I’m hoping this doesn’t start a fight, I’m just curious what the political orientation is of this community. I grew up in a liberal (in the American sense) family, and I identify now as a socialist, though a lot of the liberalism I grew up in has stuck with me, like interest in LGBTQ and women’s rights, environmentalism, etc. Wondering where people here land?
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i will answer this question through the medium of image
remember when the Soviets had a military parade with the Nazis? Pepperidge farm remembers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German–Soviet_military_parade_in_Brest-Litovsk
ML, death to amerikkka
I’m a communist, most people I work with consider me an anarchist but I’ll work with almost anyone who’s ready to end private property.
Some form of militant communist.
fiscally Marxist-Leninist (le ebil tankie)
socially anarchist
Centrist communist. I think MLs and Anarchists have useful ideas about making the world better. I’m leaning more ML lately mostly due to learning about the oppressive history of western capitalist interests, and how pacifist approaches have repeatedly failed to survive.
im a centrist, not too far left (
) and not too far right (
), just in the moderate centre (
)Also centrist, not too far left (
) and not too far right ( 
) , just in the moderate centre ( 
)TBF to old trot, idk if he’s ultra left or a right deviationist because he was such an opportunist that he fluctuated on which side of the opposition he worked with. He just went with whatever side had more leverage opposing Stalin that day.
true dat. Trot is definitely not an ultra left, and you are correct on his opportunism fluctuating on whatever would oppose Stalin – to the point of supporting terrorism
Yeah, I think some form of Anarchisms are the more-than-long goal for many places, but the early stages, with capitalists fighting to keep power, definately still need strong and organized defense forces, and a state is probably the best way of doing that.
The overabundance of essential resources that communism aims at will probably allow for groups of all sizes to organize as they wish/need
I am mostly a Maoist, with some anarchism sprinkled in.
Basically I think the single fastest thing we could to do improve our society is to:
- all kill our landlords
- form community mutual aid networks in the homes we subsequently inhabit without fear, while
- putting a priority on decolonisation and welcoming of displaced peoples to their imperialized lands.
How do you feel on the Nepalese Maoists?
This might not be the most satisfying answer, but my opinions of Maoism are based on what I’ve read of his principal texts and of the economic and social revitalization of China since he was in power. I live in the imperial core, and when I look around at the societal problems in my community and in my country writ large, I see immediate land redistribution as the swiftest cure to the largest issue, and Mao in my mind is the foremost advocate, architect, and practitioner of anticapitalist land redistribution on the national scale.
So my view is mostly from old books and from my neighborhood, and I’m not too well versed with the other cells around the world who claim the Maoist title. All I’ll say about the Nepalese Maoists is, my knee-jerk reaction to anticapitalist forces is support, I don’t know enough about them to comment further, and I hesitate to levy judgment on people across the world from me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_communist_parties_in_Nepal
Nepal’s communist and “communist” parties are a very complex and complicated topic.
Fair enough, was specifically wondering what your views were on People’s Multiparty Democracy that Nepalese Maoists subscribe to?
I’m an anarchocommunist.
While states still exist, I am a Welsh nationalist because independence from the UK is the only way we can stave off English attempts to undermine the senedd and Welsh democracy as a whole.
How can you have communism without a state forcing everyone to surrender their property?
If private property exists, that’s not communism. But to enforce communism you need a state so that’s not anarchy.
I believe anarchy and communism are polar opposites, and cannot co-exist. You’re either for anarchy (which ultimately leads to individualism and capitalism) or communism, which requires a huge controlling state to exist.
If private property exists,
Private property will not exist under anarchism, since private property (read the means of production) will be placed into the collective hands of those who need it.
anarchy (which ultimately leads to individualism and capitalism)
Capitalism requires the maintenance of involuntary hierarchies (like that between the owner and worker) and thus is antithetical to anarchism.
I believe anarchy and communism are polar opposites,
The ultimate goal of communism is the dissolution of state, this is something even MLs agree on.
"Engels suggested to Bebel that all chatter about the state be dropped altogether, that the word “state” be eliminated from the programme altogether and the word “community” substituted for it. Engels even declared that the Commune was long a state in the proper sense of the word. Yet Marx even spoke of the “future state in communist society”, i.e., he would seem to recognize the need for the state even under communism.
But such a view would be fundamentally wrong. A closer examination shows that Marx’s and Engels’ views on the state and its withering away were completely identical, and that Marx’s expression quoted above refers to the state in the process of withering away."
