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Any hardcore leftists here?
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What do you think of popular figures like Noam Chomsky, Jason Hickel, Richard Wolff, David Graeber, and Bernie Sanders?
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Why does grotesque inequality persist? Will the lot of the downtrodden and the oppressed ever improve?
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What do you think of Anarchism?
Just looking to learn from the community members here. Thanks.
Humanity will never move to the next level of what we’re capable of until we ditch religion and capitalism. Take that how you will of my politics.
I'm not sure I agree.
I think it seems like the tendency towards leaning heavily on the moral framework that religion can provide is something that is prevalent in many people, regardless of wether a supernatural religion is particularly present where they live.
I live in a country without a state religion, and with a (mostly) rather private view of religion. Not very much religious signalling outside of obviously religious settings.
More and more people are acting exacly like religiously "intense" people, but using other frameworks to define their behaviours, morals, and actions.
It is as if they will just find other religions if the supernatural isn't there. Religion as in the framework of rules for behaviour, views on right and wrong, moral judgement of oneself and others depending on how much you are in line with the rules, rituals for different events in life both big and small.
Look at food. So many people today feel that food and eating is a "clean" or "bad" evaluation. Including sub-sets, just like with ordinary religion, with people following different views such as vegetarianism, veganism, keto and so many more. Some are more extreme, others less. But so many people seem to attach moral value to their food choices.
Look at politics. The easy example here is the American situation where many people attach meaning far beyond opinions on what to spend tax dollars on to the different parties. Both for themselves and others, and mixing moral judgement of both themselves and others in with this. Oh, you prefer X type of political choices? You are a bad person! Or oh, you prefer Y political choices? You are a good person!
When things like this influences who you treat with common decency and not, or feeling shame or a sense of having to make up for having made "bad" choices, or feeling better and emotionally cleaner, depending on what ruleset you lean on, I would say it is very close to actual religion.
If I have a piece of chocolate, I haven't made a morally bad choice. If I see an overweight person eat chocolate, that doesn't equate to me making assumptions about their overal morality, or worth as a human.
Yet many people feel a sense of shame if they eat "bad" food, or feel it is okay to act rudely towards someone that breaks the rules of "clean and healthy living".
These things directly influence how a lot of people feel about their own worth as a human, it influences how they value other people, they cast moral judgement on others and allow themselves to be meaner or ruder to those they see as breaking the rules.
Another example, smoking.
I grew up with practically every adult smoking. Through pregnancies, with babies in their arms, in cars, at the dinner table, everywhere.
Today, it is not uncommon for people where I live to say that CPS should investigate a mother if they see her smoking near her kids.
As if smoking equates to it being a given that you will also be a neglectful, abusive, harmful parent.
Despite the vast majority of us adults having grown up with smoking parents that still loved us, cared for us, helped us develop into normal human beings in every way.
While I am not inclined towards believing the supernatural myself, it does seem like there is a human spectrum of using these outside structures to guide our morals. So much so that without a formal religion, we will simply use other topics as our moral framework in exactly the same way that formal religion does.
I don't believe that secularity in and of itself leads to better societies. I believe there are other factors at play in societies that both value acting with politeness and respect for everyone, that also tends to influence overt displays of religion.
From a practical perspective, religion is a tool for mass manipulation. Sure, it could give constructive morals, but as has been proven for a few thousand years, very few manage to keep it purely constructive. It becomes combative, with people accepting a tenant that others are lesser in some way, justifying atrocities. Sure, you can argue that "religion is good if it didn't do that", but the problem is that it does that and can pivot to do that pretty quickly, so someone acting on personal agendas can manipulate the masses to something very counter productive very quickly.
I also would adamantly argue religion's absolutely not needed for people to be moral en masse and that's a fallacy that the religious tend to push out of an undue sense of "righteousness". In fact, it's easier to see "others" as not others, but one of us, when you aren't religious, IMO, and reason that working together and helping others has immediate and long term rewards that aren't reliant on some extra bonus reward when you die, and it especially means you shouldn't be willing to tolerate inequities because "suffering leads to rewards after life" or "that's the plan" just isn't viable anymore.
That being said, I don't believe you can extract religion from people. It's instinctive. It's emotional. People dedicate their lives to it even though there are obvious fallacies that people just take as "tests" or whatever to justify how it makes them feel. You would basically have to lobotomize society to make it go away. We just have to hope that religions keep on adapting enough to having a realistic world view and dropping the "we are superior" and "accept life being kind of sucky" aspects that are the root of most of the issues they cause.
Smoking is bad for others around you. Also the issue is religion in most cases just like conservatives must have an in group and out group. They need to have an enemy to rally against to stay relivent as they don't do good for the world.
Yeah, the smoking bit is a bit weird of a defense. Like, "I grew up in a world where eating lead paint chips was a thing, and we were fine!" "My father spent his whole life dedicated to one company, refused to let mom work and would have considered it "sissy" to say he loved me, but I turned out swell!" "Life expectancy has barely increased by 10 years over the last 60 years of progress at making society safer, so why care about people who want to endanger others like we used to!?"
They were making a point about human-to-human attitudes in interactions, not human-to-object value judgment. They said nothing about rolling back the trends of nonsmoking, just that people have gone from living in a world where everyone smoked to one where a parent who hasn't been able to quit is placed in the same category as parents who actively abuse their children.
First, I think it's extreme to say that many would put it at the same level as abusive parents.
Second, it IS in the same category. Our parents didn't really know better. These people do and don't care. They are knowingly putting their child at risk for their selfishness. They probably do love their children, sure, but a lot of physically and emotionally abusive parents would also "love their children, that's why they do it!"
If a modern parent is willing to accept the risk their child will get cancer or have other respiratory issues from their smoking, you have to wonder what other risks that parent will accept and if they are fit to parent.
Basically, our parents did it out of ignorance, not disregard for the child's safety.
Well, that's fine, but address it on that level then. They claimed it was happening.
It is not the same category, fullstop. In a world where people have children essentially by accident, and smoking cessation continues to be incredibly difficult, lumping together parents who take their cigarettes outside and tell their kids never to start with those who chainsmoke in their sealed car, backseat full, is at best fallacious.
There was not clarification by the OP, just the implication that those people calling CPS for smokers are bad cuz our parents were fine.
My argument is that modern science lets us know it is dangerous to chain smoke in a car with your children, so "calling CPS for people smoking near their children" is not necessarily invalid. I am in no way saying a person should lose their children when they make significant, effective effort to minimize risk. I'm not really even saying one way or the other that a parent should lose their children when they do put their kids at risk. I'm saying that parents who don't effectively minimize risk are disregarding the wellbeing of their children is in the same category, but not severity, as parents who are physically abusive. Of course, abuse can have severity as well, and certainly can be less severe than a parent who chain smokes in a car with an infant. A person could call CPS for a parent being "rough" with their child in ways that aren't really significant abuse, just like a person could call CPS for smoking that aren't putting their child at risk. In both cases, the person's judgement are wrong, but their reasoning wasn't necessarily wrong. There is valid reason to believe that smoking can harm children, which is not something our parents generally knew, but is truth.
And it's best practice to assume the most coherent interpretation in conversation. Maybe they did mean that kids should just put up with asthma and increased risk of lung disease, but a saner position is that they meant somewhere between "smoking outdoors in rough proximity to their children" and "smoking indoors but keeping things segmented and ventilated."
We have a world with much more danger in it than your position implies we should tolerate, if we take hints as vague as "does smoke" as an invitation for government inquisition. Raising your child in a city center almost certainly does permanent damage to their respiratory tract due to pollution, regardless of tobacco smoke. Drugs, prescribed or over the counter, are not tested very thoroughly, even for kids. Car accidents are everywhere. I find the black and white thinking here, that "smoking nearby children" is tantamount to other possible signals of abuse as strong as public corporal punishment, very politically fraught.
No, suggesting that getting CPS involved if you see a parent smoking around their child is very much happening where I live.
Including these suggestions being put in writing when such topics come up in the media.
Every time these topics come around, those voices become more and more visible.
Looking at the replies here show exactly the effect I was talking about.
It used to be a religiously based framework of wye.to cast judgement on other people's value as a human.
With less organised religion, lots of people take up other frameworks to morally judge people by.
The suggestion of involving CPS if someone smokes around their child is very much a suggestion that pops up more and more often where I live.
Both in casual talk if you see someone on the street, but also as actual suggestions out into writing whenever topics of this nature comes up in he media.
It is very much pivoted into a moral judgement on you as a worthy human. Even the replies here show it.
It ought to be a very clear difference between a child needing to be removed from an abusive and perpetually damaging home, and them having a smoker as a parent.
But for many people, there isn't.
This is exactly the kind of moral judgement I see people leaning on more and more as organized religion has become less prevalent.
Firstly it’s extreme to say X!
Secondly X is totally true!
It's extreme to say that most people consider physical abuse and smoking at the same severity.
It's true that smoking near a child is dangerous for the child and can be indicative of otherwise poor parenting.
Category vs severity. There's a difference.
Why is it indicative of poor parenting?
This is the exact shift towards using other issues as moral frameworks that I was talking about.
Because no, smoking does not indicate lower parenting abilities.
Virtue signalling is strong in humans, and without official religions, it tends to how up in other ways like this.
Second hand smoke has been proven to cause respiratory diseases, including cancer. I believe everyone knows this.
If a parent frequently exposes their child to significant second hand smoke, they are exposing their child to significant risk. It shows a disregard for the health and safety of their child. If a person does this, it's not unreasonable to be concerned they are risking the health and safety of their child in other ways.
