Weak and pathetic would be Iran unable to strike Israel: missiles intercepted, launchers interdicted, no common and control.

Iran is defeating Israel and US missile defence.

As for this recent attack on US bases, seems the gamble was Trump would take that as a win and not escalate further. In this sort of escalation game, doing nothing keeps the tension, so once you've "responded" then the other side has the option to deescalate.

However, Iran sent missiles, I heard 40 missiles but it's hard to verify, at Israel as an immediate response.

Iran has demonstrated it can survive mass assassination of commanders and then retaliate the same day (after Israel's initial strike), keep hitting Israel everyday, defeat missile defences of US and Israel, clearly manage to deal with continued covert activity in Iran, and generally unite the people.

If this is the end of US involvement, then Iran in the final analysis Iran deterred further US involvement and can keep striking Israel to missile exhaustion, and once that happens Iran can produce cheap drones to keep sending at Israel as well as the odd ballistic missile.

Israel has no advantageous end game it can perform by itself (nuclear weapons being not exactly advantageous).

The situation is difficult to evaluate as there's strict censorship now in both Iran and Israel, so it's difficult to know what's going on, but we do know Iran can and is continuing to strike Israel and Israel missile defences and air power can't do anything about that.

So already a massive win for Iran, even if more Iranians have died.

I honestly had zero clue if Iranian ballistic missiles would work as intended, that they could manage to fire them off, and in large numbers day after day. It's impressive. Not easy.

I had to verify it directly on Truth Social, be sure it's not a prank, full message:

Iran has officially responded to our Obliteration of their Nuclear Facilities with a very weak response, which we expected, and have very effectively countered. There have been 14 missiles fired — 13 were knocked down, and 1 was “set free,” because it was headed in a nonthreatening direction. I am pleased to report that NO Americans were harmed, and hardly any damage was done. Most importantly, they’ve gotten it all out of their “system,” and there will, hopefully, be no further HATE. I want to thank Iran for giving us early notice, which made it possible for no lives to be lost, and nobody to be injured. Perhaps Iran can now proceed to Peace and Harmony in the Region, and I will enthusiastically encourage Israel to do the same. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA — Trump

If this is true, turns out the code is that ALL CAPS is a bluff (that's likely to work because ... all caps, what can you do) and normal punctuation is supposed to be trustworthy.

Wars over, CONGRATULATIONS WORLD, IT’S TIME FOR PEACE!

Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Honestly, I think we can go ahead and wrap up this whole philosophy business.

Medvedev has a reputation for making extreme statements, though. It's hard to say whether they're actually serious or just looking to provoke chaos/a reaction in the US-Israeli camp. — Tzeentch

US and Israel have teased if not directly threatened nuclear weapons use, so Medvedev / Russia is at minimum just counter threatening for the deterrent effect.

Obviously threatening nuclear weapons use is not some sort of special right of the US and Israel and others can do it too.

Israel and the US need to take into consideration that Iran is supplied with nuclear weapons, including North Korean, but also needs to take into account that even after a nuclear strike on Iran that Iran could nevertheless complete development of a nuclear weapon and strike back. It would be diplomatically horrendous obviously for Israel to strike Iran with nuclear weapons, but that may not even prevent Iran developing nukes of their own and counter-striking.

Without nuclear weapons, I really don't see how Israel could potentially resolve things on their own. When your opening move is assassinating negotiators, it's difficult to declare that everyone had fun and to just call it a day.

If the US also can't force a resolution due to anti-air supply by Russia and China, very quickly the only option left is nuclear weapons.

If Iran (and Russia and co.) can successfully deter Israel from using nuclear weapons then it's really not in a good position.

For example of why keeping it "symbolic" is not a risk averse move, Trump's statement about Iranian retaliation was literally all caps and categorical:

ANY RETALIATION BY IRAN AGAINST THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILL BE MET WITH FORCE FAR GREATER THAN WHAT WAS WITNESSED TONIGHT. — Trump

So faced with these kinds of statements, you'd find some other non-attacking-US way to retaliate if you wanted to avoid escalation.

If you don't want to avoid escalation, then that would only be reasonable with assurances from Russia, such as may have been provided in the Putin's meeting with the Iranian foreign minister this morning, on the subject of air defence.

Regardless of the state of Iran's current air defence system, Russia can provide more. Just as Russia essentially wiped out Ukrainian air defences in the first days of the war and had air supremacy, but then with the West's help Ukraine started to regain air deterrence, shot a few planes down, pushed Russia's planes back to operating behind the line of contact, Russia could potentially do (assuming their systems are good enough) the same to the US in Iran.

NBC News’ Richard Engel says the nature of the strike and the well-defended target indicate Iran’s retaliatory strike was a “symbolic attack.” Qatar was also reportedly informed ahead of the attack. — RogueAI

We'll have to see how Trump responds.

Why I (personally) would avoid such an attack if I wanted to avoid escalation, is that Trump may anyways react to the "symbol" the same as a non-symbolic attack.

And if you reached out to the US to try to be reassured that your symbolic attack won't cause further escalation ... how exactly would you trust anything the US says about it?

To me, situation seems beyond trading symbols, but I definitely could be wrong. We'll have to see what Trump does tomorrow to see what direction things are going in.

In addition to this attack, Iran is still striking Israel, so pressure is anyways quite high to go to war with Iran, so why add a symbol to the mix if you wanted to deescalate.

Ah, I see. Iran wins if they get beaten to a bloody pulp but manage to avoid complete annihilation. Right. — RogueAI

Yes that's the spirit.

Obviously the Iranian people don't win in such a situation.

Your claims about air supremacy are fantastical. Neither U.S. or Israel have lost a plane yet and I will be very surprised if Iran ever manages to take one down. — RogueAI

Then why don't we see ballistic missiles being intercepted in boost phase? If you have air supremacy, you can just fly around and B-line to any ballistic missile launch and shoot at those missiles when most vulnerable.

That's not happening, so my conclusion is Iran is able to deny airspace to cover their ballistic missile launches. If they have sufficient deterrence, Israeli planes would just leave the area. If they didn't have deterrence, Israeli planes would be hunting for launches of ballistic missiles.

However, regardless of Iran's capability, Russia and China can supply more, and I don't know what Iran's plan is or decision making criteria. All I can say is that if I was making decisions for Iran I wouldn't escalate with the US unless I had assurances of anti-air supply from Russia and China.

Now, I have not said that what follows from all my points is that Iran will therefore win an air war with the US.

My main points are:

1. If Iran is trying to escalate, or even simply risking escalation, with the US, it's only a reasonable thing to do with in a state of belief that Iran will be supplied with air defence from Russia and China (that they "got their back") and also in the state of belief that those systems will work.

2. All Iranian critical military assets are under ground, so Iran maybe preserving anti-air capability. They clearly have a lot of ballistic missiles that work, so they may have also a lot of anti-air missiles.

Of course, there are other potential explanations for Iran's actions, and it's possible that no system on the planet could defeat US air power.

However, if you were Russia and China, defeating the US in a large air battle would be something you would probably want to do, so they may try. If the cost are to Iran, they may have little reason not to give it a go.

Iran is not going to militarily win against Israel and/or America. — RogueAI

Bombs don't win wars. Since Israel attacked Iran first and its objective is regime change, if Iran survives that's a win for Iran in this context.

This claim that Israel has air supremacy and flying over Iran at will I find incredulous, as then we'd see ballistic missiles being intercepted in the boost phase, which I've seen no evidence of.

What I find more likely is that Iran is using its air defences to cover ballistic missile launches and letting Israel bomb non-critical military asset as much as it wants. Everything military-critical in Iran is under ground ... so Israel bombing the surface is mostly just attritting Israel capacity. Any fixed asset Israel could just strike with a standoff weapon if you did manage to deny the air space to aircraft (i.e. there's no point expending surface-to-air missiles and exposing radar to protect fixed assets on the surface; even if you were successful they just send cruise or ballistic missiles of their own). Concrete buildings cannot only be rebuilt (mostly at lower cost than Israel spends to blow them up), but they aren't assets critical to war fighting so it doesn't impact the war outcome anyways.

Iran is huge, the surface area and mountainous region of essentially one entire Rocky Mountain chain in addition to one whole France, so Iran will focus air defence to ensure ballistic missile launches aren't intercepted in boost phase.

