this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2026
151 points (99.3% liked)

Memes of Production

1236 readers
611 users here now

Seize the Memes of Production

An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the “ML” influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.

Rules:
Be a decent person.
No racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, zionism/nazism, and so on.

Other Great Communities:

founded 1 month ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] breakingcups@lemmy.world 4 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

The same people who overwhelmingly voted this shitshow into power?

[–] Comrade_Spood@quokk.au 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

This shit show one, has the electoral college (an anti-democratic institution in the first place), and two is a system where a simple majority gets to decide who's the leader (also not a democratic system).

Lastly, then what the fuck are you suggesting? Sounds to me like youbare saying "people are what got us into this mess in the first place." So whats your alternative? Fascism? Monarchy? Cause if your issue is that the people are stupid and thus shouldn't be trusted, then you are either a pessimistic/cynical anarchist or an authoritarian. One of which I can sympathize with. The other I have a hard time not punching in the face

[–] PugJesus@piefed.social 1 points 29 minutes ago* (last edited 11 minutes ago)

This shit show one, has the electoral college (an anti-democratic institution in the first place), and two is a system where a simple majority gets to decide who’s the leader (also not a democratic system).

"Simple majority is not democratic" raises the question of what is democratic, especially since numerous anarchist polities have had processes which are passed by majority consensus.

Lastly, then what the fuck are you suggesting? Sounds to me like youbare saying “people are what got us into this mess in the first place.” So whats your alternative? Fascism? Monarchy? Cause if your issue is that the people are stupid and thus shouldn’t be trusted, then you are either a pessimistic/cynical anarchist or an authoritarian. One of which I can sympathize with. The other I have a hard time not punching in the face

Call me an authoritarian if you like, but people are fucking blinkered when it comes to their own, personal interests. The same way that every conservative knows a 'good' member of the LGBT community, or every tax-and-spend liberal starts to balk when a 1% property tax increase is proposed on their nice suburban home.

Not only that, but people make much more trouble than can be easily solved, even if they don't mean to. It's easier to start a fire than put it out. People spread rumors out of ignorance, out of ideological delusions, or just out of fun - if Johnsonville upriver genuinely believes water with 500ppm of whatever toxin they produce is harmless and, like most people, refuses to change their opinion based on evidence; should Tablesville downriver suffer with no more than a stern word in response?

People make their best decisions as abstracts and generalities. "We need more X, we need less Y." People should decide goals; specialists courses of action, and oftentimes it takes several layers of specialists for the necessary precision for any given set of rules. And then the rules must be enforced evenly, upon all communities, even those who would rather continue spewing gunk downstream to save themselves an hour or two or work per day.

Christ, you don't want me making automobile engine regulations, and you don't want most car mechanics deciding what goes in the history books. For that matter, you don't really want me deciding what goes in the history books for anything except a very narrow subset of history; even very educated people can be very, very uneducated about matters even slightly outside of their specialization.

(actually, as I was never anything more than an undergrad, you probably don't want me deciding what goes into history books at all, in a specialist capacity, but you get my point, I'm sure)

This is what civilization enables. This is what modern democratic states enable, even if they still have a long fucking way to go.

The idea that small communes can enforce the same without systems of enforcement dependent on the monopoly of the community or confederation on violence I find strongly questionable.

My argument against anarchism is not so much against anarchist polities, which, historically, as libertarian socialist polities, have enforced monopoly of violence, just one with more decentralized and democratic processes than is usual; so much as it is against the idea of an ideal no-enforcement everyone-gets-along anarchy that sometimes is passed around under the justification that human society is shit because of capitalism.

Human society is shit. Capitalism is shit. Capitalism makes human society worse. But human society is not shit because of capitalism. Human society is shit because we have a limited number of tools and hours in the day with which to address all the problems of the world.