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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Make it work and understand what it does.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All is well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excellent.

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

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

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

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

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

Then you are warmly welcomed into the movement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is the anarchist way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are of one mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Definitely we agree here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are in complete agreement here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I second your message.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All that would be a bare minimum.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The question is one of effective power.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

↪boethius What's the solution to the Trolley Problem? What's your take on abortion? Should the state compel me to save the life of a drowning child, if I can do so with no risk to myself? — RogueAI

The point of the first volume, The Book of Croms, as the name suggests, is focused on proposing a foundation for political action and coordination, such a foundation being a proposed ethical theory upon which to form agreement.

To continue with the mathematical analogy above, The Book of Croms is essentially an existence proof that answers to political questions can have a coherent and unique answer. There need only be one such unique answer to form the basis of political collaboration, such as avoiding the destruction of the entire planet, and that is essentially the only specific moral dilemma taken up in The Book of Croms. If we can agree on that then presumably we should ensure we have taken measures to avoid that happening, but it also stands to reason coherent and unique answers may exist to other political questions as well and so, at the outset we can presumably further agree to try to find such answers to those, or any, political dilemma.

The writing plan here being subsequent volumes devoted to more and more specific political problems and proposed solutions. Volumes with hopefully equally self-explanatory names: Vol.2 - The Nonage Works, Vol.3 - Cromulous the Destroyer, Vol. 4 - Crombobbolous, Vol.5 - The Garden of Crombo, and then finally the final Vol.6 - Cromtography.

The issues you raise would be dealt with in Cromtography, which aims to place all such moral landmarks on the map, so to speak.

So, I'd of course prefer to wait until Cromtography is complete to discuss the answers to your queries, but as that may be a far way off I am happy to satisfy you now.

The short answer to your question is of course, "well people would need to vote on these things", as, as an anarchist, I am mostly concerned about equality of effective power over the political process, and not so much dictating to people wha they should vote for, much less believe. So once anarchy is achieved the results are not necessarily predictable. The Cromulomicon is more about that more fundamental level of appropriating state power to oneself in a collective mission to distribute it as widely as possible, and not a list of dictums of what the state should do.

For, the state is corrupt! There is no much point in arguing endlessly what the state should do as if it was unaffected by corruption and had some coherent third party relationship with the individual that can be parsed out mechanically what is fair and just.

So, to start with you question about the state compelling you to save the life of a drowning child, the Cromulomicon resolution to the problem would be that the community you live in will need to decide what to do with you. It will depend very much on the specific circumstances. If you're in a position of explicit or implied guardianship over the child then letting the child drown is then likely murder. If there are extenuating circumstances, then those would obviously need to be considered. However, let's say you make no such defence, but explicitly say you let the child drown on purpose when you could have easily saved the child. Then definitely my vote, at a community quorum of some sort or then a jury trial in a process of justice decided by the community, would definitely be murdered as all adults have implied guardianship over all children of the community. The most fundamental responsibility of the community being the protection of children.

Of course, what exactly is the definition of a community and how to conceive of a community of communities and what they may do, and how to create that, is what the previous Volumes are about.

As for the trolley problem. The first thing to note about moral ambiguities is that their existence does not somehow retroactively affect, much less erase, prior moral certainties. As with any body of knowledge we may get to finer and finer questions of which we have no resolution. The existence of unsolved math problems does not somehow make problems that have solution somehow no longer have a solution or then less of a solution. There's problems we've solved and there's problems we haven't solved.

The second thing to consider is that in the case of the trolley problem, is that the actual problem is not the trolley scenario, in which case the solution of seeking the end result with a minimum of harms (such as with any accident or natural disaster or what have you) is a perfectly acceptable answer to the problem.

The actual problems in the dilemma are first that a ethical-political theory is needed answer any moral dilemma whatsoever and so if one is not already agreed on then really the problem is just begging the question of what are moral truths generally speaking upon which we can answer any moral question whatsoever. The second actual problem is then making a false analogy between minimizing harm in the case of an unstoppable trolley and things like forced organ harvesting.

