Hi friend!

For what Marxist instance would be best given your background, well there are only two total, to my knowledge, so you could just try out both and see what you like best! They are Hexbear and Lemmygrad. Lemmygrad is smaller but is more focused on Marxism-Leninism in particular. Hexbear has a ML-ancom and everything in between left unity stance and places great emphasis on making the space safe for people of marginalized groups. Lemmy.ml has many Marxists but is not explicitly commie.

For reading recommendations, this can be a difficult question to answer because there are many important texts in the Marxist tradition and some of them, particularly the foundational ones, are dense and challenging to read. I do strongly recommend reading the core works of Marx and Engels, since they define Marxism and later works are based on them. The order in which to read books really depends on how you prefet to read and learn.

I prefer to read from “the beginning” and already knew the relevant philosophical background so I just read Das Kapital right after The Communist Manifesto. But reading Das Kapital takes a long time. Reading groups dedicate months just to Volume 1. If you prefer a faster introduction and summaries, then I recommend Heinrich’s companion text. Heinrich inserts some of his own opinions, but you can balance these out by reading Marxists critical of Heinrich, like Michael Roberts. If you want an even faster and simpler introduction, you can work backwards by reading short overviews from newer texts and blogs and so on and then make sure to try and tackle Capital later. But remember that the farther from the original works you get, the more likely that you will learn something incorrect about them without being in a position to notice it.

Another strategy is to start with Lenin, particularly his own notes on Hegel and Marx, and proceed to Stalin’s overview of Marxism-Leninism, which includes an overview of Marxism. These are much easier to read than the source texts. All of the works so far will have Portuguese translations.

Regarding tolerance of Catholic faith, both instances will likely not care so long as this does not mean contradicting community standards, e.g. a vocal tradcath would contradict the feminist stances of both instances. Both instances have Christian comms, similar to subreddits. Lemmygrad’s all seem to be inactive, though. Hexbear is, generally speaking, against insufferable New Atheist contrarianism (and so many of its original proponents became reactionary).

Regarding having Latin American context, both instances of course have a good amount of comrades from Latin America. I know that Hexbear has an active Latin America comm.

Ethnofascist? JFC.

Don’t listen to this person. You can trust me, I’m actually a commune of 13 Uyghurs that writes like a Redditor and parrots US propaganda right down to its terminology. Ask me about lived experience.

Should probably organize something then, eh Bernie? Use that clout to build an org?

Information density and transmission is polluted by the fears of not being convincing enough and not sounding radical enough.

It is just rhetoric on Johnstone’s website. It is a position piece. In what way are you being manipulated? This is actually more honest and direct than the faux-objectivity of typical articles.

[…] major world events do not occur independently of the actions of the major world powers who have a vested interest in their outcomes.

Sure, but this does not explain why Assad, North Korea or Putin are good enough for an opposition or even the seed of that.

It is unclear to me why you are quoting and arguing with that. Do you think I am Johnstone?

Not even the claim was on the books

Haha what if we apply more US bad to world events

Then you would have a more correct understanding of geopolitics.

No, seriously, that article is manipulative AF.

I have no idea what that means

That never existed

Osmand has a terrible user interface

I’m gonna download more copyrighted media today just because you told me not to.

I mean that is very funny but don’t tip your hand like that. Start with a low-key unionization attempt, which begins with small stakes list building actions like “anonymously” signing a petition (you use the list to initially gauge interrst and the outcome of the petition to gauge the stance of management and choose next steps).

I’m glad!

This is completely unrelated, but now is a good time to get into shooting paintball guns at pieces of circular glass about 2 cm in diameter.

The political compass exists so that right libertarians can feel good about themselves and call everyone else names. It was created by a right libertarian. It’s really just a “how far away are you from (racist) Ron Paul?” map along two axes. And the vertical axis was invented just to distance them from the Nazis that they inevitably end up supporting anyways and in order to claim to be on equal liberationist footing as anarchists despite supporting the primary vehicle of oppression, capitalism. Right libertarians are not, in reality, libertarian at all. They never saw a CEO’s boot they didn’t want to lick.

