You're going to have to expand on this cats / bees hypotheses.

This is a super good talk of the cop problem in contemporary times:



Of particular interest is not only what's criminalized (such as completely normal social activity such as smoking weed and eating magic mushrooms that's been going on since prehistoric times and actual communities don't have a problem with so creating a justification for omnipresent policing) but also what's not criminalized such as wage theft. You steal 100 dollars from your employer: straight to jail. Employer steal thousands of dollars from employees: zero consequence, likely never ever have to pay anything.

Now, an apologist for the system with some technical understanding will explain the difference between criminal issues and civil issues (and unpaid debts is a civil issue), however, nearly all wage theft also involves fraud and extortion, namely claiming there is nothing owed and various forms of coercion to dissuade from seeking what's owed, which are criminal issues and are simply ignored by the system.

Why? Because police act on behalf of the interests of the state and the state represents the interests of the upper class which are employers. Police are simply mafia goons of the biggest mafia. You may say police also sometimes do good things too ... but so too mafia goons.

Another important topic is the trauma the system inflicts on wide segments of the lower class. Trauma that directly harms individuals and communities making them less effective political actors as well as dissuades any political actions for fear of police inflicted trauma.

An example brought up the the "Copaganda" author is a guy he met in jail who was there due to not being able to pay 100 dollars and while he's there his beloved dog dies due to no one being able to feed it. This sort of trauma is absolutely what cops, wardens, prosecutors, judges and prison guards love to inflict (does that mean they're all bad people who are going to burn in hell? A topic for the theology section, but I'm going with yes), and is completely natural to the system, but would be incredibly rare in a community based justice system (or even if there was some sort of community structure that cared for community members so as to mitigate harms from the state). If a community was dealing with someone who really did owe 100 dollars ... would anyone with any actual social bonds to the person be in favour of letting his dog die of starvation while they dealt with the issue? Very unlikely, and if it did happen most everyone else would just view that as animal abuse of knowing letting an animal starve to death. However, police, prosecutors, wardens, guards and judges can have in our system the exact same state of knowledge and do the exact same crime of animal abuse, but most people in our society will still lick their boots. Does that make people therefore mostly pathetic and have no worth whatsoever, that they could be thrown into the abyss tomorrow and existence would be none the less for it; don't know, going with yes.

Does that mean that the watchmen style of dispute settlement, being community driven, was more along the anarchist model? — unimportant

Exactly, and it also highlights that basic community security is not even the same category as the investigation of crime, it's very much two different things.

Everyone who is able in a community could volunteer to guard and provide security and general assistance, break up bar fights etc. People in the community can also provide much better assistance due to knowing people and community bonds and so on. And where there is simply no resources for police that's what happens! Bunch of citizens get deputized.

Of course doesn't mean some specialists aren't still required such as firemen and paramedics, but the watchmen model is A. super cheap as people volunteer time B. more effective because people have community bonds that are relevant to emergency / security assistance C. have interest in whatever they are guarding (people, animal, property etc. in a healthy community where everyone has a stake) and D. whatever problems arise in such a system it is by definition focused on the interests of the community due to simply being made of members of the community and cannot possibly be carried out in the interests of a distant power.

Why people correctly understood when external police started to show up that this was the same as an occupying army (it's just the soldiers of some lord or state far away guarding their interests in your community).

As for criminal investigation, that is actually another category of activity and of course in that context often does make sense for someone external to the community to come and investigate. However, in local systems of justice before escalating to an external investigation (of course outside things like murder) communities left to their own devices naturally first try to find consensus solutions. "The elders talk" sort of process that results in proposals that all parties the conflict may accept.

As disputes often are a longer term process of bad blood essentially that then culminates in some crisis, and in most cases there is some reconciliation process capable of healing the community rift.

Which brings up the necessity in the police model of criminalizing normal activity that communities generally have zero problem with, like smoking weed. There needs to be justification for constant police presence to constantly surveil and intimidate local populations, so normal things are always criminalized in order to then justify the whole system. When this system was put in place in order to control and suppress industrial workers, simply not having a job was criminalized.

All that being said, there is a faction of anarchism that I put in the "speculative anarchism" category which is a debate of what would happen if there was real anarchism, and this faction argues crime disappear completely.

I don't think many serious thinkers entertain the idea today, but when this movement started in Europe there was only one governing model of feudalism people were familiar with so there really wasn't any experience (from anthropology or archeology or then making new systems) on which to judge "what would happen" questions.

However, most, if not all, anarchists today would argue that with a healthy system in which people have effective equal power (or close to it) then crime would be much, much, much less. And in the places in the world that have followed many of Emma Goldman's recommendations (such as in the Nordics where I live) crime is significantly reduced. In particular, what has the greatest impact, is rehabilitation based sentencing where people can work (even go to work outside the prison), prisons are coed as to be more socially normal, and significant effort is placed into stopping the cycle of crime where prisons produce more and more hardened criminals and networks.

A lot of Emma Goldman's writing are available for free at the gutenberg.org

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2162

Is a link to "Anarchism and Other Essays".

An example of a choice quote mentioned:

If, then, the States can be instrumental in robbing their helpless victims of such tremendous profits, is it not high time for organized labor to stop its idle howl, and to insist on decent remuneration for the convict, even as labor organizations claim for themselves? In that way workingmen would kill the germ which makes of the prisoner an enemy to the interests of labor. I have said elsewhere that thousands of convicts, incompetent and without a trade, without means of subsistence, are yearly turned back into the social fold. These men and women must live, for even an ex-convict has needs. Prison life has made them anti-social beings, and the rigidly closed doors that meet them on their release are not likely to decrease their bitterness. The inevitable result is that they form a favorable nucleus out of which scabs, blacklegs, detectives, and policemen are drawn, only too willing to do the master's bidding. Thus organized labor, by its foolish opposition to work in prison, defeats its own ends. It helps to create poisonous fumes that stifle every attempt for economic betterment. If the workingman wants to avoid these effects, he should INSIST on the right of the convict to work, he should meet him as a brother, take him into his organization, and WITH HIS AID TURN AGAINST THE SYSTEM WHICH GRINDS THEM BOTH. — Anarchism and Other Essays

Of course the main evil of police is the whole justice system of essentially disappearing citizens from the community and imprisoning them without possibility of work, generally in a process without any effective rights for the poor.

Also an example of one historic difference between socialism and anarchism is that unions, of a more socialist bent, were against paid convict labour, more or less out of prejudice, even though convicts then generally work for free anyways, which is an even worse source of competition.

But Emma Goldman's main concern (other than the injustice and brutality of the system) is how can society possibly expect convicts to have a law abiding life after prison if they can't work and save up some money.

Anarchist ideas that eventually get implemented in placed like Scandinavia.

Also this issue of police is a good example of Anarchism being more of a framework covering a lot more moral and political issues than socialism, which is more focused on the ownership of the means of production. Socialists would argue that's because that's what's most important and therefore should be essentially the only focus. At least in the 19th century; today it's more a difference in style and connotation; a self described anarchist could easily have far more in common with a self-described socialist or Marxist then fellow self-described anarchists, and likewise for the socialists.

Excellent find. I too have been going through anarchist literature to find some choice citations for the conversation.

I am not sure I am buying their premise police only came about at the time of colonialism? — unimportant

Police as we know it today is not an extension of feudal systems of justice. Why you rarely see "police" in anything to do with the medieval period (history, movies, fantasy, literature, whatever) but instead protagonists would interact with people like "the watchmen".

Before police, communities ensured their own basic security shared among community members, such as regular and changing watchmen duty.

Likewise, your medieval fantasy protagonists may also interact with "inspectors" or "detective" or "investigators" of some kind in a medieval setting, which is another system completely distinct from the watchmen to investigate crime.

Investigators of crime were also often also not similar to police but a position of some wise distinction. For example, Isaac Newton was asked to investigate a counterfeiting conspiracy.

The church (priests often being the only people who could read until the next church) also did a lot of investigating.

Nearly all crime in society was community crime and would be resolved at the community level, often by some feat of strength. A crime would need to be against some Lord or church in someway or then particularly serious to be resolved outside the community. Keep in mind people dueling to the death was often a dispute resolution mechanism during most of this time which requires no investigation at all.

The most common form of justice process was simply taking one's case to the local chief or lord who would hear out whatever anyone had to say and decide the issue.

Point is there is a complex system of justice (with certainly a lot to criticize) but for the vast majority of people and the vast majority of both security needs and dealing with some sort of offence it was community based involving members of the community and in the interests of the community.

Police is an entirely different system of justice than what existed in feudal times and emerges out of colonialization as an occupation army needing to pacify the local population. Police are not members of the community with duties to and interest in the community but a garrison force imposed on the local population to serve the interests of a distant power.

In this colonial setting of dealing with insurgencies or simply forcing cultural changes on local populations that are not easy, a whole host of methods needed to be developed.

The foundation of this system is that the police officer is not a member of the community and has no meaningful community ties and has no reason to form sympathies with the community they are policing. The overall objective of an occupation force is to suppress any sort of mass uprising, hence "justice" is mostly arbitrary and severe and entirely concerned with the protection of the occupying states "property" (such as whatever they are pillaging and looting) and not the health of the community.

