Give it to a group like Just Stop Oil or other direct action / sabotage focused climate activism group - they’re perpetually broke and could do a lot of good with that money.

So I’ve been thinking about this for a bit. Yeah, fuck countries, nation states, etc. Power should be at the level of communities of workers, similar to how the original Soviet system was before it got so fucked up.

Tbh I think we’ll just have to agree to disagree, I think wealth should be redistributed by force because I believe that the rich won’t redistribute it otherwise. But I can respect where you’re coming from - I wish it wasn’t necessary but I just don’t have faith that the rich will do it out of their own free will and kindness of heart. Also, even more than the local rich we need to expropriate the wealth of the billionaires and other shitheads that just suck the money out of areas and people, leaving them destroyed.

Also - what happens when the community is full of bigots? Like let’s take Odessa TX, where they’ve just functionally banned trans people from using their correct bathroom. The community there decided on that, does that make it right? There’s a similar argument with what happens when you’ve got a community of racist white people who decide that all POC are less than their equals.

First of all, yes, we’re living under a shitty authoritarian government in the US. It’s basically a dictatorship of the richest in society. I want to invert that, where the workers have all the power. It’ll flatten out the power hierarchy eventually because everyone will become workers like everyone else. Just, in order to get there, we’ve gotta do some things which will smack of authoritarianism, such as forcibly redistributing wealth and converting businesses to being worker-owned.

I don’t know what’s best for people, other than that we should make society more democratic. But thing is, we can’t let everyone act in their own self interest when doing so harms others. Like, it’s in a landlord’s individual self interest to charge as much money as possible and to refuse to redistribute their property.

Also, if you let everyone act in their own self interest, how do we solve the problem of getting land back to indigenous populations? For example, I’m certain that many white people in the US won’t want to give land back, and there could be a democratic majority that opposes doing the right thing. What do we do then?

Agreed, power should be held by syndicates, ideally with those syndicates/groups/unions/etc working together by sending delegates to a Congress and then abiding by the democratic decisions made by that Congress.

I think deciding who is or isn’t the vanguard is something you can only do when you look back at history - you can point at different groups at different times when they were leading the movement, but if you were living through it things might not be clear. It’s pointless trying to figure out who the vanguard is right now, instead we should be organizing.

So, I think the workers should own the nation and that power should be held at the level of workplace unions and community organizations. I see being “the vanguard” of communism as similar to a 1st place designation in Mario Kart - it’s a floating title that depends on who’s doing the most for the effort and who other people look to. That vanguard shouldn’t get any extra privileges, they’re workers just like anyone else.

I think the whole authoritarian vs antiauthoritarian split is kinda BS - IMO it’s more about who’s dictating terms to who. We really badly need land reform, and landlords aren’t going to willingly give that up, so we have to be a bit “authoritarian” in order to make them do so. Same thing goes with wealth redistribution, and land back. If you give up on using force to get what you want, how do you get land back to indigenous populations, or stop the genocide in Gaza?

I think we’ll be more free if we work together to build socialism than we would be if we keep shitting on each others approaches towards building it. Then we’ll just keep refining it until there’s a minimum amount of hierarchy or control in society that’s used to prevent re-privatisation, exploitation, and the re-establishment of Capitalism.

Signed, a “tankie”

Did someone say “One Big Union”? Sounds like the IWW would be right up your alley. It’s coming back to life again - definitely check if you have a local branch!

https://www.iww.org/

The IWW is an explicitly radical militant union devoted to overthrowing the tyranny of the wage system and settling the class war through full worker control of all enterprises. It’s an entirely different animal than the bloated business unions who settle for a “fair share” of the profits. The IWW asserts that all of the value produced by the labor of workers should go to workers, and the bosses can just become workers like the rest of us.

I’ve seen that reinforcement of workers who toe the line first-hand, people are scared and brainwashed into not acting up or demanding better. It’s why I have a hard time maintaining a job - not because I’m not good at what I do, but because I’m bad at pretending to buy into the capitalist ideology in the workplace.

Agreed, not all managers are bastards but the system they are working within creates horrible results.

I believe I’m one of those knowledge workers. I do cybersecurity and I’m actively working on trying to unionize the sector. I’m not management, and I don’t have hiring or firing power, and I’m reliant on wages to survive.

Actually, I can see the comparison. Many cybersecurity people don’t challenge the power relations in their workplace and instead act as enforcers of corporate policy. That always disappoints me, and I can see the pattern of how even our relative privilege is being actively reduced. I just hope more cybersecurity people will recognize the class struggle we have to wage and organize in solidarity with the rest of the working class.

I get where you’re going with this, and yeah, the PMC helps hold the current system in place. I was thinking about the cybersecurity/engineers/architects/other better paid workers who are still subject to class exploitation even though they’re better off than a line cook.

Also, I like your bit about the professional managerial class being an ideological shield - I see that happening in the workplace all the time where people won’t consider rocking the boat because they want to be management one day.

There is no middle class - there is the working class and the exploiter class. People have misidentified a chunk of the relatively better off working class as somehow not part of the working class. Over time the systems of capitalism and the power imbalances at the heart of the non-unionized workplace will eventually reduce better off workers to the lowest common denominator as the exploiter class demands perpetually growing profit that must come at the cost of the working class.

Both Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion are great, and protests should be disruptive, otherwise they’re just ignored. Maybe they’re not doing enough disruption and damage to force governments to listen. Or, maybe someone should go after energy/oil companies directly via sabotage or other means and cause enough economic damage that the cost of polluting and resource extraction becomes too high for them to profit from.

Yes, exactly. The IDF intentionally attacks civilians in Palestine by shelling houses, for the purpose of demoralizing the population into surrendering to extermination. Sounds like terrorism to me!