I don’t like spending this much time arguing against campism but they just keep talking at me.
Serious question: If there’s no money, what’s the incentive to work, other than punishment for not working?
People hate working out on the field. Yet some of us happily spend time in the garden. Working all day in a workshop fixing cars can get boring. But there are some people who enjoy tinkering with their car in their garage.
The human brain functions similar to a muscle, doing the same tasks over and over again becomes exhausting after a while. In a better world, we would regularly rotate tasks to prevent such mental exhaustion.
I think we’re so far from that world that this is more a question of abstract philosophy than political theory. But for what it’s worth, I think these are the three most common answers to that question:
- We reach a state of automated post-scarcity in which we don’t need people to work;
- People work for the sake of personal satisfaction or community recognition or some other non-monetary reward;
- Goods and services are exchanged in a Gift Economy: people still get rewarded commiserate to their labor, but the exchange isn’t mediated through currency.
Personally, I don’t think it’s something that we need to figure out this decades or next.
You are just describing how it is currently. You don’t get much from working, but if you don’t you can’t afford basic necessities and thus are punished for not working.
People tend to be motivated to work if they can see a viable benefit from the things they do for the community around them. This is something that capitalism desperately tries to hide and prevent, so people only see work as a purpose to make money for living
Enjoying and sharing in the results of your work.
Since you are asking seriously I will answer you: Because we have to.
At the most basic level we have to do work for basic survival. Cooking, cleaning ourselves, cleaning our living space, those are necessary to live and are actual work. This can extend to people we care about, as we are willing to put in work to maintain relationships and make sure they are well.
As for why would anyone work for something other than survival, well that can get a little philosophical. One philosophy is existentialism, where we as humans desire to have meaning in our lives and are willing to put in work to achieve something. Basically, just look back at any hobby you have done.
Now, at the societal level people will not work at the current conditions without being forced to earn a wage to survive. Once you remove money from the equation then that lets people decide for themselves how and when to work. Under those conditions people will still work for society, so long as they see the benefits it brings to that society.
An uncommon but relevant example is at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine there was a nuclear plant near the border that everyone was worried would have a meltdown either due to bombing or the Ukrainian workers abandoning it. Some of the workers chose to stay all the way until it was captured. Then there was some diplomacy between Ukraine and Russia to figure out what to do about the plant and the workers. Those workers recognized the value of maintaining the plant to protect society, and did it without pay and at the risk of being bombed.
You’re both idiots in your own special way.
Can’t wait for the tankies to show up and once again try to defend bootlicking.
It’s what they do.
Boot licking would be like living in the USA and not assassinating Trump.
Edit: but also fuck tanks.
Bootlicking is when you’re unwilling to martyr yourself in a nearly assured failure of an assassination attempt is certainly a take…
There’s this new invention called “planes”.
If you think it’s a moral imperative, you really would have been here already and done the job.
But no, you’ll just watch Hitler from afar and post one liners
“Won’t a big brave foreigner save me!?”
Guess I’ll use my Rambo training to 360 no scope kill the prez, ezpz
The guy you’re replying to isn’t the one acting like it’s a simple thing to assassinate the president, nor asking for it.
Shit posting on the internet isn’t saving the world from your country’s fascism.
Way to completely sidestep my point with a strawman but go off I guess.
Brother, I suggest you reread the comment thread.
Neither will assassinating Trump though.
It’d make a lot of people very happy for a few weeks.
You’re closer. You do it.
9 day old account with 200+ comments regularly suggesting political violence. I appreciate your effort, but you should just tag them as a troll and save your time.
Anyone acting as if getting rid of Trump does anything is clearly not serious. Vance is Thiels little bitch and would approve company towns hour one. We’re lucky we have Trump still because his incompetence is really doing us more favors than we realize. If Trump died early in his term, JD would’ve had a bunch of competent evil people in power and they would at least know how to properly file court documents. We’re lucky Trump likes suck ups and fox new hosts more than people who can string together a sentence. JD would not make the same mistake.
You say that as if 70% Americans don’t already want this. Bootlicking is when one worship people like Jinping, Putin, etc. instead of wishing terrible things would happen to them. That’s the difference between tankies and normal people.
30% want it
30% want whatever the winner wants
30% don’t want it
Utterly disagree with your 70% contention. If anything its the exact opposite.
