BennyTheExplorer
@BennyTheExplorer@lemmy.world
- Comment on Nice 1 week ago:
While I mostly agree, it would be a lie to say that the working class people in Israel would be opposed to the violence used in Palestine.
For an IDI survey conducted at the end of July, researchers asked, “to what extent are you personally troubled or not troubled by the reports of famine and suffering among the Palestinian population in Gaza?”
Over three-quarters of Jewish Israelis — 79% — were not that troubled or not troubled at all. Jewish Israelis also said they believe the Israeli military is doing enough to avoid unnecessary suffering.
Over half said it was important to free the remaining hostages.Only 6% argued the war should end because “of the great cost in human life” and a desire for peace.
Unfortunately, the population in Israel seems to have mostly bought into the propaganda and the racism / Jewish surpremacy and there is probably no going back from it, if you don’t do something like the denazification project in Germany. The opposition to the war in Israel comes mainly from a desire to free the Israeli hostages, not a critique of the warcrimes / genocide.
You have to understand, that this genocide didn’t start with October 7th, it started about 100 years ago, when the settler colonial project in Palestine first began. If the Israelis were opposed to the violence, they probably wouldn’t have moved to Israel or stayed there in the first place.
The working class doesn’t profit from this genocide, but they can unfortunately be pretty easily won over by bigotry.
- Comment on Just give me someone to vote for who is normal 1 week ago:
One point, I will specifically respond to is your claim about Marxism. This random article neatly summarizes the views of Marx towards revolution: polsci.institute/…/marx-vision-capitalism-to-comm….
Marx’s theories consisted mostly of criticizing capitalism and it’s exploitation and international inconaitancies. He believed that there was an inevitable progression from feudalism to capitalism to communism, mostly because the internal inconsistencies of capitalism would lead to collapse. In my opinion, he was right about the internal inconsistencies of capitalism, but wrong about that this would necessary lead to a workers revolution. One such breaking point was the great depression in 1929, where a some states actually went the opposite route and fell to fascism. Facism ensured, that the working class was pacified with making the lives of minorities worse, which was almost as good as actually making their own lives better. Capitalists could continue what they were doing and after Germany was defeated, they could roll back the worst excesses of facism and call it progress (Fyi: I am obviously not saying, that it was not progress, what I am saying is that facism successfully prevented a workers revolution in Germany).
So you could criticize Marx for predicting this wrong.
Another aspect, that you could criticize Marx for is that he never really specified how a revolution would exactly work. This seems to be the core of your confusion. He only said, that the workers would rise up, establish majority rule by workers, seize the means of production and finally abolish the state. He never specified how they would do that. That was also the reason, why it was so easily abused for establishing essentially facism in China or the Soviet Union. Because Marx was much clear about what capitalism was than what Communism was and especially how we could get there.
Like I said, most of his work was focused on analyzing the inconsistencies of capitalism and establishing a framework for historical analysis of societies and economical systems (historical materialism, dialectical materialism).
- Comment on Just give me someone to vote for who is normal 1 week ago:
Alright, I read your answer and obviously I don’t agree. But I don’t have the time, nor the energy to respond to all these claims.
If you are generally curious about anarchism, try to watch the video I had linked or read the book I reccomended. But I can only encourage you to stay open minded. You don’t have to agree, just try to understand the other perspective. Maybe you can also expand your own ideas with some of the ideas of anarchist thinkers.
But, I can’t force you to, I guess. I am honestly quite happy that this discussion stayed very civil for internet standards.
As to my own open mindedness, I always try to work on it. I always change my views on the world, only about a year ago, I was a really convinced democratic socialist. It’s just that, a lot of your arguments, I’ve engaged with before.
With others, like the human nature thing, I will admit that I specifically tried to look for evidence, that supports my beliefs. But, it’s also really hard to find out the truth about a subject like this, because even most scientists are shaped by their own biasses and the institional biasses of their employers or the people that give them grants.
I hope, that I was able to make you look at the world in a bit of a different way or at least make you curious.
- Comment on Just give me someone to vote for who is normal 1 week ago:
Also the crime thing, what I meant about coming together as a community was assembling councils of people that have expertise in how to handle this, who decide together and enforcing the decisions not through state violence but through collective action by the community.
- Comment on Just give me someone to vote for who is normal 1 week ago:
My question to you is this, what vision should we strive for in your opinion? If feel like, that was what my comment was about. Of course it did not address every minute detail, but I tried my best. If you want a more complete vision of anarchism, I would highly suggest you do your own research, there are a lot of great anarchist scholars, that could do a way better job than me, a random person on the internet. As I said, “The Dispossessed” is great, also you could watch this great introductory video by Andrewism www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrTzjaXskUU. He has some great and informative videos on his channel.
The problem of anarchism is that it goes basically against everything, that we were taught to assume about the world, because the system can only work, if the people, who are oppressed by it think, that it couldn’t have been different. We need to work hard to be open minded and challenge our most basic assumptions.
But this a contradictory notion, is it not? Marxism is an inherently authortarian ideology in both theory and practice, which is why every attempt at it in history has resulted in some tyrannical regime.
That is just wrong. Marx was actually stonchly against authoritarianism, he argued for workplace democracy and was against nation states as a concept. He defined communism as a stateless, classless society. So, even though the Soviet Union pretended to be Marxist or communist, they were wrong. At least if you go by what most leftists thinkers understand as communism.
The idea that you can collectivize an entire economy and redistribute resource as the “collective” (read: government) deems necessary is simply impossible without a great deal of violence, coercion, and theft involved.
You seem to be conflating authoritarianism and violence. Yeah, a revolution might be violent. But the status quo is already incredibly violent, so it might be the most sensible option we have.
One of the hallmark defining features of civilization is inequality, not in the sense of wealth, but in the sense of power.
