this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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Lefty Memes
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An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the "ML" influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
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That sounds good in theory, but incentivization is a real problem for numerous communities, particularly less urban ones. Attracting doctors, engineers, etc is much more difficult when you have a smaller pool of people even capable enough to perform those tasks to pull from. Currently this is done through money/profit, but even that isn't enough in some areas (see how the agricultural industry is currently struggling to attract veterinarians to rural communities).
I'm not fully disagreeing with you, by the way. In a perfect world, that sounds great. It just feels like a huge world of, "if X people do Y thing, it'll all work out just fine." Taking that step requires a huge leap of faith by hundreds of millions of people, and hoping no sizable group rises up to eventually usurp the whole delicate transition process.
It sounds good in practice too. The Zapatistas and Rojava have been putting systems like these in practice for quite some time now. Compared to their neighbors, they're doing pretty well for themselves. These systems work, have worked, and are likely to continue to work. These systems aren't for a perfect world, theyre systems to make the world better. My comment isn't a comprehensive or even prescriptive list of things we need to do to establish anarchy. They're examples of methods that have been used to great effectiveness and may carry insights and knowledge for people/communities to apply to their contexts in ways that make sense to them.
It shouldn't be a leap of faith, it should be a careful and calculated effort put forth by those who want to work for it. You may not totally disagree with me, but I wholeheartedly disagree with the characterization that anarchy is unrealistic. It's been done before and it's being done now
I guess the biggest issue I see is how do you handle global trade? Right now, tons of materials we need for even manufacturing highly advanced products and other materials requires a complex web of international trade. How do smaller communities hope to be part of that without sliding back to the pre-digital age? I know there are folks who probably don't see that as a bad thing, but I definitely do, as I enjoy having access to modern technology and services (not to mention, I work in IT, so my job kind of depends on it).
I can only speak for myself and my beliefs, but trade would be done in a manner where one community is capable of producing more than half of their needs within the community first. The workplaces in a community has unions represents them to meet with unions from other communities so they can coordinate production and trade for the mutual benefit of both communities.