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The entire idea of the monopoly on violence is based on the correct observation that all governance is predicated on violence as an alternative. Persuasion and negotiation (and therefore law and peaceful exchange of power) can be rejected, violence cannot. On the other hand, violence is inherently destructive and risky in a way persuasion and negotiation are not and thus is, ostensibly, to be avoided as much as possible. The theory of the state monopoly on violence isn't "the state must wield violence to keep the unruly in line", it's "the state must possess the threat of overwhelming violence in order to give persuasion and negotiation force". The calculus of rejecting persuasion and negotiation becomes extremely unfavorable when doing so will bring down the wrath of the state. In turn, the state is ostensibly held responsible to its citizens because by sheer numbers those citizens also wield the threat of violence against the state in the form of strike, sabotage, or outright overthrow. The issues arise where state capacity for violence is so great that citizens cannot credibly threaten violence of their own and can be excluded from state-level persuasion and negotiation without any serious risk to the state. It's difficult to do this for the entire population, but relatively easy to do for a controllably sized minority, especially where the force multiplier of wealth disparity in concerned. Either way, the idea of a mutually beneficial freedom-for-security social contact is nonsense, at least as far as citizen-vs-state relations are concerned.
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Nov 10, 2020 17:55
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The contemporary culture war issues involve one set of citizens successfully convincing the state to marginalize another. The state vs citizen distinction is rarely cleanly defined.
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Nov 10, 2020 18:27
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Also importantly the death of Jeff Bezos or almost any other single person wouldn't change the balance of power between state and citizen. His company and its power dynamic warping influence would persist. His wealth would persist. The state would dismiss it as a fluke and/or enact collective punishment. Individual considerations are have almost an entirely calculus than collective ones.
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Nov 10, 2020 20:43
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Also cpt might be being a little hyperbolic buts its substantially less realistic to act as though police aren't largely permitted to use any amount of force they wish for any reason, especially against marginalized populations.
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Nov 10, 2020 20:47
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Disnesquick posted:I genuinely could not parse this. What did you mean? Basically that theories about how power dynamics work across a society don't nessicarily hold true at an individual level, and that using the layer to critique the former is a waste of time.
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Nov 10, 2020 21:13
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Somfin posted:Think you might have forgotten to type "different" in the original post, chief. Oh whoops
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Nov 10, 2020 21:19
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I think that's overestimating the sorts of things that household 3d printer is capable of, or likely to become available or affordable for the foreseeable future. You're not going to get much in the way of electronics, or heavy machinery, or even most tools that require durability and strength. You can machine parts from shared templates, but there's still a lot of technical skill and knowledge to actually assemble them into most useful things.
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Nov 22, 2020 03:46
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Computers used to be loving terrible. They were the size of a room, you programmed them by hole-punch cards, and they could barely do anything. However, now every single person walks around with at least 1 computer attached to themselves. They power our washing machines and televisions and radios and workplaces. And it has changed a lot. What happens when the same revolution happens to 3D printers? I mean in some theoretical future where there are sci-fi fabricators that can turn raw materials into more or less whatever a la Subnautica or something, it seems unlikely that capital isn't going to have bigger, better ones that can make things more cheaply or more cutting-edge than home models could.
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Nov 22, 2020 04:17
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NaanViolence posted:Humans aren't rational. That includes company executives. Stop half assedly responding to three week old posts.
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Nov 23, 2020 06:52
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The idea that science is apolitical is nonsense, both in an is and ought sense. Pure research and otherwise unprofitable science are necessarily going to be funded by either individuals or collective concerns, and is therefore going to primarily research the things that those funding it are interested in or think is valuable. In turn, where there is ambiguity in results personal politics is inevitably going flavor data interpretation, especially in fields with weak models like psychology or social sciences, but also in plenty of other fields where science butt heads with public policy.
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Nov 28, 2020 15:51
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Disnesquick posted:What a moronic way to write a post. If you want people to actually take you seriously then drop this aggressive line of phrasing things. You come across as an angry little child. Don't whine about tone, especially when the post is fairly innocuous. Report it if you have a problem.
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Nov 30, 2020 23:05
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Disnesquick, I'm kind of at a loss about what you are trying to argue, because it sure read to me like biological essentialism in the defense of a fascist ideal. If your immune system example is merely a metaphor then where are you drawing the idea that human culture requires conflict to thrive, in the same way the immune system does?