Also do you really think Americans are any different than those who live under Putin? Or do you think just like the vast majority of Russians do Americans keep their head down during the day and in private in their heads and on anonymous message boards, they make wishes. Wishes that don’t mean anything. That’s why they’re called wishes.
I’m not pulling the number out of my ass. That is Trump’s actual disapproval percentage.
That’s my point though. Disapproval on a poll is a big fucking difference from action. That’s the difference between loyal opposition and actual opposition. Just because 70% disapprove doesn’t mean 70% actually want to do anything much less will.
Edit: Hell 70% won’t even vote against it.
30% of Americans are MAGA.
The rest found want as far off this ride and as far left as we can go, and we want it democraticly so those MAGA fucks don’t try to civil war us
70% want America as far left as we can go? I mean come on. You must know even at your most outrageously optimistic hopeful self that that’s nonsense. A lot of us could certainly wish it were true, but you’d have to be as high as a kite to think it is.
“BuT wHaT aBoUt AmErIcA???”
You dont even have to do anything and they show up.
Authority is when steam engine
“Lol. Lmao even” and other cringy Reddit-speak should be banned on Lemmy
And pretending “authoritarian” isn’t a useless word used to make a false equivalence between communism and fascism should be banned from life, but here we are nevertheless.
One man in charge of a country for the rest of his life without elections is pretty authoritarian, whether it’s fascism or not, don’t you think?
That’s China, Russia, and North Korea, comrade.
Well, thanks for pointing out that you don’t know the difference between a lack of term limits and AuThOrItArIaNiSm!!!1!!!one!!!
Leaders popular in their own countries tend to get re-elected, more news at 11!
I hope this is a bit. The idea of a real person believing Putin, Xi, and the Kims keep getting reelected under fair, democratic processes is just too sad to contemplate.
The idea of a real person believing US State Department canards about places they have zero personal knowledge of is far sadder.
This is no better than the MAGA bubble, where everything is “fake news.” You live on another planet.
Treating Marx and Engels like prophets and not men with a mix of good and naive ideas is part of the problem. Just because he dismissed anarchism doesn’t automatically make it a dogmatic truth
Ok, the actually rebut what he said. Should be simple if he’s wrong, shouldn’t it?
Sure, I’ll summarize what I remember of what Bakunin wrote the year before On Authority came out, What is Authority?, which you can guess by the name is an anarchist perspective on authority.
Engels claims organization requires authority, but it really only requires agreements, coordination, and sometimes rules; a strict hierarchy isn’t a necessary requirement for that to exist. Engels also says production requires obiedience, which doesn’t require an absolute authority as Engels asserts. Union elections, leaders accountable through recall votes, etc are also means of guiding production without relying on an absolutist revolutionary vanguard. The same goes for revolutionary leadership. It requires coordination, not domination by a central party.
It really boils down to do you think obedience is imposed or agreed upon. I’d like to live in a world where the workers have a voice rather than an authority telling them what they must do. It’s needlessly paternalistic and infantilizing in my view.
Yeah.
One of my biggest peeves with philosophy is that unlike the sciences, I don’t think there is much of a structure to build on and supersede notable figures.
To make a comparison, no one in biology cites Charles Darwin as a contemporary source of truth. He made contributions, and then others did, and then Watson, and Franklin, and Crick, and Sanger, and so on. But no one cites fifty or a hundred year old theories as the basis of an argument.
And just like other scientists Marx had really different phases in his work. Some are more of political activism, some are philosophical and some are economic.
Ah yes, the critique that’s so bad it actually is what made me become interested in anarchism in the first place.
I can imagine that. I just read it and thought, ‘Geez… this is like a mid-tier reddit comment. It’s such flimsy strawman nonsense. Not his best work.’
I feel like anarchism is coming back into vogue. I’m not an anarchist myself, but despite scoffing at the concept years ago, I’m finding a lot more value in it as a school of thought than I once did.
Engels weakest work tbh
Like how dare he to call liberation through revolution an authoritarian act? Thats such a lib take, idk how tankies keep linking to it
Yeah, there’s nothing authoritarian about overthrowing the entire superstructure and killing anyone who tries to stop you, what a crazy idea!
It’s incredible what wild opinions people have about marxist theory when they’ve onviously never read any.
