this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2026
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Gotta keep the infighting alive! For capital!
It's not infighting if we're not within the same organization or coalition. It's just fighting.
Then quit running DSA candidates under the DNC.
I wish they'd do that too, but also real "but you participate in society, curious" energy there given that America is under a two party system.
No, in context its a very real criticism of their stance. Stop trying to jam every thought terminating cliche into every conversation that criticizes your ideology.
I can't believe I've lived long enough to see "thought-terminating cliche" become a thought-terminating cliche.
More seriously, yes it's criticism; it's just (for the reason I gave) not very good criticism. The way the American system works, you don't need to agree with or like the people in a party to run under its name, and under a two-party system there's no reason to self-impose that condition.
Again youre missing the context.
Op was saying there is no coalition. If that were true quit trying build one with the DNC. Otherwise, if the DSA can stand on its own, it would have.
Thats why he went straight to gatekeeping because he knows its true that leftys side with liberals in the usa.
I'm not it's literally right there.
Again, an important feature of the American system is that you don't have to do that to run under a party's name. Borrowing the label for name recognition is something you can do here and it doesn't mean you're in the same team as the rest of the party.
Again, context has no meaning to you.
If you tent with the DNC youre going to pull support from entrenched liberals. It doesn't matter what your intentions are unless its just to drag the whole thing down. If the DSA does become the majority voice they are still dependant on liberals to uphold the party. Force them out and you will only revitalize the GOP. If thats youre goal fine but youre not better for it.
Or maybe you are but its yet to be seen that a Leftist majority can maintain power. At the very least you should make your intentions more clear and then ill hand it to you.
Yeah I'm an anarchist, I don't care about platforming Democratic """socialists""". Actually, I think the DSA ultimately siphons good people away from fighting oppression into liberal power structures, i.e. they benefit liberalism more than they help advance anti-capitalist worker power. There are definitely good people in the DSA, but IMO they're wasting their time and energy.
I mean you can discount the socialists as a part of the left if you want. Im just saying titles have lost their usefulness at that level of scrutiny.
I'm discounting the DSA specifically as a part of the left, with the caveat that this is a minority opinion. While as an anarchist I absolutely disagree with other socialists on a variety of issues, clearly anarchists and non-anarchist socialists are leftists.
At least anarchists and socialists have the same end goal in mind
Not to be divisive, but...not completely. I would argue that anarchism is more comprehensive in its desire to eliminate hierarchy and authority than socialism. Anarchists are socialists, but most anarchists want to go further than socialism, and we all want to do it in a way that respects means-ends unity, i.e. the means we use to achieve our ends should resemble those ends.
For this reason, even though anarchists and other socialists both want to abolish capitalism and put workers in control of the means of production...we have wildly different visions for what that looks like. We share a common language primarily, and many common values (e.g. egalitarianism, anti-racism, anti-fascism, feminism, anti-LGBTphobia, internationalism, anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism), but the theoretical and practical divide between anarchism and Marxism is fundamental.
That being said, non-anarchist socialists are absolutely leftists. No question. We do share enough commonality to share that label. But we do not have exactly the same goals.
This reply was supposed to come sooner but yeah you're right. I was mostly referring to the goal of establish a true Communist society (stateless classless moneyless). Of course the how we get there and what it looks like can be very different depending on the ideology.
I'd argue that's most socialists. Ideologically I'm an anarcho-communist, if I could snap my fingers and instantly give everyone class consciousness and a stable anarch-communist society, I would. But I can't, so I think in terms of steps to get there. Shifting the perspectives of hundreds of millions of people takes time and effort.
Right now, the next obvious step to me is market socialism. Eventually the market should yield to spontaneous mutual aid, but that will take time. Consequentially, I presently advocate Democratic Socialism. Once we have that, I'll take another step towards anarchy, rinse and repeat.
I think this perspective underestimates the strength of the forces opposing us. Not just the actual individuals deliberately working against us, but also the alienated and propagandized working class.
