I have a lot of thoughts about this as a trans person, and a communist. For one I strongly dislike the way liberals try to use queer people to excuse their war machine - it just gives the cover for bigots abroad to veil their misogyny and transphobia as "anti-imperialism"

Liberals are not doing queer people a service by making them the political football. You're not helping queer people in the countries you sanction and lay waste to either. Stonewall was a riot. If you're poor, queer people have not been really "accepted" in places like the US until relatively recently- it took 9 unelected people in robes to allow gay marriage, and Obama "evolved" on it.

As a trans person, the outcome that would directly benefit me the most from political action would be the immediate abolition of private property - ie decommodifying housing, and guaranteeing healthcare- nationalizing the for-profit healthcare. It's no good to me that my rights are "accepted" in the west if I can't afford to fucking transition and I'm living on the street. But I guess that would be "authoritarian"

Its actually not like the countries with the highest acceptance are liberal democracies

I've got 4 letters for ya. C U B A

It was in liberal democracies where LGBTQ people first gained rights and have the strongest rights.

hi i'm trans and i live in florida, where are my human rights you dickhead? where are your precious liberals?

https://www.guancha.cn/politics/2019_08_21_514563.shtml

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-lgbt-un/china-urged-to-take-action-on-lgbt-rights-after-backing-u-n-changes-idUSKCN1QO1MU

https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E6%80%A7%E5%B0%91%E6%95%B0%E7%BE%A4%E4%BD%93/19500488

https://issuu.com/undp-china/docs/undp-ch-legal_gender_recognition_-_

Homosexuality in China and Does China Ban the LGBT movement?

China has trans healthcare. You can find LGBTQ stuff on Bilibili or Baidu. China has a three-no policy. No approval. No disapproval. No promotion. As for you -- no investigation, no right to speak.

As for Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc goes...

Article 121 (the "anti-gay law" passed by the head soviet) was designed as an anti-pederasty law. If you look at the law text,it mentions or at least implies pedophilia.

To quote The Sangha kommune:

"Article 121, despite its curious reading, appears to have been designed to protect Soviet society from the menace of child abuse and paedophilia, although it is recorded that Soviet academia was interested in the practice of homosexuality from a medical perspective, and attempting to ascertain its root cause (with a number of early Soviet researchers following the Czarist assumption of aberration). This did not mean that homosexuals were persecuted – far from it – the general underlying trend in the USSR was to end all oppression, and facilitate the integration of the individual into the collective."

https://thesanghakommune.org/2016/12/28/the-ussr-and-homosexuality-article-21/ There’s no objective, verifiable evidence of a persecution of homosexuals in the USSR

To quote Sangha Kommune again:

Research By Adrian Chan-Wyles PhD

"The fact that the Soviet Union was considered enlightened and tolerant demonstrates that these laws were not applied as a deliberate attack upon homosexuals – although in the 1930’s, certain homosexual activity became associated with specific counter-revolutionary activity. In this regard, homosexuals who strove to bring-down the USSR were treated as ‘criminals’ – just as their heterosexual colleagues. Soviet records demonstrate that Joseph Stalin… was responding to various police reports about contemporary counter-revolutionary activities (usually within major cities). "

"Modern (capitalist) Russia has now imported much of the anti-Soviet Cold War disinformation fabricated by the US (and her allies) between 1945 – 1991. As a result, many modern Russian authors side with the reactionary forces of capitalism and adopt this pseudo-history as their own (apparently not realising its ‘racist’ anti-Slavic nature). The above article is anti-Soviet and is designed to give the impression that the USSR carried-out a continued pogrom against homosexuals – even though its author continuously states that there is no evidence to support his claims. Indeed, the only evidence the author can muster is ‘Western’ Cold War authors whose work – as pieces of official fiction – contain no Russian language sources. However, I have quoted this piece where I have been able to verify the facts within Russian language sources. It remains informative on two counts, 1) as a narrative history of homosexuality in Russia from early times to present, and 2) as a study of modern (Russian) anti-Soviet literature. I have found no objective, verifiable evidence of a deliberate persecution of homosexuals in the USSR. "

https://thesanghakommune.org/2017/01/05/the-ussr-and-homosexuality-part-iii-rsfsr-article-154a/

LGBTQ+ being put into camps in Cuba is also straight-up an anti-communist myth.