They would turn their radars on to check for planes, and reserve their anti-air capability for any planes that come at them. If there are no planes, they can launch, if planes come at them to intercept launch they don't launch and try to take down the planes. If they have established successful air denial bubbles (i.e. SEAD), those won't cover much of Iran, so Israel can still go around bombing plenty of other stuff, as well as use plenty of standoff missiles systems to make strikes anyways even covered by air denial systems.

However, regardless of Iran anti-air capability, Russia and China have far more than Iran. If you keep supplying Iran with radars and missiles, you'll eventually find ways to take down US planes and then keep doing it even if those systems get destroyed also. Iran may have a limited anti-air stock, but Russia and China can provide far more equipment and missiles. And they can keep producing them and resupplying Iran even for years! Could be the Ukraine of the air that we're still talking about in 3 years time!

Israel and the US have flipped the on-switch to war with Iran, nothing can force Iran to switch it off other than actual defeat, which would likely require a ground invasion and millions of troops. It is to Russia and China's advantage that Iran simply never switch the war off, not their fault there's a war, and so Russia and China maybe quite persuasive in their reassurances.

Iran also has reasons to never switch off the war, in that Israel may just attack them again later so letting them recover serves no military or political purpose.

If peace with Israel is not possible, because they keep on assassinating lead negotiators for example, then Israel turning on a formal war is a better state of affairs.

Since Israel air capacity is limited (for example compared to the US), the smart thing to do (considering the US may join the war), is to collect as much signal intelligence on the F-35 and prepare a giant air battle if and when the US joins the war.

That Israel can blow up concrete buildings meantime, assassinate a few professors and commanders and the like, is a reasonable cost to pay.

In order to "win" against a US lead air war, Iran will need to prevent the US from establishing true air supremacy to carry out a truly massive bombing campaign. As we see with Russia-Ukraine, even with limited resources (that are continuously re-supplied by the West) Ukraine can prevent Russia from establishing air supremacy and this is how Ukraine can stay in the fight.

If Iran (with Russian and Chinese backing) can make a similar situation in Iran, of limiting the US to standoff strikes, then they essentially "win", as there isn't even a ground game and nothing much is going to be accomplished with only standoff munitions against a country of 90 million people.

Of course, maybe stealth is essentially magical technology that nothing can touch.

But, assuming Russia and China have carefully studied this technology and are confident they have systems that can defeat it, then enticing the US into a giant air battle over Iran and defeating the US, would be an absolutely massive geopolitical shift.

Therefore, Russia and China, assuming they have geopolitical ambitions, would be preparing with Iran for such an air war and then to sustain it with resupply (which is super easy to do considering Iran connected to Russia by the Caspian).

Considering Iran would be in a far worse position if it were to completely lose control of the air -- so its missiles intercepted in boost phase and susceptible to way more bombing and interdiction of everything it does -- if I was Iran I would only escalate with the US if I had reassurance from Russia and China that they will supply air defence systems for a giant air battle and then long term battle of air attrition.

Without such an assurance, I would try to keep the conflict limited to Israel, inflict maximum damage over the short term, and deplete their air defence to make the susceptible to drones. In a mutually missile-depleted scenario, Iran has a massive advantage due to being far larger in surface area and population.

Iran coordinated the attacks on the American air base in Qatar with Qatari officials and gave advanced notice that attacks were coming to minimize casualties, according to three Iranian officials familiar with the plans. — NOS4A2

Iran may want to keep things as friendly as possible with the gulf states, but nevertheless escalate with the US.

So giving advance warning to Qatar isn't necessarily indicative.

Also, if you don't want to escalate with the US, you don't need any symbolic strikes at all in this situation (as that anyways risks further escalation), as you can just keep striking Israel to demonstrate capability and willingness to strike things.

It could be some weird logic or then part of some negotiated theatre with the US (give Trump a further optics win of "they could do nothing! nothing!").

But weird logic and diplomacy scenarios seem unlikely as trust and diplomacy with the US is at zero.

Trump is also erratic and unpredictable so there would be no way to be certain that Trump would view retaliation as symbolic, or not take extreme issue with the symbol anyways; he's already used extreme language about any potential Iranian retaliation. Therefore, if you want to avoid escalation you'd probably conclude you simply don't need to strike US bases at all, and just keep hitting Israel, if keeping it localized is the goal.

If you want to keep it local with Israel but want to deter further US strikes ... then you need real deterrence and not a weak symbol (which just invites more strikes), so you'd want to sent US service people back in boxes, show trump the domestic political consequences of further war.

How would that happen? Nothing going on in the Middle East will change the fact the U.S. military is the strongest in the world, the U.S. economy the richest in the world. — RogueAI

If Iran "wins" this war with Israel it is a massive boost for Russia's and China's lead counter-order, further eroding US credibility. However, it's only a proxy failing, like Ukraine, and the US empire could "put it behind us". So would be a big victory for Iran, but further improve Russia and China's position as being able to credibly back opposition to the US.

However, if the US went all in on Iran and then Iran won a conflict directly with the US, that would be a fatal embarrassment to US power and technology, as well as massive damage to US stockpiles, military and domestic moral etc.

Americans coming back in boxes in an unpopular war that in addition America loses, would be catastrophically different than just Israel losing the war with Iran.

Of course, they would still need to win the war with Israel and then the US to realize such geopolitical gainz.

So, I'm not saying that's what they want to do, but if they think they could "defeat" the American war system in Iran, then the firs step is to take advantage of US striking Iran to escalate with the US.

Obviously, escalating with the US isn't good for actual Iranian citizens; that should go without saying.

Iran has fired missiles at US military bases in Qatar and Iraq — CNN

Concerning this retaliation, one of the most important details is that it comes after Iran's foreign minister meeting with Putin (I think literally this morning).

This is Russia-China's opportunity to essentially unseat the US as the world's leading power.

I feel it unlikely that it is simply face saving, because they could just keep hitting Israel if they didn't want further escalation with the US.

They don't need to "show strength" (both domestically and internationally) by hitting the US, as they can just keep hitting Israel with more missiles to accomplish that.

If they didn't want further escalation they would just repeat JD Vance's "we're not at war" and be like ... cool

Missiles on the way according to random social media posts.

Honestly have no idea what's real and what's AI though, we'll have to wait confirmation .... just confirmed on CNN, so seems happening.

Sounds more like Libertarianism, not socialism — Harry Hindu

You literally just put a few sentences before dictionaries as the ultimate arbiter in this discussion:

All of philosophy is contained in language which Merriam-Webster provides guidance for using. — Harry Hindu

And when the definition of a more authoritative dictionary is provided (the one Google uses and provides as the top result) ... you just dismiss it entirely and you know better than the English professors at Oxford.

Sounds more like Libertarianism, not socialism. — Harry Hindu

What exactly is the point of contradicting the dictionary?

Sure, you can use symbols arbitrarily for your own private use — Harry Hindu

There are endless additional meanings to words that have technical meanings in specific disciplines and tradecraft, colloquially referred to as technical jargon. Some of them are in dictionaries if they are common enough, but very few.

Philosophy also has technical jargon. For example using "obtain" to refer to something that is an actuality to differentiate with truth value of a proposition (about those things that actually exist). That definition is not provided by google's citing Oxford Languages, and whether it appears in some dictionary or another does not matter to it clearly having a specific meaning and use in a philosophy context.

It must be that the are using anarchy as defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, not as defined in your "Marxist Dictionary". — Harry Hindu

Not all of philosophy is contained in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Furthermore, a dictionary's goal is to list the most common uses of a word, and not many, if any, meanings specific to a tradecraft or discipline.

Nevertheless, the philosophy of anarchism is provided by the Oxford language dictionary that is used by google. So, if you googled "define anarchism" you literally had to skip over Google providing the definition right at the top, which is:

Dictionary
Definitions from Oxford Languages · Learn more
anarchy
/ˈanəki/
noun: anarchy

1. a state of disorder due to absence or non-recognition of authority or other controlling systems.
Similar:

2. the organization of society on the basis of voluntary cooperation, without political institutions or hierarchical government; anarchism. — Google citing Oxford Languages

So I hope this resolves the mystery of the dictionary, and that definitely in many context anarchy simply means chaos (what it originally meant) but in other contexts it means a political philosophy, most notably without hierarchal government.