Now, this system then spreads in Europe through a series of stages, including Napoleon's conquest and spreading "the code" that was a state power based substitute to "liberty, equality, fraternity" of the revolution that Napoleon was protecting by being an emperor.

The justification that police are not members of the community and imposed by the state and working for the centre of power (i.e. the same relation between colonized people and an occupying army) is that justice is therefore "impartial" and "blind". Of course, it's not impartial but works for the central state and represents the interests of the central state.

Methods that are natural in occupation (that occupation soldiers are not members of the community) were discovered could be simulated, such as just sending police from one part of a country to another part where they have no community ties.

Another critical part of pacification of a population is disarming ordinary citizens and therefore the use of arms becoming a specialized occupation on behalf of the state. The state becomes the paternal figure and citizens essentially children who need to be supervised by police.

So that is the short version.

Of course, you can have community based and involved security and justice systems. Since police don't do a good job (and are specifically selected for their lower-than-average IQ so as not to be able to think for themselves and follow orders) such systems natural arise in any case.

Was just reading Emma Goldman's essay on the police and prison system and will be positing some citations shortly.

Well I see what people mean about users deleting all their posts.

I finally had time to respond to the Deleted User concerned.

However, to give an update on the text, thanks to the help of @unenlightened, we've educated the text and have a new and improved version.

Now available:

https://open.substack.com/pub/eerik/p/the-cromulomicon-the-book-of-croms?r=33um1b&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false

If you read (or didn't read but would need to reassured to do so) and bothered by the many clear writing errors of one form or another, many have now been resolved.

Feel free to private message me if you want to help with additional improvements.

I have yet to credit @unenlightened on the new text, but only because he didn't explicitly tell me to do so and how, so I've just mentioned help from thephilosophyforum generally.

A few points of stylistic discussion with Unenlightened perhaps mentioning here.

Everything could be written incredibly simply, that's true and I would not say a bad exercise to do, why not. However, my view is that some philosophical texts should also be challenging and training for the mind. Just like all rock climbing routes could easily be made easy, even super easy and doable for non-rock climbers or not even involve rock climbing such as installing stairs, but that obviously may defeat the purpose.

So there's that. Another cause of difficulty of reading is simply that my first focus is being confident myself the argument is good and not concerned with writing quality at all, and this may require lots or rewrites and mashing things together until I am satisfied I have resolved the issue to my satisfaction.

The whole text took started 20 years ago, intended as a more fundamental philosophy as a foundation for this text: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Kx__NDMNlTFzfMCtSdv3qjHHnnSPVvta/view?usp=share_link

Proposition from the original attempt, An Ontological Expedition, were even referenced in the above text.

However, in trying to complete An Ontological Expedition I kept on getting stuck, mainly on why the search for truth would be compatible with prioritizing humanity, and all life's, welfare; as on trivial examination doing anything will reveal the truth of the consequences of so doing.

One must continue to exist to search for truth ... presumably, for even there dying would reveal the truth of what happens after death. Anyways, not easy questions at least for me, took a whole 12 years to get a rough draft of what I found acceptable resolutions, then titled "Maybe the Truth" and then another 8 years to get to this point of the Cromulomicon, Book 1.

Point is for stylistic review purposes, the text has gone through many transformations over two decades creating problems difficult and time consuming to resolve.

I didn’t say it was a thought-out political act. I said some people (for whatever reason) might want to erase their presence somewhere. I presented one such example I did not say that this is what happened, just that it was a possible explanation. — Tom Storm

True, political motivation is not required; things seemed in some way related to Trump, hence my impression.

Definitely you are correct there could be many good personal reasons we can't know about to erase an account. We cannot know for certain.

Finland? BWAHAHA oh mate. No offense. I know many good Fins. Alright just these two guys. But really? Free health care? Free everything? — Outlander

Exactly why the situation is so surprising to me. But you will be able to make your own opinion as to the happenings. May take me a day or two but I will @ you so that you get notified. Would be off topic to continue here

But yes, system is good on paper and pretty good in the real world, but of course all systems have failings.

Hmm — frank

I will @ you too, so you will not miss it. It is truly an extraordinary tale that I not expect.

But people are different, right? You don’t understand the move because you wouldn’t do this. — Tom Storm

It's true that it could be a legitimate well thought out political act, so please elaborate if there are good reasons for the move; that you know first hand or then can speculate.

↪boethius Exactly.

The solution is to not post for a period of time and have a break from the Internet or the forum. According to the explanation of events by ↪Jamal , he started to self-erase. I believe he did it in a state of anger, and his emotions were out of control. Deleting the posts is an extreme option, indeed. Imagine everything you posted for years vanishing like the smoke in the air. — javi2541997

I do hope the issue can be resolved and the posts brought back.

Please do. But! Try the Lounge. — Outlander

I pretty much only hang in the lounge these days :) as the hot political topics are placed there for safe keeping. Which is fine, I do appreciate them being somewhere.

It's complicated/concerning, in the country I'm from "police harassment" means people who are sworn members of a municipal police force committing civil rights abuses, not what one might expect from the context of your story (you were harassing members of a police department). — Outlander

Also not expected here in Finland, but once encountering corruption everyone now tells me it's super usual and high level in Finland, old boys network etc. Unfortunately no one sent me that memo before. I was doing business in Finland precisely to avoid dealing with corruption.

Mystery member posted a new discussion that consisted of a book title, a link to the book, and basically nothing else except for some words to the effect of "here is a book" (not even anything concerning the book's content). I deleted it for low quality and neglected to tell mystery member why I did so. Mystery member began self-erasing, and the rest is history. — Jamal

That does seem unfortunate, but also extremely usual measures which are usually remedied by enquiry about the deletion etc., that would be hard to predict a strong reaction in this case.

Thanks for the clarification.

That's actually the most interesting thing I've read here in a long time. — Outlander

I will make a post about it.

Honestly when I realized I was being "One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nested" my thoughts were "thank God for high school, I am prepared for this scenario."

After seeing a total of 7 doctors, 6 of them psychiatrists, in 2 hospitals over 5 days, I was not diagnosed with anything and free to go.

However, I think this tried and tested technique to deal with trouble makers will not be an isolated incident and it behooves anyone in the trouble making business to learn from my experience (what got me there and how I got out).

Anyway, he made a post about Trump and I made a reply along the lines of "that's the kind of person people relate to, as the average person's nature is low-brow, impulsive, and is basically the lowest common denominator" — Outlander

Agreed, wise, measured, fact based, if not common sense.

ike I couldn't care less about the topic I just felt that was a fact that adequately answered the question and he completely ignored my post and just called me a "Trump worshiper" — Outlander

That seems an unfortunate reaction, though the high emotions during this time is understandable. I've been seeing children killed nearly every day for almost 2 years. I find it sometimes difficult to function and contribute what I can to it stopping (such as messing with police when opportunity presents itself).

So in my opinion, the individual in question is perhaps a bit sensitive or otherwise on a hair-trigger on certain if not many topics. I wouldn't take it personally, I suppose. — Outlander

Seems accurate.

These are trying times where world views and identities are being challenged from multiple directions.

Oh now you care. After he's gone. Yeah. How typical of you — Outlander

I was not aware of any issues. I was arrested a few weeks ago, then held in a psychiatric facility on suspicion of "illusions of police harassment" and held for observation for psychosis, so have my own stuff to deal with.

Since my time is anyways usually limited I try to only engage on one thread at a time so as to be able to participate in good faith, answer responses to my comments, and not be all over the place (which I would honestly love to do, but if I can't actually commit to a conversation and get into it, it's not really contributing to the debate).

However, I do very much care about all members of our community and their wellbeing. However, I err on the side that we're all here to argue about stuff, and that's what people expect from me if I disagree as I expect it from them if they disagree with me (by err, I mean assume people here can deal with encountering opposing points of view).

For my part, I'm here to argue, but I do very much appreciate all voices and perspectives on the forum.

As far as I know this is the only place on the entire internet you can really interact with people in total and complete opposition, which is an incredibly precious resource for the critical thinking process and understanding society as a whole (to increase, rather than decrease, compassion for all members of our wider community of humanity).

I even very much appreciated most, if not all, the posters that I've interacted with and were banned. Though I do see the justification for the bannings, and it was due to actions outside my interactions with them, such as spamming, harassing others and the like, people refusing to argue in good faith is a fact of life we need to learn how to politically deal with, so their periodic presence is valuable insight into breaking what may otherwise be an intellectual bubble that hides from rather than engages with the wider society.

Do you , , have any insight into why they chose to leave?

Or then anyone else for that matter?

Does seem pretty extreme when there's the option to just not post for a period of time, do other things.

Erasing themselves from the forum likewise pretty extreme choice.

So does seem concerning.

The following is a discussion between a self described anarchist and a sociology professor who explains super well where we're at global police state wise (why I put so much effort into my own personal battle with police helping to launder money in Finland).



you'll find in this discussion a lot of socialist concepts with their academic analogues.

Really good explanation of how identity politics and wokism are a tool of domination to divide people, as well as how the profession of sociology is made to contribute in that you can get funding to show white male nurses are paid 80 cents more than black female nurses (hundreds of thousands if not millions to find that out) but you could never get a single dollar to study how 14.50 an hour and 15.30 an hour make both groups super poor, are fundamentally exploitative wages that produce obscene profits for private capital in a system that under delivers health care outcomes even for those that can afford it, and that both groups of nurses are still far more aligned in demanding higher wages for all nurses than fighting against each other for "equality" (which the male nurses don't work for themselves and don't set the wages and there may turn out to be perfectly good reasons they get higher wage on average anyways).