“He had different phases in his life, some more philosophical some more economic” what the actual fuck is that even supposed to mean
I think It means they liked the Wikipedia summary of the Manifesto but Capital was way too dense for them…
Agreed.
I feel like tossing out a thinkers’ weaker work is an act of charity.
I wouldn’t want anyone to hold up my dumbest takes after I’m dead. So when I say that I think that article is dumb and we should just pretend that Engels didn’t write it… I’m saying that as a compliment to Engels.
For you to be able to decide something like that, you’d at least need to have a basic grasp of his work.
How does a nonauthoritarian communist society handle a billionaire who buys up income-generating property and pays people to run it for the billionaire’s main benefit?
Let’s also assume he pays people to be security guards for this operation.
Property’s not for sale dumbass, it’s a communist society. Property is owned collectively by all the people and the state’s job (yes you need the organization of a state) is to distribute that profit among the people. Any power is acquired via being elected (which is the “doesn’t have to be authoritarian” part so many temporarily embarrassed millionaires ignore) and punishment for self dealing from a position of power is treated as treason
In short: care is taken that an owning class cannot ever develop.
Wait so “if election, not authoritarian?”
If a socialist/communist society were working, there wouldn’t be any billionaires. In fact, if Capitalism were working, there wouldn’t be billionaires. There’s literally only two systems that have ever been capable of tolerating that kind of inequality. The mercantile system of feudal states, and the neo-mercantile system of Fascism. The very existence of billionaires is proof of dysfunction in every other economic paradigm.
This is such a weird question.
How does this billionaire exist in this hypothetical communist society? And how do you expect them to buy up a business?
It’s these weird pointless thought exercises people keep throwing at me that drive me to make these posts.
If you really want to know what my desired society looks like, it’s this solarpunk game my friends and I play: Fully Automated! Solarpunk RPG World Guide
Go read that, find all the stuff you don’t like in it, then write Substack article about it and then don’t send me a link.
Billionaires do exist, currently, already, in our non hypothetical world.
I wrongly assumed the proponent of nonauthoritarian communism had some idea how to bring about their ideal society from our current world.
Did you already get through the whole thing?
If you’re impatient, the relevant section is on page 65.
I have a general rule where if someone is not able to summarize their thoughts in one or two paragraphs, I am not going to waste time reading their 134 page document or 2 hour video they throw at me.
Honestly, that’s a great rule.
To answer your question, i don’t presume to have the singular correct strategy, but I personally believe the most sensible route out of capitalism is to build parallel structures at multiple levels: neighborhood mutual aid, community farms, county land banks, national single payer healthcare, etc.
I think that this will build an organizing structure and a vision for change, and by supporting more and more people we create conditions that free them from the coercive power of capitalism, which makes more radical actions like a general strike easier to sustain.
As more and more people withdraw from participating in capitalism, the tools of coercion will become increasingly direct, violent, and punitive, and revolution will take the form of a comiserately forceful refusal to submit.
If there are billionaires it’s not a communist society is it now?
How does one become communist without forcing the billionaire to give up their wealth? Is it not through the use of authority?
You are conflating force and authority
Certainly the forced removal of their wealth must look like authoritarianism to the billionaire, no?
That’s debatable, I don’t call FAFO authority, but I guess I could see how someone could argue that being limited in doing whatever the fuck one wants is authoritarianism.
In any case, the entire premise of the initial question is flawed and this argument makes little sense
The point is that authoritarian is a vague term that depends on who is holding authority and who is having authority exerted on them.
Oh this is an easy one! Tenants just wouldn’t pay rent, so there’d be no value to extract. This would be completely legal and socially acceptable (expected, even). A piece of paper saying “I own this” is just make-believe without a judicial system and police force that will enforce it.
Thanks, you are the first person out of many to provide a real answer and not just get angry at the question!
I was thinking more along the lines of a factory or a farm, but ok let’s go with a rental home.
Let’s say the billionaire’s security guards stop allowing the nonpaying tenant to access the property. Does the nonauthoritarian communist government go arrest the security guards?
Honestly the base concept is fine, we’ve just never seen a working model.
We just don’t really see many governments that are actually for and by the people. Most are closer to an oligarch tribunal that boils down to a slightly distributed dictatorship, then the slap a non-dictatorship name on it and press play.
This reminds me of the book “Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When it’s Gone”.