But key word being "organization" so clearly the idea is not some sort of chaotic free for all.

You're leaving out the part where the socialist goal is for the state to be the only owner of property - privately owned and not shared with the rest of the world. Government property isn't much different than private property in that the government still has to defend it by force. — Harry Hindu

That is not the "socialist goal". Definitely the goal of some socialist projects, but even then that was not the final objective but some transitory tactical necessity on the way to communism. Also an important caveat, property in this context is the means of production and not consumable resulting products, which can still be owned by individuals in most socialist schemes. Other socialists want more workers owning the businesses they are working in, and not state ownership.

Unclear what you mean by the state owning everything, but still privately owned and not shared with the rest of the world.

Then why do so many people on this forum conflate anarchy with libertarianism - as in do whatever you want? — Harry Hindu

I have not seen this conflating, so please provide examples.

However, anarchy is one political philosophy that is derived from or compatible with European libertarianism. We don't hear much of this because the debate for religious freedom (that your Lord couldn't decide one day you're a catholic and the next day you're protestant), also the basic principle that actions that don't harm others need not be policed, choosing your own profession, selling your flower at the mill of your choosing or milling it yourself! (and not the local Lord's mill), women not being the property of men, and the other original "liberties" that made someone a free man or women instead of a serf, and made someone morally autonomous instead of ordered about by kings and priests, was obviously won by the libertarian side in the debate with feudal moral and political hierarchy and people-ownership.

Where freedom comes to mean "do whatever you want" is because you can keep building on this concept of political freedom, making you an equal in society with equal rights and equal vote, to come up with consumer freedom of "do whatever you want" in the sense of "buy this thing you don't need because you can do whatever you want as a free person!".

"You're free, do whatever you want" is never meant as some categorical claim, but only makes sense in specific contexts with assumed limits: "You're free, do whatever you want, buy this legally available item and have a good time", or "You're free, do whatever you want, so have sex with whoever you want ... but make sure it's consensual and also not with animals and not in public and oh yeah not with a child and so on".

"You're free to spend your own money", "you're free sexually" is clearly never meant in common discourse as some sort of total freedom. You are obviously not "free", in a legal sense, to spend your money on hitmen. You are not "free", in a legal sense, to place no limits on your sexuality.

The original meanings of freedom and liberty were in contrast to feudal structures that don't exist anymore, so most people today don't really have a clear idea of what these words are supposed to mean in any political sense, except in contrast to dictatorships (free world vs dictatorships people still clearly recognize the difference; but the words no longer really hold much meaning as differentiating political philosophies within Western traditions themselves, as essentially no one advocates for theocracy, or absolute Monarchy, or we all become serfs again and so on, so liberty and freedom are essentially the only game in town and is incorporated in essentially a feel good way into political campaigns and shampoo commercials).

I understand your point.

My point is that we don't really want to have inflation on the term genocide or it to be a popular derogatory adjective as "fascist" or "nazi" describing something that it isn't. With genocide we are talking about the intent of total destruction of people. — ssu

If we agree on the basic physical facts, then we are more or less in agreement.

The reason to use the word genocide is that is that the crime of genocide is defined in international law as those acts you're talking about committed with the intent of destroying a people:

Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. — Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide

So, once the Nazis started systematic murder with the intent of destroying all the Jews (as well as other groups such as invalids) they were committing genocide. How successful they are at completing the objective would not impact the definition of the crime of genocide. Had they been stopped earlier by the Soviets and only succeeded in killing 50 000 Jews at that point: still genocide.

What is normally the difficult to prove part is the intention. As mass chaos and violence and death can be presented as carried out for some other goal.

For example, the US government will argue that if mass deaths occurred in Vietnam, Cambodia, Philippines, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and so on, that the intention was to achieve democracy and not destroy a people, in whole or in part.

Which is of course an entirely plausible argument as we may have many things to critique about US foreign police, the CIA, pentagon, and so on, as well as question whether the intention really is "democracy" or more mundane imperialist objectives, but I think we (definitely you and me, if not others) would certainly agree that the American people and government simply aren't genocidal (in the 21st century; they probably would be if political groups, such as communists, was in the definition of genocide but that was left out exactly to avoid that discussion). Americans, on the whole, simply don't have a culture of wanting to exterminate whole groups of peoples, and that has been reflected in US foreign policy in the 21st century.

Now, in this case of Israel, the "difficult to prove" part is simply not present. Whereas other cases the controversy is concerning the intent, especially institutional intent (such as even controversy of "the proof" that Hitler really did order and know about the Nazi genocide) Israeli culture and Israeli politicians, ministers, generals and so on, openly declare their intent to destroy the Palestinian people, including all the children are also enemies and must be destroyed.

How the laws concerning genocide are written is that the threshold of mass killing to be a genocide is super low (as the goal is to prevent genocide, and so trigger responses at a low threshold) and that the difficult part to prove is the intent..

Israel openly declares their intent to commit genocide, then go and do exactly those genocidal acts (such as mass killing and starvation) that they declared was their plan.

It's like if a murder happens and there's lots of circumstantial evidence pointing at one suspect and a lot that can be debated, plausibly denied, not at all a clear cut case ... but then the murderer keeps on confessing to the murder, keeps on describing exactly how he or she committed the murder, explaining why the murder was necessary and doing everything possible to disambiguate the situation. The debate is over about the circumstantial evidence once someone explains in detail how they committed the murder, why they committed the murder, boasts about committing the murder, and they are the only plausible possible suspect based on the material evidence that does exist (even if not conclusive in itself; maybe one plausible deniability scenario is "an accident" ... well difficult to maintain if the suspect keeps on declaring "it wasn't an accident! I killed that piece of shit!").

Hear hear! :100: :up: :heart:

Now the clergy that rules of Iran can really go back to the times of the 1980's when it was in war. The idea that Iran's regime would fall because of this is an example of the utter stupidity now so prevalent. I mean really, think of yourself and your country that you live in. If two foreign countries that are thousands of kilometers away from you suddenly started bombing your country, why would your response be to attack your own government? Nope. Iran will try to transition to a wartime economy now. — ssu

We are in full agreement on the military analysis.

The only intrinsic advantage (all else being equal) an invading force has is the initial invasion when taking the defenders by surprise, as it's super costly to mobilize if then turns out there is not a war. Furthermore, aggressor can just wait for demobilization and attack then, so it's really not an easy situation for the defenders to be in.

"Easing into" offensive action has zero military advantages as we are seeing.

But obviously all the military planners involved know that so it's difficult to make sense of what exactly the plan was. The only theory that fits all the data is magical thinking driven by Netanyahu's personal problems and enabled by fanatical religious fervour of his political allies.

Yet you should give a thought here also to why is Iran, of all countries, so hellbent to be against Israel in the first place? — ssu

The alternative view is that Iran supports the Palestinian cause due to real sympathies. Since Israel maintains Palestinians as an occupied people without any rights, the Iranian policy to support them doesn't go away. If Israel made a liveable peace with the Palestinians and other neighbours then Iran would no longer be "against them", even if they didn't agree with the peace terms it would no longer be their problem.

Iran also correctly identifies Israel as a Western colonial project with the fundamental goal of dividing Islam, which was explicit Western policy after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The West could have kept the Ottoman Empire intact; there's no intrinsic reason why a polity must be broken up simply due to military defeat; the reason was to remove the possibility of geopolitical competitor from reemerging down the line.

The general strategy of strife and chaos in the Middle East proposed by @Tzeentch is definitely correct; where I have doubts is that recent Israeli actions in Palestine and elsewhere are fully an extension of that policy compared to Israel's own policy (that then rides on and also exploits the Wests general policy).

Well, a lot of countries have a lot of resources that the neocons don't control. International trade is for that. In the end, the resources of some country don't justify war, because those resources never make wars actually profitable as in the end they cost a lot more than just to buy the Goddam resources by trade. Neocons and other imperialists give as reasons the natural resources of some country as a valid reason to invade them, but in the real world this never goes out so simple. — ssu

Exactly why I say the US is not pursuing some rational grand strategy from the point of view of some coherent Imperial interest. These resource wars do not accomplish anything and only weaken the US' real power base which is presiding over the global trade system and being generally admired.

