this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
525 points (88.3% liked)
Lefty Memes
4350 readers
712 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
Border have to exist to some degree, simply from a management perspective. Even if we threw all state and country borders away, it'd be literally impossible for a single government to effectively govern the world. You'd need to divide it all up into smaller regions to be managed. Otherwise, we'd might as well just fall back into the pre-industrial age as infrastructure erodes due to poor governmental oversight and management.
I agree, but those aren't the kinds of borders OP is talking about, I think. And it's a naïve simplification, in any case.
I interpret OPs point is about free travel and employment, without restriction or passports. The kind of "no borders" that exists in the EU: any citizen of a country in the EU can travel to, live in, and work in any other EU member country, without restriction, without limitations, and without passport.
It doesn't require, but is greatly facilitated by, a common currency; and as the EU has demonstrated, there's a lot of moving parts for this to function well. Having a common set of standards for human rights, having some basic economic model alignment, having mutual non-aggression agreements for a members... they're all essential components. Heck, I'd suggest that it'd be super-helpful if there was adopted a neutral, universal second language that all member countries require children to take a couple of years of in the public education system - a conlang like Esperanto (by virtue of sheer numbers of speakers), but certainly one where no single country has a advantage by having it be the natural native language, which excludes English.
Anyway, that's the kind of "no borders" I think OP is talking about, not the governance kind.
That's called an open border. No border is a stupid thing unserious morons on the internet make up.
Why do you assume we need an entire government to do work?
Because we had to live with shit in the streets for thousands of years before the invention of a strong government.
Look at what corporations (made up of people) do with the slightest deregulation.
People are, in general, awful.
There's shit in the streets right now in many large cities due to the failures of the state. The gilded age and industrial revolution spawned numerous public health crises under the watch of governments. The planet is being burned alive due to failures of the state. The solution is more state? Are you sure about that?
How do you propose you regulate corporations or any sort of industry? You want to make sure you food is handled sanitarily, no? You want to ensure your drinking water is being cleaned correctly, right? You want to know if new medications have downsides or are at least effective at what they're purported to do. You want to make sure bridges and tunnels are engineered correctly. Etc. etc.
Yes, government is not perfect. Yes, there are things that get past regulation all the time, but just imagine how much worse it would be with zero regulations. That's the kind of society you're arguing for. You literally cannot have more than a dozen people living together without some sort of social governance. Even tribal communities have some type of government in its most basic form.
Encourage and support the current unionization efforts. Stoke radicalism in the working masses, collectivize the means of production in a horizontal and egalitarian fashion. Abolish corporations so that there's no corporations to manage. Allow the people who are already ensuring you have clean water to continue ensuring you have clean water. Allow the people who already study and test medications to continue to study and test medications. Allow the people who already engineer and maintain infrastructure to continue to maintain infrastructure. Standard anarcho-syndicalist stuff.
For civic management form neighborhood councils that are federated with adjacent communities, repeating this process to cover as much area as possible. Make collective decisions via direct democracy, utilizing revocable delegates to manage specific tasks and coordinate efforts on a large scale. Operate on a hybrid library/gift economy internally and engage in trade with outsiders (if money is still a thing). Distribute housing, food, and medicine freely, based on need and not the ability to pay. Facilitate relationships of freedom and mutual trust in your community. Do your part and trust memebers in your community to do the same. Standard communalist stuff.
That sounds good in theory, but incentivization is a real problem for numerous communities, particularly less urban ones. Attracting doctors, engineers, etc is much more difficult when you have a smaller pool of people even capable enough to perform those tasks to pull from. Currently this is done through money/profit, but even that isn't enough in some areas (see how the agricultural industry is currently struggling to attract veterinarians to rural communities).
I'm not fully disagreeing with you, by the way. In a perfect world, that sounds great. It just feels like a huge world of, "if X people do Y thing, it'll all work out just fine." Taking that step requires a huge leap of faith by hundreds of millions of people, and hoping no sizable group rises up to eventually usurp the whole delicate transition process.
It sounds good in practice too. The Zapatistas and Rojava have been putting systems like these in practice for quite some time now. Compared to their neighbors, they're doing pretty well for themselves. These systems work, have worked, and are likely to continue to work. These systems aren't for a perfect world, theyre systems to make the world better. My comment isn't a comprehensive or even prescriptive list of things we need to do to establish anarchy. They're examples of methods that have been used to great effectiveness and may carry insights and knowledge for people/communities to apply to their contexts in ways that make sense to them.
It shouldn't be a leap of faith, it should be a careful and calculated effort put forth by those who want to work for it. You may not totally disagree with me, but I wholeheartedly disagree with the characterization that anarchy is unrealistic. It's been done before and it's being done now
I guess the biggest issue I see is how do you handle global trade? Right now, tons of materials we need for even manufacturing highly advanced products and other materials requires a complex web of international trade. How do smaller communities hope to be part of that without sliding back to the pre-digital age? I know there are folks who probably don't see that as a bad thing, but I definitely do, as I enjoy having access to modern technology and services (not to mention, I work in IT, so my job kind of depends on it).