For example, if we make instead an analogy to an actually analogous situation of an airplane losing power and going to crash and we ask the question of whether the pilot should stop intervening on the controls and allow the jet to crash into a crowd of people or then try to fly the aircraft into a more sparsely populated field, the obvious answer is to avoid the crowd. Unless the pilots goal was to kill as many people as possible there is not a pilot on the planet that would argue letting things take their course and ceasing to intervene on the controls is the moral thing to do even if you're heading straight to a dense crowd.

The difference with forced organ harvesting is that there is no accident or force of nature occurring in which people can have the intention to do no harm at all and given unfortunate circumstances outside their control seek the pathway that reduces harm. With forced organ harvesting you need to capture, torture and murder people against their will.

An entirely new category of harm is introduced into the situation and there is no direct analogy with the trolley problem. The deontological answer is simply that people are not means to ends but ends in themselves with their own moral autonomy, so there is a difference between seeking a minimum of harm in a disaster (whether a pilot trying to avoid a dense crowd in a crash or a doctor triaging care) and using people as unwilling tools to help other people. If people get killed by the jet crashing into the least populated area to crash in, those people were not used as tools but the deaths are accidental.

However, we can go further also, in that the goal of society is not simply to minimize short term harms in all cases. If we are concerned about the welfare of society as a whole then we are concerned about the younger generations and generations to come and we want to preserve a healthy society and not simply as extend the lives of as many present individuals as possible. Sacrificing one healthy person to save numerous unhealthy ones therefore is not as natural a choice as a fighter pilot avoiding a dense crowd during a crash. So the analogy is not directly comparable in this respect as well.

Of course, even accepting a healthy individual is more valuable to society than a sick one and it makes no senes to sacrifice one healthy person to simply extend the life a terminally ill person, one could of course argue that this logic requires a weighting, as the sick person therefore does not have zero value just not equal value. So, if we say these five sick people have each a third the value of a healthy person, then we can start arguing the human sacrifice is going to result in greater value.

We then must weigh that calculation against the value of bodily autonomy, and the debate can continue. The ultimate solution is then democracy. We (at least here in Finland) have no problem scarfing conscripts on the battlefield if we claim the conscription system has democratic legitimacy. So we could have the same system when it comes to forced organ harvesting and the debate really ends here because we all know almost no one would vote for such a system, which is why no such system exists in any democratic country (not to say it exists in non-democratic countries, just to make the point no vote has ever past in any democratic quorum of any kind in favour of forced organ harvesting).

So it's really not a dilemma at all, only a fallacy of false-analogy. We have no problem voting for air traffic control regulations that instruct pilots to avoid dense crowds during a crash and have equally zero problem not passing regulation forcing people into organ harvesting if the weighted outcome of comparative health is positive.

Now, we could of course imagine a scenario in which people start changing their minds due to extreme circumstances that humanity would perish as a whole without forced organ harvesting. In such a case it would simply become comparable to conscription and the legitimacy a reflection of the legitimacy of governance as a whole. That would of course not end the debate; the moral legitimacy, of forced conscription, whether democratic or not, as we see in Ukraine today, is of course debatable. The point here being we already today have states that force people into sacrifice for the common good and the difference with forced organ harvesting is simply that there does not seem a comparable utility for it. If there was (such as the population would go extinct without forced organ harvesting for some reason) then the debate would be very different.

Lastly, to deal with abortion, again the primary goal is equal (as equal as possible) effective power into the governing process, and there are a wide range of abortion policy options.

What is clear is that unwanted pregnancy is, by definition, better to avoid, so a healthy society would have few unwanted pregnancies, in particular unwanted due to a lack of resources to properly care for the would-be-child. So the first thing to consider is all the obvious ways to reduce unwanted pregnancies and then the less obvious ways that would need to be figured out, and that anyone arguing against abortion but not for a healthy society that cares for all the children within it, we can note is a hypocrite.