Why do you think that the market should yield to spontaneous mutual aid? I haven't seen any historical evidence that free markets tend to do anything other than concentrate wealth. This is a (mild) ideological disagreement I have even with left-market anarchists.
That's...not what it means to be an anarcho-communist. Obviously we cannot change the entire world in a day (unless you have access to a gamma ray burst 😆). Anarcho-communism isn't against stepwise processes, but our critique of state socialists is that the State is structurally incapable of bringing about communism within any time bound. Put simply: the State is a hierarchy that needs to be destroyed. Strengthening it, even in pursuit of noble ends, is a step backwards for proletarian freedom.
When we say that ends should match the means, we do not mean to live our ideal lives immediately as if capitalism never happened. What we mean is that the solutions we pursue should reflect the values and priorities of the world we actually want to see. Since we want to see a world without hierarchy and authority, and as a corollary a stateless world, it makes no sense from an anarchist perspective to support a "socialist" state as part of the transition to anarchy. I.e., we should not build systems that we will have to revolt against in the future.
But that's not a step towards anarchy almost at all. That's a step towards something else.
I am painfully aware that my views are minority views. Literally all my family and friends are not even socialists at all; most of my family are Trump supporters. Anarchists are doing huge jail sentences for protesting at Prarieland. The
settler-colonial project is openly targeting anarchists. My own family would be thrilled to watch me burn if they knew my actual views. And I yell on Lemmy all the time about how the current bourgeoisie are some of the worst creatures ever born, and I am constantly watching news and reading about the vile things the bourgeoisie are capable of, e.g. the Gaza genocide. I'm aware. My comrades are aware. If they weren't aware of the abuses the capitalists foist upon us...they wouldn't be anarchists.
When I say "should", I mean in the sense of an imperative. As in "You should brush your teeth before going to bed" not "The bus should be here in 5 minutes". It is the intention to drive the market towards spontaneous mutual aid through post-scarcity.
As to the how, I specify market socialism as an initial intermediary step. Collective ownership, even limited to the firm level, inherently counteracts wealth concentration by distributing profits between the worker-owners. Maximizing worker-ownership is the primary focus. Eventually, abolish the stock market entirely and replace existing stocks with bonds.
From there, as automation prevails (with profits settling more equally) the work week will get shorter and shorter and production cheaper and cheaper until it basically isn't worth the trouble of keeping track anymore.
I get the skepticism, but socialist markets have fundamental differences from capitalist ones; the primary difference being wealth concentration.
Which is why I'm presently a market socialist, not a state socialist. The state is just another centralized hierarchy. Businesses are distributed. Parallel to the economy, the next social step is community development, and flattening of hierarchies through densely iterative representation. Don't get me started.
Which I respect, but when pursued beyond the context of the material conditions of the world in which we currently live, those values and priorities can be taken to the point of impotent ideological virtue signaling. We're wrestling pigs here, and if we're preoccupied with keeping our shirt clean then we're not gonna make much progress.
Never gonna happen, and I think you might be stretching anarchist theory. There are too many people on this planet to coexist without organizational hierarchy and authority. You need hierarchy to accomplish any complex task, you need authority to keep some asshole from dumping waste in the river. The point of anarchy, as I understand it, is to make those hierarchies as flat as possible, and those authorities democratically controlled and revokable.
There is no future where you don't have to fight some system. Whatever happens between now and the future, there will be a system of some sort. A distributed democratic state with worker-owned industry is probably the easiest system for an anarchist to fight.
Don't get me wrong, each step is going to have challenges, but my goal is to find the path where each transition is as easy as possible. There are still a few steps between market socialism and anarcho-communism. But from my calculations, the next step which is the easiest to transition to and easiest to transition out of is market socialism.
Yeah, it really really sucks to be ahead of the curve on consciousness. But the thing about societal organization is that it requires you to organize society, which takes generations. Society steers like a cruise ship, not a speedboat. If you're going to become politically invested, you're going to have to come to terms with social inertia and develop the patience to slowly usher in an age you'll probably never see come to fruition.
Until you lock them both in a room together with no one else.
Really living up to your username
Youre pretty clever. You know.