this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2024
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Ye Power Trippin' Bastards
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This is a community in the spirit of "Am I The Asshole" where people can post their own bans from lemmy or reddit or whatever and get some feedback from others whether the ban was justified or not.
Sometimes one just wants to be able to challenge the arguments some mod made and this could be the place for that.
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This is almost the exact opposite of an anarchist understanding of power.
The point of anarchist critiques of the state is that the structure and systems themselves corrupt and constrain people into acting in ways that are authoritarian and harmful.
So, even if you put a good person, and yes, even an anarchist into an authoritarian system, it will inevitably result in an abuse of power and violence towards oppressed people.
This is exactly why anarchists generally don’t put forth candidates or actively campaign or support political parties in the existing system. Because embedding a different, even better person into a corrupt system will only lead to further corruption.
I actually think that, ironically, this is a perfect validation of anarchist theory. Lemmy is a platform that was built by and for authoritarians (initially capitalists as Reddit, then only slightly modified by authoritarian leftists on Lemmy). The structure of moderation with mods and admins able to unilaterally take action and the difficulty of organized resistance inevitably leads to abuses, which is what this community is about.
I’m still waiting for the social media platform that has better infrastructure for distributed power among users rather than the chosen few.
I feel obligated to point out that the goal is not necessarily to make the system 'good', but to avert catastrophic consequences from the very-powerful-current-system taking an all-out position of "Crush the workers, kill the minorities" when such a thing is very much negative for anarchist initiatives and very much avoidable.
All politics is about power, whether its restraint, its redistribution, or its dismantling - and decisions from anyone who considers their political positions serious must, in that vein, be strategic, not merely spiritual.
I agree with you but I don’t think these two ideas are completely contradictory. My experience after participating in and studying liberal democracy for decades now is that the existing political structure is not going to meaningfully stop its worst harms no matter who is elected to lead it. As a result, organizations that build power outside of the constraints of electoral politics will be essential for any meaningful change, whether incremental or revolutionary.
But yes, if we can keep fascists out of power by voting, I support that. However, I feel strongly that voting is not even the bare minimum of political activity that we should be engaged in.
See, I think liberal democracy is perfectly capable of stopping its worst harms in the case of an educated and active citizenry (what a fucking endeavor that is to undertake... we're nowhere close to that at the moment), but I also support organizations that build power outside of electoral politics, as alternative bases of power mandate negotiation, implicit or explicit, from the ruling power, and reduce the chance of abuse of power.
While the view of the government as a single unitary entity is foolish in my view, and thus even a society without strong non-government entities is not automatically doomed to tyranny because of the necessarily factional and disunited nature of government, a society with strong non-government entities providing alternatives is almost always better poised for liberty (and the preservation of liberty) than one without. At least within the modern context of statehood. Pre-modern polities were often worse off regarding liberty with strong non-government entities.
It's why I like anarchists, even though I don't count myself as one. I view their methods and goals as conducive to liberty, even if I'm not sure as to the desirability or practicality of entirely abolishing the state as we would recognize it.
There is a great article somewhere that makes a case that unions as the prime entities of political power and organization, as opposed to political parties staffed by a separate class of politicians who do politics and only politics full-time, is about a hundred times better.
It used to be that way in this country, and then it wasn’t and we got that second thing instead, and my god look at what happened.
You sound primed for syndicalism, honestly.
I completely agree with you here. That is more or less what I was saying.
I talked about it in another comment, about the US founding fathers. There are certain malfunctions that humans have when you put them in a position of power, and a good choice for your "ism" that you're going to use when you're developing traditions of interaction with each other is going to take that into account.
I completely agree with all of this. I may write up a big longer essay with some of my thoughts about what could be done about it. The ability to have a little peaceful-protest community like this one is quite a nice step forward, but the software is still not a completely comfortable fit, overall.
This may be my favorite comment on lemmy. I applaud the introspection and appreciate the irony you've brought to light.