Disagree, it’s pretty far left. Reddit was center-left, this is where those too far left for Reddit came as it shifted a little to the right with the top-down reaction to the API change.
You refer to .ml, but that’s not really left, it’s a tankie instance, which is closer to fascism than socialism. I see far more people on Lemmy idolizing communism/socialism than any other extreme ideology.
You’re oversimplifying (and so was I, to be totally fair). The Reddit exodus has lots of reasons. I think it has more to do with one’s thoughts on corporatization and technocultural knowledge which does correlate with left-leaning politics. I’m sure there are many who are just sick of platforms giving Trumpists tacit approval (I think this is the primary driver for people leaving twitter) but that Venn diagram is not a perfect circle.
.ml has tankies, and there’s plenty of fair criticism to direct at Dessalines and the mod team for generally cultivating a culture of knee-jerk anti-Western thought (and the inverse, more importantly) but it’s not “closer to fascism” because it leans authoritarian and drapes itself in USSR/CCP aesthetic. But it’s mostly a FOSS instance with well-deserved bashing of US imperialism and state-sponsored terrorism.
Tankies are pretty close to fascism, and tend to support regimes like in Russia the same as regimes in China. For them, the motivation doesn’t seem as motivated by economics as itvi government structure, since modern Russia is very far from socialist ideals. Basically, anything that goes against US interests is the priority, not economics as it would for your average socialist.
I think you’re losing some nuance but yeah “anything that goes against US interests is the priority” is a real problem in some leftist spaces (I was banned from /r/latestagecommunism for suggesting that maybe the things we hear about North Korea aren’t just Western lies to discredit a true Communist state.) Of the “big three” I see the most of that on lemmygrad so I don’t bother.
But there’s a scale of uncritical support and I think people use “tankie” a little too broadly to dismiss people rather than consider the different facets of belief. Online discourse sucks.
Agreed 100%. People also use “Nazi” way too liberally, and it’s really off-putting and cheapens the term for actual Nazis.
And there’s only so much nuance I’m going to put into a comment, but for “tankie,” I generally mean those who support authoritarian regimes because they stand up to the US, not because of their actual ideology. Supporting China, Russia, and NK in the same breath is nonsensical, especially since only one of those is actually somewhat communist and one is explicitly not. I get it, there are a lot of reasons to dislike the US, but that doesn’t make Russia and NK “good.”
And yeah, online discourse sucks, probably because we self-organize into echo chambers. Reddit was less bad when I joined, but pretty much any reasonably popular SM is problematic now.
Democratic market socialism is a perfectly moderate ideology (too moderate, because often it lets the market win over and the democracy decay). You can also consider weekends, paid leave, women’s vote, public education, healthcare, public media and social security as socialist policies. It is one of the main political currents founding the EU and in South America. Only in the US is it used to describe radicals or as an insult.
I’m even reluctant to point this out to magats now, because they never get the point and may even get it in their head that these are the things to destroy wherever they exist, just because they’re socialist in origin.
Sure, democratic socialism is center left, I’m talking about actual socialism, which gets promoted here quite a bit. Reddit was mostly dem socs and welfare state proponents, Lemmy takes it a bit further.
Democratic socialism isn’t socialism though, it’s capitalism with lots of government services.
The authoritarian part is pretty much baked in to “real” socialism since you need something to control the means of production until society is ready, and that hasn’t yet happened. Yes, there are other theorized structures, but they’re unproven.
Tankies (i.e. many of those on .ml) are into the authoritarian part, whereas people here are more into democratic socialism, which is another thing entirely.
Yes, indeed, socialism is an intellectual offshoot of capitalism/liberalism/enlightenment (not neoliberalism, of course) that emerged as a reaction to the industrial revolution (and the French revolution, or you could go as far back as the English civil war, with the levellers) as a reaction to the wealth inequality it creates and it predates Marxism, but communism coopted the term and made it seem exclusively authoritarian (because that was supposedly the only way to beat capital).