So just one part, but overall super clear description of the current situation and what can be done about it.

Yes but do you suggest becoming a hermit like a Buddhist monk living in a cave? — unimportant

Although the hermit is certainly suitable for some people at some times, my point was about removing from public life was a criticism of corporate power and how identity politics, of the perverse kind we're discussing, is used to discipline corporate workers. You don't know what the next corporate backed rage mob is going to be about and what sentence you said 20 years ago is going to get you fired, so best to say nothing in public at all.

Arbitrary unpredictable discipline is the best kind of discipline in an oppressive system as it on the one hand allows targeting anyone at anytime (if mere accusations of "man bad" gets a man fired and ruins his life, it is super easy to either coax such accusations out of people by making it understood there will be huge rewards and virtue showers if they re-remember entirely legal events as "I felt uncomfortable") along with straight-up fraud (but mostly once the train gets going there's plenty of legitimately opportunistic, cluster-B or otherwise deranged people that are going to want their 15 minutes of fame, so if there's no consequences to throwing down accusations, and only benefits, plenty of people are going to line up to do that).

So, the system of corporate identity politics allows getting rid of anyone who is of genuine threat to oneself or a corrupt system in general (not only gets rid of them but ruins their reputation), while also disciplining everyone else in the corporate system to just not participate in public life in the slightest, and so act in every way like perfectly bland automatons in complete and unquestioning servitude of corporate power.

That is why I was asking about seeking out other 'real' anarchists but things do not look hopeful on that front. — unimportant

In my original posts, I understood your question to be comparing Anarchism to Marxism historically, so my first focus was on the Soviet Union, as it's obviously relevant historically and starting with the most famous examples avoids the "no true Scotsman" fallacy; as a mature mind can handle what is or has been popular is not necessarily true.

However, for contemporary times, the Soviet Union is gone, and Marxist / Socialism has reemerged as the the main label opposing Neo-liberalism; mainly because MAGA / Republican partisans are going to call anything they don't like socialism and Marxism anyways, so these brands are adopted not really for philosophical reasons but a "flip the script" strategy. In a "perfectly rational world", if my political philosophy differed by even one single word to yours, the solution is just to call mine political philosophy 3387239753808 and yours political philosophy 3387239753809; then things are perfectly clear.

But we do not life in such a perfectly rational world, so there is always multiple levels to discourse.

One level is to try together to reach a better understanding of reality that is independent of the words used to describe it, in which we're as comfortable with any label over any other label for anything, and if we want to recast all variations of all political philosophies into a long numbered list then we would be perfectly comfortable in doing so (and perhaps making such a dictionary, though of course not complete, would be a useful exercise to do).

Another level has nothing to do with understanding and is a battle over what words generally mean and their connotations. If I can transform the words you tend to use to express yourself into something else I will frustrate all your interactions with society and sow disarray among your allies and more importantly would-be-allies if they had a clue what you were talking about. If I can rebrand something that has lost favour, such as war, as something else, such as defence, and doing so changes people's emotional relationship to exact same war methodology entirely, then that's what I'm going to do if I love war and want to continue the usual practice.

In short, there is a struggler for material changes in the real world, but this is mediated and often even effectuated by a struggle over the symbolic representation of the real world (which is often more fantasy than anything else).

All this to say, on one level it doesn't matter who's calling themselves what, and what you call yourself, but who's doing what and how to enter into collaboration with people striving for the same objectives.

On another level, there is no way to avoid everything you say also participating in an endless battle over symbols and prestige and deference.

Therefore, there are many consequences to things and it is the task of the elite intellectual anarchist, or whatever name they choose to go by, to parse them all and integrate over all these possible outcomes to arrive at some optimum course towards the liberation of humanity. For with enough understanding one realizes one is truly free because one has always been truly free and the choice is presented whether to share or whether to steal more of the freedom of others.

One might end up a 20 year anarchist posting rambling megaposts on an obscure philosophy forum. I jest. :) — unimportant

It's fair point, but these posts are only one part of my anarchist activities. It's also not necessary, and usually counter productive, to put on an anarchist activity the label of anarchism. In nearly all situations it's not such a useful thing to do. Do the thing and let people make up their mind about it. For example, the likely only difference between one person volunteering to feed the homeless and another person volunteering to feed the homeless and tattooing an anarchist symbol on his or her forehead, is that one person is an idiot and the other is not but hopefully the hungry are still fed either way.

Reason I refer to anarchism here is because it points to authors I feel are worth reading.

But my main anarchist task has been the development of open source solar thermal devices that can be build locally. Also, exposing international blood diamond money laundering for Isabel Dos Santos, daughter of the ex-dictator of Angola, as well as fucking with da PoliCe, as seen in this hilarious video: https://youtube.com/shorts/xb_KNzv_U20?feature=share

Why cops in Finland (and European Public Prosecutors Office, the EPPO) are helping to coverup all this obvious evidence of money laundering from Africa to the EU:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1SXU6VkygIWM14S4O-IQQUhlz41qYBjFH?usp=sharing

And harass me instead, instead of doing something even half-way competent even for totally corrupt people (aka. the limited hang out and clean up the situation) is unclear. It seems cops and prosecutors and judges in Europe have become so unaccountable they are not even accountable to do corruption well in their corrupt system. But people tolerate it because people lick boot, so it is what it is.

However, definitely the most important anarchist thing I do is the solar thermal, and since you've mentioned interest in Open Source software the most anarchist thing that can happen at this juncture in the conversation is that you take this software:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/16eIpgNP7vvBcm_P6nfFzywqjcHuTV9qD?usp=sharing

Make it work and understand what it does.

A top level view of what the software does is contained in this patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2015004330A1/fi

And then describes a bunch more that was done closed source to build the automated CNC methods, which is still nice to have but the real revolution is building with the hand methods. Software isn't strictly necessary to build by hand but is incredibly useful to accomplish the following things:

A. Software simulation allows to get some idea of how much power will actually be delivered by the device and at what times. A solar device that performs well at high noon in summer may not perform well at literally every other time. So it's way better to actually test out a design in simulation against a real use case, than to figure it out trial and error.

B. Even if the technology is built by hand, a jig can be used to set or drill the correct angles for each individual reflector, which is cheaper (as allows articulated joints required for manual calibration to be eliminated) and more pleasant to work in the shade than calibrating everything by hand in the blazing sun.

Why the software is so old is because all this was published along with step by step guides and even videos, like this one: https://youtu.be/CXJgAmft2jI

And yet super few people were copying the technology at the time. Eventually I concluded that was because no one had really proven the technology commercially successful to drive demand and the arguments of why this kind of technology is critical to the future of humanity did not interest enough people for that to matter. So I decided the quickest path to development was just prove the business case myself, create the demand.

I made sure all the previous open source stuff was findable / reconstructable and also described right in the patent what had been open sourced, assuming that once some commercial success had been demonstrated people would then start copying in open source.

But that never happened because it's slightly too complicated to do.

Thanks to the money laundering and being fired as CEO and the government backing off harassing me for a while due to failing to One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nesting me, as shown in this audio: https://youtu.be/4xdVpbGHdds

I finally had time to find the open source software in my own archive.

It may seem like such a small thing, but history demonstrates again and again what a small group of people with the right ideas can accomplish.

Furthermore, if one considers the entire history of humanity, past and future, what people will be saying about this time in a hundred thousand years or more, as is the anarchist way to do, the most important thing happening right now is the transition to local solar energy to power exosomatic energy processes, in both harmony with nature as well as placing the means of production, which is exosomatic energy for the most part, in the hands of the labourer.

It might not have to be a case of finding those who have fully adopted the True Way but those open minded enough to be persuaded to do so. — unimportant

Ideally I would suggest you find both, but it may not matter much what they call themselves.

What is best to do right now is a far more important question than what is best to call what is best to do right now. People who fight over the latter is usually inspired by not doing the former.

The problem is they get hijacked like other noble causes so that it is no longer about x minority getting on equal footing but instead how much attention can I get using this cause so I can look good/virtuous. — unimportant

I didn't see this, but we are clearly in agreement already on the co-opting.

Also notable, identity politics is nearly 100% corporate power.

Forming an outrage group, getting someone fired is the fuel of identity politics. Obviously no due-process, not even "platforming" the accused to make their own defence can be tolerated.

This whole dynamic is 100% dependent on corporate power. If corporations didn't fire people (aka. sacrifice to the moloch of symbolic catharsis) then no one would much care about these outrage groups, and they would just face the tiniest bit of litigation and basically go away.

How it is framed in the minds of identity politics warriors is that they have power over the corporations, but that is as far from the truth as one can possibly get. It is corporate power that throws fresh meat to their dogs either because it creates a lot of noise and so provides free advertisement, virtue signals to and more importantly disciplines their employees to not step out of line the tiniest bit (really best remove oneself from public life altogether) as well as serving this broader oligarch strategy of dividing the people to keep them fighting amongst themselves for scraps.

Identity politics, for the most part, is simply corporate politics and corporate advertising. It's not even hidden in anyway; plenty of corporate media material out there explaining how political identity consumers are the most loyal and profitable consumers.

