Yeah for a while Lemmy kinda felt like we-have-Reddit-at-home but nowadays I’m reminded of how it felt in Reddit’s early days (ie: less exhausting), but older and wiser.
The circlejerkiness of downvoting has increased since I was first on here, when people were more likely to respond with conversation than just a downvote of disdain (or my fave, people who downvote each reply in a conversation as they reply back). But there's less random downvotes of disapproval than reddit. Esp. on kbin which doesn't federate downvotes from other instances, ha.
You can make a social network profitable or you can make it healthy for its users, but I am entirely unconvinced you can do both.
Maintaining social networks and moderating them should be a legitimate job where people are meaningfully rewarded for their effort, but that is different.
I’m with you 100%, but I’m also becoming convinced that the quality of work from volunteer moderators who are members of the community and are motivated by maintaining the health of said community is going to be significantly better than the efforts of someone who is paid to do the same thing.
Well I am fine with that but let us not unintentionally extract the passion for the fediverse out of amazing people by expecting them to do difficult work without supporting them in a way that is sustainable.
Maybe one can do both, balancing them to some degree. Maybe. For a short time. But it seems we have several examples suggesting that maximizing short term profit can only come at the expense of a healthy, valued user experience.
Profit is so often at cross purposes with anything good or nice or enjoyable.
Yeah, my participation was pretty sporadic until I found Voyager. It’s so much like Apollo was, I no longer pine for reddit at all. The only thing missing is robust mod tools, but I’m sure they’ll come along.
I often find that if I’m having an issue or want general answers about something, I still stick “reddit” at the end of the search, but I never just open it to browse niche subs even though I am missing the equivalent here.
I’m so glad the Trek communities moved here from reddit. Whenever I go back there it just feels empty somehow, in spite of the still much larger userbase.
That right there is a big part of the problem. Watching someone do something is not the same as knowing how to do that thing yourself. Especially when the youtuber is just some fuckup selling TV dinners.
What will it take until people get it through their thick skulls that ChatGPT isn’t intelligent, doesn’t learn and is a tool that can only generate plausible gibberish.
Using the same tools to detect such gibberish will give you more gibberish.
Garbage in, Garbage out has been true since the difference engine, it’s just that today the garbage smells like English words, still garbage, but not knowledge, intelligence or anything like it.
The machine learning approach for building models, used to produce so called large language models like ChatGPT is also used to create weather forecasting models that are bigger, better and orders of magnitude faster than available until now.
The tools have changed life, but I’m unconvinced that it’s a suitable, sustainable or realistic way to create artificial intelligence, despite claims to the contrary.
People are so insistent that it’s ai that it all reminds me of Blockchain. It’s new! It’ll change everything!
It’ll change some things. What we are seeing now is business forcing it into everything when really, right now, there are only a handful of things it makes sense to use.
It’s really great at giving you a starting point a very rough outline of something. That is the easy part. The hard part is turning that into something new and coherent, and for that I think modern AI is nowhere close. That needs a human
I think it’s definitely a bubble that will burst eventually.
At the same time, I don’t think there’s any way to put the toothpaste back in the tube. This technology is out there, and even once the hype has died down, we’re going to be dealing with it forever.
In the sense that AI is an extremely general term that involves many different technologies, yes. Generative AI/LLMs are not true AGI, which is what people think it is. It cannot think, it cannot learn, it can only predict.
People think it AI intelligence is comparable to how a hovercraft hovers, as in the word is taken literally, but it is actually comparable to a Hoverboard.
Nobody who’s not an engineer seems to give a shit - or, indeed, even understand - the nuance of LLM technology, or the technical reasons behind its limitations and the implications thereof. Hell, I know a lot of engineers who don’t care or understand it at a meaningful level.
I manage computing for a large university. One of my recently graduated students told me that he thought that technology just worked until he worked for me and saw the problems that come up. He was already a very tech-aware person and is going for a PhD in Infomatics, so if even he didn’t understand this, then what can we expect from the general public?
Let’s stop this idiotic hazing ritual. 15 years ago I was a recent grad and people were saying similar stuff. These attitudes kept people my age out of many workplaces. It was shortsighted.
I was rejected many times before I got my first job, and managers in my first roles used my age against me a lot, especially when I didn’t stay in my lane. Finally a company removed my leash and treated me as an opportunity rather than a threat, and they got a big return on that investment, but it took years to find a place like that.
We were acquired and I’m doing other stuff now, but when I see my products in the wild, I sometimes wonder about all those hiring managers who couldn’t see past my age. Did they ever learn that unreplaceable means unpromotable? Did they ever learn to have a bench? What would we have built together if they weren’t so afraid of change?
Of course this is just one story, and profit isn’t a proper motive for doing what’s right. But those who don’t care that ageism is bad for society should at least consider that it’s bad for business and their careers.
The thing is people come and go through this phase of life relatively briefly. Then it’s not their problem anymore. Nobody is in it long enough to care to change it.
Maybe so, but if our generation knows what it’s like to find the ladders pulled up, and we don’t care enough to put them back for the younger people behind us, who will?
It’s kind of a joke how liberals say “they are socially progressive but fiscally conservative,” while the whole definition of liberalism in the Amerikan States is messed up.
