backed up by the threat of violence against anyone who doesn’t play along.
Every political ideology includes that. What good are rules without enforcement? Just because the enforcers are supposed to be random individuals in some ideologies doesn’t mean the threat of violence for not playing along is gone.
I’m an anarchist, and my take is that anarchism isn’t pacifism, and “no coercion” is a bad summary. It’s more about the absence of hierarchical coercion and instead distribution of power to all people and communities.
If you’re going around burning down houses, your anarchist neighbors are going to use force to take away your matches and gasoline if you don’t stop.
Yup, that is my understanding as well. Likewise, if you’re going around stealing, and someone happens to think that’s bad, they can use force to stop you because there’s no state telling them otherwise.
The idea that if there’s no state we’d automatically be living in communist utopia where everything is shared and nobody owns anything is flawed on its face. It’s certainly possible that there would be groups or tribes of people that choose to live that way, but other tribes would form around the idea that property rights should be protected and build a community around that.
You’re very much misrepresenting how anarchism is supposed to work with that “automatically” statement. No one thinks if will happen by itself, there’s a whole library on thought on how to go about making it the societal norm, with quite a lot of good points that humanity already largely acted like this for most of its two to three hundred thousand years of existence.
Supposedly, anyways. I suppose paleolithic man might well have been selling mammoth futures and executing debtors in the street.
But I also don’t really buy it in a urban society unless that society is largely run by the Culture’s Minds.
I only put that there because the thread starter seems to be an anarcho-communist who thinks that in absence of a state enforcing property rights, property rights simply won’t be enforced. That is not the case. They may or may not be enforced, either by the property owner themselves or their tribe/community.
Capitalism is primarily an economic system, not a political philosophy. And while it requires property rights in order to function, it is primarily concerned with solving problems in the absence of coercion, so it is absolutely compatible with anarchy.
You’re making a fundamental error when you think that property rights would not or do not exist in anarchy. What doesn’t exist in anarchy is the enforcement of such rights by a STATE. A property owner (or in this case, really anyone who lays claim to a property, since a state that could issue official deeds does not exist) still has the right to defend their property using violent means if necessary.
So yes, capitalism and anarchy are absolutely compatible.
Anarchy requires the absence of a state… And private property… Anarchy is to the left of “workers siezing the means of production”.
But anarcho-capitalists are, as you’ve said, only focusing on the economic system of their politics. If you ask them about the politics and government of their fantasy? Well, they all reveal a desire for a deeply coercive state. Anarchy, and also Libertarian, are words being co-opted.
Nope, anarchy is only the absence of a state. Like I said, it is still possible to enforce property rights in such a scenario… as long as you do it yourself.
This likely WOULD lead to less hoarding and more wealth distribution, because you cannot keep what you cannot defend. But it’s definitely wrong to assume all property would automatically become public and “free use” and everyone would share freely as in a communist utopia, because that requires agreement between people. And in the absence of a state, there is no authority that could enforce such an agreement.
I’ve always wanted someone to explain how you eliminate capitalism or the symbolic exchange of value to achieve a socialist/ anarchist state without violence.
The nice part about anarchism is both systems are free to coexist in the absense of the state. That cannot be said under communism and socialism.
If you think about it, such communities probably already exist: most families, even in capitalism, are communist internally: the parents contribute far more to the household than the children do, who tend to consume far more than they produce. From each according to their ability to each according to their need.
This likely also explains the continued popularity of communism as a political philosophy, especially among young people. Going out into the world, where there is competition and conflict is jarring, and the wish for society to be organized more like a family unit is understandable, although it is far more difficult to organize a large country in this way than a household of no more than, say, a dozen people.
Communism is a classless stateless society, parents within our society literally own their children as property.
This likely also explains the continued popularity of communism as a political philosophy, especially among young people. Going out into the world, where there is competition and conflict is jarring, and the wish for society to be organized more like a family unit is understandable, although it is far more difficult to organize a large country in this way than a household of no more than, say, a dozen people.