When comparing anarchists and Marxists or communists, authority isn’t really a distinguishing factor. It is about theoretical understanding, the goal towards which the group organizes, and what structures are used to advance that goal. Anarchists always have internal authority to deal with, there are always people with outsized impact and decision-making power, and when larger than 10-20 people, there is a need for hierarchy to actually accomplish anything for more than a week.

What is different is a few other things.

One is that Marxists tend to declare a party to be the best apparatus for advancing the goal of revolution, with decisive mass action by that party, while anarchists focus on free association and spontaneous waves in participation. There are aspects of each of these tendencies in the other, but it is distinguishing.

Another is that Marxists plan for a need to defend the revolution against the bourgeoisie both domestically and internationally and that this requires organized industry and a coherent internal politucal program. Anarchists do not always plan on defending the revolution at all, but focus on building communes here and now, during the revolution, and after the revolution. Some do plan on defending the revolution but only in a context where these collectives are primary over organizing industry or oppressing thr bourgeoisie.

When describing those who are “advanced”, just think of it as Marxists being big nerds thst treat revolution as a discipline of study, a science, that is geared towards application: doing the revolution in the best way you can so it is more likely to succeed in all aspects. Just like anyone can become advanced in a science by accumulating degrees and publishing scientific results, the big nerd revolutionary can become advanced through theoretical study and intentional organizing work coupled with constructive self-criticism.

It is those who are advanced in this discipline - not just with experience, but also theoretically, e.g. being class conscious - who Marxists identify as those most ready to lead revolution. And realky, it just makes sense, as a simplified way of saying it is that those with the most exoerience and who are most knowledgeable in a more correct political understanding will make better decisive and have more impact.

The label is also used by contrast. It follows from an acknowledgement that when revolutionaries looked at their real capitalist societies, most people would not have this experience and knowledge. In addition, left formations are often banned or otherwise suppressed before they can gain mass “advancement”. This is where vanguardism cones from, it’s why it exists. It posits that you can function as a suppressed, even an underground, organization to foment revolution by specifically recruiting and developing those who are most “advanced”, which will run a gamut of experiences and theoretical understandings, with the goal of having outsized influence via leadership positions in, for example, organized labor. And this can be done in many forms, including a union leader working with your front group rather than being a member of a Marxist party.

In lieu of this, when people try to organize without leadership by “advanced” members of the working class, you get the same mistakes and failures over and over again. It takes experience, theoretical understanding, constructive self-criticism, and a means by which to retain and use what is learned through each action in order to make increasingly better choices. A lack of “advanced” members or an appreciation of “advancement” is why so many of the US’ left movements spin their wheels and offer only false catharsis rather than material change.

I will leave one final negative example, which is that the most “experienced” person, in this Western context, is often the last person you should listen to. Their experience is usually in failure and often this means they have become resigned to just trying the same thing over snd over again because they have found a way to rationalize failure as a success instead. And because of their experience, they can take up a lot of space for wrong ideas. This distinguishes experience from “advancement”: the quality of experience matters but so does having clear eyes about our own work and the societies in which we are embedded.

BLM is a good example of what happens when you don’t organize with any structure or leadership, actually.

For background, BLM flared up as riots and then protests and people’s occupations in response to racialized police violence, of course. It was a reaction and not organized initially. Organization grew from on-the-ground experience as individuals and orgs shared spaces and developed political programming and actions. But this all happened locally. There was no national group that could legitimately claim to represent BLM, as every city had their own set of orgs and organizers. There was overlap, of course, as many of tge participating orgs spanned multiple cities, but no org or coalition could legitimately say, “these are our demands” at the national level.

Now you might be thinking, “hey, TheOubliette, what about the literal national organization called Black Lives Matter that published demands and spoke to the press?” Well, that group is exactly what you tend to get in the West with a left leadership vacuum: they just asserted they were in charge and started taking credit and raking in donations to their NGO. That national org was full of NGO veterans looking to advance their careers, not on-the-ground organizers. It was essentially a grift / cooption.

