Anarchy - can someone explain the basics to me?

[ViolentPanda]

"Must"? I dunno. I suspect we could just kind of oscillate based on the fashionable ideas of the time.

You're right.

You "dunno".

 

[Carousel]

Kneel in reverence before my humility victim-boy.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Also, it wasn't unheard of for some of the anarchist militias during the Spanish civil war to execute prisoners. According to Anthony Beevor's book, some of them concluded that execution was less of an affront to their anarchist principles than incarceration. The people's death penalty.

Incidentally, I wouldn't have a problem with that -- community self-determination and all that.

Intellectually I agree, but emotionally I'm always drawn to thoughts about mis-application.

 

[LLETSA]

Not so fast. It's not an attempt to antagonise you as an individual, more to demonstrate how anarchism and communism are regurgitations of the same bourgeois values they ostensibly oppose. Namely, reverence for humility and victimhood. Accounting, incidentally, for the inevitable cycles of self defeat so.

What about those bourgeois values that don't revere victimhood and humility? And what of those variations on the socialist ideology that don't do this either? There wasn't much reverence for victimhood and humility during the Bolshevik revolution, for example. Nor in the decades that immediately followed. Nor, for that matter in the attempts to recreate a bourgeoisie when Communist rule fell.

Incidentally, when a movement arose that had only contempt for humility and victimhood (despite being based on victimhood) it was led by somebody called Hitler, wasn't it?

 

[ViolentPanda]

Police, prisons and ASBO's. Forced medications for those outside the community. The loners, the bullied and abused.

Justice? Not even close.

Well, that's your spin on what I wrote, anyway.
Anyone with an ounce of knowledge about anarchism would have read it and known that what I proposed was a "minimum intervention" strategy that places rehabilitation at the forefront of that intervention, not a programme to victimise.

No mention of victimising loners. No mention of ASBOs, and no mention of forced medication (you'd have noted, if you hadn't been "rushing to judgement", that I emphasised that convincing, through argument, people to take appropriate medication would/could be part of the rehabilitative process. As for "prison", yes, but not in the sense you mean it (or fantasise about).

 

[LLETSA]

I've known one or two total fucking nutcases. Proper violent evil bastards with no regard for anyone around them at all, no sense of morals or concept of doing the right thing, people who will bully, intimidate and generally make life miserable for anyone unlucky enough to live in their vicinity...

I know people like that are a tiny tiny fraction of the population. But...

You couldn't put people like that in the care and guidance of members of the community. It wouldn't work. Unless you tied them up and put them in a cage or something.

And if you banish them from a community and another one doesn't accept them, would they have to go and live in the wild?

Just shoot them like any self-respecting revolution would.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Capitalism is the result of anarchy.

No, capitalism is the result of a particular set of economic principles being consciously taken up. It didn't emerge from an anarchy but from the re-ordering of a pre-existing order.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Kneel in reverence before my humility victim-boy.

You have a "humility victim boy"?
I must say I see you more as a gimp-mask and leather chaps type myself.

 

[DotCommunist]

Just shoot them like any self-respecting revolution would.

Slippery slope. Start shooting people as policy and one day it might be the gun at your head.

Unless of course you are so consumate a conspirator that you can ride the tide. To slake an implacable vengeance etc

 

[ViolentPanda]

Just shoot them like any self-respecting revolution would.

Alternately, you could euthanise them like that chap you just mentioned did.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Slippery slope. Start shooting people as policy and one day it might be the gun at your head.

Unless of course you are so consumate a conspirator that you can ride the tide. To slake an implacable vengeance etc

Even the most consummate of conspirators generally end up getting their just desserts, as uncle Lev found out.

 

[Red Cat]

Variations on body chemistry more like.

So, people's personality is based on their body chemistry and their 'values' are an expression of their personality; differences in values are due then to variations in body chemistry...

So you have no values, because you have no personality, and you have no personality because you have no body chemistry, and you have no body chemistry because you're not real.

So, you're God? Man, why didn't you just say so?

 

[_George]

most people grow out of it

 

[jonajuna]

 

[ViolentPanda]

So, people's personality is based on their body chemistry and their 'values' are an expression of their personality; differences in values are due then to variations in body chemistry...

So you have no values, because you have no personality, and you have no personality because you have no body chemistry, and you have no body chemistry because you're not real.

So, you're God? Man, why didn't you just say so?

He's not G-d, he's a determinist. Can't you smell him?

 

[ViolentPanda]

most people grow out of it

You're several days late with your picture of Rik, dearie.

 

[Red Cat]

He's not G-d, he's a determinist. Can't you smell him?

Like a surfeit of skunks.

 

[Kizmet]

Well, that's your spin on what I wrote, anyway.
Anyone with an ounce of knowledge about anarchism would have read it and known that what I proposed was a "minimum intervention" strategy that places rehabilitation at the forefront of that intervention, not a programme to victimise.

No mention of victimising loners. No mention of ASBOs, and no mention of forced medication.

(you'd have noted, if you hadn't been "rushing to judgement", that I emphasised that convincing, through argument, people to take appropriate medication would/could be part of the rehabilitative process.

I know you didn't mention them. That's why I did it for you. It's inevitable.

It's very easy to suggest systems based on first cases or principles.. but it's always worth having a look at what the case will be six months, six years, six decades down the line. When people who you thought were persuaded to take their medication turn out to have been palming them through paranoia... and the outcasts have banded together on the outskirts of your community to create one of their own.

What you propose is fragile... and the only way to reinforce it will be to introduce more draconian measures as time goes on.

As for "prison", yes, but not in the sense you mean it (or fantasise about).

Shame... an all playboy centrefold wing for bunnies who been bad, would have definitely had it's merits.

 

[Carousel]

What about those bourgeois values that don't revere victimhood and humility?

I struggle to imagine any. Even the far right play the victim card nowadays. I suppose Thatcherism may qualify, however its appeal was really the victimised mentality, protecting family values and all that. Alf Garnett.

And what of those variations on the socialist ideology that don't do this either? There wasn't much reverence for victimhood and humility during the Bolshevik revolution, for example. Nor in the decades that immediately followed. Nor, for that matter in the attempts to recreate a bourgeoisie when Communist rule fell.

What of them? They're consigned to the contemporary communist hall of shame. I appreciate what you're getting at, in so far as say the ICC or the Luxembourgists have a deterministic non-value laden take on history as a process and so on. Each has its own individual reasons for "failure" however it may be framed. In the case of the contemporary libertarian communist/anarchist milieu I speculate it's bound up in its ideological character which is a super-alienated version of anti-bullying, save-the-whale, feed-the-world campaigns. In a sense, it finds success in failure, in so far as it reinforces its own sense of victimisation and oppression. It's failure to achieve it's goals flatters its values, so maintaining the cycle of brave defeat as a goal in itself.

Incidentally, when a movement arose that had only contempt for humility and victimhood (despite being based on victimhood) it was led by somebody called Hitler, wasn't it?

Not so sure. As per W Reich in "Listen, Little Man!" and "The Mass Psychology of Fascism", the Fascist phenomenon is riddled with a take on paranoia and victimhood. A matter of sexual repression and family values. Indeed, it's not so much a matter of its ostensible contempt of weakness, but the weakness it draws upon in developing social behaviour. A matter of self contempt. The Pavlovian expectation of punishment in return for each indulgence.

 

[tar1984]

Just shoot them like any self-respecting revolution would.

Awesome.

Slippery slope. Start shooting people as policy and one day it might be the gun at your head.

Unless of course you are so consumate a conspirator that you can ride the tide. To slake an implacable vengeance etc

We'd probably get it right most of the time.