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Beefeater1980 posted:China’s ability to contain Coronavirus isn’t because it’s using a socialist mode of production, it’s because the population in general follows government advice. There are dozens of reasons for this but immediate ones include: China definitely has capitalist systems of production, but they are state owned (or at least heavily controlled) as opposed to purely privately owned. This is an important distinction, and we can see the ramifications of this in the way they handled coronavirus. I’m not going to pretend to know too much about the Chinese economic system, but the fact that they chose to shut down the country instead of languish in idiocy like us feels fundamentally different in its goals and scope. Perhaps China looked at the impact of an infectious disease and said, “oh, we need to shut this down right now before it becomes a bigger problem” because it was simply an authority with more power over a larger system. Contrast that to thousands of American lobbyists all with similar issues demanding more money be funneled into their pockets while keeping the country open so that workers can die to keep their stock prices from dropping. It’s a size of scope, larger picture vs. quarterly profits. At a certain point, it feels like the Chinese market is an appendage of the state, while the American state is an appendage of the global market. So, if the Chinese state is having issues, it wields the power of the market to repair them. Meanwhile, when the global market is in turmoil, it wields the United States government to bail them out. And that’s where my thoughts involving neoliberalism spring from. I’ll make a longer post when I’m not on my phone.
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Nov 13, 2020 05:57
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they shut down the country because the reference pandemic in their governing experience is SARS, which had a 10% case fatality rate even assuming that hospitalization resources are not exhausted. An uncontrolled SARS pandemic would have people dropping dead in the street. For comparison, Covid-19 has a case fatality rate of about 1-2%, almost entirely concentrated amongst the old, and mainly wreaks havoc by overwhelming hospital capacity the other East Asian states that went through the SARS outbreak also reacted quickly and severely to COVID-19, despite an astonishing spread of experiences - from liberal democracies recently emerged from brutally authoritarian dictatorships and deeply skeptical of state overreach (Taiwan) to authoritarian city-states (Singapore) to liberal city-states rocked by riots (Hong Kong) - citing ideology is perhaps problematic
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Nov 13, 2020 06:09
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ronya posted:they shut down the country because the reference pandemic in their governing experience is SARS, which had a 10% case fatality rate even assuming that hospitalization resources are not exhausted. An uncontrolled SARS pandemic would have people dropping dead in the street. For comparison, Covid-19 has a case fatality rate of about 1-2%, almost entirely concentrated amongst the old, and mainly wreaks havoc by overwhelming hospital capacity I am not citing ideology, I am citing centralized systems of resource control vs decentralized.
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Nov 13, 2020 06:13
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Quoting the previous posts for context:The Oldest Man posted:Hold a moot, achieve consensus, flog the poo poo out of cheaters. Strangely enough everyone in a community being an active participant in a decision-making process and the execution of said decisions increases compliance and cohesion rather than the opposite. Disnesquick posted:Anarchists shouldn't be banging on about state coercion but ANY form of coercion. Crumbskull posted:Its a child's game to invent an absolutist interpretation of a (highly diverse and centuries old) political philosophy and then go Ah Ha! when the reality of proposals put forth by its actual adherents doesn't gel with that. Anarchist federations are not neessarily paradoxical, as long as the powers of the federation stem from the will of the constituent groups and by extension their individual members. If this suggests to you that perhaps anarchist governance will have to grapple with many of the same issues as other systems of government: you're right! I think it's pretty hypocritical and a fundamental part of anarchist philosophy that calls into question the entire thing. Coercion is tyranny and haram, except when done by an arbitrarily small group to ensure compliance and you don't call it a state. Like, what? It isn't seem that different from libertarians banging on about states rights and how all forms of statism is tyranny except, arbitrarily, when defending property rights because that's what appeals to them. Anarchism sounds like a right wing philosophy cosplaying as leftism, anarcho-capitalists honestly seem like the only intellectually honest ones.
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Nov 13, 2020 06:15
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mila kunis posted:Quoting the previous posts for context: I’m pretty sure that if one rear end in a top hat is making GBS threads in the water supply and refuses to stop, there are very few anarchists who would be against ganging up and coercing him.