Benevolent idiot vs malevolent idiot, or as they were historically called: trotskyites and stalinists.
Tankie here. I would agree on the following point – that we are not the same. But, neither are communities where most people are respectful of others’ liberties the same as, or suited to the same kind of rule as, communities where most people are authoritarians. Anarchism doesn’t work among authoritarian populations.
In some places, there isn’t a whole lot of class struggle – I could see anarchism working in those places, but not with most modern people. Those are typically isolated places where people are self-sustaining and disconnected from modern industry, places where states can’t naturally grow on account of the pre-existing lack of class struggle in those areas.
Alright here’s my 2 cents.
There exists an impossibly we’ll organized & funded ruling class. Our society broadly is uneducated or misinformed.
How do people intend to reverse course without a very powerful form of authoritarian-leftism?
Do we intent to reform our governments so radically without the use of authoritarian mechanisms?
How do you get the average person on board with a communist society without striping the privileges the ruling class has almost always enjoyed?
I’m in favor of radical reforms. Those reforms would necessitate authoritarian mechanisms geared against the ruling class and their consolidation of wealth & power.
Yeah, like I’m trans and it seems like the majority of people want to erase me for it. Do we just let that go on until we have a democratic consensus that trans people actually do exist while 3,000 people are socially murdered in the time we wait?
It’s the same for capitalist and imperialist oppression. Pro-imperialist or pro-capitalist ideologies or ideologies that comprimise with capitalism or imperialism are not neutral and shouldn’t be respected just because a majority of people have them. People who who end up supporting liberalism or fascism should be oppressed.
Four legs good!
Two legs bad!
Four legs good!
Two legs bad!
Animal farm?
Indeed.
it’s incredibly ironic that you are using a phrase meant to ridicule people who reduce communism to black and white moralistic idealism… and repeating it like a mantra (like a sheep, perhaps) as part of a conversation where bringing up that excerpt from that Orwell book makes extremely little sense. You are making a satire of yourself, stop doing it.
You sound like you think you are much smarter than you actually are, and you didn’t understand my point.
I think the problem I’m seeing is that you seem to be equating any use of force with authoritarianism.
You can have a revolution, restore the means of production to the commons, and then just not have a single-party state. You can deliberately distribute power among the working class. Use of force doesn’t require unchecked state power.
Restore the means of production to the commons. I’ll have to see what that means concretely. I’m not familiar with the idea.
In my idea of how the government should be run, one would need to implement an extremely steep taxation structure.
That would adversely effect a minority group within the nation enacting those laws. I feel that this action as a consequence would be authoritarian.
First, regarding recommoning the means of production: it’s not a single discrete thing, but rather a collection of economic and political policies and approaches.
Look into is Solidarity Economies: this is a term that bundles together worker cooperatives, housing coops, public banks, credit unions, and all the other structures that allow groups of people to cut investors out of the critical institutions on which we rely.
As for the other part: progressive taxation is not authoritarian and does not require authoritarianism.
Progressive taxation would be a bandaid solution in my opinion but, maybe I’m being dramatic. Solidarity economics sound great as a shift in production.
The point I suppose I failed to make. In order to reverse course and affect radical change, you would need to enact taxation policies (FBI style raids on penthouses, IRS investigations into corporations, ICE style black bagging of CEOs etc.) that would be heavy handed. The heavy handedness one would think of when a regular person, like myself, misuses the term “authoritarian”.
Well, I’ll give you some nuance then:
You’re right. A revolution is not going to be bloodless. Use of force requires moral compromises, and we probably won’t get there with our hands clean.
But: I think there’s a big difference between the contradictions we struggle to navigate as we strive to build a world without masters, and the choice to enthusiastically hand unchecked power to “good” masters who we naively expect to treat us well even when we have no means to constrain them or impose accountability.
Put another way, I can tolerate grey areas we’re reluctantly forced into if our goals are anti-authoritarian, because I believe that such a project would have a good chance of reigning in those excesses. But if we accept and embrace domination from the start, the outcome is inevitably that we all wind up under a boot. Does that make sense?
Agreed. I wouldn’t want to help create hierarchy I’m just seek rigid rules around wealth.
I agree with you, I believe. The difference being that the authoritarian nature be geared towards exclusively a group that is VOLUNTARILY JOINED and nothing else. If you want to own that much wealth, you get some fancy new governmental oversight and regulations. Congrats. I don’t believe that that has be “authoritarian” to the VAST majority of people. Well over 95%.
