i just want liberation for everyone, access to their share of the material abundance our world provides, and most importantly to always have food and medical care and a decent place to live. and i want us to explore the stars. in other words i would support whatever political tendency i thought could most plausibly attain those things, and that is obviously some kind of socialism, but i am not sure which right now. that is why i am in the DSA - it is one of the few leftist political organizations with the humility to not claim it has all the answers but which does have a credible vision for forward progress toward socialism.

that was supposed to say "in other words i am a communist. i would support..."

i used to believe that anarchism was a realistic way to achieve those goals, but the more i read anarchist literature and talk and organize with anarchists the more convinced i become that anarchism itself is hopelessly utopian and does not provide a credible way to get from here to full anarchism/communism.

at the same time i have found that M-Lism and Maoism provide an incredibly useful analytical framework and have also been the guiding ideologies of nearly all of the successful socialist movements we have witnessed in the real world. even if i have serious critiques of most of socialist movements, its observable effectiveness has to count for something

@morganastra have you looked into anarchosyndicalism? I like yo think of it as an implementation of anarchist ideas with a more practical perspective.

@floi yeah i like it a lot, of all the strains of anarchism syndicalism is the one i find most compelling, and before i started intentionally refusing to identify with any political tendency more specific than "communist" i would have considered myself a syndicalist.

however, while syndicalism provides a compelling vision of a transition to a socialist society in the absence of adversity, the only way it seems possible for it to significantly restructure the material conditions to the point of interrupting the reproduction of capitalism is if it creates a quasi-state, and then you have something only different from soviet socialism on technicalities