Lady Militant posted:

I don't think it's irresolvable at all. Anarchism and statism are two necessary components of a socialist movement. You need the statists to handle all the boring poo poo the vast majority of people do not want to bother themselves with and the anarchists to keep advocating for their local poo poo so you have idea of what that local area needs. It's a huge pain in the rear end to micro-manage things (which nerds don't learn because video games simplify it for them) on big scales so any socialist project of significant scale will by it's very nature need state socialists to organize the big overhead stuff while the anarchists handle the small scale stuff.

Top City Homo posted:

Basically people don't often argue the morality of cannibalism because we don't do it due to a large amount of protein alternatives. People who specifically butcher humans for meat are considered psychopaths

and morality only comes up in extreme situations like a plane crash

Similarly, many people probably would not want to kill animals if there existed alternatives for meat outside of butchering animals

at some point, the abundance of non butchered meat would put people in the same category as a psychopath if they insist on killing live animals for food outside of emergencies

Ardennes posted:

Yeah, meat and animal products would eventually become something like probably foie gras, a distasteful luxury item that some rich people are into. Oats can easily just be grown on a massive scale (some taxes/subsidies may help) and if oat milk is around a dollar a gallon, then people will fine with it.

You just have to give people viable material alternatives.

Ardennes posted:

Yeah, meat and animal products would eventually become something like probably foie gras, a distasteful luxury item that some rich people are into. Oats can easily just be grown on a massive scale (some taxes/subsidies may help) and if oat milk is around a dollar a gallon, then people will fine with it.

You just have to give people viable material alternatives.

Dreddout posted:

Assuming we're still talking about a market economy, the meat & dairy industry will fight tooth and nail to preserve industrial farming. Companies can't legally call plant based milk substitutes "milk" ff

At least in America, the meat industry has a natural advantage due to so many rural states being heavily based on beef and pork.

Top City Homo posted:

hopefully rich people disappear like butchered meat

as someone who has been eating oats daily for the last 5 years i hope that our lives will not be reliant on only oats for protein. Every vegan I have spoken with is waiting for non slaughtered meat alternatives

Dreddout posted:

This usually leads to the anarchists getting purged unfortunately

strange feelings re Daisy posted:

I make my own seitan. The basic recipes are online and use vital wheat gluten and nutritional yeast as the main ingredients. You always want to mix in sauces and spices. A good seitan is a joy in its own right and not just something you settle for. Quite a few Thai restaurants and Buddhist temples with meal service have it. It's primarily good for replacing diced meat in Asian dishes though. The market will need some other substitute for hamburgers, steaks, ribs, etc. Also I only make it at home or eat it at restaurants. The pre-made processed seitan foods I've tried at healthstores are awful, which makes sense. Omnivore TV dinners taste like poo poo too.

Lady Militant posted:

I don't feel like that's an unavoidable fate

O Yeetus posted:

drat my last post was trolling and no one got mad at it

Ardennes posted:

I would say the US is just too far gone to reform in any meaningful sense. There is hope for the rest of the world.

LittleBlackCloud posted:

This is... reactionary thought, comrade

Dreddout posted:

Again, Americans are not anymore immune to class conflict than the "hopelessly" reactionary russians were, but the american empire abroad makes class consciousness presently impossible

Another problem with your reasoning is that America still dictates the diet of much of the world, due to geographic and climate realities I don't see american agricultural dominance going away without either:

A: the collapse of american capitalism

B: the deforestation of the amazon rainforest to the extant that brazil can compete with american agriculture

the former is possible, if predicated on the collapse of american empire. the latter most likely ends in our extinction. A and B also are not mutually exclusive

Ardennes posted:

There doesn't need to be revolution in the US, the US just needs to lose its influence abroad and in vacuum, other ways of living are possible.

croup coughfield posted:

I don't want to be flippant, but this seems awfully convenient.

croup coughfield posted:

I don't want to be flippant, but this seems awfully convenient.

Lady Militant posted:

USSR

Lady Militant posted:

empire

Top City Homo posted:

i really don't see that as unavoidable. Anarchists ML beef happened during transition from feudalism to DOtP and the disagreement is about the speed of industrialization and the sacrifices to get there vs creating an ahistorical social system from scratch

would that disagreement exist within an advanced industrialized western society after a revolution? Not if the goal is to create worker empowered organization but def if there is a vulgar drive to abolish the worker state and surrender to counter revolutionaries through liberal democracy

Lady Militant posted:

The roman empire "fell" and yet I born almost 2000 years after the latest time of death for the empire can still walk in it's halls of marble in Italy. The USSR collapsed 30 years ago and yet what it did still influences our beliefs/actions to this day. No empire rules forever.

uncop posted:

Russia wasn't feudal, the core regions that the Reds got hold of were the same kind of early capitalist that you'd have seen in Germany during Marx's time or even France a few decades earlier than that. It just had a gigantic imperial periphery that was under basically feudal conditions and which enabled the Russian monarchy to defend itself agaist bourgeois constitutionalism for longer. Colonial Ireland also had similar semi-feudal conditions for a long time while no one would have called it feudal.