Being concerned about a child frequently exposed to second hand smoke is reasonable. You imply that this isn't and is just anti-smoking virtue signaling. Do some people overreact? Sure. Do some children die of lung cancer due to second hand smoke? Sure.
A responsible parent would not risk it.
Thanks they completely missed the point on that one.
I didn't. It just overlooked the fact that the paradigm has changed. Our parents were ignorant. These parents are willfully putting their child at risk. They are being bad parents for unnecessarily risking the respiratory health of their children. It could be just a really bad example they were using to defend their point.
But I DO think it implies a weakness in the main point the person was trying to make, in that they were using practical examples with valid reasons to make their point that people being judgy using religion isn't necessarily bad because people are just judgy. It doesn't really hold that well though in that religions cause a judginess to an extreme that becomes more dangerous than anything else, and often is used to boost the dangerousness and validity of others, like nationalism.
It allows that judginess to be easily not based off of facts, unlike something like second hand smoke can cause cancer or other respiratory diseases. It allows judginess for bad reasons to masquerade as good reasons. "GOD SAYS WOMEN SHOULD NOT SHOW THEIR FACE!" so we can decapitate women who do. Well, ok, you can't argue with what their god told them, so let's accept it. That's the fundamental difference that the poster needs to ignore to say that it's anywhere near the same. You have to ignore WHY someone is being judgy about cigarettes and the severity of how far they're willing to go, to pretend it is anywhere near as severe that people are willing to involve CPS in the modern world as it is that people are willing to discount human life for not following their tenants. "God favors our nation and wants us to go to war against the enemies!" can't be countered by logic. The comparisons of the OP are just not close to the same scale.
I am serious when I say that saying you should get CPS involved when a parent smokes is a real thing that happens.
If you've actually experienced abuse o seen abused children, how it causes a total withering of their psyche, then you wouldn't equate smoking to a signal of dangerous parenting.
Yet people make all sorts of moralistic assumptions, some quite arrogant, towards even a hypothetical smoking parent.
I happen to have actual experience with abuse towards both myself, and towards children in my area around me.
Those parents do not smoke.
Be very careful with assuming that your own moralistic framework is a natural and sensible one.
Religious nut jobs feel exactly the same way about theirs.
Could you be a little more specific about where people are saying things about smoking and how serious they are? I can imagine a wide range of possibilities. People saying things, people reporting things, and authorities taking such reports seriously are different.
I've both heard it said by random passerbys on the street after seeing a parent smoking while walking with their child, and read the suggestion in opinion pieces sent to news papers. Blog posts as well. Usually from people in the teens to 30ish year old segment.
But it's the same with things like dietary opinions, political leanings, I've seen it for many other ideas as well.
It seems like it is a part of the human nature that a lot of people will have a tendency to want to lean on a blacks and white framework to make sweeping moral judgements.
Thanks. This sounds like “people say stuff,” which I’m not all that alarmed by, because people say a lot of things that aren’t practical. “A real thing that happens” sounded like it might be something else.
I think I agree, but I don't like your examples. I think a better example is science. (I know, please bear with me.)
Science was all the rage for a while on reddit. "For science!" was a very popular comment in any context. Many were arguing for more (or even only) scientists in governmental positions. There was no one who didn't like engineers and scientsts like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye. But the comments were full of fallacies anyway. I see similar behaviour in people I know personally all the time. They are intelligent and think of themselves as scientificially minded. They talk about logic and reason. They read scientific articles or even studies.
But they don't try to find the truth but to confirm what they already believe. They aren't looking for an answer to a question, they are looking for evidence for an answer they already know, and they will get emotional and resort to the same tactics as the religious people they make fun of, or even hate, if that doesn't work out neatly.
Religion (and capitalism) are not the cause of anything, they are symptoms. We have to acknowledge our flawed nature and find a way to deal with it. We need some kind of religion that satisfies our religious needs without doing any harm.
The benefit of, "For science!" Is that it's okay to be wrong. If a hypothesis is proven to be false, it's disregarded.
If a theory is proven to be incorrect because of new information, it is modified, or outright discarded.
There is surely nothing like that in religion. At least, not that I've seen. Because it works on faith, and when faced with an unknown it is chalked up to "Gods omnipotence"
Capitalism disregards anything that doesn't profit. Even if that thing keeps people healthy, happy, and able to participate in its mechanisms. If you can't participate, you are discarded.
Both are extremely flawed.
I'm not talking about actual science, I'm talking about the abuse of it. The scientific method is the best tool we have to figure out how the world works, but the things I've listed are not scientific at all. I'm talking about people who turn science into shallow memes.
Wikipedia defines Capitalism as "an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit." To abolish capitalism would mean everything you use to create value could not be privately owned. You would have to get special permits to own a car or a hammer because you could make deliveries or build stuff for profit.
I know what people mean when they want to "ditch capitalism". They want more socialist aspects in organising societies and less capitalistic aspects. (I'm in the same boat. If you ask me, personal wealth should be maxed at something like $100k.) But that's not what the top comment is saying, and I think it's important to say what mean if you are interested in a fruitful conversation. The top comment is popular in an echo chamber, but it doesn't really add anything.
This is a really odd take. Capitalism requires private property, but private property doesn't require capitalism. Just because you don't have capitalism, doesn't mean you can't also have some degree of private property. I can't imagine what you suggest here would be what any leftist worth their salt would actually want to occur, and so to imply such is a bit ridiculous, no?
More importantly, remember that there is a distinction between private and personal property. This difference isn't usually very important for capitalism, but many left-wing ideologies consider it a vital thing to spell out. Quoting Wikipedia's article on private property:1
It's safe to say that nobody will require you get a permit to own a hammer.
1. There's also this section of the article on personal property for further detail.
The definition I quoted specifically talks about "private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit". That's a subset of "private property". You are pulling a strawman by assuming that I'm talking about private property in general, which I'm obviously not.
A hammer is a means of production. Owning a hammer allows you to produce goods for your own profit. That's capitalism. If you have a different definition of capitalism, let's hear it. If you agree with Wikipedia's definition, let's use that as a basis of discussion.
I also said I'm fairly sure that I know what leftists (including myself) want. I just think that you should say what you want and not something completely over the top nobody wants. That is only useful to entrench people in their opinions and will never solve anything.
Admittedly, I'm fairly surprised by the definition of "personal property". I don't understand why movability is a criteria at all. You can move pretty much anything, even buildings. The only exception is land, but calling land "personal property" doesn't seem very useful or intuitive. To me it was pretty obvious that "personal property" is simply anything that can be owned by a single person. But now that I think about it, I have a hard time defining "private property". My best take is "any property that is or could be owned and controlled by a single person". That excludes government agencies, unions and non-profits that are controlled by a single person.
You stated that abolishing capitalism would mean that "everything you use to create value could not be privately owned," which assumes that private ownership ceases to exist without capitalism. That's false, and it's what I was addressing; an economic system can incorporate private property into itself without necessarily becoming capitalism.
As for the hammer, I think where we differ is how we define "profit." I do not include wages under that term, but maybe you do. To me, owning a hammer and using it to make goods for use value or to sell for material cost + wages does not qualify as making a profit, and so even a system that abolishes private ownership of the means of production would not bar such.
Fair on the point about leftists though — missed your last paragraph when writing that particular sentence. Out of curiosity, however, how do you define "leftist"? I ask because to me it means "anti-capitalist," but I suspect you feel differently.
P.S.: Apologies for the late reply. Takes me a while to get around to responding to stuff sometimes.
Huh. I guess I had a brain fart there. What I meant: To abolish capitalism would mean everything you use for profit could not be privately owned.
For example, a painting that's hanging in your kitchen doesn't create any profit. Your daughter's crayons that were used to create that painting don't create any profit. (Unless you pay her for it I guess.) These things can be owned even if capitalism is abolished.
A painting that's hanging in a museum that is visited by millions of paying tourists every year does create profit. All the tools in the artists studio are used to create profit for that artist. If capitalism is abolished, these things would have to be owned by some kind of non-profit organisation.
I'm really interested in your definition of capitalism. I think that word almost lost its actual meaning and is just something people use to signal where they stand politically. They either say they are against capitalism, meaning they are against unsustainable growth, exploitation of humans and resources, social inequality and all that jazz. Or they are saying they are for capitalism, meaning they very strongly oppose at least one of these views. But I don't know how that usage of the word "capitalism" would lead to a useful definition.
I know pretty much nothing about economics, but Wikipedia seems to say that profit is simply the difference between income and outcome. You buy a hammer, nails, lumber, etc, and once you've built and sold enough chairs that your income covers the initial cost, you can start to make a profit. What you do with your profit seems to be irrelevant.
But I agree that we desperately need more words to differentiate. There is stay-alive-profit, expand-your-business-profit and accumulate-wealth-profit.
In my book, "left" means you are against accumulate-wealth-profit and for strong civil rights. In recent decades, it also started to mean you are anti racist, pro LGBQT and pro environmentalism. (I don't think those two mix well, but that's a different discussion.)
I'll try to give you another example to hopefully explain myself better: In a society where everyone had to pay 100% income tax as long as they own more than $100,000, and every company that employs more than 100 people would be automatically owned by its employees, you would basically have a leftist utopia. No more powerfull rich people, and the means of production are in the hands of the workers. But capitalism would still exist. You could still run your local chair business make a profit (i.e. be a capitalist), you just couldn't expand it dramatically, buy all your competitors and build Chair Corp. International™ into a monopoly.
That's ok. I wish you hadn't replied at all so I wouldn't have spent an hour on a reply. :P
Too bad, here's another! I, too, spent an hour on mine. ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
When I refer to capitalism, I am referring primarily to the private ownership of the means of production. There are a few other things I might include softly in general usage but which I don't feel technically fall under the term (e.g. landlords), but that's what I'm mainly aiming at.
