Chris Pappas is a piece of shit. He’s the kind of gay guy who hits on other gay guys behind closed doors and when.they reject him, he’s bigoted towards them. Very much Mr Respectability Politics and a spineless pick-me.

It’d be fun to watch, it’d be engaging to the crowd, and it’d terrorize capitalists. Especially with real-time updates, imagine a CEO doing a press release and then having their bounty skyrocket as people hear the news.

I’ve got a story idea for a cyberpunk dystopia. Imagine a world almost identical to ours. In that world, some inventive person creates a darknet website that allows anonymous donations to put bounties on corporate executives. Now, this site’s creator wants to make sure their site isn’t misused, so they implement guardrails like “Targets would be required to have over $10M in assets” and “each crypto wallet may contribute a maximum of $5 so it better reflects the will of the people.”

Then, the site admin adds betting options like “who reaches a $1M bounty first”, over/under odds, betting on which target gets whacked first, etc, in order to draw traffic to the site. Maybe there’d also be a percentage of the bounty that’s paid out to organizations working to heal the damage caused by the target, so for example if a fossil-fuel exec gets whacked then that percentage goes to orgs working to stop fossil fuels.

How do you think it’d play out in this story? Would the site properly incentivize people to shoot up boardrooms rather than schools?

So I’ve been thinking about this for a bit. Yeah, fuck countries, nation states, etc. Power should be at the level of communities of workers, similar to how the original Soviet system was before it got so fucked up.

Tbh I think we’ll just have to agree to disagree, I think wealth should be redistributed by force because I believe that the rich won’t redistribute it otherwise. But I can respect where you’re coming from - I wish it wasn’t necessary but I just don’t have faith that the rich will do it out of their own free will and kindness of heart. Also, even more than the local rich we need to expropriate the wealth of the billionaires and other shitheads that just suck the money out of areas and people, leaving them destroyed.

Also - what happens when the community is full of bigots? Like let’s take Odessa TX, where they’ve just functionally banned trans people from using their correct bathroom. The community there decided on that, does that make it right? There’s a similar argument with what happens when you’ve got a community of racist white people who decide that all POC are less than their equals.

First of all, yes, we’re living under a shitty authoritarian government in the US. It’s basically a dictatorship of the richest in society. I want to invert that, where the workers have all the power. It’ll flatten out the power hierarchy eventually because everyone will become workers like everyone else. Just, in order to get there, we’ve gotta do some things which will smack of authoritarianism, such as forcibly redistributing wealth and converting businesses to being worker-owned.

I don’t know what’s best for people, other than that we should make society more democratic. But thing is, we can’t let everyone act in their own self interest when doing so harms others. Like, it’s in a landlord’s individual self interest to charge as much money as possible and to refuse to redistribute their property.

Also, if you let everyone act in their own self interest, how do we solve the problem of getting land back to indigenous populations? For example, I’m certain that many white people in the US won’t want to give land back, and there could be a democratic majority that opposes doing the right thing. What do we do then?

Agreed, power should be held by syndicates, ideally with those syndicates/groups/unions/etc working together by sending delegates to a Congress and then abiding by the democratic decisions made by that Congress.

I think deciding who is or isn’t the vanguard is something you can only do when you look back at history - you can point at different groups at different times when they were leading the movement, but if you were living through it things might not be clear. It’s pointless trying to figure out who the vanguard is right now, instead we should be organizing.

So, I think the workers should own the nation and that power should be held at the level of workplace unions and community organizations. I see being “the vanguard” of communism as similar to a 1st place designation in Mario Kart - it’s a floating title that depends on who’s doing the most for the effort and who other people look to. That vanguard shouldn’t get any extra privileges, they’re workers just like anyone else.

I think the whole authoritarian vs antiauthoritarian split is kinda BS - IMO it’s more about who’s dictating terms to who. We really badly need land reform, and landlords aren’t going to willingly give that up, so we have to be a bit “authoritarian” in order to make them do so. Same thing goes with wealth redistribution, and land back. If you give up on using force to get what you want, how do you get land back to indigenous populations, or stop the genocide in Gaza?

I think we’ll be more free if we work together to build socialism than we would be if we keep shitting on each others approaches towards building it. Then we’ll just keep refining it until there’s a minimum amount of hierarchy or control in society that’s used to prevent re-privatisation, exploitation, and the re-establishment of Capitalism.

Signed, a “tankie”

Capitalists can choose to give up their property and become workers like the rest of us, or they can get the wall and then their property is redistributed. The capitalist class has colonized our society, and their enforcers are the police. And according to Franz Fanon’s books on anticolonial struggle in Algeria, colonial relations never go away unless fought with anticolonial violence to oppose the violence of the colonizers. Ultimately, violence is what is needed to force those in power to give up their wealth, and if they gave up their wealth willingly then violence would not be necessary.

Did someone say “One Big Union”? Sounds like the IWW would be right up your alley. It’s coming back to life again - definitely check if you have a local branch!

https://www.iww.org/

The IWW is an explicitly radical militant union devoted to overthrowing the tyranny of the wage system and settling the class war through full worker control of all enterprises. It’s an entirely different animal than the bloated business unions who settle for a “fair share” of the profits. The IWW asserts that all of the value produced by the labor of workers should go to workers, and the bosses can just become workers like the rest of us.

Kind of, I meant it as a jab at people who just invert the aesthetics and morality of the Catholic Church and other faiths as a means of “rebellion” without doing anything of substance to challenge the structures of society and power around them.

Most people, and especially most techies at places like Google have lived lives where systems appeared to play by the rules, where their legal rights are respected. So, it hits you out of nowhere the first time a company does something blatantly illegal to suppress dissent or union organizing. It’s hard to internalize that it’ll happen until it happens to you or someone you care about.

It’s why a classic mistake union organizers make is to not understand just how harshly a corporation will crack down on you, and that you have to be organizing in secret until you’re ready to win the power struggle that’ll ensue once you tip your hand to your bosses.

Both Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion are great, and protests should be disruptive, otherwise they’re just ignored. Maybe they’re not doing enough disruption and damage to force governments to listen. Or, maybe someone should go after energy/oil companies directly via sabotage or other means and cause enough economic damage that the cost of polluting and resource extraction becomes too high for them to profit from.