#libertarian socialism

[whereserpentswalk]

Nonsexual nudity needs to be fully accepted in our society. It should be legal in public. It should be allowed in media regardless of rating or target audience. There is nothing about the human body that is inherently harmful to see or inherently sexual. Reblog if you agree.

[blackcat-brazil]

[shroobles]

[wiki-fight]

[magnusthepuppet]

if you engage in infighting, you are useless as a leftist.

if you tell people to k*ll themselves, you are useless as a leftist.

if you do not believe in somebody’s ability to change, you are useless as a leftist.

if you do not practice nuanced thinking, you are useless as a leftist.

if you are unable to have compassion for your fellow human, you are useless as a leftist.

[nihilo-sensei]

Capitalism: "Look at all the mass surveillance in the Warsaw Pact states. We would never do that!"

Also capitalism: [Builds most sophisticated mass surveillance network in human history, most of it to better serve you ads with weird stock photos like someone putting an onion in their sock to cure their breast cancer or some shit.]

[progressive-politico]

Capitalism cannot exist without massive exploitation of the majority of the people on our planet.

[satyrradio]

every single ancap argument is so backwards like. "whose gonna stop me from owning private property in an anarchist society" who is gonna enforce your 'ownership' in the first place?? 💀💀

[scottishcommune]

"The Rojava revolution’s economic plan is called a “People’s Economy” to differentiate it from traditional market and socialist (i.e. state) economies. But though it posits itself as an alternative to the dualism of capitalism and communism, it is really not a fully formed model as of yet. There are three major concepts in the People’s Economy: commons, private property based on use, and worker-administered businesses. The Rojava economic experiment is less an implementation of a single concept than a jury-rigged system that must respond to the needs of a war and a crippling economic embargo....

Traditional “private property” was abolished in late 2012, meaning all buildings, land, and infrastructure fell under control of the various city councils. This did not mean people no longer owned their homes or businesses, however. The councils implemented an “ownership by use” sovereign principle, a principle that could not be overturned by any council. Ownership by use means that when a building like a home or a business is being used by a person or persons, the users would in fact own the land and structures but would not be able to sell them on an open market. Öcalan wrote that use ownership is what prevents speculation and capital accumulation which in turn leads to exploitation. Aside from property owned by use, in principle any other property would become commons. This abolishing of private property did not extend to commodities like automobiles, machines, electronics, furniture, etc. but was limited to land, infrastructure, and structures.

The commons encompasses land, infrastructure, and buildings not owned by individuals but held in stewardship by the councils. Councils can turn over these public goods to individuals to be used. Commons are conceived of as a way to provide both a safety net for those without resources and a way to maximize use of the material resources of the community. Commons also include the ecological aspects of the region including water, parks, wildlife and wilderness, and even most livestock. According to Dr. Ahmad Yousef, an economic co-minister, three-quarters of traditional private property is being used as commons and one quarter is still being owned by use of individuals. The PEP posits that the commons are robust enough economically that there is no need for taxes, and since the beginning of the Rojava revolution there have been no taxes of any type."

- A Mountain River Has Many Bends

[hakaiika]

Study progress for Project HECoPS!

(P.s, blurred out bits are so I dont dox myself!)

[breawycker]

People talk about human rights in like the US versus so called "socialist" countries (USSR, Cuba, China, etc which I do not support) or other authoritarian countries as if people didn't have to fight and die for those rights. The government didn't just end slavery, allow women and people of color to vote, have better labor laws, queer rights, etc. The government did horrible things to those who tried to fight slavery or get better working conditions. How much opposition there was to these groups. We don't have to even think about how in the future people will look back and see us as backwards for not supporting these issues because a lot of them are just the same issues we've been fighting and supporting for years. Especially since the government can just erase our rights like with Roe v. Wade or all the anti-trans and racist laws. How many people died in the civil rights movement before the state was like fine we'll give you the bare minimum? How many more will die for us to keep the scraps they give us? We come out in the millions and yet the bombings in Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Palestine, and Lebanon continued. When are we all going to get together and decided "Enough"?

