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apropos to nothing posted:my one piece of advice to anyone reading this thread is to get involved in a party or organization if you see yourself as a socialist and have not done so already. some people think they need to read a bunch and understand everything before they involve themselves in class struggle and this is totally backwards and will actually probably make you completely incapable of organizing effectively. if you say to yourself "i need to read marx/lenin/whoever before I join an org or get active" you are 100% incorrect and while it is important to read and understand ideas about socialist and revolutionary organizing it cant be divorced from the actual experience of being involved in class struggle. the most absolutely worthless "leftists" you will find are folks who have read All The Important Books and can argue endlessly about ideas but dont know a single union member or what social/economic justice organizing is happening in your community. unfortunately these are often the people you are most likely to encounter online because that is where they spend 100% of their time. Definitely agreed on this point, in fact, any significant amount of reading of theory should almost compel you to get involved with a local org. I've got some serious sadbrains and social anxiety, and despite that I still felt like I couldn't in good faith consider myself a communist without doing something in the community. My city's chapter of the Communist Party of Canada typically aligns itself with and turns out in support of sympathetic causes, like Food not Bombs, union action, and the local Palestinian community protests, so that seems to be a good tactic for spreading our message in a tangible way. Sadly our local leftist community is pretty small, and organizing has diminished with the Roni situation, especially since the average age in our chapter is like 60.
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Jun 18, 2020 18:43
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apropos to nothing posted:my one piece of advice to anyone reading this thread is to get involved in a party or organization if you see yourself as a socialist and have not done so already. some people think they need to read a bunch and understand everything before they involve themselves in class struggle and this is totally backwards and will actually probably make you completely incapable of organizing effectively. if you say to yourself "i need to read marx/lenin/whoever before I join an org or get active" you are 100% incorrect and while it is important to read and understand ideas about socialist and revolutionary organizing it cant be divorced from the actual experience of being involved in class struggle. the most absolutely worthless "leftists" you will find are folks who have read All The Important Books and can argue endlessly about ideas but dont know a single union member or what social/economic justice organizing is happening in your community. unfortunately these are often the people you are most likely to encounter online because that is where they spend 100% of their time. agreed for sure. I wanted to get at least a broad overview before deciding what to even join though. Like, joining DSA and joining my local anarchists are pretty different and I feel like I should sort out my own thoughts about it first.
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Jun 18, 2020 19:57
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Where does it put you if you're deeply skeptical of the sort of utopian endgame Marx envisioned as literally full communism but think pretty much all the steps communists outline to get there are correct (including abolition of personal property, so not social democrat)
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Jun 18, 2020 20:09
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StashAugustine posted:Where does it put you if you're deeply skeptical of the sort of utopian endgame Marx envisioned as literally full communism but think pretty much all the steps communists outline to get there are correct (including abolition of personal property, so not social democrat) I think the point of Marxism is that it articulates a scientific (as the word was understood 200 years ago) approach to building communism vs. the earlier, well-intention utopians who tried to jump straight to the endgame.
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Jun 18, 2020 20:15
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cheetah7071 posted:agreed for sure. I wanted to get at least a broad overview before deciding what to even join though. Like, joining DSA and joining my local anarchists are pretty different and I feel like I should sort out my own thoughts about it first. yeah check out the second post I made shortly after. read the publications put out by an organization. pretty much every socialist org/party has a newspaper, magazine, journal, etc. that they publish. read what their perspectives are and see how you feel about them.
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Jun 18, 2020 20:17
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Sylink posted:IMO find a pet project you want to pursue, like "clean up all the garbage in a 3 mile radius" and go from there. I'm going to echo this. Start with a mission in mind, find the people who are working on it, and find out how to help. Prison abolition, or housing for all, or protest support, or domestic violence survivor support orgs, or any number of objective-focused groups are a great way to spend energy and time in a focused way. Beyond that, it integrates you into a network. You begin to understand the scene: the players, the challenges, the petty idiot politics, and who you want to work with in the future. Radical work is still Work. Radical organizations can have comparable dysfunctions to any other type of enterprise. Actionable methods and concrete goals are, in my experience, essential to getting things done.