I’ve been unfortunate enough to see this kind of thing happen a few times. For example, there was a space that pledged horizontalism but then whoever brought a bullhorn to the next action ended up being the real person in charge. They weren’t selected to do that, few people even knew who they were. But the crowd did what they said and people got arrested due to their bad instructions. I’ve seen other situations where a group declares itself representative unilaterally and begins speaking to the media and making demands or negotiating, and they end up saying and doing things completely at odds with the wishes of the collective. I’ve also seen situations where people tried a bit harder to have some structure, but ended up creating disconnected teams for different domains (press, logistics, action planning, security, etc) but the whole project blew up because one subset of one team declared themselves the only voices that mattered, using self-tokenizing and very inconsistently applied (most people of that identity there disagreed with them) liberal identity politics to justify their power grab. The project ended because they used those shenanigans to throw away leverage and told everyone to go home - it was too difficult to reassemble because communication methods were not solid and most attendees were not in organizations

This is a weakness that arises from having weak, inexperienced, and poorly-structured groups, especially when they create a leadership vacuum. Many things work very well autonomously. Mutual aid and black bloc, for example. But for a larger organizing effort, there are key functions that must be carried out on behalf of the larger group in order for it to actually succeed. There needs to be a deliberation process so that decisions can be made quickly enough without being illegitimate by being non-representative. There need to be people that organize the deliberation process itself. There need to be people that ensure the decision is carried out. There needs to be a way to have some kind of community discipline around some of the decisions - like what to so if a subset of people start doing their own thing at odds with the community decision and putting people at risk. Assuming the organizing effort has external components, like it is intended to change something or confront another party, you need to develop demands and messaging and then have people who deliver and share those things. If you don’t have those things, the organizing effort is vulnerable to the disruptive factors already (and more). Decisions will get made and people won’t understand them and will get very angry. Some people will try to enforce a decision and those who disagree will literally fight them. Without people designated for communication, you will be represented by whichever person gets in front of a TV camera first. Capitalist media is oppositional. With Occupy, they used the fact that the various people talking to them provided about 50 total demands to then suggest that Occupy had no realistic ides of what it wanted to accomplish. There is some truth to that, but mostly this is a consequence of having no media discipline.

Anyways sorry this comment is so long. I wanted to add a lot of context and examples so that it’s clear I’m not being blindly dogmatic, but speaking to the fatal weaknesses of these efforts.

Set up a proper backup system for your server. I like to use borg. Just to be safe, make a copy of your drive as well (like full disk rsync). Then do a clean install and restore as if your drive had failed. If your backups missed anything, you will now know and can fix your backup system and can still recover from your rsync’d drive.

You might also want to take this opportunity to start administering your server with code, like using ansible or other remote provisioning tools. This makes your system configuration reproducible so that you only really need to back up a few kinds of data like media files or databases.

That is a good idea just so that you don’t have to think about any potential privacy issues. Your email could be {firstword}{secondword}{4 numbers} and so long as the words and numbers are randomly generated, you can avoid accidentally including personal references or biases.

Your username does not need to be high-entropy, though. It will be semi-public. So it’s not about strength against dictionary attack or similar, it is just about leaving the selection process up to a random process that isn’t witnessed by a third party. You can write scripts that will generate these kinds of things using Python and the faker library.

We had a nice run where everyone was working together or are last tolerating each other, it was peaceful. But the US Russia and China are drifting further apart and becoming less reliant on each other, which sadly means it’s not going to be as peaceful going forward.

At which point was it “peaceful”? The US invaded 3 countries around then and bombed and couped many more. Millions were killed.

Also they are not going to tolerate each other as much China Russia already have their versions of Linux distorts just imagine there might be more differences in the future.

Yes this will eventually lead to forks due to the US forcing decoupling. It is a highly aggressive terrorist state.

I think it is unlikely that they are simply bad at PR and not trying to do damage control for something they would like to push anyways eventually. Why are they creating a proprietary element in the first place? Is the selling point of their product not that it is open source? They are making some changes.

…or they made an honest mistake and don’t care to put it back on F-droid for reasons to which we are not privy.

An honest mistake of hosting their entire own repo and writing up documents for it? It isn’t just off F-Droid, they are doing their own thing.

