I don’t just mean outrage or regular rage, I mean shock that someone was to the left of “legal weed and free college but only for those that operate a successful business for 3 years in a disadvantaged community” top-cop takes.

I think federating took them by surprise, looking back. For about a week, those smug liberals were at a loss to even fathom what Hexbears were saying, and could only chant bullshit about how we’re Russian/Chinese bots.

Sure they still do that but they’ve slightly adapted to Hexbear presence.

    • BurgerPunk [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      I’m ML and haven’t read Kropotkin, but i think his idea of mutual aid as a part of evolution is really valuabe, since social darwinism has so poisoned lib thought especially in the US that most USians don’t differentiate between Darwin’s actual scientific theory and social Darwinism, to the point of believing “survival of the fittest” is a Darwin quote.

      • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        10 months ago

        The book to go for then would be “Mutual Aid: A Factor in Human Evolution”, right? As far as I know, Conquest is mainly a utopian socialist thought experiment about how production (using technology and figures of his time) could easily provide for everyone with much less work. I think it’s valuable, just has different subject matter.

          • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            10 months ago

            I fully support it, just wanted to comment on book topics. Social darwinism is insidious and it is difficult to imagine criticizing it too much.

    • ThereRisesARedStar [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      Yes. I’m not sectarian to anarchists in general, but conquest of bread is basically a fantasy novel taking itself seriously. It isnt grounded in any research. If you like the ideas presented in conquest of bread, that’s fine, but it doesn’t actually go into how those ideas can be achieved, outside of mostly “people will just spontaneously do it”

      • epicspongee [they/them, he/him]@hexbear.net
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        10 months ago

        I don’t think this is a bad thing though. Books like the bread book or The Dispossessed can help open people up to a leftist POV by showing them that there are very realistic alternatives to a capitalist system that, while utopian, would be so cool to live under. I feel like we should push people less towards “gloom and doom” books as their first book.

      • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        10 months ago

        CoB is based on economic research, not magic, but absolutely is utopian in basically eliding the problem of “how would this ever be established?”