this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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Honestly, this place is full of communists. I’m not the biggest fan of communists, to be frank. There is a lot of backwards ideas that get accepted as “leftist,” when they’re really statist. Particularly revisionist history statist. If a communist party said it, you gotta defend it kinda thing.
I don't identify as a communist. I just don't want life to be unreasonably difficult for people. Thats it. I just what the promise of what labor was supposed to be. I want it to free us from the shackles of work or die. Guess that is extreme left now even with tankies around the corner from us.
Exactly. We have 50 years of computer driven exponential growth and not a fucking thing is better for us. We don't work less, travel more, be richer, live a better life, or have a better future for the planet. It should make everyone anti-capitalist.
Data I've seen suggests otherwise. Care to engage with me so that we can figure out where the discrepancy lies?
You're joking, right? A peasant in the 1200s would work less than a regular person today.
Do you think an average person in 13th century had a better quality of life than an average person living in the 21st century?
In many aspects, yes, they did lead a more fulfilling life.
Imma call bullshit on that one lol
And sources for that?
For one, the fact their work (which took significantly less time) lead to a real, objective difference and benefit in their society. There's also the fact that anyone not enslaved had partial or complete ownership of their lands. Not to be underestimated, as well, is the fact their society wasn't immediately doomed to collapse from worldwide catastrophes.
I'm sure the women had great lives
Drop links so I can move to this paradise 😭
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-population-between-different-poverty-thresholds-historical
This. When I was younger I considered myself pretty centrist, generally people would agree. My views never really changed, but the Overton window has shot so far right I now get called a commie (I guess here I'm a tankie? Still dunno wtf that's about except a slur for 'left of Biden') because I think a 40 hour work week should put a basic roof over your head, whether an efficency on your own or a roomie in a nicer spot.
As far as I can make out, tankies are people who support communist governments even when they go way too far. So even though leaders like Jinping are essentially dictators, because they're ostensibly communist the tankies support them.
At least that's what I've seen from a few weeks on lemmy. I'm sure some tankies will be along to correct me soon.
Ah, so the thing I still haven't seen happen except for everyone saying it happens to attack leftist instances.
Oh, and people attacking others for worshipping someone all in when they point to any particular point of a particular person (IE "In regards to X, Lenin said Y" "Oh HeRe We gO aNoThEr LeNiN wOrShiPpInG tAnKiE")
Of course, I'm sure there's SOMEBODY out here simping for China or whatever, but if that silly small percentage paints all leftists then by their own logic all capitalists should be branded as fascists - WAY more "right" people calling for fascism around here than China worshipperss and whatnot.
Not extreme left but it's socialist and isn't consistent with American ideals. You can bitch about that shit if you want but we're in the decay phase after a gluttonous society and you think the answer is communism? You do, you think everyone and everything should be "fair" but life and this country don't work like that.
Could be if we tried. The democrats have been neo-lib appeasement artists because they are a part of the ruling class. This system cannot hold. Something will change. We just have to wait and see which way it breaks. Either way, I'm already doing the work to see a world I want. I don't care about the noise. Arguments like "Life ain't fair" are a poor substitute for putting yourself out there. I used to think much the same way. But, I had to do something about how bad it is getting.
This is my objection too.
All too many people here don't seem to even begin to understand the inherent threats of institutionalized authority, so in their rush to head off the recreation of the Third Reich, they're basically advocating for the recreation of the Khmer Rouge instead.
And I dream of a world in which, instead of merely wishing to oppress and murder this group of people instead of that one, people don't wish to oppress and murder anyone.
You can read more into Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance if you want to harden your philosophical position for what you have described.
Most people seem to miss the fact that it's a paradox, even though it's right there in the name.
Define 'full of communists'.. cause it sounds like such an american phrase and perspective. To me, it's just a more leftwing centered space. The real communists are a minority. At least on the biggest Lemmy servers.
Go for a walk in Hexbear and Lemmygrad communities, these are Lemmy's communists...
Yeah but those instances are not nearly as big as lemmyworld and the others. I also didn't say that there were no communists at all. There are just not as many as OP made it out to be.