I bring up these counter-examples not as a way to point out where I’m right and you’re wrong, but to point out that there are other candidate explanations, and it’s not justified to infer that malfeasance is the only likely possibility.

Yes you are suggesting that people give them the benefit of the doubt. And I am saying that would be unreasonable given the facts.

I also understand why you would cynically think that Bitwarden might succumb to Capitalism—I too live in a late-stage-capitalism country—but that’s not a forgone conclusion, and I say again that we don’t need to be imagining villains when there’s plenty of objectively real ones at which to point a finger alreadIy

Bitwarden has already succumbed to capitalism, it is a product by and for a for-profit company. It is, with few exceptions, just a question of when they will have a profitability crisis and need to find avenues by which to increase revenues or decrease costs. Sometimes that takes 15-20 years, sometimes it takes 3.

I have not followed their finances but I would be curious to know what they are doing at the moment. Could be seeking to get bought out, could be looking for new funding, could be working around the needs of a major client, could be something else.

As always, when a project is backed by a company we should approach it tentatively because while they will provide support for it for some time they will eventually be tempted to do something shady to increase profit. Or to just be profitable at all, which investors always want ASAP when interest rates are high. And then we will need to fork it and see if it is feasible without VC backing. To my knowledge the only other viable path for an open source company is to become an industry standard where the major monopolies decide to not fight about it and instead say, “it is fine as it is and won’t be profitable but it is a useful thing to share costs on”. Docker, Inc. is somewhere along that path, scraping together products at the periphery of the software while the industry monopolies more or less share the core project in its various compatible forms. And Docker similarly tried to ham-fistedly seek profit sources like when it tried a silly fee scheme for Dockerhub and created a small exodus that the monopolies ate up (e.g. GitHub).

Where is that a excuse? I was pointing out that it’s not a petty dispute, russia is trying to wipe out Ukraine…the fuck.

You just repeated the excuse. Right there, lol. And Russia has caused far less damage to Ukraine and its people than the US has to its targets. You are simply inconsistent and don’t believe your own logic. Your true motivations are elsewhere.

Ooo oo, I know this one…is it…whataboutism again for $400 alex?

Oh, am I not allowed to point out your inconsistency because you have a term for doing that?

Yea…no it’s not, russia is doing that on their own.

This post is about a thread where the people who removed Russians from the list did so under pressure by the US federal government are: their sanctions policies. It is literally exactly what I said and not at all what you said.

Please do your best to speak the truth.

Ok. Reality, russia is a fucked up authoritarian state that willfully sends it’s people to rape, murder and commit war crimes, like it got its war plans from the viking era. How’s that for some reality. Champ.

It’s you distracting yourself through repetition because you cannot honestly respond to my points. So it is the opposite of facing reality, it is evasiveness.

Yea…yea it is.

Nope

Sweet…are we getting somewhere…

No it is just trivially the case.

Ahhh nope apparently not…still humping about the USA.

Because they did the thing that you agree deserves kicking out their citizens from the maintainer list. And they did it more.

Hahahhaha holy fuck…o wait you’re a tankie…

Are you laughing at the mass civilian bombings or the starvation of children?

And a russian apologist…man this is just hilarious…you really are following the .ml tankie guidelines.

It seems you are afraid of basic facts that contradict your beliefs.

Lol for all the west’s faults, we’re still not even half as murderous as the authoritarian dictatorships you love.

The West’s civilian death count is orders of magnitude higher than the RF invading UA.

Yea no…

You did, accidentally.

Because it’s easier to just use sanctions as the reason. The idea that a authoritarian state wouldn’t force their devs to create backdoors for their state is hilariously naive, but you won’t see it that way because you’re a brainwashed tankie.

Ah yes, the thing you just made up that hasn’t happened and calls every developer in the country “their devs” is surely more correct than decades of code review practices and individual track records.

Re: brainwashing, you will notice that I am not the one running away from inconvenient facts at every turn. I am not afraid of such things, but they are clearly a threat to your way of thinking.

Yea no shit? Who said they are?

I quoted what I was responding to and that sentiment permeates it.