Engels wrote that in 1848, when The Communist Manifesto was published, socialism was respectable in Europe while communism was not. The Owenites in England and the Fourierists in France were considered respectable socialists while working-class movements that “proclaimed the necessity of total social change” denoted themselves communists.[54] This branch of socialism produced the communist work of Étienne Cabet in France and Wilhelm Weitling in Germany.[55] British moral philosopher John Stuart Mill discussed a form of economic socialism within free market. In later editions of his Principles of Political Economy (1848), Mill posited that “as far as economic theory was concerned, there is nothing in principle in economic theory that precludes an economic order based on socialist policies”[56][57] and promoted substituting capitalist businesses with worker cooperatives.[58] While democrats looked to the Revolutions of 1848 as a democratic revolution which in the long run ensured liberty, equality, and fraternity, Marxists denounced it as a betrayal of working-class ideals by a bourgeoisie indifferent to the proletariat.[59]
The history of terms isn’t particularly relevant, though it is interesting. For example, “libertarianism” largely came from socialism, and “liberalism” largely meant “small government,” whereas today libertarianism is pretty close to what liberalism used to mean, and “liberals” are in favor of large government.
Here’s what I mean by each term:
socialism - “Democratic ownership of the means of production,” as in, the government runs the economy
Democratic socialism - large central government with a lot of subsidised services, like healthcare; the means of production are private owned, but heavily taxed
libertarianism - “subscribes to the non-aggression principle, emphasizes radical individual freedoms and minimal taxation” - government services should be minimized to prevent top down abuse
communism - the end goal of socialism, which is a stateless society where people share what they produce so everyone has enough (from each according to his ability, to each according to his need)
I think socialism as defined above is unworkable because bureaucrats will abuse their power, communism is unworkable because people are selfish, and Democratic socialism is tricky because a large state tends to restrict the freedoms of its people. That’s why I align with libertarianism, but am on the left end where I believe there should be wealth redistribution through something like UBI (I prefer Negative Income Tax), so you get most of the benefits of socialism (everyone gets what they need) without most of the bureaucracy (no application process other than tax return).
It depends on where you draw the line for “the center.” I’d agree it’s leftist for America, but it’s center-left on a global scale. You’ll usually get some push back if you promote true leftist politics. Usually more agreement than dissent, but still some.
Sure, the US does skew right. I do think Lemmy is pretty far left even compared to areas like Europe that are further left from the US. It’s kind of hard to gauge whether people are serious about things like “guillotine the rich” (or Luigi references) or exaggerating, but you don’t see that type of talk on popular subreddits (even before the crackdown), at least I didn’t, and coming to Lemmy was a bit of a shift left from what I already saw as “center left.”
I am a bit left of center in the US and pretty centrist on a global scale, and I lean fairly libertarian. I’m left of most libertarian candidates in the US, supporting things like UBI as an alternative to welfare programs. So I think I have a decent perspective on what’s left and right.
I am a bit left of center in the US and pretty centrist on a global scale, and I lean fairly libertarian. I’m left of most libertarian candidates in the US, supporting things like UBI as an alternative to welfare programs. So I think I have a decent perspective on what’s left and right.
I started at your position a long time ago, when I was a teenager. I realized libertarians are full of shit, and eventually discovered a better descriptor of my beliefs was anarchist (in particular, social anarchist). I think the government shouldn’t be telling people how to live or what they can or can’t do. It should be there to protect people (emphasis; not corporations).
Libertarians (in the US at least) are really just anarcho-capitalists. They want freedom for businesses, but usually at the expense of freedom for people. They don’t want protection for people from exploitation. They want businesses with enough money to be able to exert their authority as far as possible, to the extent of blocking competition and effectively creating slaves. (They’ll argue they don’t agree with slavery, but what’s the difference between your employer owning your ability to live and slavery?)
I have serious practical concerns with anarchism, but that is certainly the ideal.
I started life as a conservative, mostly because I bought into the lie that they actually wanted smaller government. Ron Paul got me excited because he actually wanted smaller government, but seeing him get trashed by the establishment pushed me out. Around that time I found Penn Jillette (libertarian anarchist), and he really resonated with me.
I dislike the Libertarian Party, but I have liked individuals within it, and that generally seems the most likely party to actually make a difference (i.e. get on a debate stage so people can hear a different perspective). My ballot is all over the place though, with a mixture of Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, and sometimes a random third party if the candidate is good.
But yeah, I just want to be left alone, and if we need a government (I think we do), it should be limited to protecting us from each other and ensuring everyone has the necessities. Other than that, business should be largely unrestrained and unprotected (limited liability should end after a certain size, execs should be arrested if they break the law, etc), and there should be strong support from government to protect privacy. Consumer protections should largely be unnecessary if the market is sufficiently competitive, and ending protectionism should provide that, but consumer protections should be provided by the AG leading lawsuits against companies.
I think “classical liberal” is the better term for me, but “libertarian” gets the message across pretty well, and I identify with the NAP underpinnings of the ideology. I’m registered with the party to increase the stats of third parties to hopefully encourage electoral reform (end FPTP), not because I think they’re great.