Totally agree but, it would have to be aggressive in our current world. They will not willingly part with their wealth.
I’m assuming all options would be on the table for mitigating this level of greed. Obviously in an effort to get to a better society.
If the wealthy were willing to give up their wealth without the very real threat of violence against them, we would simply not be having this conversation and instead be discussing the appropriate levels of wealth with the wealthy. The existence of this debate implies that we have all - in some form or another - accepted that the wealthy need to be parted with their wealth against their will.
To achieve a society where all are free and able to live out their potential, regardless of the labels we put on this freer society, wealth redistribution is necessary. If we say the wealthy keep their wealth then we are describing a society where only the wealthy are free.
The rich aren’t a minority group, and the action you’re describing is literally the polar opposite of authoritarianism. If you have to redefine words to make an argument, you don’t have an argument.
Minority group - any group holding less power than the group exercising the majority of it.
Authoritarian - concentration of power into one or just a few ELITE members.
Great! I’m a billionaire and I’m going to start my own fascist party and buy out and flood every means of mass communication with propaganda for my party. I sure am glad you’re going to allow my legitimate political party to flourish.
Use of force is by any state is unchecked state power, and having multiple parties does not imply democracy, nor make things more democratic.
But yes, I actually do support giving proletarian communists (specifically women and minorities) guns, so that the state can be terrorized into not making reactionary compromises that will lead to doom.
Americans programming will break when they see it working. Why do you think they try so hard to stop it?
Tenderly, you may have far too much confidence in programing being broken. Simply because physical conditions change, does not mean conservative amygdalas shrink.
There will, by necessity, be some degree of deprogramming.
Trotsky was right
Trotsky the person was acceptable, I don’t agree with him, but he was acceptable. Trotskyists… idk, they’ve really embarrassed themselves lately.
You’re speaking about socialism. Communism can’t be authoritarian.
That’s a hidden No True Scotsman fallacy. The primary superpowers which have historically claimed to be communist were or are authoritarian. Does that mean that they weren’t communist from a purely Marxist perspective? Perhaps, but if the people actually doing the supposed communist revolutions are consistently founding authoritarian states, then it doesn’t matter what you say communism is, or even what Marx said communism is. You should be decrying that those states are misrepresenting what communism is supposed to be. Call them out specifically for not being communist. Don’t fall back on claiming that the person you’re talking to just doesn’t know what communism is. The fact is that saying “I’m a communist” means siding with the people most visible in the world who say “I’m a communist”, unless you specifically distance yourself from those others in some meaningful way, and those others are Soviet Russia and the PRC under the CPC, both totally authoritarian states throughout the majority of their existence.
No, they weren’t communist by their own claims. They were social dictatorship looking to bring about the conditions for communism.
By precisely the same logic, the USA isn’t truly capitalist, as there’s no free market! Federal regulations hinder a true capitalist utopia, and so the USA is just a republic trying to establish the conditions of true capitalism. That’s bullshit and you know it. Tell any card-carrying member of the Communist Party of China that they aren’t communist, and let me know how that goes for you.
They will tell you what I said.
ITT: libs
I struggle with the term “Tankie”. Who is a Tankie? What makes them a Tankie? What makes them so frustrating? This term feels so vague that it just makes it easy lump all leftists into the term.
As far as I can tell, you’re a leftist if you’re not unpleasant to deal with and you’re a Tankie if I find you unpleasant.
It sounds like some Boogeyman I’ve never seen or spoken to but I’m obligated to dismiss everything they say even tho I’ve never seen one.
The term originally comes from a divide amongst Anglo communists between those who supported the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, and those who were critical. The tankies were the ones who supported “sending in the tanks.” These days it’s a disparaging term for any authoritarian socialists.
The tankies were correct.
https://www.joewrote.com/p/jfk-files-reveal-the-cia-role-in
In 1996, journalist Michael Smith published a book where MI6 officers, a branch of British intelligence, admitted they trained and armed Király’s fighters.8 The officer told Smith:
“We were taking them [fighters] into the mountains and giving them a crash course. I would be told to pick somebody up from a street corner at night in the pouring rain. Graz was our staging point. Then, after we’d trained them — explosives, weapons training — I took them back. We were training the agents for the uprising.”