If you wouldn’t mind me making an assumption, it appears that you have very little knowledge of anarchism’s philosophical framework. I can give you some reading suggestions if you’d like.
You’re right, I don’t have much knowledge of anarchism’s philosophical framework, but I do know that the definition of the word means that there is no authority.
In an anarchist society, what’s to stop me from accumulating wealth?
Furthermore, what would stop me from entering into voluntary contracts with others who agree to do labour in exchange for money?
Ultimately I think that without some authority (almost certainly a state) enforcing communism, the relationships we currently experience under capitalism will naturally reoccur. And (if my limited understanding of anarchy is correct, which I admit it might not be), under anarchism there can be no such authority preventing capitalism from happening.
Communism always needs to be enforced, it doesn’t happen naturally. Capitalism does. That’s why I don’t think communism can exist along with anarchy.
Communism always needs to be enforced, it doesn’t happen naturally. Capitalism does.
Lmao holy shit
what’s to stop me from accumulating wealth?
Same thing that would stop you from pulling your pants down and sitting on a friend’s carpet or unplugging their TV and walking off with it
You do not understand what words like anarchy, communism or capitalism mean
Capitalism is not a natural occurrence, it requires a state to function, planning, control and above all violence; no capitalist would honor a contract if there weren’t courts to enforce them, no capitalist would feel secure if there weren’t state agents protecting their property, no capitalist in history would’ve been able to create foreign markets without European armies conquering the world
You fundamentally do not understand the depth and scope of these discussions, you read a definition in Webster and you think you know about the way the world works? But you can’t even see the obvious facts right in front of your face
Communism always needs to be enforced, it doesn’t happen naturally. Capitalism does. That’s why I don’t think communism can exist along with anarchy.
Capitalism also has to be enforced.
What do you think all those counter revolutionary insurgencies like the bay of pigs invasion are?
Or the state crackdowns on communist groups like the red scare?
Capitalism is not a natural state that things can revert to, it is a system that needs to be imposed.
You’re right, I don’t have much knowledge of anarchism’s philosophical framework, but I do know that the definition of the word means that there is no authority.
Anarchism is the absence of involuntary hierarchies such as the state. Authority and authoritarianism is meaningless in drawing a dividing line between ideologies because every socioeconomic framework needs to defend itself from being undermined one way or another. A good place to get started on this matter would be On Authority by Friedrich Engels.
If you actually care about digging deeper into anarchocommunism as an ideology, I’d recommend starting with mutual aid, a factor in evolution and Communism and Anarchy (both written by Pëtr Kropotkin).
The bay of pigs invasion and the red scare were attempts to stop communist ideology from spreading. This was done in order to perpetuate and protect the status quo in the USA for geopolitical reasons, but is not necessary for capitalism to function. Many nations start conflicts with each other because of a difference in ideology, and a perceived need to contain or counteract the ideology of the other nation, and this is not limited to capitalist societies. The USSR for example engaged in many conflicts with its neighbors in an attempt to export the revolution and spread its influence. Yet I wouldn’t say these conflicts were necessary for communism to function as a system, any more than the conflicts capitalist countries engaged in were necessary for capitalism to work.
I disagree that capitalism is not a natural state that things can revert to. I believe that if you were to take a random sample of humanity, wipe their memories and drop them on an alien world, capitalism would happen. Not because there’s a “system” making it happen, but because that’s just what people do.
I appreciate the recommendations. I’ll check out Pëtr Kropotkin.
If capitalism is the natural way for civilisation to organise itself, how come it took until the 1700s to become a widespread ideology? Humans have been around for a hell of a lot longer than that.
For real, sitting here flabbergasted by this claim. I think it is interesting though, it highlights a very specific isolated Western dominated historical worldview to assume capitalism is naturally occurring. I demand more anthropology in school!
I believe that if you were to take a random sample of humanity, wipe their memories and drop them on an alien world, capitalism would happen
Let’s think about that claim a little more carefully, why didn’t the Romans, the Greeks, the Persians, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Arabs, the Sumerians, the Ancient Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Maya, or the Inca develop capitalism
Why did it take 5,000 years after recorded history began for capitalism to emerge if it’s such a “natural phenomenon”
This was done in order to perpetuate and protect the status quo in the USA for geopolitical reasons, but is not necessary for capitalism to function
You really don’t see the contradiction in your claim? Let me spell it out; the “status quo” of the USA IS capitalism
Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything shows you are wrong. Capitalism isn’t natural and communism is “naturally” occurring.
