Dirt_Possum [any, undecided]

Oh there’s plenty of room for someone who is informed to get angry and rightly ridicule people who deserve it.

the opinion on the topic you are not informed about displays your values and having it might be beneficial to you.

And it might be detrimental to you just as easily. There’s no way to know which without being informed, but an ignorant opinion based on “values” (aka vibes and what you want to be true rather than what is true) is more likely to hurt you or others in the long run. Just as being a racist bigot who has a wrong opinion about people of color might find that holding their racist opinion is immediately beneficial to themselves if they’re in a similarly bigoted community, being a bigot is ultimately harmful for reasons I would hope wouldn’t need to be explained.

An example would be a parent who doesn’t want any gender-related issue to be discussed in the school.

Yet their uninformed opinion is harmful. Gender issues are inevitably part of our world and learning about them will not only prepare children to have an understanding of them that their ignorant parent lacks and help make the world safer and more livable for everyone as a result, but if that child themselves turns out to be gender stereotype non-conforming, then learning about those issues will help them better understand themselves and potentially save them from much of the misery inflicted on them by an ignorant populous.

I’m shocked that drug dealing is coming up here as an example of criminality in so many comments. It’s very literally only criminal behavior because the us made it criminal behavior to crush poor people, radicals, and minorities, and most people know that

I’m hoping that most people here understand that and are using it as an example of criminality only as a way to talk about lumpen as a class that relates to the means of production differently than most of the rest of the proletariat (but I don’t know, I also wouldn’t have thought there would be so many leftists who seem to think that sex work isn’t work or that no forms of it could possibly exist under communism). But either way, what I do find shocking about it is how many people here think that they have less revolutionary potential than the rest of the US proletariat which is extremely right wing. Like the comment “drug runners aren’t gonna help us do communism dude.” Well, they’re hell of a lot more likely to than all the reactionary regular proletarians who are Trump and Biden law and order supporters.

You highlight the work aspect of sex work as if I’m saying it’s not work, or to say that it‘s work only quantitatively different from manufacturing goods, delivering goods, etc. I’m not saying sex work is immoral or impure or condemning it based on moral judgement.

Ok, maybe I was wrong about what you were saying. Do you think sex work is work, then?

Someone may sleep with many members of society and be supported in their needs by the community through the immense wealth of the people under communism, but the support of their needs would not be predicated on their sleeping with members of the community.

Would the needs of any other members of that society be predicated on the work they do?

And their activity would necessarily not contribute to the welfare of the whole community but only persons selected.

I’m not sure what you mean by this. Surely making sure the members of a community are able to lead happy and fulfilling lives is contributing to the welfare of the whole community. Human sexuality is undeniably an important aspect (for the majority of people) of a person’s over all sense of happiness and fulfillment. There being members of the community that help ensure everyone else in the community has that sense of fulfillment, members of the community who are explicitly willing and happy to provide it as a service (labor), is a positive, even necessary contribution to community wellbeing.

Replacing cash with goods doesn’t make prostitution not sex work or change the relations at play.

I never implied otherwise. I wasn’t the person who said “some people will always be willing to exchange goods or labour for sex regardless of economic or political system.” But they are correct, and you are not when you call that “bourgeois philosophy” and “utter nonsense.” Even in a system where that kind of tit-for-tat exchange is unnecessary, it is absurd to say that it will never happen.

People misunderstand communism, due to a misunderstanding of its relation to early communal society, as some sort of return to the end stage of historical communities where everyone lives in common low development and individual exchange happens under the table.

That may be, but that is not an error I’m making. As I briefly mentioned in a response to another comment, there will always be people who are unable or unwilling to form the kind of relationships usually required for sexual activity and thus sexual fulfillment. There will also always be people who choose to develop skills that help provide people with that kind of fulfillment sans any other form of relationship. You may say that such a thing is so different from the kind of purely transactional relationship we traditionally characterize as prostitution that it may as well not be called prostitution. Fine. But the same thing can be said for countless other forms of labor that people do under capitalism to survive, but that under communism would just be “something I enjoy doing,” that is still labor and provides a service to society. Like an actor who enjoys giving performances that provide other people with entertainment (as one of countless other possible examples).