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Nov 13, 2020 06:18
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Cpt_Obvious posted:I’m pretty sure that if one rear end in a top hat is making GBS threads in the water supply and refuses to stop, there are very few anarchists who would be against ganging up and coercing him. Right! That's good. Now if you scale up the group that makes the collective decision of what's right and wrong to a large enough number and give the governing committee of that group the moniker 'the state', this becomes bad. Why? And making GBS threads in the water supply is an individual misanthropic example. How do you deal with the fact that there are entire groups of people with fundamentally divergent and opposing class interests? How do you deal with individuals/groups that hoard societal resources, perhaps even coming to own it 'legitimately' through their own gumption and hard work and labor, but yet the hoarding is detrimental to everyone else?
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Nov 13, 2020 06:23
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mila kunis posted:Quoting the previous posts for context: Sorry, whose claims are you interrogating here? I'm not sure whose conception of anarchism (other than your own) you are arguing against here. If you aren't willing to recognize the differnce between a system where a ruling class hyperminority of exploiters sets rules and their enforcement and a system where those decisions are made democratically by people with level power relations then, yeah, I guess I can see why you would have a hard time understanding.
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Nov 13, 2020 06:28
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Re:kunis Well in practice that was rendered impossible with the dismantling of capitalism. It turns out you can't hoard all that much using your own individual means of "hard work" it takes a whole economic structure to achieve that. I notice you keep framing your conception of anarchism as some kind of theoretical, when most of your criticisms were addressed by anarchists in practice fairly conclusively.
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Nov 13, 2020 06:31
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mila kunis posted:Right! That's good. Now if you scale up the group that makes the collective decision of what's right and wrong to a large enough number and give the governing committee of that group the moniker 'the state', this becomes bad. Why? How does a classless system have class interests?
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Nov 13, 2020 06:38
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Cpt_Obvious posted:I am not citing ideology, I am citing centralized systems of resource control vs decentralized. the Chinese govt relies on a modernized public procurement and tender system, too, with scope for emergency requisitioning and export controls etc. If you're envisioning Soviet gosplanning it is certainly not the case - as with other industrialized countries, there are layers of private brokers and logistical houses who bridge the links between the factories and end users it's certainly the case that some countries continue to formally value rapid visibility and expertise in what actually goes on in logistical chains, who makes decisions, and how to structure contracts - but this arguably reflects varying degrees of corporatism, industry access, and whether public health authorities perceive their institutional mandate to be able to expand towards wrangling manufacturing chains during a crisis. Hindsight is always easy. Costly Tamiflu stockpiles have endured more than a decade of biting criticism and outrage. Industry ties sufficiently deep for civil services to know who to talk to and when are also, in more peaceful contexts, known as a revolving door. There's always a tradeoff.
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Nov 13, 2020 06:41
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ronya posted:the Chinese govt relies on a modernized public procurement and tender system, too, with scope for emergency requisitioning and export controls etc. If you're envisioning Soviet gosplanning it is certainly not the case - as with other industrialized countries, there are layers of private brokers and logistical houses who bridge the links between the factories and end users So you agree with me, the market acts as an appendage of the state.
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Nov 13, 2020 06:51
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if anything, Western consolidation in the logistical chains that supply household consumer goods - the P&Gs, J&Js, etc. - gives Western countries a leg up there, in the sense that there's probably at least one person who knows how the pencil is made from raw material to end user, rather than the anarchic chaos of Chinese b2b
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Nov 13, 2020 06:53
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Cpt_Obvious posted:So you agree with me, the market acts as an appendage of the state. ask Chinese mainlanders about baby milk formula sometime... the Western world, conversely, has absolutely no qualms regulating their domestic food production chains, especially for export these reflect difference in degrees of political priorities and stakeholders, rather than being a difference in kind in market-state relationship, I would say
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Nov 13, 2020 06:56
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I honestly cannot tell what point you are trying to make. You're jumping around from expertise to regulation to Corporatism and nothing remains constant. Can you just like write a one line thesis statement or something? Because every post flies off in a different direction and none of them seem to join to a central theme.
