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Cpt_Obvious
Jun 18, 2007

How are u posted:

Oh I am not writing off 74 million people. I just mean the ones who are too far gone, like the folks who stormed the Captiol. I was thinking about and writing about those type of people. I think there is some percentage of that 74 million that are completely, utterly gone. I'm not guessing exactly what that percentage is, but I suspect it is way higher than you or I would like to see.

You would be hard pressed to find a single leftist who doesn't believe that group of people shouldn't be imprisoned, reformed, exiled, or even executed. Fascism is a terrifying phenomenon that should be stamped out without hesitation.

But the question remains: how?

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PerniciousKnid
Sep 13, 2006
Anybody have a good elevator pitch for Marxism?

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

That's basically what the communist manifesto is, but "what if you owned your own home and job" is probably the general gist.

Sweetyuck
Oct 19, 2019
I'd probably say something like: Marxism is historical materialism, the science of society. Like any science, it explains the world through the world; historical materialism provides sociohistorical explanations for sociohistorical phenomena. It does so according to its motion: class struggle. Its theory is put into practice, tested, within those moments of revolution (the two that furthered the theory being in Russia and China). I might even argue that the sociological discipline is actually historical materialism, but only as it developed, at least in part, out of opposition to historical materialism.

Sharks Eat Bear
Dec 25, 2004

Here’s my crack, I’m not at all an expert or well-educated source. Definitely open to hear the thread’s input on what I’m getting wrong too :)

Marxism is a criticism of capitalism, that hinges on pointing out the fundamentally exploitative relationship between capital and labor. The more labor is devalued and weakened, the more successful and powerful capitalists can be. Even though it is a 19th century theory, a lot of today’s ills are explainable by this dynamic: income/wealth inequality, continued exploitation of colonized nations, union membership eroding, environmental destruction, etc. Marxism says that this makes capitalism unsustainable because labor can’t be indefinitely devalued, and that capitalism should be replaced by an economic model where workers own businesses.

PerniciousKnid
Sep 13, 2006

Sharks Eat Bear posted:

Here’s my crack, I’m not at all an expert or well-educated source. Definitely open to hear the thread’s input on what I’m getting wrong too :)

Marxism is a criticism of capitalism, that hinges on pointing out the fundamentally exploitative relationship between capital and labor. The more labor is devalued and weakened, the more successful and powerful capitalists can be. Even though it is a 19th century theory, a lot of today’s ills are explainable by this dynamic: income/wealth inequality, continued exploitation of colonized nations, union membership eroding, environmental destruction, etc. Marxism says that this makes capitalism unsustainable because labor can’t be indefinitely devalued, and that capitalism should be replaced by an economic model where workers own businesses.

All good but this is my favorite so far, I can't wait to use an elevator again.

I appreciate the help, I feel like my own understanding wasn't sufficient to adequately distill to the key points and make it sound appealing.

Enver Zogha
Nov 12, 2008

The modern revisionists and reactionaries call us Stalinists, thinking that they insult us and, in fact, that is what they have in mind. But, on the contrary, they glorify us with this epithet; it is an honor for us to be Stalinists.

How are u posted:

Oh I am not writing off 74 million people. I just mean the ones who are too far gone, like the folks who stormed the Captiol. I was thinking about and writing about those type of people. I think there is some percentage of that 74 million that are completely, utterly gone. I'm not guessing exactly what that percentage is, but I suspect it is way higher than you or I would like to see.
In a revolution, those who are "too far gone" will in all likelihood be divided into those who take active part in counter-revolutionary activity (in which case their force and violence will need to be responded to with the force and violence of the revolutionaries), and those who will stay low and see if the revolution triumphs or fails. If it triumphs they'll largely just resign themselves to living under the new way of things, if it fails they'll gleefully take part in killing revolutionists and other bloodthirsty acts because they'll feel there's little or no danger of repercussions.

This seems to apply to any revolution. Like I'm sure not every single person utterly convinced that the Tsar was a wonderful human being and the Bolsheviks were bunch of Jewish agents of the Kaiser joined the counter-revolutionary armies, but those that did tended to die on the battlefield or flee after the Civil War ended.

Enver Zogha fucked around with this message at 12:58 on Jan 17, 2021

Ferrinus
Jun 19, 2003

i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

PerniciousKnid posted:

Anybody have a good elevator pitch for Marxism?