I have serious practical concerns with anarchism, but that is certainly the ideal.
You should have serious practical concerns with everything. My practical concerns with libertarianism is what led me to social anarchism. For example:
Consumer protections should largely be unnecessary if the market is sufficiently competitive, and ending protectionism should provide that…
Why? Why would ending protectionism necessarily demand competition? Without government stepping in, why wouldn’t the largest companies create barriers that prevent competition? They can user their capital to undercut competitors until they can’t remain solvent, then increase prices far above cost. They can also buy out competitors before they are real competition. They can use their market dominance to demand suppliers to show their product more prominently, or to only show their product.
There are far too many ways the dominant company can curtail competition, and we’ve seen it played out many times even with our current system that Libertarians want to remove the guardrails from. For example, items listed on Amazon that sell moderately well, Amazon creates knockoffs for. They then sell them at a cheaper price under the “Amazon Basic” name until the original is gone, and then they increase prices. This is what the free market looks like.
This is the kind of thing that led me to social anarchism. People are the important thing, not companies. We need a government that’s empowered to protect people, but that let’s people do what they want (assuming they don’t hurt other people). Ideally also we remove hierarchy from the companies and have them owned by employees or the people also. Letting them treat humans as a human resource (which is crazy that HR can be called that and people don’t see a problem) is the issue. Improving the lives of people should be the end goal, not profit.
Why? Why would ending protectionism necessarily demand competition?
Right now, corporations get off w/ light fines and their execs don’t face jail time because of the explicit and implied protections in our legal system. Companies can declare bankruptcy without reaching into the pockets of those w/ a significant interest in the company because of financial protections, and prosecutors very rarely pursue criminal charges for something done in a business context. The larger a company is, the less likely it is to fail, but also the less competitive it is, because it can just buy legislators to block competition.
Here’s the current lifecycle of a corporation:
small, scrappy startup w/ an innovative idea
medium corp that expands its product line to corner a piece of the market
large corp that buys out competition and lobbies to raise the barrier to entry
mega corp that strategically uses subsidiaries to compartmentalize risk to not suffer consequences for bankruptcy
At step 2, companies are vulnerable to scrappy startups, but by the time they get to step 3, it’s too late to hold them accountable since they can just drown them out w/ negative press, lawsuits regarding regulations (and few consequences for trollish suits), etc.
I believe that if we cut corporate protectionism (say, for anything 2 or above) and hold execs legally liable for harm their products produce, we’ll largely stop the flow from 2 to 3 and largely force those at 3 and 4 to improve their behavior. You wouldn’t get situations like Boeing since the execs responsible would’ve been in jail at the first instance and the rest would follow for subsequent instances.
Our current strategy seems to be to pass regulations to improve the behavior of corporations, but corporations naturally sidestep the law and pay off legislators to make the consequences small. Instead, we should be making it unprofitable for corporations to lobby legislators and hold them accountable w/ law enforcement and the judicial system. Make laws extremely simple so there’s no wiggle room, such as if your product harms someone and you knew enough to have prevented it, you go to jail and need to make full restitution to the injured parties, and anything you earned while working there is available to make that restitution (smaller companies would have protections, but also limitation on how much profit they can pull from the corp).
In short, make it extremely unlikely a company will get powerful enough in the first place. The smaller a corporation is, the more protections it should get, not the reverse.
For example, items listed on Amazon that sell moderately well, Amazon creates knockoffs for. They then sell them at a cheaper price under the “Amazon Basic” name until the original is gone, and then they increase prices. This is what the free market looks like.
I haven’t seen those originals disappear, and I’ve heard a ton of complaints from people about the low quality of many Amazon Basics products. The only ones I’ve personally found value in are their rechargeable batteries (basically rebranded Eneloop) and their mice (backup only, they suck to use), but pretty much everything else has been poor quality.
People are the important thing, not companies
Agreed. I do think that employee owned companies are the ideal, but they’re not the only way for a company to be structured.
How people choose to organize themselves is their business, the government shouldn’t be picking and choosing structures it prefers. However, we’ve pretty much done that w/ the legal structures around corporations.
My solution here is to tear down the existing corporate structures and only have some kind of legal protection for sufficiently small orgs. For example, if your org has 50 employees and makes under 50M/year in revenue, you can apply for federal asset protection in exchange for submitting to regular audits. You would be disqualified from those protections if your net worth is above some amount, if you own a substantial stake in some number of companies, etc. The intention would be to give small companies some amount of protection so people actually want to start them, and once you start seeing success, then you’re expected to buy your own private insurance or whatever and do your due diligence to make sure your operations don’t harm others.