[whereserpentswalk]

I don't dream of a future where little girls grow up wanting to be ceos, or lockheed martin scientists, or soldiers, or whatever a human recourses developer is. I dream of a world where girls grow up wanting to be occultist practitioners, and sex workers, and unhinged artists, and boys.

[blackcat-brazil]

[shroobles]

[evpath]

Power breeds Parasites, Long live Anarchy. -Makhnovist Moto

[phantalgia]

Prohibition of Political Discussion In Communities is Dangerous

People don’t like talking about politics. Oh they really hate it. They don’t like people who talk about politics and they want their communities clean of politics. But it doesn't take to long to think of how dangerous this sentiment is. And I'll explain.

Depoliticization in a Queer Community

There is a video of Slavoj Zizek doing a lecture where he has controversally stated that there is nothing revolutionary about being trans (I’m butchering it and probably making it unnuanced but that's the essense of what I took). He was explaining specifically that being trans has pretty much been swallowed up by liberal recuperation. And from that standpoint it makes sense.

Among many individuals I talked to in the queer community there is no consensus on ANYTHING. I have yet to see it. Many don’t really bother too much with the theory behind being queer at all. This can be ok and just shows how normalizaed being queer is becoming which is great. However, among the queer community you are much more likely to find very left leaning people among all across the spectrum. But that's just a minority. Usually it's just very liberal minded individuals literally and metaphorically. A lot of times you can find right wingers, which is strange of course.

One queer community I’m in has made it a rule to exclude any political discussion. Granted, queer politics has remained. But I thought this was strange as there is clearly an inevitable tendancy for some things to turn political. And that point is important. Many things have an inevitable tendancy towards becoming political debate. For most of the 2000s it really seemed like queerness was being detatched from any political connotations, slowly. Until much more recently, this trend has reversed, especially among trans individuals. Which again, tells us that everything has the tendancy towards becoming political issues. So why detach queerness from politics and the very revolutionary act of transforming oneself into an enlightened state just as much as society needs it?

Politics Is Everyday Life, Get Used To It

If I may vent out my frustrations, politics is just a fact of life. You MUST be apart of the discussion process on any issue. Any desire to detach oneself from the act of politics must come from a place of selfishness or immaturaty. But to be fair, it tends to come from an intentional effort to make people disillusioned with politics. Many people feel they have no say amongst politics so why does it matter? And you know what, that's a fair point. It's also fair to say the education hurdles are huge and take a lifetime lf work so why bother?

I Get It, Modern Politics Sucks

Ive talked about this before. Modern political discussion is nothing but arguments and the flexing of knowledge about niche and obscure topics. And once it comes down to it, you're really electing individuals to do the politics for you. Your hope is that they're smart enough to make decisions on your best interest.

But what do these people do? Even if they have at least some semblance of social progressivism it's often very symbolic and often insulting to very real minority groups. "They don’t do enough for me! Why should I bother voting for them?" And those are fair points. It doesn't address anything and just becomes insulting to minority groups and condesending to groups who don’t get it (this I think is a general problem among the left, not just centrists and liberals and is something I want to get into at a later date).

Any imagining of alternatives to current forms of political discussion are often nullified. Instead, we have "debate bros" and two candidates flexing their egos on live TV (for the boomers), and online. They don’t do anything except flex ego, knowledge, and speak about their "truth". I've made this argument before and that's political discussion today is just unhealthy.

Existential Issues Vs. Physical Issues

One problem is that many issues debated are existential or abstract in nature. The debates surrounding queerness, identity, and kids is just too abstract and existential that many minds repel critical thinking. The issues surrounding economy are just too existential and abstract that, again, many minds just repel the possibility of more nuanced discussion. Some people are just on different levels of existance. They can't think past what is familiar to them, this is something I often struggle with and why, for example, philosophy can often be challenging.

But some issues are physical and local. For example, a local river is polluted and a city had to do something about it. Most people would like to get it solved right then and there and be done with it. Then we can move on. Oftentimes, the physical and existential come together. Say climate change or COVID-19. What happens then? They become very mooted existential issues rather than real physical ones as they should.