The toppest level view of what we see happening, I would propose is that after the fall of the Soviet Union the cold warriors had nothing much to do in any rational US imperial project and so pushed for and succeeded in making new conflicts in order to, more-or-less, entertain their sense of importance. To use a tired analogy, they still had their hands on the Cold War hammers and they couldn't help but use them. A better understanding of what we call Neocons are the more violent faction of the cold warriors who need new violence to find meaning. Hence the desire for full spectrum dominance, war's at all times, such as with Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq again, North Korea, Iran, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and clandestine operations all over the world to control political outcomes.

Of course they need some nominal reason for the war, such as resources, but they obviously have not been profitable wars, but they keep doing it as the real reason is to satiate their psychological need for conflict in which it "feels cool" to get together in secret rooms and discuss what to do; whereas in peace time that just doesn't feel so adrenaline inducing, kind of boring actually. Pathologically psychotic people can only go through the fantasy so many times before they develop the inevitable need to act out the fantasy.

Which brings up an important dynamic of what's happening now, is that the Cold Warriors are all super old, and they can't stop the younger generation slowly taking over (due to things like dying), and so there's now people like Tulsi Gabbard and JD Vance in positions of power, who went and actually fought in the Neocon wars, so regardless of their personal ideology and objectives, they at least live in reality and not the Neocon fantasy. Right now these factions have reached the compromise of "blow at least something up, but not fully engage in a disastrous war; and really big explosions! Fucking HUGE ASS explosions!".

Just encountered this channel today.

This guy predicts a ground invasion of Iran by the US:



The reasons being that:

1. Iran wants a US ground invasion
2. Israel wants a US ground invasion
3. American people and military planners don't want a US ground invasion
4. Donald Trump wants a disastrous ground invasion of Iran and a US civil war at the same time

And therefore, 1, 2, and 4 are going to get what they want.

Interesting point (though very unsure if accurate points), Israel's goal is to help collapse the US empire (such as getting it into an unwindable war with Iran) as it stands to inherit the US military infrastructure in the Middle East and so dominate the region for many generations to come. A sort of Charlemagne to the US's Pax Romana.

It's unclear to me how that would technically work, even just considering the supply chain issues, but certainly some version of it is possible if the entire region is in smouldering ruins.

The whole theory seems far fetched to me, but seems interesting to reflect on.

He also claims to predict history, so we will have to watch his career with great interest.

In other news ...

Pakistan condemns Trump's Iran bombing after nominating him for Nobel Peace Prize — Reuters

Just what genocide? — ssu

The genocide is an openly declared policy such as starving the entire population and bombing every hospital and university, and horrendous crimes in themselves even considered in isolation to mass murder, such as sniping children, proudly boasted about by the perpetrators.

There is nothing to analyze or debate about these facts. It is as clear as anything taken for common knowledge such as the sun shining upon the earth.

If you want to live in denial about it, then you weld your soul to the fate of these evil doers. So I'd consider it carefully if you entertain the possibility of an afterlife.

Or if I misunderstand you and there's multiple genocides to consider at the moment, you're just asking which one I'm talking about, then in that case I am referencing all the genocides currently being perpetrated by Israel.

I agree with you. This is Likud party's main line: there doesn't have to be any peace with the Palestinians, there can be a perpetual war as far it is low intensity and doesn't cost too much. And that has worked for decades now, whereas trying to do a peace with the Palestinians has been represented as utterly impossible, because it failed. — ssu

To make some sort of plausible attempt at peace, Israel would have to stop its settler activity.

That would be the bare minimum of Israel stopping at some line in the sand and then trying to negotiate some modus vivendi around that, which may include things like offering compensation for land already stolen and obviously some pathway for Palestinians to have rights; obviously 2 state solution being the only viable option if it's assume Israel "needs to be race superiority based in Jewishness".

And that's the bare minimum. If the US federal government was still kicking native Americans off their land today, you think they wouldn't still be resisting that? You think it would be the native population that "can't accept peace" when the US government keeps chipping away at their land. And that's just the land, imagine if the native Americans had also no rights.

This is the main issue that Trump in his ineptness doesn't understand. The only options are limited strikes. Trump should ask himself, just how long did he fight the Houthis? How long? 30 days and that was it, and they are quite alive and kicking. — ssu

We agree here. Also why I think this really isn't "Trump's war" but Netanyahu needed an escalation for his own problems, thought he could get Trump to go along.

The evidence that Trump and US elites broadly speaking didn't want this war is that there's no shock and awe. If you actually through you could smack Iran down from the air you'd go all in day 1, maximum air power, try to collapse the command and control, try to collapse civil society, absolutely pedal to the metal to establish air supremacy on all of Iran and keep hitting every possible military asset and especially convoy of any kind.

When analyst talked about a war with Iran being hard to win before, it was assuming maximum and relentless shock and awe.

Limited strikes by Israel (due to simply being way smaller) and then limited strikes by the US is the absolute worst strategy, as Iran can now transition smoothly to a total war system, and even better now after the US strikes knows exactly what these bunker busters can do.

So this idea that Israel has "softened up" Iran, mentioned in the mainstream media, is just widely naive as to how warfare works. Why Ukraine lost 20% of its territory in like a single week was because it did not transition to total war (as that's costly if you aren't sure a war is coming) and Russia maximized the advantage during that transition.

Point being, maybe Trump did understand it, and why he didn't just go and preemptively strike Iran, but he's not in a political position to just leave Netanyahu high and dry.

He maybe screaming for peace now precisely because he is able to understand generals explain that they can't do much, a message he's likely to believe considering they couldn't even defeat the Houthis. Whether the generals were over enthusiastic or he was overenthusiastic, it's hard to imagine the experience increased his enthusiasm for an air Vs mountain war.

This is behind the absolute stupidity that the neocons have spread for many decades of Iran being an existential threat to Israel and the US. The politically incorrect and utterly out of the Overton window is the fact that Iranian nuclear deterrent would be to deter Israeli nuclear deterrent, not to be used in an all out attack on Israel. Why would Iran want tens of millions of it's own citizens to perish? There's no reason.

The fact is that if Iran would have a nuclear deterrent, the US response would be similar as it was to North Korea. Bill Clinton was the last president that truly thought of attacking North Korea in the similar way as Trump has now attacked Iran. Americans too are sane in the end: they attack and occupy countries that don't have a nuclear deterrence capability. Unconditional surrender, occupation of the whole country and regime change are exactly the things that countries with nuclear weapons will opt to use them against. — ssu

I agree with all this.

Iran, like Russia, represents a lot of resources that the neocons can't control, so both they and their predecessors are psychologically damaged by the existence of Iran. They are used to being able to "do something" when they don't like someone or what's happening in a country.

Israel needed an existential enemy to justify its militarism and refusal of a 2 state solution and obstructing any peace process generally speaking. At the same time, by maintaining the conflict with Palestinians and Hezbollah and Iran, they are naturally on friendly terms, then Iran can turn around and say they are therefore Iranian proxies and no peace is possible until Iran is destroyed.

When this dynamic started, Iran didn't even have any ability to strike Israel, but has clearly developed the capacity since, so became a self fulfilling prophecy that Iran became an actual threat which certainly Israeli warhawks ideal scenario is the US go and destroy Iran.

The problem is it's just super difficult to do and the US just has no good reason to do it.

So, what really motivated this Israeli attack on Iran is either magical thinking or then a gamble, mostly for Netanyahu's personal reasons, that clearly hasn't worked. Maybe a case of becoming over confident in what the Mosad can do after the "brilliant success" of blowing up commanders and children with pagers.

This all just shows how stupid this war is and how Trump has been lured into a war that in the end won't give him that victory he so eagerly wants.

And anyway, especially the vice president is going batshit crazy in trying to deny just what has happened: — ssu

Yes, further evidence they all know they can't get any good military outcome with Iran.

Just normal friendly blowing up your stuff but totally not a war. Amazing.

Maybe Netanyahu's gamble was that he thought they could show Iran "wasn't so tough" based on the idea that decapitation strikes would cause mass panic and disarray, and also that Israeli missile defence was already "good" and US hand would be forced in providing its own missile defence in the region, so certainly results would be stellar.

If Israel could show the war was easy to win, then Trump would want to come in and mop up.

Not clear why they would think that would happen (seeing as True Promise 1 and 2 already demonstrated Iran can penetrate the missile defences), but could just be old man syndrome of not really understanding technology.

