I should have been clearer sorry. Wearing a helmet is obviously better in a crash; but, both personally and societally, not wearing one decreases the chances of getting in a crash in the first place.

Helmets are bad for safety because (1) car drivers act more dangerous around cyclists wearing helmets and (2) they discourage people from riding bikes whereas the primary safety factor of cycling, by far, is the number of people cycling.

The idea is the land belongs to everyone, and each is entitled to make use of their fair share of it by simple virtue of being human. You wouldn’t “own” your home in such a society, merely be the current inhabitant of it. If you are familiar with these legal concepts, think of the entirety of humanity having naked ownership of the entire planet, and people having usufruct of what they can actually use.

An example that might help clarify: imagine a trucker working for a logistics company that lends her a truck for long hauls. This trucker might tell people “yeah, it’s my truck” in that she drives it and maintains it and sleeps in it and uses it all the time. Yet legally speaking, the truck belong to the company, which itself belongs to its shareholders — people who might not even have ever seen the truck in question, and only care for the profits it might bring through the work performed with it. One is ownership through usage and the other the current legal concept of propriety; they are in fact quite different.

People coming to your home and changing stuff without your agreement wouldn’t be OK since the freedom of one person stops where that of another begins. How that would be enforced is a an open question — left-anarchism advocates organization without hierarchy, which means it would be possible to form citizen courts and militias, which might belong to a federation for nation-wide or world-wide coordination without a state body. But we should remember the main point of all this however is to remove the main reasons theft is a thing in the first place (along with rectifying the greatest theft of all time), so it can be questioned how much enforcement would be necessary. Certainly not to the current extent where society must bear the weight of the state maintaining a land registry, escrow officers, dedicated justice system, police force, and army to defend it all.

These concepts of “fair share” and deserving of material wealth by mere existence are very weak or absent in our current system, which is built on the core idea that only immaterial things (rights) are granted by default to everyone, and material wealth is only acquired through contracts (work, inheritance, purchase — all these from people who do have all the material wealth one seeks).

You are correct in pointing out that, without a critical mass of adherents, left-anarchism cannot function. However this simply means that rather than being an ideology imposed from above by politicians, it is one that must be adopted by actual people. For this reason left-anarchists usually believe in contributing to local free associations (not necessarily political), promoting horizontal organization there through example, and therefore building a “revolution” from the bottom up rather than from the top down as advocated by some leftist groups.

Yes, this is a long established left-anarchist position. A foundational text is Proudhon’s 1840 What is Property? if you’re curious.

Current property regimes were established illegitimately by violence: manifest destiny in the US, the Norman conquest in Britain, the Frankish conquest in France, etc. Even back then they were to the detriment of the many and the benefit of a few, and since property tends to accumulate (through inheritance and moral persons) this only amplified over time. Today this regime is backed by the state’s monopoly on violence. So effectively most of us are born in a world where violent gangs stole all the land for themselves hundred of years ago and any attempt to overturn this is met by violence from their legal descendants.

Note this doesn’t apply to personal property (legitimized by usage: your home, clothing, toothbrush, etc), but only to the state-backed legal regime of property such as owning land or companies.

Being tired is normal and I can only understand the feeling, but if there’s one hope it is through collective action, not individualism. Any individual or family will inevitably lose against the overwhelming power of corporations or the state.

Step 1: make some kind of surveillance & control system that is voluntary

Step 2: make life for those who dont want it less convenient (you are here)

Step 3: make non-participation in the system be in itself suspicious and a cause for further investigation

Weber did mean to legitimize the state but his reasoning can easily be turned from prescriptive to descriptive: we define the state as merely the entity with monopoly on violence over an area. Who decides what is “legitimate” violence? Why, the state, of course: by definition, it has the means to impose its views.

The Weberian idea is there are legitimate non-violent politics that the state offers itself to, which therefore allow the state to use violence against unlegitimate politics that don’t “play by the rules”. However since the state itself decides what is legitimate or not, and since any illegitimate political group will turn illegal else disappear when faced with the violence of the state, we just land back where we started: the state has a monopoly on violence and that is what decides what is “legitimate” politics, and therefore what is legitimate violence. The state calls its own violence “law”, but that of others “crime”.

The current labelling of political opponents as terrorists by the US government is illustrative of that. Some Weberians have you believe that is all legitimate since after all there indeed was an election

I agree people (Americans?) are idealizing the french in this regard. But you’re yourself misinformed.

