for context: i support a cross between market socialism, welfarism and georgism under a party-union/minarchist government (a small-enough government where the political parties work with the unions). i think that minarchism is a required step in a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat.
my socialist views are therefore a fusion of libertarian market socialism and de leonism and such.
My last comment was mean, but in this one I sincerely would like to try to help you. If you believe that my attempting to be helpful first requires making amends for the previous comment, then let me know.
So I ended up looking through your comment history after the last exchange because I was trying to figure out what I was missing. I don’t understand still, but I can identify a patter:
The one you probably would care the most about is that, aside from “georgism” being a bit of a meme, the reason people think you come across as a bit account is that you communicate in an extremely one-directional way. What I mean by this is that you don’t come across as listening to anyone (not even to contradict them), you just sort of say your thing and move on, even if you pose yourself as seeking conversation. This is exemplified by how you constantly say the same things unprompted over and over even when not a single person has responded positively to some of it, and there’s no apparent effort to change what you’re saying to even account for that, even if it’s just presenting an argument differently (though normally you don’t even really argue, you just declare). I can go back to posts from ~3 weeks ago where you were rattling off just the same talking points, for which you have received over a dozen refutations between then and now, and it’s one thing to still believe those things, it’s another to just keep saying the same talking points just like you said them before without acknowledging the problems people have with them. Does that make sense?
This all is not helped by the fact most of the talking points just aren’t very effective. I picked this comment because it had the example that I thought was the easiest to explain:
What do you think enforcing laws is if not coercion? Granted, there are definitely states that do a lot of coercion outside of the law, but in almost all states, most coercion is either via law enforcement directly or indirectly (via property relations, which I can explain more if you need me to). The idea of a “non-coercive state” that is “just enforcing laws” doesn’t make any sense and comes across like a joke because it’s a direct contradiction in terms.
And then you go making grand declarations on these ideas, ignoring what others have to say about them, going as far as seemingly endorsing war on Venezuela in order to write political fan-fiction. If you want to write fan-fiction, may I suggest writing about like an anime or something instead of real people being murdered?
Are you learning? What have you learned here? As I said, it seems like you’re mostly just repeating yourself for weeks straight.
With respect to Venezuela, the main thing to emphasize is that there should be no war and the people agitating against Venezuela are tools of imperialism. We can talk about the direction Venezuela should be taking when it is on ground where it is even capable of changing course rather than clinging to survival as others try to dictate its course.
While some of this makes me think that you’d like to read Engels (I already linked you Socialism: Utopian and Scientific in another comment), you are now just talking around the problem, because law enforcement is still coercion.
But as I also told you in another comment that you never replied to, as did others, this is an attempt to depoliticize the state, and it’s fundamentally misguided. There cannot be a depoliticized state. You cannot just avoid questions of what should be done and hope that things work out, and all this stuff about “shrinking” the government fundamentally isn’t serious political theory. Here is why:
Either the government is enforcing property relations, or the property claimants are enforcing property relations. The tendency of the latter is inevitably to trend toward warlordism, which you might note is functionally also a form of governance.
The Republicans who talk about “small government” (because let’s face it, those are most of the people who say that) either don’t know the meaning of their assertions, or they are lying to you. The reason is that, insofar as you can trace discussions of the “size” of government to anything in reality at all, it usually relates to regulations. Regulations do not represent a spectrum from freedom to oppression, they represent the extent to which decisions are made by the government versus by the rich. The rich cannot be reformed to make pro-social decisions consistently, there are clear structural reasons that it is impossible because doing so will cause them to lose out to more ruthless capitalists. Only a democratic government, a so-called “tyranny of the majority,” has the capability of consistently making choices that benefit most people.
Why would you do that, you would immediately be threatened, if not outright invaded, by the Capitalists. You’re thinking in a vacuum only, without considering the material reality that would surround any nation with this ‘ideology’.
That’s not what the ‘State’ means, that’s just governance in general. Not to mention that you would be unable to coerce any of the Bourgeoisie to the will of the Proletariat in any form. You wouldn’t be able to seize the means of production at all; nationalization without State force is impossible, among other numerous issues. Without the oppression of the Bourgeoisie, through the use of the State, the Proletariat are at risk of oppression again by the Bourgeoisie.
We know what you’re talking about, yet you keep reiterating as if we do not. My comrades here are trying to tell you that this is an ideological dead end, and instead redirect you to actually read Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, etc. Not Wikipedia articles. Atleast read the Communist Manifesto, it is not that long and is possible to read- even with ADHD, which I suffer from heavily. It will atleast give you the bare basics.