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A common flavor of mockery is to find leftist posts about "what I'll do after the socialist revolution" and ridicule them. We were discussing the genre and the general amusement at folks that think they will have a quasi-aristocratic life: oh I'll work on the commune garden and teach embroidery and prepare meals for everyone. Weirdly, many of the posts by women ended up being weirdly trad too -- but that's a bit of a sidetrack.
Example
KYM
My friend had an important insight: there is probably a rightist/reactionary equivalent to this. That's a good observation. We came up with a few of these
I'll actually give a limited defense of "What's your job on the leftist commune?"
I don't think the people engaging in that thread understand themselves to be sincerely laying out a plan for a total society. On the contrary, the idea that it's a commune probably suggests that it's a small, utopian community within a larger implicitly capitalist society, if anybody is even thinking that far ahead. But I don't think they are, because "what's your job on the leftist commune?" is not a question about politics at all.
What the question is actually asking is, "What would you do if you didn't have to work?", or perhaps "How would you want to spend your life if you didn't have to participate in a capitalist economy?" The details of how the commune works are beside the point. If you didn't have to do anything you don't want to - how then would you want to contribute to society?
It's a utopian fantasy, and I think there's actually a place for utopian fantasy thought experiments. Throw realism out the window for a minute and - what would you like to do? Then once you've reflected on that a bit, take the insights you find from the process and bring them back to the grubby real world of toil and compromise.
The answers people give are cringeworthy, but all fantasies tend to sound cringeworthy when you voice them out loud, and I'd defend this kind of fantasy as a reasonable thing for people of any political orientation to do. Maybe it's a hippie commune. Maybe it's a trad farming community. Maybe it's on a Culture orbital. Maybe it's a royal palace, or maybe it's being an ascended digital being with god-like power. It doesn't matter. But I think that the job on the leftist commune is basically the same thing as, say, Bostrom's Deep Utopia. It's immature but perhaps useful - and if this makes me think more of random Twitter leftists and less of Nick Bostrom, then that's all properly balanced.
I agree but I also endorse /u/maiqthetrue below that there is some kind of equivocation here.
There is also something else here -- the leftist version doesn't always actually explain quotidian things like how the food is grown when no one choses to be a farmer than wakes up at 5AM and works for 12H a day.
The modern-day anarchists and anarchoid types (not formally anarchist but obviously influenced that way) have rather clearly abandoned the goal of overturning the society totally and replaced it with the one of "existing in the cracks", ie. assuming that the regular square society will still exist in some form and they can get on by with various forms of leeching.
Well, we can dunk on them and they richly deserve to be dunked on.
But also it's equivocation again. Are we talking about a utopia -- on how we should organize society on ideal terms. Or are we talking about how one should live within a real society in its real terms.
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