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Jun 18, 2020 20:37
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The Oldest Man posted:One take is that the functions of these state entities (like the traffic department) are upon closer inspection, total bullshit and a use of coercive power to privilege some people over many others. Traffic enforcement is a good example because highly effective traffic safety designs like the Dutch Sustainable Safety model (https://sustainablesafety.nl/content/1-about/10-years-of-sustainable-safety.pdf) are self-reinforcing and designed around human scales and human limitations without requiring automated (signalization) or manual (traffic cops) enforcement of rules that were designed from day one to get richer people in cars to their destinations at the expense of poorer people on foot or on bikes. So the response is to fire all the traffic cops, tear down the traffic lights, and let traffic self-organize. And it actually works. Relevant: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/17/us-jaywalking-laws-target-people-of-colour-they-should-be-abolished
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Jun 18, 2020 20:46
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StashAugustine posted:Where does it put you if you're deeply skeptical of the sort of utopian endgame Marx envisioned as literally full communism but think pretty much all the steps communists outline to get there are correct (including abolition of personal property, so not social democrat) well, marxism itself is subject to historical materialism, lol Contemporary marxism is fortunately much "freer" than it used to be during the days of red dogma. I mean, the biggest mistake about marxism is thinking that what the man said is greater than the understanding and adapting his theoretical principles for the situation and time one lives in. Like, we now have a different cultural awareness and an entirely different philosophical outlook in comparison to the time of Marx: current communist thought regards it more as the ideal rather than an objective endstate of human history, a spiritual animus of sort instead of a historical inevitability e: also loving the organization chat, keep it going!
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Jun 18, 2020 20:49
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Thanks, that makes a lot of sense and matches up with what I've read of Marx. The differences and similarities in philosophy between Marx, his predecessors, and most contemporary people is kinda fascinating.
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Jun 18, 2020 21:14
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apropos to nothing posted:yeah check out the second post I made shortly after. read the publications put out by an organization. pretty much every socialist org/party has a newspaper, magazine, journal, etc. that they publish. read what their perspectives are and see how you feel about them. Workers World Party's weekly paper is basically "This Week in CSPAM" and is cool as gently caress - https://www.workers.org/wp-content/uploads/ww2020june18web.pdf It's also easy to throw a link to that at someone who doesn't understand the protests - since it's "a paper" I might actually get some chud family to read it
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Jun 18, 2020 21:20
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MorrisBae posted:I just discovered Workers World Party and they seem well aligned with my values and have a large presence locally what made you choose WWP over PSL?
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Jun 18, 2020 21:32
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indigi posted:what made you choose WWP over PSL? No local organization for PSL - but it looks like maybe I could be the first! Wasn't aware of PSL until now, honestly - they look to be much bigger than WWP. Why did PSL split from WWP? The Wikipedia entry is vague and just says this: quote:The PSL was formed when the San Francisco branch and several other members left the Workers World Party in June 2004, announcing that "the Workers World Party leadership is no longer capable of fulfilling [the] mission" of building socialism
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Jun 18, 2020 21:53
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I also have no idea, part of why I was asking lol
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Jun 18, 2020 22:06
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Jun 20, 2020 16:24
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This is a more general intellectual history question and I'm sure its been talked about but: how much was the rise of liberalism in the 18th century a response to increasing royal absolutism? I've generally seen early liberalism talked about as a result of idealism, proto-capitalism, or the scientific revolution. Now that I talk about it I guess that's part of the English Civil War, did that Louis XIV's centralization have a similar effect in France?