Here, private ownership means "owned by an individual or group for the purpose of profit, not use," while means of production translates to "the raw materials and tools used to create goods." Digging deeper, the definition of "profit" I'm working with is often described instead as "surplus value," which is additional money acquired through exchange after material cost and wages are accounted for. To me, then, creating a painting and selling it for more than the raw materials cost would not constitute capitalism, as for situations where no employer/employee relationshp is present, surplus value likewise does not exist; all money gained past the cost of materials qualifies as wages.
To be clear, as far as I'm aware, this is a particularly Marxist definition. While I don't consider myself particularly Marxist (I feel more comfortable with "democratic socialist" at time of writing), most leftists I know use these definitions and so I've come to use them too. They are, however, obviously not the only ones available.
Using the terms you've provided, however, stay-alive-profit roughly equates to wages, while accumulate-wealth-profit roughly equates to surplus value. Business expansion is in a bit more of a gray area. I'm okay with it so long as the business or organization in question is communally owned in some form (e.g. a co-op), but generally against it otherwise.
All in all, I suppose that our ideas of what a leftist is actually do align pretty well overall. I don't know if I'd call your example society a leftist utopia writ large – I know many leftists who take issue with the existence of a market at all – but insofar as the important metrics are concerned, your take on the term lines up with mine.
I don't think I've anything to add. I, too, feel like we essentially agree.
I also feel like I actually know much less than I thought, which will hopefully decrease the amount of bullshit in my future comments. Thank you for your input!
That's why the national health system exists and Canada and why Social Security and Medicare exist in the US right? Why can't these coexist together, and why do you feel the need to throw the proverbial baby out with the bath water?
Don't know.
Ask the conservatives, who continuously work to get rid of those programs.
I agree, but that just speaks to how we have to remain vigilant and resilient when facing adversity.
I talk about this quite a bit and what I see as, what could maybe be called, a human religious impulse. That seems to recreate itself in other areas even when it's removed from what we would consider more classical expressions of religion. I regularly feel like I see expressions of it in devoted atheist spaces, political spaces, etc.
I agree with your general point but really wish you'd pick better examples.
Secular people do not have religious texts condoning violence against others. They might have other texts and sources, but you can at least begin to argue against them. As someone who grew up somewhat religious in my childhood, arguments devolve into "god said so" more often than not, whereas arguing with secular people usually either involves opinions you can read and promptly debunk/find you agree with.
Someone telling you you should eat less meat has a basis for their claims, as is someone who tells you not to smoke next to your kids. Someone telling you not to be gay because it's a sin has no basis beyond a religious book.
So what about the many historic 'you must believe this' examples from Marxist regimes? They were most definitely secular but for example this happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session
Keep in mind I am absolutely not saying secular people don't lie and cannot make stuff up. What I am saying is that, in secular matters, you can disassemble arguments and claims and if something has no basis, you cannot handwave it as being divine.
My main point is that arguments have an end all with secular people. If a person runs out of justification for their claims they cannot turn to divine right as an excuse. With my country being a very tense standoff between secularism and religion, this has been my experience.
If you look at some of the discourse here, particularly how people actually do not find the idea of a smoking parent to be the same as abusive, you see how people absolutely will decide it is okay to condone certain actions on the basis of whatever moral framework they're working with.
I happen to have experience with prolonged abuse both as a victim, and have seen how CPS mishandles cases where children have been left with lifelong trauma because of the actions they do towards families. The lasting trauma from having CPS remove children for good families, and also from accepting the abuser's nice facade despite evidence of abuse and leaving the kids there.
To me, the people claiming smoking is actually indicative of real abuse is very scary.
The abusers Iknow of do not smoke.
With religious texts, you can at least point to something tangible as a starting point of discussion.
With the shift towards more intangible moral frameworks, it is harder to decide what is reasonable and not.
I definitely see a future where parents that feed their children meat every day will be seen as smokers are today for example. And that attitude will move towards demonising the people that we see as "the others".
I suppose I'll just have to strongly disagree, as I've not personally encountered any activists who treat smokers/meat eaters with nearly as much contempt as religious people treat "sinners" (outside of possibly a stray Twitter account with little to no actual impact on the world). To me, these are issues that might be a problem in the future, but next to the current suffering that religion promotes, I find it hard to equate the two.
I really don't want to minimize your experiences though. I can see how equating smoking to classical abuse can be insensitive, even if in my eyes that comes from well meaning ignorance than an intent to label innocent people as abusers. Most people, I feel, do not truly appreciate the weight of what family abuse can be and throw the phrase around; I may have even done so myself without realizing it.
I do want to ask, what makes you feel that religious texts are more tangible than modern moral frameworks? In my mind, it's the complete opposite.
Your last question first: The religious books are tangible. Actually so. A person that is fully commited won't change no matter the arguments, but at least the basis for their claims can be read by anyone at any time.
As for your first issue, in my country there isn't a lot of overt religiosity outside of a couple of areas of the country, and even there the young people of today are less extreme than in previous generations.
In places where organized religion is strong, like those areas here, those rulesets tend to govern who is seen as less worthy of basic human respect. But for most of the country we don't have that through religion. It seems to me that a lot of people will still be "that kind of person" - just with other frameworks. Particularly if there is a couple of generations or more since the organised religion lost its grip on people.
It seems like that kind of mindset is something deeply human, and that it exists on a scale. You can see it happening across all sorts of topics. It's almost like that teenage intensity of focus (horse girls anyone?) but it grows to encompass moral judgement over others for some people.
I think it's interesting in a depressing sort of way that it seems like something humanity cannot get away from.
Might I ask if organised religion is still going strong where you are? Because where I am, the idea of "sinners" in the actually religious sense is not something that is spoken of by the public.
To me it's all a matter of consequence. Someone judging another person through their moral framework gives them the ability to say "this is a person I do not want to be around" or, "this person is morally bad because of xyz", but it ends there. It is unlikely for you to be assaulted by a vegan activist.
My main argument is that even "those kinds of people" nowadays have more of a basis for their claims. Again, all of your examples have some basis in reality; meat is bad for the environment, smoking is bad for everyone around you, and some "political opinions" involve kidnapping trans children from families. There is substance behind the criticism, and it is far from the same thing as religion promoting monogamous, chaste relationships explicitly designed to preserve a hierarchy.
I live in Israel. Religion is probably one of the biggest issues in this country. Our government has recently been formed with far right religious actors who are very blatant with their intent to "reclaim" land they believe is theirs because the Tanakh says so. Organized religion isn't just going strong, it's threatening to devolve our country back to the middle ages culturally. I'm basically landlocked in Tel Aviv because if I - as a trans woman - walk openly in Jerusalem I will probably get harassed if not assaulted.
On that same vein, we have the exact kind of activists you describe. They are annoying, but they don't tend to harass people who are just going about their day. They protest, but the things they protest about have some moral merit beyond divine justification, such as the environment or anti-fascism. Between these two groups I find the choice to be fairly obvious, as even if our modern politics have their flaws, we are far, far less persecution-happy than the counterpart.
That's just it, that where I live the voices that use non-religious frameworks are becoming more and more forceful after a good couple of generations with possibly inherent religious bias, but not very overt.
In a country with a lot less daily violence, we still have CPS dealing with tens of thousands of reports that amount to nothing over issues that stem from people's inherent inclinations towards judging people as "sinners" for reasons that aren't religious, but amount to the same in my eyes. Personal opinions that still don't give anyone the right to condemn someone else as lesser beings on my opinion.
The violence isn't overt, but the tendency to want to punish people you consider "those kinds of people" (othering by another word, but sounds nicer) seems to be on the up and up.
It's as if there is a certain amount of people that will always try to pull their immediate surroundings towards a clear us/them society. Most people aren't too bothered either way, meaning they also don't do anything to counteract these tendencies when they're "not that bad".
No societal upheaval has suddenly sprung to life out of nowhere, though. It might be that the powers that be haven't seen/didn't think it mattered, but there is always something brewing over time until something sets it off.
Most of the time, these brewing issues might come and go as the years pass by. But some times they keep being an issue until it reaches that critical point.
Like the strikes in the US triggering unionisation over there. It's been a long time coming, then Covid happened, and then all the frustration of the working class started becoming too much to silently take anymore.
I think overt conflict tends to push aside problems that can be defined as luxury problems. That it's a luxury to only have to worry about "those things."
But after enough time in peacefulness, it's as if what was once consider inconsequential issues become more and more critical in some people's minds. As of society leans towards needing to fight over something in some people's minds?
It's really strange to see, but it does seem like we as a species don't know how to live peacefully for more than a few generations at a time or something.
Considering how some of us, like you, live in actual conflict and we are told about this all the time, you'd think that would calm down the minds of otherwise safe and calm people elsewhere in the world.
I don't know. I just see this tendency around me to make mountains out of molehills with actual harm being inflicted on some people's lives because of what I would call overzealous people, and I don't like it.
I used to be an antitheist. I still am, but I used to be, too.
I don't think religion is the key cause of most of humanity's problems - people are perfectly capable of being narrowminded dickheads who blindly follow orthodoxy, without religion.
Note that I am not saying religion is good. I'm saying it's merely one symptom of a larger problem.
It’s not just a matter of religious dickheads, I just don’t think we’ll fully reach our potential while still believing things we can’t explain currently with science meaning there’s a supernatural explanation.
I don't disagree with you are all.
But like yeah what is the "larger problem" then? Are human brains just naturally broken? What on earth.