Nagy admitted such factions were active during his October 28th radio speech.
“The Government condemns the viewpoints according to which the present formidable movement is a counterrevolution [against socialism]. Without doubt, as always happens at times of great popular movements, this movement too was used by criminal elements to compromise it and commit common criminal acts. It is also a fact that reactionary and counterrevolutionary elements had penetrated into the movement with the aim of overthrowing the popular democratic regime.”
Here’s the newly released, un-redacted version. It reads:
The Hungarian Freedom Fighters were Agency sponsored.
The “Agency” in question was, of course, the Central Intelligence Agency. In the context of the JFK assassination, the CIA was suggesting anti-Castro groups meet with Béla Király, likely to replicate the Hungarian uprising in Cuba to oust the communist government.
Undoubtedly, some will downplay this revelation and claim the CIA’s role in the Hungarian Rebellion was minor, insisting it was always a popular movement against Soviet-style communism. As has been since 1956, I’ll be called a tankie for suggesting the American foreign policy establishment was 100% honest and weren’t the pristine Good Guys of History. Oh well. It won’t be the first time and it won’t be the last.
In my opinion, there is more than enough circumstantial evidence to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that the Central Intelligence Agency encouraged, if not instigated, the bloody fighting that swept through Budapest in 1956. I don’t doubt the students and protestors shared Nikita Kruschev’s desire for de-Stalinization. But as that movement went from a demand to readjust the Hungary-Soviet relationship to outright destruction of the Soviet Union’s defensive pact in less than two weeks, there was obviously a secondary, driving force that compelled Nagy to go further. As these documents admit, Béla Király and the broader combative force were supported, trained , and armed by the CIA and MI6; you don’t need to be a genius to figure out who was pushing the Hungarian Uprising to move from civil protest to alignment with Washington D.C.’s geopolitical goals.
Not all leftists blindly support Russia or China just because they’re anti-western. Tankies seem to ignore all the evil shit Russia does just because they’re not the U.S./E.U/Israel.
Meanwhile, non-tankies blindly ignore the evil shit the west does on a much larger global scale and blindly accept the western narratives about Russia and China just because they’re too propagandized to realize they’re being lied to and misinformed. Not sure who the “blind” ones in this scenario are.
Keep coping.
I’ll keep saying this:
One side is a hyper-financialized economy of almost only consumers, which sits at the endpoint of the most global supply chains, devouring on a scale that is devastating the planet, pushing the environmental and human cost of that production on the global south, and who basically only export loans, monopoly priced essential goods, and IPs back to the rest of the world, that feeds their surplus production into an enormous military industrial complex that they use to force this global extraction system on the rest of the world.
While the other “side”, we’ll start with Russia, is an impoverished hellhole place to live in that has been economically gutted, and now has been fighting a war against Ukraine that has been going on for over 12 years, a war that is being used to throw the entire military might of NATO member states against, not to liberate Ukraine, but to try to use the opportunity to fight a proxy war directly against Russia, and the real goal is to bleed out Russia so it submits again to other side and they can put in a new dictator in charge that they can actually control this time. (I, for one, remember the time when Putin was their neoliberal darling.) Supporting Russia is a bit like supporting Saddam, you shouldn’t support Saddam, but you definitely shouldn’t support the US military against Saddam.
And China hasn’t been at war with any other country since the Korean war. I guess China just kinda sits there, menacingly, as they build their productive capacity. And they’re against Taiwan (which literally calls itself the “Republic of China” btw), but I don’t think they do anything at all other than negotiate and respond in kind when the US moves more ships and drones there. Then there’s the Uyghur stuff and the Tibet stuff, which I know there is probably a kernel of truth to, but I think that’s up to people in China to deal with, and definitely won’t be solved by like the US sending aid there, because again, when the imperial core does these things it isn’t actually about the people, it’s about exploiting the problems countries those countries have in order to tear them apart.
Ok but we all agree that the US/Israel is the greatest evil on Earth right? Like sure Russia does bad stuff, but like the US is worse.
They’re both guilty of imperialism on a world wide scale and all the evils that includes, but aside from it’s early days the US has generally been a better neighbour by pointing their evil overseas, Russia has largely been a menace to it’s neighbours in every era of history. I would say that’s the biggest difference.