What drives history? Marxists say it's class struggle - that is, everyone needs to eat, and conflict arises from different relationships to the physical and social structures we use to build things and keep ourselves alive. If you don't accept this, then by hook and by crook you will eventually talk yourself thinking that it's immanent differences in temperament and ability between the races. Every ideological attempt to escape the first has boiled down to the second.

It's the immortal science or race science. No middle ground.

Somfin
Oct 25, 2010

In my🦚 experience🛠️ the big things🌑 don't teach you anything🤷‍♀️.

Nap Ghost

Sharks Eat Bear posted:

Here’s my crack, I’m not at all an expert or well-educated source. Definitely open to hear the thread’s input on what I’m getting wrong too :)

Marxism is a criticism of capitalism, that hinges on pointing out the fundamentally exploitative relationship between capital and labor. The more labor is devalued and weakened, the more successful and powerful capitalists can be. Even though it is a 19th century theory, a lot of today’s ills are explainable by this dynamic: income/wealth inequality, continued exploitation of colonized nations, union membership eroding, environmental destruction, etc. Marxism says that this makes capitalism unsustainable because labor can’t be indefinitely devalued, and that capitalism should be replaced by an economic model where workers own businesses.

One of the moments that really crystallised things for me was the undeniable line, from a Lindsay Ellis video, "the legacy of colonialism is baked into every facet of every culture on the planet." That was one of the things that really started hatching me out of the liberalism egg- the fact that this thing that I had taken to be so stable and so natural was actually constructed, over the course of hundreds of incredibly brutal and cruel years, and that we are now living in a world that exists as it does not because of a divinely-ordained state of affairs but because millions of people deliberately extracted that world from the lives and resources that belonged to hundreds of millions of other people. And, more importantly, that the scars of that extraction are impossible to ignore if you just look for them, something that we are taught not to do.

Then you just look at the forces driving and justifying colonialism in the modern era and it's really easy to start looking for literally anything else. The elevator pitch for Marxism becomes "you're right, you're not crazy, it's all been there the whole time, and there's a clear explanation for all of it."

Defenestrategy
Oct 24, 2010

I've been reading through this thread and it's pretty neat, but it got me thinking and please check me if I'm wrong on any of these assumptions because if any of them are wrong my question at the end falls apart.


Considering management in a theoretical post capitalism society.


-Lets say such a society has magically gotten rid of coercion in related to working conditions: People can take as much vacation as they want, people can do what ever occupation they want if they even want one, they can eat, drink, and sleep to their content in decently comfortable conditions, and their medical needs are met. All by other people who do the jobs of producing/servicing them because they want to and it's fulfilling for them and it keeps the world going.

-Lets say such a society also got rid of status and class. Everyone is equal. The farmer is as applauded for growing food, as an artist is for their production of entertainment, as a doctor is for healing, as a factory guy is for producing metals.


If there becomes a dire need in such a society that may really suck to do, how does such a society get people to switch to doing what ever? is there some reading by smart people on how resource allocation would work outside of coercion, basically outside of a capitalist system?

Example 1: there's some weird disease thing that requires everyone to have some sort of widget or they die. This widget must be renewed every so often, cannot be automated, requires a lot of tedious work to produce, but basically anyone with a tiny amount of training and critical thinking ability could produce it.

Example 2: It's the same thing but the widget harms whoever is working on it.

In our current world, you'd do things like increase wages until you get enough people to do it or you'd make there be a lot of social status for it[Soldiers/Nurses/Teachers] or go make actual slaves and force them to do it, but not sure how you'd get something like that produced in a rush in such a society.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

In that instance surely the logical thing to do would be to make the training and materials available en masse and get everyone to make their own?

A thing you need to do that takes a lot of tedious labour, cannot be automated, but basically anyone can do it with a bit of training and thought but which harms people who do it is "pre industrial agriculture" and people didn't need threats to make them do that, they would do it of their own volition so they could live.

Defenestrategy
Oct 24, 2010

OwlFancier posted:

In that instance surely the logical thing to do would be to make the training and materials available en masse and get everyone to make their own?

