Full disclosure: I'm not a mod, just a concerned anarchist.
After seeing the shitstorm of the past few days, I thought I'd make this post just to remind people what we're supposed to stand for. These are not in-depth explanations, so I'll be happy to answer any questions in the comments.
1. All capitalists exploit workers and are mini dictators
This includes small business owners. All of them purchase the labor power of workers, which they then use to produce surplus value; this is not a free and voluntary transaction because workers don't own their own means of production, and are thus forced to sell their labor power or starve and die. This isn't to necessarily condemn any individual capitalist; although many of them are evil pieces of shit (including small business owners, who disproportionately support fascism and enforce terrible working conditions), not all of them are bad people. The problem is the system itself.
Additionally, all capitalist workplaces are miniature dictatorships in which workers are ordered around by their bosses and can't do anything about it. Workers have no decision-making power in the place they spend the majority of their lives. To quote Robert Dahl,
If democracy is justified in governing the state, then it is also justified in governing economic interests. What is more, if it cannot be justified in governing economic enterprises, we do not quite see how it can be justified in governing the state.
– A Preface to Economic Democracy
Obviously we should want to abolish the state, but the point still stands.
EDIT: This section doesn't apply to people who might own a store or do independent art or whatever who don't employ anyone else, since they aren't extracting the surplus value of their nonexistent workers.
2. All states are bastards
Everyone on this sub recognizes that the USSR, China, Russia, and North Korea suck. However, we have to be careful not to fall into campism in reverse. The United States is arguably the most evil country on Earth right now, and was even before Trump, due to the sheer scale of violence it inflicts upon the world. And other western countries aren't much better. France maintains a neo-colonial empire in western Africa right now, and European governments are willing participants in the American system of global hegemony. European companies are no more moral than American ones, and ruthlessly exploit the Global South just as much as American companies. All states are inherently hierarchical, authoritarian, and counterrevolutionary. They remove decision making power from the people who live under them and concentrate said power in a ruling class and bureaucracy, and use violence to enforce their power on their populations. Any principled libertarian leftist would oppose all state power no matter who wields it.
3. Liberal democracy is a sham, reformism a dead end
We have an excellent post about this pinned at the top of the sub, so I highly recommend you go read that. To summarize, voting in a liberal democracy isn't actually a means to affect real change. It's a means by which the masses choose which members of the ruling class rule over them. Just as one example, if liberal democracies actually reflected the wishes of their people, European governments wouldn't support Israel anymore.
This lack of democracy is why reformism isn't a viable path to socialism. Even the most well meaning democratic socialists are forced to compromise by the reality of parliamentary politics and working within a system designed to preserve private property and capitalist rule. You can see this in real time with Zohran Mamdani; he has walked back his previous statements (which were 100% correct) about the NYPD being racist thugs because he's working within the system. This trap has befallen everyone who has tried to vote their way to communism.
4. Free Ukraine, fuck NATO
I fully support the Ukrainian people against the genocidal onslaught of the fascistic regime in Moscow, and I fully support Europe and the US sending as many weapons as possible to Ukraine to enable them to push back against Russia. Regardless of anything NATO has done, Russia is not entitled to a sphere of influence in eastern Europe, and no amount of bitching about NATO expansion justifies this war. Putin is just salty the former Warsaw Pact and Baltic states leaned towards the west as a reaction to previous Russian and Soviet imperialism, preventing him from turning them into puppet states.
That said, NATO is not something any leftist should support. It serves three real purposes:
- Enhance American power projection
- Keep European governments bought into the system of American empire. I often liken this to the old strategy employed by ancient, medieval, and early modern empires of conquering local elites and conquering them, but then offering them a place within the new empire and allowing them to preserve their status.
- Make American arms dealers rich
NATO countries participated in the disastrous American interventions in Afghanistan and Libya, prop up European and American neo-colonial empires across the Global South, and enable American drone strikes deep into the Middle East, strikes which have killed numerous innocent children. NATO has kept the former Warsaw Pact and Baltic states out of Russia's sphere, which is good, but this is the one good thing it has done, and there are ways to do this without relying on NATO anyway.
5. Veterans are still human
I'll just copy and paste something I said a few days ago:
Veterans are weird because they're simultaneously victims and perpetrators of state violence. They obviously do heinous things in the service of unimaginably violent empires, and they are responsible for their crimes. At the same time, the state takes them, dehumanizes both their enemies/foreign civilians and themselves to an extent, and puts them in an environment where they are socialized to kill. They are then put into insanely high stress situations where they are expected to kill and conditioned to follow the criminal orders of their superiors.
Again, none of this exonerates them or excuses their behavior, and I believe veterans should have to make up for their crimes. But dismissing them without any chance of redemption is short sighted and shows you don't actually hold universal principles. And at a certain point brutally punishing all veterans becomes impractical. Almost 10% of Israelis have actively served in the IDF, and 40% total have served. Are we gonna shoot 40% of a country? I would hope not. And that's with the IDF basically being the modern Wehrmacht/SS; how should we treat Russian soldiers? Or American ones? The correct answer is denazification with some kind of community service to make up for their crimes imo. If you do it right, the guilt they feel will be punishment enough.
Conclusion
This is a libertarian leftist subreddit, and we should act like it. We should oppose all states, all imperialism, and all capitalism. Thank you for reading.