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Dec 1, 2020 00:58
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Disnesquick posted:I think you've captured the essence of what I was trying to convey here (and why I actually referenced fascism). You haven't "gotta hand it to fascists" but you do, absolutely, have to recognise that fascism offers a dynamic vision that's appealing, particularly in a society in decline. Socialists will be often be competing for the same hearts and minds as they are. Ok yeah, I see what you're going for in light of this, and that's a valid point.
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Dec 1, 2020 06:22
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Microcline posted:I'm sorry and I hope I didn't ruin a thread that was generating good discussion. It's no big deal, I thought the discussion was interesting, if a little tangential.
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Dec 4, 2020 06:40
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Sucrose posted:What are the terms for authoritarian vs. non-authoritarian Marxism? There's no easy answer for this, because those terms are pretty nebulous and there's a lot of different schools of thought.
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Dec 7, 2020 03:38
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Sucrose posted:I mean like, is there a strain of Marxism that is specifically "If some jerk tries to seize absolute power under the excuse of being the 'protector of the proletariat' or whatever, we'd tell that guy to get hosed?" Is there a specifically anti-authoritarian type of Marxism, or are all varieties potentially weak to it? There are tons of variants of anarcho-communism, that oppose the idea of state and to a greater or lesser extent coercive power. Kropotkin is the foundational figure of much of that school of thought.
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Dec 7, 2020 05:51
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I don't really think that liberty and societal cohesion are terribly at odds beyond the basic social expectations of an ethical society. The conflict lies more with how to deal with antisocial behaviors, bad actors, and external threats. In particular, to what extent indoctrination and state coercion have to be used to maintain communism.
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Dec 7, 2020 22:33
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Ferrinus posted:Here's the challenge: name a society, state, nation, or whatever that is on the "libertarian right" quadrant of the classic political compass meme, i.e. the bottom right corner. Epstein's Island
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Dec 7, 2020 22:55
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Cpt_Obvious posted:God is in his heaven. Everything is normal on Earth. Stop shitposting.
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Dec 9, 2020 00:24
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Kanine posted:even generally the fellow american zoomers i know who say they're on the authoritarian quadrant still are in favor of stuff like prison/police abolition/restorative justice and its a constant source of argument/internal contradiction This is because the quadrants are nonsense. There's no inherent contradiction between 'the state should have the authority to wield violence again bad actors' and 'that violence should be as humane as possible, and those affected by it should be offered rehabilitation'.
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Dec 20, 2020 16:48
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I'm not really convinced that reversion to capitalism is an inherent structural failure of statehood as an institution, rather than a failure to eliminate a heritable ruling class (heritable in this case can refer to either actual political dynasties or entrenched systems of patronage). I'm also unconvinced that in the absense of a state that said a de facto ruling class won't emerge anyway, just through normal social dynamics, especially once groups grow too large for a single coherent community.
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Dec 23, 2020 19:53
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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.
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Jan 20, 2021 04:27
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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.
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Jan 20, 2021 05:08
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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.
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Jan 20, 2021 05:55
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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.
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Jan 20, 2021 19:00
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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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Jan 20, 2021 21:44
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Denial of essentials is one of the prongs of how capital compels labor, and I would argue that it's more corrosive than the other: denial of freedom/threat of state violence. It's interesting that you bring up fan communities, because examples of abusive individuals with an audience avoiding justified shunning or directing unjustified shunning on others are trivial to find. Imagine that when the consequence of shunning isn't expulsion from a social group, but instead a denial of basic rights. That's not really all that different from wealthy capitalists doing the same.
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Jan 20, 2021 23:17
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Somfin posted:Did you misread the part where I explained that being able to expel people from your group is literally necessary for a group to exist? You're a Something Awful moderator, you know that the ability to remove people is a necessary part of how a functional community works. My ability to expel someone from the something awful community is not comparable to societal shunning that denies the shunned the essentials of life. The local shopkeeper or the food quartermaster or the union of independent farmers denying someone access to food is violence, and not only that, but it's less humane than temporary imprisonment and FAR less humane than proper rehabilitative justice. Putting that power into the hands of any given community leader or other person with a sufficiently large audience is no more just than capital having that power now. The only just way to deal with bad actors is a structured, consistent, well-administered system based on preserving human rights and dignity to the absolute greatest degree possible. That's complicated and difficult, but it's a lot better than assuming that Future Communists are going to act fundamentally more just and make better decisions about how to deal with bad actors.
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Jan 21, 2021 01:15
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Owning a personal domicile and having a pension (albeit one that is is superficially investment) does not make someone bourgioisie and represents a misunderstanding of what that term typically means. The bourgeoisis support themselves predominantly or entirely through ownership of capital.
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Sep 6, 2021 20:17
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