I would also like to see civil lawsuits be dramatically reduced in favor of actual criminal prosecutions. So if you’re being discriminated against or harassed at your job, you would go to the police and they would investigate and potentially arrest your employer, instead of going to a lawyer to seek a settlement from the company. The former gets results, the latter is a high enough barrier that most don’t bother.
Improving the lives of people should be the end goal, not profit.
Neither should be the end goal, the goal should be leaving people alone so they can pursue happiness on their own. The government shouldn’t protect me from making poor choices, and it shouldn’t prevent me from getting rich, it should prevent me from being taken advantage of and ensure I have whatever basic necessities I need to pursue happiness on my own.
I think we need some form of government, but I think that form needs to be very focused on providing limited, high quality services. Instead of welfare and retirement programs, just give poor people cash, whether young or old. Instead of complicated IP protections, let the courts deal with the general idea of “fraud” and “theft.” Instead of laws that say behavior must be within certain guidelines, prosecute actual harm (e.g. no tickets for “speeding,” but prosecute “reckless driving” heavily, as in actually endangering others). The government should only step in when absolutely necessary, and otherwise leave people alone.
In all honesty, the role of a legislator should be very boring, most days they should do absolutely nothing. We don’t need full-time representatives, we should have regular people that assemble whenever something truly important comes up, like maybe a few times per year or so. If the legislature doesn’t have enough power to favor or disfavor a given corporation (i.e. it doesn’t consider enough bills to matter), the corporation won’t bother lobbying them.
I think that sort of approach can self-correct and result in bad corporations failing and good corporations succeeding, because the financial and practical risk of bad behavior is high enough to discourage it.
Obviously, I haven’t dealt in specifics at all and I represented it in fairly extreme language to make a point. The idea I’m trying to convey is that I think less is more absolutely applies to the government, and we should strive to simplify it to where it’s transparent enough that the average person actually understands what government does.
The API changes were the last straw for me too, but I had been searching for a while because it felt very much like an echo-chamber. Lemmy does too, but at least the API is open.
By “far-left” you mean the pro-Russia and pro-China segment of this place? They seem more like government mouthpieces than people who actually support leftist policies (which don’t represent the policies of the Russian or Chinese government.
This place is also full of Blue MAGA liberals which I’d classify as right-wing at this point, so it seems there’s a whole spectrum of beliefs represented here.
They certainly are right-wingers when the support candidates and policies that are wholly right wing. I don’t care if they think they’re leftists just because they’re voting Democrat. They’re just deluding themselves. This is the origin of the adage “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” The Democrats haven’t represented the left in decades and now they’ve moved so far right that they’re aiding in genocide, fucking the working class, and prancing around the campaign trail with Dick Cheney
There sure is, including “vanguardism” which was what many conflate with totalitarianism because of how the Cold War shook out. Really, it was the success of anti-Communist propaganda in the Red Scares that has colored so much of our assumptions and talking points as well as the unbridled might of the American military to suppress and punish any nation that tried something other than subservience.
In what way would you classify the Chinese or Russian governments that these tankies support “communist?” That’s like believing that Nazis were a socialist party simply because that word is in the name.
Well that’s easy, I don’t. Looking at the actions of Putin or Xi Jinping and saying “this is a communist state that I fully endorse” doesn’t make sense to me. But I think there’s a lot of people that look at those countries through the historical lens and resonate with the aspirations and ideals of Marx and Lenin and other political thinkers of the era and get wrapped up in the association. And America has made it really easy to bash America, that tends to land you among modern and historical rivals.
At the extreme, sure. Authority/Anarchy isn’t a binary selection. (Fascism is an authoritarian position, specifically it’s a right-nationalist movement centered on cultural identity)
Pretty sure the one thing to say about fascism besides it being authoritarian is that it wants corporate control. Mussolini was debating calling it Corporatism.
And that is exactly the situation in Russia: it’s an
right-nationalist (“rescuing” suppressed people from the evil Ukraine - that one is super ironic because it’s exactly the same argumentation Germany used with the Sudetendeutsche)
authoritarian (arrests for holding up empty pieces of paper, drafting for the war - but only in the poor areas far away from Moscow) regime
centered on cultural identity (anti-gay laws, “restoring the CCCP”, persisting propaganda comparing the Ukraine war with WW2, "we have to defend ourselves from NATO)
It’s pretty late, so i don’t repeat the exercise for China or bring up more examples - i’m pretty sure that if you try to counter my points someone else will give you more examples.