Of course making a healthy society would not reduce abortions to zero, the case of wanted pregnancies but unwanted fetus due to potential handicap of some sort (aka. fetal eugenics), and even if abortion were reduced to zero by healthy policies that would not remove the issue as a policy question as obviously there's no guarantee that the situation would not arise in the future.

The issue has been argued every possible way and even pro-choice countries rarely allow third trimester or full-term abortions. I'm also not a woman so I'd vote for a system where women vote on the issue, if also the issue of forced male conscription is only voted on by men. Obviously plenty of society's exist with plenty of different abortion policies, so if the process to arrive at the policy represents equal effective power of the individuals in that society, including voting on whether to have women vote on the issue, then I would accept the outcome.

Which is not a way of avoiding the moral question, as I would still have my position and would vote both in a vote on who should vote on it and then a vote directly on the policy if I'm then invited to vote on it, and I can of course elaborate my position, but it is already a political position whether different policies are liveable or not. Simply because people vote for everyone to torture their children to death does not mean I'd go along with it, but in that case would consider myself at war with whoever voted for such a thing.

Simply wanting equal effective power (as equal as feasible) in decision making does not mean all decisions that follow are therefore acceptable. People could literally vote that we'll all worship satan and human sacrifice everyone.

So, to say the outcome of a vote on the policy would be accepted requires some serious reflection.

As with many policy issues where there are clearly different sides that have a lot of people, voting is the answer to formulating the policy, and therefore as equal effective power in the political process to render those votes as legitimate as possible.

That being said, my own position is that abortion is immoral unless it is indeed a trolley problem kind of scenario where there is not enough resources and the goal is to minimize harm. However, bodily sovereignty, which is also important that nearly everyone always votes for (myself included outside some extreme circumstances, potentially) their own bodily sovereignty as we saw with the forced organ harvesting, then abortion is a crime but that takes place in a different country and the political body I'm apart can't practically do anything about it (other than as many policies to ensure we take care of children, unwanted pregnancies avoided in the first place, of which education is the main factor, etc.). This of course changes in late term abortion where the community can keep alive the new individual once it has been deported.

Of course, as mentioned, the content of the entire Cromulomicon would be required to really develop the concepts of community and effective power and the more fundamental things than any given policy decision, but I hope the above does answer your questions to your satisfaction given the philosophical tools presently in hand.

Sir, you exaggerate! — unenlightened

I'm just trying to keep with the tradition set forth by Kant and Wittgenstein and most of our philosophical forebears of continuously claiming that everything argued is both trivially true and they've also essentially completed the philosophical project for all intents and purposes. I'm pretty traditional at the end of the day (using conventional languages rather than made up ones and doing many conventional things like sitting rather than standing on chairs).

I haven't finished a first skim, but it is a heroic effort. I find myself largely in agreement with your conclusions, though I arrive at them in other ways sometimes. Give me a couple of days to read more slowly, and have a think, and I will come back with some questions and thoughts. — unenlightened

I am deeply humbled by your interest.

And yes, nearly all of my conclusions are really common beliefs, that mostly go without needing to argue, such as "avoid contradiction" and "don't torture children for fun", and the point of the work is mainly to answer why exactly do I believe such things.

The point is not so much that others, such as yourself, would need to believe the have the same philosophical foundation to arrive at the same conclusions, but could perhaps appreciate that I have mine and you have yours. "Feeling strongly these are good things" in a spiritual sense I would view as equally legitimate foundation for things like don't murder children for fun.

An analogy would be that you don't need set theory or category theory or some other logical foundation for numbers in order to count, and you can also argue that counting is what's fundamental and you can't actually do any logic at all without counting to begin with (how do you count braces to be sure squiggly brackets are closed if you don't know how to count yet?), so these foundations of numbers and counting are actually going in a circle (in this case we start with the idea we shouldn't torture babies to death for fun and then get back to the same place).

