“liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.’ Mikhail Bakunin
To be fair. Everyone who is able to work should do its proportional part of work needed for the sustain and improvement of the society they live in.
Keywords:
Able to: as its truest meaning with the understanding that the vast majority of the population can work, one way or the other.
Proportionality in the work should not mean proportionality on the perceived benefits, but it should feel fair for everyone. Including the option to chose different ways of living that may mean different levels of work/benefits, all within reason.
Improvement of society: notice how society is not spelled “billonaire” or “bussiness” or “investors”.
When you’re in front of the MAGA firing squad, take comfort before your last breath that you’re not a “TANKIE.”
If I get executed by an authoritarian state. You bet you I will be proud I stood up to authoritarians during my life.
I didn’t realize Trump is a Tankie. You’re so off base, you’re not even in the game. You’re fighting the wrong battle, at the wrong time.
Trump isn’t a tankie. But both Tankies and Trump are authoritarians who oppress the masses.
And I have 400 volunteer hours for Dems the past two election cycles. I think the democratic party is very far from ideal, but I’m a pragmaticist, so I believe we would be far better off with them than the alternative. Don’t accuse me of fighting the wrong battles before you know anything about me.
“Tankie” means supporting Russian invasion into Ukraine, not “a communist”
Tankie is authoritarian “communism”. Tankies tend to support the brutal regimes of Stalin, Mao, and more recent Russian imperialism such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Needless to say these regimes supported by tankies are far from the communism envisioned by people like Marx, which was achieved much more closesly in anarcho-communist revolutions, such as the Ukraine’s anarchist territories and the Paris Commune.
I still believe you are needlessly reducing the scope of that word to only communists. Many blood thristy supporters are “tankies”, while being fascist, or simply dumb
A communist would believe in “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” (Karl Marx).
However Lenin, and to a greater degree his authoritarian successors acted according to the slogan, “To each according to his contribution”, which even they admitted was not in accordance with true communism. Lenin even used the slogan, “He who does not work, neither shall he eat“.
From Lenin, The State and Revolution, 1917
The socialist principle, “He who does not work shall not eat”, is already realized; the other socialist principle, “An equal amount of products for an equal amount of labor”, is also already realized. But this is not yet communism, and it does not yet abolish “bourgeois law”, which gives unequal individuals, in return for unequal (really unequal) amounts of labor, equal amounts of products. This is a “defect” according to Marx, but it is unavoidable in the first phase of communism
Unfortunately their “first phase” evolved into an authoritarian regime instead of the stateless heirarchyless utopia Marx envisioned.
Tankies love Elon now though.
Do they actually? I know a lot of tankies either implicitly or explicitly support Trump and most seem to worship a capitalist kleptocracy that’s pretty much worse than the US economically, but I’ve never seen one outright declare their love for the poster child of capitalism in particular.
Good time to mention [email protected]
a.k.a intelligent communism
Or really just internally consistent communism.
The bottom text comes originally from the new testament and Lenin was aiming the sentiment at upper class people who had passive incomes. He was saying that everyone would have to contribute meaningfully to society instead of just leeching off it like landlords do. He wasn’t talking about the disabled, children, or elderly
But if you don’t take the quote out of context, it doesn’t support the narrative they’re imagining up!
Nah you give what you are able and recieve what you need.
Yeah, but ðere are people who cannot give at all, and ð quote from ð Stalinists makes no allowance for ð mentally or physically incapable of labor.
A society is only as good as how it treats its least able to treat for ðemselves.
I think your keyboard is broken
Nah, it’s just set to Old Norse
ωнคт đΘ уσน мєคи?
From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs
Who decides what a person needs?
On the face, I think the idea “from each according to their needs, to each according to their ability” sounds reasonable. But if you have ever done any logistics work, then you know it is a childishly simplistic fantasy.
There is no way you could possibly keep track of the many resources and services that are needed in a modern, complex society and distribute them usefully before the people who need them die of old age (or starvation). As you try to centralize tracking of everything the administrative problems grow exponentially, and never mind building the actual distribution network. No government-managed system could ever keep up with the needs of a growing, changing society.
Just the highly centralised power structure and the single party consisting entirely of nepotism.
Yes, but you see, this is true freedom. You can only have real economic freedom, political choice and self-determination in a system where there’s only one party and they control aspects of your life you didn’t need controlling, such as how much food you’re allowed to buy.
To be fair, yes, there were times in the soviet union were rationing of specific foods was a good idea, because there just wasn’t enough for everyone otherwise. But still the thought that a single party can unilaterally decide how much you can eat is pretty damn scary.
Yeah, there’s no person or group of people on this planet I would trust to equitably distribute resources like food and water, or decide what medical services count as needs for me or my family.
i too make broad generalizations based off of misunderstandings and false assumptions
The first one: “Work and starve.”
I agree with the meme, but correct me if I’m wrong: didn’t Bakunin himself argue in favour of a work voucher system?
I don’t think so. I never saw it mentioned in his work.
edit: hmmm I faintly remeber something about “labour notes” as compensation. His does argue strongly for mutual aid and solidarity. Though I do tend to side more with Kropotkin than Bakunin. (Ignoring the fact their ideologies are 99% similar).
I faintly remember Bakunin’s utopian vision from the revolutions podcast and I thought that he didn’t really have an answer to the “what-if-someone-doesn’t-work-conondrum”.
Yeah, Kropotkin is a little bit more refined and based on science.
Kropotkin’s rebuttal in Conquest of Bread is in chapter 12: objections. He expands on it quite a bit in section 12.3, but his conclusion is:
Take, for example, an association stipulating that each of its members should carry out the following contract: “We undertake to give you the use of our houses, stores, streets, means of transport, schools, museums, etc., on condition that, from twenty to forty-five or fifty years of age, you consecrate four or five hours a day to some work recognized as necessary to existence. Choose yourself the producing groups which you wish to join, or organize a new group, provided that it will undertake to produce necessaries. And as for the remainder of your time, combine together with whomsoever you like, for recreation, art, or science, according to the bent of your taste.
“Twelve or fifteen hundred hours of work a year, in one of the groups producing food, clothes, or houses, or employed in public sanitation, transport, and so on, is all we ask of you. For this amount of work we guarantee to you the free use of all that these groups produce, or will produce. But if not one, of the thousands of groups of our federation, will receive you, whatever be their motive; if you are absolutely incapable of producing anything useful, or if you refuse to do it, then live like an isolated man or like an invalid. If we are rich enough to give you the necessaries of life we shall be delighted to give them to you. You are a man, and you have the right to live. But as you wish to live under special conditions, and leave the ranks, it is more than probable that you will suffer for it in your daily relations with other citizens. You will be looked upon as a ghost of bourgeois society, unless some friends of yours, discovering you to be a talent, kindly free you from all moral obligation towards society by doing all the necessary work for you.
“And finally, if it does not please you, go and look for other conditions elsewhere in the wide world, or else seek adherents and organize with them on novel principles. We prefer our own.”
This is what could be done in a communal society in order to turn away sluggards if they became too numerous.
i meant Bakunin’s vision, sorry. 🙈
Ah, no worries! I haven’t read Bakunin yet, so I’m not sure what his stance was either 😅
