Nothing to add really, just that I agree with every single word of this. Expanding unions and coops is a much more realistic way of transferring power to the working class that can happen right now, as opposed to pushing for a total revolution and hoping we're lucky enough to come out on top. We don't even have to use the s-word, just try to go out of your way to do business with employee-owned businesses.

This wouldn't solve anything though, apart from slightly improving the amount of surplus value workers get back from their labor. Call that which you propose in any way you want, but it's still capitalism - the mode of for-profit production remains the same, goods are produced as commodities to be sold on the market, wage labor remains fully intact (which implies labor exploitation) and so does capital accumulation meaning you'll still have capital concentration, and given how it's still capitalism, all of its contradictions remain such as overproduction that cause regular crises.

The kind of reform such as this one wouldn't even have the advantage of being "easily, peacefully implemented" given how it would take away the ownership from the current capitalists, who currently hold the class dictatorship reigns. A revolution would be needed, but at that point it'd be better to change the present state of things entirely.

Browsing all, mostly Americans

To be fair, most leftists also don't know what socialism is lmao

It feels more like people gravitate towards the "winning" team because they have the lion's share of resources and commensurate status.

Billionaires are broadly class conscious, but they routinely feud and back stab one another in pursuit of primacy. Organizations have their own internal politics. People are regularly promoted and ousted as economic conditions shift and ideology drifts. Just ask any status climbing POC who had the ladder kicked out from under them in the name of DEI. Or any "Big Balls" DOGE teen who finds himself the de facto executive of a multi-billion dollar USAID program.

I would say the starkest shifts in Trumpian politics are the ways in which he's redefining winners and losers in the domestic economy. Finance is out. Silicon Valley is in. Not all plutocrats are created equal.

People are shaped largely by material conditions of our world, and liberalism does encourage horrible qualities that we can see doing active harm today such as individualism, competitivism, selfishness, greed, dogmatism, etc. A great proof of this is looking at today's tribes that still exist and see how they behave much differently than us in the civilized world - they put more emphasis on community, mutual survival rather than individual property ownership.

Therefore, the goal is not to refuse change because "human nature" or whatever, but change material conditions of our world to change our behaviors and values as well. Kind of a catch 22 situation, but given how we transformed our "nature" over the tens of thousands of years constantly it is possible.

Anarchism avoids this problem by putting no one in charge

A system where:

• Goods are produced to fulfill human needs via the help of central planning as opposed to commodity production where the "invisible hand of the market" dictates what to produce

• Goods get distributed to fulfill needs rather than "rationed" through universal commodities like money

• Private ownership gets abolished which gets rid of the parasitic class that extracts value out of land/labor

A system where the entire mode of production changes, and the present state of things gets abolished aka communism/communist mode of production though most of these core points that I outlined (it's not everything) can also apply to anarchism.

It's easy to write these ideas off as "having provably failed" given the history, but failures at building communism have nothing to do with these economic aspects or "human nature" or whatever, but rather political and material situations. USSR didn't achieve communism because of majority of its population being peasants as opposed to urban proletariat, and you can't really fulfill the needs of people if you haven't developed the productive forces to produce said needs, and if you stay on capitalism long enough, you'll start getting opportunists who want personal power and wealth.

Other post-Stalin regimes that called themselves communist (such as Vietnam, Cuba) only did so to gain protection from the Capitalist west given their ex-colony status, so they adopted Marxist-Leninist aesthetics to gain the protection of USSR - materially, they weren't communist at all though given their repression of the workers and independent labor unions, mode of production remaining capitalist and class divisions still going strong.

Public ownership of the means of production with the suppression of the owning/capitalist class until all capitalist nation state have been destroyed and we can have a socialist world republic, duh

You know communism of some form obviously private ownership of the means of production is self evidently bad for humanity and the planet in general.