So criticism from this sort of angle I would view as perfectly fair.

That being said, having a logical foundation for counting and numbers, such as set theory, we can both appreciate that such things do exist but they are also needed to solve certain complicated problems (far beyond addition and multiplication of finite numbers).

For my purposes in The Cromulomicon, these certain complicated things are political coalition building.

I have my beliefs set out here and you have similar beliefs for different reasons, can we therefore form a coalition? To what end and to what extent.

Meanwhile, I think you could do with a bit of editing here and there - Your English is excellent but there are one or two places where the meaning could be more clear. I could make some suggestions on that level at some stage if you would like. — unenlightened

Again thanks for appreciation and definitely there's a lot of mistakes.

I originally published this essay in a rush because I discovered I had all this international money laundering evidence and believed I could be murdered at anytime.

Feel very welcome to send me corrections either just posting here, maybe in big blocks, or PM me if you think it would just clutter the space here.

Fixing all the mistakes is on my list of things to do.

Do you mean blocking the ability to see both sides of an issue? Give some examples please. I don't read lengthy essays. — jgill

If I understand correctly you are a mathematician, so the meaning of avoiding contradiction here is just in the basic sense as appears in mathematics of not believing something and it's negation simultaneously.

In my belief system here this principle is assumed to be true. Of course, it can't be proven as the principle of non contradiction needs to be assumed to prove anything.

Which is of course a pretty common, if not standard, starting point for logic and philosophizing. Where I then depart this common starting point is arguing that this principle of non contradiction is an ethical commitment. It's functionally a should statement, "I shouldn't contradict myself", and requires some effort to implement (i.e. putting in the effort to resolve contradictions when one realizes, intuits or then has some measure of doubt about things).

Someone with your skills I think can easily see this argument as the principle of non-contradiction reducing the configuration space of acceptable actions and beliefs (to remove contradictory ones) and an ethical theory meaning any restricting of this space whatsoever.

Point of all of this is to "boot-up", so to speak, an ethical purpose which is to avoid contradiction and search for the truth. Finding truth is then further restriction on all possible actions and beliefs. Again, the search for truth is a pretty common, if not standard, starting point for philosophical enquiry, but what seems obvious to me, but does not seem standard and common, is that it is clearly an ethical doctrine.

This whole point of view is summarized (for someone with your advanced knowledge of logic) by viewing is statements as also should statements.

If I argue to you that something "is" I am at the same time arguing that "you should believe it".

Thanks for this, on the Ukraine discussion one poster mostly just spammed links, without even summarizing them and when he did do so he'd make his point in the form of a question with an emoji, to avoid making an actual point. Really annoying.

As far as I can recall, that’s the first time you are bringing this argument up with me. And I really appreciated it. No irony. At least it’s something new and definitely worth discussing.
Some more questions: what empirical evidence support your claim that “socialism is a far more efficient and strategically sound approach to arms production”? And what do you mean by “strategically sound”? — neomac

Well I've mentioned quite a lot that the war is good for arms manufacturers, but it maybe the first time I've pointed out that the arms manufacturers don't actually want a total war, as that leads to socialism.

In the literature it's referred to as "war communism" to stress the irony that capitalist elites love immediately building what is essentially a communist central planned economy where everyone the state needs contributes what they can to the war effort completely outside any sort of free market dynamics; conscription being the biggest such socialist agenda.

Of course socialism in this context is used to simply represent top down state programs where most value is contributed on a volunteer or quasi-volunteer basis (both in terms of pay and also possibly not having much a choice in the matter), such as in Soviet economy. Of course, socialism here has nothing to do with workers owning the means of production.

The reason this is more strategically sound is that orders of magnitude more value is generated for the same cost, which should be common sense as a quasi-volunteer (especially conscription) produces enormously more soldiers for the same cost.