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Nov 13, 2020 07:00
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Fine "poo poo's complicated, yo"  there's probably no usefully clear dichotomy of a market->state vs state->market relationship ronya fucked around with this message at 07:06 on Nov 13, 2020 |
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Nov 13, 2020 07:03
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Acerbatus posted:I mean, isn't the government doing gently caress all to actually enforce it - or in other words, anarchy - basically what's happening right now and not working? The dictionary definition of anarchy is different from anarchism as an ideological tendency within the left. Further, even though the Federal (and for the most part, state) government is not doing anything to alleviate the pandemic, they are still enforcing status quo behavior... which then leads to people having to go to work regardless of the pandemic, because the banks, the landlords, etc. are still requiring that you pay them, and the police are still going to beat you up if you do not. And insofar as people are trying to engage in mutual aid, it's not enough, because the amount of surplus value and labor that people can afford to recirculate within mutual aid networks, is often not enough to meet the demands of the people who need it. Acerbatus posted:I don't understand this idea of anarchy that has SOME central leadership. Anarchism does not abhor centralized leadership - rather, it demands that leadership be democratized and be free of coercion. Crumbskull posted:Personally, and you'll all eventually put me on ignore for constantly banging on about this, but I view co-operative association as an extremely potent strategy for altering productive relationships (i dont know if thats whay its called i havent read any marx i jusy use context clues) AND they give people an actual material opportunity to practice worker democratic management, develop class solidarity, improve their life materially through anticapitalist action etc. I get a lot of push back from ostensibky.more radical anarchists and 'communists' in town about how co-ops don't go far enough or at risk of succumbing to identity crisis and isomorphism with capitalist enterprise and I guess my answer is: well, no poo poo but until you can figure out another way to pay your bills and get socialism practice at the same time why don't you come to my office and I'll show you how to draft a pro forma. My view is that co-operatives are (among other things) a way to develop bonds of solidarity between workers, which can eventually be weaponized towards advancing socialism, in the same way that a socialist political party can serve as a nexus for organizing even if you don't expect to be able to legislate socialism into existence. The danger in both of these cases, and why some farther to the left may tend to scoff at co-operatives (or in the latter case, at electoralism), is when people invest more in the preservation of the organization itself, rather than the long-term goal of building socialism, up to and including merely wielding the co-operative as a tool (meaning it can also be discarded) once the time is right. This is somewhat exacerbated by co-operatives, as a cog in the larger wheel of capitalism and a free market system, will still have to make decisions relative to contradictions in capitalism, so there is a problem there of workers consenting to exploit themselves, so to speak. Of course, one might say that this is still a non-trivial improvement over a fully-private capitalist firm, but it's something that will have to be reckoned with eventually.
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Nov 13, 2020 07:06
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I agree with all of that and those are real challenges to be reckoned with, what rankles is those concerns being used to dismiss the effort out of hand as somehow counter productive even though, bith in my experience and in history, solidarity economies are WAY more conducive to left structural reforms and lead to MORE radical political activity not less. Not a silver bullet by any means but, in my opinion, a strategy thats hard to argue with in the context of US workers.
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Nov 13, 2020 07:36
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Cpt_Obvious posted:China definitely has capitalist systems of production, but they are state owned (or at least heavily controlled) as opposed to purely privately owned. The private economy, which is heavily regulated and subject to industrial policy but not directly owned by the state (and which is very efficient at funnelling the surplus effort of employees into the pockets of the Ren Zhengfeis and Jack Mas of this world), makes up about 70% of GDP and 85-90% of employment according to Caixin. State-owned Enterprises (SOEs) account for the rest. Don’t misunderstand me: the Chinese government has achieved amazing success in its management of the economy, but it’s wrong to ignore the role played by a vast private sector and, until the mid 2000s, a shitload of foreign investment.