What percentage of prostitutes across history do you believe fit into a definition that isn’t characterized by exploitation?

What percentage of plumbers across history do you believe fit into a definition that isn’t characterized by exploitation? Sex work is work. Period. Just like other work, it can be done because a person enjoys it, but under capitalism (or other modes of production that exploit workers) it will always involve exploitation. If you want to define prostitution as something that always involves exploitation, ok fine, but then you also have to separate that out from sex work, which absolutely does not inherently require exploitation and most certainly would still exist even if all economic coercion were eradicated (that is, under communism rather than capitalism).

Under communism (a classless, stateless, moneyless society), the economic and class relations that force people to perform sexual labor as a means of subsistence won’t be present.

(Emphasis above is mine). Under communism, the economic and class relations that force people to perform any labor as a means of subsistence won’t be present.

People will still have sex, but nobody will be coerced into having sex in exchange for food, shelter, or medical care.

No shit. There will still be plumbers too, but they won’t be coerced into it in exchange for food, shelter, or medical care. Almost all of your arguments so far can be applied exactly the same to any number of other forms of labor.

Prostitution won’t be an occupational category under communism because the purpose of labor under communism is about fulfilling social need.

So finally we get to some reasoning (flawed though it is) for why sex work would be different than any other work. You think that sex work doesn’t fulfill a social need. Sexual fulfillment is a social need. There will always be people who find it difficult to find partners due to all kinds of possible scenarios (including having no time to build a relationship due to dedicating all of it to other interests or necessary labor). And there will similarly always be people willing to provide that, people who have dedicated their time to become skilled at providing that. Refusing to recognize them as fulfilling a social need is simply being sex-negative and it’s always shocking to me that there are still leftists who don’t understand this.

Even the so called criminal element isn’t properly considered in the traditional view of lumpen. At least from what I’ve seen, there is almost always a failure to understand that large swathes of the lumpenproletariat are simply parts of the proletariat that had no economic recourse, lacking even the ability to survive by legally selling their labor, and became lumpen by necessity. Consider redlined ethnic minorities who are denied even bare minimum legal employment and resort to drug dealing as the only means of survival. Many of them put the money they make directly back into their destitute communities. They absolutely have revolutionary potential and some of them have class consciousness on a level far beyond that of the vast majority of legal working proletariat.

You act like it’s blatantly obvious that commodities would exist under communism and mock the person who pointed it out to you, yet you vehemently deny that something else just as obvious as the existence of commodities will also still very much exist and have a place under communism, calling it utter nonsense and requiring “bourgeois philosophy” without any explanation. That something else involves sex, though. Hmm. Funny how work that involves sex always brings out a specific type with an angry and reactionary axe to grind.

At least u/porcupine can make a reasonable case by redefining prostitution as something other than and separate from sex work rather than denying the legitimacy and validity of sex work.

Nah, contrary to the belief of some weirdos, poking fun at people for their supernatural woo idealism is providing a positive service.

Incredibly hurtful? Cowardly? Come on. That’s the same as a chud crying about being pasted in a bad light onto a wojak comic. It’s a dumb meme, you should be happy your pfp made it onto one that someone made for a niche leftist website to chuckle at. I have seen you tear into liberals for their bullshit beliefs (which I enjoyed watching), and I wouldn’t have expected you’d be so weirdly sensitive to being on the other side of that equation. I think most here would take this as being barely more than a comradely joshing. You weren’t even the prime character in it, your pfp (pfp for christ sakes!) was pasted over the microphone of the original pic. But given all that, the fact you got this twisted up about it makes me feel like it was all the more a good thing to do. You should take this as an opportunity to examine why you did find something so mild as this “incredibly hurtful” but more importantly why your fellow communists would be jokingly comparing you to the current poster child for woo lunacy.

As for what is comparable, well you both believe in nonsense woo that would make many spirit crystal chiropractors blush and you both have come up with absurd justifications for it. You have this strange fixation that I was calling you a zionist when it was pretty clear that had nothing to do with it, and the comparison was around the nutty unsubstantiated beliefs. In fact I didn’t know the other person in the picture even was a zionist, but I did know she uses her “spiritualism” as a justification for the dippy new-age version of white supremacy. I think you just focus on the zionism part because you’re mad at me for making a mediocre niche meme picture and you saying that I’m calling you a zionist is a way to try to lash out. But nah, I wasn’t calling you a zionist, I was calling you a nut. So please enough with the hyperfixation on zionism. By putting your pfp next to a picture of her, I didn’t call you a zionist any more than I called you someone who appropriates black culture by wearing dreadlocks, and I think you actually know that.

