Don’t

Leftists get bogged down in being a fourth wave posadist and reading theory over doing praxis and working towards the change.

This is true and I’m definitely guilty of reading too much into stuff and not doing enough stuff… hence why I’m laying in bed procrastinating on the stuff I’m supposed to be doing… but I do think that some theory is really important to have. Like, what are we aiming for, why did some projects fail and others succeed, what are the common pitfalls and how can we spot them, and how can we better refine our arguments for the rare times we do get a platform?

IMO the most important thing is to read theory, read the history of leftist movements, and use good research practices. Just keep reading critically, try to follow the authors’ arguments, and internalize the things you understand and like. Also, it’s more important to build up a coherent worldview than it is to fall into a specific ideological box.

For anarchist literature, The Anarchist Library is an incredibly diverse resource of often contradicting viewpoints, whereas the Anarchist FAQ is (in my view) an excellent first place to look for detailed explanations for commonly asked questions. In my view, the Anarchist Library is an excellent example of how it is important to develop your own worldview. Because the most anarchist/communist/socialist/leftist thing anyone could possibly do is loudly and vehemently disagree about something with someone who otherwise agrees with you 99.99%.

IMO, this is legitimately how progress is made, by exploring the space of ideas. And that means that every once in a while, there’s going to be some ridiculous take from someone who is otherwise on your team who’s trying to explore that space of anarchist possibilities. So even when drawing from resources you typically agree with, it is so important to think and read critically.

For Marxist and state-socialist literature I’m honestly a lot less informed since…well…I’m an anarchist and I’m going to disagree with statist Marxists on a lot of issues. But when I do need to look up some non-anarchist literature, Marxists.org usually has what I need.

Probably reading too much into this meme again but agorists don’t want to eliminate money or the economy. Instead, they want to transition society into a free market where all relations are voluntary exchanges within a counter-establishment economy. In this framework, currencies other than state-controlled ones are fine to use.

I.e., money is still in play, and the economy is basically moved out of established legal markets but still very much there and (in my view) otherwise not very different from existing economic conditions. So the meme can’t be about agorists.

IMO, agorism is basically an attempt to make anarcho-capitalism appealing to left-wing anarchists, and simultaneously an attempt to make leftism palatable to anarcho-capitalists. Agorism is…kinda ass. It’s not really good at being anarcho-capitalist or anarchist. If you really need to keep your markets, look into mutualism IMO. Or just realize that even “free” markets naturally lead to the development of unjustifiable hierarchies 😉.

Consider this my penance for being an “”“anarcho”“”-capitalist when I was in high school and I actually read all this crap 🤮.

I figured, but I do vaguely remember reading an article somewhere in the Anarchist Library a while back where the author was unironically arguing that time is an unjustifiable hierarchy.

Nah, I really need to keep careful track of time. When my meds are working and I’m actually happy for once despite the soul-crushing reality of capitalism, I’m kind of a busy-body. Like I have a pathological desire to solve problems, and timekeeping is a really excellent tool in problem solving.

Like I’m an autistic person and I have a lot of specific special interests like differential equations, control theory, music production, acoustics…I really need to manage my time to accomplish even a fraction of what I want to do. I just have this perpetual desire to do deep dives and solve problems, and that requires a shitload of research, reading, and practicing new skills… which requires careful time management. (Which I’m still kinda trash at 😆.)

There’s definitely a critique to be made about how restrictions on the management of time and scheduling are imposed on us, and I would never want to impose timekeeping on people who don’t care to use it, but I don’t think timekeeping itself imposes a hierarchy.

I don’t even know what instance I am on.

You are on Lemm.ee. Unfortunately, this is the instance this post is about.

and how this matters to be honest.

In about 17 days, you will no longer be able to login with your lemm.ee account. You should sign up for an account on any other instance. Examples include lemmy.sdf.org (the one I’m on) or any of the sites listed here: https://join-lemmy.org/instances

Lemmy (and PieFed and mBin, but I’m just going to talk about Lemmy for simplicity) attempts to provide an experience inspired by Reddit, but not controlled exclusively by one party. Loosely speaking, where Reddit is only one website and the whole social network belongs solely to Reddit, the social network spanned by Lemmy is actually a bunch of smaller websites that talk to each other. If the Reddit website goes down, the whole social network is down. If a Lemmy instance goes down, only that little part of network goes down.

Unfortunately, the admins of your instance have politely posted that your instance is going down on June 30th. This applies to you and anyone whose username ends in @lemm.ee, but it does not apply to (for example) me because I am not a user on your instance. (I am on lemmy.sdf.org, which you can infer from my full username @PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S@lemmy.sdf.org, which ends with @lemmy.sdf.org.)

Which instance you pick depends on what you want to see, what kind of administration you want, your political beliefs and how important they are, and who you want to be allowed to talk to. For my use case, I use SDF Lemmy because we don’t defederate (roughly, cut off communication) from anyone, even people who unambiguously deserve to be cut off. Furthermore, the people here are pretty chill. And SDF.org has a history of public service literally much older than I am, so SDF Lemmy will probably be around for a while.