But it’s also not a joke in the sense that there are two wolves inside me: le puritan Leninist that is primarily concerned with (redacted) and people’s war. and bisexual femboy
I never understood LGBTQ people who identify as Leninists or ML given these regimes heavily persecuted LGBTQ people and continue to persecute them to this day (China for example)
You can check out the new Cuba family code. It was heavily discussed and amended at the lower councils and then passed through to the national level. Also, Fidel did have some conservative beliefs regarding gay people in the past, but he later took back what he said and supported LGBTQ+. The DDR was also wildly progressive on the gender, sexuality, and feminist front. I have heard that the DPRK is slightly culturally conservative in the aspect that public displays of affection are generally frowned upon, but LGBTQ+ are not persecuted, but neither outright celebrated. Similar position to China and Vietnam.
The takeaway for LGBTQ+ rights is not corporate sponsors, pride parades, and consumption – but if they are free to be themselves. Are they committing sewerslide in droves? Being targeted by death squads? In many parts of the West, many of their rights are being rolled back or threatened, especially in Amerika. Not all AES support for LGBTQ+ community is perfect, but that would be due to the limiting factor of traditional, conservative views held by the majority population – not socialism.
I’m aware of Cuba’s recent laws regarding LGBTQ rights. Cuba for decades sent homosexuals and trans people into internment camps because they were “deviants” and only recently has enacted LGBTQ rights because it’s been forced to open up to the rest of the world after the fall of the Soviet Union. Also it’s just one example, whereas the largest ML country, China, heavily represses anyone who is not heteronormative. So does North Korea. So did the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc. It was in liberal democracies where LGBTQ people first gained rights and have the strongest rights.
China has trans healthcare. You can find LGBTQ stuff on Bilibili or Baidu. China has a three-no policy. No approval. No disapproval. No promotion. As for you – no investigation, no right to speak.
As for Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc goes…
Article 121 (the “anti-gay law” passed by the head soviet) was designed as an anti-pederasty law. If you look at the law text,it mentions or at least implies pedophilia.
To quote The Sangha kommune:
“Article 121, despite its curious reading, appears to have been designed to protect Soviet society from the menace of child abuse and paedophilia, although it is recorded that Soviet academia was interested in the practice of homosexuality from a medical perspective, and attempting to ascertain its root cause (with a number of early Soviet researchers following the Czarist assumption of aberration). This did not mean that homosexuals were persecuted – far from it – the general underlying trend in the USSR was to end all oppression, and facilitate the integration of the individual into the collective.”
"The fact that the Soviet Union was considered enlightened and tolerant demonstrates that these laws were not applied as a deliberate attack upon homosexuals – although in the 1930’s, certain homosexual activity became associated with specific counter-revolutionary activity. In this regard, homosexuals who strove to bring-down the USSR were treated as ‘criminals’ – just as their heterosexual colleagues. Soviet records demonstrate that Joseph Stalin… was responding to various police reports about contemporary counter-revolutionary activities (usually within major cities). "
"Modern (capitalist) Russia has now imported much of the anti-Soviet Cold War disinformation fabricated by the US (and her allies) between 1945 – 1991. As a result, many modern Russian authors side with the reactionary forces of capitalism and adopt this pseudo-history as their own (apparently not realising its ‘racist’ anti-Slavic nature). The above article is anti-Soviet and is designed to give the impression that the USSR carried-out a continued pogrom against homosexuals – even though its author continuously states that there is no evidence to support his claims. Indeed, the only evidence the author can muster is ‘Western’ Cold War authors whose work – as pieces of official fiction – contain no Russian language sources. However, I have quoted this piece where I have been able to verify the facts within Russian language sources. It remains informative on two counts, 1) as a narrative history of homosexuality in Russia from early times to present, and 2) as a study of modern (Russian) anti-Soviet literature. I have found no objective, verifiable evidence of a deliberate persecution of homosexuals in the USSR. "
LGBTQ+ being put into camps in Cuba is also straight-up an anti-communist myth.
To say that “It was in liberal democracies where LGBTQ people first gained rights and have the strongest rights.” is ridiculous. AES countries had LGBTQ+ rights first and continued progressing, The DDR was fairly progressive in the 1980s and continued to progress – similar to the USSR and Eastern Bloc, however, I discussed the famous article 121 above how ""homosexuality was recriminalized. Meanwhile, during the Red Scare in Amerika, gays were specifically investigated because they were seen as more likely to be communists. In many parts of the West, it took until the late 20th and early 21st centuries for the advancement of rights for the LGBTQ+ community.
So no, reality doesn’t conform to what you’re saying.
DDR was fairly progressive in the 1980s
It was less progressive than West Germany/West Berlin, and only began tolerating LGBTQ people (not granting them equal rights) after opening up more to the West near the end of its existence.
Sources: LE FUCKIN ECONOMIST – “journal that speaks for British billionaires.” It’s just more anti-China absurd nonsense. AT LEAST TAKE A LOOK AT MY BAIDU LINK WHICH IS LITERALLY WRITTEN BY A PERSON LIVING IN CHINA. It summarizes things nicely, and you could just translate it.
do some more digging than just wiki.
the sources that wiki links for its claims are: " #37Archive from Resource Information Center Washington D.C in 1998. Their claim of punishment for sodomy and homosexual relationships being 5 years of hard labor was States News Service 28 May 1991; The San Francisco Chronicle 18 Oct. 1992. I found the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper article, but it was paywalled, so I will have to see if my local library has it, or if I can get access to it.
