Serious post warning, sleep-deprived wall of text ahead.
Someone who I dare say I respect publicly discouraged joining or supporting Lemmy on the basis of being The Tankie Place, linking this raddle post, a collection of horrifyingly flimsy evidence that Dessalines (lemmy.ml admin, maintainer of the wonderful dessalines.github.io/essays/) is a freedom hating redfash tankie who likes it when the evil CCP genocides uyghurs and bans femboys.
Naturally it all sucks but now i'm investing too many brain cells into thinking: how do you even refute this garbage?
I'm not proud of it, but I was an "anti-authoritarian leftist" too. I unironically said "tankie" once. And if i were told there is no Uyghur genocide, i would react exactly as if they had told me there was no holocaust. To the westerner, China really is as bad as nazi germany and straightforwardly saying otherwise, in their mind, is no different than if you replace Uyghurs with jews and China with germany. When this narrative is so deeply ingrained, how do you fight it? How the hell did I get here?
i really have no idea how to address it when, to them as it once was to me, it is so obviously true that anyone suggesting otherwise is not even worth listening to. these are fundamental beliefs and challenging them is grounds for instant block and report. its not open for discussion. all i can do is hope they find the truth on their own.
i'll stop rambling now and sleep instead. so i wont respond for a while. sorry if theres a better community to post this in i just needed to get this out before i spontaneously combust. good night comrades.
Not to disagree – because I agree – but I want to unpick the degrowth point a little.
Would workers necessarily feel the impact of degrowth negatively? Most things produced under capitalism is pointless, easily-broken, tat (how many versions of sink drainers and spectacles cases do we really need?). It's all marketed hard to create demand.
Stopping the production of that tat would surely lead to job losses but without the advertising would people really miss the goods? If Apple and Microsoft weren't allowed to make their machines redundant via software updates and they stopped manufacturing desire for the latest model, would normal people realise and if they did would they be upset? I'd imagine that most would sigh relief.
There would have to be a shift in employment and the division of labour but that's not necessarily painful if people can e.g. stay indefinitely in the home they currently occupy (or be given a home if homeless/houseless). Expectations would have to be adjusted – I fully agree, but if the bourgeois ideological apparatuses can be stopped, I reckon that most people would adjust quite well and quite quickly.
Just imagine if the number of total working hours halved because we decided to shut down lots of harmful industries, then guaranteed everyone a fair share of those hours, with the guaranteed services that you listed. I suppose the labour aristocracy, as you say, may be pissed off with the change because they already have access to all those services and they've been propagandised to think that they have it all because they're special. Everyone else might be right on board and willing to tell the ex-labour aristocrats to boil their arses.
It's hard to say for sure without a deeper analysis and a real revolution to analyze. It depends on how much is destroyed in the course of revolution, whether the economy collapses or not, and all of that and more is basically a crapshoot. I guess it might not be strictly inevitable because of the inefficient characteristics of our current economy, so thank you for the food for thought.