i mean, i have seen many naive anarchists who think “everyone has a garden” and “hi, my favourite hobby is making paracetamol in my garage!” are substitutes for organized agriculture and medical manufacturing…
mostly on social media. but then again, this is a social media post too.
The vast majority of capitalists believe in the possibility of an ever expanding market on a planet with finite resources.
There have been communist who believed you should plant seeds really close together because they would have plant class solidarity and not compete with each other.
There are anarchists who think chaos is a legitimate form of government.
There are fascist.
It’s almost like naive and insane people exist within all political ideologies to different degrees.
Economies and societies are so complex that none of the models we imagine on the whiteboard are able to stay stable across centuries (or even decades).
We know, for instance, that capitalism has to be heavily regulated to prevent things like pollution, mistreatment of workers, shoddy goods and anticapitalist practices. We also know that over time, government regulators will get captured by business interests. The environment and workforce / customer base suffer, small businesses cannot compete and all the money ends up at the top with everyone else bankrupt.
So far we haven’t been able to implement any system that doesn’t degrade into authoritarianism, and eventually a one-party state with a dictator, or that doesn’t get overrun by another, more militant society intent on plundering their labor and resources.
The vast majority of capitalists believe in the possibility of an ever expanding market on a planet with finite resources.
actually that’s not true. spaceflight is explicitely researched because they understand that you can’t have an infinitely growing economy on a finite planet.
I disagree. Space exploration is mostly still done on public sector money, with the goals of national prestige, scientific advancement and as an appeal to the biological human impulse to seek out the unknown. Private endeavors are mostly focused on using space to grow the terrestrial economy (satcom megaconstellations [Even spacex and their starship is primarily being developed to serve this end]) and as investor bait (the loonie space data center rush and every such impractical startup). The noble search to conquer the cosmos is just PR for them.
You can be an anarchist and poke fun at naive interpretations of anarchism. I don’t think you have to read “all anarchists are like these hypothetical human pets” into that joke.
You don’t have to, but that is absolutely the correct interpretation when ‘anarchists’ is further qualified only by, ‘pet’, which only implies ownership. That’s even worse than calling anarchism naive. That’s implying anarchists are so dumb as to be considered pets.
“Workers own the means of production” is, in fact, anarchist but I can understand freshly-minted anarchists get turned off the idea at first by tankies lol
Tankies think that the state should own the means of production. Sure, they’ll then claim that the workers own the state, but in reality it’s just owned by the political elite.
Bingo. If your hands aren’t operating the equipment on the daily, you shouldn’t get to (co)own it. Statism bleeding into work life is effectively diet capitalism.
Theory and reality are different things, absolutely - politics is labor. Whether that’s used for good or evil is separate. Politics also =/= statism, and nothing will ever be neatly cut and dry in the real world to fully divorce ourselves from these quandaries.
Re: statism, that’s very fair, and it was what you said. I think I was partially responding to the “political elite” comment you were also responding to.
Totally agree, we can only speak certainties about real-world conditions, and the tendency toward abstraction and hypotheticals IMO is sort of a negative tendency in many ways.
I keep writing more, but I don’t wanna get way in the weeds. Def appreciate the thoughtful response
Why not? Politics happens either way. There are going to be people who are more influential than others. name any famous anarchist, my favorite was Malatesta, and they were 100% absolutely engaged in political work.
Is it just that political work is okay until after the workers seize the means? IMO denying the necessity of political work as a means of suppressing the possibility of political domination of a minority, which is a real concern, drifts into authoritarianism almost instantly. Its just denying reality. Denying that political work is work is a political opinion. Enforcing it would be political work!
This is not a gotcha question, genuinely want to hear your opinion. I don’t think pointing out a contradiction is, on its own, a total invalidation of any given viewpoint. Contradictions are everywhere, people are contradictory.
Anarchy is more about dissolving ownership. Why would it be right to keep people out of a factory by force just because you work there?
If you have reason to believe they will cause direct or indirect harm, sure, but ownership is no indication of that. In fact production may be causing more harm than good, in which case it would be right to stop the factory’s operations, with force against the workers if necessary.
The beautiful thing about anarchism is it’s a space for hundreds of differing viewpoints (so long as they’re centered on non-hierarchical structures).
That said, I at no point mentioned force or violence in anarchist production ownership. Also where in my comment is there “keeping people out of a factory by force?” Having say over the day to day operations for the place you work is pretty typical of syndicalism, at least.
The phrase is usually used to refer to the social class of workers as a whole (the people who work to live), as opposed to the capitalist class who simply own things for their livelyhood.
i mean, i have seen many naive anarchists who think “everyone has a garden” and “hi, my favourite hobby is making paracetamol in my garage!” are substitutes for organized agriculture and medical manufacturing…
mostly on social media. but then again, this is a social media post too.
