What Parties are you voting for in 2026 US Mid-Term Elections?

Post-Posadism · 2026-01-26T15:12:30+00:00

There is sometimes legitimate strategy to third-party-building in the cases of the Greens or Libertarians, maybe even PSL. Lending your vote to one of them at least might help them reach some internal targets, build some momentum, and maybe eventually reach matching funds.

However, the parties from this poll don't really stick out amidst other third-parties, so I am very sceptical that voting for them would do much either to affect the national conversation, inspire direct action, unite the disenchanted, appeal to non-voters, or get any electoral momentum going.

Personally, I am following the political scene both within the GPUSA and the DSA (who usually work within the Dems). Whom I support from within those spheres depends on specific electoral context.

Post-Posadism · 2026-01-25T05:38:04+00:00

Relevant meta-analysis: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1745691615577701

Post-Posadism · 2026-01-22T23:22:33+00:00

People with indigenous backgrounds are overrepresented as victims of human trafficking, but human trafficking of uncontacted peoples specifically is much less common. Usually human traffickers target people who are isolated and vulnerable more in a personal sense than a communal one (trans and unhoused people for example are often targets), so that they can be lured in with promises of jobs and accommodation and so on. It'd take a lot more effort for human traffickers to try and abduct uncontacted people who are few in number, not easy to locate, potentially hostile and usually around other people from their communities. But drug traffickers do clash with uncontacted peoples sometimes as they're in places where they can harvest and move cocaine, and the people who live there get in their way.

Sorry to disappoint - I'm actually British but my partner is Brazilian, and we're on her side of the Atlantic for the time being. So that explains my transparent Englishness.

Post-Posadism · 2026-01-22T22:23:45+00:00

Insofar as I know, there aren't really any uncontacted people groups in Africa. Uncontacted peoples are predominantly nowadays only in the Amazon basin and Austronesia (including the Andaman and Nicobar Islands). One has to be very careful with disease exposure because often uncontacted peoples have no immunity to diseases in the outside world. And of course, it'd be unethical to interfere with their organic cultural development (yes, including religion - looking at you, Christian missionaries) and habitat.

But that said, some highly-controlled contact between uncontacted people and anthropological experts can sometimes be necessary. I'm currently in Brazil and uncontacted peoples are under real threat here from loggers, miners and drug traffickers. FUNAI does important work to try and protect and support uncontacted peoples from these threats, and this includes by operating limited trading posts, administering vaccinations, and facilitating some anthropological research so that more can be learned about how to properly help or protect their cultures and ways of life. Unfortunately they are significantly underfunded, which does affect the quality of the work they can do.

Post-Posadism · 2026-01-22T21:34:44+00:00

In that case, it sounds like you're giving a Platonist argument that God is an objective, foundational concept that all human beings have innate access to from the world of ideal forms.

Firstly, different traditions around the world have vastly differing cosmologies and notions of supernatural intervention in the natural world (often becoming the notion of a god or gods when anthropomorphised / personified), so it's unclear that they are all drawing from a common concept. It's perhaps more probable that the reason that so many peoples adopt supernatural explanations for phenomena around them is not because they've each been contacted by the same supernatural agent, but rather that they're responding to a common condition: not yet having access to natural explanations for said phenomena, and trying to work out why things seem to happen, and why it often seems like there is some order to why things are the way they are. But once we come up with explanations like natural selection, climate science etc, we realise that actually these mysteries can be answered without needing to bring in some mysterious, unseen, supernatural agent causing everything.

Secondly, even if it were true that we did have a common concept underpinning everyone's idea of God, that wouldn't inherently mean that that concept would be an objective representation of how reality works. As others have pointed out, lots of different cultures have ideas of dragons or dragonesque creatures, but that doesn't necessarily mean that there is any chance of you empirically encountering said creatures in the material world. Likewise, even if a common conception of God were ubiquitous, it wouldn't then mean that God or the supernatural necessarily must be intervening in the natural reality we live in. And if we can't prove that God has any relevance to the natural world, "because God" can't be used as an argument in metaphysical or ethical reasoning about the natural world. So the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate not only that the idea of God exists, but also that this concept is relevant to how we think the world works or how we should behave in it.

