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

Excellent subject.

Well, mostly anarchists and communists are both communists; the end goal is the same of living in equal and vibrant communities without private property. The communist parties we know will generally explain that in order to get to communism we must first go through socialism, which is the workers owning the means of production, which we aren't even "there yet" and the state must in fact manage the economy in order to compete with the imperial capitalist nations constantly trying to get a hand on their resources, which would sound paranoid if they weren't actually out to get them.

So the communist end goal, of both anarchist and communists, is actually super easy to visualize as we have practical examples.

There's both the deep past or contemporary hunter-gatherers as well as, whenever people become shipwrecked, a la Swiss Family Robinson, and it goes well, then that's all basically communism.

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

The essential characteristics are that there's no private property, and by property is meant the means of production like land and tooling and not personal items of consumables, so the management of the important things are decided by the communities involved.

To anarchists and communists, it is absolutely obvious that the private ownership of land is a terrible idea that also has no justification. Even many of the original free market liberals saw it as absolutely obvious that the land should be owned collectively and rented out to form the tax base of the government.

So it really almost happened with the fall of feudalism, and the reason why it was essentially common sense is because the lords were the government, so the idea they can just keep all the land would be the same as Trump giving himself all the US federally owned land when he leaves office.

That would be the standard answer.

However, in my view the critical thing that is missing is the source of energy. If you want a decentralized society (starting from where we are right now) a decentralized source of energy is needed, hence my focus on solar thermal energy.

I don't think much of this is true, even on a historical level. So i'll leave it.. some of the more underhanded comments seem pretty self-serving. Specifically the one you quoted, and then dismissed as not worth responding to. — AmadeusD

If my citations are self serving (i.e. support my argument in a debate), maybe cite the counterweights instead of complaining I've provided justifications for my point of view.

Ok, let's consider the quote in question:

This is an utterly bizarre way of characterizing protecting wider society from the ills of people who cannot conform to the social contract. Exile is less humane, but more on-point. Would we want that? — AmadeusD

You're really saying that all the prisoners of the world not only deserve to be in prison due to their being unable to conform to the social contract ... but, assuming this is true, the only alternative to being imprisoned in the conditions and the time frames the prisoners of the world find themselves in ... would be exile?

If you really believe all the states in all the world have a perfectly just imprisonment process and protocol, then I will present the evidence to the contrary.

If you don't actually believe it, then you are not interested in truth but simply feeling superior to your "idea of who prisoners are", and are a lost soul of little concern to me, simply digging yourself further into the darkness, the prison of your own mind, with every thought and fancy.

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

There's definitely fierce debates between anarchists and socialist / Marxists, especially historically.

However, it's important to keep the context in mind of what's agreed on, and as a general rule the closer two political philosophies are the fiercer the debate, for several reasons.

First, if we imagine political philosophies structured as a tree with a trunk of core principles and then branching out into corollary principles, models of the world and eventually individual policies or opinions on specific situations, then if the difference between two philosophies is at the trunk there's not much to debate about. The disagreement is at the core and of course that can be debated but there isn't a long list of tiny differences each one debatable at length if not indefinitely.

For the same structural reason, if you do agree on the core and many of the main branches then from your point of view it should be possible to convince the other that what you believe follows from shared principles, and vice-versa. So debates appear to be, and often are, resolvable because there's enough common ground that the other party seems to be convincible.

Then there is the practical consideration that someone with a lot of common has practical benefits to arriving at an agreement on what to do and thus forming an alliance. So there's some practical reason to debate and try to work out differences. With an open mind you're more likely also to be genuinely curious what supports these differences in opinion; such as facts you don't know about or arguments you haven't heard. Whereas if you disagree with someone at a very fundamental level, once you've debated the position once, all subsequence debates are pretty similar and you don't expect to learn anything.

Psychologically, the more similar, but still different, a point of view is the more it challenges one's identity. Encountering a point of view that is completely different and you'd never adopt because you think it's simply and obviously wrong at it's very core or then the culture is so vastly different you could never really become that anyways, is not a challenge to ones identity. However, people who are very similar in belief are a far greater psychological challenge on the remaining differences. So much so that differences on subtle theological issues can lead to large scale conflict within a religion in which people share 99.9% the same beliefs.

Indeed, it is not just marxism, socialism, anarchism and communism that share a common core, but also liberalism and capitalism.

All these theories share the common core of enlightenment humanitarian values, where the individual has value, society should exist to nurture and expand that value, individuals should not be harmed simply be benefit, much less for the pleasure of, other individuals or sacrificed for trivial reasons, people should be equal in the legal resolution of disputes (i.e. there's no aristocrats who's words weigh more or can't face accusations from commoners at all), individuals have fundamental rights society / the state can't simply dismiss for expediency, the environment should be managed sustainably, "the will of the people" should be manifest in government, society should not be controlled by priests, and so on.

In terms of "qualitative experience of society" all the major Western political philosophies have the same nominal objective of a society of free, creative and prosperous life of the individual on equal legal footing with other members of society and in a sustainable relationship with nature .