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Jun 20, 2020 17:47
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thinkin bout that Maoism post
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Jun 22, 2020 21:24
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indigi posted:thinkin bout that Maoism post
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Jun 22, 2020 22:39
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also hereby formally requesting an effortpost on Cuba. or at least a direction to point me in to read about their system
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Jun 22, 2020 22:40
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did Cuba really send all their prisoners to the US as refugees as claimed in Scarface
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Jun 22, 2020 22:54
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radio war nerd just had a real good episode about cuban aid to socialist Angola. i haven't finished it so i can't yet effortpost... but basically, cuba was way more into actually helping other socialist revolutions vs the soviet union, which was actually quite conservative in its foreign policy. also cuba has real good healthcare and has been sending doctors around the world to help with corona. cuba good
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Jun 22, 2020 23:18
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indigi posted:thinkin bout that Maoism post  posting blessings in the form of the best hair game in the chairmen league had to do some writing for other stuff as of late and felt a bit down in terms of vigor, hoping it is not the loving chudplague e: gonna finish it tomorrow most likely
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Jun 23, 2020 02:56
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indigi posted:did Cuba really send all their prisoners to the US as refugees as claimed in Scarface I don't know if it was all, but... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariel_boatlift It was an actual thing that happened.
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Jun 23, 2020 04:04
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What was Karl Kautsky's position on revolution and why did he denounce the Bolsheviks? From what I understand, he denounced Bernstein so he must have been against a purely reformist approach. Also it seems pretty evident that Social Democracy has its origins in the Reformist branch of Marxism (to me it seems that socialism and social democracy were basically synonymous), so what caused SocDem parties to abandon Marx in favour of Keynesian economic theory.
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Jun 23, 2020 04:33
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Are there any recommended books about the history of the Soviet Union and/or modern China that are written by a Marxist or at least some other flavor of leftist? I'm working my way through studying Capital now. It's hard. I'm getting there. But like, OK, all of this sounds very right in theory. But the USSR committed atrocities and fell. Modern China sounds terrifying. So, I have a few thoughts on how to square these: 1) What I've learned through a western education and media bias about the USSR and about China are skewed. 2) Neither the USSR nor China have been able to run the socialist experiment "in peace" in that there has been outside interference from the capitalist powers 3) Leaders of the communist party deviated from whatever Marx prescribed (I'm not really there yet, I'm still struggling with commodities). 4) There are failures inherent in Marxist thought/philosophy. I imagine that the soviet experience can be explained by some combination of these factors. So I'd like to study more, but I don't want to read some a book about the failings and crimes of the USSR as written by a neoliberal capitalist dork.
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Jun 23, 2020 17:16
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Hellblazer187 posted:Are there any recommended books about the history of the Soviet Union and/or modern China that are written by a Marxist or at least some other flavor of leftist? I'm working my way through studying Capital now. It's hard. I'm getting there. But like, OK, all of this sounds very right in theory. But the USSR committed atrocities and fell. Modern China sounds terrifying. So, I have a few thoughts on how to square these: Capital is a critical description of the capitalist system and isn't gonna give you answers on that front really. I think other than the manifesto which was a rushed pamphlet you're more looking for Engels' Socialism: Scientific and Utopian as well as Marx's assorted writings from the workingman's associations. Another factor I think that you need to take into account is by basically all historical experience industrialization is a brutal and agonizing process which the soviets effectively had to undergo twice under wartime/immediate postwar conditions. Edit: this covers the 'what Marx himself was intending' I can't really give you a great recommendation on a broad history of the USSR and wouldn't mind hearing one as well. Foxrunsecurity has issued a correction as of 17:38 on Jun 23, 2020 |
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Jun 23, 2020 17:35