Think it through. Plenty of Europeans volunteered to go fight in Ukraine, how many more would volunteer (or quasi-volunteer, as in perhaps be paid something but far below market value) to work in factories producing shells. People would be lining up!! Plenty qualified people to boot.

To put 2000 posts in two months in context, I have just over 2300 posts in 8 years, and I'd say I post pretty regularly.

... and it's an average of 33 posts a day ... so possibly part of some relapse into methamphetamines. And I say that out of concern and not insult.

Philosophy can be a dangerous mind game at times and injuries do occur.

You are just describing how Russia attacks other countries. False flags are just the Russian traditional method. Or the attackers described as being "volunteers" or "local freedom fighters" and in the end, a "peace-keeping operation". — ssu

You just described how you proved my point.

I guess thanks for that.

Lol. Glenn Diesen, of course. The person who is frequently on Russia television. — ssu

Soooo, I'm not following you here, you'll need to spell it out.

By "manages the risk" what is meant is maximizing the net present value, which is basically expected gain but integrating over a longer term to take into account depreciation, discount rates and a bunch of other stuff we corporate executives like to phone up accountants about and be like "crunch the numbers on this! stat!".

1% chance of nuclear armageddon MULTIPLIED by a trillion dollars, equals 990 billion dollars (BILLION dollars man!) of net present value and is simply a win in business terms if both increasing or decreasing the risk of nuclear armageddon results in a lower net present value, and therefore would be violating fiduciary responsibility and lead to lawsuits from shareholders, which quite obviously would mean the end of the fucking world in corporate executive terms. QED in corporate speak.

Why aren't Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems not bribing Trump to push for the war in Ukraine, so they can sell more weapons? — neomac

First, in terms of general principle, the war profiteering contribution from the war in Ukraine, especially in terms of defence contractors, is in creating a far less stable world generally speaking in which it is "common sense" that more arms are needed by all parties. I.e. in stoking a new arms race.

Once adequately stoked, a fire no longer needs further kindling.

Second, even defence contractors don't want a nuclear war and even they would recognize the need for drip feed theory. Which, as the name connotes, is far from the maximalist approach to "whatever it takes" to supply arms to Ukraine.

Indeed, defence contractors don't even want too much war!!

Too much war, even in setting policy too ambitiously in arming Ukraine, would be bad for defence contractors as it would be necessary to transition to a war time economy, at least partially. What a war time economy means is a central planning and low wage, if not volunteer, basis to war production (think women building planes in WWII).

If EU states actually sat down and put themselves to the task of making enough arms as simple as shells for Ukraine they would immediately realize the only way to do it is through government mobilization of the work force (say the recently unemployed industrial work force of Europe due to cutting off Russian gas) and they would need to organize this production themselves. This wouldn't be a good thing from the perspective of the defence contractors. May even open pandoras box of the defence contractor world in that socialism is a far more efficient and strategically sound approach to arms production. We rely on quasi volunteers (i.e. paid well below the market value of mercenaries to do the same thing, made possible through the magic of patriotism) as combat soldiers so it actually stands to reason that a quasi volunteer force to produce arms (or then at least standard munitions like shells) may in fact be equally common sense.

You wouldn't want to open pandoras box would you?

God man, heaven forbid.

In other words, even from the private producers of arms point of view it is merely a truism that more chaos and death is good for business. Aristotle man, moderation is the key. There is a sweet spot of chaos and death that maximizes profits, minimizes socialism and also manages the risk of destroying the defence contractors in a nuclear war along with much of the rest of the economy (this is the "does the stock market still work in your plan" sanity check for corporate executives in this sector of the economy).

Who are they? List 3 of them. — neomac

Hmmm, well Zelensky to start, then maybe throw in a bit of Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems.

But why stop at 3?

There's all sorts of profits to be gained from war, from human trafficking and black market arms dealing to just generously supplying LNG to a gas starved Europe.