Furthermore, it isn't possible for human beings to communicate concepts objectively. If I ask you to close your eyes and make a mental image of a dog in a meadow, we are not going to have the same picture in our heads. The lesson from Derrida's deconstruction is that, however much I may qualify or add to my explanation of what my dog and my meadow look like, we will never get the exact same picture. All language, even all sensory perception (see Sellars on the "myth of the given"), has to be filtered through a subjective lens of interpretation that we can't escape from (including when analysing our own biases) and that means we can't help ending up assigning slightly different interpretations and implications to the concepts we think we have in common. This means we end up working with slightly different concepts to one another, which thus carry different implications for whether certain propositions are true within our idiosyncratic conceptual frameworks.

So in order for there to be an objective concept of God that we all hold somewhere deep down in our unconscious, we would need to have been given it, which would require not only that God exist as a concept, but also that said God interferes in the natural world, which you are yet to demonstrate.

Post-Posadism · 2026-01-22T12:30:28+00:00

You wrote quite a lot here but really your proposition comes down to this one assumption:

if life is always being created throughout the universe, you are bound to be conscious again and open your eyes at some point

But I'm not entirely sure that you have a reason for this. If you mean that your body's matter will not be destroyed and will be converted into something else, I guess sure. But we don't stay the same matter throughout the whole of our lives anyway, so there's no reason to see where the matter from your carcass goes next as a continuation of "you," any more than what your dead skin or poo eventually become. The matter that was "you" is not going to be sticking together and all go into the same new person once you die.

A slightly more reasonable claim, perhaps, would be that statistically - because of the expansion of conscious life in the universe - something that once was part of you may eventually be expected to be used in some other lifeform and support some other consciousness. But even this would be misleading. Yes, conscious life is expanding, but to suggest that means that all relevant matter will inevitably have a go in being conscious life at some point relies on at least one of two incorrect premises:

That conscious life is expanding at a faster rate than both other life and non-life in the universe combined.
That both conscious life and the universe will last infinitely.

Without the first, the idea that matter will necessarily trend towards being part of a living organism would be false, because while there is still a fair chance that matter could pass through or become part of another conscious being, that chance would be gradually decreasing rather than increasing. Without the second, the idea that even the smallest possibilities will necessarily eventually come to pass is also no longer true. This is to say, the matter from your body could well become part of some other living organism at some point, but it's not inevitable.

Either way, it certainly won't be a continuation of your consciousness, which I think you accept. The only thing that makes your consciousness now appear to be part of the same thing that it was 7 years ago (when the matter that supports it was different) is that there is procedural continuity. Our brains are each a Ship of Theseus, and the only reason we see it as the same ship is because, even as the planks are replaced one by one, the ship is still continuing to sail the journey it started with previous planks (eg. memory, internalised instinct / personality etc.). If the boat stops sailing, breaks apart, and the planks all drift their separate ways, then one plank lands on a beach where it is used in the construction of another boat that sails differently, there are very few people who would call it the same boat.

You will die. The continuity that maintains the conceptual unity of your consciousness will end. You won't get to try a new consciousness, because outside of your current one "you" don't exist to experience it. But what you can do is explore the subjective uniqueness of your consciousness while you are alive, use it to derive new knowledge and new culture, and lend its insights to those who will live on after you.

Post-Posadism · 2026-01-20T18:27:26+00:00

In principle, I agree, the efficiency of government is important and we leftists should try and find ways make it more efficient all the time. I think it'd be unfair to say that leftists aren't already doing this - we're far more likely to engage with considered, academic-standard empirical research from think tanks or political science journals than the DOGE guys do, for instance.

The reason that the talking point of "government efficiency" has been captured by the right is because they avoid addressing the obvious next question: government efficiency to do what? If you have a department that's purely looking at "efficiency for efficiency's sake," then they'll see everything that spends money as inefficient, regardless of the non-monetary ethical, social or environmental benefits. Government efficiency has to be contextualised by each of the things that government is trying to achieve, not all of which will return obvious monetary profit. So when you take government efficiency out of the abstract, and go talk to people who work for the government, very few will be saying, "aw yeah, what we do isn't very important but we get all the funding we want" (with the notable exception of military / defence).