Napoleon did shoot royalists with cannons in 1795, when he wasn’t yet in power. It didn’t stop the 1830 or 1848 revolutions happening, nor the 1871 commune. More recently the 1968 protests were accompanied by a general strike which did scare the hell of many people.

What we need is a pragmatic and informed assessments of events so that we can decide what might work and what won’t. National stereotypes and prejudices should be discarded.

Airplane fuel is basically untaxed worldwide due to the Chicago convention. But also infrastructure costs for HSR are very high and scale with distance whereas the opposite is true for planes.

The state calls its violence law, and that of others crime. (to paraphrase Stirner)

In China it was the Communists who walked the death march.

I was unaware communists were an ethnic group. But I guess if their predecessors had a hard time in a civil war 80 years ago it means they can’t be racists now.

In North America, unlike South America and Tibet or Xinjiang, the people don’t look native. It’s not very similar.

Ah yes, let’s set state policy based on what people look like.

That’s how everyone makes money. They produce a good or service and get paid accordingly.

That is quite a load-bearing use of “accordingly”. You’re allowed your opinions, but don’t make it seem the relationship between work and money is straightforward and neutral. You’re allowed to believe that a streetsweeper or farmer should make less money than Taylor Swift but that is very much not an obvious thing that everyone agrees on.

The blue track is voting democrat, the red republican, the green third party.

The meme is saying whatever way one votes, the us government will still support Israel in spite of what the ICJ calls a “plausible” ongoing genocide of the Palestinians, especially in the Gaza strip. And calls for destroying the system.

It’s interesting how you seem to believe your stance is based on science and facts yet you conducted no research to find out what vegans actually eat. Else you’d have found out vegans do typically eat a lot of protein and generally have healthier diets than the general public. The reason being vegans by definition spend time thinking about what to eat and looking stuff up, whereas many people just eat whatever.

The “communism” in anarcho-communism much predates these states.

I didn’t disregard your source, I simply pointed out how you utterly lack the basic context necessary to understand its actual impact in cold war french politics. The CIA certainly would have liked to obliterate french leftism but its ability to do so was negligible. I believe you are relying on a frame of reference that is not relevant, and you arent’t acquainted enough with this particular subject to realize so. I suggest you be more careful in the future when commenting the politics of foreign countries, lest you overgeneralize and rely on your own preconceptions.

The french communist party (PCF) supported the invasion of Finland and the Baltics while condemning that of Czechia and colonialism. It then supported the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the annexation of Poland, which caused a third of its PMs to leave the party. It then supported Nazi Germany against French and English aggression. It then negociated with German occupation forces to continue its activities and ridiculed resistance fighters. Once Germany invaded the USSR, it finally supported the resistance and the allies. It also lied that its leader, Thorez, had been a resistance fighter when he in fact had fled to Moscow. Postwar, it denied the existence of labor camps and the Katyn massacre, and supported Soviet repression of Eastern European uprisings.

This is what I mean by flip-flops. Every single of these, even when obviously contradictory, was justified by the will of the workers and the fight against capitalism; this decredibilized the idea there was a single unifying theory for its action. By the 60s, it appeared that for decades the french communist party was puppeted from the Moscow, had knowingly lied or disregarded its principles in multiple occasions, and defense of the international (or even just national) proletariat was in fact not its guiding principle but rather the material interests of the USSR. This was the main, fatal blow to the party. It had lost all credibility as an actual alternative system and henceforth only subsisted as a political force within the existing system. In this it was somewhat successful since it had theorized a split between revolutionary theory and socdem practice, something which had further eroded its claim to power as well. It for instance refused to support the tentative student revolution in 1968.

That isn’t to say US imperialism wasn’t an issue. But much of the electorate saw the PCF as hypocrites who only condemned imperialism and dictatorship when it was the West doing it. Anti-imperialism and decolonialism in cold war France went far beyond the PCF so that wasn’t really something they had an edge on.

Even after destalinization the USSR was a brutal dictatorship that criminalized dissent under the idea that the state is the party is the class. Therefore (1) democracy isn’t needed as it is merely needed to place the correct class in power for true democracy and (2) an enemy of the state is a class traitor and must be destroyed. Public protests were put down with overwhelming force such as the 1968 Prague spring. Individual dissidents were given bogus psychiatric diagnoses in order to indefinitely detain them.

Many leftists in France pointed this out and fought for the rights of the people under Soviet rule. For instance french trotskyists fought for the liberation of Leonid Plyushch, Jiri Hayek, or Edmund Balunka.

The decline of the french communist party is very well documented and was primarily a political matter. They committed many mistakes but also were dealt a serious blow by Mitterand in the 80s; finally, their voter base started voting far-right in the 90s. Not everything is a CIA operation.