So in the same answer you don't believe Russia attacking the EU yet then you believe maybe Russia would attack the EU.

These delirious opinions should be given respect they deserve: Not worth commenting further. — ssu

You are so committed to the propaganda that you are simply unable to conceive that it's even possible for their to be a hot war between Finland and Russia without that war being 100% Russia's fault in aiming to conquer Finland. Reality is more complex than what propaganda would lead you to believe.

A Finnish-Russian war, that I predict may indeed happen, would not be Russia attacking Finland but some messy situation and a series of strange events and false flags / alleged false flags (that could be caused by literally anyone, such as cutting undersea infrastructure).

The goal would be to create a tense military situation with little actual fighting. Russia has no interest in conquering Finland and Finland has no possibility to conquer Russia obviously.

At least to start, of course once fighting starts the nob can be slowly turned up while avoiding any unwanted escalation (such as any non-Finns dying in the proposed conflict).

So it would be this sort of war.

And this isn't really my prediction but only extrapolating a bit on the analysis of Professor Glenn Diesen, who quite confidently asserts Finns are being prepared to fight an inevitable war with Russia.

So the two notions are compatible that Russia does not "attack the EU" with the intention of conquering parts, much less all, or it, and there is nevertheless a war between Russia and Finland.

Just like the war in Ukraine radically increased tensions, including nuclear tensions (if you remember those days of increasing nuclear readiness), simply because Ukraine is a European country and US / NATO was backing Ukraine (at least in terms of social media virtry signalling), now that we've all been desensitized to the war in Ukraine and it is essentially normalized and no longer viewed as a source of nuclear tensions, if you wanted another "tension dose" you'd need to upgrade.

The logical upgrade available is some sort of war between Finland and Russia as Finland is in NATO. Now, to have such a war also not lead to a nuclear war it would need to be calibrated just like the war in Ukraine was calibrated to achieve such effect and things would need to be confusing so as not to result in US and Russia fighting.

For, it is assumed that any sort of fighting whatsoever between Russia and any element of NATO would immediately result in a full blown war, but this is just a thing "people say" and assert as if it's a law of nature when obviously it is not. There is a whole spectrum of both fighting and tensions between Russia and elements of NATO that can be explored without that leading to a full war, much less a war in which Russia seeks to conquer large parts, or even any part, of the EU.

Ouch, did I poke a bear, or something? — Punshhh

You do realize this is a debate forum, and considering you weren't even addressing the points impacted by your citation of my point, certainly you can appreciate that's annoying.

Look, I’m well aware of the points you raise. But I wasn’t addressing them, I was saying what the big story is, the big headline. That the post war settlement is coming to an end and a new settlement will be reached. — Punshhh

You cite my point and respond, if you aren't responding to my point then just say so.

Now if by "aware" you mean "agree" then it's even more confusing, but if you agree on the points about narratives (aka. propaganda) that were being discussed then that's good to know we agree on those points.

Nevertheless, I disagree with this adjacent point of what the "big story is".

First I would argue that the "big story" is Western elites cynically manipulating, aka. bribing, Ukrainian elites (with the complicity of said Ukrainian elites, who definitely want to be bribed), into fighting a war that could not be won, no one ever intended to win, and in which hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians died and it's not even over.

That would definitely be "the big story" in my book of stories related to this affair.

As for Europe rearming. I seriously doubt that is any story in terms of actually fighting the Russians.

I'd say they story there is that actual war in Europe and constantly claiming Russia will take all Eastern Europe, maybe Western Europe too (indeed even the US according to the "fight them over there so we don't need to fight them here" rhetoric), if not stopped in Ukraine, was not enough to really get war profiteering going.

European elites may not like Trump but they see the opportunity to get that war spending finally going by playing the Trump-Europe personality friction like a full string orchestra.