You happen to be lucky in that despite adamantly believing in wacky things that there is zero proof for and has been demonstrably proven false, you still arrived at the correct conclusions about politics, capitalism, imperialism etc., which I think most here would agree is by far what’s important. But again, I think you got there in spite of having some massive brainworms about the supernatural. Having wacky batty woo beliefs isn’t a crime but it is one hundred percent on the table fair game to be made fun of, and it needs to be. Because uncritical belief in magic is not something that should be present in a healthy society, the society that we as communists and materialists should aim for, where we examine reality with a scientific mindset to come as close as we can to modeling reality instead of making up just-so stories that fit our conception of how we wish things were instead of how they are. It is only through brutal honesty with ourselves and how the world works (as opposed to how we wish it worked, like with magic telekinetic, telepathic or prophetic powers) that we can find the way towards true human flourishing. Going the route of ghosts, demons, telekinesis, astral projection, crystal powers, star seeds, or whatever, it’s all different facets of the same bunkum and it is anathema to a materialist conception of reality (in whatever way you want to define materialism, strictly Marxist, more broadly philosophical, but any meaningful definition of materialism).

This Shanin person (who tbh I didn’t know existed until the thread here about her and that chud singer) has also followed this path of going down the rabbit hole of unsubstantiated spiritualist nonsense that “makes sense to her” despite all these things she believes being obvious, provable bullshit. She arrived at much more odious conclusions about people and supremacy, and that’s not surprising. I know the concept of the “slippery slope” is often abused, but in this case it’s very fitting and actually happens a lot. I’ve watched it happen with people, the new age woo to white supremacy pipeline. It’s not uncommon that it is tangential to Joe Rogan. It’s not always a bad trajectory, but it often is. When you start believing in this kind of antiscience wishful thinking, you can follow it to all sorts of conclusions, literally anything imaginable, including the truly horrible and antihuman. I think of the esoteric alien origins horseshit that many of the inner core nazis made foundational to their beliefs. I think about the batshit mormon beliefs that were based on the whims of a known charlatan con artist, and how interwoven all of that became with the white supremacist “security” apparatus of the US, the most evil organizations that ever existed. Magic underwear is innocuous and even funny, but it’s part of a sort of larger complex of beliefs, a structure founded on woo supernatural mysticism, self referential and self reinforcing, that is used to justify some of the most heinous crimes. A failure of critical thinking, which in my opinion is a form of a failure of self crit, is dangerous in the long run, and belief in magic is without a doubt a failure of critical thinking.

There, does that meet your criteria for being “said it to your face”? I don’t see how anything else I posted before wasn’t saying it to your face. I don’t even know what subtweeting is, as I fortunately never got sucked into that brand of social media. But stop implying I was doing something underhanded or sneaky. That’s absurd. I made a dumb meme pic and posted it where you and anyone else could see. Just like with the zionism thing (that didn’t happen) you keep twisting me into this strange caricature that has nothing to do with… well, anything, and assigning to me these nonsensical intentions that simply aren’t there. It’s weird, comrade! Don’t do that! Now, if you want to take my pfp and paste it to compare me to some scientism nerd like ND Tyson, or even a bigger asshole like Dick Dawkins, that would be a fair reciprocal and I’d have to laugh even. But I wouldn’t suddenly think you were, for example, accusing me of SA just because they were (I think?) I definitely wouldn’t come back and call you a coward and make up all these off the wall accusations about your intentions.