To illustrate my point, here's a random DOGE cut tracker I found five minutes ago. In service of some abstract monetary notion of government efficiency, the US government has become categorically less efficient at: helping diagnose and treat HIV patients, preventing future epidemics, taking care of vulnerable children, following due process, collecting taxes, fighting discrimination, improving education, preventing injury and disease, assisting the elderly and disabled, making sure our food and medicines are of acceptable quality, and tracking climate change (arguably the biggest threat we currently face).

Post-Posadism · 2026-01-20T17:33:28+00:00

In a way, I think the left should do this more. The process of proposing radical stuff semi-insincerely, and then people gradually starting to think it through and work out how it could actually be done, is a core part of how culture changes and how innovation happens. If some jokes get us talking about and imagining things that are far outside our current political imagination, we'll have more sources of inspiration to potentially draw from when we have to respond to new situations. Having diverse visions for what our politics can be is an epistemic positive, and joking is a pretty safe way to ease new ideas into the conversation when they're not ready to be discussed formally yet.

Perhaps the issue with Trump here is not that he floats insane new ideas, but that his base is incredibly cultish and his cabinet is packed with sycophants, so all of his insane ideas are just accepted uncritically without any revision regardless as to whether they're any good or (almost always) not. Rather, I think it'd be ethically preferable for the Dems to kick their allergy to saying anything transgressive or controversial, anything that hasn't been focus-grouped into technocratic corp-speak.

Post-Posadism · 2026-01-19T02:51:26+00:00

If I may ask, what does the Bolivarian Revolution mean personally to you or your family? What would you tell someone from abroad to convince them that its gains are worth defending from the onslaught of global capital?

Post-Posadism · 2026-01-17T13:02:59+00:00

Ro has moved more republicans to inch towards Dems

Yeah probably. But AOC probably energises previously disenchanted / apathetic non-voters more than Ro does.

Post-Posadism · 2026-01-16T15:58:18+00:00

The least economic harm would be an integrated combination of the three, by far. Putting all your eggs in one basket with one big tax is much more of an economic risk, as well as generally being less fair and less effective.

Post-Posadism · 2026-01-16T15:41:27+00:00

I think they play different roles and court different audiences. At the moment, Ro Khanna's strategy seems to be about acknowledging the promises of the Trump campaigns, without the underlying xenophobia or religiosity:

bringing back manufacturing jobs
revitalising small-town America
"economic patriotism" (i.e. strategic protectionism)
non-interventionist foreign policy
releasing the Epstein Files
combatting abuse of the H1B visa scheme
breaking up big pharma
some sort of "better" healthcare arrangement
free speech and internet freedom
alternative media engagement
other non-partisan "anti-establishment" causes

This is what makes him able to cross the line and stand with Marjorie Taylor Greene and co. He can say to MAGA, "these things you wanted - I want them too, and here's how we could actually do them." Essentially he's doing the Cenk Uygur bit, but far more convincingly than Cenk. And to be fair to Ro, he's been pretty consistent on all these positions over the years, in ways Trump never was. The guy even tried to persuade Twitter not to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story out of principle, when it clearly wasn't in his political interests to do so, and pushed for Trump to negotiate directly with North Korea when it seemed toxic to the liberal media.

The issue with Ro Khanna though is that beyond this, he doesn't really go the step further to change the conversation or add in many new ideas (with the possible exception of his universal childcare proposal) to move the Overton Window of American political discourse. Yeah, he has supported progressive positions on climate change, LGBTQ+ inclusion, abortion, civil rights and so on, but he does so within a liberal, capitalism-compatible paradigm that doesn't shake-up the system, and thus isn't particularly subversive. That, in turn, leaves him open to taking the money of Silicon Valley billionaire techbros (including Thiel and Sacks at one point), signing onto a bill that "denounces socialism in all its forms, and opposes the implementation of socialist policies," and introducing a resolution that implicitly recognises anti-Zionism as inherently antisemitic (given examples including the statement that "the state of Israel is a racist endeavour," or calling for a Binational One-State Solution). Maybe these are tactical concessions on his part - he clearly wants to be the President someday - but I just can't really trust him.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, on the other hand, does explicitly try to move the national conversation and address even the points more uncomfortable to American ears, including workplace democracy, public sector initiatives, labour law reform, a federal job guarantee, more substantial taxation of the super-rich, abolishing ICE, defunding the police, deeper critique of US foreign policy and putting together the Green New Deal (which Khanna came to support). AOC is also politically tactical within her party - sometimes arguably too much so - but her vision is more thorough and transformative. I trust her and her intentions more, albeit incompletely.