To say that "It was in liberal democracies where LGBTQ people first gained rights and have the strongest rights." is ridiculous. AES countries had LGBTQ+ rights first and continued progressing, The DDR was fairly progressive in the 1980s and continued to progress -- similar to the USSR and Eastern Bloc, however, I discussed the famous article 121 above how ""homosexuality was recriminalized. Meanwhile, during the Red Scare in Amerika, gays were specifically investigated because they were seen as more likely to be communists. In many parts of the West, it took until the late 20th and early 21st centuries for the advancement of rights for the LGBTQ+ community.

You’re just straight up lying about Cuba, shut the fuck up.

Cuba for decades sent homosexuals and trans people into internment camps

The UMAPs only existed for 32 months between 1965 and 1968, they were an awful failing of the government but to claim that the cuban government did this for decades as a point of policy is a blatant ahistorical lie.

It's also worth noting that just 60 miles off Cuba's coast in the United States, it was only in 2003 that the government made it so that gay men would no longer be thrown in jail and forced to carry out labour for pay low enough that it would (depending on the state) legally be classified as slave labour if they weren't imprisoned.

and only recently has enacted LGBTQ rights because it's been forced to open up to the rest of the world after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Look, I'm no fan of how Cuba treated it's queer population historically. That much we agree on.

But to suggest that Cuban queers have no agency of their own, and pretend like Cuba only passed its family code because it was "Forced to open up to the rest of the world" portrays an incredible ignorance of Cuban history and politics.

I feel like i did something wrong

There's more to participation than voting. Truly participatory organizations recognize everyone in a community as equal stakeholders in the success of the community, and encourage engagement across all levels of decision making. Think about how you and your friends decide on where to go to dinner, for instance. You probably don't just list some options, have everyone vote, and then go with the majority choice. You discuss why everyone has the preferences they do, listen to their reasons, and do your best to address competing priorities and concerns. You seek consensus through discussion and compromise, and recognize that while everyone has different preferences, you're all interested in and sympathetic to each other's desires. That's a kind of anarchist decision making.

I think a key place where we are disagreeing is in the nature of Welsh identity. I don't view it as a national identity but rather a cultural one. Even once all states have been dissolved, Welsh identity will likely persist through our language and traditions.

If capitalism is the natural way for civilisation to organise itself, how come it took until the 1700s to become a widespread ideology? Humans have been around for a hell of a lot longer than that.

I believe that if you were to take a random sample of humanity, wipe their memories and drop them on an alien world, capitalism would happen

Let's think about that claim a little more carefully, why didn't the Romans, the Greeks, the Persians, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Arabs, the Sumerians, the Ancient Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Maya, or the Inca develop capitalism

Why did it take 5,000 years after recorded history began for capitalism to emerge if it's such a "natural phenomenon"

This was done in order to perpetuate and protect the status quo in the USA for geopolitical reasons, but is not necessary for capitalism to function

You really don't see the contradiction in your claim? Let me spell it out; the "status quo" of the USA IS capitalism

Graeber's The Dawn of Everything shows you are wrong. Capitalism isn't natural and communism is "naturally" occurring.

How are Microsoft and CNN part of the state? Aren't they just providing a service in exchange for money, in the same way a farmer, an actor or a mechanic does?

Obviously we're talking about different ideas here. Microsoft, for instance, pays for enforcement of copyright (a relatively modern invention) and gets profits from that enforcement (e.g. through corporate deals, sponsorships, software ecosystems etc), which maintains class character. The owners of Microsoft sit around and do nothing (hypothetically), and the systems surrounding them ("the state") funnel money up to them, that money being a representation of the power and labour of people buying and using Microsoft products (often without choice; I don't get to choose which OS my workplace uses, for instance, but I also play video games which can be jank with various linux OSes etc etc). It is in Microsoft's best interests to maintain this class character of society, thus they will lobby the government to defend their interests, fund op-eds to say "tech workers unionising is bad, actually", pay for private security, bankroll candidates in local sherriffs elections etc etc. The fact that they are privately owned and the money and power are "private" only really explains where the money/power goes, it doesn't explain Microsoft's behaviour. The same with CNN except with different specifics.

