Well only on the periphery but it is not hard to spot the flash tractors they drive.

Drones, maybe but tractors are a mainstay and they are already comfortable with them so the improvements are incremental, not a jarring change.

I might not know them personally but I have read online communities lately, where they air their views freely. They might not be techy themselves but lots of chatter about the latest super modified crop which they want to purchase and stuff like that.

They use machines and spraying for everything hence why I stand by my post above. I would say they no more want to give up their modern technology than the city dweller.

I did also grow up in the country before 'getting out' to the big smoke so already had that background and my mother stayed in the country so have always heard bits what she says about the community there.

I think there is an even simpler explanation available. It is that agricultural work is inherently conservative. It relies on stability, predictable patterns and yields, and only incremental improvements. The farmer has a tried and true method of sustaining life, and he will not jeopardize that method with newfangled progressive ideas. He has a strong and realistic sense of what is possible given the tangible constraints of nature that he is so familiar with. He is not going to shoot for the moon and thereby risk losing what has taken so long to carefully develop. In general he is less ideational and more concrete, whereas progressives are the opposite. — Leontiskos

Yes I agree with that however what I find very incongruous is that they hate all that 'witchcraft' that happens in the cities however they are very quick to adopt new technologies for tractors and whatever other machinery which would inevitably have been discovered in those bohemian dens of iniquity they hate so much.

It is ironic that they rail against all the integration and progress but are certainly benefiting greatly from it. Also I was shocked how technical farming is these days, not only the machinery but all the statistics and data harvesting and collating and research and all that stuff and the farmers are eating it all up to get the slightest edge on nature and of course their competition.

Lol, I believe those statements require some qualifying too.

And no doubt there are some zealous left-wing activists who go too far, — Tom Storm

Well I would say once the term woke is used then it has gone too far. In this sense I would not say there is a 'healthy' form of wokeness. :) I would say the term itself is always pejorative. Like for instance there is not a healthy form of crazy.

There are healthy Leftist views and social justice advocates but I would not call them woke.

It is funny when I hear that word because I seem to recall waaaay back in around 2006-8 or so it used to mean the conspiracy theorists. I mean when conspiracy theories were kind of intriguing to people and before the age of debunking that came after. So from what I remember woke just meant someone who looks into those kinds of things and somehow remember Jo Rogan using it in this context when his podcast was still in its infancy and niche. Have I remembered it right?

It is like the Pepe frog thing, which started as something totally innocent and got co-opted by the alt-right.

In Australia, the only people who use the term 'woke' are Murdoch journalists and oddly discordant right-wingers, from what I’ve seen. It doesn't seem to have captured people’s imagination as widely. — Tom Storm

I would say in the UK the woke term has been extremely and enthusiastically taken up by right wingers. The Daily Mail newspaper uses it it nearly every article they print. Piers Morgan loves saying it last time I would see clips of him presenting daytime tv, which was some years ago. I hadn't heard of this author the OP discusses before but just a quick search and the first results show he is aligned with GB News and that said it all for me. It has proudly self styled itself after Fox News.

I am not going to blanket claim all his views are trash because of that, like 'woke' person would :), but I will say I am heavily de-incentivized to explore him further due to that association.

I am no fan of wokeness either but I think there are more careful considerations and critiques of it from the likes of Sam Harris to name one, or Zizek, from the little I watched of the latter, but I doubt this guy will fall into that category. I suspect it will just be the usual right-wing dog whistles of cultural marxism and such.

Your experience in the UK is, of course, going to be different than someone living in the US. — BC

That is why I invoked Hypericin's post which I agreed with and assumed, perhaps wrongly but since the replies have been US centric so far thought it a fair bet, they were from the states.

My mother has worked for the council, what we also call the government, on the local level and she told me that ironically, it is the opposite here in that the farmers don't like Labour because they are more city focused in their policies while the Conservatives I suppose must at least give some more scraps to the farmers to make them for them even though in the end the latter are still looking after their old boy's club of each other, but that is true of Labour too I think. I remember that is your point made in my other thread where there is another class above which they look after in either party rather than the people.

Haha, a lot of American terms going over my head - flyover state, country mouse and political terms that are lost on me. :) Doesn't matter though; I get the gist of the posts.