RIP Mitch
I don't know. I was raised with a religion that seems to encourage leftist and humanist values. I think this all depends on the religion in question.
Also - capitalism is objectively very useful as a tool. It shouldn't be the only tool available to a society for organization. I think selectively applying capitalism is the best approach.
Do you mind elaborating further?
And please don't say "exploits natural human greed to bring progess."
Capitalism is a system that breeds greed because it rewards it. In absence of it, there would likely be a lot less of it around.
This seems like some kind of naturalistic fallacy either way. There is no neutral environment. I can imagine environments where some kinds of greedy behavior are discouraged more, but I expect situations where survival is at stake to be more chaotic. Competition for resources doesn’t just happen among humans.
I’m not sure that “level of greed” even makes sense in the abstract. Generosity within a group can be combined with hostility towards strangers. Businesses trying to make money often do a lot of free giveaways. We know there are mixed motives. When are there not mixed motives?
Definitely. But also I think if you have a system that would naturally limit greed you can safely deploy capitalism. I'm arguing that if you were to change society a rule that says "no capitalism" wouldn't make sense. As you make each change you should weigh the options.
Getting many different groups to all try to solve some mundane problem just for the hope of a large payout does get some problems solved. But there are also perverse incentives with capitalism - monopolization, enshittification, regulatory capture.
Capitalism is at its core about private enrichment via ownership. It is a system that rewards and encourages greed by rewarding selfish, greedy behavior. You can try to put stopgaps in place, but Capital will try to remove those limits as they become larger and larger impediments to profits.
Now, a free market economy certainly has its uses, but that's not a feature exclusive to capitalism. It can certainly fit within a socialist or communist framework.
Capitalism is a much more important thing to get rid of so let's start with that
Religion (at least the Christianity most of us Americans know best, especially Catholicism) is the school that teaches that heirarchy is good and desirable, and that faith is more important than seeing what is in front of your face. I'd love to see a study that investigates how effective propaganda is relative to religousity of the subject.
If Capital would be destroyed tomorrow, the new system propped up would be almost identical because all of the deeply engrained cultural propaganda isn't going to vanish overnight.
It's part of why a small revolution isn't going to work. It needs to have a large enough base of support that the actual bad parts of the old system don't get worked back in.
I like capitalism and I like liberalism
I work for a charitable organization that works in Healthcare directly for the homeless and impoverished in the US. I am an atheist, but after my decade existence helping these people I truly believe religion is necessary for some people to prevent them from killing, stealing, or otherwise hurting each other.
The scariest revelation of all.
The biggest problem is that most religions basically are capitalism: a lucky few get to reap the rewards and benefits of the rest of the group, while suffering none of the punishments. Plus they get to make up the rules as well.
So really. It’s just capitalism that’s the problem, because without that structure in place religions wouldn’t have the incentive(or at least ability) to be as terrible as they are. And the ones with the biggest reach and influence would die off, because they are based off of monetary value.
There's a lot to unpack here, but first let's define capitalism which is as follows: an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit.
Four religions make up the majority of belief in the world they are, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Religion itself relays the following: "practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relate humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements." Capitalism does not infer spiritual or transcendental elements. Furthermore, I don't think you lable can be used on all religions as widely as you applied it, and I think it comes from an emotional point of view.
Inequality went into overdrive when we got agriculture. In a hunter-gatherer society there must have been status differences but there just wasn't much surplus. The more a civilization grows the more resources there are to build a pyramid with a very wide base and a high top.
I find this book depressing but enlightening as to how politics works
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action
It is much for more feasible for a small group to organize and extract rents from the rest of society than it is for a large group to organize so from a purely rational and economic viewpoint the scenario that a "majority" oppresses a "minority" isn't really right, that is, 90% of the population can only make a small change in it's standard of living by immiserating 10% of the population (they just don't have enough to take.) On the other hand, 2% of the populating extracting rents from 98% is a business. If it looks like the first is going on the situation is really like
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-convince-the-lowest-white-man/
Today we focus on the Marxist definition of "worker" in terms of trading commodity (labor) for money to get a commodity (what you need to live) as opposed to the "capitalist" who trades money to get a commodity (productive assets) and in turn make more money. Many of us in the U.S. wear two hats in that some of our livelihood is (a) based on our future work and (b) some of it is based on pensions and related assets and if you watch CNBC they frequently invite you to consider your (b) interests as opposed to your (a) interests.
Up until Lenin, however, Marxists specifically thought factory workers were a historically special class in that their situation made them disciplined and organizable and with the power to physically seize the means of production. In that sense that we are post-industrial (working at home there is no territory to seize!) that time may have passed if it ever came at all.
In reality, Lenin and Stalin starved peasants to finance industrial development, trying to out capitalize the capitalists and it might even have been justifiable in that WWII was on the way and national survival depended on being able to fight. The New China went down basically the same path (with the "Great Leap Forward" being the worst mistake) but they were fortunate enough settle into a long period of peace soon after their revolution.
A major problem in theory if you live in the core is what to think about
Almost everyone in groups 1-4 feels like they'd have something to lose if the system collapses but also feels oppressed some of the time. There's also that people confuse the limitations of physics and biology for social factors. For instance, people get old and sick and die. People are always going to want more out of the health care system than it can deliver. It is dangerous to pump CO2 into the atmosphere and that would be the same for any society: it would be pretty hard to get where we are without a social pyramid able to coordinate large undertakings, but without that we wouldn't have the large population and high standard of living. Even though many working class people are feeling the heat of a world on "broil" right now, they also know that decarbonization will cost money, fear it will standard of living in the short term and rightfully reject the conclusion that it is all the fault of distant billionaires with their megayachts and private jets.
As for anarchism I used to be fan but then I read Foucault, I think his early works such as "Birth of the Clinic" and "Discipline and Punish" make a strong case for why some of our most problematic institutions would likely be re-invented if they were washed away.
If you had a million people on Earth they would not need so much social organization, they wouldn't be broiling the planet, they wouldn't be killing each other with cluster bombs, etc. We are facing problems though that do need technocratic management and will require that somebody be able to say "no" somewhere. The hope of anarchism is that people would take responsibility and be relieved from the ways that "powerlessness corrupts" but the way forward seems to be more organization, not less.
I think you hit the nail on the head on many points. It's all well and good to say we need to decarbonize the economy, but the sky is falling if gas prices actually go up enough to blunt demand. Very few people are actually willing to compromise their living standards for a nebulous thing like "climate change".
It's really hard for anyone to understand how their own small actions affect the collective, so effective organization is always necessary. Even in flat organizations, a shadow hierarchy still forms to organize the group.
That's where LTV comes into play. By revolving costs around the most precious resource, human labor, all kinds of 'reduce costs by hiding slaves' problems are reduced.
LTV has problems. I am a big fan of Chris Harman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Harman
who wrote about
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_to_fall
a lot, which is one of the most interesting ideas in classical Marxist economics because it is the force expected to destroy capitalism. In Harman’s telling of it the stock of capital is always growing because all the labor that is used turns into capital one way or another and never expires so you divide the labor embodied in all time as capital vs the labor we do today that ratio keeps increasing.
That’s not really a correct analysis because capital can be destroyed leaving no value (a machine rusts) and a conventional analysis of anything in the long term requires a ‘discount rate’ whether it be the economics of a hydroelectric dam or the quasi-religious speculations of the Yudkowsky cult.
That “tendency for the rate of profit to fall” is mirrored in capitalist economics by
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_factor_productivity
which is as equally elusive and controversial topic. When it comes down to it, though, it may be the most important thing when it comes to standards of living. From the viewpoint of a consumer I get the same “value” out of something if it takes 1 hour to produce or if it costs 10 hours to produce, the difference is in the first case I can afford it and in the second case I can’t. If it takes a huge amount of capital to reduce the labor input then I still can’t afford it because somebody has to pay for the capital.
Yes, very interesting. I think as with all abstractions a “tendency for the rate of profits to fall” needs to be looked at on a case by case basis, though. It’s obviously true that some markets evolve that way. Consider agriculture and clothing manufacturing. But it seems pretty debatable if you include new markets, which can be very profitable.
There’s a paradox we see with the tech industry, where productivity has improved enormously and costs dropped exponentially by many measures, and yet Apple has both enormous revenues and high profit margins.
Somehow we often end up paying similar prices for vastly more computing power. The Amiga 500 cost about $700 in 1987 and a Mac Mini can be had for $600 now. (Inflation adjusted, the Amiga’s cost would be $1,180 today, though.)
Microelectronics are a special case but I think the party is coming to an end.
In the 1980s home computers were built around the video system so you couldn’t just bump the clock rate 50% thus there was this period where technology hung in the air for a long time, Steve Jobs thought the Apple ][ would be obsolete by 1981 but he was so wrong.
The IBM PC decoupled the video system (at the cost of horrible video performance) but meant you could incrementally speed the CPU up so the glory days of Moore’s law were from 1985 to 2005 when making transistors smaller made the transistors faster, less power consuming and more importantly cheaper. “Faster” ended then but “cheaper” kept going until… Now. It is not accidental at all that NVIDIA’s 4000 series isn’t cheaper than the 3000 series. It used to be that “smaller” meant you got more transistors out of less material (and effort) but now the complexity and capital intensive nature of the process is outracing that trend.
It might continue for a bit and we may get a chip glut in fact because TSMC is being pressured to set up factories out of the range of the New China’s missiles.
See
https://archive.ph/2023.07.23-085448/https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/craftsman-america-wrench-stanley-black-decker-reshoring-factory-1125792f
for a great case study of a failed factory that tried to trade high tech capital for labor. It’s a move that can succeed but sometimes fails and was a familiar story in the 1980s when U.S. manufacturers were struggling to keep up with Japan.