What is different is how this enlightenment humanist objective is to be achieved.

And the major criticism from one of these enlightenment schools towards another is not even that the opposing philosophy is bad per se but that if and when implemented it will and does fall victim to an entirely different political philosophy called greed. That capitalism as we know it cannot and does not deliver on its promises because the greed of the predatory rich and powerful (which is not all the rich and powerful but the non-predators do not balance out the predators) take over the system using their riches in pursuit of their insatiable lust for power wealth and power and turn it into an oligarchy. Likewise, the criticism levelled against Marxist-Leninist vanguardism (the kind that created the Soviet Union) is that such a project will create a class of predatory bureaucrats with the exact same consequence of creating a de facto oligarchy if not dictatorship.

For our purposes here, many, if not most, socialists will claim anarchists are impractical in their pursuit of the shared communist objective, both in the strategy and tactics employed to oppose the capitalist oligarchic state as well as in organizing a new social structure if and when they were to ever succeed. Anarchists usual criticism of socialism / marxism is both more incremental and more radical, simultaneously. More incremental in that there is no point of a revolution if common people have zero idea what the revolution is about, so there needs to be a hearts and minds campaign before taking over or toppling the state for that not to horribly wrong. More radical in that anarchists do not view industrial work as healthy to begin with (compared to socialists who tend to reify industrial work and the industrial worker and are solely focused on who benefits from the surplus value) and so anarchists will often strive to not only engage in opposition and criticism of the state but also develop and demonstrate completely different ways of living that are no industrial. A short version of this is that anarchists usually don't found unions because anarchists usually don't do any "work".

The disagreements were more heated and pressing in the 19th and early 20th century when revolutions were clearly possible and actually happening; so "if we were to topple or take over the state, what to do?" was clearly a far higher stakes debate in that context. Keeping in mind these revolutions were generally against absolute monarchies so the situation is very tense and violent (literature is banned).

Not to say the enlightenment humanist political philosophies are somehow equal with equally weighty criticism one to another, but that they share a common core which then gives rise to many debates.

Fascism is best understood as a rejection of this enlightenment humanist core and an attempt to revert back to a feudalism, why it emerges after the perceived disastrous attempts to implement all the various enlightenment political projects, and in particular disastrous failures liberal democracy of which the idea is to mediate the debate between different points of view and deliver incremental improvement (why liberal democracy proponents are wedded to the myth of progress).

In the night between 27 and 28 October 1922, about 30,000 Fascist blackshirts gathered in Rome to demand the resignation of liberal Prime Minister Luigi Facta and the appointment of a new Fascist government. — Benito Mussolini, Wikipedia

And what does Mussolini believe?

When dealing with such a race as Slavic—inferior and barbarian—we must not pursue the carrot, but the stick policy ... We should not be afraid of new victims ... The Italian border should run across the Brenner Pass, Monte Nevoso and the Dinaric Alps ... I would say we can easily sacrifice 500,000 barbaric Slavs for 50,000 Italians ... — Benito Mussolini, Wikipedia

Which is obviously incompatible with any form of enlightenment values, but a return to the most wantonly violent feudal ethic of raping and pillaging and murdering whole people's and cities a la crusades or Gengis Khan.

However, that society has gone through an enlightenment social change, the old feudal ethic and hierarchy cannot simply be re-imposed on society.

Mussolini cannot simply declare himself king, as that wouldn't make any sense as if we're going back to "feudalism classic" then if you want to be king you need some birthright claim to the crown, so Mussolini calls himself "the leader" instead, and generally fascism is powered by feudal nostalgia because the basic argument is that "all this intellectual stuff isn't working, we just need to go back to simpler times when society was made of 'real men'," but of course no one in fascist movements hasty detailed understanding of feudalism so it's all mediated through a mythical interpretation of the feudal past in symbiosis with vestigial feudal institutions and cultural touchstones (such as going on glorious crusades again). "The leader" is the new king, the nation state is the new religion, officers the new knights, propagandists the new priests.

Precisely because reinventing feudalism in this way is not so sophisticated and lacks any depth (people aren't all that sure what this new belief system actually is, unlike in feudal times) it can only be stabilized by intense and violent conflict with both internal and external enemies. Internal enemies must be eradicated as the project is not intellectually self sustaining and so is incredibly intellectually weak and so threatened by basic criticism. External enemies must be conquered in a blood frenzy to fuel this new warrior ethic to flourish. The core attraction of fascism being that being an individual is psychological hard; it was psychologically a lot easier in many ways to "know your place" in a rigid and unchanging hierarchy in which one's intellectual focus is narrowed to the performance of clearly defined glorious deeds to the acclamation of one's peers.

As an anarchist I would go further and say fascism, at its core, is a psychological response to the lack of meaning in industrial work. Within the dark claustrophobic confines of industrialism the prospect of an epic violent adventure can appear as the way out to fresh air. Naturally, along the narrow forest path the hero will encounter many fowl beasts that require slaughtering to continue along the way to saving the kingdom from evils and decay.

