how many people find the concept of anarchism appealing but...

[LLETSA]

Well that depends on how you define alternative. Certainly people aren't calling for the removal of democracy but people do feel like that their vote is useless, that politicians don't listen and that they are increasingly ineffective in their roles.

So there's clearly room for some grassroots politics on a non-governmental level, where people can be encouraged to engage in their society rather than passively observing it and putting a tick in a box every so often.

Clearly its not going to spring into life as a fully formed functioning role, but then nothing ever does.

Don't disagree.

 

[Fruitloop]

capitalism produces alienation shocker.

 

[kyser_soze]

I wasn't talking about feudal society-I was talking about the heyday of the industrial system when workers were herded together in large enterprises, often close to where they lived. This fostered both a sense of community and a readiness to identify with each other as workers. As opposed to the fragmented working class communities and dispersed workplaces of today.

While consumerism as we'd recognise it today began in the middle of the nineteenth century, and grew continually from that moment on (mainly among the middle class), the kind of society in which a majority of the population was able to participate in it, to one degree or another, didn't come about until after WW2.

Cool, ta. I just like to clarify points like that, cos I take the view that the consumer society started way back in Rome, China etc, possibly even before then (would you classify the production of jewellery that was used for exchange as well as personal decoration consumerism? I would. We're a shopping species it seems!)

On your first paragraph...that's actually something I'd always wondered as well! Are there any specific historical reasons for it that you know of?

 

[rhys gethin]

It seems to me that, if no-one can come up with a practical scheme for getting the thing established, we are talking 'the personal is political' or lifestyle stuff when we talk about anarchism. I can do that bit without sticking labels on my head though.

 

[Divisive Cotton]

i think it is a beautiful idea... no money... co-operation... community... how can it notbe appealing? ... although some of its ardent pupils on here and elsewhere leave a lot to be desired...

 

[samk]

Perhaps a map of government structures and companes trade patterns, preferably worldwide would help, both for holding them to account and giving people clues for how to set up their own trading networks.

added: For instance, you could trace from the pot noodles you bought in a supermarket, see what ingredients went in them (with links to their health effects), what companies make those, how far they have been shipped, what banks/stock investors backed the manufacturer, some links to accounts from people on the ground of conditions in the factories, that companies lobbying activities to food regulators...

 

[TeeJay]

Class conflict always exists - it's simply a fact of life that those who depend upon profits and rents for their living have a natural and inalienable conflict of interest with those who depend upon wages. Whatever you want to call it, it always exist.

Even many poor people have pensions whose finds are invested in the stock markets while many rich people rely on wages - there are not two distinct and separate groups of people.

Moreover most people - rich or poor - in rich countries, benefit directly from private sector 'profits and rents' of rich country businesses and also through their rich country governments. Again there is no clear separartion or distinct groups that can be held to be in opposition.

Even some poor people in poor countries might well own assets (some farmland, a shop, a fishing boat) and 'profit' from rents or employ people on wages.

There are no clear cut 'classes' which are in neat opposition to each other: reallife is messy and not neat, it can't be meaningfully or accurately modelled using clunky and obsolete 19th century ideas which are well past their sell-by date.

Every single individual has a relationship with 'capital' - capital itself is not embodied in a distinct, discrete or exclusive class of people. Everyone is within the system and the system has its own logic - there is no need to try and pretend that aspects of capitalism can be 'embodied' by discrete groups of people. Anyone is capable of deciding that they want to support or oppose various aspects of the system and how they want to express themselves politically. This means that political struggle is not automatically determined by underlying waelth or relationships with the 'means of production'.

There are even more flaws in marxist analyses - a nonsense 'labour value' theory, a flawed definition of 'means of production', an utter fetish on industrial workers and an inability to understand modern economics generally.

For all these reasons 'class struggle' advocates - anarchist, communist or otherwise - are irrelevant and wasting their own and everyone else's time.

 

[Fruitloop]

Flevit.

 

[TeeJay]

The way some people talk you'd think we were descended from sabre-toothed tigers or something, rather than funny little over-sexed monkeys with big brains.

The funny little over-sexed monkeys with big brains wiped the sabre-toothed tigers from the face of the planet, along with a lot of other large predators.

"In late Pleistocene ... there were mass extinction events in many different parts of the world, involving at least 200 genera [group of related species] ... but this was different from previous episodes of mass extinction:

...It was much more selective, involving mainly the megafauna: the large herbivores (mammoths, mastodons, huge ground sloths, cave bears, woolly rhinoceros, other rhinoceroses, etc.) and the carnivores that fed on them, the dire wolves and saber-tooth cats. There was no accelerated extinction of smaller terrestrial species, plants, or marine organisms.

...In all of these cases except Africa, the extinctions occurred shortly after the first arrival of prehistoric humans. The first humans were faced with animals that had evolved in the absence of human predators, and the animals were probably easily overcome. Therefore, the most plausible explanation is that these extinctions were caused by overexploitation by human hunters.

...In Africa, massive extinction does not coincide with the arrival of humans. Humans had been evolving there for millions of years without causing mass extinctions (they may not have been as carnivorous as their descendants in other parts of the world) but it does coincide with the maximum development of advanced early Stone Age hunting cultures."

http://www.dbc.uci.edu/~sustain/bio65/lec04/b65lec04.htm

 

[TeeJay]

Flevit.

pons asinorum?

 

[Fruitloop]

It woz the brains wot did it, though.