A thing you need to do that takes a lot of tedious labour, cannot be automated, but basically anyone can do it with a bit of training and thought but which harms people who do it is "pre industrial agriculture" and people didn't need threats to make them do that, they would do it of their own volition so they could live.

The very young, very old, and the disabled would need widgets made for them, even discounting the very old, there's still a percentage that can't make a widget. Also there are people who have to do stuff to keep the lights on, at the very least make sure there's food on the table and you have resources to make the widgets and guys to get the widget resources delivered to peoples homes and some sort of management to make sure everyone gets as much resource as they need. Even if you stream lined all that stuff thats another percentage of the population who may not have the time for it.

What I'm getting at is someone somewhere would probably have to tell someone else 'breh I need you to make x amount more widgets because Bob, Jim, and Joe need to make sure you have food and resources to be able to make the thing, and I'm curious how a structure like that exists without coercion or status.


Edit:I guess this goes more into ethics than leftist theory?

Defenestrategy fucked around with this message at 04:26 on Jan 20, 2021

fool of sound
Oct 10, 2012
Honestly I think the real life example of covid is more informative than your invented one, specifically with regards to voluntary social distancing (non-work related, for this example) and masks. It's a useful example because it demonstrates that, absent coercion, a substantial group of people expresses reluctance or outright refusal to modestly (social distancing) or trivially (masks) inconvinence themselves to not only save the lives of a small but appreciable minority of people, but save themselves a risk of serious illness or death. Its representative of a major issue with strict voluntarist thought: that even in aggregate people don't necessarily respond to their own obvious best interest, much less societal interest.

Somfin
Oct 25, 2010

In my🦚 experience🛠️ the big things🌑 don't teach you anything🤷‍♀️.

Nap Ghost
Even a classless anarchic society would have folks whose job was to make hard decisions, they'd just be people who are good at making those hard decisions, rather than also being given the power to force other people to carry them out. They'd be expected to show their working and explain why they think what they think, for example, why the widgets need to be made even though they're harmful.

Anarchies are against unjust hierarchy, not against all hierarchies. Someone being placed in control of a group by assent of that group often makes quite a lot of sense, and sometimes you need a captain whose orders are simply followed- because their job is to figure out what will get us where we're trying to go.

If I was in an anarchic society and the crew of smart thinkers, who had been chosen by the community based on their ability to make good calls in the past, put out a call for widgeteers, I'd read their explanation and probably voluntarily sign up for a shift or two.

As I've said elsewhere (I think the example in that case was about a mostly autonomous nuclear power plant needing volunteers to monitor it), if a society can't survive without a mechanism for forcing people to work, it might not deserve to.

e: small grammar touch-up

Somfin fucked around with this message at 05:06 on Jan 20, 2021

i say swears online
Mar 4, 2005

also covid is a good way to talk about bourgeois attitudes like people putting STAY HOME as their twitter handle while you're working at subway with inadequate PPE

fool of sound
Oct 10, 2012

Somfin posted:

If I was in an anarchic society and the crew of smart thinkers, who had been chosen by the community based on their ability to makep good calls in the past, put out a call for widgeteers, I'd read their explanation and probably voluntarily sign up for a shift or two.

Covid also provides a object lesson about this: a substantial number of people not only reject experts and leaders in the relevant fields, but accuse them of being tyrannical for merely for making non-coercive suggestions that inconvenience them.

i say swears online posted:

also covid is a good way to talk about bourgeois attitudes like people putting STAY HOME as their twitter handle while you're working at subway with inadequate PPE

It certainly is, but the rejection of covid safety comes from a similarly privileged attitude.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

fool of sound posted:

Honestly I think the real life example of covid is more informative than your invented one, specifically with regards to voluntary social distancing (non-work related, for this example) and masks. It's a useful example because it demonstrates that, absent coercion, a substantial group of people expresses reluctance or outright refusal to modestly (social distancing) or trivially (masks) inconvinence themselves to not only save the lives of a small but appreciable minority of people, but save themselves a risk of serious illness or death. Its representative of a major issue with strict voluntarist thought: that even in aggregate people don't necessarily respond to their own obvious best interest, much less societal interest.

I think that that is more representative of a catastrophic absence of ability to determine one's own or societal best interest, not an indictment of voluntarism. As even with plenty of coercive mechanisms you can't stop people from doing things that spread the disease if doing that does not overrule their other desires, or if they fundamentally do not believe the disease is real or dangerous.