Then the book “Hidden from history: reclaiming the gay and lesbian past” from pages 347-364 “Russia’s gay literature and culture :the impact of the October revolution” by Simon Karlinsky – gay scholar of Russian literature at Berkley. He often contends that the “Marxist Leninist ideology is at odds with homosexuality.” Why does he contend that? Good question. He says the ideology goes against homosexuality. Which is weird, because he isn’t arguing about real world socialism, but the ideology, which is synthesized from many socialist authors/works/theories but isn’t inheritly anti-homosexual
The actual wiki states " there were several high-profile arrests of Russian men accused of being pederasts. In 1933, 130 men “were accused of being ‘pederasts’ – adult males who have sex with boys. Since no records of men having sex with boys at that time are available, it is possible this term was used broadly and crudely to label homosexuality”
And I am getting a 404 to the 43rd resource
The book “Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent” by Dan Healy is referenced a lot. He actually is pro lenin, (and trotsky?), but very anti-Stalin, and uses a lot of primary sources/narratives about sexuality in the USSR.
" “In the first criminal code they composed after the revolution (1922), the Bolsheviks decriminalized sodomy. They did so because they were intent on secularizing and medicalizing the language of sexual crime. Old Testament concepts like “sodomy,” “fornication,” and “feminine honor” were purged from the law. In their place came a modernized, gender-neutral language to describe a sexual revolution. Henceforth, the sexual inviolability of all young persons was to be protected by the state, and the maximum self-determination was offered to both adult men and women: freedom to marry and divorce without having to explain why, freedom to engage in harmless consensual sexual relations without the interference of a moralizing higher authority. Homosexual relations were not explicitly welcomed by the Bolsheviks and raised to an equal status with heterosexuality. Yet they were regarded in principle as no great vice. The majority of Bolsheviks perhaps subscribed to the view that homosexuality was a medical condition, probably (if they read the popular sex advice tracts that they sponsored) a hormonal anomaly, and perhaps one day science would be able to control or even eradicate it. In the meantime, the legal persecution of homosexuals found in Britain and Germany was seen as irrational, reactionary, and bourgeois.” — Daniel D Hailey
and from the wiki ITSELF!!
“Soviet legislation does not recognise so-called crimes against morality. Our laws proceed from the principle of protection of society and therefore countenance punishment only in those instances when juveniles and minors are the objects of homosexual interest (emphasis mine, because that is literally what I was fucking saying)”
—Sereisky, Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 1930, p. 593
DO YOU NOT READ? Even from le ant-commie wiki. 5 short paragraphs are all for “Stalin era”
and again, this is in THE FUCKING 1930s. THE BASTION OF “LIBERAL DEMOCRACY” IN AMERIKKKA IS LYNCHING BLACK PEOPLE
Also, the thing about Cuba is again, a myth. I am not going into that. But you can’t use WIKI AS A SOURCE. They are a compilation of sources. Can give a good run-down on things. Generally bad for political stuff. And there is a lot more shit I wanna say but I have to go to work very soon.
ALSO YOUR FUCKING NONSENSE ABOUT THE DDR IS STRAIGHT-UP INCORRECT. LIKE ACTUALLY STUPID. LIKE THE MOST STUPID THING I HAVE HEARD ALL DAY. AFTER HEARING THAT, I AM ENDING THIS CONVERSATION.
I am going to touch le grass. not bother replying to Kautsky
Even the wikipedia article on LGBT rights in Germany, despite being very slanted and anti-communist, admit that West Germany had no national progress in gay rights until after the cold war. Saying the West/West Germany was more progressive and tolerant is just straight up false.
Wikipedia links got thrown around like it’s the absolute truth source, people would frown upon Wikipedia link back then and linking them is more of a reference. For sensitive topic like politic, people should praise a big doubt if it’s from Wikipedia.
Furthermore, linking and not even quoting relevant points is just lazy and low effort.
They’re not in communist countries. And Florida is led by illiberal increasingly anti-democratic figures that are directly inspired by Russia and even China, so what a terrible example to counteract my point, lol
Love to accuse communists of being intolerant and socially conservative while engaging in Yellow Perilism and saying that America’s problems are the fault of evil inferior foreigners
There is absolutely no way that you don’t understand that the GOP’s anti-queer stance is 100% homegrown, and you’re only making this ridiculous argument because you’re incapable of admitting that your previous comments on this topic are all bullshit.
Do better and just take the L, this isn’t fucking reddit.
The GOP is directly inspired by the homophobic attitudes in both countries
lmao are you doing a shitty bit, what absolute fuckin nonsense, absolving western homophobes of responsibility and agency while simultaneously peddling a racist conspiracy theory, get a grip you shitlib
i never understood LGBTQ people who identify as liberals given these regimes heavily persecuted LGBTQ people and continue to persecute them to this day (the U.S. for example)
I have a lot of thoughts about this as a trans person, and a communist. For one I strongly dislike the way liberals try to use queer people to excuse their war machine - it just gives the cover for bigots abroad to veil their misogyny and transphobia as “anti-imperialism”
Liberals are not doing queer people a service by making them the political football. You’re not helping queer people in the countries you sanction and lay waste to either. Stonewall was a riot. If you’re poor, queer people have not been really “accepted” in places like the US until relatively recently- it took 9 unelected people in robes to allow gay marriage, and Obama “evolved” on it.