Sure I just thought there have already been tangents of a similar or greater magnitude.

I get criticized on other forums for 'spamming' too many topics rather than keeping to one thread so was also conscious of that.

No one taking this up? ?

Today, most right-wingers live in or near a city — Gnomon

Really? My experience would be attune more to Hypericin's that they are in the country for the reasons they mentioned. Where did you get the idea they are in the city? Your image does not prove they live in the city, from what I can see; it is showing states and their denomination, not city.

A good pragmatic reply.

Some good points here, thanks.

The one I will take up right away is the petite bourgeois which makes sense now y'all mention it and that they don't want to spoil a good thing. Now I read that I do remember on a communism documentary it had a bit explaining that as soon as the socialists got into power - don't recall if it was China or Russia but it matters not - one of the first things they did is take the grain and property away from the farmers and made it communal.

The comments by Jamal about the current farmers still 'remembering' socialist russia seems a little far fetched, lol. Maybe in the countries that happened, sure.

I very much doubt the average farmer in rural UK has any inkling of those things.

It could just be that farmers vote for policies that suit them. — I like sushi

Indeed, Ockam's razor but it will suit them because of the above reasons.

Hold on...that just brought me to another question. I recall from our discussions about communism/anarchism that they take pains to say that the proletariat are dis-empowered because they lack ownership of land so does that mean if a serf manages to improve their station and gets their own land they immediately become an enemy of the socialist and de facto petite bourgeoisie? :)

We touched on the police earlier and how they enforce the mores of capitalism.

I got to thinking about another huge and insidious force that does the same which is the medical establishment.

How many behaviors are pathologized simply because the individual does not fit in to the mould of conforming to capitalist society? I would say a large amount of so called mental illness is just propagandized capilalist rhetoric.

The most poignant creative work to deal with this subject matter that comes to mind would be One Flew Over the Cookoo's Nest but so many lesser cases where doctors give pills to fix the symptom behavior with nebulous diagnoses like anxiety and depression when capitalism is the root cause which is never addressed.

The medical establishment, I would posit, is in large part enabling the system and medicates citizens only with the intent to keep them producing. So the goal is not to heal the patient but rather to keep them productive.

As with policing, the objective is always maintaining the capitalist status quo.

Discuss.

Partly Marx is addressing himself to other intellectuals who he assumes is familiar with all the texts he's familiar with, such as Ricardo and Hegel and he's using references and language and conceptual frameworks that Western intellectuals at the time would be familiar with; and partly there's a lot of words and concepts that everyone is familiar with at that time but now require more erudite historical knowledge to fully understand. — boethius

Yes good point. I had actually been reading some of the creative writing classics of that era, before this interest in political philosophy took my fancy. Ones like Jane Eyre and Around the World in 80 Days. I have liked Victorian era writing for a long time because of its rich language and my recent re-acquaintance with it reminded me of that.

As you note, many of the terms which seem esoteric today would have been commonplace then and I noticed quite a few come up between writers. Not just the words themselves but the roles of men and women as good examples and the casual misogyny or racism or classism which would be offensive today. Particularly the classism in Jane Eyre. I thought it hilarious when she writes of teaching working class people as 'gaping mouth rustics' without a hint of irony, more as a matter of fact statement.

Why analysts today still use the word bourgeoisie is first there's no good modern counter-part, as to say "upper class" is to include also aristocrats, but the whole point of the bourgeoisie is that they are rich but no aristocrats. So in modern language they are the 1% who aren't still actual kings and lords. King Charle's is part of the 1% but not bourgeoisie, likewise the pope is reasonable to say is part of the 1% but is not bourgeoisie.

Aren't the bourgeoisie just the middle class today?

I have begun reading some of the classic Marx/Engels texts and what I am finding is that they assume a high level of knowledge on the reader's part about capitalist economics.

Not as accessible as The Conquest of Bread, which has a bit of that but much lighter and more general.