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Hellblazer187 posted:Are there any recommended books about the history of the Soviet Union and/or modern China that are written by a Marxist or at least some other flavor of leftist? I'm working my way through studying Capital now. It's hard. I'm getting there. But like, OK, all of this sounds very right in theory. But the USSR committed atrocities and fell. Modern China sounds terrifying. So, I have a few thoughts on how to square these: 1, 2, and 3 are all definitely true. As for flaws in Marxism: of course there are flaws. No philosophy created by humankind is an infallible, perfect construct. There are big gently caress off flaws in capitalism too, and we're literally surrounded by them at all times nowadays. Frankly IMO, 1 is a big deal. Look at the space race: the USSR ate our lunch on EVERY GOD drat MILESTONE except for the Moon landing, and we didn't even do anything with that! There's no base on the moon, there's an American flag and some footprints. That's it. How much of that poo poo do people learn about? How much did you learn about that in public school? #2 is also a pretty big deal. Tzarist Russia was a feudalist society, and even Marx thought a workers' revolution was gonna come from industrialized nations like the US and the UK. So the USSR bootstrapped itself from a feudal society to an industrial powerhouse that beat the loving Germans and then won the space race in a period of 50 years, and it STILL took almost a century of constant capitalist hostility to finally pull them down. Imagine if Russia was already industrialized when they socialized! Note: if there are misconceptions present in my ramblings please do correct them. This all came from self-study and thus may be incorrect. mycomancy has issued a correction as of 17:42 on Jun 23, 2020 |
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Jun 23, 2020 17:39
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Thanks for the replies guys. I'm working my way through the thread and I'm seeing some of the issues I brought up have been addressed. It's a long thread and I generally prefer to educate myself with books rather than forum posts, but I'll get through the whole thing. And yeah, so far Capital (I'm reading the Ben Fine book because reading the ACTUAL book is a challenge I'm not yet ready for) seems more like "This is what capitalism is and why it's hosed up" and less like "Here is the specific way we could set up an entire nation state to be better." I'll check out the Engels book you mention when I'm finished. mycomancy posted:No philosophy created by humankind is an infallible, perfect construct. There are big gently caress off flaws in capitalism too, and we're literally surrounded by them at all times nowadays. Yes, of course. I suppose what I'm getting at is you know capitalists want to overlook the flaws in capitalism because they profit from the system and want it to perpetuate. On the other hand, leftist thought in general shouldn't be about holding up any particular dogma but about the respect and dignity of the ordinary person. So if the experience of the USSR or China or wherever else points to demonstrable errors in Marx's reasoning, I'd like to see that explained by someone broadly sympathetic to the left rather than seeing it explained by a neoliberal.
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Jun 23, 2020 18:00
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All three points of 1-3 are a big deal. After Lenin's death USSR strayed further and further away from the ideal. I will also say that while what you guys hear in the USA about the USSR is skewed, there is a tendency to unskew it the other way: as a person from a Warsaw Pact country I only needed to listen to parents and grandparents to hear some bad poo poo. Yes, it wasn't as bad as capitalists pretend but there were some truly hosed up things with police brutality, military brutality, anti-union action in the 70s-80s etc. to say nothing of Stalin's brutality before that
dex_sda has issued a correction as of 18:05 on Jun 23, 2020 |
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Jun 23, 2020 18:02
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dex_sda posted:All three points of 1-3 are a big deal. After Lenin's death USSR strayed further and further away from the ideal. I will also say that while what you guys hear in the USA about the USSR is skewed, there is a tendency to unskew it the other way: as a person from a Warsaw Pact country I only needed to listen to parents and grandparents to hear some bad poo poo. Yes, it wasn't as bad as capitalists pretend but there were some truly hosed up things with police brutality, military brutality, anti-union action in the 70s-80s etc. to say nothing of Stalin's brutality before that I am from the US but I live outside of it now. I buy food from a woman who was raised in the USSR. Sometimes we eat with a woman who was raised in east Germany. I haven't gone into great detail about it with either of them, but from what we have discussed, it seems that some regular people had very normal and fine upbringings. Obviously a case where millage may vary significantly.
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Jun 23, 2020 18:10
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Hellblazer187 posted:I am from the US but I live outside of it now. I buy food from a woman who was raised in the USSR. Sometimes we eat with a woman who was raised in east Germany. I haven't gone into great detail about it with either of them, but from what we have discussed, it seems that some regular people had very normal and fine upbringings. Obviously a case where millage may vary significantly. It's more like if you toed the line you had a pretty decent life. But, say, if you had substance abuse problems, got into the wrong team at work, stepped on a wrong person's toes or got caught doing some minor crime you were hosed. It's kinda like neoliberal petty bougie people or computer touchers today saying "but my life is good" - yeah, but it's not representative of the people who aren't so lucky. In fairness to communism there was less inequality so that was an improvement. And there were outside influences and inside opportunists fighting it at every turn. But just be weary of whitewashing it all.
