Nah, not yet at least, I’m just borrowing a Hexbear emoji. If you view the source on a comment using a non-unicode emoji, you can see that it’s actually just an embedded image, which you can then copy and paste to use in comments from any instance. It’s a little unwieldy, but if you know the name of the emoji you want to use it’s usually pretty easy to find what you are looking for.
By “neat and easy” I mean, “The root of all evil is capitalism and we solve that with revolution”.
This is exactly why they are responding to you as they are. This is not an accurate summary of the marxist position. You’ve built up a strawman to knock down to justify calling us cultish.
Some basic questions that marxists are concerned with:
Why is a revolution necessary to begin with?
Who is exploited, and who is the exploiter?
What material conditions are necessary for a revolution to be possible?
How do you organize society post-revolution?
How do you prevent those who oppose the liberation of the proletariat from taking over your post-revolutionary society and destroying it?
How do we learn from the successes and the failures of history so that we don’t repeat the same mistakes?
If you don’t understand the marxist position on these questions, yet continue to criticize us, then of course you will come to nonsense conclusions and just piss people off. You’ve made up a guy to represent us and then mock them.
So when people constantly call us deluded, cult followers, bots, shills, brainwashed, fascists, bigots, trump supporters, and any other number of dehumanizing insults, often coming into our spaces to do so, all the while themselves defending some of the most violent and evil people in history in the name of “lesser evil”, are we supposed to just turn the other cheek and never respond in kind? When we witness the regular defense of the people ensuring the destruction of Palestine continues, are we supposed to just patiently and calmly explain how genocide is bad, actually? When dot worlders accuse me of faking being trans and being a privileged child, am I not justified in losing my temper? Y’all do not even try to understand where we are coming from, constantly use strawman arguments and put words in our mouths, but we’re supposed to smile politely while you spit in our faces? Like this is literally a thread spawning from an OP that is just an ableist insult, and yet some of us are still in here trying to talk things out despite that!
And it’s not like it’s limited to Lemmy, right? Literally everywhere I go I have to either tolerate anti-communist red scare bullshit, transphobia, ableism, misogyny, etc., or I have to try and have stressful and exhausting conversations with people who never, ever take me seriously. So yeah, we’re kind of on edge! If you get shit on for that when it wasn’t deserved, then I’m genuinely sorry, and I wish it wasn’t something that happens. But can you at the least understand that it is not a one-way street here?
I wonder what that something is?
I highly recommend you give Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism and On Authority a read. At least On Authority, as it’s a very short piece, but the two combined should give you a basic understanding of the historical and theoretical basis of why marxists defend the use of authority. I can understand where you are coming from, I was more than a little skeptical of authoritarianism when I was younger and still identified as an anarchist, but I think if you take the time to honestly engage with our position then you will at least understand why our stance is what it is, and how we are diametrically opposed to fascism, even if you don’t agree with us.
That’s right folks, remember not to engage with any opposing ideology in an honest or intellectually rigorous manner! If someone is critical of your beliefs, it is important to simply ignore them and never seriously consider either of your positions.
Harris is sitting here telling you that she will not stop funding/supplying the genocide of Palestinians, that she will take a stricter border policy and continue building the wall, that under her the US military will be the most lethal fighting force. Not to mention her horrific track record up to this point. A vote for Harris is just as much a vote for fascism as a vote for Trump is. Not that voting out fascism in the USA was ever a realistic option to begin with.