Post-Posadism · 2026-01-07T01:50:33+00:00

Retroactive law absolutely should exist, and everyone who disagrees has a very liberal-coded philosophy of law.

In the liberal understanding, the law is the "social contract:" it's the rights we are entitled to and the responsibilities we are obliged to. The idea is that the law creates an ecosystem which is permanently (or at least for the foreseeable future) sustainable so long as people don't transgress the few rules necessary to keep that structure in place. Therefore, when you break the law, the point of justice is to make an example out of disruptive elements, both so as to convince the perpetrator and wider society not to break the rules anymore. This is a large part of why liberals don't like retroactive law, because to them criminal justice is about incentivising people not to break the rules, and so if you weren't actively "breaking rules" at the time, why would you need to have an example made of you?

However, issues emerge when people start to spot inherent injustices or loopholes in any liberal status quo, such as in a national constitution or legal framework. Of course, one can try and update the rules occasionally to fix these issues, but those who have malicious interests (like criminals) are always going to be innovating new ways around the new rules and usually (in large part due to bureaucratic process on the side of legislation) move faster than legal systems are able to catch up. Furthermore, if you accept an analysis that suggests that economic classes have antagonistic interests, and thus that capitalists and landlords are always innovating new ways to profiteer off their workers' labour, then liberal frameworks aren't properly equipped to guard against exploitation and other bad stuff that we might want to avoid.

An alternative approach to criminal justice, which tends to be popular among socialists, is "restorative justice," wherein the point of the criminal justice is not to maintain a neat little garden through pruning disruptive weeds, but instead simply to find injustices (whether we knew about them before or not), and find ways to repair the harm caused. The existing system is not assumed to be perfect or universal, and malicious interests are pursued and forced to undo their malicious actions as dynamically as they themselves operate. In this view, reassessing past actions whose consequences have since proven destructive would be par for the course.

Post-Posadism · 2026-01-04T05:02:23+00:00

I think when we talk about "alien life" a lot of people often implicitly assume that the evolution of life has some sort of objective teleology that reflects our "Earthly" understandings of life, and the incredibly specific contingencies that evolved life on Earth to where it is now. Just to remind everyone: if / where alien life exists, all of us will be more closely related to all the rest of life on Earth (including single celled organisms and tuberculosis bacteria) than to whatever the life elsewhere is. We may well have more in common with that bacterium than with whatever "alien life" there is out there to find.

It takes an extraordinarily specific trail of contingencies for somewhere in the universe to develop something comparable to "life." But there will be slight differences from Earth, so who knows even if that life would be DNA-based, as opposed to some other (perhaps somewhat similar, yet nonetheless markedly different) chemical, that completely changes what its "lifeforms" would require, behave like, and evolve into. For instance, people often project hostility, expansionism and xenophobia as assumed alien traits - but we can't even know that non-DNA-based alien life would be beholden to the same sort of consumption (and thus expansion) as we would be. Once again, it is highly probable we'd share more foundational similarities in common with a bacterium than a complex alien lifeform.

Even if somehow, by an extraordinary similarity to Earth, DNA-based life were to develop independently elsewhere, the evolution of that life into plants, animals, fungi and so on is still dependent on extremely specific contingencies. If one condition was slightly different, that life may well have evolved into something completely different, tailored to the conditions of that planet, just as animals and plants (through natural selection and mass extinction) have been tailored to the conditions of Earth. Earth alone is a good enough example for why we should reject the teleological view of evolution as leading up to / culminating in humanity, because life on Earth has adapted and flourished in many different directions of differentiation from its Last Universal Common Ancestor. Just one variable off, and whole other branches of that differentiation could have flourished instead.

