I’ve seen countless times of things we need being completely ignored by the system. When it’s inconvenient enough it will simply never get passed. We can fight for it, and win, but if the same system remains in place, once again, what we won was a concession that can and will be taken away at the nearest chance. You showing me an example of a rich youtuber followed by millions of people being able to do it doesn’t change what the situation is like for regular people like you and me. You can do both if you want to, just don’t think emailing a bunch of rich aristocrats is going to ever have a reasonable chance of being meaningful. Seriously, if you want to make real change, join an org.

Also, “extremism” just means things that go against the status quo. It’s not a synonym for “bad”.

I didn’t ignore it. I said what we achieve working within the system is a temporal concession and thus it’s not actually a reliable and deep change. It’s good, but it shouldn’t be the only thing we do.

I’m not being defeatist at all. Quite on the contrary, I’m telling you to fight.

My point is that fighting within the system never works. Everything we achieve that way eventually gets taken away from us. As long as the ruling class is still in power, they simply benefit the most from granting us as little as possible, and so they will always search for ways to do just that, and to take away things they previously granted us if they think we wont be threatening enough to take them back.

That’s why I am saying, do not hire lobbyists or email politicians or something. Or if you do, make sure it’s not the only thing you do. Join an org. Join an union, a party, a syndicate, organize. That is what has brought, brings and will bring real change. Fight against the system.

Kropotkin is a nice start, though if you want an introduction I think Errico Malatesta’s work is a lot better for that. The essay “Anarchy” is short for leftist standards and is very good. Also “At the cafe” is honestly an amazing introduction piece and it’s written in a regular language as socratic dialogues, so it’s perfect for starting. It even adresses a lot of counter arguments from many perspectives.

Otherwise Anarchy Works by Peter Gelderloo is also amazing.

For the standards of leftists in the USA, they’re massive.

What would be different about this revolution that would see it go right (or what examples am I missing?)

I would say there’s no way revolutions of today will go in exactly the same path as before. Remember that China’s and Russia’s revolutions happened in extermely rural, agrarian, over exploited and basically completely ruined countries. If there’s a revolution in the global north, just the difference in conditions and systems is already going to make a huge difference. But even if it happens in the global south, most of it is at least partially industrialized and not agrarian, as far as I know.

Anyway, other than that, I can’t really give you an objective, unbiased answer. I was actually the same as you a couple of years ago, actually. I had the same concerns as you. I think you would really resonate with anarchist theory, analysis and critique of past revolutions, if you’re interested in digging into it.

Why would you ‘shut up’?

Concessions are given, the radicalization stops as the standards of living improve. People are satisfied and don’t pursue the deeper systemic issues. Once the radicalism has died down, efforts are made to remove those concessions. Sometimes it does not work, a lot of the times it does. The rise of neoliberalism was one of these efforts, the most succesful so far.

Passed laws just don’t evaporate into thin air after they’re done being passed, they continue to exist.

They don’t evaporate, they get repealed. Tons of things do. Roe v Wade, police defunding, literal underage labour laws got repealed this year. The Paris Agreement almost worked, but thankfully protesting brought it back.

Not everything was about slavery.

I’m not talking about slavery. Every fundamental working right we have comes from fighting. The 40-hour work week and 8-hour work day, the abolition of child labour, the minimum wage, pensions, sick leave, paid overtime, the right to strike… even weekends are thanks to fighting. Look it up if you don’t believe me.

You may notice some of these things have been dissapearing recently, and that’s exactly what I’m talking about. They were concessions given to us so we stopped being a threat. They don’t perceive us as one anymore, and so they’re trying to gain more power for themselves by stripping us of the things we earned. And part of this threat reduction is precisely the insisting on working within this “democratic” system, which will never meaningfully challenge them, because it is for them, by them, and controlled by them.

Enormous by socialist standards. The fact that they can have so many members in this day and age is commendable. A few decades ago any socialist thought being given an honest platform at all among the general population was a miracle.

I think you’re seriously underestimating what most young socialists believe. It is true that they don’t believe in revolution, but many of them change when they grow older and they lose faith in the system. I’m confident that will keep happening.

No, an average person in the DSA believes in wayy more than any regular social democrat. I agree that they’re not radical enough, but they’re an enormous organization of people against the status quo and so many of them genuinely care, so it’s no surprise that a huge part of current radicals are ex-DSA members.

That’s what the media has always done. It’s just that in this age it’s the easiest it’s ever been to see past red scare propaganda.

As I said, the things you don’t get by fighting are purely concessions so you shut up. When you do shut up, they get taken away. Every single fundamental working right we have was fought for with blood, not votes.

What corpos are really afraid of is us organizing. They have always been. That’s all we have to do. Advocating for people to send emails (since none of them are going to have the money to hire lobbying firms) will just feed them back into the system, the same way voting does. Makes you feel realized when it never fundamentally changes anything for good.

Working within the system will never give us what we need. The system is made for them. All we get are concessions that then get taken away when we’re no longer a threat. No company, no matter how much popular support, is ever going to allow this. You’d have far bigger chances of making far bigger changes if you joined an org. Any org.

Actually socialism is more popular now than ever. Enough that mainstream media constantly writes scare articles about how socialist the young generations are.

It’s not just about the inconvenience though. Windows is paid. It’s at least 100 bucks. It’s not even “free but you are the product” like Google drive or whatever. Yet it still abuses you, controls you and exploits you, and you have to do tons of workarounds for it to not get in your way. Most of them are always temporary, as a new update reenables everything again or directly circumvents the workaround you used.

If you are locked into the ecosystem, then I do agree that it’s annoying that people think moving to Linux is seamless. It wasn’t for me, it even cost me money since I had to buy an AMD gpu for things to work well + another GPU to passthrough to a windows VM and still use Clip Studio. But if someone only uses their computer for things that can be done seamlessly on Linux, and they genuinely dislike and are against all the bullshit Windows always does, it’s worth it to tell them there is a viable alternative, and what they heard about “you have to use the command line for everything meaningful!” or “everything breaks all the time!” hasn’t been true for years.

If you hate being used by Windows so much, you really should try an alternative, unless you’re a professional that uses software that just can’t run on Linux at all, chances are you can get most of what you use a computer for working fine. In return you get freedom, privacy, choice, performance.

Or if you hate it but are too reluctant to change for whatever reason, that’s totally fine, but just say that. Don’t spread misinformation about Linux.

It’s worth it to be FOSS to take three weeks to get your Arch install just the way you like it.

Literally no one ever says this. Just use Fedora. Almost completely seamless. There’s a KDE version if you want to have the same workflow as windows without configuring anything. You don’t have to use firefox, brave or ungoogled chromium are FOSS too.

I guess I’ll give it a try. Thanks for being patient.

Like I said I didn’t dig very deep into the site. I searched for the anarchist community, saw that it was almost completely dead except for this one post with hundreds of comments: https://hexbear.net/post/272574 And I saw that all of the comments were belittling and/or making fun of anarchists. So I left.

Are anarchists part of the moderation team, or is it all run by MLs that are just benevolent with us like most “left unity” subreddits?

I went to the Anarchism community, which was completely inactive, except for one post with 200 comments, all of which were statists making fun of us. After that I never looked at it again.

I looked at it, it seemed mostly vanilla, had good servers, didn’t have defederation drama like lemmy.world, thought it’s cool.

I’d be open to move to a “leftist” lemmy instance, but as a staunch anarchist I’m not really compatible with lemmygrad or hexbear.