The point is it’s not a contest, and we should be opposed to it no matter which country is doing it.
Yeah but if your goal is to bring the most good to the world, you’ll get closer to your goal by fighting against the US than you will fighting against Russia.
“Lesser evil!”
“No! Not like that!”
Again, you’re making this into a two-sided contest between two huge turds. I don’t choose either of them. I choose to fight the bad ideas and behaviors they’re known for, at all scales and in all walks of life, regardless of comparisons between them.
That’s only true if a stronger Russia somehow would be a better country than a strong USA. There’s absolutely FUCK ALL to suggest that’s remotely true.
It also a false dichotomy. You can hate Russias imperialism AND USAs imperialism.
Imperialism isn’t a policy that states have, it’s a global system of extraction from poorer countries into the countries that control most of the finance capital on Earth, it’s not “big country goes to war with smaller country.” Russia does not control global finance, global finance will pretty much always be their enemy. A stronger Russia (if it was still a semi-periphery country) probably would be better than a strong US, you’re underestimating just how terrible the US is, and you’re comparing apples to oranges, because the US is a country in the imperial core and its bourgeoisie control capital on an international scale, the bourgeoisie of Russia have almost no power outside of their country.
The concept of imperialism that you’re using was first used popularly by Lenin, and it was an economic definition that described a global system. You should learn what unequal exchange is and what super-exploitation is, I think they’re good concepts. Also read Neocolonialism by Kwame Nkrumah.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
If they have a god damn wiki definition, I’m not sure where you think its vauge. You just literally never looked.
wikipedia, lmao, I could go in there and change the definition, lol.
Hear that? Thats goal posts moving.
You went from no definition, to not liking mine. Instead of clicking on any cited sources, you closed off.
Go ahead, change it, see how well that actually works and how wikipedia is actually moderated.
Yeah, exactly and also if you mention the Gaza genocide on Wikipedia without putting in a billion allegeds then you’ll also be banned, the article you linked even admits the definition has changed throughout history to refer to different things.
It even has a section on how its used on the internet!
Its almost like language isnt static, and has history beyond a one line deffitnition!
You are systematically dismantling your own arguments. “Tankie” is vague because it’s a word for a label and the underlying concept being referred to can be very different when different people say it.
A Tankie is anyone who self-identifies as a Tankie.
I don’t apply the term to folks as insult, I’m just acknowledging people who choose to identify as such.
Anarchists and what would become social democrats were calling Marx an authoritarian socialist during the 1st International. This is not new. This debate has existed for at least 160 years, just let that sink in, we haven’t come to an agreement on this stuff for 160 years.
Regardless of the system, it will always have PEOPLE running it. It will always be fucked.
Except that the range of human behaviors is largely determined by the system. A better system allows for better behaviors.
I kind of disagree with you there, but dont have the training or education to argue it.
Based on history, Anarchism appears to be the system most immune to human corruption, to the point where George Orwell (of 1984 and Animal Farm fame) traveled to Spain to fight for the Anarchist society that had formed there (where he got shot in the neck, and while recovering was then hunted by tankies that betrayed the Anarchists, requiring him to quickly flee).
Some (most) of the species like to be dommed by a big daddy or mommy of one form or another. They should be free to live like the submissive Lil boogers that they are. We should be free of their pathetic attempt to get the parental figure they lacked in their formative years.
Every commune wont be the same. Let them be wrong.
What if they try to force others to submit to their dear leader aswell?
If youre talking about the inevitability of outsiders coming to dominate a free people, send them to their sky daddy that they love so much.
If youre talking about those trapped within the confines of their neighbors delusions, the best we can do is open our arms and borders to refugees.
I feel a big problem with humanity is their attempt to fix things that will always remain broken. We show people we are right by living our best and most free lives. Forcing our way of life on others drags us down to the cave peoples level.
Imagine the reactions you’d get from other people if you said this in real life. Accusing other people of like having a psychosexual fixation with being dominated and that’s why they have their political beliefs is such a strange thing to say. You’ve made it unclear if it’s a joke, but I don’t really care.
“We should be free of their pathetic attempt to get the parental figure they lacked in their formative years.”
Why do you have to degrade people with childhood trauma to make this analogy?
Real Life™ is a joke, and deserves no respect. My opinions that i have shared are not a joke.
Hope you find your way to peace stranger. The block button is below my comment.