If they only wanted more tensions for domestic political outcomes or distract from Gaza, then they would have started a more limited cycle of strikes and retaliation, such as we saw before but just one notch up.

We've debated at length this issue before, and I'm still not convinced these Isreali conflicts / genocide are some sort of grand US strategy.

You wouldn't need an AIPAC and endless Israeli lobbying and intelligence operations to influence US politics if it was all rational US grand strategy.

For example, contrast with Taiwan which is clearly US grand strategy to keep independent of China, we never hear of Taiwanese lobbying efforts to keep the status quo, much less increase the conflict with China.

Of course, Israel will align its goals with as many US elite faction goals as possible, such as simply having wars to sell weapons generally speaking.

Who I would argue was following some sort of rational US grand strategy was Obama, who made the nuclear deal with Iran and talked constantly of pivoting to Asia to contain China. Which is what follows rationally from a goal to stay the leading power: confronting the rising economic super power which is easily identified as the competition.

The other thing Obama did was try to restore American soft power after Bush, which he successfully did and there was clear advantages to the US system for doing that, so having it severely damaged under Trump 1, then further eroded under Biden, then jettisoned entirely in the first months of Trump 2, is not achieving some rational objective.

So I just don't see how it's a rational strategy to get into a war with Iran which there seems no pathway to victory on, and if Iran "wins" the conflict by simply surviving it will be in a far better position in the region to thwart US and Israeli interests.

Feel free to argue otherwise (I of course don't exclude there is some sort of master plan driving events), but for me a better model to explain what is happening is Israeli race-superiority settler fanaticism, Netanyahu's personal political problems, and a weakening and disastrously corrupt imperial core that can no longer assert imperial grand strategy interests over special interest factions that compose the US controlling elite.

Any powerful enough special interest gets what it wants and endless money printing satisfies all the elites generally speaking. They all (the actual major players) have yachts off Monaco, cabins in Switzerland, bunkers in New Zealand, and can all see the bigger picture that if the US does over extend and collapses they'll be doing pretty fine.

In this context of a cognitive collapse of US grand strategy the US system is erratic and essentially driven by random gyration encounters other powers it can't do anything about. They don't know what to do about Putin, so run over a decade of propaganda to "take him out" as that's what they normally do with someone they don't like, they then takeover Ukraine as that's something they know how to do, but then Russia invades and all they can do is prop Ukraine up but do nothing decisive (as it's good money for the arms industry and it "sounds good" to bleed Russia, but welding them to the Chinese for the foreseeable future is terrible grand strategy) as well as act opportunistically such as blowing up the Nord Stream gas pipeline locking Europe into buying US LNG.

I definitely see how various US elite factions profit from these events, but I don't see how it's some sort of rational plan beyond that short term profit / prophesy seeking. It's nonsense strategy we'd expect from a corrupt, easily manipulated geriatric mental case, just as the current strategy is what we'd expect from a corrupt, easily manipulated narcissistic megalomaniac.

Once few weeks (or less) have gone and Israel and the US halt their strikes and declare victory, all these MAGA people will rejoice victory and the wisdom of Trump and deride those who opposed this war. Of course, likely Iran will continue to adapt it's defenses and simply then get the nuclear weapon and the clergy will stay in power in Iran. After these attacks, the young generations of Iranians will remember just how Israel and the US attacked them, hence the evil nature of the US doesn't have to be retraced back to the Pahlavi regime and the ouster of Mossadeq, which is old history for the new generations of Iranians. If Iranians had an 8 year war against Saddam Hussein, then this generation isn't going to be softer either. And then the Iranian nuclear deterrent, likely with ICBMs, will simply be a "non-issue", just like North Korea. Because that's what the US does when the country actually has nuclear weapons that could possibly strike mainland US. Bibi's Israel has opted for perpetual war already, so they are totally OK with this. — ssu

Possibly, maybe even probably, but there's a few things that can go wrong with such a plan that are worth considering.

Israel has no way to normalize due mainly to the genocide.

The extent of the damage Iran has done can't continue to be suppressed if the war ends. Of course we don't know the extent of the damages, but it does seem pretty significant based on what we know.

Whereas the US can do as you say, as the war is far away and easily forgotten in the next news cycle, that option isn't available for Israel, so if the war didn't accomplish anything and was super destructive Israelis may not be so happy about that.

Israel has pursued a strategy of intentionally having no off ramp, so unsurprisingly finds itself with no off ramps.

Then Iran need not cease striking if Israel and US cease striking and if they continue striking then Israel will likely have to continue responding.

I believe Netanyahu said the quiet part out loud the other day that a long war favours Iran, that's what Iran wants. So there maybe no way for Israel to just "turn it off" now that its started.

The reason this war favours Iran is that even if missile interceptors were super effective (which they don't seem to be) Iran can likely outproduce ballistic missiles compared to interceptor missiles (which are more expensive and several are fired at each target).

If we ignore missile defence (assume both are depleted); in terms of Israel's strike capability, Iran is far bigger in population and geography so can absorb more destruction (along with being more accustomed to hardship and less snowflaky Westerner psychology to begin with).

Even if exchanging comparable damage, Iran is so big that most of its population aren't effected psychologically or economically (they keep having normal days as the bombs are out of sight and out of mind for the most part), whereas incoming missiles can be seen from essentially anywhere in Israel and economic activity is focused in a few major cities; so doesn't take many missiles every day / night to completely disrupt normal life for most Israelis.

Given these advantages, Iran has no incentive to just call it quits, and also Iran and China have every incentive to push for the war lasting as long as possible (to absorb US capacity, attrit weapons, damage diplomatic position, and so on).

The US has an armed forces of over 1 million with roughly quarter of a million based outside of the Continental US. Of those less than 40 000 are stationed in the Middle East. Hence there's no land invasion happening. And no regime change, actually.

So along the invasion of Iraq, this is one of those stupid wars the US gets itself into. — ssu

Agreed.

Moreover, there's really no way to conquer Iran. 90 million people, and a geography that similar to 1 entire Rocky Mountain chain in addition to 1 entire France.

It's just not feasible for the US to conquer Iran without going to full total war, drafting millions of people, which is obviously not happening.

However, whereas Trump can get bored and walk away from the situation, it's not clear how Israel can just call it an "oopsie" and turn off the war and restore the status quo ante.

Nuclear weapons I would argue are no longer a feasible option now that the US has struck Iran.

So very unclear how Israel can get out of the war now that they've started it (and by the most antagonistic means of assassinating civilians, including professors, in their homes).

They already manipulate, surveil, imprison and suppress western citizens and if these wars happen at a low cost for us, we will be overwhlemed forever by manipulative/controlling/murdering apparatuses that right now have turned on Gazans, but another day may turn on ordinary Europeans and Americans. — Eros1982

Agreed.

Nothing diplomatic offered to them by Bibi and Trump. — Eros1982

Their strategy is to make diplomacy impossible.

Israel elites (not just Netanyahu) make diplomacy impossible by assassinating diplomats and making sure to break any word they do give, because they don't want pressure for a diplomatic solution.

Specifically they don't want pressure from American Jewish elites who aren't as fanatical and pay a cost for Israel's genocide and warfare. If diplomacy was an option then powerful jewish voices may pressure US and Israeli politicians to cut it out. The way to solve that issue is to make diplomacy not-an-option and therefore further escalation the only option that can be discussed.

As for Trump, his strategy is to make diplomacy impossible simply by having the psychological need that anyone he's dealign with (that he doesn't like) accept humiliation as part of any agreement.

However, so far at least, if he doesn't get his way then he mostly just walks away from the situation and focuses on people he can humiliate. For example he didn't get what he wanted in the Ukraine-Russia war, so just walked away. He couldn't subdue the Houthis, so just walked away.

As with most narcissists, a challenging battle is not the goal but only preying on weaker parties.

When there is a war in the Middle East the first thing a sensible citizen should do is to drop all US based media outlets and turn on British ones, for more honest and unbiased information. Reuters and BBC may not be perfect, but they are definitely less censored than their US counterparts. — Eros1982

That's a bit of a laugh honestly. Maybe slightly less propaganda than US media, but if you're looking media that is not propaganda there are plenty of independent analysts around. I'd start with Chris Hedges.

However, in terms of reporting from events on the ground, fog of war and disinformation / psychological operations make that pretty difficult.