It would be fair to claim that the same problems wouldn't arise if their source was in the existence of a huge peasantry, but it wasn't. It was in how workers didn't actually have much of an idea how to operate their workplaces and the economy more generally. Power had to be centralized around the small number of people left who could organize production. And the basic formula where capital develops the proletariat to be unable to understand how things are made hasn't really changed. If a proletarian revolution happened here and now, they'd still be dependent on middle-class and bourgeois management in the immediate term. And those people would end up forming a massive bureaucracy that would need to be watched out for. And the suppression apparatus can't be just local workers' militias because it deals with complex schemes and needs to apply policy consistently.

By that point, you've totally lost the anarchists and are a counterrevolutionary who needs to be fought with all available means. You've reproduced both the workplace and the state. At best you have created the conditions to develop the workers into their own masters, but that all depends on the success of a new form of class struggle. As far as I see it, anarchism is more or less unable to deal with societies that aren't economically homogenous and un-alienated enough to completely get rid of elitist command relations without descending into chaos. The only hope you have is if capitalism has developed a proletarian middle class that both has the technical and organizational know-how to run everything and also instead of guarding that knowledge to center enterprise around themselves, actively wants to train the proletariat to run everything without them.

indigi posted:

the latest time for death of the empire is actually 14*jocks come out and give me a HUGE wedgie*

strange feelings re Daisy posted:

Checking myself into a rehabilitation facility. Please water my plants.

Seriously I would prefer if people just stopped eating meat or cut back heavily but I don't see it happening without cheap, very convincing substitutes. Years ago China had some kind of climate change dietary council with a plan to cut meat consumption in half by 2030. I don't think they've had an annual drop even once since setting that goal. Indigenous people in the Amazon rainforest are having their land stolen and clear cut to make room for cattle and soy(for animal feed) to meet growing demand. The whole issue is depressing as gently caress.

StashAugustine posted:

1920

Lady Militant posted:

The roman empire "fell" and yet I born almost 2000 years after the latest time of death for the empire can still walk in it's halls of marble in Italy. The USSR collapsed 30 years ago and yet what it did still influences our beliefs/actions to this day. No empire rules forever.

Ferrinus posted:

this all comes back to the anarchist conception of the state as a malevolent spirit or demon that colonizes society whenever it sees the opportunity and needs to be confronted and exorcised directly, rather than an emergent social relation which signals to the observer that class struggle is ongoing

Sheng-Ji Yang posted:

moscow was the third rome, so technically the soviet union was true the heir of the roman empire

uncop posted:

Kind of, but not exactly. Kropotkin has a pretty good and concrete take on the kind of state that deserves to be called capital-S State: proper tributary formations with a state class that supports the development of the state's powers for the sake of the state itself rather than for any productive class. The state class reproduces its power through tribute that it gains from running what is essentially a huge organized bureaucratic protection racket. Wherever there's a state, there's a prospective state class, and in a State the state class is part of the ruling class bloc and does not merely take what it's given by another class that rules over it. If the bourgeoisie collectively went ancap and told the police and military to disband themselves and give way to decentralized private armies, there would be a civil war.

The dictatorship of the proletariat as I outlined is internally compromised in the concrete way that well-read anarchists claim it to be: it employs a necessary technocratic layer of people who are actually bloodthirsty enemies of the proletariat: they want to lay the foundation for a State that the proletariat stays dependent on and has to pay tribute to in perpetuity. The anarchists' problem is mostly just being afraid to compromise with evil to take out others one by one. They're afraid of internal corruption and would like to fight violent evil exclusively through antagonistic means. So they see those who aren't afraid to deal with the devil as being in league with the devil. But OTOH people like dengists who deny the existence of the devil, call it the proletariat and condemn the principle of fighting it *are* in league with it. So non-lib anarchists stand on a mountain-sized moral high ground over revisionist marxists.

GalacticAcid posted:

Lady Militant posted:

the USSR was a super power and could project power through over seas bases far outside its borders. it was an empire. and the way i use the term is neutral/descriptive in this context because i think it's loving stupid to come up with a super special leftist name to classify leftist super powers

LittleBlackCloud posted:

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