So, I’m not an anarchist any more, but just to throw in a few odds and ends:
In the socialist conception of things, the state is the network of social forces that separates classes. Things like cops, or parliament are big obvious parts of “the state”, but things like CNN or Microsoft are too, despite being in private hands. In your hypothetical, the apparatus you use to accumulate wealth is “the state”.
A part of this reading is that it requires active effort to maintain the state. To take an example, let’s say your method of wealth accumulation was by becoming a landlord. You own the land and dwellings that people shelter in. Cool.
What makes this “yours” and not the tenants? Well, you paid for it, yes, but unless you spend all your time debating your tenants about the philosophy of ownership, you’re going to need enforcers. Enforcers who take your claims of ownership seriously. And this gets more and more necessary as you get more land and more tenants. You’re not going to fight ten tenants yourself to extract rent, let alone 10,000. After all, one would expect a slave to try to escape even if you rightfully paid for them, why not housing or food or anything else people need to live.
In most strains of anarchism, hoarding property so you can exploit your fellow man is violence, just as in liberalism walking across an empty bit of lawn that someone owns is violent.
But then, this isn’t really my beliefs any more, so um… idk, I hope it helps
Thanks for these thoughts.
How are Microsoft and CNN part of the state? Aren’t they just providing a service in exchange for money, in the same way a farmer, an actor or a mechanic does?
Your landlord example is interesting, and does illustrate how a state may be necessary to enforce private ownership, which is something I hadn’t considered about capitalism before. I suppose the landlord could pay private militia to enforce their ownership claims over the land, but at that point the landlord is basically a warlord and realistically wouldn’t need to pay for the land in the first place. The libertarian idea that everyone would voluntarily respect private property rights now seems as absurd as the communist idea that everyone would voluntarily share all property.
I don’t quite see how hoarding property could be considered violent, assuming it was acquired peacefully. Using what you’ve acquired to gain materially is not necessarily exploitative if those gains come from voluntary exchange of goods and labour. If someone wants to clean my windows in exchange for some money, I don’t see how it can be violent to enable that transaction. No one’s being forced to do anything in that scenario.
Definitely some interesting ideas though.
How are Microsoft and CNN part of the state? Aren’t they just providing a service in exchange for money, in the same way a farmer, an actor or a mechanic does?
Obviously we’re talking about different ideas here. Microsoft, for instance, pays for enforcement of copyright (a relatively modern invention) and gets profits from that enforcement (e.g. through corporate deals, sponsorships, software ecosystems etc), which maintains class character. The owners of Microsoft sit around and do nothing (hypothetically), and the systems surrounding them (“the state”) funnel money up to them, that money being a representation of the power and labour of people buying and using Microsoft products (often without choice; I don’t get to choose which OS my workplace uses, for instance, but I also play video games which can be jank with various linux OSes etc etc). It is in Microsoft’s best interests to maintain this class character of society, thus they will lobby the government to defend their interests, fund op-eds to say “tech workers unionising is bad, actually”, pay for private security, bankroll candidates in local sherriffs elections etc etc. The fact that they are privately owned and the money and power are “private” only really explains where the money/power goes, it doesn’t explain Microsoft’s behaviour. The same with CNN except with different specifics.
I do know a couple of leftists that complain about using the word “state” for this, since it has a different definition in common parlance (usually equivalent to the government or nation-state), so it could just be semantics. But if you’re talking to a left anarchist about states, that’s what they mean. I also realise that this means that your local fish and chips shop owner is a part of “the state”, but the municipal work guy who fills in potholes for the city council isn’t, at least in that conception. I’m not really going to argue these points, just hopefully building some understanding to what anarchists (except ancaps) mean when they talk about the state.
Most people aren’t washing windows for the love of washing windows. Perhaps it would be true if all their needs were met (say, food security, housing etc etc), then your window washing friend taking money to wash windows so he can buy warhammer miniatures or something. Erm… What follows isn’t an argument, but more just a scenario to explain the view. Again, I’m not super interested in arguing the point.