At no point in here have I said that Russia isn’t a fascist state. It checks all the boxes: violent, authoritarian, nationalist, suppressing minorities and marginalized groups, single party, lots of corruption. You’re confusing my Communist sympathies with uncritical support for the modern regime dressed in red.
Hexbear is specifically the shitpost refuge of displaced terminally-online /r/chapotraphouse diaspora and it’s hard to parse the layers of irony and in-joke and I’m not invested enough in that community to try and fairly represent it here. I’m not surprised that people have an aversion to it but the amount of space it takes up in some people’s head here is bonkers. The goals and culture are very different than .ml.
Eh, it’s a center-left chamber at best. As evidenced by the extreme reaction to the far-left echo chambers.
Disagree, it’s pretty far left. Reddit was center-left, this is where those too far left for Reddit came as it shifted a little to the right with the top-down reaction to the API change.
You refer to .ml, but that’s not really left, it’s a tankie instance, which is closer to fascism than socialism. I see far more people on Lemmy idolizing communism/socialism than any other extreme ideology.
Aren’t the devs of Lemmy Marxist leninist or something and .ml is one of their instances?
That’s what they claim, but their moderation practices feel a lot more on the tankie spectrum than marxist leninist.
You’re oversimplifying (and so was I, to be totally fair). The Reddit exodus has lots of reasons. I think it has more to do with one’s thoughts on corporatization and technocultural knowledge which does correlate with left-leaning politics. I’m sure there are many who are just sick of platforms giving Trumpists tacit approval (I think this is the primary driver for people leaving twitter) but that Venn diagram is not a perfect circle.
.ml has tankies, and there’s plenty of fair criticism to direct at Dessalines and the mod team for generally cultivating a culture of knee-jerk anti-Western thought (and the inverse, more importantly) but it’s not “closer to fascism” because it leans authoritarian and drapes itself in USSR/CCP aesthetic. But it’s mostly a FOSS instance with well-deserved bashing of US imperialism and state-sponsored terrorism.
Tankies are pretty close to fascism, and tend to support regimes like in Russia the same as regimes in China. For them, the motivation doesn’t seem as motivated by economics as itvi government structure, since modern Russia is very far from socialist ideals. Basically, anything that goes against US interests is the priority, not economics as it would for your average socialist.
I think you’re losing some nuance but yeah “anything that goes against US interests is the priority” is a real problem in some leftist spaces (I was banned from /r/latestagecommunism for suggesting that maybe the things we hear about North Korea aren’t just Western lies to discredit a true Communist state.) Of the “big three” I see the most of that on lemmygrad so I don’t bother.
But there’s a scale of uncritical support and I think people use “tankie” a little too broadly to dismiss people rather than consider the different facets of belief. Online discourse sucks.
Agreed 100%. People also use “Nazi” way too liberally, and it’s really off-putting and cheapens the term for actual Nazis.
And there’s only so much nuance I’m going to put into a comment, but for “tankie,” I generally mean those who support authoritarian regimes because they stand up to the US, not because of their actual ideology. Supporting China, Russia, and NK in the same breath is nonsensical, especially since only one of those is actually somewhat communist and one is explicitly not. I get it, there are a lot of reasons to dislike the US, but that doesn’t make Russia and NK “good.”
And yeah, online discourse sucks, probably because we self-organize into echo chambers. Reddit was less bad when I joined, but pretty much any reasonably popular SM is problematic now.
I just hate their app and refuse to use it
Oh it’s a terrible app, just the worst.
Democratic market socialism is a perfectly moderate ideology (too moderate, because often it lets the market win over and the democracy decay). You can also consider weekends, paid leave, women’s vote, public education, healthcare, public media and social security as socialist policies. It is one of the main political currents founding the EU and in South America. Only in the US is it used to describe radicals or as an insult.
I’m even reluctant to point this out to magats now, because they never get the point and may even get it in their head that these are the things to destroy wherever they exist, just because they’re socialist in origin.
Sure, democratic socialism is center left, I’m talking about actual socialism, which gets promoted here quite a bit. Reddit was mostly dem socs and welfare state proponents, Lemmy takes it a bit further.
Yes, but that is no reason to disparage socialism itself. In authoritarian socialism, it is the authoritarian part that sucks.
Democratic socialism isn’t socialism though, it’s capitalism with lots of government services.