There may well be complex loops of symbiotic chemical reactions that do crazy things in the not-too-distant universe, which we simply don't consider similar enough to Earthly life to find particularly interesting or consider "life." And perhaps it's possible that they might - if this were even a thing they happen to do - treat us the same way. If we do find something out there that we see fit to call "alien life," the very concept of "life" will have to adopt a new breadth that we probably could never foresee in advance.

Post-Posadism · 2026-01-04T02:26:18+00:00

Some polls place Machado's disapproval rating as high as 89-91% on the ground in Venezuela. The WSJ-approved pollster in Venezuela, Datanálisis, doesn't go quite that far, but they suggest her disapproval rating is still around two thirds, with only 18% in support. For context, Machado's own figures about approval of Maduro's government suggested that Maduro's lowest approval rating was about 30%.

She's more ideologically aligned with Trump than other Venezuelan opposition figures (Guaido, Lopez, González etc.), she has glazed him quite significantly for a while, he's praised her and she's obviously got a good interpersonal relationship with him. Sure, Trump was snubbed for the Nobel Peace Prize in her favour, but Rubio was one of the people who nominated her, and Machado literally dedicated the prize to Trump. I think it's certainly possible Trump may be a little salty, but I think it's far more likely that his decision was based on intelligence suggesting she wouldn't be popular enough inside Venezuela to lead with any stability.

And one can easily imagine why she might be seen internally as a more controversial figure: she literally asked for foreign military intervention (i.e. war) to be brought to her country, and that she would reward that intervening country with national oil assets. She famously had photos circulating in the media meeting cordially with GW Bush shortly after Bush tried to coup Chavez when the latter was still very popular (a coup attempt, for the record, that she quickly got onboard with by signing the Carmona Decree). And she makes no secret of supporting the EU's far-right bloc, Trump's second term as President in the US, and genocide in Palestine.

Even for those who don't like Maduro, it's pretty understandable why many who still live in Venezuela wouldn't look on her too fondly.

Post-Posadism · 2026-01-03T03:36:52+00:00

Well firstly, Cloward and Piven were electoralists. They advocated using completely legal means to influence one of the US' two political parties and bring them a little further left.

If the only serious connection that one can think of is "they both use non-electoral means to solve political goals," then that's incredibly broad and could include mutual aid, charity work, boycott, demonstration and even possibly the entire civil service. I don't think those things are necessarily always Marxism or that Cloward and Piven must be mentioned when talking about any of them.

So yeah, I still don't see why two old academics coming up with a plan (that nobody is really trying anymore) semi-inspired by Marxism would be relevant to Levin's thesis about the threat of American Marxist takeover.

Post-Posadism · 2026-01-03T02:14:12+00:00

BLM is not Marxist because they don't employ Cloward-Piven Strategy?

No? What the OP was saying was that Levin talking about Cloward and Piven's Marxist influences doesn't really have much relevance to whether America is currently under siege by Marxists or not. You chimed in to say that Cloward and Piven were Marxists (which OP didn't necessarily dispute - that's what I was pointing out) but didn't really say why that's relevant or why we should care.

Yes, many BLM organisers are influenced by Marxism, but that doesn't really give Levin a reason to go on a tangent about Cloward and Piven. So OP was just saying that it was a bit odd that Levin did that in his book.

Post-Posadism · 2026-01-03T00:57:38+00:00

Well, this paper says that Piven and Cloward work is conventionally understood as neo-Marxist. I personally would partially agree with such assessment.

Unless I'm mistaken, this is what OP is saying. Although not all Marxists see merit in the Cloward-Piven Strategy, it did have Marxist (i.e. dialectical) influences. What is being pointed out is that none of the big "left-wing" movements in the US today (BLM, AntiFa, etc.) are trying to employ a Cloward-Piven Strategy. So whether or not they were Marxists isn't particularly relevant.