I don't know if you follow American politics — Leontiskos

I know little about either uk or american politics. I would say I see more of american politics just because it is more of a show and on the news more with trump's antics but it reminds me of around the 2016 period when an equivalent lefty to Bernie in the uk who was a very outside 'back bencher' as they call them got in as the main candidate for the Labour party. He was voted in by other member's who would never have voted for him but from what my mother told me it was their protest votes to block other real rivals that ended up getting him elected from all the protest votes. Oh yes, that is his name. Had forgotten it as he has been out of the media for some years now...Jeremy Corbyn.

He is really far Left and stirred up Corbynmania in the country for a time with quite some enthusiasm for actual change in a real socialist flavour but the powers that be seemed to see to it that he didn't get anywhere in the end and he has since faded back into obscurity on the back benches from whence he came.

If there are forum members you would like comments from you can ask them using the format their name like @ " unimportant " but with no space after @ or ". A note will show up in their e-mail that "Unimportant mentioned you in such and such a thread". That doesn't always work, but it sometimes gets more people to comment. — BC

I am new here so don't know who would. Isn't it that this forum is just relatively quiet overall, probably in large part to the fact that it is invite only - not that I am complaining about that as the other forums I perused before this one had much lower quality content with front pages mostly filled with rants.

It isn't that it benefits people but it is like the popularity of Trump that it panders to the xenophobic types who think immigrants are ruining their 'Britishness'.

What you mentioned about the politicians pandering to the wealthy class rather than the people that voted them in I think also applies here.

Shame that no one else seems interested in this thread who also knows more about British politics than you or I!

This is probably more suited to politics and current affairs subforum than political philosophy as the content is more pop culture in substance.

Well to add a little to your knowledge there is another man named Nigel Farage, maybe you knew the name already, who is very pally with Donald Trump and was the one who championed the Brexit cause.

He has had various parties of his own, the most notable being the Brexit party until we voted to leave and now he is continuing similar xenophobic caused and is very appealing to that type of demographic. I think he does fancy himself as Britain's Donald Trump.

Yes that sounds like a good summation of the milieu in the states. I wonder how it contrasts with the UK.

I am not really sure how it works here if anyone else can chime in?

I don't know that things are so based on funding as the states or if so at least it is not as out in the open? Just guessing. All these alien terms like 'cpac' and 'caucuses' in the states and elon giving 250 million to the trump campaign.

Perhaps things just go under different names here in the uk.

I don't see why it necessarily has to be that though? What about the lead by example way of communes mentioned throughout this discussion?

Yes then one asks what difference are religious crusades from proletariat uprisings?

I suppose anarchism will also get down in the mud too? I seems they had a fair few bombings of choice adversaries to name but one instance.

unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. — Adolf Hitler

This is what I tried to tell boethius to perhaps allow his points to get across better but he dismissed it and continues with is disjointed ramblings. :) There is gold in the ramblings but they are not easy to pick through at all and the reader is left to sort the wheat from the chaff themselves. A task most would not wish to undertake.

But they conveniently leave out the various sins that allowed us to establish capitalism, or the sins that it perpetuates. — Moliere

Oh yes I forgot that that was discussed earlier, the idea of capitalism/christianity being just as bloody or perhaps far more merely through having been around longer, than the little blots on history communist regimes have done so far.

So can it be said the end jusifies the means and that all states have blood on their hands but communism at least aims for a better end goal? In this interpretation Stalin and Mao were heroes?

^^^^^

First off, the historical analysis is complex. It's a Western truism that all socialist and communist governing projects have completely failed.

However, without the Soviet Union, and perhaps without even Stalin, the situation could be a 1000 year Reich in Europe. At the same time, the intense price paid by the Soviet Union to defeat the Nazis may have been essentially a fatal blow, or significant contributing factor, resulting in its inevitable collapse. — boethius

Just looking back at this again and still trying to get a more clear picture of how the Maoist or Stalinist, or whichever other you wish to enter here, vision of communism differs from the original Marxist one, if it did.

In other words was their employment of it perverse or true to the letter of the original manifesto? If not what was different? So I am asking is it the implementation at fault in these case or is it a natural conclusion of communism on a larger scale? The detractors would surely want to claim the latter but I am trying to figure out if it is accurate or not.

Perhaps you could come back in to the fold as well @moliere?

Zizek was mentioned briefly by you earlier, what are your thoughts on him?

Since your mention I have been looking into him a little. I had seen the name around here and there but never had the motivation to seek him out previously.

