They're between 20 and ~40 years old, and about 25 people in total in my close circles

Actually, most of the people who'd normally be described as tankies (Stalinists, Marxist-Leninists, CPUSA members, other flavors of communist that want to seize state power and use it against the capitalist class) that I've met are some variety of queer themselves. In my organizing circles usually the queer folks outnumber the few token cis-het people, so again, it could just be that my IRL circles don't represent the norm.

For context, I'm usually organizing at the local level. I know that things suck at the national level in a lot of orgs like IWW and CPUSA, there's toxic leadership in there that have seized power in order to keep their own positions and are really ruining the image and functioning of both orgs. Yeah, CPUSA leadership might suck, but your local communists that you might write off as tankies might actually be really caring people.

I'm curious, what do you mean when you say "tankie"? It's a word that's used to mean so many different things these days

So I've been thinking about this for a bit. Yeah, fuck countries, nation states, etc. Power should be at the level of communities of workers, similar to how the original Soviet system was before it got so fucked up.

Tbh I think we'll just have to agree to disagree, I think wealth should be redistributed by force because I believe that the rich won't redistribute it otherwise. But I can respect where you're coming from - I wish it wasn't necessary but I just don't have faith that the rich will do it out of their own free will and kindness of heart. Also, even more than the local rich we need to expropriate the wealth of the billionaires and other shitheads that just suck the money out of areas and people, leaving them destroyed.

Also - what happens when the community is full of bigots? Like let's take Odessa TX, where they've just functionally banned trans people from using their correct bathroom. The community there decided on that, does that make it right? There's a similar argument with what happens when you've got a community of racist white people who decide that all POC are less than their equals.

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.

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!

https://www.iww.org/

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.

Yeah, as I commented elsewhere, I'm damn impressed my code managed to compile and run. I guess life has a pretty fault-tolerant compiler at times, or maybe I was just super lucky to not have the errors be in spots that'd completely screw me over.

I love these old IWW posters, especially as a current wob. It's really cool to see the history of the One Big Union!