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Nov 13, 2020 07:39
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Re: the discussion of how to know if capitalism is failing, I have a question for the thread. At what point does capitalism become feudalism with better technology and with global reach? Or is that what it has always been? I think my historical and theoretical chops are lacking such that I can’t really deal with the nuance of this question, but it feels like if capitalism was successful as a project of liberalism, it would be progressing the world away from feudalism towards a brighter future, to use a cliché. But it feels like with every passing year, the gilding strips away a bit more and it becomes more apparent that capitalism effectively has created a global feudalist system, but with computers instead of ploughs or whatever. I suspect that I’m maybe being too liberal with terminology here (that’s a lil joke) and maybe just stating a tautology in a way that feels profound to me because of my own blind spots, so I’m curious to hear what this thread thinks! Btw - can’t overstate how much I love this thread, awesome stuff
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Nov 13, 2020 08:57
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Sharks Eat Bear posted:Re: the discussion of how to know if capitalism is failing, I have a question for the thread. At what point does capitalism become feudalism with better technology and with global reach? I would say once you can’t buy your way into owning the means of production anymore but need to be born (or marry) into it. E: unrelated, here’s an example from antiquity of a pre-capitalist absolutely horrible boss telling other bosses how to micromanage and exploit their workers. Beefeater1980 fucked around with this message at 09:20 on Nov 13, 2020 |
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Nov 13, 2020 09:00
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A loose distinction that one can make between feudalism and capitalism is that feudalism appropriates surplus value via force/fiat, with the feudal lord essentially being a fusion of the military and economic spheres, while capitalism appropriates surplus value via contracts and legalism - the establishment of the concept of private property and the enclosure of the commons denies most people the ability to provide their own subsistence, which means they need to sell their labor, and the price of labor is controlled by capitalists, etc. Of course, capitalism still and also relies on brute force to enforce such contracts, such as the police, the general bureaucracy of the state, private security, etc., which I why I said it was merely a "loose" distinction, but I think it should be clear that a proletarian who goes through life "living by the rules" and never runs afoul of the law is still having their surplus value appropriated all of the time merely as a function of capitalist society, without the kind of direct, violent coercion at the point of a feudal lord's sword. Anyway, capitalism's need to appropriate more and more of the proletariat's surplus value in order to keep propping up the constantly falling rate of profit forms a contradiction with preventing the proletariat from being able to participate in the economy as they're able to afford fewer and fewer goods and services as their wages keep getting progressively smaller. This contradiction will manifest itself in crises and spasms of resistance and even revolutions... but if we get to a state where the capitalists are appropriating so much surplus value from the proletariat that even individual, edge-case proletarians are unable to accumulate capital anymore, and it is only the bayonets pointed at their necks that are keeping the workers in line, then I would argue that we've entered some form of neo-feudalism - the contractual, legalistic obligations of capitalism have failed, and the capitalists enter again into a fusion of the military and economic spheres in order to continue this (by then illusionary) cycle of workers ostensibly working for "wages".
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Nov 13, 2020 09:20
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It's the amount of swords actually.
