It’s what they do.

You dont even have to do anything and they show up.

Thanks for sharing this perspective.

As a baby leftist, I don't want to fall into the traps of others when it comes to heralding the goods of past socialist experiments without criticizing the ills as well.

Nothing is perfect, as you say, and it a materialist socialists' life long project to see the world clearly for all the material conditions that exist, and have existed up until this point. Idealist socialists and idealist communists will capsize their entire movement, and endlessly make things about purity tests.

It is possible. We had socialist consenus not that long ago :/ The only possible way to achieve at least near-socialist system is democratic. If the system does not directly represent views of their citizens, eventually you get oligarchic corpocracy with planned economy, that will crush all the nations beneath their boots. Furthermore: Bolsheviks were fucking extremists. When post-revolution parliament was established, and parties ran for seats, the majority of votes were Social-Revolutionaries, bolsheviks didnt have nearly as much votes. But then bolsheviks just shut down the parliament because they lost, and put their opponents in jail or even executed. So much for the people's republic ig.

Instead, we need to actually get support in southeen countries, fight US hegemony and get votes in european countries, but this time hwlping global south first would be priority, so the european and us capitalists couldnt move their capital to poorer parts of the world and thus destroy the socialist consensus.

Yep, I agree with all of that.

I'm not sure if you're into this sort of thing, but I'm working with some friends on a tabletop game jam that we're planning to run (online) over a weekend some time early next year about stories set in the midst of a future revolution. You can see the draft document into which we've been occasionally adding ideas here. Let me know if you're interested.

I hate being told I'm not socialist for wanting coöperative ownership and a coöp commonwealth economy, but that they are real the "real" socialists when they just want state owned corporations.

the leftist version

Are they leftists, though? They call themselves leftists, sure, but if it walks like a duck...

which was written in 1872 and is kinda way way way way way way way past its selling date.

You call this a democracy? The entire system is built to extract wealth from the working class

How do you justify democracy when people are voting for life to be worse instead of better, even to the point of undermining the democratic process itself? Sure we could argue at some point democracy had the effect of improving living conditions but should we expect that to be true forever in all circumstances?

I dont believe that democracy is valuable as an end unto itself, it is a tool that should serve its people and if it stops doing that we shouldn't be dogmatic about it. Authoritarian systems certainly arent the way, and I would guess what we need doesnt even have a name yet.

Democracy is akshually authoritarian because there are laws.

I don't think Marx ever condemned the word "authoritarian." Or said anything about a dictatorship of the proletariat becoming more unjust than a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. That doesn't sound like anything he'd say.

Rosa Luxemburg certainly did but who cares about women in history am I right? /s

https://www.marxists.org/...

this is like a page long, maybe worth a read

Guy Debord criticized the Soviet Union for creating a new class system. He still believed in Marxism, but didn't believe that the structure of the Soviet Union was able to create the conditions for communism.

Yup.

Not according to "tankies" :D They love shiny boots holding a red flag. They just hate brown flags, but love a good boot-liking

Exerting force ≠ authoritarian. These words have completely different meanings. For example, community defence against an authoritarian state can involve the exertion of force, but would be categorically anti-authoritarian.

According to that logic the warsaw uprising was also authoritarian because the rebels imposed their will onto the nazi occupiers.

there is a difference between using force as a means of self defense and for dominance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_d8_VpLc-k

Upvoting not because I agree but because this claim is very common and needs visibility.

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.

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.

Americans programming will break when they see it working. Why do you think they try so hard to stop it?

Four legs good!

Two legs bad!

Four legs good!

Two legs bad!

Ok.

Every post-apocalyptic society we can point to is fictional. After all, we’ve never actually experienced an apocalypse on that scale.

But just off the top of my head, The Book of Eli depicts a post-apocalyptic society that has largely devolved into anarchy, with power concentrated in the hands of warlords and whoever can enforce their will through violence.

Cyborg presents a similar picture: societal collapse, competing factions, and survival through force.

Then there’s Mad Max, where civilization has collapsed into violent competition over increasingly scarce resources, with whoever controls the necessities of life holding the power.

But I’d also venture to say that many of the post-apocalyptic societies people point to as examples of socialism are actually post-scarcity societies, or at least societies in which scarcity has been resolved to some degree. When the necessities of life are readily available, the incentive to hoard resources and compete for basic survival diminishes. That creates the conditions for people to organize society around collective needs rather than individual accumulation.

In other words, what people identify as socialism in these fictional settings may actually be the result of a fundamental change in the material conditions of society.

The interesting question isn’t whether people are naturally selfish or naturally cooperative. It’s how the conditions people live under influence which behaviors become necessary for survival. When resources are scarce and institutions collapse, people may turn to violence and self-preservation. When their basic needs are reliably met, cooperation and collective ownership become much more practical.

Of course, neither outcome is inevitable. Scarcity doesn't automatically produce anarchy, and abundance doesn't automatically produce socialism. But the material conditions of a society have a tremendous influence on the political and economic systems that can realistically emerge.

you know anything can happen in fiction? you can plausible write a post-apocalyptic capitalist society as well.

Dune. Turns out feudalism was what made it out of the machine apocalypse and ensuing Butlerian Jihad. Feudalism with nukes.

So you're saying that communism only exists as a literary fantasy?

This reminds me of the book "Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When it's Gone".

Except that the range of human behaviors is largely determined by the system. A better system allows for better behaviors.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Trotsky the person was acceptable, I don't agree with him, but he was acceptable. Trotskyists... idk, they've really embarrassed themselves lately.

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.

!["The ultimate goal of our oppressors is to limit our imagination about what is possible without them, so that we might never imagine more for ourselves and the world we live in. We can only imagine what is in front of us because the power structure decrees that there are no alternatives other than what currently exists. We humans have lived the alternative for tens of thousands of years. We are capable of building a free society, a brighter future, because we already have ideas about what that might look like. We know what societies without bureaucracies are capable of."

— David Graeber, cultural anthropologist](https://slrpnk.net/...)

It is people who continue to claim that humanity must be authoritarian are the ones who have no idea of how humans work and are ignorant of history.

like it is barely manageable to maintain farming collectives which is relatively small scale but anything past that is bound to endless ugly mutations into something unfair and cruel.

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

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.

Enjoying and sharing in the results of your work.

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:

1. We reach a state of automated post-scarcity in which we don't need people to work;
2. People work for the sake of personal satisfaction or community recognition or some other non-monetary reward;
3. 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.

If there are billionaires it's not a communist society is it now?

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 don't send me a link.

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.

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.

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.

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?

What if they try to force others to submit to their dear leader aswell?

No. But, tell us, what part of the post are you struggling most with comprehending? The "antiauthoritarian" part?

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

Ah yes, the critique that's so bad it actually is what made me become interested in anarchism in the first place.

Authority is when steam engine

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

“Lol. Lmao even” and other cringy Reddit-speak should be banned on Lemmy