this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
525 points (88.3% liked)
Lefty Memes
4350 readers
803 users here now
An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the "ML" influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
Serious posts, news, and discussion go in c/Socialism.
If you are new to socialism, you can ask questions and find resources over on c/Socialism101.
Please don't forget to help keep this community clean by reporting rule violations, updooting good contributions and downdooting those of low-quality!
Rules
0. Only post socialist memes
That refers to funny image macros and means that generally videos and screenshots are not allowed. Exceptions include explicitly humorous and short videos, as well as (social media) screenshots depicting a funny situation, joke, or joke picture relating to socialist movements, theory, societal issues, or political opponents. Examples would be the classic case of humorous Tumblr or Twitter posts/threads. (and no, agitprop text does not count as a meme)
1. Socialist Unity in the form of mutual respect and good faith interactions is enforced here
Try to keep an open mind, other schools of thought may offer points of view and analyses you haven't considered yet. Also: This is not a place for the Idealism vs. Materialism or rather Anarchism vs. Marxism debate(s), for that please visit c/AnarchismVsMarxism.
2. Anti-Imperialism means recognizing capitalist states like Russia and China as such
That means condemning (their) imperialism, even if it is of the "anti-USA" flavor.
3. No liberalism, (right-wing) revisionism or reactionaries.
That includes so called: Social Democracy, Democratic Socialism, Dengism, Market Socialism, Patriotic Socialism, National Bolshevism, Anarcho-Capitalism etc. . Anti-Socialist people and content have no place here, as well as the variety of "Marxist"-"Leninists" seen on lemmygrad and more specifically GenZedong (actual ML's are welcome as long as they agree to the rules and don't just copy paste/larp about stuff from a hundred years ago).
4. No Bigotry.
The only dangerous minority is the rich.
5. Don't demonize previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.
We must constructively learn from their mistakes, while acknowledging their achievements and recognizing when they have strayed away from socialist principles.
(if you are reading the rules to apply for modding this community, mention "Mantic Minotaur" when answering question 2)
6. Don't idolize/glorify previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.
Notable achievements in all spheres of society were made by various socialist/people's/democratic republics around the world. Mistakes, however, were made as well: bureaucratic castes of parasitic elites - as well as reactionary cults of personality - were established, many things were mismanaged and prejudice and bigotry sometimes replaced internationalism and progressiveness.
- Absolutely no posts or comments meant to relativize(/apologize for), advocate, promote or defend:
- Racism
- Sexism
- Queerphobia
- Ableism
- Classism
- Rape or assault
- Genocide/ethnic cleansing or (mass) deportations
- Fascism
- (National) chauvinism
- Orientalism
- Colonialism or Imperialism (and their neo- counterparts)
- Zionism
- Religious fundamentalism of any kind
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Do you think the Russian army should just be allowed to march to France?
Usually the idea that borders shouldn't exist is connected to the idea that armies shouldn't exist.
How do you propose to stop armed groups from forming?
Typically community defense, which means there are already armed groups, they just autonomous groups of people ready to defend their own communities. Similar to the concept of minute men if you want to think broad strokes.
So you want a local conscript or volunteer militia? How about those local groups making alliances, sharing training, building up shared resources and infrastructure, a unified command, standardized equipment for better and more efficient defense?
So long as the local group autonomy is still respected that can work fine in theory. Once you start stripping groups of autonomy to make a beauracratic monster, you've lost the anarchism plot. A lot harder in practice to have a massive armed org that values that autonomy. Most of the time local groups will be linked to other groups. Just by group consensus, not by necessity because of course that too would not be anarchism.
Well, yeah. Anarchism loses wars to bureaucracy. That was settled in 50 BC with the Gallic Wars.
Im no historian but I think we've made some headway in technology that allows for quicker longer distance organization in the past 2000 years.
That gives even greater advantage to centralized bureaucracy. 2000 years ago armies could be independent weeks before anyone back in Rome knew what happened.
Sounds like a theoretical Libertarian trying to raise an army. Do you hand a copy of the NAP to just the volunteers or also to those you fight?
If you cant tell anarchism from libertarianism, theres no intelectual basis to continue this conversation on. Which would explain why you set up a strawman with your second sentence.
You got me, it seems I have not educated myself thoroughly enough.
Really though, if only the enlightened can see the light then it seems like it's just an academic exercise or trolling people to advocate for ineffectual fringe theory.
You may be right, but also powerless.
That's not a reasonable argument. We already have large armed groups, and these are armies. And they already commit war crimes. If you don't find armed groups forming acceptable, and you do not find the harm they cause acceptable, then you do not find what we have now acceptable.
Tell them to fucking stop it or we'll shun them.
Ideally by eliminating any reason they might form.
More realistically... I'm not sure. Small local militias?
Anarcho-NATO.
I'm pretty sure Vaush was memeing when he said that but it honestly makes a lot of sense
Until one guy with an army realizes no one else has an army, then they march their army into whatever they now claim as theirs. Humans are too greedy, selfish, and divided to completely abolish borders and armies any time soon.