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Nov 13, 2020 09:24
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Nov 13, 2020 09:48
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Sharks Eat Bear posted:Re: the discussion of how to know if capitalism is failing, I have a question for the thread. At what point does capitalism become feudalism with better technology and with global reach? Or is that what it has always been? I think my historical and theoretical chops are lacking such that I can’t really deal with the nuance of this question, but it feels like if capitalism was successful as a project of liberalism, it would be progressing the world away from feudalism towards a brighter future, to use a cliché. But it feels like with every passing year, the gilding strips away a bit more and it becomes more apparent that capitalism effectively has created a global feudalist system, but with computers instead of ploughs or whatever. if you go to the market and find yourself considering the cabbages by whether buying or not buying it will offend your grocer or impact whether they will stand with you in a social feud or strife, you will have arrived at a premodern economy if, on the other hand, you mainly weigh the produce by taste and cost, without regard to the specific identity of its trader, then what you have is an alienated commodity
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Nov 13, 2020 10:01
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Disnesquick posted:Anarchists shouldn't be banging on about state coercion but ANY form of coercion. Anarchism as a platform is not necessarily opposed to centralization, and definitely not organization, but hierarchy. This is based on the observation that, not only does power corrupt, but that it's very hard to take power away from someone/a small group, once it has been granted to them. Furthermore, once a concentration of power has been established, it will tend to accumulate more power unto itself. An anarchist "state" would be based around some as-yet-undiscovered technique that could reverse this dynamic. Your question about "voluntary substates" and how to stop them competing with each other (to effectively concentrate power again and re-establish hierarchy) is pretty much what anarchism aims to discover. One potential option would be to limit groups to the size that human instincts can comfortably manage altruism (e.g. <100 people) and then make sure they have sufficient overlap by having individuals be members of multiple groups. This is all speculative, however. They key is that a successful anarchist society would have to come up with a mechanism to ensure that there wasn't a power vacuum but an active dynamic that destroyed any nascent concentration of power likely to reach enough of a critical mass to, eventually, re-establish a hierarchic society (and therefore its eventual collapse via the usual mechanism of the creation of an elite and its subsequent disconnect from being both subject to, and aware of, the material needs of the people). Anarchy means, quite literally, without rulers, not without order. One thing that seems to work out in both EZLN and Rojava which are quasi-states with anarchist praxis is the reversal of a traditional hierarchy - the 'leaders' have LESS power than the workers, the workers choose and can recall them, in some applications the leader is even just chosen by sortition for things where you simply need someone focusing on managing things without an expert leader. Society is organised in small cells that decide on local matters, and also send representatives to pass on their vote on more global matters. To not have a power vacuum and to fight outside threats, they have a standing army, but it's organised under the same principles: leaders are chosen by troops, and in EZLN, each troop down to the topmost general is subservient to a civilian: a single civilian, without a court martial, can suspend a soldier if they feel it's necessary. It's helped by the fact that individual cells are actually taught resistance strategies - if the army chose to take over, the individual communes can effectively resist and thus doom the coup to failure. There certainly are anarkiddies who miss the need for organisation but I would say "claimed members of ideology missing its point" is universal especially in online discourse, and applies just as much to MLs or even non-Marxist ideologies dex_sda fucked around with this message at 13:56 on Nov 13, 2020 |
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Nov 13, 2020 13:53
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Once the capitalists invent equi-sapiens, you've got yourself a regression to (post-industrial) feudalism.
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Nov 13, 2020 14:38
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mila kunis posted:Quoting the previous posts for context: You seem to be mistaking a platonic ideal for an achievable reality. Libertarians are obviously hypocritical because private property is, itself, directly a form of involuntary coercion (l.e. the denial of someone else the right to go where they please and use whatever land they want). An Anarchist society however, would constantly be looking to eliminate (seemingly necessary) coercive relationships by developing better social science. There's no end-state there, rather a constant search for self-improvement. That acknowledgement of imperfection and a dynamic, evolving system, rather than an attempt to impose a static (and therefore stagnant, dying) state is key to modern Leftist thought: Socialisms of all variety are asymptotic. I would draw an analogy with an optimization problem. We seek to reduce the error to zero and every new bit of data allows the learning algorithm to get a little bit closer to that. Maybe we'll reach it someday, maybe it's impossible, but every fractional improvement is a valuable benefit along the way.
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Nov 13, 2020 15:41
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Could liberal capitalism eventually square the circle someday by using steadily more advanced technology? Marx and the other socialist, communist and anarchist writers could not have envisioned that we would someday have machines that could do all the work that a human could do. What if the following happens: 1) more and more jobs get automated, 2) UBI is instated as a palliative measure to prevent violent uprisings, 3) all work is automated and people are reduced to merely consuming in order to drive the engine of capitalism. This strikes me as a possible future given ongoing trends.
