FluffyPotato
Yea, yea, I have seen the talking points before. I’m sure you just have plenty of legitimate questions about how many were killed and since the historic records arent very complete it can’t be that many, right. And even if they were killed then it was justified. I have gone through this song and dance before and it’s the same tune every time and it’s not interesting anymore.
Genuine question: What would the alternative be then?
Socialism has only become slightly popular in recent years and it’s still incredibly niche. There isn’t enough support for a revolution and it’s highly unlikely there ever will unless conditions change massively. And even if a revolution happens anarchist will not (or at least should not) work with MLs as authoritarianism is everything I (and hopefully we) stand against. A ruling class will never share the same class interests as the workers.
But we have gotten stuff pushed though with a local anarchist group and the only time that will work is when liberals are in power (hopefully along with the more left parties as is the case usually). Also changing the minds of liberals is a lot easier than conservatives and the best way has been to show them that socialist policies will work better. If our nationalist, conservative and fascist parties form a coalition all we get is to lose right, our platform gets a lot smaller and weaker and we are just stuck loosing power until the next election.
An added bonus is that you can actually do both. While advocating for socialist policies we can get support for a revolution if needed in the future as good policies will move liberals over more as capitalism fails them but if right wing parties are in power it’s much harder to build any support for anything.
Really depends on what you mean by market. Like a market has existed since humans have and probably will until post-scarcity. The market we have now with arcane rules that all end up enriching people with more money than any one human will ever need is something that has been in the making since industrialization. That market is pretty much at a point where salvaging it is not really possible even if there was any attempt made to do so. Control of how that market works seems to be at the hands of bad actors who just want to squeeze as much wealth out of it as they can, screwing over anyone else.
Like for example the power companies in my country stopped producing power on their own and bought power from neighboring countries just to sell it to locals at a higher rate. Basically just acting as middle men without providing anything of worth. That drove the price of power to hit 300% more than the year prior. The only reason they stopped was because our government started their own power plan with locally produced power forcing those companies to compete with it but the damage was done and power prices never went back to normal like they never do when companies inflate prices. A market regulated by people who only care about profit will never work.
That’s why I started with “depending on what you mean by market”. There are like a ton of different academic and colloquial definitions.
Though I don’t agree that you need an army to enforce the current market system as the current system seems quite capable of being perpetuated by capitalists themselves.
The US police is a very weird anomaly in the world, the hiring standards and educational requirements are below anything most other countries consider acceptable while the budgets are higher than anywhere else as well while producing the worst outcomes of most other police forces.
Debt is pretty much never collected by a police force but usually by banks (or what ever other institution gave out that loan). Most of these relations are not maintained by cops or military since working class people lack a unified front to combat anything (France is the only place where that has even remotely shifted in recent years). So maintaining anything by cops hasn’t even been necessary for like the last 50 years at least. If workers had any unified front that may change.
Also the only country that does imperialism with their army in modern times in Russia, the US, China, France etc all do their imperialism by investments making another country dependant on them and then exporting their resources.
Crypto was always a speculative asset. It has been used effectively as a stock market with no regulations the moment it contained any considerable amount of capital. At no point in time did it have a shot at replacing the current monetary system.
Force may have been a method to maintain the capitalist system once but in modern times it’s division and complacency.
In 99.9% of cases yea we as a society have ended up enforcing it unfortunately. Gotta win over hearts and minds to change that and if most people can be convinced to change I’m sure there will be a bigger threat of violence and probably more than a threat but if enough people back changing from the capitalist system it won’t matter, cops will never outnumber the working class. If only the working class learned to work together (and also stop putting dictators in charge who fuck over the working class).