Or if you want to take perhaps a bleaker view, a lot of people actually would rather die than not contract and spread the disease so they are operating entirely in their own self interest.

Either way I don't think voluntaryism has anything to do with it.

Somfin
Oct 25, 2010

In my🦚 experience🛠️ the big things🌑 don't teach you anything🤷‍♀️.

Nap Ghost

fool of sound posted:

Covid also provides a object lesson about this: a substantial number of people not only reject experts and leaders in the relevant fields, but accuse them of being tyrannical for merely for making non-coercive suggestions that inconvenience them.

If you saw the people making those suggestions as unjustified experts and unjustified leaders held up by unjust institutions, you'd naturally consider their suggestions to also be unjustified; and if you had someone else who you saw as a justified expert telling you otherwise, you'd probably listen to them instead. That's why you rejected Trump telling you to try drinking bleach, but you listened to the CDC folks telling you to wear a mask. We're dealing with a reality disagreement here, not laziness.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

Yes, that, somehow forgot to actually include that bit but yes that puts it well.

fool of sound
Oct 10, 2012

Somfin posted:

If you saw the people making those suggestions as unjustified experts and unjustified leaders held up by unjust institutions, you'd naturally consider their suggestions to also be unjustified; and if you had someone else who you saw as a justified expert telling you otherwise, you'd probably listen to them instead. That's why you rejected Trump telling you to try drinking bleach, but you listened to the CDC folks telling you to wear a mask. We're dealing with a reality disagreement here, not laziness.

I see your point, but I think my question remains the same: how should a society deal with people who suffer under a 'reality disagreement' like this? There are enough of them that they can't just be ignored, enough to throw a wrench into the whole 'leadership by group assent" thing.

Pentecoastal Elites
Feb 27, 2007

Defenestrategy posted:

Lets say such a society has magically gotten rid of coercion in related to working conditions

I want to reiterate here that socialism, communism, and -- to a certain extent -- anarchism don't abolish coercion. There are still jobs that need doing that really suck to do, be they dangerous, strenuous, or just extremely boring. Someone has to do them and it will suck. The idea is that the hardship (and you can include the coercion itself here) involved with doing this work is spread out and lessened to the extent that it's not that bad, or at least doesn't totally define your waking life, and everyone likewise gets a fair share in the product, or the enjoyment and a participation in a society where whatever work has to be done is actually being done.

To port it back to your widgets thing, yes, at some point someone is going to say "listen I need you to make a few widgets and we need them by Friday". In eg. communism it's the workers making the decisions and the workers doing the work and that will result in the job being more-or-less as nice as it can be, with as many safety precautions taken as needed, with enough break time, etc. etc -- because the people doing the lovely job will be the ones calling the shots and setting the working conditions within the lovely job. Contrast with capitalism in which we need widgets and the boss goes to like a sweatshop in Malaysia and tells them they're going to make widgets for fourteen hours a day until they keel over dead.

Even in a perfect, magical, techno-anarchic fully-automated gay luxury space future like The Culture or something, if there was a problem big enough that needed widgets at some point there'd need to be some level of coercion.

Sharks Eat Bear
Dec 25, 2004

Or to flip it back to the premise of the hypothetical, if the society has truly figured out a way to sustain itself with no coercion, then I don’t see why it wouldn’t be able to solve the widget problem. to me, the hypothetical sort of seems premised on a highly collective voluntarist culture, so an answer of “a collective would voluntarily form to make the widgets” seems sufficient to me, despite not knowing the exact process and mechanism by which the collective would form and operate.

This doesn’t seem like a satisfying answer, but I think the hypothetical might be too utopian and ambiguous to address more precisely. It’s hard to imagine solving that society’s problems when the real problem in front of us that FOS is laying out feels impossible.

Edit: and if the real question wasn’t just how would a non-coercive society solve this problem, but how would an anarchist or communist society solve it, then I think others are better equipped to address than me. Which I guess is me deferring to expertise in the anarchy of posting, the purest anarchy of all

Sharks Eat Bear fucked around with this message at 06:36 on Jan 20, 2021

Ferrinus
Jun 19, 2003

i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world
Capitalism isn't the same thing as coercion, and there's no reason to expect a socialist or even a communist society would be completely absent coercive forces, whether formal or informal. A disaster like COVID requires coercive measures to keep in check. But what if such coercive measures interfere with even short-term profits in your capitalist society? Well, then you can't use those measures because the bourgeoisie won't let you, and four hundred thousand people die -- but at least they died free!

