Oh thanks for crossposting, I am still a Lemmy noob and didn’t manage to find right instances.

i hope it was okay to crosspost it here for you.

(i see a downvote already, but i don’t understand how this would be unfit for the comm…)

Oh, and hope you would enjoy Focus on the Road if you want to give it a try!

of course! i played a few turns. i like to remix and mashup systems i find interesting, so mostly i’ve been tinkering with the core rather than playing the game. i’m thinking of converting the tables to generic scifi and sword/sorcery themes, and using it to create connections for Cepheus characters.

@Five@slrpnk.net: something for !abc@slrpnk.net?

EDIT: →https://slrpnk.net/post/19234160

i like this. i think for now as a workaround: one could lock the topic and leave a comment asking the OP to crosspost it elsewhere, with grace for posts which have high engagement (as ladfrombrad suggested).

i don’t agree that crossposting works to ‘move’ posts. as far as i know: the OP is not notified when their topic is crossposted by someone else, and in that case they also won’t be ‘subscribed’ to comment notifications.

🎵 cathy don’t go to the supermarket today. cause there’s a very strange man at the checkout stand,

coöps are cool, but we can’t just have coöps. their liberatory potential is cancelled out by the fact that they still participate in capitalism and they still need to turn a profit.

Even if the labour of individuals might be slightly transformed by having a vote over the methods and aims of production, the very nature of co-operatives as institutions for the production of commodities renders them a revolutionary dead end. Even enterprises seized by workers during struggle and turned to cooperative production face a dead end if the broader struggle across society does not continue to move forward.

deleted by creator

i’m not who you asked for, but i’ve worked a lot with people in Sweden.

first, let’s talk about options. you don’t really have any negotiating power unless you are a member of one of the big three unions, and even then: only if you’re in the union which your employer has a collective agreement with, and even then: you don’t have any say in negotiations.

there’s TCO, which is the Liberal’s Choice™ confederation of unions, ranging from cops, to office workers, to insurance scammers. within TCO is the largest: Unionen (lit. ‘The Union’), whose unofficial motto is ‘if the boss could pick’ (om chefen själv för välja). Unionen is the default character’s choice for anyone who’s ever touched a keyboard.

there’s LO, best known for their hit single IF Metall, and they’re right-wing blue-collar productivists.

there’s Saco, best known for uhhhh. and they primarily represent the elite, lawyers, quacks, and other priests (such as religious ones).

the main alternative is the Syndicalists. they’re anticapitalist, they have few agreements with anybody, and they’re a great way to get blacklisted and wiretapped. their ideology is outlined here: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/rasmus-hastbacka-swedish-syndicalism

the independent Dockworkers Union is a great example of a functioning union. but they’re only for one industry, and many of their members give off national syndicalism vibes.

Is it a viable method of unions getting stuff done or is it just a pacifier that slowly traps them in a state-controlled “no fun allowed” box?

it’s definitely a pacifier.

the unions primarily serve to maintain a minimum level of comfort for the middle class, while acting on behalf of employers to crush left-wing organising and militancy. they give leeway to the largest employers, while ignoring the plight of employees at small companies. they follow the party line of the socdems, which in recent years is ‘whatever the far-right is on about this week’. the general view toward salary negotiations is ‘the highest paid jobs should be paid even more, and the lowest paid jobs should be paid even less so we can pay the highest paid jobs even more’.

whenever there’s any criticism of the unions, the socdems, or the Swedish government/economy overall: you’ll get union leaders and politicians across the spectrum snapping back that ‘hEre in SweDeN, wE hAvE a ModEl’ and then passing/proposing laws to criminalise and punch down at criticisms of ‘the Swedish System’ as some kind of foreign threat. you can’t criticise or protest ‘elected’ leadership, because that’s ‘undemocratic’ and ‘strongarm’, and ‘you should just shut the fuck up and wait till the next vote’.

there’s two short English essays here (from a syndicalist perspective):

• https://organizing.work/2021/12/swedish-unions-why-do-we-suck/
• https://libcom.org/article/swedish-unions-crisis-what-solutions-do-syndicalists-offer

they’re referring to anarchist federalism, which scales in principle from neighbourhoods and work groups up to nations.