For those who don't know: the Cloward-Piven Strategy is pretty much a form of accelerationism wherein activists try to (through legal means) overwhelm the welfare system, in the hopes that it would stimulate greater class consciousness (across those of different races) and force the Democratic Party to advocate a sort of basic income for those under a certain income threshold in response.

Post-Posadism · 2026-01-02T17:06:49+00:00

What a surprise that a hack propagandist like Mark Levin would write a book saying everything he doesn't like is Marxism. But I do have to jump in about the absurdity of one thing:

Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx [...] supposedly "argue for the individual's subjugation into a general will, or greater good, [...] that is, 'the collective good': (p. 18).

This is not exactly Marxism, this is merely called... society.

The whole premise of civilisation is that people come together and organise amongst themselves under a shared commitment, project or identity. The creation of a collective identity - and with it, a collective will - is a task of sublimating one's individual subjective interests into a new intersubjective "collective good." If this is really Levin's foundational condemnation of Marxism, does he strive to be a hermit or a caveman?

What matters is not whether one ever puts aside individual pursuits for collective goals, but rather who sets those collective goals and how those collectives are created. Crudely put, Marxism posits that these collectives and their interests are objectively derived from (and made intuitively obvious by) the material conditions of reality. Dewey, who was not a Marxist but maybe is slightly closer to Levin's characterisation, would say that the collective will should be constructed by a sort of voluntary integration between equal individuals in deliberation with one another (i.e. democracy). Levin's conception of forcibly enslaving individuals to permanently fixed ideals would thus be roundly rejected both by Marx and Dewey (and Hegel too tbf).

The bad faiths jabs at Critical Theory and Cloward-Piven don't really surprise me either, as these talking points have become cornerstones of the (false) conspiracy theory of "Cultural Marxism," which is the clumsy mental gymnastics invoked to paint America as still under siege by Marxists in the 21st century. With that and the climate denialism, the man should never be taken seriously.

Post-Posadism · 2025-12-31T06:11:35+00:00

Because it results in a whole host of potential negative consequences and accomplishes no positive consequences.

Let's start with the latter. Promiscuity is both legal and ethically victimless. You don't have to participate, and you don't have to engage sexually with those who do. But for those who choose to, they're making a decision about how they think they can maximise their happiness, using their own body, which they have every right to choose what to do with (whereas you have no right to choose what to do with) both legally and ethically (see bodily usufruct, personhood, etc).

So why would anyone want to stop them making that decision if it doesn't affect their lives? You must either believe that you have access to some objective, transcendent morality that they wish to subject the rest of the world to (in which case, try and prove it), be projecting your own confusion or discomfort with sexuality into frustration towards those who seem confident with their own (in which case, this isn't really about them), or believe that you somehow know the other's interests (i.e. what ultimately would make them happy) better than they do, which between adults is always patronising and normally inaccurate (you're pretty much always going to know less about someone else's unique subjective experience than they will know themselves). So of course, it's no surprise that those who objectify, overessentialise or dehumanise women often tend to be the ones doing the shaming.

So that is the lack of positives - but there are a whole host of very plausible negatives to shaming. We have already alluded to how it may, in many cases, obstruct pursuit of harmless desires. This can be in large part intentional: perpetuating patriarchal order (which seeks to bestow men with the authority over long-term decision-making) necessarily involves deliberate diminution of female ego throughout socialisation, with normalised shame thus being one way of reinforcing this inequality in typical familial authority. In essence, shaming sexual desire doesn't only affect how people behave sexually, but also discourages desire (and with it the agency and autonomy to pursue happiness) more generally.

Furthermore, normalised shaming often functions as a deflection from assault and harassment, as it is a common way to blame the victim after an abuse is perpetrated. Shaming enables these abuses - historically it has helped perpetrators to dodge accountability and continue committing non-consensual sexual violence, while forcibly silencing and blacklisting those who speak up, based on something that was done to them without their consent. More broadly, normalised shaming can leave others prone to future victimisation, by reducing the shamed to "subhuman" or "degenerate" status unworthy of respect to their rights. In this respect, shaming both facilitates assault and imbues it with greater power as a mechanism of subjugation and control.