This ties things back nicely to the fleshing out of the communist side and also relevant to the original question as it appears he opposes anachism.

There are endless additional meanings to words that have technical meanings in specific disciplines and tradecraft, colloquially referred to as technical jargon. — boethius

Indeed. Lots/most philosophers will take the general meaning of a word then run with it and just explain how they are going to be using it (hopefully).

Heidegger I recall did this a lot, using every day 'ready-to-hand' (one of his I remember) terms and uses them in idiosyncratic ways. Of course countless others but Heidegger is one I remember particularly.

It was remarked to me online, by a Libertarian crypto enthusiast, that communism is bad because you don't have a choice. Is that true? I don't remember the exact wording but it was along those lines.

I am wondering since communists think that the end justifies the means, of using the state as a stepping stone to communism, does that mean they would use any manner of coercion to seek that end?

I am thinking again of current regimes like china with control of the press as a prime example. That would be a 'tame' example with others being any individual's life can be sacrificed for 'the party'.

Is this a natural progression of communism or not necessarily? These are the reservations I began to have which led me in towards anarchism.

I have been thinking that while I was not politically aware over my life this does seem to get to the root of what I have always hated about society as I have known it during my lifetime.

I would get told that I was anti-social and things like that but it was rather that I felt that the empty consumerism that most of society revel in so joyously I found vile.

I always felt things like people getting giddy about buying new cars or going on package holidays or the creme de la creme, christmas just somehow made me balk and bristle.

The only way I could explain it before was the general distaste for consumerism but this thread has made me understand better what lies beneath.

Times when I have felt I had found my type of people is in counter cultures, perhaps another nod to small anarchist style communities, but sadly these seem to have been stamped out in direct correlation around the rise of social media. Any theories on this?

Why is it that society at large sees no problem with this vapid existence and on the treadmill of working to buy useless things that doesn't fulfill them long term, thinking that the antidote to their ills is just to get more money to buy the bigger thing, and on and on?

Why do most of society come to the defence of capitalism and say 'it isn't perfect but it is the best system we have' and just balk at any alternatives you might suggest as idealism at best or worse, dangerous and deviant?

During the time of much of the anarchist classical anarchist writings were produced from what I can read of the social milieu at the time things seemed a lot more unsettled so were people a lot more open to these different ways of living at those times? Sure anarchism/communism was hated too then but there seemed to also be a lot more fervent followers whereas today people, while not happy with their lot, and there is general malcontent, they would blame anything but capitalism for their grievances.

The state is almost sacrosanct and they will bicker back and forth about Left of Right under the current narrow band of politics they would dismiss anything more radical.

I am indeed, and would welcome the discussion continuing in the thread between you two, but I have higher priority questions which are currently taking precedence for me, as above.

The police stuff is an interesting side quest/plot. :)

You write pretty clearly when dismissing concerns about how just prison systems are, but then suddenly you have no idea what we're talking about when I point out your claim is essentially not worth responding to. And clearly you don't want to expand or support your claim, so seems you yourself agree that your claim is such vapid and empty propaganda that it's no worth responding to. — boethius

I too am interested to see if they are able to bring anything substantive to their claim.

If we then imagine many such communities developing and interacting with a devolved decision making structure that sorts out inter-community issues, even planetary issues, then the system can become quite large and sophisticated but maintain its communist nature. — boethius

To bring back an analogy this does strike me as sounding very similar to the open source idea of federation. With many jumping from X to Mastodon, apparently the Fediverse works very much how you just explained it, where there are smaller hubs of self-hosted servers with their own communities, which can also communicate with other hubs.

I am not really familiar with the meaning of the term federation; only from Star Trek but it seems something I should learn more about! I recall it being used in The Conquest of Bread in the first few pages.

it really almost happened with the fall of feudalism — boethius

That reminds me of another thought I had been having. In order to know thy enemy what is the history of capitalism and how did it avail over others that, as you mention above, could perhaps have come to be instead?