Militias are a thing. We mean standing armies. No one is saying we just let the imperialists walk in and conquer us. It means people should be able to live and work wherever they want, unhindered by borders. An invasion is something else, and would be defended against by community defense and militias
So without a standing army, how does a militia made of local community fight a force gathered from across an entire country? 500 semi trained militants won't last long against a trained army of 2000 with military equipment and logistics
Through coordination with the communities of others. Militias have and are very effective at fighting conventional standing armies. Look at the viet kongs, the anarchist militias in the Spanish Civil War, and the Ukrainian Black Army. Or the slave rebellion of Haiti. Even modern day, the Zapatistas hold their own against both the Cartels and the Mexican government.
Hey! You comment in support of Israel bombing hospitals. Thanks for commenting in bad faith and alerting me to your post history.
Do you support that Hamas uses hospitals as military facilities?
That has never been proven despite Israel bombing 38/38 hospitals and invading most of them. No actual evidence has ever been found to support this narrative. Incidentally Israel has killed more children just in hospitals in the last year than Hamas has killed people total in its entire existence.
No actual evidence? There have been firefights literally inside hospitals.
Yes there have, Israeli genocide forces have indeed started firefights in hospitals killing civilian police that fired back on them.
I think the Russian and French armies should be disbanded and the workers of the world should unite to violently eliminate
until we can all be free to equitably trade our services in furtherance of the common good in society, enabling a time of total enrichment and pursuit of happiness.
Anyway this tos is crazy right.
Workers uniting to violently accomplish something looks like an army to me.
History has taught us that formal armies are not effective in doing much besides killing civilians and ruing the environment.
However independent groups of self reliant people all working towards the same goal can resist the strongest most depraved military in the history of humanity.
Workers of the world, if we unite around the common goal of a new tomorrow without owners, would not ever be controlled, all without the need for a formal military.
A $100 drone and home made explosive can elimate the most advanced 50 million dollar tank, and a single 5.56 round in the right place at the right time can take out the most advanced stealth fighter. Resistance is not only possible, it's fiscally responsible and has never been more realistic of an idea.
Like drug cartels!
And "terror" cells, and resistance fighters across the world. The US managed to kill at least a million Afghan civilians, drop tens of millions of tonnes of ordinance, spend more than ten thousand years of Afghanistans GDP on military operations, violate more children and commit more generalized war crimes than nearly any other empire while causing tens of thousands of vets who participated to kill themselves... All to take the taliban out of power and put them right back in power with even more public support than they had before the invasion.
Independent groups all working in commicationless tandem towards a single ideological goal is far more effective than even the best example of a formal military with unlimited funding and absolutely no morals.
That is more about an insurgency being difficult, since the oppression radicalizes more and more people the longer it drags on.
It isn't like city states or other small groups were less violent than more recent wars, the scale is different. Hell, the KKK and other hate groups are independent groups that work towards a single idealogical goal. The structure isn't what has a better or worse outcomes, there are different challenges and benefits to centralized and decentralized systems but the root issue with all of them is human behavior.
Human behavior is objectively to work together for a common goal. It is exceedingly few people in society that cannot do this. Basing your view of humanity's behavior on the outliers is asinine.
I highly recommend you and other misanthropes take a human evolutionary psychology course or two. Standford has one for free on their YouTube page.
If human behavior is objectively to work together, then why would scaling that up be a bad thing?
It's not, but that's not what government is. Government is the removal of responsibility away from the people; the positive reason proffered being that this frees up time for people to focus on other things, but in reality the only actual reason is misanthropy. You don't trust people, so you want a source you can trust to do things. The problem with that is humans have an evolutionary adaptation wherein some, exceedingly few, humans are born without the key ability of empathy that all normal (meant in the most offensive way possible) people are born with. These few individuals colloquially known as psychopaths exclusively take advantage of this distrust and place themselves in positions of power despite the fact they are solely the reason the distrust exists.
The line about how power corrupts is false, power attracts the corrupted and allows them to be free. Therefore we can never have any person ever have more power than any other.
Without borders, there would be no 'Russian' and no 'French'.
Just roving bands of armed robbers, pillagers, and looters.
Do armed robberies and lootings happen in countries with borders? Yes, so your argument has been falsified.
Without a state, what would constitute an army and what would it fight over?
If Russians are freely allowed to roam into France, and French into Russia, what would be the matter of the war, and ultimately, what would define French or Russian as a nationality?
If you go back in history a bit, then wars were fought to steal, plunder, enslave, and to spread religions or ideologies.
Which is something that we'll have to deal with using internal forces.
If it's a global state, then there should be peacekeepers - the benefit here is that we can literally use armed forces of an entire world, though accountability is a must here. If it's an anarchy - militias can help solve it - it would be a harder balance, but it's doable and comes with less corruption.
Also, people freely moving across the world would lead to a gradual unification of culture, which should take at least religious/racial/ethnical extremism out of the question.
Should an anarchist community be able to exclude people?
Probably yes. And accept, too.
Then you will get segregation by ideology, culture, ethnicity, religion etc.
Inevitably, to some extent. But such enclaves will likely be small in size, which wouldn't let the global scale conflict develop.
States have power of all on behalf of certain group, which isn't much true for the anarchist community.
(With that said, I think anarchism is full of assumptions and I'm not sure it's the ideal way forward; but it's worth mentioning nonetheless)
I just think that anarchist societies are fragile.
Self segregation isn’t necessarily a bad thing either.