Somfin
Oct 25, 2010

In my🦚 experience🛠️ the big things🌑 don't teach you anything🤷‍♀️.

Nap Ghost

fool of sound posted:

I see your point, but I think my question remains the same: how should a society deal with people who suffer under a 'reality disagreement' like this? There are enough of them that they can't just be ignored, enough to throw a wrench into the whole 'leadership by group assent" thing.

I don't know. Reality disagreements are a part of my anti-prison stuff; you can't just punish folks in the midst of a reality disagreement into doing what you want, because they do not believe that they're doing anything wrong and all you'll do is make yourself into an enemy, and excluding them from society just makes them more isolated and increases the pace of their divergence. I don't know if deprogramming is inside the scope of the thread.

VictualSquid
Feb 29, 2012

Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.
I generally agree, but I think you are misrepresenting the process if it is to be compatible with my ideas of anarchism. While both representation and conscription are not necessarily incompatible with anarchism I do think they should be treated as undesired actions by the society.

So the experts would give advice to the public and call on a public vote, or a vote of representatives if it is considered a minor issue. Then the public decides if the proposed solution is implemented. It might be a propaganda campaign to convince people to voluntarily make more masks, it might be a conscription of mask makers. And they would also recommend an investigation into the reasons for the lack of normal workers and try to find long term prevention, like an education reform.

An interesting side point is that after all needs of society are met, people might be forbidden from working more to minimize ecological impact if we get full communism within the next few hundred years.

If we try to project the current anti maskers to late stage communism, we run into a big problem. Which is that the root cause of large size of the movement is that some powerful people used their power to convince people to be anti-mask in specific and selfish and uninformed in general. That would be tautologically impossible in out hypothetical complete communism, because nobody would have the power to do that.

VictualSquid
Feb 29, 2012

Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.
Another thing is that there is a material difference in why the hypothetical person is selfish:

Most anarchists believe that human selfishness is unnatural and the product of indoctrination and trauma. We believe this based on studies of societies in primitive communism and on some results of attempts at communist schools (for example in the EZLN).

Many anti-anarchist communist believe that such selfishness is natural and needs to be overridden and controlled. They believe that based on some of the results of the school systems in the Leninist countries and on the tendency of past societies to become more unequal as they grow.

This is a question of fact and once the answer is clear it must significantly change the way we approach the question of antisocial selfishness.

And even before we get there we will pass through a phase were most of our society will be made up of people who grew up under liberal indoctrination and thus our approach to selfishness must again be different to either of the ideas of true late stage communism. Even if we postulate that we can deprogram people fairly quickly individually.

Timeless Appeal
May 28, 2006

Boba Pearl posted:

The entire education, and justice systems should be reformed so that people prove they understand and are capable of having empathy, and understanding how the system should work for them, those that don't get iut are taught again, and again until they get it, or they're so removed from society that it doesn't matter.
Hey, sorry to dig this post up, wasn't ignoring it. I'll say I agree with the core critique you made of my OP. I think any place we disagree is more semantics.

I think we're on the same page actually in many ways, but I would recommend looking into Restorative Justice systems and protocols. They're implemented in both prisons and schools although not enough. I think it speaks to a lot the ideas and values you're pushing.

Pentecoastal Elites
Feb 27, 2007

I think, too, in fully-realized communism the relationship any given person would have to the collective would be such that coercion would be unnecessary. You'd build you widgets (or work despite a pandemic) because you'd understand the necessity of it, and recognize your responsibility to the community. On the flipside, there wouldn't be unnecessary or useless dangerous or unpleasant work because society would only propagate that work which is useful to society: you're stocking the grocery store because people need to eat, not because Rodney McMullen needs a few more millions.