I think this is because there's this confustion about what "value" is within the context of LTV. A TV is a TV after all...nobody disputes that. LTV is all about expense costs, not purchase price.
Suppose I can create a TV with 40 labor hours, or a TV with 30 labor hours, the difference made up with 10 hour's worth of automation. For the purposes of economic planning, that second TV is exponentially better, because it costs 10 less hours of human labor. That factory improvement means you can free up 1/4th of the TV production workers to make other stuff.
Keep in mind, this works its way all the way down to the raw materials. The value of the raw copper is the aggregate of the human labor to extract it. The capital part of the extraction only has value insofar it requires human labor to build, maintain, and replace.
By focusing on labor as the primary unit for currency, you create a standard which makes it harder to exploit cost of living differences (and frankly would normalize them).
The trouble is you can’t set a constant exchange rate between time and value. Even for material handling tasks around the barn there is a considerable difference between an efficient and an inefficient worker. Similarly a doctor’s time is worth more than a maid’s. Chris Harman introduces the idea of “labor power” as a fudge factor, in the case of the doctor it can be treated like capital but really people’s productivity is not just a factor of the people but also the environment they work in.
Thus I find it more useful to situate “value” in sense of what the consumer gets out of it, it could take more or less resources including labor to create identical products of services which create the same “value”.
It's not about the individual worker, its about the average.
"If I were to assign this task to the average worker I have, it would take 1 hour. Inefficient Joe might take 1.5, and efficient Jane might take 0.75.
And since work would be task-based, Jane could have a 30ish hour workweek, or get more done and paid more, while the average is 40. Joe could be content with lower wages or find a job he's better suited for.
In the modern monetary age, this theoretically translates to different wages. But that also has billions of hidden biases. "Same pay for same work" is a lot easier to achieve when work is clearly defined as "labor hours for the median staffer." Joe and Jane end up working vastly different hours or earning vastly different sums, but its done in a more objective way.
This is incidentally why workers owning the factory is an important part. Having owner/managers being able to dictate the standard at their own whims results in poverty eages, while the workers being able to collectively decide will result in fairer wages.
Yep, I'm running a free café out of my garage to support food equity and dodge bureaucracy (donations only!)
I recently posted on a forum I frequent about how dope it is that Noam Chomsky is still alive, and someone responded with some fearmongering hearsay about him being a genocide denier? I did some research and turns out that it's totally unfounded as a statement. As far as your questions go:
I think the people you mention are important voices that need to be heard. Are they the be-all end-all of politics? Absolutely not, but when everyone is focused on red/blue politics it becomes really important to recognize that black (i.e. no state) is also an option. I'm reading Debt right now and I find it fascinating.
Grotesque inequality exists because people accept subservient roles without questioning the powers that have subjugated them. There will always be people who accept these roles and people that put others there, but we can definitely stand to reduce those numbers by helping to emancipate our neighbors and friends from mental slavery.
Anarchism is a key ingredient, but you can't cook an entire meal with it. State is a how we scale beyond tribal communities, and scale is how we afford the specialization and organization to do stuff like build the computers and networks we're communicating with. If the state stops being "by the people, for the people" (as it has in North American culture), though, then I believe we need to take a step back and regroup.
I'm a leftie but the issue with Chomsky is that for all his contributions to pointing out imperialist behavior of United States, he lost sight of bigger evils. His takes on russian invasion of Ukraine cast a shadow on his legacy. When asked about his stance on russian war crimes or genocide he'll change subject to US every time, which Ukrainians probably don't appreciate. They probably don't appreciate his calls to roll over and die.
And yes, he's a genocide denier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial
In Manufacturing Consent (1988), Chomsky and Herman discussed the media reaction to their earlier writings on the Cambodian genocide. They summarised the position which they had taken in After the Cataclysm (1979):
Doesn't seem like denial to me. As far as the situation in Ukraine, I think it's fair that people exist who choose to focus on the nuance of situations that are otherwise flooded with one-sided political rhetoric. NATO is not the "good guy".
It's nice that Chomsky is very concerned about nuance and can slightly course correct years later. I think that addressing genocide as it happens is key and I'm judging Chomsky on outcome rather than intent.
Russian invasion of Ukraine is not about NATO. Again, judging by outcome, Putin caused NATO to expand right up to Finland. It's a regime preservation war sprinkled with a bit of delusion of grandiosity. Everything else in their rhetoric is a firehose of falsehood, hoping to mud the waters as everything happens and hoping that some lies will stick with people that hate "collective west" to the point they can be no longer objective. Chomsky is a prime example of falling for this, openly advocating for regime order of magnitude worse, with immediate effect to human lives.
I'm sorry but this kind of takes make me quite angry. If it wasn't for NATO it would be my country being attacked by Russia, my people killed, raped, enslaved, again. So please, consider more than academic context, or any context because this:
is bad taste by someone who completely lost his marbles. No, NATO is not a modern day nazi Germany. But it's just a cherry on top of yet another article denying neighbors of Russia sovereignty and the right for self determination.
The saddest part is that previous genocide denial by Chomsky could be understood as someone misguided hoping that autocratic/totalitarian regimes posing as socialist couldn't be that bad. Now he's taking side of an openly capitalist fascist regime simply because it's opposed to US.
It seems despite all his knowledge and intelligence, Chomsky has really lost the forest for the trees and perhaps as you said his marbles which is a shame.
You’re echoing a sentiment I’ve felt for a long time but always struggle putting to words.
As an adult I’ve always felt a deep-seated recalcitrance towards the various authoritarian structures that dictate my life and shape the world for selfish interests; I feel as though they subjugate a core part of my nature, and I viscerally despise it.
On the other hand, anarchism leaves me too many unanswered questions, and I believe in a robust social contract with the means to enforce it. I feel cognitive dissonance from my inability to unify my very progressive political views with these anarchistic musings.
Do you have any readings you’d recommend on the subject? Admittedly my understanding of anarchism is superficial, so maybe that’s a good place to start.
It's tough to say where it came from, my views have been informed by a fairly large breadth of subject matter - I place a lot of value in the spiritual world, meaning that I see the material world as full of traps that keep us from pushing towards our full potential as a species. IMO we need spiritual teachings in order to teach people the values of healthy social contracts without relying on fear to keep them in line, which is how authoritarianism operates.
As for introduction to "how can we live differently?", I think Mutual Aid by Dean Spade did a lot for me. I read the book in physical form but this is far easier to send to you!
On the American spectrum I would be considered a hard-core radical leftist, but anywhere else in the world I would be considered a little left of center. As a tell, I haven't voted for a Democratic president since Clinton's betrayal because I don't vote for Republicans no matter what they call themselves ("I used to say Clinton was the best Republican president of the modern era, then Obama came along..." is a favorite saying of mine). Both my wife and I were staunch Bernie supporters, even though it was clear he didn't have the will to fight those who would (and did) obviously stab him in the back - IMHO he was the last hope for the US to peacefully halt, or even reverse, its obvious decline into christo-fascism that's been happening for the last 40+ years. It won't happen now w/o a lot of misery and bloodshed, mostly experienced by the most vulnerable.
I know some actual radical leftists, and like many marginalized groups their main concerns are only nominally about solidarity, instead focusing on the circular firing squad of demonizing and excluding anyone who doesn't fit their narrow model of ideological practice, effectively alienating many who could and would be their allies (they deny this vehemently when pointed out, but I've seen it happen too many times to count). There are several reasons for this, but I'll just highlight a natural need to exercise even petty power in a society that excludes them from any other power at all, and the effectiveness of fascist propaganda in poisoning their strategies.
In this, as in many things, Chomsky is right: propaganda works, and the US is the most propagandized people on the planet with giant media corporations spending $millions/day to convince people to believe them and not their own lying eyes. Chomsky was instrumental in opening my eyes in the late 90s/early 00s; I don't read much leftist literature these days b/c frankly it all seems so repetitive, slightly different lyrics but playing the same tune. I have read Graeber and found him enlightening (there have been suggestions that he was playing a little fast and loose w/ history, but w/o looking into the details I find it hard to differentiates those accusations from the standard smear tactics always used to demonize and marginalize the left), and recognize Pickety et al are making important advancements, but I find it difficult to dive into the weeds of those works b/c frankly to me the details don't matter that much, I'm already convinced, wake me when we're about to do something.
You point out the infighting in leftist circles and I could not agree more.
While right wing parties also have infighting they do also constantly find common ground and compromise with each other to at least get some of their politics through.
Speaking from a Danish perspective here by the way.
The left has had so much infighting the last decade or more that the social democrats, the historically largest left-wing party, went into government with a new self-proclaimed centrists (leadership by a former neoliberal prime minister) and the historically largest right-wing party. Quite a few political commentators or experts have been saying that they are no longer a left-wing party and yeah, they keep supporting classic right-wing policies, such as cutting welfare and even supporting extremist foreign policies like sending immigrants to a detention center in Rwanda.
So what's left of the actual left? A so-called socialist people's party that called themselves "centre-left" during the last election who got 8% of the vote, an actual socialist/communist party that got 5% of the vote and a green party that got 3% of the vote. The social democrats got 27%. So now that they've done such an insane rightwards turn, I just say good night and good luck to us, because the left is more or less dead without them...
We will not see actual leftist policies for many years, is my armchair guess. And we certainly will not see the climate catastrophe addressed.
The right does fight with themselves, too. The big difference is that conservativism is inherantly balanced towards the status quo so their fights are relatively inconsequential.