As a trans person, the outcome that would directly benefit me the most from political action would be the immediate abolition of private property - ie decommodifying housing, and guaranteeing healthcare- nationalizing the for-profit healthcare. It’s no good to me that my rights are “accepted” in the west if I can’t afford to fucking transition and I’m living on the street. But I guess that would be “authoritarian”
As a trans person, the outcome that would directly benefit me the most from political action would be the immediate abolition of private property
No it wouldn’t, given they didn’t have rights in the Soviet Union, which abolished private property.
I don’t really buy into tankies complaining about “the war machine” when they back Russian and Chinese imperialism. Something tells me you don’t care about trans rights when Russia directly claims to be fighting LGBTQ people in Ukraine.
If my options are 1. unsafe living situations at home 2. unsafe living situations in shelters 3. unsafe living situations on the street + police encounters, a khrushchyovka sounds pretty fucking good.
What good are rights when you’re poor and hungry with no fucking housing?
edit- NATO has couped/overthrown a lot of governments before Ukraine.
CW: SA
spoilerIn Greece during the coup "the US ambassador in Athens, Phillips Talbot, complained to Maury ((Athens CIA chief) one week after the brutal change of power that the US coup represented ‘a rape of democracy’. Maury answered: 'How can you rape a whore? https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/0859d75f-3156-48d5-b834-65153a8296cf.png
What good are rights when you’re poor and hungry with no fucking housing?
I mean you’re not poor and hungry if you have time to argue with me on Lemmy on a Star Trek space, unless you just have really bad priorities? Also you dodged the point about private property abolition not doing anything for trans rights…
It’s something that often people will point to how communists heavily persecute LGBTQ people but ignore that the people who fought for LGBTQ liberation in the western world were Marxists, MLs, Maoists, or worked very closely with those groups.
Do not fucking dare to speak for us with your ahistoric ideas about gay rights. No communist government during the 20th century was worse than western countries on “equal rights” for LGBTQIA+ people. Because we didn’t have equal rights anywhere in the world in the last century. Are you a literal fucking child that you’re unaware of that or are you just the typical liberal that completely lacks object permanence and immediately forgets how he has actively supported the oppression of marginalized people once the mainstream consensus has moved on? That doesn’t mean the USSR’s treatment of gay people wasn’t atrocious, it means that we were legally persecuted everywhere. The USSR threw gay people in jail, so did the USA and West Germany and the UK. Gay men were actively hunted by the law in the bourgeoise democracies you love so much. Germany had forced sterilization of trans people seeking a name change until 2011 (btw the DDR didn’t have a law like that on the books). Fuck you for thinking us having at least some basic human rights has always been the status quo of the enlightened west since forever, i still have to struggle against my goverment and my healthcare system all the damn time while my people are being actively singled out and villified through multimillion euro harassment campaigns backed by our conservative party. How do you fucking dare to explain to me how free i am under this joke of a system? Democracy is a fucking nightmare when you’re a minority of less than 1% of the population. Majority rule means minorities are treated like dirt. Free speech means that the majority is free to shout us down while we are being silenced.
Regarding your idiot takes on the DDR, backed by wikiepdia links (lol) that you, in typical liberal fashion, didn’t even read, the “equal rights” situation was actually better in the DDR, were gay sex was legalized in 1968 instead of 1994 like in the West, which only had a partial legalization a year after the DDR and retained a significantly higher age of consent for gay relationships, as judges and lawmakers back then were firmly convinced the being gay spread by social contagion and that vulnerable young men had to be protected from predatory queers trying to turn them gay. That was the actual legal consensus about gay sex throughout the mid 20th century in Germany. If you knew ANYTHING about gay rights in Germany, you’d be aware of this, it’s a key part of queer German history how the West perpetuated fascist views about queerness. West German conservatives were thinking out loud about throwing gay people in camps in the 1980s. But you aren’t, because you’re a clueless het shit trying to straightsplain queer rights to queer people.
The Queer liberation movement has long been spearheaded by communists. Harry Hay, Sylvia Rivera, Rudolf Klimmer, and many others, were all communists who, in some form or another pushed forward the cause of queer liberation.
On the whole, Socialist states in the 20th century were no better or worse on queer issues than any liberal democracy. We were treated like shit pretty much everywhere. They were not special in this regard.
A notable exception was East Germany, which, though not without flaws, had a far better queer rights track record than its Western capitalist counterpart:
The HIB (Homosexuelle Interessengemeinschaft Berlin) was established in 1973 with the belief that ‘homosexual emancipation is part of the success of socialism’.
Modern ML states like Cuba have made immense strides in queer rights in the modern day, and progress in, for instance, China is slow but steady.
Tankie, though if I take the 2-axis politics test I wind up being in the bottom left corner (you have to give some pretty unhinged answers to get top left).
I started out as a techno-libertarian and then lib left, then socdem, then anarchist. There’s been life experiences that have changed my politics.
I guess, though I have extensive critiques of both. I’m probably closest to Cuba, given my Carribean heritage and actually helping the local community outreach program.
While states still exist, I am a Welsh nationalist because independence from the UK is the only way we can stave off English attempts to undermine the senedd and Welsh democracy as a whole.
Welsh nationalism as a short-term project, because the structure of the UK gives ultimate control to the houses of parliament (a largely unelected seat of power), if any form of communism, let alone anarchist communism, is to be successfully built in Wales we must first be free from direct interference by our neighbours.
I realise that I’m using nationalist in a context that you’re probably unfamiliar with.