Imagine there is a village where everyone is hungry except one person. That one person owns all the grain. How he acquired the grain is irrelevant, what matters now is he has all the grain in a legal sense. Maybe he inherited from its previous owner. “Give me everything you own, and I will feed you”, he says. The villagers balk. It is a long journey to the nearest town, too long for many of them for they have been hungry for a while. Some of them give up their homes in exchange for grain. They continue living there, but agree to pay future rent. For the others, the situation becomes more dire as the days pass. People are rapidly losing weight, trying to fill their stomachs with a mixture of sawdust and water. The grain lord ups the ante “Give me everything you produce in the future, as well as everything you own right now.” Again the villagers balk, but some people sell themselves into more explicit serfdom than the people from before. and so on and so on until the villagers are selling their firstborns to the grain lord who haven’t even been born yet. I got bored of writing this. At some point or another, the villagers just take the grain and fight off the lord if he tries to stop them. His property hoarding requires violence to maintain regardless of how he acquired that property, unless you consider violence against property to be worse than violence against people (which, uh… idk). Ergo, it is violent.
The point being that in this scenario, everything is “freely” given, in a legalistic sense, but is extremely exploitative in any other sense. The right libertarian viewing this as just is… Well, most people don’t act like this in their personal lives. If a friend or member of their community is hungry and they have lots of food to share, they will share it quite freely. It is the state (in the anarchist’s view) that obfuscates our local community relationships where we see ourselves as so separate that would not give spare food someone in our communities if they were hungry (that said, our cities are very large, something about urbanist critique here). Like, my loser brother who fucks up everything is still welcome to share my pot roast tonight, though I’m probably not going to invest in any of his ventures per se.
I think, also, that while anarchists view the hoarding as violent, they also view the source of all capital as violent as well. For instance, would Standard Oil or US Steel have been as profitable or even have existed if the United States’ land had never been violently appropriated from the native societies that already existed there? A lot of the initial wealth even before the colonial era was squatted on by descendants of warlords who ran what we’d call “protection rackets” (feudalism). How much of any of the wealth that exists is “legitimate”?
Again, I don’t really follow this political view anymore, so I’m not going to get into the nitty gritty of arguing any of these points. These scenarios are just for helping get into the mindset of anarchism. If you want a decent primer to the different forms property and ownership can take, you could read Debt: The First 5000 Years which has very accessible anthropological discussion of many different societies throughout history (including free market arguments in the first Islamic Empire).
your questions presume the existence of money[1] and capital which can be held in private hands. by the time the state withers away, both will necessarily have been eliminated along with class distinctions. as capital is pure under the domain of the administrative apparatus and under democratic control, it cannot be used to accumulate wealth in the sense of the term as we understand it under capitalism.
can someone decide to accumulate currency? absolutely. what good does it do them? not a whit - once capital passes entirely into the public domain, the function of currency is no longer to denominate the flows of capital but rather merely to facilitate trade, as it was before capitalism, and will again be after it.
the unique part, that which has never happened before, is the social productive capacity of the whole society will lay entirely within the hands of the public at large - ie the ability to organize production without the interposition of private individuals, except where the production itself involves them materially.
[1]: money is distinguished from currency by the MCM’ relation, whereby money is turned into commodities through the process of production and the sale of said commodities becomes new money - ie profit. currencies by way of contrast have existed in many forms and for many purposes - I recommend David Graeber’s Debt for a survey.
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Thanks for the detailed reply. I hadn’t considered the difference between money and currency before. Maybe I still don’t fully understand it because I still think there would be an advantage to hoarding currency in any system where others are prepared to exchange goods or labour for that currency.
Trade would surely still occur, and it would be possible to profit from said trade. That profit would enable the trader to live a more luxurious life than those who make less or no profit, because he would be able to acquire more goods and have more work done for him by spending the profit. Consumerism would happen.
Even in a post-scarciry world I think we’d still have Ferengi.
I appreciate the reading recommendations. These are some fascinating ideas to understand for sure.
think about a village that treats a particular kind of wood used in ritual ceremonies - like weddings and funerals - as a kind of currency. the person who bears that currency has a kind of ritual power but it’s limited in scope. a young man who trades years of labor to acquire a single stave can burn it in order to declare his worthiness to marry a woman of the tribe. if one person simply “buys up” all of the available supply… how? it’s a ritual item - they’re literally not for sale in the traditional sense. that is, it’s not money because it’s not a commodity.
another kind of currency is IOUs issued by a particular person - they’re only valuable to you if getting a favor done by that person carries some kind of significance to you. that is, they can be traded like commodities within a community but hold no value outside of it.
this is what we mean by non-monetary currencies.