Remind me again, what is the political ideology of the new world superpower? The one with 1.4 billion people? You know, now that the capitalist US empire is in obvious terminal decline.
Are you talking about China? If so, I’m afraid they’re communist in name only. They realized many years ago that Marxist economic theory doesn’t work and began to integrate capitalist principles into their economy. There are banks, there is a stock market, and there is private ownership of the means of production, although all of these are tightly regulated by the state and can be rescinded at any time or for any reason (such as not paying enough bribes).
De facto, China is a capitalist-fascist state more comparable to WW2 Germany than anything Marx ever came up with.
Are you talking about China? If so, I’m afraid they’re communist in name only. They realized many years ago that Marxist economic theory doesn’t work and began to integrate capitalist principles into their economy.
You’re kind of incredibly ignorant on China. They’re a mostly publicly controlled economy.
The reasoning for a private sector is to prevent economic and technological siege.
Also marxist economic theory is literally just a structured critique of capitalism. It doesn’t have anything to say about socialism or communism, that is marx’s other works.
De facto, China is a capitalist-fascist state more comparable to WW2 Germany than anything Marx ever came up with.
I would really suggest reading “Economy and class structure of german fascism” and comparing it to the political and economic situation of China. (And actually understand those situations, not just passively absorb ideas from anglophone media) This isn’t meant to be a dig, but this level of political illiteracy is embarrassing.
than anything Marx ever came up with.
Have you literally read any book that Marx wrote? (The manifesto is a manifesto, it doesn’t count, but I’d also be interested in knowing if you’ve read that)
I’m not convinced about the second paragraph. How do you think we ended up where we are? In the stone age there was no government either, and yet some people became royalty and he and his friends became wealthy
A property owner (or in this case, really anyone who lays claim to a property, since a state that could issue official deeds does not exist) still has the right to defend their property using violent means if necessary.
Okay, but if there isn’t a state, who is to say the workers don’t have the right to protect their surplus labor value from theft by seizing the means of production, through violence if necessary?
This is one of the reasons why anarcho capitalism is an incoherent ideology. People who believe in it think that the right of private property is just something everyone agrees should be held sacred, when it only exists because of state violence.
Okay, but if there isn’t a state, who is to say the workers don’t have the right to protect their surplus labor value from theft by seizing the means of production, through violence if necessary?
Nobody. But conversely, if there isn’t a state, what’s to prevent property owners from banding together and protecting their property with violence?
Before you say “but there’s more workers than property owners”, keep in mind that given enough money or gold or whatever, they could also hire mercenaries to prevent workers from rebelling.
It really all comes down to who is better at organizing. So it’s possible that in one scenario, workers would seize the means of production successfully, and if they are good enough at keeping it running, they’d operate as a commune, while in another scenario, there’d be a more hierarchical, capitalist structure of organization.
You’re simply arguing from a standpoint of “but I like THIS approach better” when it’s a question of “but can you make it WORK?”
But conversely, if there isn’t a state, what’s to prevent property owners from banding together and protecting their property with violence?
That would literally be a capitalist state in every meaningful sense.
keep in mind that given enough money or gold or whatever, they could also hire mercenaries to prevent workers from rebelling.
Sorta like a police force of some kind?
It really all comes down to who is better at organizing. So it’s possible that in one scenario, workers would seize the means of production successfully, and if they are good enough at keeping it running, they’d operate as a commune, while in another scenario, there’d be a more hierarchical, capitalist structure of organization.
You know what is really fucking organized? A state. It is almost like at the beginning of the country all the large landowners and capitalists got together and made one of those to protect their interests.
You’re simply arguing from a standpoint of “but I like THIS approach better” when it’s a question of “but can you make it WORK?”
Lol. I am literally asking how your hypothetical system would handle class antagonisms, the primary concern of politics. I am very directly asking “but can you make it work”
Private Property cannot exist without a state. That which gives private property legitimacy is a monopoly of violence, otherwise you have a winner-takes-all might makes right system.
Collective ownership of property can be enforced via the collective itself, without a need for a governing body.
Anarchism is certainly idealistic, but Anarcho-Capitalism is pure fantasy.