I just checked and you're instance isn't federated with Hexbear so you don't see their users' comments, my instance was federated with them for a couple of days and it made the Lemmy experience a mess.
I have more than one account, none of them get many communist posts. Maybe there's one in there in a few rare occasions but it's not significant.
Lol I’m not crying “SOCIALISM!” because someone recommended taking care of poor people. And maybe it’s just the communities on lemm.ee, maybe it’s because I interact with the communities more because I can’t bite my tongue. But I come across way more communist communities than anything else. Your instance matters. I see a lot of communist communities. As an anarchist, the prevalence of communism on lemmy is troubling to me because I see huge flaws in the thinking and i want to see the left not follow down a doomed hierarchical road that has proven to be a failure over and over and over again.
Hm might be. On lemmy, the instances you're signed on significantly affect your experience.
Lemmy world and feddit never gave me such vibes tho. But it might also be because you're indirectly looking for these confrontations.
Lemmy.world I think has banned most tankie subs. It wasn’t until the endless problems with lemmy.world that I switched over to lemm.ee and I see way more communist shit, but have way fewer connectivity issues.
Good to know
Instead you'd want everyone to adopt a system that literally can't possibly work. Genius.
What system do you think they are referring to as an anarchist? Anarchism is simply opposition to hierarchies that allow control over others, such as the control capitalists have over workers by owning the means of production and political forces. The system that anarchists advance in place of that can take an unlimited number of forms.
Or the control the hierarchical entity (state) must have over a populous to stop thievery and violence. Even in a perfectly idealized world, anarchism only just barely gets to work, teetering on the brink of collapse.
We have a state now though, has thievery and violence been stopped? How many thousands are in poverty, how many are killed in global wars waged in the name of profits? There are states where theft and murder are extremely rare, and states where it is common. What is the difference between the conditions where it is common and uncommon? Is a top-down control and manipulation the only way to reduce violence?
Anarchism works all the time. It's more than a political structure, it's an idea about how to organize relations between people, and there already are many groups that are active that function on anarchist principles.
Any group that collects itself in the modern world as anarchist, like anarchist groups in the Spanish Civil War, are heavily repressed by state forces. Capitalist states work together to discourage anarchist ideals even more so than communism because of the possibility it has for threatening traditional power structures.
You mean the possibility of completely collapsing civilization as a whole.
Fallacious reasoning, and pretty obvious at that. I give you a cup of water - some water has been poisoned by heavy metals. If you drink the cup of water, will you get metal poisoning? The only intellectually honest answer is: the question is flawed. The same way it doesn't follow that
Some water is poisoned ⇏ All water is poisoned
It also doesn't follow that
The suppression of violence begets control ⇏ All control suppresses violence.
This is further proven by your following statement
Which opposes your own argumentation.
You said a state must have control to stop thievery and murder, but I've never heard of a state that successfully stopped those things, is what I was getting at. The point about conditions where violence is common or less common is that there are more primary factors to violence than whether or not someone will be punished by state forces for that violence. There are more effective ways to combat violence and theft than a police state.
Sure – state healthcare, state infrastructure, state base income all help.
You'll find that the vast majority of anarchists nowadays are gradualists (short of the usual vocal minority), precisely because Anarchy depends on a populace sticking to social norms and rules, and that shit takes time to develop, and definitely can't be instituted by force. Or its final form be predicted from our position in time. Sure, if you live in tyranny a revolution is the way to go, but if you have a half-way decent liberal and social democracy pushing it further towards all three things is the way to go.
To paraphrase Kerry Thornley: With progressing enlightenment the state is going to wither away, or, that failing, it won't annoy anyone, any more.
Little tidbit, though: The internet is a quite proper anarchy, actually. I don't mean the web I mean the way ISPs, hosters, IXPs, etc, all interact on an infrastructure level. The internet has no government, what it does have is lots of technocrats writing requests for comments turning into consensus and a moral baseline (tolerate spam or CSAM and you're out). The ICANN is the pinnacle when it comes to centralisation, there (if DNS can even be considered to be basic infrastructure. The RIR are certainly more important).
It's the type of communism present on Lemmy that makes matters worse too...