PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S [he/him]

amerikkka Anarchist, autistic, engineer, and Certified Professional Life-Regretter. If you got a brick of text, don’t be alarmed; that’s normal.

No, I’m not interested in voting for your candidate.

Free 🇵🇸, abolish Pissrael .

  • 15 Posts
  • 755 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • Like come on guys, he literally proved how what I was saying, its bullshit!

    Not quite, no. I spoke specifically about anarchists and our relation to socialism.

    Unfortunately, in AmeriKKKa, our socialist movement is so weak and atrophied that we often find ourselves working with social democrats and well-meaning liberals and progressives who are just starting out their journey into socialism. So leftism is most certainly not a single coherent ideology; it’s a vague generalization of various groups that want to move the needle towards egalitarian values. It would be convenient if all these people were socialists, which I suspect is what you’re pushing people to do: identify as socialists. And to that end, I agree with you: cast off the shackles of capitalist fearmongering about spooky scary socialists and their Satanic™ ways, so that we can all speak the common language of socialism and the precision it gives us to critique our world and imagine better alternatives.

    But that doesn’t mean that non-socialist leftists don’t exist. It would be easier if we all spoke the common language of socialism…but we don’t.



  • So no, I won’t be using socialist to describe an anarchist.

    Phoenix Wright from Ace Attorney pointing to the right screaming "OBJECTION!"

    From An Anarchist FAQ:

    A.1.4 Are anarchists socialists?

    Yes. All branches of anarchism are opposed to capitalism. This is because capitalism is based upon oppression and exploitation (see sections B and C). Anarchists reject the “notion that men cannot work together unless they have a driving-master to take a percentage of their product” and think that in an anarchist society “the real workmen will make their own regulations, decide when and where and how things shall be done.” By so doing workers would free themselves “from the terrible bondage of capitalism.” [Voltairine de Cleyre, “Anarchism”, Exquisite Rebel, p. 75 and p. 79]

    (We must stress here that anarchists are opposed to all economic forms which are based on domination and exploitation, including feudalism, Soviet-style “socialism” – better called “state capitalism” --, slavery and so on. We concentrate on capitalism because that is what is dominating the world just now).

    Individualists like Benjamin Tucker along with social anarchists like Proudhon and Bakunin proclaimed themselves “socialists.” They did so because, as Kropotkin put it in his classic essay “Modern Science and Anarchism,” “[s]o long as Socialism was understood in its wide, generic, and true sense – as an effort to abolish the exploitation of Labour by Capital – the Anarchists were marching hand-in-hands with the Socialists of that time.” [Evolution and Environment, p. 81] Or, in Tucker’s words, “the bottom claim of Socialism [is] that labour should be put in possession of its own,” a claim that both “the two schools of Socialistic thought . . . State Socialism and Anarchism” agreed upon. [The Anarchist Reader, p. 144] Hence the word “socialist” was originally defined to include “all those who believed in the individual’s right to possess what he or she produced.” [Lance Klafta, “Ayn Rand and the Perversion of Libertarianism,” in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, no. 34] This opposition to exploitation (or usury) is shared by all true anarchists and places them under the socialist banner.

    I guess it’s a bit imprecise to refer to anarchists as “socialists” but we’re definitely a (proper!) subset of socialists 😄.









  • But I don’t think it’s normal for weather to be -10 degrees F with snow, and then 3 days later 75 degrees F! That seems insane to me!

    The climate is going crazy, but strictly speaking, you can’t logically conclude that from solely your local weather fluctuations. I.e., climate change is a global property of our planet, which requires global statistics…which we have, but your folks either refuse to look or refuse to listen to experts who have looked.

    And extreme weather events are more likely, but that doesn’t mean they never occurred before or never would occur without climate change.

    I’m not saying this to downplay the severity of the climate crisis or even to say that you literally can never use local weather events to reason about climate change, but IMO is it both politically and mathematically important to stress the global nature of climate change whenever it is brought up.