For example in this recent US strike on Iran, what we don't know:

a. How effective the bunker busters were.

b. In the case they were effective, if anything important remained there or was already taken away.

c. If the Iranians tried to shoot at the B-2s but failed, can't shoot down B-2s at all, can shoot down B-2's but that capacity is already degraded, or then can shoot down B-2s but did not for diplomatic reasons (US says where they are going to strike to avoid actual damage, in return Iran doesn't shoot down the planes), or then Iran can shoot down B-2s but chose not to in order to assess the potential of these weapons systems (if existing architecture of similar sites are good enough, or they need to go deeper). Then all the same questions can be asked about Russia and China, as they could bring in missile and radar capacity for the purposes of trying to shoot down B-2s if they wanted to (do they want to, not want to, can't, or won't for diplomatic and/or assessing the weapons reasons).

d. What impact the strike has on Iranian enrichment and nuclear bomb production (which is almost certainly coming; hopefully when it does Israel will need to cease and desist from reckless warfare and genocide).

And there's similar unknowns about pretty much everything: how effective US / Israel missile defence is, how many missiles remain, and likewise Iranian ballistic missile effectiveness and how many of their missiles remain.

The only information we can be pretty certain of is clearly verified video evidence or then events all parties agree happened (such as this recent US attack on Iran). From this we know Iran and Israel are definitely attacking each other and both doing damage.

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

We have similar experience. When I was 16 I tried to opt-out of the commercial side of Christmas, started calling it Arbitrary Gift Day and asked people not to get me anything ... people then got me presents anyways and then resented me for years (as I bought nothing as I said I would) my oldest sister resents me to this day about it, and we almost have not spoken since (I'm now 39).

This was all very shocking to me as my concerns about the environment, labour conditions in China, were clearly well founded and that everyone else also believed. My family is super "left" so they weren't denying climate change or explaining to me that child labour was a natural and healthy market process between parties in engaged in mutually beneficial transactions.

So, I didn't even think people would take issue with my moral stand.

What I learned was that for most people consumerism is not viewed as a vice, which to me was clearly obvious anyways even if it was sustainable and ethically sound labour conditions ... clearly a vice to consume things you don't need only for temporary pleasure. Maybe not a serious vice depending on these issues, but it's clearly never some sort of virtue.

Rather, for most people in Western society, consumerism is essentially a spiritual experience, and the family dynamics that occur if you stop consuming are essentially the same as if you are in a super religious family and not only stop going to church but inform everyone you're now on the side of the devil and fully committed to satanism.

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

Again, same experience on my end. I've spent a lot of time visiting experimental places here in Europe, religious, "anarchisty", non-profits, or otherwise, and lived in an eco-village for a time (then they rented the space I was in to someone else for more money). I've also visited places like Auroville in India and spent many months in Mexico and Cuba (Mexico for the anarchist, Cuba for the communists). Spent some time in "intentional communities" in San Fransisco as well.

The problems are always financial and interpersonal, along with cartel and Fidel Castro based problems (who's an interesting character but also problematic on some issues).

The main problem in West is financial. When normal people had purchasing power, free or inexpensive education, could buy land etc. then it drives intentional community migration. When people are more constrained financially then the migration pattern reverses and becomes really hard to start and sustain such projects. And if there's no migration pressure in this direction (as people have students loans to pay off for example) then the interpersonal problems that arise, and lack of financing to smooth things over, causes the breakdown of these communities.

To make mattes worse, industrial farming is subsidized, uses illegal labour to get things done (as Trump has no problem informing us), so it's also difficult to compete economically as an organic farm. Margins are tight so the only model that works economically is either the corporate approach, just applied to organic farming, or then the family farm model (where you have the same financial interest as your spouse and can benefit from entirely legal child labour of your own children). If you try to make a community with different financial interests, so not a healthy spouse relationships, then tight margins is a recipe for unending financial disputes.

To make matters even worse, these places attract people who are not motivated by any ecological or ethical consideration, but are in search of new tribal relations. Which is of course perfectly fine to be in search of, but it can then easily give rise to unresolvable differences in values, and this is even worse than the financial tensions. It can take a lot of resources to house, nourish and deal with someone's incompatible moral system, and when these communities are founded they want to be welcoming and help people, but these kinds of terrible experiences easily destroy the whole thing.

To give one typical example, one eco village I visited had a community building "open to the needy", and it simply became a drug den and the community members (who built their own eco-houses on the property) would never go there, and then of course this created all sorts of problems with the police as well, and also community members fearing for their lives; I went to check out the building and there was easily over 1000 empty alcohol beverages of one kind of another, lying around or in big garbage bags lying around, and a whole assortment of drug abuse paraphernalia.

Point being, it's not easy to translate values into practical action and in our society if there's no financial model for it it's very difficult to sustain.

However, even if these social experiments aren't sustainable, they are still super valuable as it is often these random personal initiatives that prove things are possible and build momentum for changes to government policies. Obviously the government paying for things is a financial model. Churches do a lot of this stuff too. For example, here in Finland it was churches and secular non-profits that pioneered the "home first" model to deal with homelessness, which then created the experience, learning and data necessary to change government policy to "zero homelessness".

The difference with the eco village is that the churches and non-profits involved had money and obviously know dealing with homelessness is complicated; so they have a plan and don't just naively make a space available to the wider community; the eco village wasn't planning to deal with substance abuse, but assumed people interested in ecology would be interested to stay with them and learn about organic farming and sustainable building practices and so on.

As a general rule, trying new social things is very complex and simply maintaining that complexity has a high cost that people usually don't realize at the start.

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

We can learn about the history, but at the end of the day it remains a pretty big mystery why people do what they do. As I mention above, it seemed obvious to me that consumption was anyways a vice and I thought everyone believed the same thing, so it's not so clear to me why I learned that lesson but a surprising amount of people learned the exact opposite lesson in the same culture.

Likewise, everyone starts to believe the system is not sustainable (there wasn't really any denialism about it in the 90s; Al Gore was vice-president and he talked about it and seemed to be "dealing with it"; the denialism industry was really started under Bush) ... so there's not really a controversy at that time, and this is also Canada which is very "ecological branded" and big national value ... so again, it's surprising to me that I am the only person that is really alarmed about it.

If a doctor told you that your hearts not sustainable in your current lifestyle ... genuinely seems alarming and seems to imply your heart is going to stop if nothing is done about it, and seems the same situation that experts are telling us that every thing around us is not sustainable in our current lifestyle and everything is going to stop if nothing is done about it. Sounds super alarming.

So again, not sure why no one else was alarmed by this information, but it seemed to me that my interest in mathematics habituated me to accepting logical conclusions. That's sort of the process of learning mathematics, building the habit that what "feels true" turns out is simply not true if it can be proven wrong by clear and irrefutable steps. Indeed, a lot of proofs are done by assuming the opposite and seeing where that leads (to mathematical Mordor, that's where it leads), and a lot of mathematical results are "almost can't believe it" kind of things, and especially the mathematics that's difficult to learn. Likewise, mathematical truths are timeless, so if things are true now they are true also later, and so for me it only mattered if our system was unsustainable or not, and not how long it could be unsustainable for.

So that's my little pet theory of why I was alarmed enough to change my behaviour concerning our shared environmental predicament, whereas plenty of others who believed the exact same set of facts did not even consider the idea there was anything in the slightest to do about it, but ultimately it's pretty mysterious why some people do one thing and other people do another thing.

The postmodernists seem to have the most insight into how things are working psychologically, but they are also bark raving mad and so also cannot be trusted on that account. My view of postmodernism is like shrooms experts telling me how shrooms work while high out of their minds on shrooms. Both the best source of insight in some ways, but also potentially delusional.

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

Again mysterious, but why the phrase was coined "it's easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism".

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

Yes, feudalism was very communal and fresh in people's memory, and the transition to industrial capitalism is ongoing and no one knows where it will lead, so if the system can change it stands to reason it can change again. On the ownership of land, obviously doesn't make all that much sense that the previous government top officials (the lords) get to just keep all the governments land. So there's also clearly issues of dispute over all these fundamental matters that are not part of a new status quo that people just accept. Serfs lived on the land and had plenty of rights to the land and also within the feudal system, so even in normal Western jurisprudence they should be bought out of their rights if they are to be kicked off the land. So people obviously lived the enclosures as unjust both in personal experience and intellectually.