The U.S. and Russia have been sparring since the end of WW2. That was part of the Cold War narrative with occasional proxy wars, crises etc. It worked for a long period maybe 70 or 80yrs. That has now come to an end and the geopolitical tectonic plates are moving. — Punshhh

If by sparring (of which the whole point of that word is to indicate no one dies) you mean "fighting proxy wars" (in which many people die), then correct.

Maybe geopolitical "skirmishing" was the word you were looking for to denote fighting that is less intense than a full blown war in which the idea is to relate the size and role of a skirmish in an actual war to that of an actual proxy war in relation to a global conflict between superpowers.

An important thing to remember in that settlement was the caretaker role of the US in Europe. This is why European countries haven’t developed powerful armies. This is why they have become complacent , always relying on Uncle Sam to do the heavy lifting. This suited both part parties. This was not likely to change much until Trump came along and trashed NATO. This combined with Putin’s imperial ambitions have changed the landscape and a new equilibrium will have to be found. — Punshhh

I simply disagree, the equilibrium is exactly as it was before. No one (who matters; aka. decides what the propaganda is rather than their job being to believe it) actually believes that Russia will actually attack the EU. Ukraine was a particular case in terms of culture, strategic military implications, and resources.

Another war maybe fought in Finland, but that will just be to sacrifice Finns to keep up the pretence of this amazing confrontation (and so sell more arms).

This inevitably results in a lot of chaos and shouting. — Punshhh

... and also people dying. You seem to always leave that part out, such as the "Big story" is arms being purchased ... not all the dead Ukrainians.

The story here is that Europe will now re-arm. This will take a decade or more. In the meantime Russia is weak and can be held at bay for that decade. — Punshhh

... Again ... why only now? (even if true, which it's not in any remotely meaningful "preparing for total war with Russia" sense)

But same question to you as with @ssu ... the rhetoric has not changed, so how are you not implicitly accepting European leaders where lying about that for years, drip feeding weapons to Ukraine to prop it up just enough to not collapse spectacularly (before the US election), and therefore the "story" being "Europe will now re-arm" is because they've been crying wolf and only see an actual wolf now because the US (specifically Trump as you've said) has exposed them to the consequences of their own actions of antagonizing a far more powerful neighbour for cynical reasons?

How can you just casually skip over the fact the EU obviously wasn't rearming in 2022 in response to literally New Hitler invading a European country and EU countries are bound to be next if New Hitler isn't stopped in Ukraine ... but obviously could have with things like the "biggest arms deal in EU history" and the like, or then even a little bit of actual war time economy measures to support Ukraine (such as essentially volunteer based factories to produce enough shells for Ukraine)?

I.e. how can you just casually skip over these obvious lies and deception by European leaders for 3 years, if not many years before, without exposing your position as just repeating whatever "pro-Ukrainians dying" propaganda you heard last.

The fly in the ointment is the possibility that Trump will gift Ukraine to Putin. This will embolden Putin allowing him to replenish his army and threaten Europe before it re-arms and will have a destabilising effect on geopolitics. — Punshhh

WTF are you talking about?

The fly in what ointment? The delicious ointment of provoking and then propping up a war by drip feeding in weapons for war profiteering purposes, only to suddenly realize antagonizing a far more powerful military while being nearly fully dependent on another great power an Ocean away (that has since decades being talking about it's "pivot" to an Ocean even farther away) was terrible state craft?

Now, if your question is why would European leaders go down such a self-destructive path which, at best, renders Europe a poor vassal backwaters to the United States?

Well the answer is that the European leaders that did this are essentially just organized crime kingpins and organized crime have benefited a great deal from this war.

In the meantime Russia is capable of throwing a vast amount of artillery at her opponent and is developing her drone capability quickly. A drone arms race is not good and needs to be choked off asap. — Punshhh

Ah yes, in the meantime Russia can just casually outproduce the largest economic block on the planet.