I can only speak for myself and my beliefs, but trade would be done in a manner where one community is capable of producing more than half of their needs within the community first. The workplaces in a community has unions represents them to meet with unions from other communities so they can coordinate production and trade for the mutual benefit of both communities.
imbisbibal hamd
No.
No we didn't.
We did not live with shit in the streets without government. Even the earliest known sites for long term near human habitatation had sanitation at least to the point of handling waste away from living areas. It's really exclusively the British and British controlled India that had problems with this. Nearly every other known society in history has sensible sanitation. Indoor plumbing is older than monotheism for ducks sake.
It wasn't British. All of Europe was known for dumping their waste in the public street. Britain did not bring that to India. It was already traditional.
Sanitation in Rome was stones placed in the middle of the road so you could cross the street without stepping in human waste.
Sanitation in Rome was open sewer lines yes, that had constantly flowing water that removed waste in the gutter. Also closed sewer lines nes that removed waste from people's houses. Depending on the era you want to try to claim this in. At no point were people just throwing waste into the street and leaving it there. That was just an English thing.
And a French thing too
Who do you think works in governments?
"Government is terrible, I trust people!"
or
"People are terrible, I trust government!"
Both hamstrung by the fact that people are what make up a government.
A corporation might be made up out of people, but it is also a vertical power structure that gives the people at the top the ability to benefit from being awful, at everyone else’s expense.
People are awful when they have the ability to be awful while benefiting themself and are able to get away with it.
And to say people are generally awful completely ignores the societal strictures imposed on us that reward horrible people.
Infrastructure.
Is built by people, designed by people, contributed to by people, and most importantly exists in stateless societies. When a community has a common need and enough spare time to address that need, infrastructure happens. A government not only is not needed for this, but objectively halts or stalls progress for a variety of selfish goals of the individual politicians, as humans cannot be politicians, just parasites.
What stateless societies have infrastructure on the scale of NYC, Paris, or Tokyo?
What government has given out free ponies to all citizens?
Is this not where we ask nonsequiturs?
To address your point that is irrelevant to any discussion at hand. We can get into why there are exceedingly few stateless societies allowed to exist, the history of aristocracy and how every single world leader is a descendant of a feudal lord proving feudalism never died out and psychopaths have ruled the world since the dawn of government, but you're frankly not ready for that discussion. Until you are I suggest JAQing off in your right wing echo chamber from now on like you types are used to.
Wtf are you even talking about? You literally said that stateless societies have formed infrastructure. I asked you to provide examples of where that has occurred on the massive scale that modern cities exist at. Basic roads and sanitation that stateless societies create is a whole lot different than getting clean water to tens of millions of people in a relatively small, dense footprint. You could argue that Kowloon did it, but honestly it is only due to the extreme humidity in that area of the world that the whole place didn't go up in flames due to how shoddy the ran electric lines throughout the whole city. But there were tons of other problems that existed in that place, e.g. extreme levels of mold, sanitation issues, etc.
But sure, just write me off as a right wing zealot because I challenged your worldview. I'm not even conservative, but whatever, lol.
Nooo don't break up the giant monolithic top down states into smaller federated communities, noooo!
But there'll still need to have common policies across all of those communities, otherwise you just end up right back at square one with nation states. The US and EU are literally just this, a bunch of states (US) or countries (EU) that agree to allow free travel/living/learning/business/etc between each other with a larger governing body that oversees all of it.
That's all good as long as this body doesn't have final control over the other territories.
The US/EU states/countries are also... states and countries, so that could change.
Originally, the federal government in the US was very, very limited in power and states had much higher degrees of autonomy than they do now. It resulted in tons of problems, even agreeing on a basic common currency was problematic.
Now, I think that it's swung too far in the other direction and that the federal government nowadays in the US has too much power. I think it's possible to meet in the middle, where you have a semi-central body where federated communities have a common ground to address and resolve grievances with an outside, neutral party mediating things.
Anyway, just my two cents.
The problem with the "middle ground" approach is that eventually it's bound to start acquiring more power.
This is just the nature of top down government structures and is pretty much inevitable.
True, that is a valid point. Maybe with direct democracy, hard safeguards, and very limited terms and funding, it could potentially be limited from expanding power. But, I'm not an expert, so I'll leave hypothetical future social governance planning to those who are more competent.
Understandable, I just enjoy thinking about these sort of things way too much, haha.
You think it's ok for a local federated state to allow slavery?
Because it took a centralized government to have final control over those states rights.
And the big bad wolf went to the straw man and huffed and puffed and blew the poor straw man away.
It would also effectively mean that every region in the world would have to have the same laws.
Take Canada and the US. Very similar culturally, very similar economically, but some pretty important differences in human welfare. Like, every Canadian resident pays taxes to support a healthcare system, and if you need healthcare it's free.
If you eliminated the US/Canadian border, people could live in the US where taxes are cheaper until they had a serious illness, then they could move to Canada to get free treatment whenever necessary, moving back as soon as the treatment was done. That obviously wouldn't work well.
The only ways to make that work are either to eliminate the border, and have both regions have exactly the same healthcare system, or keep the border and allow both to have different systems.