Nevertheless, the emergence of fascisms also attenuates the previous intellectual and political competitions between the enlightenment philosophies. That things can be a lot worse is a powerful argument in favour of the status quo, though, ironically, it is precisely the failure of the status quo to deliver on its promises that motivates fascist movements; but if you don't know much about it then the status quo saying "things could be worse" is a pacifying song.

Ok so it is not totally unfounded that anarchists have at some points in time sown discord in society. — unimportant

Yes and no. Anarchism first emerged as both an academic political term for what we today would call a failed state, obviously not generally desirable, and then later to describe people (from this point of view) accused of trying to cause a failed state, what we would call terrorists. This is way before anarchism is a term coined to describe a political philosophy that had largely been developed by previous authors but not called anarchism yet.

So, it's sort of like if in a 100 years someone makes a political philosophy called "terrorism" and people casually go around calling themselves "terrorists", maybe considered a bit edgy but entirely new meaning to terrorism as some well thought out political theory, or maybe just coincidence in that "terre" means "earth" in French so maybe in 100 years terrorists are "the earth people".

But basically anyone with any grievance whatsoever resorting to violence would be called an anarchists in order to paint them as just violent extremists causing chaos for no reason and to dismiss their grievances. Most violent groups are local autonomy groups seeking political independence; such as the American founding fathers.

Nevertheless, there was both anarchist revolution that did establish anarchist communes and governments at various times, as well as some anarchists who took it upon themselves to rid society of the state, thinking that the results would be splendid (that people would naturally self organized into amazingly peaceful and reasonable anarchist collectives if there just so happened to not be a state anymore). What can be said in the defence of these anarchists is that they were faced with incredibly violent states that would wantonly murder and torture people, so wantonly assassinating agents of the state in turn is a tit for tat tactic in these circumstances, and one reason that elites accept limitations to their power (cruel and unusual punishment and so on) is partly because they don't want to be randomly executed by the state (the primary constituents of the state also have reason to fear the state if they are suddenly out of favour) but also because it's forms part of a wider compromise that if the state is relatively peaceful then grievances against the state should be relatively peaceful too.

Which is all definitely an improvement over the arbitrary, and often completely incompetent, rule of absolute monarchs.

The main problem with the social wide compromise that results in what we call liberal democracy is the continued tyrannical exploitation of the imperial system abroad and the ecological un-sustainability of the entire project. If the liberal democratic system is not reliant on foreign resource exploitation then history shows it just moves towards a welfare state set of policies (such as the Nordics and Switzerland), which is a clear direction of improvement we would expect if people's interests are being represented (why wouldn't normal people vote for universal healthcare? or free education? or to not be in the street if their business goes bust? etc.).

However, imperial systems that extend beyond the nation states borders result in a very different system of influence and power, that forms the power basis of continuing a divide and conquer strategy to maintain essentially tyrannical rule even in a representative democracy.

The main reason is that when elites depend on the exploitation of foreign labour then they have no interest to maintain healthy domestic labour (in terms of health-care, education, rights and so on) and domestic idle labour, that foreign labour simply does better and cheaper, is simply a nuisance and so criminalized in one way or another. However, if the elites (of which liberal democracy is designed to super heavily in bias of) cannot exploit foreign labour then their only option is to make due with the labour they have domestically, so if domestic labour is healthier they make more money, if domestic labour is more educated they make more money, if domestic labour has rights which they insist on being respected in order to work efficiently then elites just have to deal with that.

Conclusion being that if you have both democratic pressure and most elites would also benefit from healthier and more skilled domestic labour, then these interests easily align to overwhelm the interests of elites that happen to make their profits from sick, unskilled and easily exploited domestic labour pool.

But the basic point of all that is that the political situation can be quite complicated with many interests and pressures, both internal and external, and solutions to problems are not self evident.

For example, certainly many Iranians have many grievances with the Iranian government ... but they also don't want to be bombed by Israel, as happened this morning, and the problem of advancing the cause of living in a peaceful and prosperous society is not so easy when there are foreign threats requiring military readiness, such as Israel today or Iraq in the past.

What's the ultimate cause of this violence? Imperial colonialism in Palestine.

So it's all well and good for a Swiss to say we should just have more inclusive decision making and hold hands, but it's more difficult in conditions of foreign imperial exploitation and "rivalry" that the Swiss haven't faced for some centuries.

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

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

Of course zero worries, very normal for discussions to meander all over the place, and if something is really off topic then a new discussion can be created.

Going back to the attempts of communism that have already gone before vein — unimportant

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

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

In addition to this, the West portrays Tsarist Russia as basically ballerinas prancing around engaging in romantic love affair and also sometimes chased around by everyone's favourite modern shaman Rasputin and then brutally murdered by the revolution.

However, the truth is Tsarist Russia was a pretty brutal and incompetent regime that gets itself into the disastrous war of WWI and then manages that even more disastrously than the other countries involved, leading to the breakdown of society. Tsarist Russia essentially becomes a failed state and in this context the Soviet takeover is a remarkable success.