S'all good. I could have been less snarky and more friendly. But no need to apologize for expressing peevishness; we understand one another better through it. — Moliere

All is well.

That's a good point. A fellow worker noted to me the importance of the IWW could be seen by its continual involvement in new issues that then became normal. That it wasn't the number of shops organized or membership numbers but the overall effect and continual vigilance at being at the front of positive social change that made it important. — Moliere

Yes indeed, propaganda of the deed can be big and small actions.

At the same time, all this has failed to prevent or even mitigate a genocide or the destruction of the natural world, so all of the various Western humanist-ecological movements in the broadest sense, including everyone with the same "make the world a better place" general goals, and all the strategies have clearly failed (perhaps not failed in a way that things are even worse now, but clearly failed to reach the objectives as such).

Hence the attraction to the elitist intellectual anarchist school mentioned above in that it takes a perspective of the entire history, past and future, of humanity and moral agents generally speaking.

So in dark times this school of anarchy can content itself with being keepers of the flame of defiance.

At the same time, politics is not constrained to the West and I have lots of hope, and I think good reasons for hope, of what is possible in regions outside the West not currently benefiting from the current system. In this Global South movement I am more a student than a teacher, but do feel there are nevertheless important contributions to make even from the Imperial core, such as developing local solar thermal technologies, and pointing out the hypocrisy of not only my government but fellow citizens; that the intellectual merit of nearly all Westerners, from the lowliest bar keep to the loftiest corporate or university board, is absolute hypocritical trash and can simply be dismissed; that intellectualism in the West is more a mental disease than something to take seriously.

I was just looking up local anarchist forums and the front page of the first one I click is full of trans and queer stuff. Certainly nothing, apart from having anachist in the name, would indicate it had anything to do with the kinds of topics which have been discussed in this thread. — unimportant

In the same way you may walk into a Mormon temple and fail to identify the teachings of Christ, or fail to see it in a popes golden hat for that matter, or be perplexed about the fiscal conservatism at work in a trillion dollar deficit spending for the military, or be unable to locate liberal democracy ideals in the financing and arming of a genocide and so on.

In short, hypocrisy is very much the norm and not the exception.

Of course I don't know these anarchists you're talking about, but what I can say about the anarchism I've been talking about is that it's essentially an elitist intellectual movement which doesn't seek to found or manage organizations under the name of anarchism. By elitist I mean wealthy enough to be able to read at least a thousand books that together at least scratches the surface of the accumulated recorded history, wisdom and knowledge of humanity as a whole. From such a perspective ethics plays out intergenerationally and one's capacity to contribute is fairly limited.

There's no way to "make people better" so anarchists of my kind don't seek to make organizations to "make" more anarchists and we are disinterested in creating partisan followings. Doesn't mean anarchists don't make organizations or participate in party politics, just that it doesn't make sense to call these collective projects "anarchism". The conditions of equality of effective power in the political process is what we'd call anarchism, and that is essentially an all-or-nothing proposition.

So anarchism is the goal, and "the people" can make it at anytime if they on the whole realize they don't need to accept subjugation (the "states in people's heads" doctrine), so in the meantime it maybe, or may seem to be, one party is definitely better than another or that it's still necessary to make money and so do business. But it doesn't make much sense to call a party in a representative system "anarchist" as party leaders and elected representatives and their unelected bureaucratic colleagues have vastly more effective power than anyone else, so maybe less insane than the other guys but the result is not anarchism. Makes even less sense to call a business operating within capitalism some form of anarchism.

You can of course have individually anarchist principles and trying to make your individual contribution towards anarchism while doing business or making organizations of one form or another or even doing party politics.

The only exception being the day people are demanding the abolition of private property as we currently know it and a complete dismantling of the state and recreating governing processes along equal and devolutionary principles. When that day occurs an anarchist party would make sense to have. Of course, until then, standing up this proposal in the party system wouldn't be a bad thing, it's just so unpopular it's not financially sustainable whenever a few anarchists attempt it (and anarchists getting together and money being involved tends to result in madness, so even if the wider culture was willing to accept and even support it, it may not be possible to do); but perhaps it is not so impossible today or then in the near future.

Identity politics seems like a product of capitalism with its obsession with being recognized as x,y,z that seems far from what a radical left movement should be concerned with. Just a materialist thing. — unimportant

The mainstream calls liberals the left and simply ignores anyone more left than that.

For self-described "leftists", and especially socialists, identity politics is a divide and conquer ploy by the power structure.

I forget who made the following analogy first, but basically the image to have in mind is the domination structure is a pyramid (slaves / wage-slaves on the bottom, oligarchs on the top) and the goal of all leftists is to organize the bottom to basically get rid of the top.

Identify politics cuts the pyramid vertically, from the very top to somewhere on the bottom. Feminism (when formulated as a conflict between men's interests and women's interests) cuts the pyramid in half. This not only creates division on the bottom layer of the pyramid making collective action harder, as importantly it creates sympathy and organization vertically along the pyramid, as there are women at all layers of the pyramid; so, under this form of feminism, when a female oligarch makes even more money this is now somehow a victory for all women; the interests of most women (who are poor) is not to improve their lives by advancing their interests as poor women along with poor men, but their interests are now served (not for real of course, just in their heads) by applauding the exploits of rich women.

Same with homosexuality, there are poor gays and rich gays and federating them together makes a clique at odds, not with straight rich people but with poor straight people (even if it's the rich that made all the anti-homosexual laws in the first place, doesn't matter if they can point to homophobia sentiment among the general population). Same of course for race and any identifying feature that crosses class lines of the pyramid.

End result is classic divide and conquer strategy of pitting one's opponents against each other in order to weaken them collectively and facilitate domination.

Of course, in all these identity politics movements there is always a base of real oppression and genuine desire for justice, the trick is to extract that conversation from economic conditions. It is not the system that is making women's lives poorer and harder and less meaningful, nothing to do with capitalism at all if a women needs to work two jobs while trying to raise kids as a single mother without a wider family or community support structure while being poisoned by most if not all products needed for survival, it's men's fault!

Which is all an example of a more general theme of capitalism called "co-opting". Anything and everything that happens, whatever the original intention of who started it, will be transformed or then copied into a perverted form that serves the interests of the oligarchy. There's examples of this all of the place, such as "incel" was originally coined as a term to form a support group of sexless people, who suffered from being sexless and a forum was created for mutual support.

Which is not to say don't do anything because capitalism is going to co-opt, but rather definitely do the things but just don't be surprised and ideally be prepared to need to advance among perverse doppelgängers of whatever it is you're doing.

People who are fighting the good fight on the contrary should only identify with the party! Anyone is welcome but don't be selfish and demand attention because you are xyz. It should have no bearing on party membership. — unimportant

That's more definitely a soviet sentiment. In anarchism the idea is to identify as yourself, develop your own beliefs, and if you collaborate with others it's insofar as that's more effective than alternatives to advance your goals, ideally moving ever so slowly towards a future truly equal society.

Party politics maybe a means to such an end at different times in different parties.

Diem25.org I'd say is the place to be today to oppose capitalism in the West. I don't expect it to "win" but such a network may have unexpected results.

I guess with those kind of opinions I won't be making many friends if I aired that at local communist/anarchist groups and be shouted out as a fascist or somesuch. — unimportant

In general most people in Western society is sick and mad, and slapping a label of socialist or anarchist or marxist on your forehead doesn't change that. It's rare person that can advance party politics in a representative system without being corrupted; why anarchists tend to not associate with party politics. However, at least so far, Yanis Varoufakis seems to me the real deal. I don't agree with everything he says, unlikely he's going to "win" anytime soon, but an important example of someone not obviously corrupt and involved in party politics (which we definitely want as much as possible; tiny differences in corruption can make the difference between an extremely bad time and total destruction, when the system comes under stress).

Ok, I am on board with this. I despise the mega corporations where you not able to get in touch with a human and only get automated responses. — unimportant

Excellent.

And if you read Proudhon, Kropotkin, Emma Goldstein, Tolstoy (Kingdom of God is Within You), you'll find this school of anarchism mostly human relationship centred.

And you'll actually be surprised how non-radical anarchy is. 90% or more of "first wave" anarchist ideas were super radical at the time but common sense now, such as not beating children at school, which was though to be an impossible utopian dream, and then some anarchists made a school and demonstrated it was possible.

Another good example, Tolstoy's Kingdom of God is Within You is almost entirely dedicated to arguing for conscientious objection to forced conscription, something that is totally normal today (but at the time might get you executed, tortured, thrown in a dirty hole for life etc.); Tolstoy was just like ... "well if we just keep doing this eventually the state will give up", which is exactly what happened.

These themes also highlight the focus in anarchism of individual example. Being willing to be the first one to refuse military service on moral grounds (and so be immediately executed) is just as, if not more, important to the anarchist movement as writing a book or being involved in party politics in one way or another. Likewise being willing to be the first one to not beat your children to see what happens, put the hypotheses that they will literally go insane to the test.

What you write pretty much is what I had hoped anarchism would be. I am ready to sign up. — unimportant

Then you are warmly welcomed into the movement.

I am also a big advocate of open source technology which seems along the same lines of decentralization and power to the people. — unimportant

Yes, whole hacker / open source / anonymous movement is super "anarchy" whether people involved call themselves anarchists or not, it's all clearly part of the anarchist school to do.