What makes you think that? There is actually quite a bit of evidence pointing to the contrary (newrepublic.com/…/dawn-everything-book-review-ear…) (while I find the evidence cited in that article to be quite interressting, I don’t agree with all the conclusions they come to).
The way that we survived in nature is by forming small communities that we depended on our survival. If you lost your community, you’re screwed. Therefore, we evolved to become very protective of our tribes.
Community does not necessarily need violence towards outsiders. In fact, according to a lot of scientists, human societies were very peaceful for a very long time (ancient-origins.net/…/debate-continues-stone-age-…). So the claim, that war or racism is in our human nature is ridiculous.
Like I was saying earlier, things like this don’t exist because of capitalism. If your claims about capitalism were true then there wouldn’t be any notion of things like war, racism, crime, and so on before the 17th and 18th centuries when capitalism formed
Almost as if there were other authoritarian systems, that tried to protect the interests of their ruling classes before capitalism.
In fact, a lot of these traits can be found in our closest ape relatives, which means that they’re a product of our evolution.
Apes are racist and wage war? That seems interesting, where can I learn more?
Impressive how? I think all three are considerable failures. They didn’t manage to last long and they didn’t achieve anything notable.
Almost as if every capitalist government is doing everything they can to strike down these attempts because if they became successful, they would make other systems look bad.
But also, the Zapatistas still exist and have existed since 1994, so we don’t know yet, how long they will last. And yeah, it is really impressive to build an egalitarian, system with flat power structures amidst overwhelming resistance by governments with hugely powerful military force.
- Comment on Just give me someone to vote for who is normal 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.
- Comment on Just give me someone to vote for who is normal 2 weeks ago:
There is none. That’s why I am an anarchist. I guess, I worded that in a bad way.
- Comment on Just give me someone to vote for who is normal 2 weeks ago:
Where shitpost?
- Comment on Just give me someone to vote for who is normal 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.
- Comment on The rich convinced us that taxing them is too complicated but everyday people can be taxed pretty easily 3 weeks ago:
The post was litterally about soemone who owns a house
- Comment on The rich convinced us that taxing them is too complicated but everyday people can be taxed pretty easily 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, just be homeless, that will solve all your problems.
- Comment on Mission to the Cloud Server 2 months ago:
How is Windows (which costs money) cheaper than Linux (which is free)?
- Comment on Having to work during the apocalypse sucks 2 months ago:
Also, something I’d like to add (it may seem contrary to what I said before, but it stems from the same line of thinking).
Everyone changes the world, for better or worse.
It doesn’t have to be a revolution or anything, you can change the world in so many ways.
The most important thing is to be an upstanding, good person. You can change the world through community, you can help your friends out, when they are in trouble. You can help your friends through just having a good time with them. You can reflect on life with the people you love, try to offer them new perspectives. You can help random strangers. You can make inspiring art.
You can raise confident, smart children, that may change the world themselves one day, either as a parent or a caregiver or teacher.
Fundamentally, Facism is about hate and left wing ideas are about love. So we can win by just increasing empathy in the world.
For me, I believe that free software can liberate us, and also I just love to code and be a nerd. So I contribute to free software projects online, I helped my mom and a friend of mine install Linux. I helped my scouts move to Nextcloud and Jitsi.
Change is about exploring new ways to use any skills you have to make small impact, which will maybe eventually bear bigger fruit than you might have thought. And if not, then you just made your life, or maybe the life of people you love a bit better, and that’s also great.
Of course, it’s also great to go to demonstrations, join political orgs etc. I just found for me, that I don’t have that kind of energy in me, so I focus on other things. That might also change someday.
Changing the world is mostly about your attitude on life.
- Comment on Having to work during the apocalypse sucks 2 months ago:
I feel like, that’s exactly what I said
- Comment on Having to work during the apocalypse sucks 2 months ago:
You can still be part of the change.
And also that is a gross overgeneralisation, it’s not like schools were full of revolutionaries a decade ago, and today I definitely feel like more people are ready to do something, especially since Trump took office.
Just look at the success of Mamdani or the no Kings protests.
- Comment on Having to work during the apocalypse sucks 2 months ago:
Jacob Geller made a video about something that’s quite analogous, how we deal with the knowledge, that the world is going to end. www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9N7Awpk9lE
I highly recommend it, Jacob Geller is an excellent storyteller.
- Comment on Having to work during the apocalypse sucks 2 months ago:
You can definitely change the world, have you ever heard of history? It’s full of revolutions, the french revolution, the civil rights movement, the workers rights movement / unions. How do you think, we achieved this relatively good living standard in the last 50 years?
Shure, changing the world will be hard as fuck and it could be years until you see any positive change from your behaviour, maybe your actions will only bear fruit after you died.
But the only thing we can / we have to do is try.
And attitudes like yours are exactly what fascists are counting on.
If you don’t want to do anything and just stick your head into the sand, I can’t stop you, I guess, but stop pretending you didn’t have a choice.
- Comment on Woke 2 months ago:
Honestly, I am pretty happy as a woke person.
The trick is to watch less news and do more things to actually change anything.
- Comment on Dumb bitch 2 months ago:
OK, I am sorry, but I am pretty sure, your use of objectively is wrong here!
What empirical evidence are you basing this claim on?
- Comment on You ever been to Disney World? 3 months ago:
Damm, that’s dark. I laughed out loud at this.
- Submitted 5 months ago to [deleted] | 18 comments
- Comment on Github Banned a Ton of Adult Game Developers and Won’t Explain Why 5 months ago:
Codeberg is also really nice if you are doing open source
- Comment on Rainbow Six Siege ravaged by massive server breach that gave its players billions of paid currency for free 5 months ago:
You can definitely go outside, just try it