When I say Welsh nationalism I’m using this definition - “advocacy of or support for the political independence of a particular nation or people.”
As opposed to the definition you’re likely more familiar with -“identification with one’s own nation and support for its interests, especially to the exclusion or detriment of the interests of other nations.”
Now for how I Square these two otherwise inconsistent political goals:
It is a complicated process and I don’t doubt that the Welsh nationalist movement may present some hurdles in the long run to the dissolution of state hierarchy. But the way I see it is like this:
UK parliament controls the entire UK, there’s the senedd in Wales and the Scottish parliament but ultimately they only have the power to make minor adjustments to laws (such as change the speed limit slightly).
As such, any revolution that occurs in Wales has to contend not just with the local bourgeois but also from the bourgeois of the United Kingdom as a whole.
Now two possible tactics exist in this situation:
revolution across the whole UK at once.
Or
Wales separates from the UK and then undergoes revolution.
Of the two of those, I believe the latter outcome is more likely to succeed.
And I understand the difference between left wing and right wing nationalism, but it’s kind of weird to be for the identity of Wales and against all governments, given national identities heavily rely on governments to exist.
I think a key place where we are disagreeing is in the nature of Welsh identity. I don’t view it as a national identity but rather a cultural one. Even once all states have been dissolved, Welsh identity will likely persist through our language and traditions.
Yes, but the cultural identity will outlive the national one when the state dissolves, it has millenniums of cultural inertia behind it after all. I don’t forsee any future anti-capitalists getting in the way of, for example, Eisteddfod gatherings or couples exchanging love spoons.
If an anarchist revolution is successful, the dissolution of the state is inevitable.
If a socialist revolution is successful then the eventual dissolution of the state will likely occur in a framework such as Engels’ “withering away of the state”.
Since capitalism cannot sustain itself indefinitely, it is likely that one of these two revolutions will occur (or there will be a backslide into fascism).
Pëtr Kropotkin wrote a lot about possible organisation of anarchist society after the revolution, at this point it’s a meme to recommend reading “the bread book” The Conquest of Bread and I don’t personally recommend starting with it and instead beginning with a pamphlet like Anarchism and Revolution.
The ZAD de Notres-Dame-des-Landes, is a good example of a long running commune that has managed to withstand assault from an external state. But the kinds of large scale anarchism that will do away with the state in its entirety has not yet been attempted.
Revolutionary Catalonia provides a good example of an anarchist project where large scale industrial infrastructure was maintained and could help form the blueprint for decentralised industry. Much ink has been spilled pointing fingers about who was to blame for the sectarian infighting that ultimately led to its collapse, I think a more important question would be “how do we stop something like that happening next time?” A question that I have no clue how to answer.
Anarchist Ukraine - correct me if I’m wrong, but this is about the Mahknovists right? Despite being largely agrarian, they were able to rebuild destroyed infrastructure an astounding rate in the face of multiple invasions and an ongoing civil war. There are rumours of antisemitism within Mahknovshchina but a lot of them come from USSR aligned sources and are hotly debated by different anarchist groups, I don’t know enough about Ukrainian history to know if the accusations are true.
Fair enough on the Zapatistias, I just hear about them a lot from anarchists as a workable example of anarchosocialism.
And yeah I actually don’t know a lot about anarchist Catalonia, just that it’s basically the biggest example of anarchism on a society-wide level. Was actually goading you for more information lol.
Mahknovists
Yes, them. Also don’t know much about them. I know far more about the Menshevik territories in Georgia and Russia, which were democratic socialist and not anarchist, and even more forgotten about.
your effort was commendable, don’t let this moron ruin it. I myself have saved your sources to read later, it was very enlightening. Thank you for your posting rat-salute-2
Oh, this is the popular conception of anarchy as a political project, but doesn’t really reflect anarchist thought much at all.
Anarchy is the project of volentary, participatory, and minimally coercive government. You can’t really have “no government” in any largish group of people. What you can do is structure that government to have the least amount of heirarchy and control with the greatest amount of participation.
Counter to popular conception, this actually means a lot of rules, just rules that everyone has a say in making. The goal will be that the rules serve to protect and promote wellbeing while having the minimum impact onthe choices people have available,
How can you have communism without a state forcing everyone to surrender their property?
If private property exists, that’s not communism. But to enforce communism you need a state so that’s not anarchy.
I believe anarchy and communism are polar opposites, and cannot co-exist. You’re either for anarchy (which ultimately leads to individualism and capitalism) or communism, which requires a huge controlling state to exist.
Private property will not exist under anarchism, since private property (read the means of production) will be placed into the collective hands of those who need it.
anarchy (which ultimately leads to individualism and capitalism)
Capitalism requires the maintenance of involuntary hierarchies (like that between the owner and worker) and thus is antithetical to anarchism.
I believe anarchy and communism are polar opposites,
The ultimate goal of communism is the dissolution of state, this is something even MLs agree on.
"Engels suggested to Bebel that all chatter about the state be dropped altogether, that the word “state” be eliminated from the programme altogether and the word “community” substituted for it. Engels even declared that the Commune was long a state in the proper sense of the word. Yet Marx even spoke of the “future state in communist society”, i.e., he would seem to recognize the need for the state even under communism.
But such a view would be fundamentally wrong. A closer examination shows that Marx’s and Engels’ views on the state and its withering away were completely identical, and that Marx’s expression quoted above refers to the state in the process of withering away."
