Comment on Just give me someone to vote for who is normal
BennyTheExplorer@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Um no, that is not what the “left” thinks.
There are a lot of radically different “left wing” ideologies. The quote, you claim to be left wing could probably be attributed to social democrats, maybe socialists, although not really. And that quote doesn’t really represent a good summary of what they believe.
I, for example am pretty far to the left, I am an anarchist. I believe, that all forms of unjust hierarchy are a bad thing, be it a companie’s CEO or a government and I advocate for flat hierarchies and the organization of society via specialized assemblies. And of course the ownership of workers of the means of production.
So, I guess I would agree with your quote, as I am against exploitation from the government and from billionaires. I just think, that corruption is the wrong way to look at it. The way, capitalism is going right now is not corruption in the sense that is an “error” in the system. Nor is it the fault of individuals or a group of people. It’s just that capitalism is set up in a way, that it naturally produces and needs these crisees, like faciasm to once again violently reinforce itself and live on. Capitalism will inevitaly lead to concentration of wealth and power, because of the power imbalance between worker and employer. And this leads to imbalances in power, which you could call corruption.
So, in summary, your statement could be considered leftist, as that is pretty close to what leftists believe. It’s just that a lot of leftists go a bit further and analyze the issue on a systemic level rather than an individual one.
Gorilladrums@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
What exactly do you think is a just hierarchy? Where is the line?
BennyTheExplorer@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
There is none. That’s why I am an anarchist. I guess, I worded that in a bad way.
Gorilladrums@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Okay, how exactly do you think things like crime, inequality, or general societal order should be handled?
BennyTheExplorer@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
That’s a hard one. And I will admit, that I don’t know everything. I generally think of anarchism not as a perfectly thought out system, that I could implement tomorrow, but as a utopian vision, we should strive towards. But I will give my best shot at answering this.
I’ll start with the easiest one: inequality. My vision of anarchism is very inspired by the ideas of Marx, so I believe that all economic activity should be full owned and controlled by workers in some kind of democratic system. My idea would be to organize the economy via “workers councils” where decisions are reached through mutual negotiations ideally with concencus based decision making. In these councils, every worker, that would be affected by the decisions could participate and have equal power. Of course there would ideally be mechanisms to encourage all to partipate in these decision making processes etc.
There would of course be no one at the top, that makes much more than other people so I don’t really see a way, where inequality would meaningfully arise.
The general societal order (I guess you mean decision making processes) would be handled in a similar way, so in councils where everyone can participate.
Crime, and general disturbances to the social order would have to be handled through social conditioning and preventative action. One important factor in this is that most crimes happen due to inequality and people acting out of desperation. That source would be probably mostly eliminated. Things like bigotry or rape or something are also, in my opinion happening in a lot of cases because of external social conditioning, so we would have to radically rethink things like education, parenting etc. The capital class also loves to push racism, sexism etc. through the media they controll to protect their own interests. The bugiorsy would of course not exist in my vision of anarchism. Trauma from war or other forms of capitalist exploitation, which could cause you to be sick and do crimes would of course also not exist, because there would be no capitalism nor imperialist nation states.
And still, we could not control for everything. For these cases, we would have to come together as the affected communities and decide on a cases by case basis. There should of course be general rules the community agreed on, but the circumstances should also be considered. A potential action for these cases could be rehabilitation, therapy ect., helping the victims fix the harm caused by the crime and in extreme cases maybe shunning an individual from a community. Maybe we would also need something prison-like for really extreme cases, but I am not really sure about that.
If you want to look at some real world examples, of how (imperfect, but still impressive) real world implementations of this could look like, look at anarchist Spain, Rojava or the Zapatistas. I will note though, that Rojava and the Zapatistas don’t call themselves anarchist, but their ideas are still really closely aligned with what I am talking about.