Realistically, though, even in as fully realized communism as you'd like there'd almost certainly be coercion, somewhere, at some point. You'd probably get enough willing garbagemen as you'd need in a city, but that might be a tougher ask in a small town and you might need to "force" someone (even if it's only via social pressure or something) to spend a few tuesday mornings on the truck.

also regarding the "reality disagreement": I'm willing to bet 99.9% of that stuff would dissipate in years, if not months, if the loudhorns that blast pure, uncut, fishscale white supremacist propaganda were turned off and the underpinning ideology of society isn't "gently caress you got mine". The only sort of isolation/re-eduction you'd ever need would only be for the people that have accrued power and wealth under capitalism: the capitalists -- and specifically the billionaires and their attendant politicians, because they're always going to fight to reproduce the conditions that give them their wealth and power. The vast, vast majority of even the most boat-dealership-owning MAGA chuds will lose their resolve and become more-or-less regular people in a shockingly short amount of time because these things that we think of as bedrock ideologies that define who a person is in their hearts and soul mostly aren't. Even the most devoted ride-or-die cult hardliners almost always drop their foundational beliefs if the cult breaks up or they leave the social environment of the cult.
This cuts both ways, too. If any of us here woke up tomorrow with billions of dollars and wealthy friends we'd probably be huge pieces of poo poo within the calendar year. We, on the whole, just aren't that resilient.

The Oldest Man
Jul 28, 2003

fool of sound posted:

Honestly I think the real life example of covid is more informative than your invented one, specifically with regards to voluntary social distancing (non-work related, for this example) and masks. It's a useful example because it demonstrates that, absent coercion, a substantial group of people expresses reluctance or outright refusal to modestly (social distancing) or trivially (masks) inconvinence themselves to not only save the lives of a small but appreciable minority of people, but save themselves a risk of serious illness or death. Its representative of a major issue with strict voluntarist thought: that even in aggregate people don't necessarily respond to their own obvious best interest, much less societal interest.

OTOH autonomist communities with anarchist tendencies have had much better luck actually enforcing these rules on themselves than our shitbird capitalist society has. Whether you consider that evidence that those societies are really stealth coercive hierarchy or whatever, the evidence here only contradicts the idea that a society of perfectly spherical frictionless libertarians would be able to manage a public health crisis.

VictualSquid posted:

Most anarchists believe that human selfishness is unnatural and the product of indoctrination and trauma. We believe this based on studies of societies in primitive communism and on some results of attempts at communist schools (for example in the EZLN).

It's entirely possible to believe that selfishness is a totally natural and predictable human behavior and also that alienating and atomizing social and economic structures amplify it beyond the ability of our social institutions to manage successfully. People have always had a taste for sugar but it wasn't until we started federally subsidizing cheap sugar for kids that diabetes became an epidemic. The totalized, alienated selfishness poisoning American society is a crisis of our own manufacture.

fool of sound
Oct 10, 2012

The Oldest Man posted:

OTOH autonomist communities with anarchist tendencies have had much better luck actually enforcing these rules on themselves than our shitbird capitalist society has. Whether you consider that evidence that those societies are really stealth coercive hierarchy or whatever, the evidence here only contradicts the idea that a society of perfectly spherical frictionless libertarians would be able to manage a public health crisis.

Do you have any good articles about such communities and their response to covid? I suspect in those small, tightly knit communities social pressure successfully take the place of state coercion, but I'm skeptical of the scalability of that concept.

To be clear, my critique here is specific to left anarchist theory, not more hierarchical communism. I'm not terribly swayed by the idea of "elected officials, but the elections somehow produce more just, effective, and readily accepted results", especially during 'transitional' stages, where a more socially-minded population can't be assumed.

The Oldest Man
Jul 28, 2003

fool of sound posted:

Do you have any good articles about such communities and their response to covid? I suspect in those small, tightly knit communities social pressure successfully take the place of state coercion, but I'm skeptical of the scalability of that concept.

To be clear, my critique here is specific to left anarchist theory, not more hierarchical communism. I'm not terribly swayed by the idea of "elected officials, but the elections somehow produce more just, effective, and readily accepted results", especially during 'transitional' stages, where a more socially-minded population can't be assumed.