Of course compared to Western liberal democratic standards (which we can clearly see Western don't actually have) then of course Soviet Union is a tyrannical police state that we don't want, then later collapses so is was not even viable as a horrendous despotic system.

Furthermore, just as we easily do in analyzing Western countries there are pros and cons in communist one-party systems. China too is a one party communist system and we keep on hearing how successful it is. So if we're judging systems on simply economic terms then over 1 billion people succeeding economically with a one-party communist system modelled on the Soviet Union can't be ignored.

The basic defence of what contemporary Marxists (such as on Gabriel Rockhill) starts with the problem Lenin is most concerned with which is that any anarchist or communist style revolution results in all the capitalists countries attacking it, so it's a difficult problem with immense risks to try to shake off tyranny, but that it's difficult does not mean it is not worth trying to do.

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

The basic problem is ownership of land. Given the choice most people rather work for themselves, building their own community and making their own food, and especially if literally every previous generation was doing the same thing and that's what you know how to do.

Why the "industrial revolution" goes hand in hand with the enclosures is that in order to get people to "want to work" in a factor filled with poisons like arsenic and coal smoke, long hours for little pay, you have to remove from them the possibility of just basically camping and then incrementally improving their camp site into a hamlet or village.

And even that's not enough, but refusing to work in a factor needs also to be criminalized as just going around as a vagabond and seeing what happens, doing small economic activity like inter-settlement trading and odd-jobs, is still a superior lifestyle to working in an arsenic based industrial process in a factory filled with coal smoke. The first industrial workers were literally covered head to toe with coal soot.

Of course, whenever people do have the opportunity to work the land as a community, if there's no external force that comes and destroys them, it is usually successful. We view it as normal that peasants in feudal times were both able and willing to work the land to sustain themselves, sort of goes without saying. It remains true today. But if you can't access any land it's difficult to do.

And this part, of people being both suited for and generally desiring to, live in communities and work mostly for themselves on things that improve their own lives, does not really require any theory.

What requires theory is explaining why this changed, how this change is maintained, what the impacts on society are of "urban anonymity" and what the impacts on the environment are of a system exclusively devoted to maximizing the throughput of material transformation into commodities, so exclusively dedicated that it invents the practice of planned obsolescence (something that had never occurred to anyone in any previous economic system as a good idea to do) as well as implementing the project on a global scale. Not at all obvious why a system incompatible with both human social dynamics and environmental constraints would develop so spectacularly.

Likewise, if such an unfortunate series of events were to occur, requires a lot of theory to try to find some way to reverse or then otherwise transform the situation into something sociologically healthy and sustainable.

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

Exactly. When economists claim that the natural state of affairs in society is rational self interested parties seeking to maximize gains through all interactions and transactions, they simply take it for granted that the entire foundation of human society, raising children, is a communist exercise of sharing and caring.

And that's the basic theoretical problem of modern economics which is that its central thesis is that "people want to make a profit, except when they don't". So people are self-interested want to profit from social interactions except when they don't vis-a-vis their own children, family and friends and also other community members they feel sympathy for. Judges are self-interested want to make a profit in their profession except when they don't because that would be called taking a bribe or otherwise compromising their impartiality and we just assume the justice system is fair and impartial in mediating contractual obligations in order to have a market in the first place. Firemen are self-interested and want to make a profit in their profession too, except when they don't and literally sacrifice their lives to save total strangers. Soldiers self-interested and want to profit from their profession, but maximizing compensation for the risk of facing enemies in battle would compromise the security of the state upon which all private property depends but for its de jure existence and de facto existence, therefore we're just going to go ahead and assume in the "market for soldiers" there is no self-interest and profit maximization, and that soldiers aren't going to demand mercenary market based salaries as well as just quick when the risk of death exceeds some original salary to risk tolerance economic calculation.

Basically everyone's self interested except when they aren't, which is not a theory of anything but just only selecting data that supports one's narrative and ignoring everything else (aka. propaganda).

The reason for this propaganda is to justify the policy of both allowing and insisting upon corporations being self-interested, out to maximize profits, even if it's likely to be in theory as well as provably true in practice that this damages society as a whole.

Why would society legally mandate self-harm to itself? There is by definition no justification, and so it must be assumed in as some sort of necessary evil, such as human nature. Corporations seek to maximize profits because individuals seek to maximize profits and anytime they clearly don't do that we'll just pat them on the head as good parents, good judges, good firemen, good soldiers and thank them for their service, and just completely ignore that contradicts our core identify and justifications for the entire power structure.

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

It's alluded to above, but states get attacked by other states.

In general, inclusive decision making is only viable when:

A. there is time for the decision making process to be carried
B. the sharing widely of the information of what the decision is about is not problematic

Conditions that obviously do not exist in wartime or on a ship in a storm. Why ships have captains and even the most egalitarian society's nevertheless appoint de facto dictators to manage war.

All political units that come under enough existential pressure must transform, one way or another, into a despotic regime as it is the only option for decision making to have even a chance at survival and the long term consequences to society of despotism must be discounted in the fact of imminent existential threats.