Things are much harder for the left. Imagine two leftists in Nambia who have to come to a consensus of where to lead their party. Both of them want to outlaw child labor. But one of them is queer and the other is against the idea of queer rights. Same-sex relationships are still against the law in Nambia. It's not enough for them to just agree to drop the issue of queer rights and focus on outlawing child labor because for one of the two people their life is literally in danger because of the persecution queer people suffer in their country.
Now I know that a lot of the leftist infighting is not about existential issues. But to be fair, the Nambia example wasn't exactly existential either; the laws against same-sex relationships are largely uninforced as it is, and striking the law from the record won't stop the people who would queer bash or otherwise hate queer people. In any example, the people feel it's existential. Leftists who didn't vote for Biden didn't do it because they thought he was a bad person, they did it because they see the pain being caused by the issues they care for not being addressed. They have become disillusioned to the idea that someone is going to do something, so they jump to a different ship that is at least willing to give them some lip service.
At one point car metaphors were en vogue and there were sayings like "you can't go forward in R". The way I see it, the country is a car that is on a very steep hill. It takes tremendous effort to just keep the car in one place, let alone move it forward. And everyone has a different idea of where "forward" is.
Sounds like the social democrats are following the US Democrats and UK Labour playbook all right. Next you can expect them to start beating the fear-monger drum complaining "If you don't vote for us then the bad guys win!1!" (if they haven't started that already, and I know the parliamentary system has different dynamics than the US 1.5-party system so the details will probably work differently) in an effort to bully people into voting for them even though they don't represent their interests.
Chris Hedges says something similar in his writings.
True - I was also a fan of Hedges and that's probably where I picked up the term. He's still great, and makes connections you rarely see anywhere else - his writings on the US' sacrifice zones are instrumental.
He wrote an entire book on it: American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.
My sister has once described me as a hippie, so I guess I count.
I don't care about any of those people. It's good that they promote ideas that help people, but it's more important to follow the ideas than the people. To be honest three of them aren't even memorable enough for me to recall who they are.
I agree with @Zenen in regards to inequality, but I would say it's a bit more broad; I think that most people are too happy to accept the status quo even when it's clear that they are drawing the short straw. I don't blame them for it, though; fighting back is hard.
Beyond that, a bigger problem is that our government has allowed corporations to seize too much power, so nowadays billionaires seem to have more power than even our politicians, who are already bought by the billionaire class anyways. Things which were once democratic have instead become aristocratic. We've seen companies grow absolutely huge because they can basically disregard the law in quite a few different ways now. It feels like Wayland-Yutani is just around the corner.
There is a lot about anarchism that I haven't read about, but I'm not too enthusiastic about the idea as a whole. It seems to require too much faith in humanity, and I've lost that years ago. We're living in a world where half the population seems content to disregard facts and live in a fantasy world.
I grew up in a pretty conservative area, and I was told again and again, mostly by my teachers, that "liberalism" is for young people, and I would become more conservative as I got older and wiser. In fact, I am further left than I was when I was younger.
These people speak truth to power. In a world of fascist propaganda, some people would call these people extremists, but they are not. They are pragmatists, and the truth of their arguments is unassailable.
People are afraid to confront the truth or think about things that make them uncomfortable. So people just dehumanize poor people and homeless people, instead of recognizing that it could be them and taking steps to make things better (ie, forming a coalition to house people and provide them with goods and services).
Anarchism is misunderstood. Every man for himself is libertarianism. Anarchism is about helping each other out, and it is needed, because we can't just wait for the oppressors to grow a conscience.
How does any formulation of anarchism effectively deal with national defense? Take Ukraine for instance -- if Ukraine were an anarchy, they would now just be Russia.
George Orwell wrote Homage to Catalonia, and described how an anarchist group had an effective military. In short, instead of relying on dogmatic subservience, it required mutual respect and a feeling of unity. People allied and fought the fascists together.
There's more to it, but I just suggest looking up some passages. I'm currently traveling and away from my computer, otherwise I'd grab the quotes from my running list of book quotes.
That doesn't sound like it would be effective. How do you produce weapons? You could mount a resistance, but how do you coordinate an entire campaign? Does everybody just do their own thing and hope that respect can beat a well-coordinated strategy with artillery and air support?
It is probably worth pointing out that the anarchists lost to the fascists in Spain.
It is probably also worth pointing out that they lost to the fascists in Spain only after the Stalinists absorbed and crushed them politically. Typically anarchist losses in these wars stem from naive trust that statist communists wont align themselves with fascists.
This is an excellent point and what informed much of George Orwell's novel Animal Farm as he was deeply involved in the Spanish Civil War and saw the destruction and subsumption of the socialist faction first hand by "allies".
So there's a lot of different flavors of Anarchism, some/many of which would be able to produce weapons:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutualism_(economic_theory)
Anarchism isn't necessarily just MAD MAX WORLD WOOOO, but "unjust hierarchy sucks." Emphasis on the "unjust". It makes sense for an expert in a specific subject to teach others. It doesn't make sense for a King to hold wealth and power because of who his father was.
I say all that because anarchy doesn't necessarily mean that there isn't coordination among communities. Mutual voluntary cooperation is the name of the game. Different towns/communities can work out systems of trade for supplies, and if folks are working toward the same goal, and have some idea of the overall strategy, people can and will work together.
Secrecy in times of war is a challenge, of course. Loose lips sink ships and all that. So of course: this is optimistic/idealistic. Likewise, I know that a death march by fascist nutcases forced to fight or be executed by their own men is probably far more effective. Likewise, factory slave labor at the barrel of a gun will certainly outproduce voluntary worker co-ops. They'll make more money, too. I just tend to think that voluntary cooperation is better than coercion. I'm not a grenade throwing radical, but I do think that humanity would be better off if we organized ourselves more like an anarchist commune than most political/economic systems we have today. That's a wild over-generalization on my part, of course. Plenty to discuss there, and I'm about to fill up the screen with some quotes about Orwell's time when he joined some radicals to throw grenades at fascists, so I'll leave my thoughts there for now.
Here's a couple parts of the passages in Homage to Catalonia, where he talks about how it worked. Not exactly anarchist, but it gets at the idea of how a classless/less hierarchical society would work in the time of war. Here's the whole book: https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0201111h.html
I agree it would be ideal for people to organize in that type of way, but it's just completely unrealistic because someone will always seek to take advantage of it and it would lead to tons of decisions by committee. Sure, mutual respect is great, but what happens when multiple people think they have the better experience/mind for those things? You need someone appointed to be a leader for life or death situations. Human factors engineering finds that time and time again. Simple committees and freedom to question orders in war leads to plane crashes and massacred squads.
There were military leaders in the example I quoted! Folks were given that power, because of exactly those reasons: and in the book folks did take orders without question, once that trust was established. He explains how over time, the squads were doing quite well. Folks would volunteer for dangerous missions, etc.
Again though, I'm not a war expert, and as I mentioned in my previous comment: I'm not going to pretend like a less hierarchical military would be superior to the more rigid forms we're used to. Nor am I even necessarily an Anarchist, precisely because of the doubts you have about it. I'm not entirely sure we as humans are ready for it, especially not unless we're all "for" it.
Likewise, I agree that in general on the Left side of the political spectrum, infighting is pretty common between various ideological factions. Orwell even talked in Homage to Catalonia about folks getting into arguments about different flavors or socialism/communism/anarchism that sounds a lot like petty online discussions today.
What I always think about, though, is that many folks deep in the middle ages in Europe would scoff at the idea of non-nobles running things, right? It would never work if a leader of a political State was not ordained by God, and not from a long line of nobility. The idea of democracy would be bizarre to many, in the same way that an even less hierarchical society is to us now. We can agree it would be ideal, but worry about usurpers in the same what that folks hundreds of years ago would find comfort in lines of succession, I suppose. My hope is that the incredible communication technologies will help us get there, since large-scale coordination between smaller groups is easier than ever. Mixed bag on that one though, given the general state of things on the internet at any given time.
A nation cannot be "an anarchy". If Ukraine were territory largely occupied by anarchist communities, Russia would stroll right in and say "you are now Russia" and the anarchists would hopefully be like 'whatever man' and continue living the same way as they were before.
You can see how this is not realistic, right?
whatever man
Joking aside, I know it seems unrealistic. a lot of things do until they happen, though. See @Arshan's response below, these sorts of communities DO exist and they resist assimilation.
Resisting assimilation is all cool with me, but effectively they're ruled (or worse, marginalised) by some nation anyway no matter how deep they plug their ears.
So do they just hope that the ol' "they can't arrest all of us!" tactic works this time?
Except that Arshan’s response consists of a failed society, which in its failure directly supports my position, and another that doesn’t appear to be anarchy in any sense that I am familiar with.
That works until it they state you owe them taxes. This sort of tribalism is very popular in the Arabian states and a key reason why Afghanistan has resisted imperialist rule. But it's also come at the cost of the various tribes not being able to say jack about whomever the current ruling entity is, what they do, and what they take.
Or until they kidnap all your children, deport them thousands of kilometres away and deliberately get rid of evidence of where they came from.
Coincidentally, Ukraine had one of the most successful anarchist societies in recent history, the Makhnovschina. They did well enough militarily that the Bolsheviks had to ally with them. Eventually the alliance was no longer necessary for the Reds, so they massacred their "allies". For a current example, Rojava played a massive role in defeating ISIS, and is explicitly organized around libertarian-socialist theory. So yes, anarchist societies can, have and do defend themselves successfully from nation-states.
I’m not sure how an entity that existed for 4 years and was brutally destroyed makes for an example of how anarchy can successfully defend itself.