Hard epidemiological data on rural Chiapas and the Zapatista municipalities doesn't exist, since those places had no modern medical infrastructure to begin with, no ability to administer or process COVID tests, and have basically been fending for themselves since the start of the pandemic. The last EZLN public communique on this subject is from October (http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2020/10/07/part-six-a-mountain-on-the-high-seas/) and accounted for three deaths with known exposure and 12 suspected across all of the municipalities which have a combined population of around 350,000.

quote:

Fourth: The Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated not only the vulnerabilities of human beings, but also the greed and stupidity of the national governments and their supposed opposition groups. The most basic, commonsense measures were discarded on the gamble that the pandemic would play out in a short timeframe. As the epidemic’s timeline extended, numbers began to replace tragedies. Death became a statistic, lost amidst the noise of daily scandals and declarations in a dark contest of ridiculous nationalisms, playing with percentages like batting averages and earned runs to decide which team, or nation, is better or worse.

As we detailed in previous texts, Zapatismo opted for prevention and health safety measures based on the advice of scientists who offered their counsel without hesitation. The Zapatista communities want to show their appreciation for this assistance. Six months after the implementation of these measures (face masks or their equivalent, distance between people, cutting off direct personal contact with urban areas, 15-day quarantine for anyone who has been in contact with someone who is contagious, frequent handwashing with soap and water), we mourn the passing of three compañeros who presented two or more symptoms associated with Covid-19 and were directly exposed to infected persons.

Another eight compañeros and one compañera who died during this period presented one symptom associated with the illness. As we have no access to tests, we will assume that these 12 compañer@s died of corona virus (scientists told us to assume that any respiratory problem was Covid-19). These 12 deaths are our responsibility. They are not the fault of the 4T[i] or the opposition, of neoliberals or neoconservatives, of the sell-outs or the bourgies, or of conspiracies or plots. We think we should have implemented precautionary measures even more rigorously.

Currently, after the death of those 12 compañer@s, we are improving our prevention measures with the support of nongovernmental organizations and scientists who, individually or as a collective, are helping us orient our approach in order to be in a stronger position for any potential new outbreak. Tens of thousands of masks (affordable, reusable, specifically designed to avoid transmission by a probable contagious person to others, and adapted to our specific circumstances) have been distributed in all of the communities. Tens of thousands more are being produced in the insurgentes’ sewing and embroidery workshops as well as those in the communities. The measures we have recommended to our own communities as well as to our party-affiliated brothers and sisters—the widespread use of masks, a 2-week quarantine for those potentially infected, physical distance, continual hand and face washing with soap and water, and avoidance of the cities to the greatest extent possible—are all oriented toward containing any spread of contagion as well as permitting the maintenance of community life.

The details of what our strategy was and is will be analyzed at an appropriate time. For now we can say, with life pulsing through our bodies, that in our estimation (which may well be mistaken) it has been our approach of facing the threat as a community, not as an individual issue, and orienting our primary efforts toward prevention that has put us in a position to say now, as Zapatista peoples: here we are, resisting, living and struggling.

Now, all over the world, big capital intends to get people back on the streets to resume their role as consumers. What concerns capital are the problems of the market, the lethargic rate of commodity consumption.

We do need to get back on the streets, yes, but to struggle. As we’ve said before, life, and the struggle for life, is not an individual issue, but a collective one. Now we see that it’s not a national issue either, but a global one.

They of course subject to all the usual arguments like that they're not really anarchists and that some of the people living in those municipalities live in towns where control is contested with the Mexican national government and so on.

fool of sound posted:

I suspect in those small, tightly knit communities social pressure successfully take the place of state coercion, but I'm skeptical of the scalability of that concept.

I also wanted to address this. People see small/tightly-knit as binding attributes of communities that adopt horizontal organizing principles like direct democracy and federated decision-making, as if those qualities are somehow naturally occurring unobtainium and therefore those communities are a special case with no applicability to others and yet, the top-down atomization and alienation enforced on us by capital is taken a priori to be the natural state of affairs and the behavior of humans in that context to be natural, even though a) many horizontally and anarchist-tendency communities have scaled to tens or hundreds of thousands of members and in the historical and pre-historical record, egalitarian communities with minimal class stratification with thousands or tens of thousands of members were a common pattern for settled agrarian society for thousands of years. Our "natural intuition" about how human societies work has been built from the ground up by liberal capitalist indoctrination and should be rigorously checked against extant and historical evidence.