The french communist party was also the most Moscow-aligned of all the western communist parties. This is a fact and was a serious factor in its decline since it suffered from its close association to the many failures of the Soviet Union (such as its foreign policy flip-flops and numerous human right violations), and ran all its important decisions by Moscow which prevented it from reacting quickly to the local political events. It can’t be said to have been “infiltrated” however, it was all quite open.

I should also add that the french government wasn’t too keen on NATO far-right paramilitaries, in that (1) de Gaulle was famously suspicious of NATO and (2) the very same paramilitaries (OAS) tried to assassinate him for advocating decolonization.

“Democratic” is an overloaded word that I could have wielded with more caution.

I believe the utmost importance is to preserve human freedom and dignity (meaning to treat people as an end and not a mean). Western liberal democracies enable a ruling class to use violence to preserve their power and the exploitative system they benefit from. Their political system, as presented in the media, is largely a farce. But they do, so far, preserve more individual freedoms than leninist states do : freedom of speech, of movement, of organisation, from arbitrary police repression, etc. Many freedoms are lacking in the West though, such as the freedom from exploitation or the freedom not to participate in society (ie not to consent to be governed).

It’s good the Soviet Union after Stalin tried to improve the standard of living. But that is besides the point of individual freedoms and governing only through the consent of the citizenry.

In fact I’m unsure whether you’re counting Gorbachev in your list of benevolent dictators, but he was of your opinion and tried to actually acquire the consent of the governed. It didn’t go very well, for various reasons. Lenin himself disregarded the result of a popular vote, the constituant assembly election in 1917.

There’s also the question of the nomenklatura and the army. It cannot be denied they enjoyed privileges beyond what was necessary and therefore the Soviet state was at least in part extractive in that it took wealth from the workers to hand it to a minority who controlled the system.

Ok so there’s three parts in your message. First you “correct” me by pointing out I didn’t mention liberalism as a justification for colonization. Indeed, but I tried to keep concise given the context. I also didn’t mention other important aspects of liberalism such as economics. Also, liberalism was hardly the only justification for colonization, it was used against it, and colonization predates it in any case. You also point out I didn’t mention Lenin sought to apply Marxism to under-industrialized nations. That is accurate but besides the point, and he wasn’t the only one. But he also theorized the vanguard party as you mention, and that is crucial to the rest of my paragraph. The parent comment asked what was the difference between a liberal and a leftist, and what was a tankie, and I replied as concisely as I could.

Now adding to what I mentioned is fine but you also imply that I in fact did it on purpose :

You did a great job disregarding the colonial history of the west and the implications it had for billions of people in the global south.

You’re basically saying that I’m racist. Why would you say that ?

Lenin led a democratic vanguard party until his death, but understood that a socialist project in construction will have interference from capitalists both locally and abroad, and needs state repression of said interference in order to be able to carry out the goal of redistribution of power to the people because capitalists won’t just give it away.

I think you misspelled “eliminated fascism from Europe and saved tens of millions of lives from Nazi extermination”. It wasn’t done personally by Stalin, but by the socialist project of the USSR as a whole.

And there is the reason. I criticized Lenin and Stalin as being undemocratic and you disagree. The problem is the only source that will call Stalin “democratic” are stalinists themselves ― most leftists in fact criticize stalinism, and more largely the way the bolshevik party was set up. Trotsky himself predicted it would come to a dictatorship in Our Political Tasks (1903).

So you just reply with stalinist apologia : the Soviet Union was in fact democratic (it wasn’t, and only stalinists will assert thus), they fought the nazis (true, but that’s besides the point of using military force against the people), capitalists would interfere (true, although far less than implied before the cold war, but again that is besides the point of establishing a dictatorship and using military force against the people)

I just want people to recognize this pattern. This is what “tankie” is : you make side comments to my main points, you paint me as a monster and an enemy by calling me a racist, and you spew apologia about dictatorship actually being democratic but still being justified by the circumstances and military force being necessary under the context and also the nazis.

The fact you can, in a single message, paint me as an enemy before explaining that using lethal force against enemies is acceptable is chilling and I hope you’ll never get near any position of power.

I agree with the sentiment but some practicality is needed. I think most unpoliticized audiences would hear a pitch about “workers’ self-management” but balk at “anarchism”. However the word is very good when some bite is needed.

I do think Proudhon messed up when he chose “anarchism” though, it already meant “chaos” long before that. And in the US “libertarian” was heinously stolen. In general words seem to have a very hard life in the US.