It's also a great example of "other things to do" in the anarchist framework compared to most socialist schools. Party politics can stagnate (for decades if not centuries) and there simply isn't must to contribute. By all means stand up socialist and left candidates, but the culture can simply be at a point where there's steep diminishing returns to "try to push harder" with leftist parties, because people simply aren't voting for it (see the "states in people's heads" doctrine in response above to @Moliere).

So, if people aren't "getting it" the anarchist response is to lead by example. If knowledge should be open and free, the foundation of the liberation of humanity, then maybe easiest to just go and show how that's possible. A sort of "if the door of governance is bolted shut with a thousand spikes ... maybe go try and open a window, let a bit of fresh air in at least" approach to things.

Of course, there maybe times when the door can be moved and it's important to realize that "the shits happening now", so it's not one thing is better than another but rather there's lot's to do and what's best for each person to do in any given time is for them to figure out.

I myself have dedicated 20 years to the development of open source solar thermal technology in poor countries. Back in the late 90s, early 2000s, seemed pretty clear people in the West weren't simply going to vote for not-destroying-the-environment, and that attitudes would change when we start feeling the consequences, so I my conclusion was best I could do is prepare tools that would be useful in such a realization / collapse of the industrial system.

Grass roots projects that work a million times better than the 'too big to fail' bloat of most capitalist garbage. — unimportant

That is the anarchist way.

Though one thing to note is my contrast with socialism / Marxism above is centred about Soviet-Marxism because that's the most famous and historically consequential Marxist school, and in my view when historical movements are contrasted it's best to start with the most famous formulations; for example a historical contrast of Christianity with Islam makes sense in my view to start with Catholicism and Orthodoxy and Sunni and Shia; and once there's some clarity on that get into smaller groups in terms of historical numbers (of course such a historical analysis does not resolve "who's right" about different theological topics).

So, important to note that since the Soviet Union collapsed that school of marxism isn't important to day.

Contemporary Marxists and socialists are pretty close to anarcho-anarchism in theoretical outlook. The difference maybe essentially none, just labelling difference, or fairly obscure aspects of theory, or merely tactical, or historical outlook, and the difference likely as big as between Marxists and their typical fellow Marxists.

For example, a self described socialist and Marxist like Yanis Varoufakis doesn't say anything I disagree with, and I'm a member of his party Diem25 as it's "radical enough" for me.

Difference today is more one of temperament and personality. One may vibe more with self-described anarchists or socialists or Marxists or communists or unionists or eco-villagers or development-aid workers or open source education or anonymous or soup kitchen staff or conservationists or scientists of one discipline or another, UN staff and special reporters, and so on, while recognizing there's this general leftist-humanitst-ecological movement going on with a lot of people involved. Not to say no one's counter productive or a complete douche bag doing whatever they're doing, just that there's clearly a lot to do. Likewise, not to say there isn't important differences; indeed, the lack of internal debate and criticism in the movement at large in my view is the main obstacle (too much virtue signalling, not enough rolling around in the mud and hashing it out).

Where anarchism is a bit special is that anarchy is really not that good a brand, and we anarchists put a lot of effort into keeping it that way.

↪boethius Heh, yeah we don't need to simplify to that point. I think we basically agree -- I was just peeved you'd say that no one would ever say such and such, and so asked you to provide something similar that might be better. But it's no worries now, and it doesn't really matter. — Moliere

We are of one mind.

I was more peeved at the suggestions against the need to read a whole lot of books to gain any insight into this particular question. Not that I have issue with neophytes asking whatever question comes to mind, but if actually understanding pretty much anything about the subject is going to require a lot of reading I don't like to see that denigrated.

What's a better or worse simplification shouldn't be an emotional question, so apologies for my part for that.

And it could be a good simplification, could apply to different socialist factions and maybe even some people calling themselves anarchist, but the heart of anarchism in the "main cannon", such as Kropotkin (echoed by anarchists as esteemed as Bertrand Russel), is really the rejection of the whole framework of "all we need is power to do this one thing to make the world a better place".

For us, let's say "mainline anarchists" or I like to say anarcho-anarchists, "the state" is mostly in people's heads. As long as people have in their heads that it's quite normal and proper to have a king, even if they have an issue with the current king and cut his head off they just turn around and ordain the next one.

Considering the French Revolution also murdered a bunch of anarchists, and not only anarchists but the best kind of anarchists going around hilariously calling themselves the "Without Underwear" faction, anarchists became even more skeptical of state power than they were before.

So, to this end, anarcho-anarchism are also keenly interested in how these murder all the anarchist episodes transpire and so take close interest into works such as Tocqueville and The Old Regime and the Revolution.

In this book, Tocqueville basically describes what's in people's heads (what they are used to essentially) as a great river and uses the image that it may suddenly disappear underground, but the river is not gone and will simply spring up somewhere else. French people were quite accustomed to tyranny so that can't be just reconfigured over night, so you cut the kings head off but you end up with the tyranny of The Terror followed by "electing" an emperor to "protect the revolution".

Same in Russia: get rid of the Tsar, feels good for a time but then society simply coalesces around a new Tsar with a different name.

So, the conclusion is not that social change is impossible only that it takes time and it's the change in people's heads that is fundamental and determinative. If it no longer makes sense to people to be ruled by a king, then society sorts things out to get rid of monarchal rule (often without violence and even the king agrees and cooperates! ... if you let him keep his toys of course).

The anarchists role in such social movements is mostly to keep undermining the faith in authority that maintains it.

↪boethius This demonstrates the difference I was alluding to, and you've already pinpointed as a difference -- the way anarchists speak about nature differs dramatically from the way Marxists speak about nature. I'm not speaking here in terms of which is better than what, but only trying to lay out conceptual distinctions to differentiate, and do so in a manner that's user-friendly, though accurate. — Moliere

Definitely we agree here.

If we've moved past simplification to a single sentence, relationship to nature is probably the biggest cultural, motivational and effective policy difference between socialist / Marxists and anarchists.

There is quite obviously a respect, if not outright fetish, for both industrialism and industrial workers in socialism / Marxism, that is mostly absent in anarchism.

For Marx "the economy" is very much in the human realm of things, to the point that our very being is defined by the process of production. — Moliere

I'm definitely not saying anything different, but if we're contrasting economy and social structure, then for me the economy is the material conditions of production (including humans) and ownership in the realm of symbols and social structure.

But anarchists tend to see it in a wider sense, as embedded within an ecology, and tend to have more respect for nature than Marxists do, who are certainly part of the industrial revolution. This is because of their universal stance against hierarchies, be they socially constructed or imposed on other living creatures.

Nature is something to be exploited for human ends, in a Marxist philosophy. It's part of the Enlightenment inheritance. Further, hierarchy is a useful means to an end which the Marxist will not shun. — Moliere

We are in complete agreement here.

Can you answer the question I posed earlier, how do anarchists propose to manage things like law enforcement, healthcare and the like if there is no government or is there government just only local government so it would be just all grass roots, cottage industry type of companies locally for all human public services? — unimportant

For anarchists (of my school, say Kropotkin school for short, under consideration here) the key question is effective power.

For example, we do not have issue with a ship needing a captain to weather hard seas, keep things in order and navigate effectively to wherever the ship is going.

If it was efficient for ships to have no captain and everything decided by spontaneous vote then that certainly would have been discovered by now.

The issue anarchists have is if the ship's captain is some sort of god, morally or judicially. If people on the ship want to elect a new captain because the current captain has lost the trust of the people of the ship to advance the ship community's interest as a whole, then they should have no qualms in doing so.

If everyone can at anytime participate equally in selecting, deselecting, instructing, reselecting, any managerial agent required to perform some task or another, then there is no effective authority figure. The authority remains equally among the community electing the manager for the performance of the task under consideration.

A system of equal authority we obviously do not have in our liberal Western democracies. We cannot recall police officers, prosecutors, judges, colonels and generals, bureaucrats and politicians, and for the most part they are not elected at all. The state is comprised of thousands of bureaucrats and agents of various kinds, and the smallest possible set is elected (with minimal, if at all, possibility of recall) in order to pacify the population under the dogma of "consent of the governed".

Anarchists of my ilk want rather to see the governing of the governed, that we each participate with equal authority to formulating what actually happens.

As for institutions of the kind you are talking about, they are imbedded in a centralized state that anarchists take issue with. There's no "anarchist way" of managing a highly centralized state. The anarchist thing to do under such political conditions is build-up grassroots and decentralized alternative modes of living and working and being. If the super centralized state was sustainable then that would be a real intellectual dilemma for anarchists, but the super centralized state is not sustainable so it, and the institutions you refer to, will eventually collapse anyways.

Of course, in a decentralized anarchist community power based system, there would be analogues to accomplish all the same tasks you mention, but mostly on the smaller scale, whether the label institution is retained or not, the answer to who has the authority is always people in genuine equality and deliberation. For example, hopefully we can still afford to have medical doctors in such a decentralized world and communities see to ensure that happens in one way or another and make the resources available to maintain the health of the community. And similarly for anything of genuine utility.

As for the retort that what if people are foolish and enact policies of self-harm, the answer is that they will need then to learn from their mistakes just as humanity as a whole is learning from our mistake of having created the state in the first place.