The Oldest Man fucked around with this message at 19:47 on Jan 20, 2021

Defenestrategy
Oct 24, 2010

Thanks for the various answers to my question. What I've gotten from it is,

Even in a magical paradise leftist society, some amount of coercion is required just to maintain the basic functioning and health of society. The big difference between status quo and that hypothetical is that ideally the amount of coercion is the bare minimum for some sort of functional society rather than as much as capital interests think they can get away with. Does that seem like a good take away?

The Oldest Man
Jul 28, 2003

Defenestrategy posted:

Thanks for the various answers to my question. What I've gotten from it is,

Even in a magical paradise leftist society, some amount of coercion is required just to maintain the basic functioning and health of society. The big difference between status quo and that hypothetical is that ideally the amount of coercion is the bare minimum for some sort of functional society rather than as much as capital interests think they can get away with. Does that seem like a good take away?

"Coercion" is a pretty specific term in anarchist discourse. The real poison to society is not when the community can come together, decide by consensus that Not Die of COVID is a priority or Everyone Eats Food is a priority, and then enforce rules on itself to prevent single bad actors or people from perverse incentives from loving everyone over. Like if you go to lunch with your friends and one of you wants pizza but the other three want sandwiches and you come to some kind of pizza/sandwich power-sharing agreement where the pizza guy doesn't immediately get pizza you could define that as coercion but it's not what anarchist tendency writers mean when they use that phrasing.

It's when there are self-replicating institutions that allow a subgroup to set those priorities and enforce them on others unilaterally. IE, pizza guy always gets to pick what everyone eats (or if they eat at all) because he has all the money and the restaurants won't feed you if you don't have money, and his possession of the money today also enables him to ensure he continues to have the money tomorrow.

VictualSquid
Feb 29, 2012

Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

Defenestrategy posted:

Thanks for the various answers to my question. What I've gotten from it is,

Even in a magical paradise leftist society, some amount of coercion is required just to maintain the basic functioning and health of society. The big difference between status quo and that hypothetical is that ideally the amount of coercion is the bare minimum for some sort of functional society rather than as much as capital interests think they can get away with. Does that seem like a good take away?
Essentially. I would say that some amount of coercion might be required, because the science on that is undecided.
Also another qualitative difference is that the coercion was democratically decided, so if it would be necessary to coerce the majority of participants the society would not come to that decision.

Defenestrategy
Oct 24, 2010

The Oldest Man posted:

"Coercion" is a pretty specific term in anarchist discourse.

To be clear when I say coercion I mean things that cause people to act based on implied or explicit threats or force.


For example: being forced to work in lovely conditions, because the alternative is starve because there's no social safety, or do prison labor because the alternative is I throw you in solitary or make your stay in prison worse.

The Oldest Man
Jul 28, 2003

Defenestrategy posted:

To be clear when I say coercion I mean things that cause people to act based on implied or explicit threats or force.

Is shunning an implied or explicit threat of force in your parlance?

Defenestrategy
Oct 24, 2010

The Oldest Man posted:

Is shunning an implied or explicit threat of force in your parlance?

Clarify please?

Do you mean is coercion, coercion even if it doesn't work? I.e

Someone decided not to work in a poo poo factory and suffers for it?

I mean yea, I would say it would be. Taking the consequence instead of doing the action would have no barring on the underlying 'do this or else' I would think

The Oldest Man
Jul 28, 2003

Defenestrategy posted:

Clarify please?

Do you mean is coercion, coercion even if it doesn't work? I.e

Someone decided not to work in a poo poo factory and suffers for it?

I mean yea, I would say it would be. Taking the consequence instead of doing the action would have no barring on the underlying 'do this or else' I would think

No, I mean, literally do you consider the community-administered or customary law punishment of shunning of the offender by everyone else to be a use of force or the threat of force?

Defenestrategy
Oct 24, 2010

The Oldest Man posted:

No, I mean, literally do you consider the community-administered or customary law punishment of shunning of the offender by everyone else to be a use of force or the threat of force?

Ah I get it, Yes, at it's core 'shunning' is coercion. Do this or else we will not care for you in anyway. I believe the amish do this still in the states?

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fool of sound
Oct 10, 2012
If the people doing the shunning have the ability to deny the person being shunned essentials then it's absolute coercive, and not in a terribly different way that capitalism is.

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