cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/72685299
I discovered this after upgrading our instance yesterday, which also upgraded all frontends to their latest versions as well. After I did, our Tesseract frontend stopped working and I noticed immediately as it’s been my primary for a while. Initially I thought it was an API version mismatch, but no, it was much worse.
Someone pointed out that the developer of the frontend added an explicit hidden and unmodifiably blacklist which includes any and all instances to the left of Kissinger. There’s a commit which also explains their specious reasoning about our instance specifically, as it seems we’ve been on their shit list for a bit longer than that.
This instance and its admin staff encourages identity politics, groupthink, mob mentality, and extremist solutions to societal problems. Users who advocate violence are not moderated so long as the admins agree with the target. Caution and critical thinking are advised when interacting with this instance or its users.
When you use tesseract to connect to one blacklisted such instance , you just get a message informing you that Tesseract is “incompatible with that instance” which leads one to think of a technical issue, like an API mismatch, rather than the dev being an opinionated coward.
Isn’t it funny how all the software developed by turbolibs, like Piefed and Tesseract, end up with hidden control mechanisms from developers who think they know better than everyone else? That they don’t just think they deserve to tell you what you should think, but they should manipulate you to think it? Isn’t it funny how libs go on about how bad it is to support lemmy due to the ideology of the devs behind it, and yet lemmy has 0 opinions as a software? It does make one think…
Anyway, I forked - it as one does - and disabled the blacklist, but since this is a massively ideologically compromised software, I’ll doubt I’ll keep this frontend up after Lemmy 1.0. I think we’ll bring up mlmym again now that someone’s maintaining it again.
Of course colonialism is bad, you won’t get an argument from me in favor of it. That’s why I support countries like the former USSR, who were and are the biggest anti-colonial powers in history. Simply stating that “colonialism is bad, no matter what color” is a subjectivist truism that doesn’t prove one iota of colonialism from socialist countries. It’s the kind of substitution for an argument people who refuse to investigate how colonialism actually functions make, because otherwise you’d make a concrete claim against socialist countries.
As for “the workers denied an education for refusing Leninism,” etc, this is largely nonexistent. In socialist countries, education is typically free and universal, or exceptionally low-cost. Literacy rates went from ~30% to 99.9% in the USSR over the course of a couple decades. Either only .1% refused Marxism-Leninism, proving that acceptance of Marxism-Leninism was and is exceptionally popular in socialist countries, or that education was in fact free and universal, regardless of political views, assuming you weren’t a domestic terrorist. Either way, terrible point on your part.
Religious persecution is largely seen as a dogmatic error by early socialism, but is also overblown. Same for the idea that people were mass punished for participating in bourgeois culture.
I won’t weep for those who worked in tough working conditions out of necessity, instead I will salute them for taking on the difficult work. In many socialist countries, they were and are compensated in reduced working hours for the same pay, more pay for equal hours, or both. Such was common in the USSR for hazardous work.
As for the working classes gaining power, it’s happened many times, such as in the USSR, GDR, PRC, DPRK, Laos, Vietnam, Cuba, etc. Office work is still work. Party membership is largely reserved for those exceptionally dedicated and competent among the working classes, and communist parties regularly purge corrupt or lazy officials, replenishing their ranks from the rest of the working classes. Those in administration were and are workers, they do not gain income from capital ownership but from their own labor.
As for the idea that commodity shortages are unique to socialism, this is absurd. Further, the abundance of commodities in western countries comes near exclusively from the spoils of international plunder, through imperialism, unequal exchange, and neocolonialism. The vast productive forces for agriculture in the US were created thanks to colonial relations securing vast amounts of steel and other resources, and yet despite having agricultural abundance Americans often go without eating to save money. The USSR, on the other hand, was found to have eaten more calories and more nutritionally complete diets compared to Americans.
I’m not advocating for revolution for a “fairy tale.” I’m advocating for revolution because I want to decolonize Turtle Island, and get the same gains of socialism for the people living on it. I want to end imperialism and neocolonialism. I want to end climate change and mitigate its effects. Comparing me to the US Empire is ludicrous and horrendously out of touch, considering the US Empire is all of the horrendous issues you accuse socialism of having, but far worse than even your accusations.
Saying that “there is no class” is an absurdity. Class is objectively defined and empirically understood. Class is relation to ownership of the means of production and distribution. Every single economist on the planet, no matter what ideology, agrees that workers and capitalists exist, that feudal lords and peasants exist, that slaves and slave owners exist. Even if you disagree with Marx’s analysis of class society, you cannot possibly deny the existence of class.
And most importantly, I am a worker. I do create the means of production and distribution, as do all workers. Capitalists do not. Revolution ends the massive contradiction between socialization of production and privatization of appropriation, where those who do no labor gain the vast majority of the wealth while those who do labor gain crumbs.