I see. In that case, I think the development of money is inevitable. People will want a standardized token of value that is universally accepted. If there is no state, something like gold or bitcoin will meet that need. Something rare but commoditized and fungible will inevitably become the standard unit of account that represents value, and a free market will mean that goods and services naturally find their own price.
Graeber’s Debt the first 5000 years does talk a bit about:
the difference between money and currency before
Anarchism is rooted in the identification of and opposition to unjust hierarchies and how they may be opposed and dismantled most efficiently. This is a leftist tradition, unlike what Westerners are usually taught in school (or by pop culture), where anarchists just vaguely oppose authority and rules and want “chaos”. As such, anarchists identify the system of capitalism as the primary engine of unjust hierarchy and tend to bring a class analysis to their work, which includes union organizing, mutual aid work, and direct action to oppose the police state
how can you have private property without a state forcing everyone to respect that your name is written on a piece of paper that says it’s yours? we are social beings. in situations where authority collapses, as in natural disasters, the collapse of property relations soon follows.
the right-libertarian misconception that property is a natural, fundamental law that pre-exists all of human society is a fantasy – you are not going to hoard your 50 acres of farmland for yourself while your neighbors starve just because you have a large gun collection. And the right-libertarian solution to this obvious problem is that they would simply create the state again, but with them at the top, by hiring mercenaries to shoot anyone who climbs the fence. That is what the state is at its core: maintenance of property relations. Communism and anarchism aren’t opposites, but synonyms.
when leftists say “private property” it means “means of production.” Factories, etc.
Your house is “personal property.” You still own that under socialism.
Tankie, though if I take the 2-axis politics test I wind up being in the bottom left corner (you have to give some pretty unhinged answers to get top left).
I started out as a techno-libertarian and then lib left, then socdem, then anarchist. There’s been life experiences that have changed my politics.
Communist
I’m an anarchist, and very much into industrial unions.
anarcho syndicalist?
That would probably be an accurate description of me, but I think simply “Anarchist” has wider implications. I do more than unions and I think eco-anarchism and popular assemblies might possibly be a more effective path towards the eradication of unjust hierarchies.
Theoretically some kind of communist but it’s mostly just all window dressing for whatever lets me act out my decades long grudge against conservatism at large. The fact that I hate their asses and want to spend the rest of my life lashing out at them is more where my commitments lie more so than any specific school of thought
My liberal friends call me a libertarian, and my conservative friends call me a libtard. So what does that make me? A centrist? I don’t believe fully in any one ideology. There are good things about multiple different belief systems, and bad things about them too. I think we’re doing ourselves a massive disservice by aligning so neatly into tribalistic views of the world.
Agreed with that
Most Americans (your terminology is American so I’m assuming) have incoherent political beliefs handed down to them by popular discourse. Nearly all of them can be summarized as liberalism, i.e. a supporter of the capitalist order, and “debate” is whittled down to which of its various forms you “support”. You are given basically zero agency to actually support those things unless you’re a major business influence, but your frustrations at a lack of material improvement in your and others’ lives has been effectively redirected into a pantomime of political movements, and this helps the boss pick your pocket.
Basically… this is how I would contextualize conservatives (liberals) and liberals (liberals) calling you “the other”. You probably just aren’t subscribing to their own team sport-like political divide, one that changes easily and often depending on what their masters tell them to think. That doesn’t necessarily make your understanding better or worse, I just want to point out that their opinions probably mean nothing and that you are probably a fairly typical person in your region.
With that said, I highly recommend reading about the foundations of socialism and the horrible things the US has done and continues to do to other countries to enforce its economic order. We are not taught these things in school - we are instead taught nationalism and arguably fascist things so that there are ready-made excuses for the terrorism our country inflicts on others and us. There are, unfortunately, many, many examples, but one place to start is the coup and genocidal campaign in Guatemala premised in bailing out the exploitative landlords (basically feudal lords) there in the form of fruit companies. Their truth and reconciliation document is one of pure horror. The School of the Americas never died, it just expanded and became more diffuse. This is the ideology of mainstream America.
Rather far left both economically and socially, but I actually understand that progress takes step by step effort and screaming that you want everything done now doesn’t get you anywhere. Also, purity tests of “follow every one of my beliefs or you’re evil” are dumb and unhelpful when you’re discussing where people are on the left.
Oh, and I think tankies are morons.
I would like to be King.
