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Kat Marchán 🐈
@zkat@toot.cat  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

honestly the democratic socialists are THIS || close to "discovering" democratic confederalism, and once they figure it out it's gonna be like "oh shit, so this is what we actually wanted", and I am tremendously impatient about when they actually get there.

I watched an interview with Mamdani yesterday (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbq7DFB8jWE), and he got asked about the Socialist Thing (aka "oh so you want the state to own everything"), and like, "this would not be a gotcha if the political identity you name were the one you're actually describing".

Like he's hitting the nail on the head: It's not actually about socialism vs capitalism vs whatever the fuck. It's about centering people, empowering people, fulfilling people's needs at a livelihood level. And you don't get that by trying to move entire governments. You do that by moving people.

And that's kinda the beauty of democratic confederalism as they do it in Rojava: You don't need a revolution. You don't need a massive, overwhelming election. You just need enough power to carve out your niche, and then you grow your (nazi-less) tent by having people talk to each other

I don't think iterating ad nauseam about what kind of state we should have ruling over us is going to get any of us anywhere (except the ruling class, which always swears THEY have it right, and everyone else stays screwed).

I think we fix things from below, or we don't fix them at all, not really.

p.s. it just so happens that when you start that kind of from-below power, Capitalism just... it's going to go away. It just will. You don't need to rise up against it. You literally can just hold hands and stand firm and organize and make it a positive thing where you imagine a better future.

Some people are just very horny for their Guns and Knives Out fantasies, and I'm extremely not into that. Although of course there's always going to be a reality where communities may need to be defended. But it's no longer states being defended. It's people. And fights look very different then.

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SnackOverflow
@SnackOverflow@darmstadt.social replied  ·  activity timestamp last week

@zkat Thanks for saying it this clearly! The left's fixation on the state is pretty much a sell-out: Instead of rejecting the state and its authority, too many just want another clique to be in charge. This kind of authoritarianism is clearly incompatible with what is happening in #Rojava right now, however imperfect its reality might be. #Engels wrote about the transition to #Socialism: "The State is not 'abolished'. It dies out." That is wonderfully close to what you're saying, I think.

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Kat Marchán 🐈
@zkat@toot.cat replied  ·  activity timestamp last week

@SnackOverflow yes. Also credit to the Zapatistas over in Chiapas for doing a lot of this work long before Rojava.

I think Rojava is also a reminder that we need to embrace iteration and imperfection, but that what we really need is the principle of being democratic-led in a true sense. Let's be messy. Let's figure it out. Let's be imperfect and play whack-a-mole with the flaws. The journey matters and we need to be willing to engage with it. I think a lot of "revolutionary" thought focuses so much on promising that "if we do guns and knives NOW, that'll just fix everything", because it seems so much easier to just let someone else take care of it for us.

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Aiden Fox Ivey
@aidenfoxivey@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@zkat > Capitalism just... it's going to go away. It just will.

Is there an example of this? I don’t have one on hand, but am curious.

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Kat Marchán 🐈
@zkat@toot.cat replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@aidenfoxivey Rojava and Chiapas are the two current polities where this is true

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andrew773
@andrew773@mastodon.online replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@zkat Link the interview if possible. Interesting read on Wikipedia.

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Kat Marchán 🐈
@zkat@toot.cat replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@andrew773 edited OP with a link

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jokeyrhyme
@jokeyrhyme@aus.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@zkat frustrating that the state owning everything is somehow more offensive than billionaires owning everything

And the willful ignorance/misinformation about the socialism's distinction between personal property and private property

Versus what we're witnessing with the insatiable greed of billionaires

But yeah, socialism bad, m'kay (urgh)

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Kat Marchán 🐈
@zkat@toot.cat replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@jokeyrhyme personally I see “state” ownership as being just one step less bad than private ownership. A lot of highly-bureaucratic/auth stuff works out to just… a few powerful bureaucrats enriching themselves and their cronies, and I don’t think that’s an unrealistic description of what happens a lot.

It’s just not as bad as Capitalism.

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jokeyrhyme
@jokeyrhyme@aus.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@zkat agreed, governments are no silver bullet
They **should** act as countrywide unions to protect citizens from billionaires, but it seems like lots of them do the opposite
And even "democratically elected" holds no water when the choice is only ever between industry-captured incumbent parties

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Kat Marchán 🐈
@zkat@toot.cat replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@jokeyrhyme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_confederalism this is the style of model I'm arguing in favor of

Democratic confederalism - Wikipedia

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jokeyrhyme
@jokeyrhyme@aus.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@zkat OMFG ... take ... my ... money ...

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Kat Marchán 🐈
@zkat@toot.cat replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@jokeyrhyme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDnenjIdnnE&pp=ygUObGlmZSBpbiByb2phdmE%3D

and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o96IJ49IaFI&t=448s&pp=ygUObGlmZSBpbiByb2phdmE%3D

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Woozle Hypertwin
@woozle@toot.cat replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@zkat This is queer100 % in line with the solution-space I've been focussing on lately.

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