First of all, yes, we're living under a shitty authoritarian government in the US. It's basically a dictatorship of the richest in society. I want to invert that, where the workers have all the power. It'll flatten out the power hierarchy eventually because everyone will become workers like everyone else. Just, in order to get there, we've gotta do some things which will smack of authoritarianism, such as forcibly redistributing wealth and converting businesses to being worker-owned.

I don't know what's best for people, other than that we should make society more democratic. But thing is, we can't let everyone act in their own self interest when doing so harms others. Like, it's in a landlord's individual self interest to charge as much money as possible and to refuse to redistribute their property.

Also, if you let everyone act in their own self interest, how do we solve the problem of getting land back to indigenous populations? For example, I'm certain that many white people in the US won't want to give land back, and there could be a democratic majority that opposes doing the right thing. What do we do then?

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.

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.

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.

A similar shitty Gadsden flag parody was in a protest flyer I saw recently -

There is no middle class - there is the working class and the exploiter class. People have misidentified a chunk of the relatively better off working class as somehow not part of the working class. Over time the systems of capitalism and the power imbalances at the heart of the non-unionized workplace will eventually reduce better off workers to the lowest common denominator as the exploiter class demands perpetually growing profit that must come at the cost of the working class.

Both Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion are great, and protests should be disruptive, otherwise they're just ignored. Maybe they're not doing enough disruption and damage to force governments to listen. Or, maybe someone should go after energy/oil companies directly via sabotage or other means and cause enough economic damage that the cost of polluting and resource extraction becomes too high for them to profit from.

We really don't need more liberal apologia, IMO LibertyHub was and should be a respite from all that. Can we please not let it be overrun by class collaborationism, revisionism and bourgeoisie pseudo-theory? If our goal is to create a proletariat strong enough to throw off the chains of our oppression and move towards socialism, we need to not platform liberal ideology that reinforces the status quo of capitalism.

We really don't need more liberal apologia, IMO this space is a welcome respite from all that. Can we please not let it be overrun by class collaborationism, revisionism and bourgeoisie pseudo-theory? If our goal is to create a proletariat strong enough to throw off the chains of our oppression and move towards socialism, we need to not platform liberal ideology that reinforces the status quo of capitalism.

OMG yes it is - it's especially fun to tell it to TERFs who are all "but muh chromosomes"

Oh look, it's me! I found out a few years ago that I have De La Chapelle syndrome. I'm actually a trans woman though and not a guy, so I consider it a bonus rather than a downside since it made me have very little testosterone growing up.