Anarchism is just a matter of having the courage to take simple principles of common decency that we all live by, and to follow them through to their logical conclusions. - David Graeber
Anarchism and Socialism have not experienced the same failures. Socialism has been implemented into full and sustainable systems and has succeeded in lifting millions out of poverty and idiocy, e.g., China and Russia, after their socialist revolutions just to name two. Anarchism has never been able to raise itself to a large enough scale without being destroyed.
Socialism has never been fully implemented. The best that has ever been attempted was Capitalism Lite. True socialism would fail, as it would require voluntary compliance with the economy that cannot happen. Black markets would quickly destroy it.
I see no reason why voluntary compliance with a socialist planned economy can never happen. Sure, immediate voluntary compliance with such an economy by society is unrealistic. No socialists, except for the most utopian, have ever suspected that immediate voluntary compliance would happen. 1/2
Dealing with noncompliance with a socialist economy is literally what the dictatorship of the proletariat (a socialist state with the proletariat as the ruling class) is for, to deal with noncompliance with socialism so that overtime more and more of society will become voluntarily compliant until everyone, or most of everyone, is voluntarily compliant with socialism. 2/2
A socialist economy implemented through force is not socialism. It never becomes sufficiently voluntary. The human default is self-interest. That is why Communism failed.
The limbic brain is why socialism fails. It was REASON that conceived of socialism in the first place, and unwavering reason is required for its implementation and success. The humans species is not yet ready.
I don't associate with people like you.
@VulcanTourist @kin ... maybe that's where anarcho-syndicalism comes into its own. All it really needs is to sow the seeds... just by asking people in advance, "what do you think you'd do if push came to shove?" Most people are actually decent and, with such a show of solidarity, would at least think twice about obeying in advance...
@VulcanTourist @kin Same is true of Capitalism and every other *ism. No system works if the people within it aren't invested in maintaining it. Getting that investment is the primary goal of any activist.
Capitalism doesn't require voluntary acceptance. It's the economic law of the jungle. It's DEscriptive, not PREscriptive. Anything other than capitalism is prescriptive and demands either force or voluntary cooperation to function. At scale, the best we've achieved any time anywhere is Capitalism Lite, and even that requires threat of force to function, albeit with constant crises.
Economic activism (again, at scale) to replace capitalism is a generational project, if it has any hope at all of succeeding. Though I would voluntarily participate in socialism myself, most humans currently would not, and I don't think that will change until a significant evolution of our neurology has occurred.
@VulcanTourist @kin capitalism requires acceptance by the capitalists, otherwise it devolves into oligarchy.
It is descriptive of an impossible system. I remember in highschool when we were learning about these various systems. The exact phrase they used, which feels so utterly absurd, was "fully informed rational consumer" -- ie, you look at the options available in the market and you choose the one that provides the most value to you. And companies therefore must compete to be the one providing the best value. But how the fuck do you know which is the best value? How do you know ANYTHING about the products you're buying in our complex modern economy? These companies wouldn't even admit that there's oats in oatmeal if we didn't force them to label the stuff. So sure, if your idea of capitalism is the rich fleecing and enslaving the rest of us, then that requires no buy-in from anybody else. But for it to actually be a functional system there have to be some rules and standards.
> "fully informed rational consumer"
That is a requirement of the libertarian ideal, not mere capitalism. True capitalism is a black market.
Also, monopoly is the ultimate end result of the capitalistic process. It's a core feature, the consequence of all that competition: someone has to win, and they do. The libertarian ideal posits that upstarts create new competition to upend a monopoly, but the reality is that rarely or never happens. Monopoly is inevitable without severe controls to prevent it. Our controls are not severe enough, when the aftermath of AT&T v U.S. 1970 leads to the company fully reconstituting itself.
@VulcanTourist @kin I would still call that a failure. Most definitions of capitalism at least include the phrase "free market"; but once that market is monopolized it is no longer free and the system has failed.
Free markets are a mythical creation. They do not and cannot exist, any more than that mythical perfectly informed consumer who can deftly avoid fraud and manipulation. Non-free markets are what true capitalism looks like, in contrast to the fictions presented in textbooks written by economists indoctrinated with the same fictions in Ivy League schools conceived by, funded by, constructed by, and staffed by the One Percent. (Those same economists all declare that recessions are bad news for everyone, when the reality is that they're the opening salvo of a proletarian revolt and they're only bad for the One Percent, who then retaliate with layoffs and more.)
I still remember a TV commercial from the early 2000s wherein the Clorox corporation tried to convince us that their brand of 5% sodium hypochlorite solution was better than any other brand of %5 sodium hypochlorite solution. I have no doubt that messaging succeeded in the American market.
I think we at least find agreement in the conclusion that capitalism in any form sucks for everyone *except* the One Percent.
@VulcanTourist @kin Well sure, if we throw away the commonly used definitions we can make *anything* a success or a failure! :)
What distinguishes your idea of capitalism from a dictator's (or oligarchs') planned economy?
> What distinguishes your idea of capitalism from a dictator's (or oligarchs') planned economy?
Probably nothing at all, because that's the reality of it: the economic law of the jungle where anything goes and monopoly is the end goal. There Can Be Only One.
Do I care that other people talk about constrained capitalism while conveniently (or ignorantly) omitting the adjective? Nope, but I'd change the textbooks if I could.
@VulcanTourist @kin I mean...you're not wrong, just feels like at that point why have the word at all, we have more accurate ways to describe such a system :)
I'd prefer updating the textbooks to make it clearer that those constraints are an integral part of the system and not some kind of perversion of it as so many seem to believe... (thanks to huge quantites of propaganda of course...including from those textbooks!)
Also, fully informed electorate is a great idea, but they don't talky want that from voters. Plus we are out here trying to make it, few have time to be fully informed.
@VulcanTourist @kin Nope, The Ojibwe basically lived that way before they were colonized. It's a matter of cultural conditioning. Their system of cultural storytelling and maintaining close familiarity with the natural environment allowed children to adapt naturally to the world with memorable metaphors carrying past lessons helping them navigate it. Our culture raises kids in artificial environments that adapts them to authority then we fail to understand why we can't manage without a hierarchy
Sorry, that wasn't a scale comparable to any contemporary nation. Their total population was estimated to be something like the population of a contemporary suburban town. At that tiny scale, it's rather trivial to achieve some form of anarchism.
What's not trivial is achieving it now with a human population in the billions.
@VulcanTourist @kin Didn't say it would be trivial. What I was disputing is the idea that we're "not evolved enough" to achieve it. I believe this perception comes from our cultural conditioning that ingrains authoritarian habits so deeply that we believe it to be our default nature. I think this cultural conditioning is a remnant of imperialism. Whether or not it's possible to achieve anarchism at scale I don't think can be determined until we produce a generation not indoctrinated by authority
That's idealistic and untrue. A social or political system being possible is dependent on whether the material conditions of society allow it to exist (which, for anarchism, they don't). Having courage and principles of common decency, i.e., having a particular mindset, doesn't magically change reality and make anarchism or any system possible. That's wishful thinking, which isn't helpful for real-world social movements.
@kin I miss him. 😭
@kin
Not many people have that courage. That is why anarchism fails at scale, just as does socialism. They depend upon a species of Homo that doesn't exist yet, one with core instincts for egalitarianism and cooperation rather than self-interest and competitiveness.
The atavistic mammalian part of our brains needs to die off, like the appendix.