The authoritarian part is pretty much baked in to “real” socialism since you need something to control the means of production until society is ready, and that hasn’t yet happened. Yes, there are other theorized structures, but they’re unproven.
Tankies (i.e. many of those on .ml) are into the authoritarian part, whereas people here are more into democratic socialism, which is another thing entirely.
Yes, indeed, socialism is an intellectual offshoot of capitalism/liberalism/enlightenment (not neoliberalism, of course) that emerged as a reaction to the industrial revolution (and the French revolution, or you could go as far back as the English civil war, with the levellers) as a reaction to the wealth inequality it creates and it predates Marxism, but communism coopted the term and made it seem exclusively authoritarian (because that was supposedly the only way to beat capital).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism#Etymology
The history of terms isn’t particularly relevant, though it is interesting. For example, “libertarianism” largely came from socialism, and “liberalism” largely meant “small government,” whereas today libertarianism is pretty close to what liberalism used to mean, and “liberals” are in favor of large government.
Here’s what I mean by each term:
I think socialism as defined above is unworkable because bureaucrats will abuse their power, communism is unworkable because people are selfish, and Democratic socialism is tricky because a large state tends to restrict the freedoms of its people. That’s why I align with libertarianism, but am on the left end where I believe there should be wealth redistribution through something like UBI (I prefer Negative Income Tax), so you get most of the benefits of socialism (everyone gets what they need) without most of the bureaucracy (no application process other than tax return).
It depends on where you draw the line for “the center.” I’d agree it’s leftist for America, but it’s center-left on a global scale. You’ll usually get some push back if you promote true leftist politics. Usually more agreement than dissent, but still some.
Sure, the US does skew right. I do think Lemmy is pretty far left even compared to areas like Europe that are further left from the US. It’s kind of hard to gauge whether people are serious about things like “guillotine the rich” (or Luigi references) or exaggerating, but you don’t see that type of talk on popular subreddits (even before the crackdown), at least I didn’t, and coming to Lemmy was a bit of a shift left from what I already saw as “center left.”
I am a bit left of center in the US and pretty centrist on a global scale, and I lean fairly libertarian. I’m left of most libertarian candidates in the US, supporting things like UBI as an alternative to welfare programs. So I think I have a decent perspective on what’s left and right.
I started at your position a long time ago, when I was a teenager. I realized libertarians are full of shit, and eventually discovered a better descriptor of my beliefs was anarchist (in particular, social anarchist). I think the government shouldn’t be telling people how to live or what they can or can’t do. It should be there to protect people (emphasis; not corporations).
Libertarians (in the US at least) are really just anarcho-capitalists. They want freedom for businesses, but usually at the expense of freedom for people. They don’t want protection for people from exploitation. They want businesses with enough money to be able to exert their authority as far as possible, to the extent of blocking competition and effectively creating slaves. (They’ll argue they don’t agree with slavery, but what’s the difference between your employer owning your ability to live and slavery?)
I have serious practical concerns with anarchism, but that is certainly the ideal.
I started life as a conservative, mostly because I bought into the lie that they actually wanted smaller government. Ron Paul got me excited because he actually wanted smaller government, but seeing him get trashed by the establishment pushed me out. Around that time I found Penn Jillette (libertarian anarchist), and he really resonated with me.
I dislike the Libertarian Party, but I have liked individuals within it, and that generally seems the most likely party to actually make a difference (i.e. get on a debate stage so people can hear a different perspective). My ballot is all over the place though, with a mixture of Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, and sometimes a random third party if the candidate is good.
But yeah, I just want to be left alone, and if we need a government (I think we do), it should be limited to protecting us from each other and ensuring everyone has the necessities. Other than that, business should be largely unrestrained and unprotected (limited liability should end after a certain size, execs should be arrested if they break the law, etc), and there should be strong support from government to protect privacy. Consumer protections should largely be unnecessary if the market is sufficiently competitive, and ending protectionism should provide that, but consumer protections should be provided by the AG leading lawsuits against companies.
I think “classical liberal” is the better term for me, but “libertarian” gets the message across pretty well, and I identify with the NAP underpinnings of the ideology. I’m registered with the party to increase the stats of third parties to hopefully encourage electoral reform (end FPTP), not because I think they’re great.
You should have serious practical concerns with everything. My practical concerns with libertarianism is what led me to social anarchism. For example:
Why? Why would ending protectionism necessarily demand competition? Without government stepping in, why wouldn’t the largest companies create barriers that prevent competition? They can user their capital to undercut competitors until they can’t remain solvent, then increase prices far above cost. They can also buy out competitors before they are real competition. They can use their market dominance to demand suppliers to show their product more prominently, or to only show their product.