One of them here being even an understanding of what constitutes "the economy", since it seems you're in favor of some kind of anarcho-primitivism, given your comment that hunger will teach people to garden — Moliere

If the system is unsustainable, as our most erudite scientists tell us, then the system will fail at some point in the future.

If the sustainable alternative is the vast majority of food coming from local gardening, then that will definitely for sure happen if the current agricultural system, that we are assured is unsustainable by a long list of experts, crashes or then more likely discombobulates in some longer more drawn out process of collapse.

Of course, the third option (the first mentioned) is people starting to garden now. That's the preferred anarchist option of course. If that doesn't happen, then the remaining options are make the state force people to garden or then people gardening by necessity, if indeed it is so essential to the future of humanity.

However, although I have much sympathy for my genuinely primitivist anarchist comrades, I do not view that as practical. There's simply too many people to return to any previous economic system.

We consume today vastly more exosomatic energy than any previous time and there's simply no possible feasible way to go backwards in technical organization without culling the large majority of humanity, which I view as unethical and also simply impractical anyways. It can be entertained a democratic and ethical system of population reduction, but a necessary condition for that is that there really is no alternative and some agreed to process is preferable to war to sort it out (not that some consensus is likely, but presumably worthwhile to discuss before the wars start on the off-chance agreement is reached about it).

Long story short, there is a technically viable sustainable alternative to culling humanity and returning to a primitive organization voluntarily, which is solar thermal energy. It's easy to see why in that most energy required for production (which even in a decentralized system we'll still need things like hammers and nails) is thermal energy, and trees and biomass are incredibly inefficient at providing thermal energy (why deforestation has been a problem ever since we discovered mining and metal working), on the order of 0.1% to 1% efficient at transforming the original solar energy into usable heat energy. Solar thermal energy devices are up to 50% efficient and additionally their use does not send local nutrients into the air far away.

Upon such a decentralized and sustainable system, the sophisticated technologies we take for granted today could still be produced, either in local laboratories at a smaller scale, or then in some central locations somewhere on the planet. In technical terms, maybe a decentralized system could not sustain 5 nanometer processing architecture but could work out 32 or 90 nanometer architecture. So where there would be a difference in technological access, the question becomes do we really need 5 nanometer architecture if the destruction of the entire planet is necessary to achieve that?

So perhaps a few things would be downgraded, that's possible, but keep in mind also that there would be no planned obsolescence in such a sustainable system, so over time such a technical advantage (of building things to last) may accumulate far more technical sophistication than what is presently available.

↪boethius OK, this demonstrates a good theoretical difference -- something for philosophy. — Moliere

We are on the same team, wanting to know more about things.

I'm gathering that you're speaking from the anarchists perspective in this. In which case "the economic system" does not mean the same as it does in Marx -- whose goals are also clear in a desire to change the means of production in order to change society. — Moliere

Marx aims to change the ownership of the means of production.

For Marx the development of the means of production (the technological know-how) is essentially linear, happening all the time and in some sense in the background. Which for much of human history is certainly true.

Marx is very much pro-capitalist in assuming capitalism was necessary in creating the immensely powerful technologies already of the 19th century. In seeing the poverty and misery that the Industrial Revolution and continued Imperialism creates, Marx's proposed solution is that the workers should own the means of production.

This is the central objective of Marx and I think safe to say Marxism in general.

In Marx's framework, who owns what is a superstructural symbolic change (words on a paper) and not the material reality of production. Keeping in mind revolution happens when the superstructural symbolic world (who's a priest, who's a king, who owns what, who can do what) becomes disjointed and incompatible with the new reality of how things are actually being produced.

For capitalism to develop further it becomes necessary to destroy the feudal system of Lords, rents and estates, and so various revolutions transform feudal institutions into ones suited for the capitalist mode of production; aka. liberal representative democracy with "independent" institutions of justice (aka. that part of the feudal system of property and contract resolution capitalism is built on-top of).

Anarchists, by and large, appreciate this analysis but tend to reject industrialism wholesale. If anarchists had our way (i.e. everyone woke up suddenly with a penchant for anarchism) the entire industrial system would be dismantled and production localized and power decentralized as much as possible.

However, the biggest difference is anarchists usually reject the framework of "social design" at the beginning. Society will be better when people are better, and that may take a long time.

There's a thing called "simplification" that we do to get the gist of an idea across. — Moliere

Sure, but the simplification shouldn't be the opposite of a true statement.

In this case, it's socialists by and large and in particular Marxists who don't seek to change the actual economic system.

Marx is super clear that he views capitalism as a good and essentially inevitable development of the productive powers of humanity. Industrialism is not a problem as such, and if you're not trying to change industrialism as such then you aren't really seeking to change the economic system.

For socialists, and particularly Marxists, the question is who owns this productive equipment, who benefits from the profits.

Anarchists, by and large, reject entirely industrialism as well as any top down social structure or economic change as likely to result in much good. Anarchists criticize socialists (especially the kind that makes things like the Soviet Union) for having the delusion of capturing the state and wielding it for good to "make people better" (USSR style socialists are Denethor II, Steward of Gondor, would use the one ring to fight the enemy that created it; Anarchists are Gandalf, knowing it cannot be used for good even by the wise, and so seeking to destroy the one ring by guiding a fellowship of misfits, and also hanging out with Radagast the Brown, exemplifying the harmony of humanity with nature).

Any good and long lasting change, economic or social (to the extent these are separate), is a bottom up development in most anarchist frameworks.

For example, most anarchists would agree that they want to see a world where a large majority of people are gardening in their own personal gardens as well as communal.

Well, what's stopping that from happening right now? Not much, not even the state is standing in the way for most people on the planet.

So, what to make of this situation? Should we create a state program to force people to garden? The anarchist answer is no, zero need: they will learn to garden when they're starving.

So marxism the revolution is economic and the rest sorts itself out and anarchism is social structure and the rest sorts itself out?
— unimportant

Yup -- that'd be the utopian version of both, but in terms of differentiating them and trying to wrap your mind around it that's a good simplification. — Moliere

Literally no Marxist or anarchist would ever say either of these idiocies.

How exactly would you go about changing economic conditions without changing the social structure (aka. political power)? How would you go about changing the social structure without being concerned with the economic implications or the economic means required to the change in the first place?

And what is "the rest" that "sorts itself out"?

Socialists, such as Marxists, are primarily concerned with the ownership of the means of production, that's pretty much their tagline, which is a social structure change leaving the economic system otherwise largely intact.

It would be far more anarchists that have issue with industrialism full stop, and would want to get rid of it.

Nevertheless, anarchists, as expressed both by myself and @Martijn, view both social structure and economic structure as mostly a consequence of what regular people believe. For example, no Anarchist likes to see people licking boot, but 99.9 % of bootlicking episodes is entirely voluntary. People by and large choose to lick boot and very much like licking boot, and changing the feet in those boots may change the beneficiaries of the boot licking but hardly anything else.

For the vast majority of anarchists, all you can do in the face of such rabid and rapacious bootlicking is simply not lick boot yourself, and go do something else; hope for people to emancipate themselves from the bootlicking.

Point being, there's no taking control of history with our superior intellect and directing the state to create a new and better citizen worthy of our ideology.

Contemporary anarchists use the word "co-creation" a lot (like really a lot) to describe this framework of simply being one among many in a process of creating the future together with few guarantees of what's actually going to happen.

At the same time, seeing the burning flesh and screams of children scrolling through my social media feeds, the Marxists do have a point or two concerning the current system worthy of serious consideration.

I second your message.

Now, if people don't want Marxist language in a discussion involving Marxism, my argument can be simplified.

There is first a christian communist movement during the Middle Ages, with all sorts of variations and re-emergences over the centuries, sometimes by clergy and sometimes lay people, often involving both.

Then there starts a Utopian movement emerging self consciously from fans of Thomas Moores Utopia, which is a satire (both of existing society and attempts to improve it) but adherents view it as a call to creativity, of sort of playful social design, which at first is all "micro". The reformation, going on at about the same time, mixes all this up a great deal resulting in things like the Pilgrims sailing across the Atlantic on the Mayflower to found the Plymouth Colony. So these religious (both catholic and protestant) and secular utopian ideas floating around and mixing in all sorts of ways, have very real consequences in history.

These early "micro level" utopians, "socially innovating" in one form or another, were at first not so interested in what internet denizens would call "macro" issues today.

"Utopia" is both simultaneously referencing a radical ambition, while at the same time a humorous self effacing dodge to avoid being executed. These early pioneers do genuinely want to practically make a better society, while at the same time be viewed as impractical and harmless day dreamers (so as to remain alive).

However, both these social innovation experiences, scope of analysis and movements grow with time to the point of challenging the existing political order (early pathfinders were quite aware the king would just chop their head off if they were too ambitious in their analysis; what literally happens to Thomas Moore for being the first, a lesson not lost on subsequent followers; so these movements grow slowly over time until the existing power can be challenged openly).

There's a series of revolutions starting with the American revolution. These revolutions are powered by utopian slogans with the hopes of practical management at least better than what existed before; democracy the core mediating principle to make things work out in practice.

Marx is born and works in this time of political change from absolute monarchies to secular liberal democracies. Nearly all the core ideas, slogans, rights, organizing principles, and so on have their roots in utopian thinkers in the previous centuries.

