So, I think the workers should own the nation and that power should be held at the level of workplace unions and community organizations. I see being "the vanguard" of communism as similar to a 1st place designation in Mario Kart - it's a floating title that depends on who's doing the most for the effort and who other people look to. That vanguard shouldn't get any extra privileges, they're workers just like anyone else.
zeroday
joined 2 years ago
I think the whole authoritarian vs antiauthoritarian split is kinda BS - IMO it's more about who's dictating terms to who. We really badly need land reform, and landlords aren't going to willingly give that up, so we have to be a bit "authoritarian" in order to make them do so. Same thing goes with wealth redistribution, and land back. If you give up on using force to get what you want, how do you get land back to indigenous populations, or stop the genocide in Gaza?
I think we'll be more free if we work together to build socialism than we would be if we keep shitting on each others approaches towards building it. Then we'll just keep refining it until there's a minimum amount of hierarchy or control in society that's used to prevent re-privatisation, exploitation, and the re-establishment of Capitalism.
Signed, a "tankie"
I'm so tired of being the Cassandra of my social life - I call this shit out years ahead of time and nobody believes me or takes my analysis seriously because I said that I'm a communist. Like, holy shit, yes, I am a communist - I want workers to own the entirety of society. That's the exact opposite of these fascist fucks who essentially want bosses, money and corps to control society. I'm a communist because I saw this fascism coming, I recognized the patterns and incentive structures in society, and realized communism is the best way to defeat fascism - we have to decisively win the class war. And this is a war, don't confuse it. Mark my words, now that things have gotten to this point, massive violence is inevitable soon.
Capitalists can choose to give up their property and become workers like the rest of us, or they can get the wall and then their property is redistributed. The capitalist class has colonized our society, and their enforcers are the police. And according to Franz Fanon's books on anticolonial struggle in Algeria, colonial relations never go away unless fought with anticolonial violence to oppose the violence of the colonizers. Ultimately, violence is what is needed to force those in power to give up their wealth, and if they gave up their wealth willingly then violence would not be necessary.
Did someone say "One Big Union"? Sounds like the IWW would be right up your alley. It's coming back to life again - definitely check if you have a local branch!
The IWW is an explicitly radical militant union devoted to overthrowing the tyranny of the wage system and settling the class war through full worker control of all enterprises. It's an entirely different animal than the bloated business unions who settle for a "fair share" of the profits. The IWW asserts that all of the value produced by the labor of workers should go to workers, and the bosses can just become workers like the rest of us.
Kind of, I meant it as a jab at people who just invert the aesthetics and morality of the Catholic Church and other faiths as a means of "rebellion" without doing anything of substance to challenge the structures of society and power around them.
Most people, and especially most techies at places like Google have lived lives where systems appeared to play by the rules, where their legal rights are respected. So, it hits you out of nowhere the first time a company does something blatantly illegal to suppress dissent or union organizing. It's hard to internalize that it'll happen until it happens to you or someone you care about.
It's why a classic mistake union organizers make is to not understand just how harshly a corporation will crack down on you, and that you have to be organizing in secret until you're ready to win the power struggle that'll ensue once you tip your hand to your bosses.
A similar shitty Gadsden flag parody was in a protest flyer I saw recently - 
Check out Communications Workers of America - they've been pushing into the tech world
I've seen that reinforcement of workers who toe the line first-hand, people are scared and brainwashed into not acting up or demanding better. It's why I have a hard time maintaining a job - not because I'm not good at what I do, but because I'm bad at pretending to buy into the capitalist ideology in the workplace.
Agreed, not all managers are bastards but the system they are working within creates horrible results.
I believe I'm one of those knowledge workers. I do cybersecurity and I'm actively working on trying to unionize the sector. I'm not management, and I don't have hiring or firing power, and I'm reliant on wages to survive.
Actually, I can see the comparison. Many cybersecurity people don't challenge the power relations in their workplace and instead act as enforcers of corporate policy. That always disappoints me, and I can see the pattern of how even our relative privilege is being actively reduced. I just hope more cybersecurity people will recognize the class struggle we have to wage and organize in solidarity with the rest of the working class.
Agreed, power should be held by syndicates, ideally with those syndicates/groups/unions/etc working together by sending delegates to a Congress and then abiding by the democratic decisions made by that Congress.
I think deciding who is or isn't the vanguard is something you can only do when you look back at history - you can point at different groups at different times when they were leading the movement, but if you were living through it things might not be clear. It's pointless trying to figure out who the vanguard is right now, instead we should be organizing.