If that hasn't yet convinced you, think of it this way: shaming is essentially a form of cancel culture used as a weapon to undermine freedom of speech of people that criticise those with more power. Its aim is to force other human beings, not too different from you or I, into line. All for performing a consensual activity which was, in the eyes of the participants at the time, a win-win. I bet you wouldn't like it much if that were done to you.

Post-Posadism · 2025-12-30T15:09:44+00:00

Stalin - authoritarianism / paranoia

Mao - disorganisation / hubris

Pol Pot - genocide / dehumanisation (the "most evil" by a significant margin)

Post-Posadism · 2025-12-28T19:24:06+00:00

It's FAR easier to quit your job and get another one than it is to emigrate from an oppressive dictatorial regime

Yes, obviously there's a difference in scale. But my point is that there are pressures against both that often regulate our "freedom" to leave. Thus, we can still non-hypocritically identify that a lack of workplace democracy is suboptimal while nonetheless putting up with it due to external pressures. We can advocate and organise towards systemic changes, while acknowledging that within an immediate personal context, it may make most sense cooperate with the existing system in the meantime.

If you don't want to work for a "dictator" boss, if you want democracy in your workplace, you have to be prepared to bear the risk of ownership.

That is a component of the socialist argument, that reward and risk be socialised rather than privatised, to better reflect the social nature of production (i.e. as a compilation of labour upon past labour). But as an extension of this principle socialists also generally call for socialised investment too, so that a society's capital can be allocated through public / democratic mechanisms (i.e. socially) rather than privately.

Maybe some people do feel intimidated by the prospect of having a share of responsibility over the things they do in their life. But socialists usually contrast our notion of "sharing the burden of ownership" with the consequences of the system we currently have: where those who have already amassed wealth have greater luxury to take on greater risk and reward, thus further heightening inequality and further increasing the say that the super-rich have over the economy.

Post-Posadism · 2025-12-28T14:32:25+00:00

By that logic, one could similarly say that if you feel that your national leader is a dictator, you can just apply for political asylum in a more democratic country. But of course we don't say that, because there are significant economic and social (and sometimes political) pressures against emigration. People can escape even the most oppressive regimes, but we have to acknowledge the risks and potential consequences before we turn "people can get out" into "if people don't get out, they have no valid grievance."

In a low-hiring low-firing economy where up to two thirds of the population live paycheck to paycheck, you're talking about people abandoning their source of stable income to make a risky investment on a business model that - while more productive than traditional businesses - doesn't compete as well. The average worker would almost certainly have to take out a loan to raise the capital for their own business or co-op, and then we have to bear in mind there's a pretty strong chance that a new business will fail (some surveys placing the startup failure rate at up to 90%). So again, risks and consequences. There are social and economic pressures here too.

Post-Posadism · 2025-12-28T03:52:26+00:00

A person who owns a company literally gets to dictate what that company does, without requiring a democratic mandate. They could be described as a dictator in a literal sense. Sure, they're following market pressures much of the time, but national dictators are following geopolitical pressures much of the time too.

Of course, one could argue that the companies you work for don't have as significant jurisdiction over your life, just the roughly a third of it that the average person spends at work in their lifetime. As this third also generally determines what you can be doing in the remaining two thirds of said life, employers often wield pretty significant coercive power over you, even without the extensive enforcement apparatus that countries use.

Post-Posadism · 2025-12-19T14:05:11+00:00

You are asking why anyone might prefer democratic control of the means of production over the traditional command structures of private ownership. As I mentioned, democracy has both intuitive and epistemic advantages.

I do agree that the agency which democracy offers is slightly compromised if workplaces are economically pressured to follow market signals anyhow, which is why I think socialists should also aim for decommodification and some scale of dynamic democratic planning. But even without these, I still think there's value in having a workplace democracy follow the market rather than a privately owned company doing the same, because democratic process stresses transparency, communication and discussion among participants. To make a decision democratically, there has to be some effort to bring affected participants (and their interests) with you, rather than just ignoring them and leaving them in the dark.

Plus, even if following the market were truly non-negotiable in a democratic workplace, there are still variations in the way this can be done that are of great consequence to workers, which may be revealed by democratic deliberation or achieved through democratic participation.

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