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Nov 13, 2020 15:45
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DrSunshine posted:Could liberal capitalism eventually square the circle someday by using steadily more advanced technology? Marx and the other socialist, communist and anarchist writers could not have envisioned that we would someday have machines that could do all the work that a human could do. What if the following happens: 1) more and more jobs get automated, 2) UBI is instated as a palliative measure to prevent violent uprisings, 3) all work is automated and people are reduced to merely consuming in order to drive the engine of capitalism. This strikes me as a possible future given ongoing trends. If you had that level of technology then you wouldn't need UBI, just kill-bots. Then you'd realize that you wouldn't need consumers either. Capital ownership of semi-sentient AI and actual elimination of the proletariat is a possible alternative to the emergence of socialism. Who knows where that robofeudal path leads.
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Nov 13, 2020 15:53
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DrSunshine posted:Could liberal capitalism eventually square the circle someday by using steadily more advanced technology? Marx and the other socialist, communist and anarchist writers could not have envisioned that we would someday have machines that could do all the work that a human could do. What if the following happens: 1) more and more jobs get automated, 2) UBI is instated as a palliative measure to prevent violent uprisings, 3) all work is automated and people are reduced to merely consuming in order to drive the engine of capitalism. This strikes me as a possible future given ongoing trends. Actually, a large amount of Marx's work is founded on the inevitability of automation replacing much of human labor and it is this eventuality that will destabilize the wage-labor relationship. If capitalism is a system where wealthy business owners pay workers for their labor, that system falls apart when machines are doing all the work. BTW, he made this prediction back around the time of the American Civil War.
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Nov 13, 2020 15:59
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The Oldest Man posted:It was symptomatic of the accelerating collapse in material conditions that (obviously) is hitting Black and immigrant and indigenous communities first and hardest. But a) it's not over, only the people who wanted to parade with a sign have really gone home and many cities are still seeing large-scale protests and direct actions daily even though the news doesn't cover it because the election news is more riveting to TV watchers and b) the economic root causes of that crisis are growing rapidly, not going away. What happens when 35 million people can't make rent, the eviction moratoriums expire, and the government does nothing to help them because it's so paralyzed that it can't even act to save itself? The last six months of protests and riots were just the prelude to what happens next. Speak of the devil https://twitter.com/Crosscut/status/1326913647302627329 quote:At the same time, the extension sent landlords clamoring to fully repeal or at least roll back more of the moratorium — saying it would push many out of business. One group filed a lawsuit against Washington last summer seeking to roll back the moratorium.
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Nov 13, 2020 17:02
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DrSunshine posted:Could liberal capitalism eventually square the circle someday by using steadily more advanced technology? Marx and the other socialist, communist and anarchist writers could not have envisioned that we would someday have machines that could do all the work that a human could do. What if the following happens: 1) more and more jobs get automated, 2) UBI is instated as a palliative measure to prevent violent uprisings, 3) all work is automated and people are reduced to merely consuming in order to drive the engine of capitalism. This strikes me as a possible future given ongoing trends. Not economically no. Consider how surpluses from our already vast increases in productivity have mostly ended up in the pockets of a handful of people. That conversion rate is terrible and only getting worse, and it has every reason to stay that way as each member of the capital class scrambles to juice their own profit margin. This race also ensures that palliative measures like UBI or Social Security will always be raided to squeeze out a few more bucks, so their stabilizing effects are temporary. witchy fucked around with this message at 17:21 on Nov 13, 2020 |
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Nov 13, 2020 17:18
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witchy posted:Not economically no. Consider how surpluses from our already vast increases in productivity have mostly ended up in the pockets of a handful of people. That conversion rate is terrible and only getting worse, and it has every reason to stay that way as each member of the capital class scrambles to juice their own profit margin. This race also ensures that palliative measures like UBI or Social Security will always be raided to squeeze out a few more bucks, so their stabilizing effects are temporary. In real terms, the material conditions for most Americans are in decline now. Life expectancies are dropping, more people live with their parents longer, people are are deferring marriage, wealth for the young adult generation lags far behind that of the generation before at the same age, and so on. The stabilization won from Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, TANF, etc. decades ago are in collapse and new problems (like the opiod epidemic, which is explicitly an abuse of capitalist profiteering) are not being addressed in any effective way.