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Jun 23, 2020 18:16
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It seems like state brutality and concentration camps seem to be a property of any sufficiently powerful state, not of any particular economic arrangement This isn't even an argument for anarchism because the "sufficiently powerful" part does seem to be relevant. You do get atrocities in smaller countries but they seem to be a lot rarer. Maybe that's just confirmation bias though and a proper study of state-caused deaths per capita would reveal that it's basically constant over large geographic regions regardless of how many countries that region is broken into.
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Jun 23, 2020 18:19
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dex_sda posted:It's more like if you toed the line you had a pretty decent life. But, say, if you had substance abuse problems, got into the wrong team at work, stepped on a wrong person's toes or got caught doing some minor crime you were hosed. Yeah, that's very fair. I guess my point is I'd like a fair telling of the USSR if there is one. I don't want to read a tankie's diatribe on Stalin doing nothing wrong, but I also don't want to read a neolib's hot take on how socialism can't work.
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Jun 23, 2020 18:26
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alright, let's get poo poo poppin' MAOISM Maoism, or "Mao Zedong Thought", is a communist school of thought formulated and developed primarily by its namesake articulator and founder of the People's Republic of China. Of the Great Posting Tendencies in the great CSPAM arena that is communist thinking, maoism is the one that we are closer to in both time and effect, as the current Chinese Communist Party still acknowledges maoism as its foundational doctrine, regardless of the alterations and transformations that the Chinese state has done in the past few decades in terms of market economy which were and are in effect a repudiation of what Mao Zedong himself aimed at following the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War. So what is the big deal about it? Basically, it completely changed the game in terms of goals and general "what to do" for revolutionary ideology worldwide, not only in terms of political theory, but by also discussing practical assessments of warfare and organization, collective action, general and metaphysical philosophy, personal opinion and experience, and finally worldview formation in one single stream of thinking. This seems a lot, but it is actually very coherent from a historically Chinese point-of-view, as all those things integrate with one another in their purpose. As such, imho, maoism is better understood as a philosophical worldview than a branch of marxist/communist thinking. But what exactly he say Right. Let's get on it. I am going to post about his bigger, more general ideas rather than the particulars of people's war or mass line politics: which I feel it is waaaay too much for a broad outline. So: The peasantry are the revolutionary class in pre-industrial societies. As Lenin himself eventually disagreed with Marx on the matter, Mao just went all the way about it. Marxism regards the proletariat as the urban, industrial worker by definition, with the peasantry unwilling or unlikely to be revolutionary due to their circumstances of development and living, which reproduced conservative values, as well as being secondary in their participation of making capitalists richer in comparison to those working in factories. Mao disagreed vehemently with that. Peasants, in his view, were not inherently conservative, but rather merely "a clean sheet of paper" in matters of ideology: ready to receive new words and ideas to those willing to bring it to them. The tensions generated by capitalism do not guarantee its downfall. Mao did not believe that the development of capitalism was necessary in order to bring the socialist and eventually communist society, which was a frequent argument in nation-building from others in Europe: you need those productive forces. But Mao, coming from a fundamentally different perspective in relation to the West, did not see that why you should feed a greater evil in order to stave off the problems generated by a bunch of lesser ones, especially because there was no evidence of its automatic downfall by the generation of internal contradictory and self-destructive forces. More on that later on. Communist theory as basis for nation-building and anti-imperialism. Mao's writing uses marxism as reference within the context of Chinese culture and its time, not making it abstract as something from without. In order to address what he felt were the grave problems and difficulties to the Chinese people throughout its recent history, he brought marxist thinking to address simultaneously the matter of ancient feudal oppression and foreign imperialist exploitation. This was huge. Immense, even. From here is where communist thinking got more appealing fast to Latin America, Africa and other parts of Asia, as Maoist thinking contextualized their collective exploitation better than the other main forms so far, even though Lenin was among the first to really elaborate on colonialism and its evils.  