The vast majority of capitalists believe in the possibility of an ever expanding market on a planet with finite resources.
There have been communist who believed you should plant seeds really close together because they would have plant class solidarity and not compete with each other.
There are anarchists who think chaos is a legitimate form of government.
There are fascist.
It’s almost like naive and insane people exist within all political ideologies to different degrees.
Economies and societies are so complex that none of the models we imagine on the whiteboard are able to stay stable across centuries (or even decades).
We know, for instance, that capitalism has to be heavily regulated to prevent things like pollution, mistreatment of workers, shoddy goods and anticapitalist practices. We also know that over time, government regulators will get captured by business interests. The environment and workforce / customer base suffer, small businesses cannot compete and all the money ends up at the top with everyone else bankrupt.
So far we haven’t been able to implement any system that doesn’t degrade into authoritarianism, and eventually a one-party state with a dictator, or that doesn’t get overrun by another, more militant society intent on plundering their labor and resources.
actually that’s not true. spaceflight is explicitely researched because they understand that you can’t have an infinitely growing economy on a finite planet.
I disagree. Space exploration is mostly still done on public sector money, with the goals of national prestige, scientific advancement and as an appeal to the biological human impulse to seek out the unknown. Private endeavors are mostly focused on using space to grow the terrestrial economy (satcom megaconstellations [Even spacex and their starship is primarily being developed to serve this end]) and as investor bait (the loonie space data center rush and every such impractical startup). The noble search to conquer the cosmos is just PR for them.
I don’t deny that there’s plenty of naive anarchists around. But it’s a false conclusion that anarchism itself would be naive because of that.
You can be an anarchist and poke fun at naive interpretations of anarchism. I don’t think you have to read “all anarchists are like these hypothetical human pets” into that joke.
You don’t have to, but that is absolutely the correct interpretation when ‘anarchists’ is further qualified only by, ‘pet’, which only implies ownership. That’s even worse than calling anarchism naive. That’s implying anarchists are so dumb as to be considered pets.
To be fair, I do have a harem of pet anarchists
Call that a polycule
“Workers own the means of production” is, in fact, anarchist but I can understand freshly-minted anarchists get turned off the idea at first by tankies lol
Tankies think that the state should own the means of production. Sure, they’ll then claim that the workers own the state, but in reality it’s just owned by the political elite.
Bingo. If your hands aren’t operating the equipment on the daily, you shouldn’t get to (co)own it. Statism bleeding into work life is effectively diet capitalism.
Honest question: is political work a valid form of labor?
Theory and reality are different things, absolutely - politics is labor. Whether that’s used for good or evil is separate. Politics also =/= statism, and nothing will ever be neatly cut and dry in the real world to fully divorce ourselves from these quandaries.
Re: statism, that’s very fair, and it was what you said. I think I was partially responding to the “political elite” comment you were also responding to.
Totally agree, we can only speak certainties about real-world conditions, and the tendency toward abstraction and hypotheticals IMO is sort of a negative tendency in many ways.
I keep writing more, but I don’t wanna get way in the weeds. Def appreciate the thoughtful response
Honest personal opinion: Absolutely not.
Why not? Politics happens either way. There are going to be people who are more influential than others. name any famous anarchist, my favorite was Malatesta, and they were 100% absolutely engaged in political work.
Is it just that political work is okay until after the workers seize the means? IMO denying the necessity of political work as a means of suppressing the possibility of political domination of a minority, which is a real concern, drifts into authoritarianism almost instantly. Its just denying reality. Denying that political work is work is a political opinion. Enforcing it would be political work!
This is not a gotcha question, genuinely want to hear your opinion. I don’t think pointing out a contradiction is, on its own, a total invalidation of any given viewpoint. Contradictions are everywhere, people are contradictory.
Also that’s not my downvote, I don’t do that shi
Anarchy is more about dissolving ownership. Why would it be right to keep people out of a factory by force just because you work there?
If you have reason to believe they will cause direct or indirect harm, sure, but ownership is no indication of that. In fact production may be causing more harm than good, in which case it would be right to stop the factory’s operations, with force against the workers if necessary.
The beautiful thing about anarchism is it’s a space for hundreds of differing viewpoints (so long as they’re centered on non-hierarchical structures).
That said, I at no point mentioned force or violence in anarchist production ownership. Also where in my comment is there “keeping people out of a factory by force?” Having say over the day to day operations for the place you work is pretty typical of syndicalism, at least.
The phrase is usually used to refer to the social class of workers as a whole (the people who work to live), as opposed to the capitalist class who simply own things for their livelyhood.