I do know a couple of leftists that complain about using the word "state" for this, since it has a different definition in common parlance (usually equivalent to the government or nation-state), so it could just be semantics. But if you're talking to a left anarchist about states, that's what they mean. I also realise that this means that your local fish and chips shop owner is a part of "the state", but the municipal work guy who fills in potholes for the city council isn't, at least in that conception. I'm not really going to argue these points, just hopefully building some understanding to what anarchists (except ancaps) mean when they talk about the state.

Most people aren't washing windows for the love of washing windows. Perhaps it would be true if all their needs were met (say, food security, housing etc etc), then your window washing friend taking money to wash windows so he can buy warhammer miniatures or something. Erm... What follows isn't an argument, but more just a scenario to explain the view. Again, I'm not super interested in arguing the point.

Imagine there is a village where everyone is hungry except one person. That one person owns all the grain. How he acquired the grain is irrelevant, what matters now is he has all the grain in a legal sense. Maybe he inherited from its previous owner. "Give me everything you own, and I will feed you", he says. The villagers balk. It is a long journey to the nearest town, too long for many of them for they have been hungry for a while. Some of them give up their homes in exchange for grain. They continue living there, but agree to pay future rent. For the others, the situation becomes more dire as the days pass. People are rapidly losing weight, trying to fill their stomachs with a mixture of sawdust and water. The grain lord ups the ante "Give me everything you produce in the future, as well as everything you own right now." Again the villagers balk, but some people sell themselves into more explicit serfdom than the people from before. and so on and so on until the villagers are selling their firstborns to the grain lord who haven't even been born yet. I got bored of writing this. At some point or another, the villagers just take the grain and fight off the lord if he tries to stop them. His property hoarding requires violence to maintain regardless of how he acquired that property, unless you consider violence against property to be worse than violence against people (which, uh... idk). Ergo, it is violent.

The point being that in this scenario, everything is "freely" given, in a legalistic sense, but is extremely exploitative in any other sense. The right libertarian viewing this as just is... Well, most people don't act like this in their personal lives. If a friend or member of their community is hungry and they have lots of food to share, they will share it quite freely. It is the state (in the anarchist's view) that obfuscates our local community relationships where we see ourselves as so separate that would not give spare food someone in our communities if they were hungry (that said, our cities are very large, something about urbanist critique here). Like, my loser brother who fucks up everything is still welcome to share my pot roast tonight, though I'm probably not going to invest in any of his ventures per se.

I think, also, that while anarchists view the hoarding as violent, they also view the source of all capital as violent as well. For instance, would Standard Oil or US Steel have been as profitable or even have existed if the United States' land had never been violently appropriated from the native societies that already existed there? A lot of the initial wealth even before the colonial era was squatted on by descendants of warlords who ran what we'd call "protection rackets" (feudalism). How much of any of the wealth that exists is "legitimate"?

Again, I don't really follow this political view anymore, so I'm not going to get into the nitty gritty of arguing any of these points. These scenarios are just for helping get into the mindset of anarchism. If you want a decent primer to the different forms property and ownership can take, you could read Debt: The First 5000 Years which has very accessible anthropological discussion of many different societies throughout history (including free market arguments in the first Islamic Empire).

think about a village that treats a particular kind of wood used in ritual ceremonies - like weddings and funerals - as a kind of currency. the person who bears that currency has a kind of ritual power but it's limited in scope. a young man who trades years of labor to acquire a single stave can burn it in order to declare his worthiness to marry a woman of the tribe. if one person simply "buys up" all of the available supply... how? it's a ritual item - they're literally not for sale in the traditional sense. that is, it's not money because it's not a commodity.

another kind of currency is IOUs issued by a particular person - they're only valuable to you if getting a favor done by that person carries some kind of significance to you. that is, they can be traded like commodities within a community but hold no value outside of it.

this is what we mean by non-monetary currencies.

Graeber's Debt the first 5000 years does talk a bit about:

the difference between money and currency before