you in the near future Contradiction. IMHO, this is the biggest one, and is something that a lot of lefties dislike talking about in general because it raises all sorts of very uncomfortable ideas depending where you come from on this subject. In one of the greatest trolling acts of all time, Engels made Marx extremely mad when he addressed the problem that, well, contradictory poo poo exists and is compatible through historical materialism. There is paradox, contradiction and illogical fuckery in reality: as such, it must be a material property of the universe. The whole heavy truck impact of this took a very long while to happen, because for a lot of people, Engels was talking about what Marx meant by contradiction: stuff like class struggle and so on and so forth, but the text seems to suggest that he was in fact being metaphysical about it as well. This is what informs Mao here, but he gets to bring it back towards history and political philosophy, such as by arguing that contrasts are what allows us to determine and understand different aspects of things (e.g. happiness/sadness), but rather than these contrasts being defined in stone , Mao goes along Engels and Lenin and says, well, the contrasts themselves are subject to transformation. Something we find beautiful in one moment might be ugly later on, even if the thing itself has not experienced any change at all. Class struggle might have different flavors and presentations over the ages, but still changes within the form of class struggle, or how class themselves change and create relations with one another. However, he stops there. Other lefties elsewhere, especially in the arts, philosophy, theology etc tackle that on with, "couldn't the forms themselves change?" Contradiction is huge because it is a thing that allows to tie together, in the left, ideological theory and personal action. Mao's lifelong concern about thought and movement being contradictory are solved here: ultimately, learning a lot of theory makes you more likely to take forms of action that are coherent to someone who reads lot of theory, while an autonomist who is always wired on and can't read more than two paragraphs will have a theoretical framework consistent to that. For Mao, what matters is the direction, where their historical movement is aimed towards. Dogmatism and ideological particulars are irrelevant when considering those matters.
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Jun 23, 2020 18:39
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Hellblazer187 posted:Yeah, that's very fair. I guess my point is I'd like a fair telling of the USSR if there is one. I don't want to read a tankie's diatribe on Stalin doing nothing wrong, but I also don't want to read a neolib's hot take on how socialism can't work. Understood. It's actually something I'd love to read myself, because everything I've read for either side seems like revisionism towards one side or another when compared with my (admittedly anecdotal) stories from family and friends.
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Jun 23, 2020 18:44
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cheetah7071 posted:It seems like state brutality and concentration camps seem to be a property of any sufficiently powerful state, not of any particular economic arrangement I would say it is more a product of using the strategy of taking over the state to further the revolution, but the state you hijack happens to be full of tools of oppression. Tsarist Russian already had secret police, prisons, and Siberian work camps. You could say these are the means of production for "peace" or "law and order". And the people are shaped by their relation to them. If they are not changed significantly after the revolution than it stands to reason that those behaviors will reassert themselves. It's the old saying, "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Like, post revolution, you throw the owner out of the factory. But the guy you elect to manage it still sits in an office high above the factory floor, eats lunch separate from the workers, and after the shift takes a private car back to a separate gated neighborhood... And in many cases that is exactly what happened. They ended up with a society that looked a lot like the capitalism with the edges sanded off, and they got stuck there.
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Jun 23, 2020 19:08
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Does anyone really think a stateless society is practical or even possible? Even if there wasn't a government, there'd be social/cultural pressures that coercively act as a state. And in certain cases people just need to do certain things, regardless of their own personal ideas (like vaccines). In which case they have to be forced in some way. Exile isn't really an option. Modern socialism, to me, seems more like it should revamp itself in the lense of diffusing power as much as possible. I discuss this with business owners sometimes regarding spreading the wealth at businesses. And I say the spread of wealth and democratizing the work place is more about reducing individual power to prevent abuse than anything else. I.e. one person shouldn't decide the fate of another in as few cases as possible. Like a boss being able to fire you and wreck your life at any time, so to diffuse that power we install safety nets and worker democracy as norms. That gives power to the workers, but not to a single worker for example. Same for current events and police. Getting rid of the police is about diffusing power, getting rid of the individual right and power to kill another as a cop can. Similarly in justice and executive reform, there are too many single individuals making life changing decisions for other individuals, like a judge sentencing vs a tribunal. Or the President having so much single authority vs a council or tribunal and so on.