Occasionally SDF Lemmy is out for like 24 hours and the SDF.org admins are a bit slow to respond, but that’s fine for me. But also, SDF is a pretty big instance now. In order to not concentrate too much power in the hands of SDF (or anyone else), you should probably choose a less crowded instance.

I went to engineering school in the US. Twice.

No. Lol.

I think it’s this, at 4:33

I don’t know if you can. May you post?

Yes. Imagine we meet at a train station or something and I say. “Hey, you look like a racist piece of shit, but we’re starting a campaign to end world hunger, would like to hear more about it?”.

Yeah but we’re not at a train station. Particularly, we are communicating through text, where you can skim the entire body of the text. Maybe the upcoming text justifies why the author sees me as a racist piece of shit. Maybe I have a blind spot! Or, maybe the author is just a jackass. But now I want to find out.

But like also I think you’re missing the forest for the trees? The point was not to say “you’re a liberal and you should feel bad about it”, it was to critique the point you started with. Namely, the “forest” is that the far right is not morally or materially equivalent to the far right, and to claim otherwise ignores history and the current reality. And I only used the “fellow liberal” framing because liberalism is the default ideology in the Western world, and because it is usually liberals who make points like this. Strike out any usages of the word “liberal” if you really can’t look past this point.

And we’re on Lemmy. I’m pretty sure " liberal" is a generally acknowledged insult here.

I mean we’re on Lemmy.world so I don’t know about that 😆. Lot of liberals around here.

People stop hearing the things that you actually want to say because the name calling bears more weight.

Yeah those people are never going to listen anyways. Really, namecalling bears more weight than the entirety of an argument, than the reality of the situation? If not namecalling, they’ll make up something, or just admit they never cared.

And while I think that “liberal” should be an insult in 2025, it unfortunately is not.

Did you actually stop reading at the word “liberal”? Because the actual argument I made was, with only a little bit of sass, that even from a liberal perspective, based on the values that liberals claim to uphold, the far right should be evaluated to be much worse than the far left. And then I remarked that this is not how liberals think because most liberals are two-faced (even if unintentionally so!).

And while there’s a small chance you’re not a liberal…well, you’re walking like a liberal, quacking like a liberal, posting and commenting like a liberal… and we’re on .world, so there’s gonna be lots of liberals here anyways.

You won’t be able to log in, post, comment, etc., with this account. Basically, the website lemm.ee is going to be gone forever. Lemm.ee is how you do stuff in the Fediverse. The rest of the Fediverse will still be up, and the instances you interacted with will have copies of your posts and comments, but your account will otherwise be dead.

So you probably do want to change instances.

Based, keep up the good work 👍

Ah yes fellow liberal, this is our classic dilemma: do I support people who want to destroy the planet, create an ethnostate, take away all my personal liberties, and kill me and all my friends and family and colleagues, or do I support people who are more zealous than I am about changing society in the direction of the values I loudly claim to hold? /s

(It’s not actually a dilemma because liberals always pick the far right.)

I am incapable of the kind of black and white thinking that would allow me to believe that literally ACAB

Well…ACAB is not just an assessment of all officers’ individual characters [1]. It’s an assessment of their role in society. Even a polite, protocol abiding, perfectly gentle cop is, on their best day, a member of the enforcement arm of the State, i.e. they are part of the organization that imposes the will of the capitalist class on the rest of the community every single day. Anything else that individual cops or individual police departments do is subordinate to the designated goal of enforcing the will of the capitalist class. In almost all cases where police departments attempt to do things beyond their primary function

I.e., literally all cops are the enemies of the community by design, regardless of the internal character of an individual officer or department. ACAB communicates this sentiment as well as you can do in 4 letters, i.e. something that can be graffitied in a pinch.

[1] To be clear, like 99.99% of all cops are still shitty people, even if the “cop” portion of their life is assumed to be separable and then ignored. And like you, I really don’t like black and white thinking, so the leftover 0.01% does not represent any cop I have ever personally met or read about; I’m only leaving open the theoretical possibility that there exists a person who would otherwise be a good person if they were not a cop. This observation is almost a corollary of the main point of ACAB, and then plug in the statistics about officers beating their partners and history of police brutality, violating their own protocols, enforcing heinous laws, etc…

Trump disrespected those troops by being there.

Yeah he gave them exactly what they deserved 🖕

We were part of an ‘anarchist’ group once but we left because two people became the defacto ‘leaders’ and kept telling us that we couldn’t do things without ever explaining what they meant beyond just saying that we couldn’t (in a more specific way but we don’t want to let on should they ever find this).

That fucking sucks. Respect for putting yourself out there into the real world. ❤️

I agree, but Andrew makes a very careful distinction between leaders (in the sense discussed in the video) and bosses, and correctly identifies that there are still risks of hierarchies developing out of anarchistic leaders. One of the YouTube comments makes a point that a better word for Andrew’s concept of “leader” in his video would be “guide”. For talking about this concept in English, I agree with that commenter, but otherwise I also agree with Andrew’s take.