There are far too many ways the dominant company can curtail competition, and we’ve seen it played out many times even with our current system that Libertarians want to remove the guardrails from. For example, items listed on Amazon that sell moderately well, Amazon creates knockoffs for. They then sell them at a cheaper price under the “Amazon Basic” name until the original is gone, and then they increase prices. This is what the free market looks like.
This is the kind of thing that led me to social anarchism. People are the important thing, not companies. We need a government that’s empowered to protect people, but that let’s people do what they want (assuming they don’t hurt other people). Ideally also we remove hierarchy from the companies and have them owned by employees or the people also. Letting them treat humans as a human resource (which is crazy that HR can be called that and people don’t see a problem) is the issue. Improving the lives of people should be the end goal, not profit.
Right now, corporations get off w/ light fines and their execs don’t face jail time because of the explicit and implied protections in our legal system. Companies can declare bankruptcy without reaching into the pockets of those w/ a significant interest in the company because of financial protections, and prosecutors very rarely pursue criminal charges for something done in a business context. The larger a company is, the less likely it is to fail, but also the less competitive it is, because it can just buy legislators to block competition.
Here’s the current lifecycle of a corporation:
At step 2, companies are vulnerable to scrappy startups, but by the time they get to step 3, it’s too late to hold them accountable since they can just drown them out w/ negative press, lawsuits regarding regulations (and few consequences for trollish suits), etc.
I believe that if we cut corporate protectionism (say, for anything 2 or above) and hold execs legally liable for harm their products produce, we’ll largely stop the flow from 2 to 3 and largely force those at 3 and 4 to improve their behavior. You wouldn’t get situations like Boeing since the execs responsible would’ve been in jail at the first instance and the rest would follow for subsequent instances.
Our current strategy seems to be to pass regulations to improve the behavior of corporations, but corporations naturally sidestep the law and pay off legislators to make the consequences small. Instead, we should be making it unprofitable for corporations to lobby legislators and hold them accountable w/ law enforcement and the judicial system. Make laws extremely simple so there’s no wiggle room, such as if your product harms someone and you knew enough to have prevented it, you go to jail and need to make full restitution to the injured parties, and anything you earned while working there is available to make that restitution (smaller companies would have protections, but also limitation on how much profit they can pull from the corp).
In short, make it extremely unlikely a company will get powerful enough in the first place. The smaller a corporation is, the more protections it should get, not the reverse.
I haven’t seen those originals disappear, and I’ve heard a ton of complaints from people about the low quality of many Amazon Basics products. The only ones I’ve personally found value in are their rechargeable batteries (basically rebranded Eneloop) and their mice (backup only, they suck to use), but pretty much everything else has been poor quality.
Agreed. I do think that employee owned companies are the ideal, but they’re not the only way for a company to be structured.
How people choose to organize themselves is their business, the government shouldn’t be picking and choosing structures it prefers. However, we’ve pretty much done that w/ the legal structures around corporations.
My solution here is to tear down the existing corporate structures and only have some kind of legal protection for sufficiently small orgs. For example, if your org has 50 employees and makes under 50M/year in revenue, you can apply for federal asset protection in exchange for submitting to regular audits. You would be disqualified from those protections if your net worth is above some amount, if you own a substantial stake in some number of companies, etc. The intention would be to give small companies some amount of protection so people actually want to start them, and once you start seeing success, then you’re expected to buy your own private insurance or whatever and do your due diligence to make sure your operations don’t harm others.
I would also like to see civil lawsuits be dramatically reduced in favor of actual criminal prosecutions. So if you’re being discriminated against or harassed at your job, you would go to the police and they would investigate and potentially arrest your employer, instead of going to a lawyer to seek a settlement from the company. The former gets results, the latter is a high enough barrier that most don’t bother.
Neither should be the end goal, the goal should be leaving people alone so they can pursue happiness on their own. The government shouldn’t protect me from making poor choices, and it shouldn’t prevent me from getting rich, it should prevent me from being taken advantage of and ensure I have whatever basic necessities I need to pursue happiness on my own.
