• @redtea@lemmygrad.ml
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      152 years ago

      This may be part of the problem.

      People don’t like to feel powerless.

      So they may have convinced themselves it’s better to think they can work themselves out of poverty.

      Rather than accept the system is rigged and no amount of hard work will make a difference.

      Communism provides an answer, of course.

      But it still demands hard work – but for the revolution.

      And this solution means entirely rewriting one’s way of viewing the world (mainly individualism versus collectivism).

      And looking around, the libertarian can see there’s little hope of a collective solution, so the only thing left is an individual one. (In most of the West, anyway.)

      If twentyfirst century Western communists got better at organising, I reckon a lot of these libertarians might jump ship.

      (Not to discount other hurdles, such as exceptionalism, racism, etc.)

      • @TheConquestOfBed@lemmy.ml
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        72 years ago

        This is what I mean whenever I talk about labor aristocratic tendencies. Some try to characterize these sorts of people as not-proletarians, which genuinely just shows they don’t know any history.

        Non-bourgeois reactionaries are still proles, but to get them to your side you often need at least an embryonic start of a mass line to get some of them to see the collectivised mistrust others share in the (current) state. This kind of argumentum ad populum is how they got to be libertarians in the first place (who do you think they heard it from?).

        This is why I say it’s better to focus on more easily radicalizable groups first. Min-wage earners, lumpenproles, minorities, the disabled, lgbt and all the sorts of people society looks down on already hate ‘big money’ and ‘big industry’ and other powerful entities that they see as corrupting the state and actively making their lives worse. In my conversations with them, they seem to have more tendencies toward collective thought, even if some Westernized brainworms are in there (like, for example, a lot of immigrants have big families and tend to make informal workplace coalitions/proto-unions with coworkers who share their language). By directing energy toward the kind of people the bourgeoise state burns through like fuel, you can talk the individualism out of them in a few conversations rather than months of slogging through metamorphised propaganda.

        • @redtea@lemmygrad.ml
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          22 years ago

          Excellent point(s). I agree.

          The people you mention are also the people who might benefit the most from small(er) improvements in material conditions (which collective action and collective thinking could produce even without big, radical social changes). Even something like group shopping at a supermarket to make the most of offers and bulk buying. Taken a step further, group cooking to save on fuel. Then a community starts to form, which people feel part of, rather than so alienated.

          Additionally, I think what you suggest is not mutually exclusive from other types of organising. (I’m not saying that you said this, btw – or maybe you did with the ‘first’, but I did not read this as ‘only’.) Focusing efforts where they will be most productive does not have to mean ignoring other avenues.

          Aside: The lack of this kind of organising from the Labour Party is what led me to predict that Corbyn might not do as well as some people hoped back in 2019. There was a sense that Corbyn’s Labour wanted to do this after being elected, but that’s too late. A worker’s party needs to serve the people and be seen to serve the people before it even thinks about getting elected.

          • @TheConquestOfBed@lemmy.ml
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            12 years ago

            I mean like, in terms of the effort-to-returns ratio, I’m not saying it wouldn’t be worth it to try and talk with like…libertarian friends or family members or something. But randos are always going to be more difficult, and randos with an incentive to side with the state will be the most difficult. So when judging how you’re going to spend your energy you have to plan accordingly. Racist cousin Steve is going to require more hours of debate than, say, some coworkers that you already know hate your job and talk openly about how much it sucks. But if you spend all your energy on cousin Steve you lose out on the coworkers. You have to decide which of those is more important to you and your goals.

    • Dochyo
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      32 years ago

      Thats interesting to me, the only libertarians I know of in my area are small businessmen who migrated into the area over the last decade.

  • Where did Mr. Employer get those Capital Investments? Just thinking about this stuff for 5 seconds is enough to flip Lolbertism on it’s shitty head 🤮.

    • @electrodynamica
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      82 years ago

      As someone who is self employed and has trouble getting work because no ethical work exists, and has trouble existing because I have no (ethical) access to capital, I declare this the most based comment of the thread.

  • @Shrike502@lemmygrad.ml
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    212 years ago

    Ah, another of those “Mistah capitalist worked so hard! You are so greedy for not wanting to share some of those profits you make!”

  • @lil_tank@lemmygrad.ml
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    192 years ago

    Libertarians be like “muh human nature” and proceed to ignore the most natural fact about humans that we can’t produce anything alone

  • @HaSch@lemmygrad.ml
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    62 years ago

    Libertarians will think they found a genius exploit to game the system when they learn you can peel a banana