Peasants wanted to keep being peasants for the most part and also have the skillset to be peasants, so it's not so easy to control them.

Today people are accustomed to the status quo and have only the skills for the status quo and no one remembers the "before times".

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

Agreed.

The state is in people's heads first and foremost, and it is a powerful state of mind.

One last note, the free rider problem is not a fatal blow to "opt-in" systems.

At the extreme, say someone does not want to contribute in anyway to society as a whole, the solution to this problem is that everyone has a patch of land they can live in a subsistence way, and even trade, if they want.

Whereas the typical prisoner today hasn't actually been presented with any plausibly reasonable social contract that they can sign, such an explicit social contract can be made with the responsibilities and the benefits, and you can be given the option to self-sustain (as part of your inheritance as a member of society) if you wanted to. Of course, anyone who does simply not agree to the social contract would very super likely still expect medical care if they were to become sick, but we have already demonstrated that universal healthcare is possible with a high percentage of free riders.

And it would be this sort of system where you really don't have to contribute anything if you don't want to that would be an example of a social structure without coercion, but with agreed rule sets for what we would call "normal life". For me, why I talk more about effective power and not non-coercion, is because the decision process I view as fundamental, and the goal to create effective equality in decision making processes of society, and such decisions could very well result in coercive measures on dissenters; obviously that would be a last resort in a anarchist society but we can always contrive extreme situations in which coercion is the only viable solution.

To add to all these discussions of the state, power, decision making, community and so on, I think it is useful that I explain my own school of anarchism. Since your area of interest is large and historical I've tried to answer as much as possible from a perspective of "most anarchists" at given periods of time.

Most schools of anarchism and communism approach the issue from a psychological perspective, in that we (the people of earth) are psychologically "not happy" in industrial-imperial-capitalism, and what would make us on the whole much happier is to live in real communities where we decide things together. There will still be problems but they will be "our problems" that the whole community has an incentive to solve in a healthy and durable way, unlike a bureaucrat hundreds of kilometres away. Worse, these psychological problems give rise to all manner of vice and crime which makes the whole thing worse.

The problem with the psychological approach is that there exists the rebuttal that "it's just how it is and people will just need to get used to it", or in technical speak that the transition to industrial-capitalism is inevitable, likewise the imperialism that creates and sustains it, and the transition is difficult but the situation is the same as transitioning form hunter gatherers to farmers. Obviously hunter gatherers were not psychologically and physiologically adapted to be farmers, but they "got used to it". The transition to farming was inevitable due to population pressures (in this line of thinking). Farming is a response to reaching the carrying capacity of ecosystems with hunter gathering and so trying to increase the carrying capacity rather than fight to the death with more powerful neighbours, and a so a similar argument can be made about industrialism. Centralized industrialism outcompetes local and largely autonomous economic systems as a basis for human life, the trend is inevitable and therefore people will simply need to adapt to these new economic and social structures; just as hunter gatherers adapted to the new agricultural conditions and vastly different social structures that emerged to manage agricultural life.

In concrete terms, maybe we are simply fated to live in giant mega-buildings, powered by nuclear fusion reactors, that we never even leave, as such a system simply outcompetes all other forms of economic organization.

In short, the evolution argument of what we are adapted to can always be countered with an even more evolution argument that the new conditions we create are uncomfortable because we are not adapted to them but we will then evolve to be adapted to them. For example, with agriculture came terrible diseases that sometimes wiped out 50 to 100 percent of communities infected, but the survivors evolved to build immunity to such diseases and continue on with the agricultural experiment. We changed out conditions something our social and individual immune systems were not compatible with, creating problems and then we adapted to those problems to be more adapted to the conditions we created.

Therefore, of central and critical importance to all these conceptual consideration is what is actually feasible in terms of engineering.

In particular, is the industrial infrastructure sustainable and if not can it be made to be sustainable and retain its centralized industrial character?

For, if our current system is not even sustainable and can't be feasibly made to be sustainable, then that is a fatal flaw to the "we'll evolve to adapt to industrialization" as that would require industrialization being a sustained practice we can adapt to.

To bring things back to Star Trek, faster than light travel maybe an attractive concept psychologically ... but is it possible? And as long as things stay at the concept level then nothing is ever resolved. For example, how many different concepts of faster than light travel have you encountered compared to how many actually exist? Obviously at some point technical feasibility trumps psychological attraction. Being able to teleport by "blinking" myself to anywhere I can think of is very psychologically attractive but extremely not-technically feasible with our current understanding.

The political debates of the 19th century can be more easily understood as these kinds of conceptual debates without any technical means of resolving the differences. There's not really a theory of ecological limits and science is viewed as simply this bestower of essentially magical powers with zero drawbacks. Therefore, who controls this great power is the primary issue.

However, now that we are reaching the material limits of the industrial system, what are even the feasibly sustainable technical modes of human society that we could develop from our current situation? Is a more fundamental issue than what political system is best.

Only some technical systems maybe viably compatible with our environment in a sustainable away, those which we could feasibly reach an even smaller subset, and only some political systems maybe compatible with such technical constraints.

Hence, my long technical adventure to all these issues (for example if fusion is feasible and will solve all our industrial problems with more industry, maybe best to work on that, and so on for every single technical proposal available) to eventually conclude local solar thermal energy is the only technically viable source of energy that is abundant enough to feasibly power both the transition to and sustaining a locally based economic system (and really any sustainable economic system at all that involves billions of people), and such an economic system naturally gives rise to a flattening of the natural democracy within any social system (creates leverage locally that naturally balances the leverage of any centralized structure; that we may imagine still take care of various large scale problems such as managing our nuclear waste, making computers, research universities, and even things like space travel if people remain convinced by the proposition).

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

Definitely continuing about police is entirely relevant to the discussion.

In any modern political discussion, such as we are having here, "the state" gets mentioned in abundance. And particularly relevant to a discussion about anarchism and communism because essentially all schools in both philosophies will agree that they don't want the state; that it's the state that is the main cause of our social ills and the differences between the many schools are mainly about how exactly to go about getting rid of the state and what exactly is best to build in its stead.

But what is the state exactly? We are so used to the state, it is so omnipresent in all our actions and considerations to do essentially anything, that it's both obvious what it is as well as distant, foreign and strange at the same time.

What the state boils down to is: the police force and standing army, a bureaucratic system that controls society with these too primary tools, and an education system that "teaches" everyone that the system is entirely normal and how to "behave properly" within it.

Why you can have very different cultures and very different political systems (in terms of how decisions are made on paper) but the exact same state structure that is extremely consistent in behaviour across cultures and times.

"Getting rid of the state" therefore boils down to getting rid of the police and standing army, bureaucracy and education system, as is practiced to maintain a state. Of course, the legitimate functions those institutions serve will need to be addressed in some non-state-based way.

So, for example, what could replace police and standing armies is community based security (devolution of security), what could replace bureaucracy is a system of inclusive councils where citizens have equal effective power in decision making on the issues that concern them, and what could replace education is self directed learning, as much as feasible, so children build up their own understanding as intellectually independent and autonomous spirits pursuing their natural curiosity, rather than "taught to behave" and their natural curiosity repressed over essentially 2 whole decades.

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

Yes, the general concept is free-association, and so the general goal is to build a society where people are as not coerced as possible and so any organizational structures are built due to people deciding it's a good idea, and that each "political unit" maintains their ability to simply drop out of any system they disagree with. In other words, if you want an individual to participate in your organizational scheme (for example build a computer factory that will require a large amount of resources and labour from many different communities), you need to convince them with force of intellect and if you fail they may just stay in their hut and tend to their own garden, and likewise you will need to convince communities to contribute to the scheme by force of intellect.

If anyone is not convinced they don't contribute and the idea is there is no option to force them.

There's a bunch of technical words to describe the differences in decision making structures, but they are all very weird, like devolution (why that word, unclear), so I coined the term "natural democracy" in my book Decentralized Democracy that attempts to go deep into all these subjects.

By natural democracy is meant the "people power" and leverage each individual in a society actually has.

So there is a natural democracy in any society that exists independent of the nominal structure (be it feudalism, dictatorship, oligarchy, democracy, a tribe or anything).