As for Rojava, according to that article it doesn’t sound like anarchy in any way?
It existed for 4 years in a near constant state of war, often fighting both the Reds and the Whites. Many nations have fallen quicker and more decisively, and it doesn't make it impossible for them to have won. My point on the betrayal was also that it wasn't defeated in a direct military sense. I personally consider it evidence that the Bolsheviks considered them a real threat, but that is an assumption. The question is whether an anarchist society has a real shot at defeating an invading force, which I believe is true.
As to Rojava, no its not "true" anarchy, but it is the closest society currently to it that I am aware of. The reason I included it was that its military is run under fairly democratic means and that it is officially inspired by writings from the anarchist Murray Bookchin. I'm not 100% sold on it either. It seems to have a real cult of personality around their leader, and I am not sure how deeply held anarchist values are by the average person. But I am armchairing people who fought for lives, so I digress. I am curious what your definition of anarchy is.
You're describing two guerilla resistances. The question is how to repel an invasion, not how to make life hell for the people who have conquered you.
I think the same way. Basically everything you said. I'd include animals in that too with nature conservation and what not.
I'm atheistic and depending on how bad of a mood I'm in, antitheist. But that's also because of my own religious journey. I've come to realize that some people do fare better with the idea of a higher power, and I'm okay with that as long as they don't dictate how anyone else lives. But I know that that's quite complicated, and based on some religious rules, that's not quite possible. So that's why I mention a general higher power and not specific religions, because there are religions out there that are incompatible with the idea of letting other people live the way they want.
I guess I'd say I'm a post leftist?
We could all agree right here and now to give to provide everyone with the needs they want and need. We don't, because the institutions we've developed to ensure our survival do not allow us to do so, a result of the powerful making a human calculation that it's easier for them to simply not. To overcome this, we need to overcome human nature's apathy towards one another, while working to purge the existing structures of cruelty and inequity. Leftism can't even slap a band aid on the solution because they start worrying about property rights, and whether it's fair and equitable to stop a factory from dumping waste.... it's just pathetic.
Gross inequality exists because the social contract is always balanced in favor of the existing powerful. Power is a corrupting, and addictive force that allows one to reshape the reality of the world around oneself. Thus, it becomes the driving force of civilization, the balance and wielding of power. Inequality exists because being powerful is addictive, blunts empathy, and gives one the opportunity to simply dismiss any ideas of how unequal it actually is.
Anarchism is a fever dream that is wholly inconsistent with the human condition, and contemporary civilization. It's all around an intellectually poor idea. Besides all of the currently existing issues about self-governance being impossible, and it just devolving back into a state.... like even anecdotally it's just impossible.
Even if we stripped away capitalism, there's simply too many things that happen in conjunction with one another to run a civilization of any size. Like, in an anarchical society, who is making, and programming computers? Even if we took away mechanical computation, who ends up making and distributing paper? I have never heard an Anarchist ever answer those questions. Who maintains the roads, and keeps highway bandits off of them? Who watches the watchman? Who deals with the sewers? It just... can't work and maintain any level of civilization.
Hi, anarchist here! Let me make a small attempt.
First of all: I don't have definitive answers for you. Not having The Truth™ is kind of part of Anarchism imho. I'm also mostly going to focus on your last paragraph, as the others would necessitate me to write a small essay and I'm rather strapped for time.
So, it's interesting that the first thing you mention is computers and programming, since a LOT of what is happening in that space comes from the kind of anarchist collective action that you say is incapable of producing that. Open source coding, hacker culture, maker spaces and fablabs are often decentralised, concensus-based and non-hierarchical. They are a wonderful example of how people, even when working long hours in a capitalist system, still fine the will to devote hours of their days or weeks to projects without any profit motive, without being forced to, simply because... They want to.
Of course, this is a different thing entirely when it comes to less 'fun' activities, such as producing paper, or better yet, maintaining a sewer system. Here I think you may fall into a misunderstanding of anarchism. (One which many anarchists share with you, unfortunately.) Anarchism does not mean the absence of structure or even of government. It is the rethinking of power structures. Imagine the sewer example in an anarchist community. I can imagine the group appointing a committee to deal with such issues. These people could come up with guidelines, plans, and ask for the labour of their community. Whether they receive it or not is entirely dependent on the need of the community, the goodwill, etc. I certainly would not mind spending my time creating helping build something that I would the use on a daily basis. Conversely, I'm also certain that, sometimes, you'll end up with a horrible waste and hygiene problem. (Which also occurs under current systems, I might add)
Of course, the above example is naive. I agree with that. On the other side, having the defeatist and cynical outlook that says that the only way for us humans to lift a finger in cleaning up the literal shit around our place of living is if someone threatens us (indirectly) with violence is... Equally delusional.
We are social beings, with a drive to improve, help and share, just as much as to destroy, control and abuse. The question of anarchism is not about implementing a specific system. It's about which side of humanity you want to nurture, to fight for.
Lastly, I'd like to point out that there are actually quite a few examples of societies that consciously rejected power structures and did, in fact, achieve the kind of things you consider impossible. I suggest taking a look at the excellent book 'The Dawn of Everything' for both examples and an answer to why we do not consider these examples in our view of history.
I think such societies can be quite interesting but they often ignore their foundations. Free software depends on hardware. Chips come from fabs. Copper comes from mines. Even if you go off the grid, solar panels aren’t manufactured by collectives. It all depends on global trade.
That doesn’t make anarchism uninteresting, but it means it’s in a bounded context. Claims of independence should be treated skeptically.
Recognizing and accepting our dependencies might make them less of a problem, though. Maybe an anarchistic society doesn’t need an army because it’s happening within an internally peaceful country that largely leaves it alone to do its own thing?
I don't think they ignore it. (At least, what I'm reading does not) People just kind of assume anarchists ignore it because it's hard, in our current capitalist world, to conceive of something like mines being operated in anything other then a strict hierarchical way. There is no reason why something like that can not be run by a collective.
Of course, that would mean that it would be way harder to exploit those miners, so prices for all that would go way up. But that's simply reflecting their real value, a good thing in my opinion.
By "ignore" I mean something like "make big claims for anarchy despite not having good answers for some glaring difficulties." I haven't read the literature, just seen the claims posted online occasionally.
This isn't just anarchists. There are similar problems with any kind of alternative state that doesn't participate in global trade. (And of a Mars colony as well.)
But if there are people who have taken these challenges seriously, that would be interesting reading.
I'm definitely not a hardcore leftist. I usually describe myself as "progressive". But believing, as I do, that all human beings deserve respect, justice, equity, and a minimum of misery (modulo the paradox of tolerance, of course) puts me to the left of an awful lot of people on an awful lot of issues, especially social ones. I'm actually pretty agnostic on economic policy (it being, in my philosophy, merely a means to the end of justice and equity society-wide).
I think the fact that all five of these suggested icons of leftism are men is extremely interesting.
I think Chomsky was an excellent linguist and a mediocre sociologist who has over the past decade or two taken a deeply unfortunate slow slide into tanky-ism, which completely negates his credibility. (Pro-tip: if you support authoritarian states, I'm not very interested in what you have to say. Double-pro-tip: The USSR and post-USSR Russia have always been authoritarian.)
I think Sanders is a mediocre progressive whose actual, practical contributions to progressivism are minimal at best, and who has a deeply unfortunate (but unsurprising—Vermont is the second whitest state in the US) blind spot to the incredible influence of race on American society (which, incidentally, absolutely precludes him from election to the presidency on a Democratic ticket, as we've seen repeatedly).
The other three, I've never heard of (probably because I don't particularly identify as "hardcore leftist" and don't follow leftist media or literature). This suggests that they're probably not having a large practical impact on the world, though of course I could easily simply be ignorant of their achievements.
I'm going to split up and rearrange the other two questions a little, because my answers to some parts relate to each other:
I think self-organizing, non-hierarchical communities of human beings (which is what I take anarchism to mean; I'm almost certain this definition is not universally acceptable to all self-described anarchists, but I believe it to be acceptable to most) are psycho-socially incapable of growing to more than a few hundred people. With groups much larger than this, too many people cannot know each other (see Dunbar's number), and the community can't self-organize because interactions between strangers are far less efficient than between acquaintances.
And it's an unfortunate fact of reality that, because hierarchical communities can be organized at much, much larger scales (I posit there's not been any demonstrated upper limit), any such anarchistic communities will simply be absorbed or destroyed by their larger, more powerful hierarchical neighbors.
Consequently: grotesque inequality persists because hierarchies are an extremely effective means of organizing incredibly large groups of people. Aside from the tautological hierarchy present in a hierarchical society (which I think needn't be nearly as dramatic, cruel, or oppressive—"grotesque", as you put it—as it in practice is in extant societies), the simple size of the society makes it very easy to ignore the plight of people far from you. Who wants to worry about some people you'll never meet? I do (as I assume most of the people answering this question also do), and let me tell you, it sucks, lol. There's a lot of misery out there, and being conscious of it without suffering empathy fatigue is a constant challenge. Ignoring it, while obviously wrong, is always going to be tempting.
Well, there's good news here, I think: it pretty clearly has. Not to understate the gravity of the misery and suffering in the world right now, but there are a lot fewer slaves and serfs as a percentage of the global population now than at pretty much any point in history.
Of course, living through slow, halting progress is incredibly frustrating. Believe me, I feel it! But it's absolutely essential to keep a realistic view of the situation, because this progress is not guaranteed (it's the result of incredible and constant efforts by activists and idealists), and losing hope can doom it.
Rebecca Solnit argues this point far more compellingly than I ever could in Hope in the Dark, which I highly recommend.