Why feudalism was as militaristic as states are today, as any feudal lord is liable to be attacked by any adjacent feudal lord at any time. The competition between lords in feudalism powered by peasant communism is replaced by competition between states powered by industrial commodity production, particularly of weapons.

It is not a coincidence that states that have developed the most inclusive decision making systems, such as Switzerland, have been the most secure over the longest period of time.

If seas are calm and there is no urgency, then the ships crew can assemble to debate what to do and every voice can be heard.

The nature of warfare also explains why the progressive branches of socialism (that simply rebrand and social-democracy) are the most successful in getting a lot of what socialists and anarchists wanted such as free education, free healthcare, social safety net, strong unions, police and prison reforms, and so on. But, it is not simply due to having a "good idea" but being in conditions in which there is little military threat. You cannot simply say that people in colonies suffering from brutal repression and exploitation should have simply had "the better idea" of inclusive democracy.

It's not so obvious how to to be free of oppressive systems, otherwise people would do it.

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

The basic principle is devolution. Oppressive systems are by definition power systems (i.e. men with guns) that serve the interests of a distant power centre, such as colonial gerrisons serving the interests of whatever empire sent them there, of then police serving the interests of the state (less clear "where it is exactly", but definitely you know when you "aren't the state").

The basic characteristic of a less oppressive system is that decisions are made on the level and including the people who are affected by the impact of the decision. The most repressive systems were absolute monarchies in the pre-revolutionary era (why people found revolution to be a risk worth taking, which is extremely rare in history and doesn't "just happen" because someone wrote a pamphlet) were incredibly centralized with essentially all important decisions in the whole state being made by direct representatives of the king sent from the capital to manage things; and the basic structural change that revolutions brought about that deposed (one way or another) absolute monarchies is the devolution of power (a process that continues to today).

Why these absolute monarchies were structurally even more repressive than the previous feudal systems they developed out of, is that in feudalism lords had the decision making power locally and there were all sorts of inputs into decision making (church, guilds, even peasants were represented), so even if system is quite hierarchal locally you at least have decisions in "your fief" decided by "your feudal lord" and that could make a lot of difference. The feudal lord also had the awareness that he needs to be able raise men at arms and materials from his population in times of war as well as build defensive structures in times of peace, therefore there is genuine local reasons pressuring decision making to genuinely care for the local society, as the lord is aware that any failure in battle could get his head chopped off.

So even though feudal society was not democratic it had a devolved power structure that represented people's interests reasonably well, and why it then lasted 1000 years.

Take away that devolved decision making structure and put all the power in the hands of the king, due to no longer relying on feudal lords and knights managing and raising men at arms and resources from their fiefs to fight wars, but instead relying on the commodity production of muskets and cannon, disastrous wars and famine results almost immediately and then revolutionary destruction of the entire system, on a historically short time frame. Where power was the most centralized (France, Russia) is where revolution was the most violent and profound.

And the cause is not "ideas" but a political system that is not able to process information and make decisions even plausibly in the interests of the people governed.

To take a concrete example.

An employee is cheated out of wages owed and some deception is created to try to trick the employee from understanding they were cheated.

Simply because something can be a civil issue does not mean the manner in which it is done is a criminal issue. You have the right to not pay what you owe and force the counter-party to take civil acton. However, you don't have the right to make false statements about what you owe, you'd have to either say nothing or then make up some plausible civil litigation reason you don't owe the money; you could also just straight up say that maybe you do owe the money but don't have it so what-are-you-gonna-do. So plenty of ways debts are a civil issue. However, making false statements to try to deceive the counter party about their rights is fraud, deceive them out of what they are owed or then try to deceive them out of their rights of redress in the situation.

For example, you go into the debt at the casino. If you say nothing, just don't pay because you don't have the money, that's a civil issue and the casino will need to sue you to get their money. However, let's say you come up with some scheme to try to trick the casino about what's owed, well now you're committing fraud and police for definitely sure will show up to investigate the fraud.

But you don't stop there, when the casino challenges you on your false statements you threaten the casino that they aren't even going to be able to continue their casino activity if they go after the money and the fraud, that if they got a nice operation going on and that's not going to continue if they go after the money. Text book extortion.

Now, let's say you're an employer, and you owe an employee money but you come up with some scheme involving false statements and false documents to try to trick your employee out of what's owed. Same exact scenario but incredibly unlikely police will show up to investigate this "scheme" by an employer. But you don't stop there, when your employee figures it out and then complains to you, you threaten them that they won't ever work in the industry again if they keep it up.

That's text book extortion, just as if you threatened the casino's very economic existence, threatening to shut down your economic existence of your livelihood is the same thing. How many times have employees heard this threat that by clearly illegal means (such as defamation and then collusion with others to harm a party) they will be deprived of their livelihood? How many times has it been investigated by police as extortion?

However, threaten an employer, say their business isn't going to exist for much longer if they keep it up about asking about your previous defrauding them of money, you really saying police are going to ignore that? Not show up almost immediately to start investigating what you mean by "not exist" (you can come up with plausible deniability defences, but police aren't just going to assume A. you're even making those plausible deniability defences and B. they are 100% airtight just because the words "plausible" and "deniability" can be brought together in the same sentence to describe what you're trying to do).