Did capitalism exist before the industrial revolution? I am getting through The Conquest of Bread and in that I recall them indicating that it did indeed spring from that. Isn't that a difference between the Communist and Libertarian views? that Communists peg it as a recent phenomena due to our stifling ourselves with concentrated power and not using the technology in the right way whereas Libertarians wish to view capitalism as an extension of the natural order of hierarchical man and evolution and thus just, as such.

seems we should make a thread dedicated specifically to police. — boethius

I don't object to it continuing in this thread? I was also finding it relevant and this thread has had its natural meanderings already and does not seem out of context.

However if you feel it would not get the attention it deserves in this one do not let me stop you making a dedicated one.

Something else I have been thinking about. If we were to engage in a thought experiment, how would social life look under an anarchist or communist society?

With the hideous conspicuous consumption and 'vip culture' of today being seen as the pinnacle of success in this capitalist society it is just a reflection of the indoctrinated hierarchies of capitalism isn't it? Also with social media, everything is a popularity contest and how people feel about themselves is determined by how much they are above others.

People's self esteem rests mostly on how much 'stuff' either material or in status they can accumulate and hoard and show off which is just a mirror image of the capitalist foundations of society.

So how might communist or anarchist social play look in comparison?

I am just starting to read the anarchist faq. Is this the same one as the one you linked earlier but with a different url?

While both anarchism's and communism's relationship with one another have been described as cordial so far and even cooperative bedfellows this writer's negative view of communism immediately jumps out at me:

The positive core of anarchism can even be seen in the anarchist critique of such flawed solutions to the social question as Marxism and right-wing "libertarianism"

Wow don't waste any more time indulging them. Hindu, is like Jordan Peterson. Wants to argue semantics because they don't have the chops to actually add anything to the discussion and endlessly try and trip up the interlocutor with what they think are 'gotchas' and claim some victory.

I made a similar comment earlier but edited out as I thought it a little strong but have no such compunctions after all that chicanery above.

Been quite clear through this thread those who want to have a discussion in earnest and those who just want to throw in their bad faith 2c.

by a campaign of random assassination — boethius

Ok so it is not totally unfounded that anarchists have at some points in time sown discord in society. The mainstream view is not a total fabrication then. :sweat: Sure it is propagandized and the good point was made Christianity, the forerunner of capitalism, has far more blood on its hands than any other.

Come to think of it, how is capitalism tied to Christianity, when it can also be said, as you noted earlier, that plenty of communistic type of offshoots also arose out of it? Or is it just incidental in either case that Christianity was the dominant force?

It's also not clear how this relates to differences in anarchism and socialism, as both, generally speaking, want shared resources over the whole of humanity. — boethius

Yes I don't know why this getting hung up on the semantics of an analogy, which is, as is commonly understood of the term, not the thing in itself.

I point back to the map is not the territory as discussed earlier.

However, on the topic of the two strategies, there is a strategically compatible version between the forms of anarchism and socialism / marxism you describe.

Both groups want to push on the doors of power in order to effect deep social change that despite different emphasis and other differences there can be fundamental agreement, such as effective equality in decision making, abolition / curtailing the impacts of the current system of private property, and devolution. Maybe differences in preferred policy, but agreement on the foundational goals. — boethius

I am glad the conversation has naturally come back to the comparing of the two as the communism part, queried in the OP, had fallen behind. I take responsibility for that though as I expressed increased interest in the anarchism due to my relative lack of understanding of that.

I would now be interested in looking at the nuances of communism again.

Going back to the attempts of communism that have already gone before vein, how would you explain the seeming success of small scale communes of the 60s and 70s hippy movement, as well as your various examples going further back, mostly in the religious context, comparing those to the 'famous disasters' of china and russia et al that capitalist detractors are always so quick to jump to as being the only logical conclusion of communism.

I have seen it claimed many times that those hippy communes were 'based on communist values' but I am not sure how except general shared responsibility of labour and everyday concerns. Isn't that just how smallish units would work anyway, like a family? What makes them specifically 'communist inspired'?

Why did those small sects seem to putter along without much incident while the big state wide endeavours leave huge blots on human history? Is it just a matter of scale or other factors? I would like to explore this, as to why the big attempts have had, invariably, to my knowledge, big failures and what led that to happen? How to refute the claim that 'communism doesn't work just look at these examples'?

How could it work on a large nation/world scale, and what would be different if attempted again on that level to avoid the mistakes of the past?