I would not consider myself a "hardcore leftist" but I, like many others here, would be considered that by the current Right in the US and other locations that have been brainwashed by the likes of Murdoch and Putin trolls, among others.
I grew up pretty centrist, voted for some Republicans in the past, but will probably never again.
Anyway, as for your points, #3 like every ism, wouldn't work well in its pure form. Whether its Social, Capital, Commune, or Anarchy, the concepts always take for granted why #2 still exists: apathy vs greed.
Basically, there's an assumption people will look out for their own best interests or will accept when others do. That just doesn't happen on a large enough scale to overcome how greed can lead some to manipulate perception into having people actively working against their own best interests.
People will be too apathetic to really investigate issues. They rely on trust chains to get condensed information. Greed will infiltrate those trust chains and be willing to package the information in a way that's more appealing to people than facts are, not surprisingly, often using greed to do so.
People are sourced from animals. We have all those built in instincts. We're different in that we have a higher functioning brain that can out reason anything else on the planet. BUT, people often don't do that. They go on "gut instinct" of not trusting or out right fearing "others" and wanting to protect their own at the cost of those "others". This makes manipulation easy either through intimidation or misinformation.
So, you're forced to use the higher reasoning arguments to fight against apathy and instinct, and convince a large enough mass of people that that is the right thing to do. Incremental progress has been made, but it's not easy, and it's easy to have setbacks, like European immigration stoking fear and greed and chipping away at the progress the EU has made over the last 10-20 years.
And time's running out, really. IMO, with AI and robotics, we're heading towards a future where 8 billion people can't really be productive in a way that a modern society requires them to be, and our overly-Capitalistic societies are fragile to "consumer confidence" and quarterly profits and could easily spiral in a way that's going to cause vastly more wide-spread issues. This could boost people into being more socialistic and allowing people to live good, modern lives while not "giving back" much. It could also cause insane levels of poverty and the rich building terminator-like robots to protect their assets from the hordes.
I used to have confidence that "we'd get there". I also believed that post-apocalyptic stories where society breaks down ala Mad Max was just not realistic because people know cooperation and community leads to better results. I no longer believe the latter. It's been proven again lately that a large percent would forsake others for their short term benefit, including being violent about it, and all those apocalyptic shows/movies/books are feeling pretty realistic. I also similarly don't have confidence that the upcoming chaos won't lead to a world settling into a "comfortable" dystopian have-lots and have-nones with the vast majority in the latter. Maybe we'll still "get there", but we may have to go through some Dark Ages first, and we're more than capable of wiping ourselves out at this point.
That "best interests" assumption is a really big problem, IMHO. I've seen so many cases where people actively work against things that they would benefit for. A common example I have seen are people arguing about universal healthcare. There's a type of person who will hear that it will help everyone get healthcare and reduce the cost of their own healthcare as well, but they will fight it tooth and nail because they think they can afford it, will be able to afford it in the indefinite future as they age, and most importantly is utterly against the concept that part of their taxes will go towards helping people other than themselves. Or on the other end of the spectrum there is altruism; helping out others with no expectation of remuneration.
I think that there are some places where Anarchy principles would work, but there's no single simple philosophy that can blanket cover a society in a way where it won't collapse in the long term. For the most part our world runs on a hodgepodge mix of philosophies that conflict with eachother constantly.
The classic case of the Affordable Healthcare Act being more popular than Obamacare shows how easy it is to get people to work against their best interests. When presented with details, they approve. When presented with it packaged in a way that their "handlers" have demonized, they think it's destroying everything they care about and will vote to make sure that doesn't happen.
So I am not going to get too deep into my personal philosophy although I tend to support leftist positions here in the US.
However, I want to highlight that there at least (at minimum) two important tasks in making significant change toward the left. One is increasing justice in distribution of wealth etc.
The second is ensuring rights for political, ethnic, philosophical and religious minorities under the new system and preventing any revolution from being highjacked by narcissistic authoritarians. Creating a non-abusive government is a hard technical problem and the moment of change is a point where a system is vulnerable to being taken in directions that the change makers did not intend.
It seems like our political system assumed that the people who are elected would be good, trustworthy people. Any new political system should assume deceit and untrustworthiness, and make it easy to remove people from office.
I think Noam is a legend, and Bernie is essentially just every-day politics here in Scandinavia.
yes, but I’m not an atheist unlike seemingly everyone else in this thread
You got one more here. I am a "Follower of the Way of Jesus" (excellent term I heard from Stephen Backhouse) but I am having to do significant reckoning with the religious right and unwinding the stuff hat growing up in a conservative Evangelical church has left me with.
And my ☦️
Theists and agnostics can be hardcore leftists, why not? Christ preached about living your neighbour; it's pretty hard to call it love it I lived in a mansion and my neighbours is Lazarus, dying of hunger outside of my gates.
Chiming in. My current church has practiced racial integration and lgbtq inclusion since the 1970s. We also work to alleviate local hunger, support immigrant rights, work against gun violence, work with police and former gang members and more.
Speaking of Christianity since it's what I know, there is a long complex history of both abuse and reform within religious tradition. The best and worst acts of humanity can be found among religious people. But also secular philosophies including marxism have been used to justify atrocities.
I would consider myself an Anarchist, at least on an ideological level. Though I'm much less concerned with theory than praxis. However, I'm well aware that classical conceptions of Anarchist revolution are not, just around the corner, and so on a more practical level I probably fall on the far left of democratic socialist. I do think it's important to dream big though and be working towards larger goals even if they are likely unachievable in my lifetime. Much of my overall philosophy can be simply summed up in "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need." And I firmly believe that that is the world we should be working towards. Often times what that means for me is practically demonstrating that in my day to day life.
Depending on who you ask, and where in the political spectrum that person lies, I'm either a dirty dirty centrist or a perverted communist that eats babies for breakfast.
People will find a way to demonize anyone that is not exactly like them.
Capitalism is like gunpowder -- pretty useful, but you gotta force it to the right direction. And never let your guard down.
Anyway, yeah, I'm pretty lefty all things considered. I believe in social justice, bodily autonomy, affirmative action, equality, universal healthcare, LGBT rights, etc. But I'm not religious about it. Particular situations must be assessed with nuance and an open mind, and the answers ideology provide are often not the better ones.
I'm not flexible about everything, and I can be pretty stringent when I feel that is warranted. Generally speaking, you might say I'm a "moderate". Whatever that means. Which, to some people, is like being Devil incarnate... Radicals will always find a reason to hate you, what you gonna do?
I just wish people would remember that competition isn't an inevitable result of capitalism, it's something we force companies to do even when it would be in their own long-term self-interest to collude with their competitors and keep prices/profits high for everyone.
Some neoliberals aren't so much letting their guard down as denying the need for any defense whatsoever.
In case you missed this, there is currently a 60 day public comment window regarding proposed tougher antitrust rules from the Biden administration. https://tildes.net/~finance/18i7/new_us_merger_guidelines_released_this_week_60_day_window_for_public_comment
The trustbusters did a very good thing for stability and prosperity in the US. More recent policy makers and judges who weakened antitrust protections based on hopeful economic theory were wrong and their work needs correcting imho.
I did miss that, but I'm not American so I'm not sure what I can even do with that knowledge. I'm happy to hear that Biden is considering doing something, though.
Sorry. I haven't seen neoliberals referenced in an international context, so I was less than usually careful about people not necessarily being american. In the US, antitrust law is meant to help with preventing monopolies and cartels. Thanks for your perspective.
I wish you luck standing up to the neoliberals.
I'm a communist, but from Brazil so don't know or read any popular figures you mentioned. I know Chomsky and Sanders by name.
Sanders seems to be similarish to our current president Lula. Just a reformist that does not really reform anything and tries to put some brakes here and there on liberalism, but in the end it does not solve the root of the problem.
For some kind of improvement here in Brazil first we have to put a stop to USA imperialism in our country. It seems to be what we are doing by trying to not rely much on dollar and getting closer to China.
But I don't think anything major will change.
We are still the country who kills more trans people in the world.
Have a look at European left figures as well. Chomsky is fine but Thomas Piketty is important as well, and a lot younger.
The American left is really quite different. Orwell once described the British left as morris dancers and cheese enjoyers compared to the steel spine of Russia (paraphrase by me)
I wouldn't call myself an anarchist, but I 100% support libre software and I've come to the realization that user-funded development is the only sane logical conclusion for making libre software sustainable - you can't rely on corporate sugar-daddies because they have their own priorities* (even with the best of intentions), you can't rely on ads/tracking and other not-core-product revenue sources because that creates horrific perverse incentives, and you can't force people to pay money because then it's not libre software. Volunteers help, but if it's not a day-job then the best devs will take a day-job at FAANG (who'll get the lion's share of their effrots), and libre software will therefore never have as high-quality devs/code as FAANG.
I think the main problem right now is that there isn't a culture of paying for your "Free Software", which is partially because people haven't really acknowledged that 1) the money needs to come from somewhere, and 2) if you rely on volunteers, you get what you pay for.
*e.g. if you're building server software then home-servers probably prioritize something simple and low-maintenance, but Google will prioritize making the software scale well across three different continents.
It has - a lot! To paraphrase Yuval Noah Harari, "life is hard and it still sucks, but it's been gradually sucking a little less."
Noam was great 30 years ago. I really wish he stopped speaking words about 20 years ago. He says some dumb things in more recent times.
Also I don't know what a "leftist" is. That sounds like a Republican slur. I go by "progressive" personally.
Way forward is not about politics, but rather about didactics. How to effectively teach people to question authority and collaborate. Best methods are those where people experience different arrangements for themselves.