So, if you're thesis is correct, police would be as concerned about wage theft when it could potentially involve fraud and extortion (that's why you investigate, to see if there's a criminal case for the wrongdoing), as they would be about analogous fraud and extortion if committed by employees against their employer.

And we haven't even gotten to the issue of taxes and whether your saying false statements about taxes owed, not to speak of threatening the state's existence as a coherent economic unit when the taxman starts asking questions, would be treated the same way as an employer making false statements about wages owed and threatening employees continued coherent economic existence.

The answer to all these issues is the incredibly obvious conclusion that police work for the state first and foremost and then the state's main constituents who are the employer class, and police do not work to protect the interests of the employee or lower classes.

This seems completely untrue, to my understanding. The first modern police force was Louis' in the 17th C in France. — AmadeusD

I am describing the process of going from feudalism, where there is police as you confirm, to a system of police.

Why there was no police in feudalism is because pretty much anyone with wealth lived in a castle with their own guards and soldiers of the lord or king (or queen) in charge. Cities were mostly walled and basically just a really big castle. Basic principle being if you had wealth you protected it yourself.

Everybody else (at least 90% of the population) were peasants and lived in villages and hamlets and they were mostly pretty poor and there was nothing like a state providing security services, so what security issues they had they organized themselves, such as having a system of watchmen to watch over things, community members taking turns to do so.

So why would society suddenly develop the concept and need of what we call police?

There are two concerns. The first is the emergence of the bourgeoisie as a powerful political class. The bourgeoisie are wealthy enough to have security concerns but not wealthy enough to all have their own guards and soldiers. For example, you can't easily pickpocket a lord or a king in feudalism because he goes around with a bunch of knights that make him difficult to get to and will also immediately cut your hands off if you tried. However, with the emergence of capitalism and the bourgeoisie there's suddenly a lot of people that want to go around with a lot of wealth in there pocket but don't want to pay for security personally.

So, the solution is for a collective security force of the bourgeoisie which is what we call police.

Second, peasants did not have to be "coerced to farm". There has never been any such thing in the history of humanity as a "farmers strike". Doesn't mean farmers can't agitate, but they do so by revolting and armed conflict and not by simply refusing to farm. To have a strike you need labourers who do not depend on the output of their labour. So with the industrial revolution started labour agitation of a new form that not only disrupts the bourgeoisie concept of how things could be but even threatens a revolution against the bourgeoisie and their new political power represented in the modern state.

So, police are also a tool to pacify the population and suppress agitation. The states developing the modern police force are the very same states colonizing the entire planet, so whenever local agitation becomes a problem it is simply common sense and natural to recycle whatever has been learned in pacification of native populations in the colonies to the domestic situation. Of course you're not going to call it the same thing, but the dynamic persists right up to the present day.

For example, why are US police forces so interested to train in Israel and learn from Israeli security forces ... not say low-crime rate places like Norway of Switzerland? The reason is that Israel can teach pacification techniques that are relevant to maintaining class structure in the US, whereas Norway and Switzerland can teach how to attenuate the class structure (even while still having super wealth people around), avoid poverty and organized crime that goes with it, give everyone health care and so on, and create a society in which police have a different role than pacification of the local population to ensure compliance.

The earliest American Systems were jus formalized watchmen systems utilizing local enforcers and militias. Municipal police is a different story, but still seems to not have a lot to do with anything colonial, per se. It was a density issue being dealt with by formalizing overwhelmed informed policing systems as above. — AmadeusD

If by "per se" you mean that when the first people were brought together and called "police" that the state didn't get up and make a speech of how these people will be used to pacify the working class and repress the underclass to reduce agitation and maintain and protect the privileges of the upper classes. Sure, yeah, I guess.

As I explain above, to get to the modern police there's a long process. What matters, as I explain at some length in the comments you're responding to, is that police work on behalf of the state and represent state interests, and they are not apart of nor work on behalf of local community interests.

This is an utterly bizarre way of characterizing protecting wider society from the ills of people who cannot conform to the social contract. Exile is less humane, but more on-point. Would we want that? — AmadeusD

This is essentially not worth responding to.

Pure nonsense. — AmadeusD

Police are organized, trained, paid and supervised by the state, therefore they follow instructions from the state and act in the interests of the state. If you look around and ask yourself "where is the state?" it is unlikely to be around you.

Even with the laws "on the books" without putting them into question, it's easy to prove. For example, if you defrauded and extorted your employer police would get involved. However, if your employer defrauded you and extorted you out of wages, police would not get involved. The exact same sums could be involved and the exact same words could be used, in the first case it would be obvious that police would answer a call from an employer saying an employee has committed fraud and is extorting them; as obvious as police not doing anything about an employee saying the exact same words to commit the exact same kind of fraud and extortion, only difference is the roles in society.

Why does the police system respond as it's basically silly and a joke for employees to report fraud and extortion from employers? Because the police system does not serve the interests of the community.