I think we need some form of government, but I think that form needs to be very focused on providing limited, high quality services. Instead of welfare and retirement programs, just give poor people cash, whether young or old. Instead of complicated IP protections, let the courts deal with the general idea of “fraud” and “theft.” Instead of laws that say behavior must be within certain guidelines, prosecute actual harm (e.g. no tickets for “speeding,” but prosecute “reckless driving” heavily, as in actually endangering others). The government should only step in when absolutely necessary, and otherwise leave people alone.
In all honesty, the role of a legislator should be very boring, most days they should do absolutely nothing. We don’t need full-time representatives, we should have regular people that assemble whenever something truly important comes up, like maybe a few times per year or so. If the legislature doesn’t have enough power to favor or disfavor a given corporation (i.e. it doesn’t consider enough bills to matter), the corporation won’t bother lobbying them.
I think that sort of approach can self-correct and result in bad corporations failing and good corporations succeeding, because the financial and practical risk of bad behavior is high enough to discourage it.
Obviously, I haven’t dealt in specifics at all and I represented it in fairly extreme language to make a point. The idea I’m trying to convey is that I think less is more absolutely applies to the government, and we should strive to simplify it to where it’s transparent enough that the average person actually understands what government does.
I left because of the api changes and the excessive censorship (rip r/watchpeopledie my beloved) and it’s general hatred towards ita mobile website
The API changes were the last straw for me too, but I had been searching for a while because it felt very much like an echo-chamber. Lemmy does too, but at least the API is open.
By “far-left” you mean the pro-Russia and pro-China segment of this place? They seem more like government mouthpieces than people who actually support leftist policies (which don’t represent the policies of the Russian or Chinese government.
This place is also full of Blue MAGA liberals which I’d classify as right-wing at this point, so it seems there’s a whole spectrum of beliefs represented here.
also calling people blue maga is very disengenious, they arnt right wingers so please dont associate with them.
They certainly are right-wingers when the support candidates and policies that are wholly right wing. I don’t care if they think they’re leftists just because they’re voting Democrat. They’re just deluding themselves. This is the origin of the adage “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” The Democrats haven’t represented the left in decades and now they’ve moved so far right that they’re aiding in genocide, fucking the working class, and prancing around the campaign trail with Dick Cheney
the so-called left wing one are usually the ones we block , but they seem more like right wingers.
Wat
If this were a lefty echo chamber people wouldn’t hate .ml but they do.
Idolizing authoritarian governments isn’t “left” no matter how much they might think it is.
Anarchism isn’t the only way to be a leftist.
There’s an awful lot of space between authoritarianism and anarchism.
There sure is, including “vanguardism” which was what many conflate with totalitarianism because of how the Cold War shook out. Really, it was the success of anti-Communist propaganda in the Red Scares that has colored so much of our assumptions and talking points as well as the unbridled might of the American military to suppress and punish any nation that tried something other than subservience.
In what way would you classify the Chinese or Russian governments that these tankies support “communist?” That’s like believing that Nazis were a socialist party simply because that word is in the name.
Well that’s easy, I don’t. Looking at the actions of Putin or Xi Jinping and saying “this is a communist state that I fully endorse” doesn’t make sense to me. But I think there’s a lot of people that look at those countries through the historical lens and resonate with the aspirations and ideals of Marx and Lenin and other political thinkers of the era and get wrapped up in the association. And America has made it really easy to bash America, that tends to land you among modern and historical rivals.
You ignore 50% of the political compass here - authoritarianism sucks just as much as fascism or unbridled capitalism.
At the extreme, sure. Authority/Anarchy isn’t a binary selection. (Fascism is an authoritarian position, specifically it’s a right-nationalist movement centered on cultural identity)
Pretty sure the one thing to say about fascism besides it being authoritarian is that it wants corporate control. Mussolini was debating calling it Corporatism.
And that is exactly the situation in Russia: it’s an
It’s pretty late, so i don’t repeat the exercise for China or bring up more examples - i’m pretty sure that if you try to counter my points someone else will give you more examples.
At no point in here have I said that Russia isn’t a fascist state. It checks all the boxes: violent, authoritarian, nationalist, suppressing minorities and marginalized groups, single party, lots of corruption. You’re confusing my Communist sympathies with uncritical support for the modern regime dressed in red.
If .ml were a lefty echo chamber people wouldn’t hate hexbear, but they do.
Hexbear is specifically the shitpost refuge of displaced terminally-online /r/chapotraphouse diaspora and it’s hard to parse the layers of irony and in-joke and I’m not invested enough in that community to try and fairly represent it here. I’m not surprised that people have an aversion to it but the amount of space it takes up in some people’s head here is bonkers. The goals and culture are very different than .ml.