Of course, what emerges at the same time to this political transition is a new economic order we call capitalism.

It is clear there is a tension between liberal democracy and capitalism, as concentrated wealth undermines democratic institutions.

The anarchist movement, that has both successes and failures during all this time (including things like "radical anarchist experimentation" of proving children can learn without beating them), by and large views the problems of democracy as resolved by more democracy, and if people aren't convinced then the only thing to do is convince them harder and try to set an example of whatever it is.

The Marxist movement (which is highly debatable what Marx actually thought about it) is distrustful of liberal democracy to the point of viewing it as essentially irrelevant.

The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. — Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels

Many anarchists, liberals and social democrats (largely founded by rebranded anarchists), form the consensus that political violence is legitimate against tyrannies (such as the absolute monarchs they deposed) but is illegitimate if there's enough democracy that "the people" can obviously change things at the ballet if they wanted to (even in a process in which there is much to be criticized). A pretty reasonable argument and why political violence goes from a truly remarkable level of random assassinations of bureaucrats and blowing shit up regularly (including the suffragettes even though there is some democracy already, just not enough) to non-violent protest, where police tell you that you can protest, being the courageous maxima.

This movement culminates in the welfare state in Europe (free education, free health care, rehabilitation based justice system, labour protections, environmental protections etc. are all core anarchist, socialist, communist, liberal, utopian goals generally speaking, and so if they can be achieved piecemeal, and revolutions turn out to be super dangerous, then why not just do things piecemeal with the hard fought democrat right), and significant tensions in the Unites States due to capital managing to avoid that happening. Liberal democracy does little to tamp down on globalized Western imperialism.

Marxists, especially the kind of Marxists that found and manage the Soviet Union, are like "how about, no" and develop what is basically a Dune like science of historical management. Long story short, obviously didn't work out, while at the same time Marx's prediction of what would happen to capitalist liberal democracy seems to be proven correct (just about a century off in accuracy - not great, not terrible).

Important Marxist schools still exist, such as the entirety of China, presenting itself as socialism with Chinese characteristics. I do not know enough to say what the Chinese Marxist school is, how it differs from the Soviet conception, what exactly it's doing today managing the largest experiment in state capitalism the world has ever seen in order to produce a significant proportion of the world's satisfaction of bourgeoisie wants and desires, but would definitely be interesting if someone here did know.

All I did was mock your post for its excessive length, and implied that reading Marx instead of reading your posts is a better use of time. — Jamal

Sure, obviously, definitely reading Marx is a good starting point in a discussion that includes Marxism ... but then what's to discuss here?

As for verbosity, Marx and Marxists are verbose; it's impossible to discuss their ideas without using their language. It's one issue I have with them in that insisting on using 19th century agitation tradecraft lingo loses most people.

We haven't even gotten to Hegelian dialectic and Marx's antithesis (and dare we say synthesis) to that.

But please oblige me, how exactly do you go about comparing historical movements over many centuries, if not millennia, that include many intellectual sources and many differing schools of thought, often mutually exclusive but each insisting they are "the real one" doing many different things, sometimes allies and sometimes murdering each other ... without reading anything?

How is it a "beginners" step, to use your language, comparing Marx to Proudhon (a tiny part of the subject at hand) not having read Marx nor Proudhon, and my advise to go read them first and then perhaps start by just comparing these two, somehow doing it wrong?

You're saying having read the thinkers the OP is asking about is akin to playing hockey with an upside down stick ... or in other words the noble craft of ringette?

And in general, I just really don't get anti-book intellectualism and why you, or anyone who's read books, would foster and nurture the notion.

It's like being an anti-stick hockey player ... what ... exactly is the idea here?

A beginner won’t have the time to get through Marx if they feel obliged to read your rambling mega-posts. — Jamal

How exactly do we go about comparing Marx to Anarchism if reading any thinker in each, not to mention Marx himself, is off the table?

Obviously no one's obliged to read any of my posts.

However, anyone who wants some insight into the OP's saught after knowledge, in my opinion, would need to read Utopia, Proudhon, Kropotkin, Tolstoy, Emma Goldman, Bakunin, Lenon, Trotsky, a history of catholic mendicant (aka. communist) orders and their thinkers (as the early anarchists, socialists, self described or lambasted as "utopians", were all Christians familiar with these works as well, as well as the actual practice of monastic or friarly communal living), as well as obviously Marx, history of the American Revolution, French Revolution, Russian Revolution, and also feudalism in Europe. Ideally also with a pretty clear understanding of Ancient philosophy, medieval philosophy, renaissance and enlightenment philosophy and the general trend of the whole culture that results obviously with liberal democracies (and not socialism or communism, much less anarchism).

All that would be a bare minimum.

Otherwise, the question is basically "I don't know what this is and I don't know what that is, but please someone tell me the difference between this and that".

However, the question is still interesting either for those familiar with the material the question is about or then who plan to read that material in the future.

The short answer to questions about thinkers from people who haven't read those thinkers is of course "go read those thinkers first", but that's hardly a discussion.

↪boethius I appreciate the effort but respectfully there is too much here in one, or several, mind dump/s to be able to work with and is not accessible for me.

Looking up and unpacking all the points would take days which stymies an active back and forth debate.

We were taught in essay writing to make one point and hammer it home well. Not trying to tell you how to write just that it is my experience that is easier to digest. — unimportant

Then focus on one point if your mind and education is only able to deal with one point at a time.

Your OP question here is wanting to know the difference between two quite large historical movements, that overlap and are similar in many ways and sometimes allies and sometimes killing each other, each with a myriad of sub-factions, often mutually exclusive.

The kind of answer to this kind of question can only make sense to people who are actually familiar with the history and major works, and polemics, of the intellectual traditions addressed.

If you haven't read Marx you won't be in a position to understand what the difference between Marx and other thinkers you haven't read are. If you haven't read Utopia and aren't familiar with the pre-Marx utopian thinkers (and doers) that eventually give rise to political revolutions such as in American and France and Russia, then where Marx is situated in this intellectual and historical development isn't going to make any sense.

I realize it's popular today to perceive oneself to be an intellectual without having read anything concerning the topics at hand, but that's really not how it works.

The question is one of effective power.

Liberal democracies are constructed specifically to avoid anarchy through the principle of "consent of the governed": there's a totalitarian state built-up by kings, popes and emperors over many thousands of years, and that OK as long as people vote for the shiniest head of the hydra (aka. the president, prime minister, or what have you). Once a tiny handful (among thousands of bureaucrats) are elected it is essentially impossible to recall them, they need keep no promise, and the most critical governing institution that effectively controls society, law-enforcement and the judiciary, are kept "independent". What does independent mean? Independent from any democratic oversight whatsoever, even the paltry amount of oversight of managerial policy that does exist.

Our law-enforcement and legal system is for the most part simply a direct continuation of the feudal institutions with essentially zero democracy.

The first people to experience what we now call state power correctly identified police as a de facto hostile occupying army there to protect the interests of state power and not regular people. Of course, people had a justice system before police, which of course the merits of one such system over another can be debated, but it at least aimed to protect the interests of the people of that community and not state power in a far off capital.

So this is the sort of state power anarchists take issue with. A rebranding of the anarchist principles (or at least direction anarchist want to go in) of governance is direct participatory democracy, with immediate and easy recalls of any elected agent of the community.

Both marxism and anarchism are bestialities. Marxism is, however, a bestiality of minor imperfection. The dictatorship of the proletariat is equal to a true form of State — Ludovico Lalli

The "dictatorship of the proletariat" was a criticism of the idea of democracy by its detractors at the time; democracy being a horrid thought for aristocrats. It was common sense for some thousands of years that poor people should never be able to participate in politics as they would just vote themselves more money. Even the original and archetypical democracy in ancient Athens had a wealth check for citizenship and the Roman republic system had weighted votes.

The dictatorship of the proletariat referred to regular people being able to vote (i.e. dictate governance rather than the Lords and kings, which was the system at the time), not that socialism / communism would need a dictator, such as Stalin.

Anarchy is equal to a lie. There cannot be anarchy as also within anarchy there would be a major agency of protection, an institution playing, de facto, the role of the State. The greatest bestiality is equal to anarchy. — Ludovico Lalli

Anarchism is about equal participation in the political process, without a moral or class hierarchy.

The general goal of most anarchists, such as myself, is genuinely accountable and decentralized governance. A stateless society in the sense of not having a class of bureaucrats organized in a hierarchy of essentially totalitarian control for all intents and purposes.

The greatest bestiality is equal to anarchy. While the dictatorship of the proletariat is an extended form of State characterized by penetrability (thus by the presence of perpetual newcomers), the dominant agency of protection ruling anarchy is equal to a private-based State, an institution that would not be accountable to the people. A private form of State is the most false and dangerous. — Ludovico Lalli

You seem to be talking about US libertarians who love private property but hate taxes and government. They sometimes randomly call themselves some sort of anarchist school, but that's just ridiculous. Their patron saint is Ann Rand who is not in anyway an anarchist thinker.

As a short addendum, the post above is differentiating Marxism with Anarchism starting with Marx and ending with the collapse of the Soviet Union, as the most important "Marxist streak", as it were, primarily differentiated by this idea of understanding the laws of history in order to change history to our liking.