... but I thought the holy ointment was propping up total war in Ukraine while not even making token efforts to match production rates and only starting to think about that part of "being essentially at war with Russia" now that Trump wants to make peace with Russia as that's in American's interest to do, and will lower energy prices and get US access to all sorts of minerals and so on.

So considering war with Russia your "ointment" ... how exactly do you see choking off a drones arms race? Arms control is a deescalatory process of arms limitations, but the "story here" is Europe will re-arm ... so you're idea is Europe will rearm while asking Russia to kindly exnay on the onesdray, just kind of cool it a little, maybe just a forceful "knock-it-off", or a strongly worded letter will get the job done?

This situation could become very expensive as Putin is throwing all his remaining money at it. This needs to be avoided and Trump throwing a spanner in the works really doesn’t help. — Punshhh

Why would your program of choking off an arms race become expensive?

Also, it's called "oil", which is turned into an obscure economic thing called "revenue", which renders the phrase "Putin is throwing all his remaining money at it" basically nonsense. This sort of complicated businessney thing maybe over your head but I, as a long time corporate executive, could try to explain it to you.

Well, you answered it yourself. — ssu

No, I did not answer the rebuttal myself.

Well, because the Trump team is basically hostile to Ukraine and on the side of Russia. So yes, that indeed is really a change here. — ssu

The points here are twain:

First, they've been saying the exact same thing since 2022 in order to justify pouring arms into Ukraine, so for you're argument to work you must recognize that from 2022 to 2024 "saying stuff" like Putin is literally Hitler and we need to him in Ukraine and so on was pure propaganda that no leader in Europe actually believed.

I.e. that you're argument structure is that it was the boy who cried wolf for 2 years and now, NOW, there's actually a wolf, trust me bro.

That's the first point you need to contend with as the rhetoric has not changed.

Second, even 2024 and 2025 there is still zero evidence of the EU planning, preparing, much less implementing some semblance of a war time economy in order to fight the Russians, not even a little bit to just reach shell parity for Ukraine in Russia.

Is it really that hard to make enough artillery shells?

There's industrial layoffs in Europe all over the place, idle capacity ... why not get people to work making shells.

Which still wouldn't make a lick of sense to only start doing now (if any part of the rhetoric represented the slightest true belief), as even if we recognize that painting Russia as a threat to the EU was bullshit there was still the "rules based order" and democracy and borders, Borders man! (outside the Middle-East of course) that needed defended.

Furthermore, even if it's completely delusional, a large majority of Europeans simply believe the propaganda that Ukraine good, Russia bad, Putin's literally Hitler, if Ukraine falls then literally the rest of Europe will be next, and so on, even more so at the start of the war ... so not only could idle capacity be put into making shells but there would be a large group of recently laid off industrial workers essentially volunteering for the production lines, not to mention millions of just able bodied people's (and even women with zero construction or industrial experience whatsoever could rapidly skill up and not only produce simple things like shells but far more complicated things like fighter aircraft, in WWII ... but with more eduction, more automated tooling, more engineers and so on, this cannot be accomplished today?).

At some point you have to answer these sorts of questions.

And the answer is there was never any intention, whether in Europe or the United States, to have any other outcome in the war in Ukraine other than the one we are currently seeing (of the Ukrainian military lines breaking).

The reason there is no crash program to produce things as simple as artillery shells is because that would help Ukraine quite a lot, and as importantly does not generate obscene profits for military contractors.

The strategy was always to drip feed weapons to Ukraine to at least get to the next election while still being able to at least pretend things are fine.

Ah yes, that beautiful realm of cognitive dissonance where Russia is militarily inept, on it's last legs, and simultaneously an existential threat to Europe.

The Russian economy and military are in shambles. It will take decades to recover! Also, they will be at the gates of Berlin in no time: we must militarize! — Tzeentch

It's Schrödinger's war machine.

There is no cognitive dissonance: the narratives are superimposed simultaneously without that bothering anyone in the slightest.