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Jun 23, 2020 19:09
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Sylink posted:Does anyone really think a stateless society is practical or even possible? Even if there wasn't a government, there'd be social/cultural pressures that coercively act as a state. And in certain cases people just need to do certain things, regardless of their own personal ideas (like vaccines). In which case they have to be forced in some way. Exile isn't really an option. Babby's first Bakuninism
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Jun 23, 2020 19:24
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Sylink posted:Does anyone really think a stateless society is practical or even possible? Even if there wasn't a government, there'd be social/cultural pressures that coercively act as a state. And in certain cases people just need to do certain things, regardless of their own personal ideas (like vaccines). In which case they have to be forced in some way. Exile isn't really an option. tbf i think that's exactly what realistic anarchist thought is about. how *do* you structure society in order to diffuse power? le guin's "the dispossessed" is probably my favorite reflection on this.
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Jun 23, 2020 19:34
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It does depend on what you mean by the state. If you mean any coercive pressure or force, then parents are the state to their children and yeah, statelessness is not remotely possible. But there's a whole host of related concepts that make up how modern states function that are by no means universal to the human experience. Humans existed for tens of thousands of years without any state apparatus more complicated than could be implemented by a community collectively. Even after population densities got high enough to see the emergence of what we'd recognize as governments, they spent thousands of years not really concerning themselves with many of the issues modern states consider to be extremely important, simply because they weren't capable of it. The capacity for broad scale state-based coercive force to deter or punish unwanted behaviors has only existed for a few hundred years, and the desire to do so only for a few thousand. I'm not even really trying to make an argument about the desirability of returning to any of those historical societies, just pointing out that depending on what you think the important defining characteristics of the state are, they probably aren't all that old and humans have spent a lot of time without them.
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Jun 23, 2020 19:34
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Sylink posted:Does anyone really think a stateless society is practical or even possible? Even if there wasn't a government, there'd be social/cultural pressures that coercively act as a state. And in certain cases people just need to do certain things, regardless of their own personal ideas (like vaccines). In which case they have to be forced in some way. Exile isn't really an option. animist posted:tbf i think that's exactly what realistic anarchist thought is about. how *do* you structure society in order to diffuse power? le guin's "the dispossessed" is probably my favorite reflection on this. That's exactly it. You make decision making a federation of local governments to diffuse power. You prioritise consensus over 2/3 majority over simple majority. Justice is done by a jury of your peers, as in, literally everyone. Large penalties like exile would be decided by multiple communes. I'll give you an example Sylink. In the Zapatista community, in 1996, the women (feminism is very represented there) came forward with an idea. The idea was that alcohol consumption was especially damaging to women - because when men consume alcohol, women get a disproportionate amount of domestic violence. Also, crime increases under the influence. Similarly, a lot of accidents and long-term diseases like cirrhosis happen because of it: in the jungle of Chiapas the men often cut themselves with machetes when under the influence. The law was debated, and voted on by the Zapatistas. It passed - alcohol and drugs have since been completely prohibited in Chiapas. What happens if you disobey? Well, penalties, instituted by the commune's autonomous police force consisting of members accepted by the assembly. Individual commune can institute punishments as desired, but generally, they constitute extra public work you have to do, or restitution if personal property gets taken or bodily harm happens. That's thanks to the socialist spirit ingrained in every participant of this democracy. They only reserve the toughest punishments for people egregiously against their law - this includes the prohibition. Allegedly, in 2013, in this area with at the time 400k inhabitants, only two men were in jail, for cultivating weed. The 'statelessness' is not in the lack of structure. The statelessness is a lack of a hierarchy capable of oppression: you'll notice at every point in the process I described, things were voted on either directly by everyone or at least by a huge representation of the genpop. You'll also notice that this is properly exactly what Engels envisioned with his 'withering away of the state' that he advocated as the end-game of socialism: the disappearance of the unilateral coercive element. dex_sda has issued a correction as of 19:58 on Jun 23, 2020 |
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Jun 23, 2020 19:50
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