Nah, it’s way easier than that: pirate everything, give as much money as you can afford to small creators. Intellectual property is a fuck and the vast majority of any money you pay for media goes directly into the pockets of wealthy executives, not to the people who actually make the media you enjoy.
Ok, so, first of all, people vote in China. Like, they do. They have elections there. If you’re defining democracy as “a system in which people vote”, then by that definition China is a democracy. (Full disclosure, I don’t think that’s a great definition and I don’t think China is a “liberal democracy” like the US is, but at this point, we’re getting hugely into the weeds of different political systems and I don’t think now is exactly the time for that.)
Sure, the hexbear posts that make it to the top of the “all” feed aren’t going to be the ones where we’re talking theory, they’re going to be the ones where we’re dunking on people for shitty political opinions. Fair enough. That’s true. It doesn’t mean that theory posts don’t exist, just that they aren’t as contentious as dunking posts. That’s an indictment of the internet and social media, not of hexbear specifically.
Hexbear does talk about liberals a lot, because they are the political group in power in the west. It’s probably worth pointing out here that (american) republicans are, in fact, also liberals. So when we say “libs suck”, we are also talking about the american republican party. Republicans are more open than the democrats about their genocidal tendencies, but fundamentally, republicans and democrats believe the same things and act in the same ways. They all think capitalism is cool and good, they just have slightly different feelings about which tactics to employ to keep capitalism as the dominant economic system. So it’s not that we ignore republicans, it’s just that it can sometimes look that way to people who think “liberal” means “democrat”. It never has historically, but because political education in the US is so fucking garbage, a lot of people think “liberals” and “democrats” are synonyms.
And your last point is just wrong. We know that voting is never going to bring about real change, but that doesn’t mean we only want to complain. The usual advice is to get organized. It’s to find a local group that is on the ground helping people and get involved. Start working to build non-governmental power in your local area. Make connections, talk to people, help people, so that when world events are exploitable, we communists are ready to exploit them. It’s fucking hard, especially in the US where our government has spent years and years trying (and mostly succeeding) to make “communism” a dirty word, but just because something is hard doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. The idea that voting is something that will affect change is laughably incorrect. We could get into it, but let me just point out that the electoral college exists and that in my lifetime there have been not one, but two presidents who have been elected to office even though they lost the popular vote. Does that sound like a system in which the mass of voting people can bring about real change?
even if there was never any official method of communicating the public will.
What do you mean by this? What kinds of methods do you find acceptable?
There isn’t any discussion on political theory
There is absolutely talk of political theory on hexbear. Right now currently there’s a bell hooks reading group pinned to our front page. I’ve learned a surprising amount from my fellow hexbear nerds. People drop reading recommendations constantly and if you make a thread with questions from something you’re reading, you’ll get engagement and answers. It’s pretty cool.
the focus seems geared on one small part of the political spectrum while ignoring other parts entirely.
Yes, we’re communists. We aren’t going to pretend liberals are worth engaging with politically. That being said, we are a leftist unity instance, so anarchists, MLs, maoists, what have you are all welcome. As long as you’re an actual leftist and not some “just vooooote” liberal, you’ll probably enjoy hexbear.
I agree with your suspicion. Between the op being pretty obvious anticommunist bait and then that asshole arguing in incredibly bad faith about some alleged “10 principles” that supposedly guide all of politics in the dprk, I would guess that the reason this post exists is that people paid to post western propaganda on the internet are here doing exactly that.
Yup! It’s what finally made me stop watching twitch (embarrassing, I know, I’m more of a gamer than I like to admit). Minutes of unskippable ads, way too often, and no adblocker could get rid of them. The best I could find was a twitch redirect that would block the ad, but it couldn’t give you the content back, so when the ads happened the stream would just go dark until they were over. I decided enough was enough and I haven’t gone on twitch since. I’m mentally preparing to do the same with youtube if and when they succeed in breaking adblockers. Which is going to absolutely suck, I watch a lot of youtube, but maybe it’ll actually be a good thing and I’ll be on the internet less.
Good. Unlimited piracy on media and software corporations.
I’m a communist first and foremost. Private property is wrong in all its forms, this wrongness is just most obvious when talking about intellectual property, because intellectual property can be easily copied and isn’t something physical like the tools in a factory. Of course corporations will always try to clamp down on piracy, they’ve been trying to do so my entire adult life. It doesn’t really matter how many pirates there are, because corporations don’t just want money, they want all the money. If even one person pirates, corporations will try to make piracy difficult.
I guess I fundamentally disagree with your statement that “The world can handle a stable population of pirates.” I don’t think that’s a meaningful statement. It’s not like there’s some “carrying capacity” for piracy after which point the intellectual property ecosystem will tip out of equilibrium and cause pirates to become an endangered species.