If you wouldn’t mind me making an assumption, it appears that you have very little knowledge of anarchism’s philosophical framework. I can give you some reading suggestions if you’d like.
You’re right, I don’t have much knowledge of anarchism’s philosophical framework, but I do know that the definition of the word means that there is no authority.
In an anarchist society, what’s to stop me from accumulating wealth?
Furthermore, what would stop me from entering into voluntary contracts with others who agree to do labour in exchange for money?
Ultimately I think that without some authority (almost certainly a state) enforcing communism, the relationships we currently experience under capitalism will naturally reoccur. And (if my limited understanding of anarchy is correct, which I admit it might not be), under anarchism there can be no such authority preventing capitalism from happening.
Communism always needs to be enforced, it doesn’t happen naturally. Capitalism does. That’s why I don’t think communism can exist along with anarchy.
Communism always needs to be enforced, it doesn’t happen naturally. Capitalism does. That’s why I don’t think communism can exist along with anarchy.
Capitalism also has to be enforced.
What do you think all those counter revolutionary insurgencies like the bay of pigs invasion are?
Or the state crackdowns on communist groups like the red scare?
Capitalism is not a natural state that things can revert to, it is a system that needs to be imposed.
You’re right, I don’t have much knowledge of anarchism’s philosophical framework, but I do know that the definition of the word means that there is no authority.
Anarchism is the absence of involuntary hierarchies such as the state. Authority and authoritarianism is meaningless in drawing a dividing line between ideologies because every socioeconomic framework needs to defend itself from being undermined one way or another. A good place to get started on this matter would be On Authority by Friedrich Engels.
The bay of pigs invasion and the red scare were attempts to stop communist ideology from spreading. This was done in order to perpetuate and protect the status quo in the USA for geopolitical reasons, but is not necessary for capitalism to function. Many nations start conflicts with each other because of a difference in ideology, and a perceived need to contain or counteract the ideology of the other nation, and this is not limited to capitalist societies. The USSR for example engaged in many conflicts with its neighbors in an attempt to export the revolution and spread its influence. Yet I wouldn’t say these conflicts were necessary for communism to function as a system, any more than the conflicts capitalist countries engaged in were necessary for capitalism to work.
I disagree that capitalism is not a natural state that things can revert to. I believe that if you were to take a random sample of humanity, wipe their memories and drop them on an alien world, capitalism would happen. Not because there’s a “system” making it happen, but because that’s just what people do.
I appreciate the recommendations. I’ll check out Pëtr Kropotkin.
If capitalism is the natural way for civilisation to organise itself, how come it took until the 1700s to become a widespread ideology? Humans have been around for a hell of a lot longer than that.
For real, sitting here flabbergasted by this claim. I think it is interesting though, it highlights a very specific isolated Western dominated historical worldview to assume capitalism is naturally occurring. I demand more anthropology in school!
People on the star trek forum with a historical timeline more in line with the people thinking the world is 6000 years old and defending private property picard
I believe that if you were to take a random sample of humanity, wipe their memories and drop them on an alien world, capitalism would happen
Let’s think about that claim a little more carefully, why didn’t the Romans, the Greeks, the Persians, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Arabs, the Sumerians, the Ancient Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Maya, or the Inca develop capitalism
Why did it take 5,000 years after recorded history began for capitalism to emerge if it’s such a “natural phenomenon”
This was done in order to perpetuate and protect the status quo in the USA for geopolitical reasons, but is not necessary for capitalism to function
You really don’t see the contradiction in your claim? Let me spell it out; the “status quo” of the USA IS capitalism
So, I’m not an anarchist any more, but just to throw in a few odds and ends:
In the socialist conception of things, the state is the network of social forces that separates classes. Things like cops, or parliament are big obvious parts of “the state”, but things like CNN or Microsoft are too, despite being in private hands. In your hypothetical, the apparatus you use to accumulate wealth is “the state”.
A part of this reading is that it requires active effort to maintain the state. To take an example, let’s say your method of wealth accumulation was by becoming a landlord. You own the land and dwellings that people shelter in. Cool.
What makes this “yours” and not the tenants? Well, you paid for it, yes, but unless you spend all your time debating your tenants about the philosophy of ownership, you’re going to need enforcers. Enforcers who take your claims of ownership seriously. And this gets more and more necessary as you get more land and more tenants. You’re not going to fight ten tenants yourself to extract rent, let alone 10,000. After all, one would expect a slave to try to escape even if you rightfully paid for them, why not housing or food or anything else people need to live.
In most strains of anarchism, hoarding property so you can exploit your fellow man is violence, just as in liberalism walking across an empty bit of lawn that someone owns is violent.
But then, this isn’t really my beliefs any more, so um… idk, I hope it helps
How are Microsoft and CNN part of the state? Aren’t they just providing a service in exchange for money, in the same way a farmer, an actor or a mechanic does?
Your landlord example is interesting, and does illustrate how a state may be necessary to enforce private ownership, which is something I hadn’t considered about capitalism before. I suppose the landlord could pay private militia to enforce their ownership claims over the land, but at that point the landlord is basically a warlord and realistically wouldn’t need to pay for the land in the first place. The libertarian idea that everyone would voluntarily respect private property rights now seems as absurd as the communist idea that everyone would voluntarily share all property.