I mean, first of all, have you taken a look at our current society, and second of all, this is just a thought experiment to prove that anarcho-communism is pure fantasy, or at the very least not inevitable.
Anarcho-Capitalism cannot exist, it would cease to exist the very second it did.
Anarcho-Communism is a lofty goal, but is fully capable of existing.
That’s the fundamental difference, what you consider to be Private Property simply wouldn’t be, it would either be personal property or you wouldn’t have it. It is only through threat of violence that one can own the products of tools despite not doing the labor.
I dont know, let’s ask Chinese feudal lords how their ability to enforce private property went after the CPC stopped enforcing their private property rights for them like the old government did.
Ok I should preface by saying I think ancap is dumb and having a slight disagreement with what you’ve said does not mean I’m not defending them. They’re asshats.
But: imo, anarchist thought escapes definition. There’s no such thing as anarchism (in the sense of an agreed-upon political philosophy), only anarchists.
Readers of Rene Girard might describe coersion (insofar as it’s a natural result of hegemony), as a sort of force of nature, like violence, that, if society doesn’t find a healthy way to express, will come out sideways, in ways that are anti-social.
Anarchism can only exist when there’s a single individual not interacting with any other person, period. Every human interaction immediately breaks any sort of anarchism, there will always be some agreed upon behavior, whether implicit or explicit, violently enforced or not.
I suppose most ancaps are actually minarchists, or “minimal state” proponents, because capitalism fails terribly without laws and some way to enforce them. Without a state (even as small as a group’s leadership), “ownership” doesn’t exist, whoever’s stronger owns the thing. You blink, you lose. You die, it’s first dibs. Fell for a scam? Too bad, you should’ve been smarter. Got captured and sold into slave labor? Too bad, you should’ve seen that coming. Someone stole your stuff? Too bad, you should’ve secured it better.
Anarchy (as a political philosophy) is about an absence of coercion.
Capitalism is about the supremacy of property rights over all other rights, backed up by the threat of violence against anyone who doesn’t play along.
How anyone can think those two concepts are compatible is beyond me.
Every political ideology includes that. What good are rules without enforcement? Just because the enforcers are supposed to be random individuals in some ideologies doesn’t mean the threat of violence for not playing along is gone.
Anarchism claims to be different. But yeah, that’s a big part of why I see anarchism as a thought experiment and not a serious ideology.
I’m an anarchist, and my take is that anarchism isn’t pacifism, and “no coercion” is a bad summary. It’s more about the absence of hierarchical coercion and instead distribution of power to all people and communities.
If you’re going around burning down houses, your anarchist neighbors are going to use force to take away your matches and gasoline if you don’t stop.
Yup, that is my understanding as well. Likewise, if you’re going around stealing, and someone happens to think that’s bad, they can use force to stop you because there’s no state telling them otherwise.
The idea that if there’s no state we’d automatically be living in communist utopia where everything is shared and nobody owns anything is flawed on its face. It’s certainly possible that there would be groups or tribes of people that choose to live that way, but other tribes would form around the idea that property rights should be protected and build a community around that.
You’re very much misrepresenting how anarchism is supposed to work with that “automatically” statement. No one thinks if will happen by itself, there’s a whole library on thought on how to go about making it the societal norm, with quite a lot of good points that humanity already largely acted like this for most of its two to three hundred thousand years of existence.
Supposedly, anyways. I suppose paleolithic man might well have been selling mammoth futures and executing debtors in the street.
But I also don’t really buy it in a urban society unless that society is largely run by the Culture’s Minds.
I only put that there because the thread starter seems to be an anarcho-communist who thinks that in absence of a state enforcing property rights, property rights simply won’t be enforced. That is not the case. They may or may not be enforced, either by the property owner themselves or their tribe/community.
Capitalism is primarily an economic system, not a political philosophy. And while it requires property rights in order to function, it is primarily concerned with solving problems in the absence of coercion, so it is absolutely compatible with anarchy.
