this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2026
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Tankies think that the state should own the means of production. Sure, they'll then claim that the workers own the state, but in reality it's just owned by the political elite.
Bingo. If your hands aren’t operating the equipment on the daily, you shouldn’t get to (co)own it. Statism bleeding into work life is effectively diet capitalism.
Honest question: is political work a valid form of labor?
Theory and reality are different things, absolutely - politics is labor. Whether that’s used for good or evil is separate. Politics also =/= statism, and nothing will ever be neatly cut and dry in the real world to fully divorce ourselves from these quandaries.
Re: statism, that's very fair, and it was what you said. I think I was partially responding to the "political elite" comment you were also responding to.
Totally agree, we can only speak certainties about real-world conditions, and the tendency toward abstraction and hypotheticals IMO is sort of a negative tendency in many ways.
I keep writing more, but I don't wanna get way in the weeds. Def appreciate the thoughtful response
Honest personal opinion: Absolutely not.
Why not? Politics happens either way. There are going to be people who are more influential than others. name any famous anarchist, my favorite was Malatesta, and they were 100% absolutely engaged in political work.
Is it just that political work is okay until after the workers seize the means? IMO denying the necessity of political work as a means of suppressing the possibility of political domination of a minority, which is a real concern, drifts into authoritarianism almost instantly. Its just denying reality. Denying that political work is work is a political opinion. Enforcing it would be political work!
This is not a gotcha question, genuinely want to hear your opinion. I don't think pointing out a contradiction is, on its own, a total invalidation of any given viewpoint. Contradictions are everywhere, people are contradictory.
Also that's not my downvote, I don't do that shi
"banning" politics is a wild concept anyways, because as we bang on about everything is politics.
Yeah, and I def relate to the person I respond to. I fully accept the necessity of political engagement, and volunteer time and money and energy toward that goal. That being said, I'm someone very concerned with truth and criticism, whereas there are others who are very concerned with politics. And in my experience, people who are very talented, committed and active politically are prone to always wanna come down on this or that side of an issue, or have a very clearly developed line even when maybe the conditions for having a hard and fast line are not all the way developed.
Meanwhile, a lot of people just aren't really experienced with that kind of engagement. It's very frustrating, and perhaps counter productive, to collapse every issue and practical activity into politics. Like actually, not everything is politics. Every movement has a political character, and denying that is a political stance! But culture isn't politics. Culture is political, it has a political character, but it isn't in and of itself politics. Just like politics has a cultural character but is distinct. I like the Marxist framing of economic base and superstructure; so that politics, law, and culture, and all associated institutions, are superstructure -- closely related and categorically similar but still distinct. While the motivations behind those things have a basis in economics, or maybe to simplify even further, the real human need and creation/social distribution of resources -- which is the economic base.
In many cases I wish for more cultural engagement than political engagement. And peoples experience with politics, and how easily and thoroughly it becomes corrupted, is a real objective obstacle to mass political engagement. So while I am active in and very proud of the political gains the left has made in recent years, the absence of a real leftist culture, or counter hegemony, is a red flag for our movements. And I think I would prefer to have many spaces for people to engage with politics indirectly, than to just insist that people engage with politics directly. There's wrong headedness in believing that all politics is inherently a path to corruption and centralization of power. But its perhaps just as wrong to insist that the only path to engagement with left mass politics is through direct political engagement.
As someone whose talents lie more in pedagogy and art and culture than politics, I think I am less effective than I could be if there was more to our movements than just winning people to this or that political line through campaigns and clear victories of legal/organizational legitimacy.
Do they extract the same fraction of resources for their own pleasure? Did Stalin or others have car collections, horse stables or private islands?
Ownership means control. If you own something, that means that you have control over it. Obviously with something as large as a country, most of what that asset produces will go into sustaining said asset. A factory owner doesn't invest the full revenue of his enterprise into personal luxuries, he has to first pay all the running expenses.
And even then, that person doesn't need to be fond of luxuries in order to still be an owner. I haven't looked into what luxuries Stalin enjoyed and I don't much care. My point is that he had power over everything in the country, and the proletariat had little power over the supposed "dictatorship of the proletariat".
How else would you do it? As long as everybody can join the party and rise in ranks I would say that it can't be more open.
uhhh, you'd structure it from the ground up? Like we have this right now, co-operatives exist and they work really well.
Less centralized control. Lenin sowed the seeds for Stalinism when he centralized the political system after the revolution. Selfish actors seek power, and the selfless find themselves corrupted by it. The position being open for everyone just means that anyone can become a tyrant.
How do you want to deal with the overhead of decentralization in case of war?
Well, the obvious solution would be to appoint a temporary supreme leader who, wait a second, he just abolished the republic and appointed himself emperor for life. Nevermind.
Centralized decision making is more efficient than its decentralized alternative, but that would be race to the bottom, the culmination of which would be a society of drones controlled by the central authority in every regard. So decentralization may be a losing position, but I still consider it worth it. The means are the ends.
Also worth noting that asymmetric warfare and guerrilla tactics benefit from the agility afforded by decentralization.