. The idea of a tankie is the ideal vision of a McCarthyian Communist. In reality, the overwhelming majority of people labeled as such don’t actually fit that label, it’s more of a way to cast an image of someone’s positions based on, say, support for AES countries, and twist that into the evil Commie Pinko that haunts the dreams of 1960s children in the US.
says the .ml person commenting on .world. it does not matter what any particular places people is like unless they defederate from each other. @[email protected] is talking about his experience and is likely not seperating out where users come from. in addition anyone can make a user on any open instance. I actually would like to see more closed instances that are about a particular local groups like sci fi conventions or makerspaces and such.
Hexbear supports AES, that's nowhere near the same as thinking "communism means supporting dictatorships." It's far easier to find people that have actually read theory on Hexbear than in most other instances on the fediverse.