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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • The hate largely comes from the side of anarchists who refuse to work with MLs and spend their time trying to discredit the accomplishments of existing socialist states.

    You have been discrediting the accomplishments of anarchists while I have been acknowledging the accomplishments of marxists.

    While the left bickers, the right is rapidly growing in power in vast majority of western countries.

    I agree, but remember this conversation was started because you were insinuating that anarchists never accomplished anything.


  • This is getting repetitive and we’re just talking past each other so let’s just agree to disagree about the USSR. I just want to make the point - which I hope we can agree on - that the revolution wouldn’t have been successful without political pluralism within the ranks, and no future revolution will either. Dismissing the contributions of anarchists will only harm your cause.


  • What I’m pointing out is that all ideologies compete with others. That’s the reality of the world. If Anarchists are not able to defend the way they want to organize society then their ideology ends up being trampled by others. That’s the world we live in. Calling this victim blaming doesn’t change the material reality of the world.

    The Bolsheviks’ had the ill-gotten might to push their agenda, but might does not make right. The Bolsheviks lied to and used the anarchists to achieve what they did, but anarchists have learned from their past mistakes and will prove you wrong.

    USSR existed under siege from global capitalism throughout its whole existence, and that was the reason it was organized the way it was.

    Capitalist aggression did not make necessary the regressive views on social issues and science the USSR had (which resulted in famine), nor the widespread corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency of state officials. You cannot simply excuse all flaws of the USSR by blaming global capitalism.


  • You’re using the same argument capitalists use to dismiss socialism, namely that socialism clearly doesn’t work because all socialist projects ended in collapse or continue in a state of poverty. This is, in essence, victim-blaming. Just as socialism struggles under the oppression of capitalist hegemony, anarchism struggles under the oppression of both capitalists and statists.

    What Bolsheviks achieved was the betrayal of all who fought for the liberation of the proletariat. If power had gone to the Soviets as the Bolsheviks promised then the USSR would not have collapsed under the weight of its’ contradictions. You speak as if the USSR only repressed the forces of reaction, but it also repressed the very same workers it claimed to support when they tried to claim the worker control of the means of production they were promised.


  • Nah, I’m going by the actual tangible achievements, or lack of thereof as the case may be, of anarchists based on the teachings of their thinkers.

    The Bolsheviks discount anarchist achievements by claiming them as their own. Anarchists fought alongside the Bolsheviks because they promised to realize the anarchists’ goal of all power to the Soviets. When it became clear the Bolsheviks lied in order to selfishly establish themselves as the intelligentsia, a privileged class, the anarchists resisted and were violently repressed by their former brothers and sisters in arms.

    I would like to hear about your experiences growing up in the USSR as I know there were many positive aspects, but by betraying the values for which many of the revolutionaries fought they created a society with an unstable foundation, as evidenced by its’ eventual collapse. Anarchists did not reject real world solutions, they defended them with their lives and lost. The Bolsheviks have themselves to blame for the collapse.


  • You claim to know with great detail and certainty what anarchists believe without citing any anarchist thinkers. All you are doing is constructing a strawman of anarchists based on vibes hoping that none will be here to refute it. Anarchy is more than the absence of the state, and none who are knowledgeable posit that anarchy will materialize without effort. Anarchists are idealists not out of naivete, but necessity. It has been born out of history that when means and ends are not unified, the means become the ends. This was true of the Russian revolution when “all power to the Soviets” became hollow words and “war communism” became the new oppressor of the people.




  • Your anecdote seems to support that it’s a learned behavior/skill, which tracks for me. I have a very active internal dialogue that’s difficult to turn off. I say dialogue instead of monologue because I often make up “other voices” that bounce ideas off each other, and this generally happens without my conscious effort. I think I developed this because as I was growing up I was encouraged to pray regularly, and I was very fanatically religious as a kid so I did so as often as I could. I prayed silently so often in fact that my thoughts were basically a constant one-sided monologue directed to god. Whenever I would daydream or let my imagination wander I would imagine god responding, and eventually the constant monologue became a dialogue. I would work out problems or make decisions by having conversations with an imaginary god. When I stopped believing in god the second voice never went away, I just started recognizing it as my own.




  • Schmoo@slrpnk.nettomemes@lemmy.worldHe is the man
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    2 months ago

    Who is this man?

    Some random white dude in historical clothing.

    How does his death help us?

    I don’t know, should I be concerned? Is this man in danger!?

    Why is it important that we remember him?

    I don’t who this dude is, why do you want him dead? Should I contact the authorities!?




  • Wikipedia - While the Wikimedia Foundation itself is hierarchical, it manages Wikipedia through a process of community-led governance. Every article is maintained by a community of volunteers who engage in open debate to decide on content moderation policies. Wikipedia remains one of the few popular websites to avoid the recent internet enshittification.

    Food Not Bombs - An activist organization that serves free food. FNB has no central organizing body, instead operating as a loose-knit group of independent collectives who voluntarily cooperate and exchange information and resources with one another. One specific collective, “A Food Not Bombs Menu,” has taken to coordinating the global activities of FNB collectives and helping people start new ones, but has no power over any others.

    IWW - The Industrial Workers of the World, while hierarchical, ensures a hierarchy that is accountable to its’ rank and file members by means of a robust democratic process, as well as the right of any member union or individual member to leave at anytime and go it alone.

    There are many more, but it’s late and it took me a while to pick out what I think are good representative examples of different ways an organization can be run well.



  • Schmoo@slrpnk.nettoChat@beehaw.orgThe Lesser of Two Genocides
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    4 months ago

    the only political currency left to us being our votes

    I agree with a lot of what you’re saying, and I understand your concern for what it means that our lesser of 2 evils now supports a genocide. That being said, thinking that voting is our only means of affecting change made this rightward shift inevitable in our 2-party system influenced primarily by wealth.

    I know this may be hard to hear, but our democracy - in isolation - was doomed to fail from the start. The only positive changes to our government were made not as a result of voting, but of direct action, which always has been and remains to be our most valuable political currency.

    If you focus on the vote as being the only way to make change, then voting is indeed pointless, and that realization can only lead to doomerism and despair. However, understanding how insignificant the vote is is the first step to understanding how much more significant your other choices can be. When you know that organizing mutual aid, protesting, unionizing, and otherwise engaging in direct action is the most effective way to change things, the hard choice of how to cast your vote becomes much easier.

    Personally, I will be voting uncommitted in the primary, and for Biden in the general, so that the Dems get some kind of message while I also buy time before the decline. Yes, it bothers me to vote for a man who is complicit in genocide, but knowing how little my vote matters allows me to give it a very small amount of thought and dedicate the rest of my energy to more important matters.



  • Schmoo@slrpnk.nettoMemes@lemmy.mlSpices too
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    5 months ago

    Younger guy from the southern US here, I have done this just to fuck with people. I’m just not very sensitive to the “bite” onions are supposed to have. I can chop quite a few of them before my eyes start to water.