Now, Marx would disagree with most if not all the policies of the Soviet Union, but the basic framework as some sort of historical scientific mastery is rooted in Marx; famously saying "philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it".

The resurgence of Marxism today are generally not of the historical mastery school, but generally using Marxism as a sort of brand recognition as an alternative to Neo-liberal economics. For example, Yanis Varoufakis may reference Marx, but also clarify that not in a Stalinist way.

This difference is also one of historical period. The idea of "changing history" made a lot more sense in the 19th century. New natural-philosophy (aka. materialism, aka. science) is being discovered all the time, wondrous reports from around the world, new technology that is essentially magic to people (such as electricity and the telegraph and so on) while the Reformation and then American Revolution proved that turning the religious order on its head was possible and the democracy was possible (previously a Utopian dream), after literally a thousand years of things staying basically the same, so there was this sort of "anything can happen vibe" and if we can master steam power, and then the electron and discover where continents and species come from and so on, why couldn't we master history?

So Marx is as much the product of the erudition of the 19th century as the naivety about what was possible.

Where socialists, communists, marxists, anarchists, leftists in general, agree is that people suffering is not a necessary evil and it's wrong to exploit people through system of coercion and manipulation (such as state power) for profit.

In terms of relation to libertarianism, all European renaissance and enlightenment philosophies that maintained any relevance are libertarian. Libertarian is in opposition to the surf and vassal system of feudalism. If feudalism simply doesn't exist anymore and there basically not adherents trying to bring it back, then all philosophies, including religious philosophies, are libertarian. All Western states and all Western parties promise liberty.

Liberals (from the leftist perspective) view liberty (in the you're no longer a surf sort of way) as the only necessary value and if poverty persists that's the poor fault for not using their liberty wisely enough, whereas anyone left of centrist liberals views poverty as a social ill that can be remedied (through various degrees of redistribution of wealth).

US libertarians are not anarchists, and not even liberals, but are basically in a philosophical psychosis of believing you can have private property without state power enforcing property rights. This just doesn't make any sense from the get go, but comes from American elites existing in a sort of philosophical vacuum in need of an ideology that backs them up. Wheres European elites can position themselves in a tradition of symbolic aristocracy and go rub shoulders with actual royalty and remark to themselves that this prince's balls are hot as fuck, and therefore all is well in the political order and so do not need to go around calling themselves philosophers to satiate their anxieties.

As a self described anarchist, I certainly hope I can provide some insight into your question.

First some historical context: Socialism, communism and anarchism all predate Marx, and can be argued not really have traceable historical origin but have been points of view developed way back in pre-history, along with traditions that result in monarchy, feudalism and private ownership etc.

In other words, as soon as their were chiefs there were people who had issue with chiefs and as soon as there was private property there were people who had issue with private property (or then issue with who happened to own it).

So there's already a lot of traditions, schools of thought, movements and material on these topics by the time Marx is born.

Probably the best place to start in terms of insight into the cultural conversations is Thomas Moore's Utopia, which is one of the corner stones of the kind of conversation that socialism, communism, and anarchism represent. Thomas Moore's Utopia is both a synthesis of political critique available at the time (in 1516), somehow managing to satirize both feudal power and alternatives to it simultaneously. It's a comedy, but written to be as thought provoking as it is hilarious. It's a sort of "why not? why can't things be better" book.

Essentially omnipresent to the development of what we include in the "philosophy cannon" such as Thomas More are all sorts of Christian schools and orders, already under Catholicism, that explode into far more sects and cults and churches during the reformation. Christian communism is a constant theme of Western society since basically Christ. The difference being that the various mendicant orders of Catholicism are doing communism for religious purposes and avoiding commenting on "worldly affairs" (even if they do essentially say everyone should be christian communists like themselves, it is not taken as dangerous political philosophy by kings or philosophers).

To make a long story short there's a rich history of all sorts of people trying out new things, making "ideal farms", or founding "more perfect" religious communities in the US and New Zealand and so on, in parallel to European states taking over the entire planet, subjugation or eradicating people as they go. Then capitalism starts to develop out of feudalism and globalized imperialism and along with that discovery of political instability of this new economic-political order, into which these new Utopian ideas suddenly take hold of the public imagination and inspire revolution.

All this context is necessary as Marx is one thinker in thousands of years of development of all these sometimes competing and sometimes aligning political ideas, and then Marx himself famously says "if this is Marxism then I'm not a Marxist" so there's then further distinction between Marx himself and Marxism as a school referencing Marx as a foundational figure.

However, in terms of broad comparison, the fundamental difference between Marxism and Anarchism I think can be reasonably found in Marx's work.

What Marx attempts to do is develop a science of history. Historical materialism just means science of history; science was a more nebulous word (astrology would be an erudite science for example) and if you wanted to talk about what we call science today you used the word materialism (that causes to effects were to be found in matter).

Long story short, Marx discovers a lot of, if not actual scientific laws, then useful guide rules (and far more "law like" than what passes for sociological peer review today). His foundational insight is that the technological development of society determines (although a modern equivalent would be constrains) a society's political organization and ideas. This is obvious to us now, but it was not really obvious at the time. Anthropologists are direct descendants and users of Marx's theory, immediately informing us of some ancient tribe's organization, religion, general world view, based on the material artefacts they dig up. This is exactly what Marx is talking about. Out of this technology based analysis of historical Marx undertakes an analysis of capitalism and how it develops from and is different than feudalism.

His second main insight is that technology progresses, and so a society's political organization that was suitable for the technological situation when it started could be no longer suited due to technological improvements. When Marx talks about revolution in his works he's referring to periods where there is tension between the political organization and the new constraints of technology. Again, in anthropology this is completely obvious, for example bureaucracy developing due to the problems that farming creates on a flood plain (both to keep track of stored grains, keep track of debts paid off by the next harvest, and also keep track of who even owns what land), a problem created due to agricultural success and reaching carrying capacity (people were obviously farming before bureaucracy was invented, so having no maps or anything they could either just go out and "find a spot" or then eyeballing / moving a rock to settle disputes, was sufficient when there was plenty of extra space anyways). So bureaucracy is a Marxist revolution in Marx's theory, followed by consolidation of state power to manage this bureaucracy, and then either slave-based Empires (such as Rome) or surf based feudal systems (such as Western Europe after the collapse of Rome).

As you may imagine, there's a lot more Marx has to say about capitalism and revolution: that capitalism is both simultaneously in continuous revolution of itself (as it constantly seeks to intentionally innovate; a stark difference to most previously political orders which were by nature conservative) while also hurtling towards a revolution of political relations due to the irresolvable internal conflicts capitalism creates through the concentration of wealth and power. To be complete, Marx does not say revolution is inevitable, only that when conflicts between political order and material conditions arise, either there's a revolution that creates a new political order adapted to the material conditions or then the system collapses.

Enter Marxism. Marxism, and certainly the grain is planted by Marx in his writings, central belief is the manipulation of history through this science of history.

Why you end up with things like "avant-guard" and "accelerationism" in Marxist traditions is that it's not exactly clear how exactly a science of history can manipulate history to begin with as well as what the point is. For, one poignant question is that if the revolution is inevitable ... what exactly is there to do? And from this starting point one can as easily argue attempts to cause a revolution could as easily backfire and in fact help state power.

A debate that can go on for quite some time, but it's the whole framework of manipulating history that anarchists generally reject and the main difference with other socialist-communist schools.

What Marx does not develop is a moral theory. That's why there's so much focus on who exactly causes what profit in Marxist discourse and debate, as Marx basically just assumes the general humanist ethics floating around in the enlightenment, of which the central ethical cornerstone of reformation is the idea that the benefits are due the producer (not at all obvious idea at the time, as what was previously totally obvious is that benefits mainly go to lords, kings and priests, and normal people should suffer quite a big deal actually to make amends with god).

So where socialists, communists, Marxists, anarchists and capitalists all agree is that the benefits of economic activity should definitely not be mainly going to lords, kings and priests, but amongst themselves. But who exactly, that's another question. The Marxist-Capitalist debate arises in that they both assume that if the proceeds of some economic activity can be attributed to themself, then they should get that share of the bounty. Fairs fair.

Anarchists generally reject this entire moral framework and view life and the value of life from a much broader perspective than economic production.

The purpose of the human enterprise for anarchists is not efficient economic production, with only who gets what as to be worked out, but rather love, mutual caring, and both creative self expression and creative community expression.

Where this creates differences is that anarchists were and still are highly skeptical, if not hostile, to the Industrial Revolution and destruction of both nature and the human spirit it entails, whereas for Marxists the Industrial Revolution is generally considered an important, necessary and good step in the development of man's productive capacity. For anarchists if it does not make people more creatively engaged in their surroundings, with their fellows, with their work and nature, then it's not progress, but subservience to state power.

Due to this focus on individual and collective creativity, anarchists are more political flexible and open. What anarchists generally want politically is equal participation in the political process (so that each can equally contribute their creative spirit to the collective project) and due to this focus anarchists simply don't know what such an equal people in terms of political power would do. They may very well vote that some people can have a hundred or a thousands times more wealth than others.

To summarize, the project to control history reduces to the project to control people (cue the Soviet Union), whereas the project of equal political participation is the project of a single individual and what they think they can contribute to the world, and what other people do is outside our control.