One top level view of the state therefore is a structure that minimizes most people's actual power and maximizing the actual power of agents of the state (such as bureaucrats and police). By power is meant real effective influence over outcomes. For example, a president of a state can be overthrown by the effective "natural democracy" of the real power regular people have, but clearly has many "levers of power" available to prevent that from happening; those levers of power in turn (generals, ministers, top bureaucrats, intelligence chiefs, billionaires, media organizations, chiefs of police, and even mafia bosses etc..) have far more effective power than regular people commanding their own smaller set of levers of power, and so on.

The president in the above example being simply one person who clearly has more effective power than regular people, but isn't necessarily "at the top"; could be lower down, and intelligence chiefs and billionaires at the actual top, but obviously, but the president is obviously far from the bottom.

So, each level in the hierarchy of state power depends for its application on the lower levels following orders or otherwise being influenced from the top (deals, coercion etc.), so how to parse anything that is probabilistic to evaluate value (in this real effective power) in the actuary sciences we bring in the concept of net present value. So the real effective power of an individual in society who depends on subordinates following orders or then striking deals with other powerful members, is simply the power assumed by that happening multiplied by the probability that it actually happens in discounting for any decay over time we maybe able to "price in" (if a president is elected, then their real effective power must discount the fact they can lose the next election).

But the main point is that the lower the probability people actually do follow orders or strike deals, the lower effective power you actually have. When people one or two rows down on the hierarchy decide not to follow orders and appropriate their actual power and ignore nominal constraints, that's then called a coup.

The basic criticism of this state structure from anarchists and communists is that there is no nominal structure that actually prevents abuses of power.

Therefore, anarchism and communism seek to create a social structure in which the natural democracy is as flat as possible (all individuals have comparative real power; aka. compactly equal capacity for physical violence as well as real influence in society) and then build up methods for dealing with bigger and bigger problems without state like structures in which individuals placed in charge of those processes have vast real effective power to determine outcomes (see Stalin).

Why then so much focus gets placed on the means of production, is because the people who control how things actually get done in a society, and in particular how a society reproduces itself (for example, the education system and how children are taught / formatted) have the most amount of power to determine the structure of society. If a few people have vast real effective power: surprise, surprise, they use that power to make sure they have even more power in the next iteration of the social structure (by both radical reforms on occasion as well as continuous incremental changes).

Insofar as regular people do nevertheless have a greater effective power together, due to numbers, then the state structure must prevent them from exercising that power by ideally making them want to be repressed and love their oppressors, but failing that resigned to their fate and inactive, and failing that divided against each other and ineffective, and failing that coerced by the threat of state violence, and failing that in prison, and failing that dead.

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

Federate simply means some process of voluntary association and collaboration, such as the federation of planets in Star Trek.

Why we don't have decentralized federated systems is not that "they don't work" or then developed into centralized systems, but mostly due to imperial conquest. People in a decentralized system do not usually simply give up their local autonomy to create some centralized monstrosity. But what does regularly happen is that a group as a whole realizes they can conquer and subjugate other groups either out of fear they will be conquered first (by either who their conquering today or then some more distant enemy that they fear will have the upper hand if they don't stock up on the conquering) or then simply because it seems anyways profitable to do, and once this process starts these society's can easily become both highly effective at conquering as well as dependent on more conquering for their society to function. These imperial structures then expand and conquer other groups, and then immediately apply themselves to the problem of maximizing their power over these conquered peoples for the indefinite future (i.e. start building the institutions of a state); through this process of conquest and subjugation people lose their old habits of federated association (as it takes a lot of time to develop a culture of complex decision making that processes the inputs of large amounts of people; once that culture is lost then it seems anyways more efficient that decisions are made centrally by bureaucrats of one kind or another) and is not trivially easy to re-learn (the old federated structure may have been the result of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of years of cultural development).

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

Absolutely essential.

Capitalism is essentially the continuation of the feudal power structure and imbalances while converting to an industrial economy, in replacing land ownership with lot's of money and in particular who makes the money. Almost everything that happens in an industrial economy requires financing that requires loans and if you control that system of loans then you control the means of production and how society reproduces itself.

The land doesn't need to be owned directly by the people at the top in order to control society (such as in feudalism) it's just important that communities don't own the land and are therefore able to develop it as a community with voluntary labour that does not require bank financing. Again, it's a divide and conquer strategy in that the land is divided up and that prevents local economic forms from developing that are independent of both large scale industrialism and the financing necessary for its development.

If people developed as a community systems of "staying alive" that were autonomous locally then communities would not only be able to develop without financing but could opt out of contributing to larger structures if they disagreed on either practical or moral grounds. If enough communities followed suit, and indeed a majority, there's little a central bureaucracy could do about it.

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

The components of capitalism are all developed within feudalism before the transition to industrial imperial capitalism (aka. the Industrial Revolution).

The automation of work was developed mostly by monasteries because they had access to books and mathematics but also motivated to save time on chores in order to pray more, the financial system of fractional reserve lending was developed to accelerate conquest of lands (you can lend out promises for gold you don't have if those promises finance ships to go steal more gold from indigenous people to then make good on your promise, before your competitors that are not using that shortcut; as long as more gold is inflowing from colonization than outflowing in coupon redemption, aka. "money", then the system is stable, and with industrialization gold in this equation is substituted by commodities of any form).

The crucial moments in locking the capitalist system as we know it today are first the land ownership; overturning feudalism could have easily been accomplished by just taking away the land of the lords just as it makes no sense today to let a president keep the land the country owns (land ownership could be a public utility and so land use determined by public interest considerations), then the financial system (banking could be a public utility and not generate any profits at all for a small set of private individuals, much less allow a small set of private individuals decide what gets financing and what doesn't), maintaining imperial domination (one way or another) of "former colonies", breaking the union movement globally, and then lastly the social welfare state (despite the flaws of not doing the previous 2 things it's nevertheless possible to create a social welfare state within capitalism, which does happen in some countries, but not enough for a new sort of system to emerge globally, such as had the US adopted nordic welfare state best practices, even 10 years ago; world would be totally different today).

and are a lost soul of little concern to me, simply digging yourself further into the darkness, the prison of your own mind, with every thought and fancy.
— boethius

This explains you, I guess. — AmadeusD

The statement does describe me as well, of course the full statement without taking out the start which reads:

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

Which also applies to me. "If", key word here, I was not searching for truth and went around asserting things I did not even believe to be true in order to support a cruel power structure that happens to act in my interest, then the statement would apply to me as much as anyone who chooses power (whether real or vicarious) over truth.

Instead of saying "no, no, I'm authentic, I really believe what I stated, convicts broke the social contract and the only alternative to the current system is exile" in which case you're still obviously wrong but at least not bad faith, maybe you could learn something about how either prisons work or then language works (if you meant your general statement to be incredibly restrictive, just don't know how to use your words to say that), or then, instead of that, retracting the statement and apologizing for bringing obvious pro-cop (and likely racist, but feel free to explain a non-racist basis for your point of view) propaganda to a philosophy debate that may frustrate or then "establish psychological dominance" over people who can see the injustice of the police and prison system as is generally practiced but can't articulate it easily (for example children) but simply doesn't work on people who A. know the subject and B. know how basic reasoning works and C. aren't intimidated or confused by bold assertions of obvious falsehood.

Please quote where I suggested this (or even mentioned it as a topic???????) — AmadeusD

I write:

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

To which you cite me, so it's very clear what you're referencing, and then respond:

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

Contradicting my point that people are put in prison with no effective rights to the port.

i.e. That what I describe as injustice you describe as justice, and the alternative for all these people would be exile.

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

I agree with boethius on the origins of police and while it's related I think it better in another thread? — Moliere

Yes, seems we should make a thread dedicated specifically to police. The police and the standing army are the two ingredients necessary to even have a state, and I feel there's not enough attention paid to the history, theory and contemporary practice (and alternatives) to these systems.

Thanks also for the encouragement, I do appreciate it.

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

Excellent subject.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That would be the standard answer.

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

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

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

Ok, let's consider the quote in question:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And what does Mussolini believe?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In general, inclusive decision making is only viable when:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To take a concrete example.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is essentially not worth responding to.

Pure nonsense. — AmadeusD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is that really true though?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, as you say:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indeed you are wise in the ways of science.

Please do.

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

News to me, but I'm intrigued