Why We Need Political Discussion In Communities

In our online spaces there is a tendancy to believe that the internet is not reallife and all discussion of politics should not exist. Instead, the internet is a place to escape to. Which is clearly not the case given much of what goes on here is a reflection of the real world, not against it.

But the number one reason why our communities need political discussion is an obvious one, it's just dangerous to not allow it. I have increasingly seen more and more communities turn away from politics in the most dire times. Which is now. This spells out ignorance, docility, and a quick road to fascism.

It's strange to think people don’t seem to find the contridiction in getting politics out of things when political discussion is essential to a healthy democracy and beyond that, existance regardless of if it's democracy or not. There is often political calls to depoliticize issues when they arrise and this happens a lot in politics. For some examples...

Many Republicans try to decouple politics from mass shootings by using their "thoughts and prayers" as the closest thing to any political action. Many argue for the depoliticization of being queer so they can "live in peace" making the mistake that being queer, let alone HUMAN, is inherently a political thing.

I feel like it's difficult to explain exactly why just existance is political and nobody can disengage from politics and all acts in life are political but I want to try my best to explain...

Why Existence and Everything Is Inherently Political

I think the problem here is what people think of when they hear the word "politics". Perhaps it's a donkey and an elephant. Abortion, taxes, fiscal policy, or foreign policy. But let's bring the word "politics" back to its roots.

"Politics" the word comes from Ancient Greece meaning "affairs of the cities" (I mean this is straight from wikipedia, so you can find this pretty quickly). It's just how decisions are made among groups of people and how power and resources are distributed. Ok, so now the word politics is much more broad, it doesn't just mean GOP vs Democrat. This can include municipal, town, neighborhood, state. And affairs can be like the polluted river example.

So then we as citizens have a political duty to something. Because we are apart of some group or a collection of groups. In this case those groups are AT LEAST family to city to country to the planet. You do politics in just your family alone, what to eat and where, and who is doing the dishes if there's any strict rules to begin with. There are people now doing politics for you, making politics before you, and will after you. What comes out of these collections of historical and present political decisions becomes the environment YOU GROW UP IN.

What does this mean? That you are the product and are influenced by these political decisions and we can throw economic ones in there too because they're connected. The culture you become accustomed to. The communties you interact with, the media you consume each have a taste of those collected political decsions throughout history from Ancient Greece to modern capitalist liberal democracy in 2024. I hope you enjoy my butchered historical materialism. Anyway, I think we can take an EXTREME example of why something seemingly innocuous can be political. Let's take brainrot as an example.

"How The Fuck Is Brainrot Political?!"

If I told you that skibidi sigma rizz was fr fr ong political you'd probably think I was the jonkler from Ohio (I can't believe I said that but Im dying laughing right now). But, let's go through it. How the hell does the collective actions of political decision-making lead to brainrot as a phenomenon?

I think it's easy to imagine how economic and political decisions on young people, large tech companies and their influence in shaping culture through the help of Washington and the capitalist structure rewards this reshaping of young minds with profits to those firms. What matters is an algorithm that brings in the most profits effeciently, effeciently in the neoclassical economist sense, not in an ethical sense.

The content produced by people individually can be seen as an expression of the times. Brainrot and all that shitposting is an expression of the cynicism of contemporary times. A reflection of the absurdity of modern culture, modern economy, modern politics, being self perpetuating through its hypernormalization. The capitalist enterprises take advantage of this and CONTINUE TO PERPETUATE IT. Reinforcing itself. There may have been no intial political intent to create brainrot, but it's existence is a product of all those past and present political decisions.

So I could say that videos of horses eating hay being filmed in a funny angle is political just in an indirect way. The videos created by themselves reflect the political world indirecty, the politics that created the internet, the real world politics shaping internet culture. But once it is recognized and circulated as a meme, it grabs the attention of algorithms and can become commodified and becomes apart of the internet culture. Again, reflecting the absurd nature of the real world. This isn't to say that it can't be entertaining without political or economic context, but that it reinforces cultural and societal attitudes of a given time.