You’re making a fundamental error when you think that property rights would not or do not exist in anarchy. What doesn’t exist in anarchy is the enforcement of such rights by a STATE. A property owner (or in this case, really anyone who lays claim to a property, since a state that could issue official deeds does not exist) still has the right to defend their property using violent means if necessary.
So yes, capitalism and anarchy are absolutely compatible.
Anarchy requires the absence of a state… And private property… Anarchy is to the left of “workers siezing the means of production”.
But anarcho-capitalists are, as you’ve said, only focusing on the economic system of their politics. If you ask them about the politics and government of their fantasy? Well, they all reveal a desire for a deeply coercive state. Anarchy, and also Libertarian, are words being co-opted.
Nope, anarchy is only the absence of a state. Like I said, it is still possible to enforce property rights in such a scenario… as long as you do it yourself.
This likely WOULD lead to less hoarding and more wealth distribution, because you cannot keep what you cannot defend. But it’s definitely wrong to assume all property would automatically become public and “free use” and everyone would share freely as in a communist utopia, because that requires agreement between people. And in the absence of a state, there is no authority that could enforce such an agreement.
I’ve always wanted someone to explain how you eliminate capitalism or the symbolic exchange of value to achieve a socialist/ anarchist state without violence.
The nice part about anarchism is both systems are free to coexist in the absense of the state. That cannot be said under communism and socialism.
If you think about it, such communities probably already exist: most families, even in capitalism, are communist internally: the parents contribute far more to the household than the children do, who tend to consume far more than they produce. From each according to their ability to each according to their need.
This likely also explains the continued popularity of communism as a political philosophy, especially among young people. Going out into the world, where there is competition and conflict is jarring, and the wish for society to be organized more like a family unit is understandable, although it is far more difficult to organize a large country in this way than a household of no more than, say, a dozen people.
Communism is a classless stateless society, parents within our society literally own their children as property.
Remind me again, what is the political ideology of the new world superpower? The one with 1.4 billion people? You know, now that the capitalist US empire is in obvious terminal decline.
Are you talking about China? If so, I’m afraid they’re communist in name only. They realized many years ago that Marxist economic theory doesn’t work and began to integrate capitalist principles into their economy. There are banks, there is a stock market, and there is private ownership of the means of production, although all of these are tightly regulated by the state and can be rescinded at any time or for any reason (such as not paying enough bribes).
De facto, China is a capitalist-fascist state more comparable to WW2 Germany than anything Marx ever came up with.
You’re kind of incredibly ignorant on China. They’re a mostly publicly controlled economy.
Source: https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/chinas-state-vs-private-company-tracker-which-sector-dominates
The reasoning for a private sector is to prevent economic and technological siege.
Also marxist economic theory is literally just a structured critique of capitalism. It doesn’t have anything to say about socialism or communism, that is marx’s other works.
I would really suggest reading “Economy and class structure of german fascism” and comparing it to the political and economic situation of China. (And actually understand those situations, not just passively absorb ideas from anglophone media) This isn’t meant to be a dig, but this level of political illiteracy is embarrassing.
Have you literally read any book that Marx wrote? (The manifesto is a manifesto, it doesn’t count, but I’d also be interested in knowing if you’ve read that)
Okay, fair enough.
I’m not convinced about the second paragraph. How do you think we ended up where we are? In the stone age there was no government either, and yet some people became royalty and he and his friends became wealthy
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Okay, but if there isn’t a state, who is to say the workers don’t have the right to protect their surplus labor value from theft by seizing the means of production, through violence if necessary?
This is one of the reasons why anarcho capitalism is an incoherent ideology. People who believe in it think that the right of private property is just something everyone agrees should be held sacred, when it only exists because of state violence.
Nobody. But conversely, if there isn’t a state, what’s to prevent property owners from banding together and protecting their property with violence?
Before you say “but there’s more workers than property owners”, keep in mind that given enough money or gold or whatever, they could also hire mercenaries to prevent workers from rebelling.