I don’t quite see how hoarding property could be considered violent, assuming it was acquired peacefully. Using what you’ve acquired to gain materially is not necessarily exploitative if those gains come from voluntary exchange of goods and labour. If someone wants to clean my windows in exchange for some money, I don’t see how it can be violent to enable that transaction. No one’s being forced to do anything in that scenario.
How are Microsoft and CNN part of the state? Aren’t they just providing a service in exchange for money, in the same way a farmer, an actor or a mechanic does?
Obviously we’re talking about different ideas here. Microsoft, for instance, pays for enforcement of copyright (a relatively modern invention) and gets profits from that enforcement (e.g. through corporate deals, sponsorships, software ecosystems etc), which maintains class character. The owners of Microsoft sit around and do nothing (hypothetically), and the systems surrounding them (“the state”) funnel money up to them, that money being a representation of the power and labour of people buying and using Microsoft products (often without choice; I don’t get to choose which OS my workplace uses, for instance, but I also play video games which can be jank with various linux OSes etc etc). It is in Microsoft’s best interests to maintain this class character of society, thus they will lobby the government to defend their interests, fund op-eds to say “tech workers unionising is bad, actually”, pay for private security, bankroll candidates in local sherriffs elections etc etc. The fact that they are privately owned and the money and power are “private” only really explains where the money/power goes, it doesn’t explain Microsoft’s behaviour. The same with CNN except with different specifics.
I do know a couple of leftists that complain about using the word “state” for this, since it has a different definition in common parlance (usually equivalent to the government or nation-state), so it could just be semantics. But if you’re talking to a left anarchist about states, that’s what they mean. I also realise that this means that your local fish and chips shop owner is a part of “the state”, but the municipal work guy who fills in potholes for the city council isn’t, at least in that conception. I’m not really going to argue these points, just hopefully building some understanding to what anarchists (except ancaps) mean when they talk about the state.
Most people aren’t washing windows for the love of washing windows. Perhaps it would be true if all their needs were met (say, food security, housing etc etc), then your window washing friend taking money to wash windows so he can buy warhammer miniatures or something. Erm… What follows isn’t an argument, but more just a scenario to explain the view. Again, I’m not super interested in arguing the point.
Imagine there is a village where everyone is hungry except one person. That one person owns all the grain. How he acquired the grain is irrelevant, what matters now is he has all the grain in a legal sense. Maybe he inherited from its previous owner. “Give me everything you own, and I will feed you”, he says. The villagers balk. It is a long journey to the nearest town, too long for many of them for they have been hungry for a while. Some of them give up their homes in exchange for grain. They continue living there, but agree to pay future rent. For the others, the situation becomes more dire as the days pass. People are rapidly losing weight, trying to fill their stomachs with a mixture of sawdust and water. The grain lord ups the ante “Give me everything you produce in the future, as well as everything you own right now.” Again the villagers balk, but some people sell themselves into more explicit serfdom than the people from before. and so on and so on until the villagers are selling their firstborns to the grain lord who haven’t even been born yet. I got bored of writing this. At some point or another, the villagers just take the grain and fight off the lord if he tries to stop them. His property hoarding requires violence to maintain regardless of how he acquired that property, unless you consider violence against property to be worse than violence against people (which, uh… idk). Ergo, it is violent.
The point being that in this scenario, everything is “freely” given, in a legalistic sense, but is extremely exploitative in any other sense. The right libertarian viewing this as just is… Well, most people don’t act like this in their personal lives. If a friend or member of their community is hungry and they have lots of food to share, they will share it quite freely. It is the state (in the anarchist’s view) that obfuscates our local community relationships where we see ourselves as so separate that would not give spare food someone in our communities if they were hungry (that said, our cities are very large, something about urbanist critique here). Like, my loser brother who fucks up everything is still welcome to share my pot roast tonight, though I’m probably not going to invest in any of his ventures per se.
I think, also, that while anarchists view the hoarding as violent, they also view the source of all capital as violent as well. For instance, would Standard Oil or US Steel have been as profitable or even have existed if the United States’ land had never been violently appropriated from the native societies that already existed there? A lot of the initial wealth even before the colonial era was squatted on by descendants of warlords who ran what we’d call “protection rackets” (feudalism). How much of any of the wealth that exists is “legitimate”?
Again, I don’t really follow this political view anymore, so I’m not going to get into the nitty gritty of arguing any of these points. These scenarios are just for helping get into the mindset of anarchism. If you want a decent primer to the different forms property and ownership can take, you could read Debt: The First 5000 Years which has very accessible anthropological discussion of many different societies throughout history (including free market arguments in the first Islamic Empire).
your questions presume the existence of money^[1] and capital which can be held in private hands. by the time the state withers away, both will necessarily have been eliminated along with class distinctions. as capital is pure under the domain of the administrative apparatus and under democratic control, it cannot be used to accumulate wealth in the sense of the term as we understand it under capitalism.
can someone decide to accumulate currency? absolutely. what good does it do them? not a whit - once capital passes entirely into the public domain, the function of currency is no longer to denominate the flows of capital but rather merely to facilitate trade, as it was before capitalism, and will again be after it.
the unique part, that which has never happened before, is the social productive capacity of the whole society will lay entirely within the hands of the public at large - ie the ability to organize production without the interposition of private individuals, except where the production itself involves them materially.
[1]: money is distinguished from currency by the MCM’ relation, whereby money is turned into commodities through the process of production and the sale of said commodities becomes new money - ie profit. currencies by way of contrast have existed in many forms and for many purposes - I recommend David Graeber’s Debt for a survey.