As absurd as this was, I hope this can help people understand what some mean when they say things like "all art is political". It's difficult to fully explain, especially given how abstract it is and how attuned we become to just passively consuming media isolated from current material conditions. This is something I want to talk about further, especially in light of the "controversy" surrounding Tim Cain's (Fallout creator) video and comment on capitalism and Fallout.

So, What Are The Solutions?

We Need To Rethink Political Discussion

Modern political discussion sucks. Watching streamers, drama freaks, and debate bros talk isn't helping and is only good for ragebait. What is the solution? Really, I don’t entirely know but I have some vague ideas.

YouTuber Zoe Bee points out that facts don’t change minds, stories do. And I think that's one place to start. I have said this before that you must introduce people to your world. What you see and think. And you must engage with the other party's world. Try to challenge their world a little bit, you probably won't get anywhere. But you can at least try to humanize your views instead of using facts. And maybe plant a seed in their mind that needs time for growth.

I really think truth is out the window. Again, people love to point out at facts. And what x,y,z person or group did to a,b,c person or group. They will go deeper down the rabbit holes of things and frankly, there's just too many rabbit holes to go down.

Facts and truth don’t matter in the face of information overload, or if they can be whisked away with conspiracy theories, whether true or false. So instead, we need core values and beliefs and to be critical of our inherent beliefs about the world and living as a whole. Not specific issues. If any issues, broader ones.

Communities Need Spaces Where Political Discussion Can Happen

Communties need to foster spaces that allow for political discussion. Perhaps such a platform needs to be heavily moderated and parties need to be aware of the risks involved with engaging in such a space. Which also need solutions. Perhaps the tools we use for allowing political discussion must be shaped in a way that allows for no judgement, allow critique, and reassurance?

Political discussion is the make or break for relationships with people. So we must be vigilant to ensure that we can humanize discussion and ensure our tools for discussion are as well humanized.

These spaces should obviously be seperate from the main community. A little corner where this can take place among a community. Perhaps with an acknowledgement system an agreement to? Unfourtunately some social media platforms make carving out a little corner difficult. Some are easier.

Social Media Networks Should Allow Anonymity

This is more up to those networks rather than people. But anonymity can reduce the burden of being made fun of for certain views, beliefs, opinions, and ideas. Of course, people can make seperate accounts to achieve this, but many people like to keep one account and that's fair. Perhaps there are work arounds to ensure anonymity?

Temporary Indirect Forum Styles

Another idea is to have political discussions be based in forum style to allow people to fully articulate the nuances of their arguments in a single post. Then, instead of getting troll replies, there could be a way in which individuals must respond to those posts via seperate forum posts. Of course, you could just retain the original forum style and just ensure rules are in place that prevent trolls or unenlightening replies. But this idea is mostly to prevent some anxieties associated with how people might react. These forums would also disappear over a set period of time and can be chosen by the creator. Of course, that can have the opposite effect and have people ensure there is a record of posts by screenshotting.

Parties Must Consent

Consent to discussion is key, and opening it up with a friendly demeanor is important. Communities should give consenting parties the space they want to discuss poltical issues, especially with opposing parties.

Political Discussion Coincides With Education

The hurdle of becoming educated in political issues is immense. As I stated way earlier, it can take a lifetime even. We're constantly learning. So political discussion must be a place to educate as well. This is why the flexing of knowledge is quite useless and aggravating because it just leads to snobby remarks and oppression to unlearned parties (you were unlearned once, still are, and always learning). I am still guilty of this habit. It's still heirarchal which must be unlearned. It comes from a place of wanting control.

Once people can see or be a part of discussions and hear from people more knowledgable on things, this can create more thinking people. But it cant be from a place of "dumb vs. smart". Such distinctions don’t exist and if it comes to that point then they can become ad hominem or personal attacks.

Spaces must provide resources or allow people to ask questions and more. Again, humanizing is important.

Conclusion

I want to wrap this up. At the end of the day, we are political creatures interacting with a political world regardless of whatever political system we're in. We must be aware of our mutual dependency on each other and that we don’t need people to do the politics for us. We're better than the debate bros. We're better than to exclude political discussion in our communities. We need it in order for our existence to survive, for minority groups to survive. We must engage critically. Not resign from the world.