It really all comes down to who is better at organizing. So it’s possible that in one scenario, workers would seize the means of production successfully, and if they are good enough at keeping it running, they’d operate as a commune, while in another scenario, there’d be a more hierarchical, capitalist structure of organization.
You’re simply arguing from a standpoint of “but I like THIS approach better” when it’s a question of “but can you make it WORK?”
That would literally be a capitalist state in every meaningful sense.
Sorta like a police force of some kind?
You know what is really fucking organized? A state. It is almost like at the beginning of the country all the large landowners and capitalists got together and made one of those to protect their interests.
Lol. I am literally asking how your hypothetical system would handle class antagonisms, the primary concern of politics. I am very directly asking “but can you make it work”
In the same way that a collective of workers getting together to control the means of production would be a communist state in every meaningful sense.
Yes. The difference is I’m not claiming a proletarian democracy isn’t a state.
So you just want the violence you prefer meted out by the state.
Is this meant to be a gotcha? What I prefer has nothing to do with understanding how states function and why they coalesce.
Not really a gotcha. I just forget I’m pretty alone in my (particular) distaste for violence.
Edit: didn’t really mean for that to sound so negative.
I guess I dont base my understanding of politics around morality, morality enters the field when determining what to do within that understanding
LOL.
Private Property cannot exist without a state. That which gives private property legitimacy is a monopoly of violence, otherwise you have a winner-takes-all might makes right system.
Collective ownership of property can be enforced via the collective itself, without a need for a governing body.
Anarchism is certainly idealistic, but Anarcho-Capitalism is pure fantasy.
If the collective has to enforce collective ownership, isn’t that just a monopoly on violence again?
Private ownership doesn’t require a collective, or a monopoly on violence. You only get to keep what you can defend.
If everyone has equal ownership, there is no "mono"poly.
Private ownership requires a monopoly on violence to exist, if you can’t defend it there are no rights.
I have a gun. Try taking it from me.
There are no laws saying I can’t have one, and there are no laws saying I can’t shoot you if you try to take it.
You cannot seriously believe in a might makes right society, can you?
I mean, first of all, have you taken a look at our current society, and second of all, this is just a thought experiment to prove that anarcho-communism is pure fantasy, or at the very least not inevitable.
Anarcho-Capitalism cannot exist, it would cease to exist the very second it did.
Anarcho-Communism is a lofty goal, but is fully capable of existing.
That’s the fundamental difference, what you consider to be Private Property simply wouldn’t be, it would either be personal property or you wouldn’t have it. It is only through threat of violence that one can own the products of tools despite not doing the labor.
Do you believe that collective forms of ownership would win on an even playing field?
I dont know, let’s ask Chinese feudal lords how their ability to enforce private property went after the CPC stopped enforcing their private property rights for them like the old government did.
Yes, absolutely. How would one win over with individual ownership? One dude with a couple guns vs an entire community?
Then we gradually dismantle corps by eliminating regulatory capture, IP and limited liability over time and we all win.
Ok I should preface by saying I think ancap is dumb and having a slight disagreement with what you’ve said does not mean I’m not defending them. They’re asshats.
But: imo, anarchist thought escapes definition. There’s no such thing as anarchism (in the sense of an agreed-upon political philosophy), only anarchists.
Readers of Rene Girard might describe coersion (insofar as it’s a natural result of hegemony), as a sort of force of nature, like violence, that, if society doesn’t find a healthy way to express, will come out sideways, in ways that are anti-social.
Anarchism can only exist when there’s a single individual not interacting with any other person, period. Every human interaction immediately breaks any sort of anarchism, there will always be some agreed upon behavior, whether implicit or explicit, violently enforced or not.
I suppose most ancaps are actually minarchists, or “minimal state” proponents, because capitalism fails terribly without laws and some way to enforce them. Without a state (even as small as a group’s leadership), “ownership” doesn’t exist, whoever’s stronger owns the thing. You blink, you lose. You die, it’s first dibs. Fell for a scam? Too bad, you should’ve been smarter. Got captured and sold into slave labor? Too bad, you should’ve seen that coming. Someone stole your stuff? Too bad, you should’ve secured it better.