Whatever though. I feel like I’ve said my piece and I’m pretty sure also answered your questions, mostly by trying to straighten out the misconceptions about me you glomed onto. I know this was long, but that’s mostly because I think you’re still a decent poster and commie, so I’m taking the time to lay it out there. If you were just some random chud which I’d assume you were if this thread was all I’d ever seen you post, I’d roll my eyes, PPB you and move on. Even though the hostility you assumed I had wasn’t there in my original image post nor this comment, I do feel like your response with demands of posting “to your face” and calling me cowardly, etc. really was hostile. And I don’t like that. So this is the end of the conversation at my end. I expect you’ll respond, and I hope it is about things I actually said this time. But I won’t know. Tomorrow is my scheduled day to touch grass and be away from the internet entirely, and I won’t be touching this pile of internet drama with a ten meter pole. Again, I’ve said my piece, I went into great detail specifically to answer your hostile questioning, now I’m disengaging.

What are you talking about, no they aren’t. Besides, when did it become not ok on hexbear to treat harmful and false ideas with the condescension and disdain they deserve? You do know about the Posting Policy Bulletin at the bottom of every hexbear page, I hope. Also, telling someone to relax is pretty condescending, just fyi.

Removed by mod

Cool story

I love when hexbear users just make shit up about what I say.

I love when hexbear users demonstrate not only a complete unwillingness to do bare minimum self crit, but deflect around the reason they’re being criticized and then pretend the people criticizing them are “making shit up.” “I’m getting ratioed because hexbears are making shit up about what I say!” is the kind of comment I expect to read from .world lemmitors, but its especially disappointing to read it from a leftist I would have thought should know better.

I said “you should just block me if you don’t want to see it”

Do you think blocking a user lets people unsee something they already saw? Does blocking on hexbear allow for time travel now?

Intentional bad faith misreading of what I said as well as an unwillingness to even try to comprehend what I did say. Also, you don’t get to decide for other people what is traumatic for them. The self centered lib-brained gall of some people to think they’re the arbiters of other people’s trauma… Just wild.

Because they’re literally given the power to not see it if they don’t want to

Can you really not see why this is just a bad argument? Not to mention selfish? The exact same thing could be said about literally anything that we require content warnings for. Talking about SA? “Bro, just block me if you don’t wanna see detailed depictions of assault!” Traumatic gore (which is actually what “meat” really is)? “Come on bro, it takes no effort just to block me when I post gore images, so I shouldn’t have to figure out how to use spoiler tags late at night for your delicate snowflake sensibilities.” Even then it’s retroactive, people are not given the power to not see it if we don’t want to the first time around. Blocking you comes after we’ve already been forced to see something we didn’t want to see and only works in hypothetical future occurrences.

I think Gaia answered that question pretty well in the affirmative, as have countless communist sex workers before her, that yes, it absolutely can and does help people, including women. Anyone who says otherwise is discounting the voices of women and comrades. That doesn’t mean there aren’t terrible examples of exploitation in the sex industry and that it isn’t dominated by power imbalance. But so too are there terrible examples of exploitation and abuse in most other low wage work. From miners to service industry workers. Sex work is work, and it doesn’t deserve scorn or disdain any more than any other form of work. As communists, this should not be a difficult concept to grasp, but unfortunately patriarchal, reactionary brainworms still infect a not insubstantial subset in some leftist spaces.

Removed by mod

Not a bad post except for that you just had to throw in some sexist SWERF garbage in #7.

Thank you for extra information. If you’re the person I think you are, then I felt like the scrubbing of all your old comments/posts was a big loss to the collective information and wisdom that can be found by digging through hexbear. I rolled my eyes at the foolish decision to remove your informative comment here in this thread. I mean, agree or not, it’s great having an actual Chinese perspective, and then to see it get deleted on a pro-China thread as “ultraleftism” was very funny. But it was a gutpunch when I saw you had deleted all the comments on your old account! Keep posting, comrade, some of us really do appreciate it.

Tankies usually are bastions of political understanding though, whether you agree with them or not. They have to be to stand up to the mountains of propaganda we’re all fed that people are trained since childhood to accept as “simply how things are.” Many tankies only earn that title after developing a perspective that requires spending years reading, you know, actual books, on history and theory and working to honestly understand why things are the way they are, not how they wish they were, nor simply accepting what everyone is told for the sake of reinforcing existing power structures. Hexbear is way out there, yes, since the overton window is so ridiculously far to the right, by design, that it keeps most people from ever even understanding what leftism is. Hexbear is not divorced from reality so much as it is painfully hyper-tuned in to how dire reality actually is.