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Nov 13, 2020 17:28
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The Oldest Man posted:The stabilization won from Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, TANF, etc. decades ago are in collapse and new problems (like the opiod epidemic, which is explicitly an abuse of capitalist profiteering) are not being addressed in any effective way. That's what I was trying to get at. We've already seen productivity grow massively in our lifetimes and the average person has gotten poorer. Already existing stabilizing measures have been either overwhelmed or stripped. There's no reason to suspect that the trend won't hold even if we can make even more widgets or institute something like UBI.
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Nov 13, 2020 17:36
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I disagree with Witchy; liberal capitalism has **temporarily** squared the circle otherwise there would be daily riots in every major city. The bottom line for citizens of 21st century western societies is so much higher than it was when Marx was writing that it would have been almost inconceivable to him: even the poorest in our societies have the challenge “after what the government gives me, can I feed myself” not “government gives me literally nothing and somehow I have to feed myself” Capitalism is unsustainable. Simple logic says that a system based on exponentially increasing consumption can’t last for ever. However, it can keep on chugging longer than any of us can stay alive, so long as nobody has the power to overthrow it. Which will remain true so long as the capitalist class can afford to buy off the petit-bourgeois and a segment of the working class. Structurally, capitalism the system can’t fail until the fuckers in charge steal so much that enough of the rest of us are forced to risk our lives or starve because the insatiable need for Growth can no longer be satisfied. Bluntly so long as number can still go up, the world isn’t ready for communism. We can win battles on the way to make sure the impact doesn’t fall so hard here and there and IMO that’s a goal worth fighting and sacrificing for, but the fundamental dynamic of capitalism isn’t played out yet and will continue to gently caress people’s lives up until it can’t.
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Nov 13, 2020 17:45
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Cpt_Obvious posted:How does a classless system have class interests? We live in a society. Class interests clearly exist now and cannot be waved away by overthrowing the existing system. You seem to be talking about "anarchism" as in the communist horizon long after capitalism has been defeated, rather than anarchism as a strategy of resistance to capitalism and contemporary alternative to it. Anarchists insist that we must get to that point without a state, and without coercion. Do you believe reactionaries out there will voluntarily cooperate with losing their privileges without fighting back? And if they do fight back, isn't it the onus on a supposedly pro-worker philosophy to use whatever means exist at their disposal, including severe repression, against them? mila kunis fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Nov 13, 2020 |
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Nov 13, 2020 17:48
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mila kunis posted:We live in a society. Class interests clearly exist now and cannot be waved away by overthrowing the existing system. You seem to be talking about "anarchism" as in the communist horizon long after capitalism has been defeated, rather than anarchism as a strategy of resistance to capitalism and contemporary alternative to it. No, dude, you were talking about anarchism as a society, not a method to achieve it: mila kunis posted:Right! That's good. Now if you scale up the group that makes the collective decision of what's right and wrong to a large enough number and give the governing committee of that group the moniker 'the state', this becomes bad. Why? The question was: How does an anarchic society handle the proverbial water-shitter? And you went off about class interests which necessarily wouldn't exist in an anarchic society.
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Nov 13, 2020 18:12
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mila kunis posted:Anarchists insist that we must get to that point without a state, and without coercion. Which anarchists are you arguing with here please because there several in this thread explicitly telling you they are not arguing this.
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Nov 13, 2020 18:22
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Crumbskull posted:Which anarchists are you arguing with here please because there several in this thread explicitly telling you they are not arguing this. Yeah ngl as someone who's mostly spectating/absorbing the discussion it seems like that person just wants to argue about their strawman of anarchism without really addressing what anyone else is saying, over and over...
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Nov 13, 2020 18:26
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Also, once again the answer to 'how does this system of governance handle bad actors' is an almost impossible one to answer because it will depend on how everyone decides to handle them together and also ignores the fact thay the current system of government handles them with the reward of power.
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Nov 13, 2020 18:26
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