I've made a thread proposing the basic theory of what I've been talking about solar thermal wise.

It is in the lounge: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/16010/the-solar-socialist-revolution

As it's important it's therefore lounge business, but I mention here for those forum denizens that have not yet upgraded their critical thinking activity to mostly just lounging around.

But this can be said of many social structures so is not a defining property of anarchy. — Harry Hindu

My school of anarchy is more a framework of social analysis and not the positing of any particular social structure or set of policies.

This sort of "Kropotkin framework" takes the view people have been fighting for freedom, personal expression, healthy community bonds, since coercive social structure first emerged, and so this prehistorical idea of liberty and respect for others is not at all unique to anarchism.

Kropotkin and similar anarchists, including Bertrand Russel, are constantly pointing out that Jesus was this kind of anarchist and also the Buddha, and considering the power of coercive social structures there would not still be a battle for individual rights, liberty, creativity and participation in governance if this desire was not essentially innate in humans.

Therefore, in this framework it is not surprising that plenty of political-philosophies propose ideas Kropotkin anarchists are aligned with, as the goals are fairly universal (it's quite rare to find someone who actually wants others to suffer needless or for their enjoyment; they exist, but not the norm of humanity, and people who don't want others to suffer needlessly is not surprising will often come to the same ideas on how to do that).

In this sense Kropotkin anarchism is not espousing one particular social structure or one particular set of policies, but seeks to build a framework of analysis in order to add new things to the social conscience. By taking a deep look at history and the challenges people fighting for the ever present flame of effective equality, creative freedom and respect, very different challenges have been faced by very different people in very different circumstance and cultures. So there is a lot to learn form all the freedom fighters from all the world and from all the past.

Now, given that learning, the question the Kropotkin anarchist seeks to answer is what new idea could be useful where I am in my particular circumstance and culture, or then bring somewhere else or then from else to here etc. It's a sort of "think historically, act contemporanously" approach to political analysis and strategy.

This point of view is more comfortable with multi-generational change, so what's going to be accomplished in our time maybe limited but we only have the tools and knowledge to be fighting for justice at all because our predecessors bequeathed us knowledge and tools so we are responsible to do the same for the next generation, at the least.

And what is particular to Kropotkin is that things are chaotic and developing and adapting. The coercive system adapts to any methods that prove effective, and therefore it is the task of the anarchist to likewise adapt and develop new methods.

Therefore, this kind of anarchist framework does not strive to agree (between such anarchists) on a particular set of policies today and build a particular party and try to take power and implement those policies (and call it anarchism). The goal is not to create a mass social movement called "anarchism" in this school. Does not mean one policy is not better than another, and one party is not better than another, nor mass movement for good particulars are not a good thing, but what's viable today in party politics hardly ever makes sense to call anarchism, but it can make perfect sense for anarchists to be involved in whatever party it is that is most effectively pushing back against state power and try to implement better social policy and push on that door of power when it seems the moment for it.

The social function of the word anarchism in this framework is as a signal between anarchists who are "in the know" to make clear however mad it seems their activity seems to be there could be something there to consider, while also inviting the curious to learn more about anarchism, and to everyone else it is just dismissed and "edge lord speak" and doesn't matter; I went around for a decade as a corporate chair and managing director calling myself an anarchist at every opportunity and other corporate executives either got the joke or ignore it, but it does I think help inspire the younger generation of corporate neophytes to demonstrate you can be good at your job and not speak and internalize banal corporate efficiency discourse; that was the basic point I was trying to make with the choice of diction in the corporate environment.

One way to understand this framework idea is that modern (uncorrupted) scientists are not bothered by disagreement on particular scientific issues; modern uncorrupted physicists do not view their goal as to come to an agreement on a particular set of physics ideas and then deliver that to society so that everyone else believes the same thing about physics too. Modern physics and cosmology is a framework in which you can have differences and debate. Of course, plenty of things have been resolved to be clearly true in a particular range of circumstances, and "doing physics" is a process involving exploration and error. When a physicist, or more likely mathematician let's be honest, discovered something new and profound that results eventually in new technology, people then implementing and using that technology do not then call themselves "physicists".

Likewise, if anarchists develop a new form of schooling called "not beating the children" and it happens to be an effective social technology, it does not then require to call, and makes little sense to do, anarchist everyone that then uses this novel social technology (novel in the Western context), just as it makes no sense to call yourself a mathematician simply due to using a computer. Likewise, if anarchists develop organic agriculture techniques, it does not require for all farmers that use those techniques to call themselves anarchists. And of course, anarchists are not the only people engaged in developing novel forms of social technology that can advance the cause of freedom, respect and harmony with the natural world, and so are as keen to learn from and work with others developing good things for whatever reason, as with fellow self-described anarchists.

"Anarchism" as such is only a Western intellectual label on a general "esprit" that goes deep into humanity's past and is cross cultural and manifest in nearly all spheres of human activity, if only in glimpses and sparks.