And if decisions are at rhe lowest possible levels then it seems like thats a hierarchy, which is more horizontal rather than not being a hierarchy.’

And i dont know what you meam by “the position” or “temporal” or “at the start” and that it “changes everything”.

horizontalism does not create a hierarchy, because a hierarchy (from Greek, for ‘rule of priests’) is a structure which creates superiors and subordinates.

say there’s a community — a geographical neighbourhood, a nongeographical group with shared interests, a workgroup… — that holds meetings on their own self-management and needs. when their needs concern more than themselves, then they delegate someone to communicate their concern to a larger (‘higher’) group — a city, a region, an industry — on a mandate: that they are temporary (till the concern is resolved, till the end of a project, or for an arbitrary time decided by the group); that they represent the group consensus; and that they can be recalled for any reason, more specifically in the event that they aren’t fulfilling their obligations to the group they represent.

proposals go up a chain, and revisions/changes are sent back down the chain. this cycle continues until the smallest (‘lowest’) groups are in agreement, with that agreement communicated by the delegates up to the largest relevant group. with a population like the US, these rounds of consensing can be done in the span of a month: https://participatoryeconomy.org/project/computer-simulations-of-participatory-planning/.

this structure can take infinite forms, but those structures remain fundamentally similar and therefore compatible.

there are examples like anarchist Spain, the Zapatistas, and — aspirationally — Rojava, mostly in in the Rojavan restorative justice system. to be fair to Rojava: they have been under siege for a decade.

for some thought experiments: Can This Book Save Us From Dystopia? (43m), The Future of Socialism (15m).

when the GP says ‘this changes everything’, they mean that the temporary and recallable nature of holding a special role in society flips the current paradigm: where politicians can promise whatever they want and then fail to deliver, because other (economically-)viable candidates are few and they already have their position. there’s nothing in the current system that gives constituents the ability to immediately remove a representative who isn’t representing the people who elected them, or who uses their position to further personal agenda.

a system where the people directly involved in their work and their lives are also participants in their own work and their own life creates people who are invested in the world around them.

good post. since i’m here, i want to expand on a few things:

But effectively, it boils down to the difference between authority as in power over people, and authority as in knowledge.

i recommend using expertise to refer to authority as in knowledge — like you did later in your comment, as Andrewism does — to avoid confusion.

They don’t have the unilateral ability to fire someone (nor does any individual)

no criticism, just expanding:

i think it’s important that someone who is given by a role or responsibility should have a mandate: the role should be specific, and it should be temporary (for an arbitrary amount of time, or till the end of a project) or recallable by a vote.

Graeber notes in something i’ll link below: ‘If something has to be done, then it’s okay to say all right, for the next three hours she’s in charge. There’s nothing wrong with that if everybody agrees to it. Or you improvise.’

Crowdsourced decision making is meant to be for the bigger aspects, stuff like what the end goal of a project should be. Smaller, extremely specialized aspects should get handled by those best equipped for it, that’s not a hierarchy.

in Kurdistan, this is the difference between technical decisions and the political (‘moral’) decisions[1]. it’s the difference between ‘when should we have our next meeting?’ and ‘should we be nonviolent?’.

• technical decisions are low-impact; operational or logistical.
• political decisions are high-impact, with broad social implications.

the political decisions are consensus decisions, of at least 1/3 of the group. these are vetoäble by anyone affected who wasn’t present for the vote.

the technical decisions are 2/3 or 3/4 majority votes, of the minimum affected people.

tho, as Graeber notes:

And then of course, obviously the question is who gets to decide what’s a moral question and what’s the technical one? So somebody might say, “Well, the question of [when to meet] bears on disabled people, and that’s a moral question.” So that becomes a little bit of a political football. There’s always things to debate and points of tension.