Thanks for the detailed reply. I hadn’t considered the difference between money and currency before. Maybe I still don’t fully understand it because I still think there would be an advantage to hoarding currency in any system where others are prepared to exchange goods or labour for that currency.
Trade would surely still occur, and it would be possible to profit from said trade. That profit would enable the trader to live a more luxurious life than those who make less or no profit, because he would be able to acquire more goods and have more work done for him by spending the profit. Consumerism would happen.
Even in a post-scarciry world I think we’d still have Ferengi.
I appreciate the reading recommendations. These are some fascinating ideas to understand for sure.
think about a village that treats a particular kind of wood used in ritual ceremonies - like weddings and funerals - as a kind of currency. the person who bears that currency has a kind of ritual power but it’s limited in scope. a young man who trades years of labor to acquire a single stave can burn it in order to declare his worthiness to marry a woman of the tribe. if one person simply “buys up” all of the available supply… how? it’s a ritual item - they’re literally not for sale in the traditional sense. that is, it’s not money because it’s not a commodity.
another kind of currency is IOUs issued by a particular person - they’re only valuable to you if getting a favor done by that person carries some kind of significance to you. that is, they can be traded like commodities within a community but hold no value outside of it.
I see. In that case, I think the development of money is inevitable. People will want a standardized token of value that is universally accepted. If there is no state, something like gold or bitcoin will meet that need. Something rare but commoditized and fungible will inevitably become the standard unit of account that represents value, and a free market will mean that goods and services naturally find their own price.
People will want a standardized token of value that is universally accepted.
why? this is not how commerce was done for most of human history. to get to a single fungible token, whether it has inherent value (ie a system in which cash is rare and the system itself unstable) or it represents debt (historically more common and stable), we have to presuppose a state whereby one class exerts it’s dominance over another class because both the issuance of currency and the tax must be tightly controlled. but the extant state in our hypothetical is the dictatorship of the proletariat, after class divisions have been erased.
Why does the existence of currency presuppose a state? Let alone one that involves class dominance? People can easily trade precious metals or crypto without the existence of a state, because these things don’t need to be issued in order to represent value.
Same thing that would stop you from pulling your pants down and sitting on a friend’s carpet or unplugging their TV and walking off with it
You do not understand what words like anarchy, communism or capitalism mean
Capitalism is not a natural occurrence, it requires a state to function, planning, control and above all violence; no capitalist would honor a contract if there weren’t courts to enforce them, no capitalist would feel secure if there weren’t state agents protecting their property, no capitalist in history would’ve been able to create foreign markets without European armies conquering the world
You fundamentally do not understand the depth and scope of these discussions, you read a definition in Webster and you think you know about the way the world works? But you can’t even see the obvious facts right in front of your face
Anarchism is rooted in the identification of and opposition to unjust hierarchies and how they may be opposed and dismantled most efficiently. This is a leftist tradition, unlike what Westerners are usually taught in school (or by pop culture), where anarchists just vaguely oppose authority and rules and want “chaos”. As such, anarchists identify the system of capitalism as the primary engine of unjust hierarchy and tend to bring a class analysis to their work, which includes union organizing, mutual aid work, and direct action to oppose the police state
how can you have private property without a state forcing everyone to respect that your name is written on a piece of paper that says it’s yours? we are social beings. in situations where authority collapses, as in natural disasters, the collapse of property relations soon follows.
the right-libertarian misconception that property is a natural, fundamental law that pre-exists all of human society is a fantasy – you are not going to hoard your 50 acres of farmland for yourself while your neighbors starve just because you have a large gun collection. And the right-libertarian solution to this obvious problem is that they would simply create the state again, but with them at the top, by hiring mercenaries to shoot anyone who climbs the fence. That is what the state is at its core: maintenance of property relations. Communism and anarchism aren’t opposites, but synonyms.
Centrist communist. I think MLs and Anarchists have useful ideas about making the world better. I’m leaning more ML lately mostly due to learning about the oppressive history of western capitalist interests, and how pacifist approaches have repeatedly failed to survive.
TBF to old trot, idk if he’s ultra left or a right deviationist because he was such an opportunist that he fluctuated on which side of the opposition he worked with. He just went with whatever side had more leverage opposing Stalin that day.
true dat. Trot is definitely not an ultra left, and you are correct on his opportunism fluctuating on whatever would oppose Stalin – to the point of supporting terrorism
Yeah, I think some form of Anarchisms are the more-than-long goal for many places, but the early stages, with capitalists fighting to keep power, definately still need strong and organized defense forces, and a state is probably the best way of doing that.
The overabundance of essential resources that communism aims at will probably allow for groups of all sizes to organize as they wish/need
This might not be the most satisfying answer, but my opinions of Maoism are based on what I’ve read of his principal texts and of the economic and social revitalization of China since he was in power. I live in the imperial core, and when I look around at the societal problems in my community and in my country writ large, I see immediate land redistribution as the swiftest cure to the largest issue, and Mao in my mind is the foremost advocate, architect, and practitioner of anticapitalist land redistribution on the national scale.
So my view is mostly from old books and from my neighborhood, and I’m not too well versed with the other cells around the world who claim the Maoist title. All I’ll say about the Nepalese Maoists is, my knee-jerk reaction to anticapitalist forces is support, I don’t know enough about them to comment further, and I hesitate to levy judgment on people across the world from me.
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