The profound version of the doctrine of the propaganda of the deed is that if something new and good gets developed then it should spread due to its inherent goodness regardless of what it is called and if anyone even remembers who started it.

↪boethius Yeah I see a sort of "dialectic" between them -- in some way it feels like the two "fill out" one another, and by keeping that tension in a single political philosophy we build in some kind of way for people to make appeals which curb each philosophies excesses. — Moliere

Exactly if you did start out with 10 socialists with the same ideology pushing on that door of state power and no one else in society gives a shit (at the moment) a logical conclusion of their strategic deliberations would be that it would be more efficient for 5 to stay and keep fighting the battle against the state but for 5 to go out there and try to spread the message of the cause and develop examples of how things could be different.

Likewise, if you had 10 anarchists doing anarchist things and they saw that state power was gaining significant ground as no one was pushing back, they may conclude that 5 of them need to go and resist so that things don't get too bad and that there's a seed of resistance if social conscience suddenly changes as they are aiming to do.

The differences between these schools was more extreme in the 19th century when it was possible for both to be far more naive. It was possible for socialist to believe if they just took over the sate they could usher in peace and prosperity for the working class, and it was possible for anarchists to believe that if you just ignored the state or then got rid of it directly by a campaign of random assassination, that people would naturally self organize in an entirely friendly and efficient way without the oppressive yoke of the state.

Obviously history has made those positions untenable, so with that learning both schools have converged on more nuanced and hedged thinking.

Indeed, the only people in this more general movement I have real difference with are anarchists who continue the 19th century ignore the state completely idea. The state has proven too powerful to simply ignore, so on that point I am in complete agreement with my socialist comrades. Of course what exactly we can do about it is a different question, but clearly state power cannot simply be ignored; mainly due to the damages to ecosystems of the current system, "eventually we'll get there" thinking isn't viable (due to planetary damages that were not so clear in the 19th century).

Is that really true though?

Ants and bees in a colony are all brothers / sisters so are essentially a nuclear family and won't share with other colonies more genetically distant. Fun fact, too small a genetic pool of an invasive ant species resulted in a mega-colony (where new colonies don't compete with other colonies as they identity as siblings) in California.

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

Anarchists tend to make small projects to develop and exemplify best practices that could be scaled up through revolution of one form or another (such as toppling corporate control of agriculture).

My own focus has been on local and open source solar thermal technology. Anarchists of this school tend to want to seed such ideas and practices all over the place, and not stay isolated in some analogue of the family. Both socialists and anarchists try to form networks and groups of mutual support generally speaking.

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

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

Now, as you say:

In order to topple hierarchies hierarchies are necessary evils simply because that's always what's worked before. — Moliere

Is a logical conclusion. Coercive hierarchies rarely just "give up" and they usually only change through toppling due to one method of pressuring the system or another; obviously existing democratic mechanism, no matter how flawed, is one method.

So, to use the metaphor of pushing on the doors of power the socialists strategy is to always be pushing, doesn't matter how unlikely it seems it will move in the foreseeable future. When enough people come to push to make a difference is chaotic and unpredictable so they are always pushing on that door in case others join and suddenly reach crucial mass. Both their pushing back prevents losing ground and also leads by example.

But for the anarchist in order to topple hierarchies we have to start living like they aren't there, and learn how to chill out and have sex all the time without exploiting one another. — Moliere

The anarchists see that the door isn't moving ... also not exactly clear what would happen if it did move and the socialists got through. Of course, that results aren't guaranteed doesn't justify not doing anything, as the status quo cannot be justified simply because change is unpredictable. There's a learning process going on.

So, to hedge against the possibility that toppling the hierarchy is not effective or leads to something even worse, the anarchist leaves the door and seeks to teach people a better way of living through mostly example (such as not beating your kids, gardening and other local economy activity, helping the poor, building local decision making structures and so on).

On a surface level this seems to be a disinterest in the toppling the hierarchy but from this anarchist perspective, and easily part of the socialist perspective also, part of the same strategy. As demonstrating alternatives to the system undermines faith in the system.

Yes, if power is doing evil shit people should push back on that. However, if there are no better ideas on how to live out there (such as proving organic agriculture is viable) there is no practical vision of a better society to build if and when the current power structure fails.

At the same time, if no one's pushing back there's no seed of social opposition that can grow into a critical mass to change power structures. For, we're dealing with exponential processes.

So if there's no one constantly pushing at the door there's no seed of an exponential process that suddenly results in masses of people pushing on the door. At the same time, if no one's out there trying to demonstrate better forms of social structure, then there's no motivation to change things if it's not clear what the change can be.

From this perspective, therefore, contemporary socialism and anarchism are simply two roles in the same social movement. The uniting foundation is if there is agreement on democratic principles which would resolve other differences.

But for the anarchist in order to topple hierarchies we have to start living like they aren't there, and learn how to chill out and have sex all the time without exploiting one another. — Moliere

Indeed you are wise in the ways of science.

Please do.

Or am I to understand that the promiscuous relationship between birds and bees is preserved over a wide range of different taxonomic categories?

News to me, but I'm intrigued

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.