When I refer to communists, I mean people whose goal is to reach the stateless, classless, moneyless end-goal society known as communism, in which workers own and control the means of production and receive the full value of their labor. This includes tendencies such as classical Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, and Marxist-Leninist-Maoism, as well as some others, like Trotskyism or Posadism, which are a bit different but still definitely communist. Just about all communists today are Marxists of some form, but Marx and Engels did not invent the idea when they wrote the Manifesto, nor does the Manifesto lay out any sort of path to reach the goal of communism (it’s more a statement of purpose for a movement than a set of instructions).

Socialism is a more nebulous term, encompassing everyone from reformists who seek to use electoral means to achieve their ends (something I and most other Hexbears believe is a non-starter, though many of us fell into this category not so long ago) to revolutionaries who are simply trying to escape the “negative branding” of Communism. There are also people who claim to be Socialist but are actually capitalists who support a welfare state, generally known as Social Democrats (we at Hexbear view social democrats as liberals, and generally don’t like them very much; there is some disagreement on the use of politicians like Bernie Sanders and AOC to the leftist movement, but we mostly aren’t super fond of them). To further confuse the matter, communists frequently refer to revolutionary states (e.g. the USSR, Cuba, China, Vietnam, and others) as “socialist,” positioning the concept as essentially the middle ground between capitalism and the end-goal of communism.

And since you asked about China: views on China vary on Hexbear, but are almost universally more positive than you’ll see in a liberal space like this. Not everyone trusts that the CPC will seek to “hit the communism button” by 2050 as they claim they will do, but basically everyone recognizes that the US state department, and the US media who walk in lockstep with it, is constantly lying and otherwise obfuscating the truth to cast the country in a negative light, as they have been doing for decades. We do not believe that China was committing a “cultural genocide” against Muslims, as those claims rely almost entire on a single, deeply anti-China source named Adrian Zenz, and we also don’t believe that China is the authoritarian hellscape the US media and state department portray (people in China do vote for their local officials, the government officials with whom they have the most contact, and over 90% of Chinese people approve of the central government’s policies and actions, per a Harvard University poll of the Chinese public).

Color me dubious that this comment was worth typing out, to be honest, but since you seem to be engaging in good faith at the moment, I have done the same.

It was conceived by Marx based on the Machiavellian quote “The ends justify the means.”

rofl tell me more about my own ideology please, this is absolute gold

(And here I thought it probably wasn’t worth engaging with you lmao)

There’s no difference between the likes of you and fascists.

Pretty sure literally every marginalized group would disagree with you on that, but ok lol

lmao you seem to have built a bizarre caricature in your head.

Just so you know, we like communists (mostly, we are communists), we’re generally OK with socialists (if they’re actually socialists and not just adherents of welfare-state capitalism, aka social democrats), we despise fascists and want to see their ideology eradicated from the world, the “far left” isn’t really a coherent concept to us (unless you mean ultraleftists, but it’s pretty clear that you don’t, and that’s a whole ball of wax), we are almost entirely opposed to nationalism, though there would likely be disagreement on its value in the context of a liberatory struggle (like what’s been going on in Africa lately), and we don’t like liberals because they support capitalism. Also we probably know better than you do what those things actually mean. And yes, we hate the US, because it’s an evil empire.

Stopping by this thread to offer a window into the Hexbear response to this statement. This thread is all serious and miserable, but we’re having a great time over there laughing about all of this and dunking on the worst of the comments.

Edit: Oh and also here and here.

PS: I am absolutely loving the downvoting, it’s hilariously cute; I legit can’t stop giggling right now