only partially related, but this discusssion reminded me of an essay on the myth that management == efficiency: David Harvey, anarchism, and tightly-coupled systems

i appreciate your bluntness, and sorry for the vaguepost — i was venting, and i had few spoons. you did give some meaningful insight.

in the main case i had in mind: it was an internal discussion to drop principles like anticapitalism to ‘concede’ to the right in ‘good faith’, both to appeal to a larger audience of radlibs and with the idea that if the right doesn’t concede on something then they’ll look mean and extremist. i and others pushed back, and we were told our ‘uncompromising attitude is toxic’. this isn’t a new experience for me, and so i was looking for a sanity check.

but i take away from your comment that it’s probably not worth the struggle session if there’s no potential in the organisation anyway, or if the issue doesn’t need a (satisfactory) resolution to still achieve something. everyone might benefit more from an amicable split rather than an argument that leaves everyone bitter.

i think it’s a good discussion, and i agree with your interpretation and the message of her video. i don’t think either you or she did anything wrong.

i was venting frustrations about recent events in my life related to the subject, because i and others in my org have been accused of being too ‘rigid’ or ‘unrealistic’ on principles like anticapitalism, and that we’re ‘driving away’ potential membership by not being more ‘moderate’ in our politics.

this isn’t a new experience for me, and so i was looking for a sanity check. i don’t know where healthy gatekeeping ends and purity politics begins, but OrionsMasks’s comment gave me something to think about.

purity politics is a problem i don’t know how to escape. where do i draw the line?

how can i not call in someone who aligns with me socially and culturally, but then actively engages politically and economically in the very things which reproduce our collective misery (because they’re ‘being realistic’, and it’s ‘just the way it is’)? how can i not call them an asshole when they turn around and throw out a friendship because i’m ‘just a hater’ and ‘they don’t need this negativity in their life’ and say i need to ‘learn to respect other peoples’ opinions / ways of life’?

i have been extremely worn out and worn down by infiltrators, entryists and wreckers. how do i not have a kneejerk reaction at someone trying to reäctivate individualist brainworms and spreading solipsistic ideas in leftist spaces? even if they have good praxis or ideologically align with our goals: they’re advocating for ideas which would undermine our work in the longterm.

at what point does gatekeeping turn into purity politics? i am skeptical of people who complain about ‘purity politics’ and ‘echo chambers’ because i mainly hear it from the types of realpolitik liberals in paragraph one, or the types of incoherent wreckerkind in paragraph two. is it not right to call out people for being unserious, incoherent and solipsistic? why should i entertain hateful, misinformed people on the assertion that not doing so is somehow epistemically irresponsible of me? i can do opposition research on my own time; i’m in leftist spaces to discuss anticapitalism, antiïmperialism, and antixenophobia, not to discuss the possible merits of commodification, empires and racist statistics.

i’m sick of treatlords pathologising my compassion and then claiming i and other leftists are ‘alienating potential allies’ for calling out their lack of imagination and for not respecting their appeals to the status quo.

my brain is tired.

you are probably fine without learning Swedish in a meaningful manner, but if you are planning to become a citizen it is not unreasonable a requirement.

i had a rant all prepared for this comment, along the lines of ‘yeah but they’re not doing anything to make learning the language or integrating any easier; they’re just adding further alientation and precarity into their lives’… but i realise all those words would be wasted because that’s the point.

the rightwing government doesn’t want people to integrate. they want to give every migrant such an acute case of Ulysses syndrome that they burn out and fail.

i have heard from people there that they just completely broke down after receiving their citizenship. they spent the years on a residency permit in unfurnished apartments with no lasting or heavy investments in society. they didn’t get medical or psychological treatment when they needed it, and they didn’t participate politically and stayed in their lane, living in effective peonage to their employers and trying to be model migrants and manage their energy levels so as not to draw any attention to themselves. they were too afraid to make any longlasting commitments in case it would all just be taken away from them on three-month’s notice. such a weight lifted from their shoulders that all the stress came barreling out and they crashed hard. this news — that their citizenship can be taken away on vagueties of ‘national security’ (most of the people i know there are activists), or because of ‘crimes’ committed long ago in their home countries, or that the rules could apply retroäctively — have brought back their stress right when they were just recovering and finally felt safe digging into their new permanent life.

it doesn’t matter that these policies are ‘targeted’ at ‘terrorists’ and gangs. these changes affect everyone who migrates to Sweden for any reason. the government’s habit of wildly changing the rules every 6 months isn’t helping.

Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor the savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism censure. I do not content myself with consulting authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognize no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such an individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others.

— Mikhail Bakunin, God and the state, Chapter 2

Expertise merely refers to one’s knowledge or skill in a particular field, but my understanding of CPR or ability to bake shortbread cookies does not make me an authority over you. Other than the conflation of force and authority, this is one of the most common confusions people have about anarchism, made worse by the fact that there are some anarchists who still use authority to refer to both command and expertise just because Bakunin did. Personally, I find that creates needless confusion. If you’re using the word authority to describe everything from slavery to knowing how to build a bridge, then why use the word at all? Just use the word expertise when you’re talking about expertise. Listening to medical advice isn’t a hierarchy. Having expertise doesn’t give me the right to command you unless I hold a position in a hierarchical power structure that grants me that authority. As Bakunin himself said:

…we ask nothing better than to see men endowed with great knowledge, great experience, great minds, and, above all, great hearts, exert over us a natural and legitimate influence, freely accepted and never imposed in the name of any official authority whatsoever, celestial or terrestrial.

— Andrewism, How Anarchy Works » Dissecting Authority (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrTzjaXskUU)

I highly recommend reading in full that section from Andrewism. It’s no more than 5 minutes to read.

I don’t like unions strongarming companies

‘i don’t like it when the people who produce value for the capitalists have a say in their working conditions’

‘i don’t like it when corporations are forced to comply with the rule of law’

‘i don’t like it when neoliberals have to comply with local labour market practises in foreign markets’

‘i don’t like it when other people pull the boot out of my mouth’

I didn’t even say anything bigoted!

ok: https://beehaw.org/modlog?page=1&userId=9724172

It’s crazy and it’s tragic.

take a drink every time a narc parent uses the words ‘weird’ or ‘crazy’ to describe being treated like the horrible person that they are.

… and how exactly will Trudeau’s resignation help?

Can you please explain what you are basing this critique on?

reviews i’ve read, and my own bygone notes and experience with The Dictator’s Handbook and The Logic of Political Survival. my critique is leveraged at both of them, because my memories of them are intertwined, and the former is based heavily on the latter.

The Logic of Political Survival is based in game theory (rational choice model), which falls apart when you consider that people don’t/can’t always process all information and don’t/can’t always minmax their choices. the supporting data for selectorate theory is biased; correcting for this bias heavily diminishes the findings.

on the theory’s usefulness as a tool for analysis: Gallagher and Hanson wrote two papers ([1],[2]) about it. tl;dr: it’s not a great predictor; it doesn’t explain illiberal systems or peripheral politics; and it doesn’t account for plurality.

What I find interesting in Selectorate Theory is that it links power and economics in a quantifiable way.

i can appreciate that; i also have a STEM background. if you’re modelling a core liberal democracy, i think it does well enough. however, i think it’s oversimplified, which is a common problem i find with quantified theories of social phenomena. it also probably falls apart if you want to predict the effects of a system reform/upheaval, or beyond.

that’s why i refer to the philosophers and social scientists. their theories aren’t calculus, but they provide the framework for understanding the origins and also what rough shape the outcome can take, without being too prescriptive.

I think that it’s a very useful tool that seems to be completely ignored in left/socialist circles.

it’s probably ignored because there are many other theorists with more nuanced analyses of power: Marx, Gramsci, Marcuse, Foucault…

The Dictator’s Handbook doesn’t offer much in that regard. it assumes homo economicus and bases conclusions on flawed studies. selectorate theory has thus far failed as a tool for analysing — or making predictions about — states in the periphery.