Overexploitation says nothing about any inherent rapaciousness - bacteria in a petri dish will do just the same.

 

[kyser_soze]

I think most life will do the same if it doesn't have something else controlling it's population innit? Be it bugs in a dish or upright apes with big frontal lobes...

 

[Belushi]

Fuck 'em, who really sits around saying 'I really miss those Wooly Rhinos' anyway?

 

[TeeJay]

How would you miss something you never even saw?

 

[SuburbanCasual]

How would you miss something you never even saw?

You don't know what you've got 'till its gone.

 

[detective-boy]

One Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police?

 

[The Black Hand]

Maybe so-but nobody in their right mind could look at society as it is today and claim that anarchism's time has come.

Yup, it has, go look on the TG site for the reason why - you have been posting there a lot and I've added a couple now...

 

[The Black Hand]

What's up-have they let you out again?

You're boring Letsshite, you are the one who always, but always, comes out with the same rubbish rather than something interesting...

 

[gurrier]

Even many poor people have pensions whose finds are invested in the stock markets while many rich people rely on wages - there are not two distinct and separate groups of people.

Moreover most people - rich or poor - in rich countries, benefit directly from private sector 'profits and rents' of rich country businesses and also through their rich country governments. Again there is no clear separartion or distinct groups that can be held to be in opposition.

Even some poor people in poor countries might well own assets (some farmland, a shop, a fishing boat) and 'profit' from rents or employ people on wages.

There are no clear cut 'classes' which are in neat opposition to each other: reallife is messy and not neat, it can't be meaningfully or accurately modelled using clunky and obsolete 19th century ideas which are well past their sell-by date.

Every single individual has a relationship with 'capital' - capital itself is not embodied in a distinct, discrete or exclusive class of people. Everyone is within the system and the system has its own logic - there is no need to try and pretend that aspects of capitalism can be 'embodied' by discrete groups of people. Anyone is capable of deciding that they want to support or oppose various aspects of the system and how they want to express themselves politically. This means that political struggle is not automatically determined by underlying waelth or relationships with the 'means of production'.

There are even more flaws in marxist analyses - a nonsense 'labour value' theory, a flawed definition of 'means of production', an utter fetish on industrial workers and an inability to understand modern economics generally.

For all these reasons 'class struggle' advocates - anarchist, communist or otherwise - are irrelevant and wasting their own and everyone else's time.

You are arguing against a picture of class where everybody neatly slots into one or t'other and there are no graduations in between - a picture which only exists in your head. It certainly didn't exist in the 19th century (when the wage-earning class was relatively tiny) and it doesn't exist now.

In reality it really is quite simple though. If all wages (and/or social spending) were reduced by x% overnight without any reduction in productivity, the vast majority of the population would end up poorer by something between 0% and x% and a small proportion of the population would end up richer by something between 0% and an awful lot. That's the simple and inescapable truth and it's the truth that means that the class war is simply a fact of capitalism.

 

[exosculate]

You don't know what you've got 'till its gone.

Apparently they paved paradise and put up a parking lot too!

 

[samk]

Ha, you've seen nothing yet, technology is still less sophisticated than biology, limiting the speed of change to how fast humans can build and think, when this changes it won't be humans thinking 'Fuck 'em, who really sits around saying 'I really miss those Wooly Rhinos' anyway?' it will be the machine gods thinking 'fuck'em if they were too stupid to reprogram their dna they deserved to have their resources reallocated' and so-called radicals aren't even trying to solve todays problems yet alone tomorrows

 

[Tom A]

...think that human nature will never allow a society based on mutual cooperation to materialise? is people's selfishness the main obstacle to this ever working?

I'm one such person. Too drunk to say much else that would be comprehendable atm.

 

[treelover]

mmm, is the TG site back up, where?

 

[rhys gethin]

You are arguing against a picture of class where everybody neatly slots into one or t'other and there are no graduations in between - a picture which only exists in your head. It certainly didn't exist in the 19th century (when the wage-earning class was relatively tiny) and it doesn't exist now.

In reality it really is quite simple though. If all wages (and/or social spending) were reduced by x% overnight without any reduction in productivity, the vast majority of the population would end up poorer by something between 0% and x% and a small proportion of the population would end up richer by something between 0% and an awful lot. That's the simple and inescapable truth and it's the truth that means that the class war is simply a fact of capitalism.

That is exactly so. And back in the period of 'classical' class confrontation - like for intance the Merthyr Rising in the early 1830's, industrial workers quite often had a family farm - a very small one - they could go back to and in some places much later - the Penrhyn strike lasted two years because most of the quarrymen had a bit of land - and sent their sons south to the mines). These plots served as the equivalent of a very very basic social security - but iron-workers and miners didn't become peasants by going home and doing a stint on the harvest, or whatever - they remained industrial workers on strike, laid off, or waiting to be able to afford a boat ticket to somewhere better. From the late Eighteenth century on more and more people were seeing themselves as PRIMARILY industrial workers, and that is what counts. Because I am part of a pension plan doesn't turn me into PRIMARILY a capitalist either.

 

[trashycakes]

...think that human nature will never allow a society based on mutual cooperation to materialise? is people's selfishness the main obstacle to this ever working?

capitalism teaches people to compete (and thus, be selfish.)

 

[Blagsta]

I think its part of human nature to compete, just as its also part of human nature to co-operate.

 

[DrRingDing]

I think its part of human nature to compete, just as its also part of human nature to co-operate.

...and the question is can we nuture out the nature of the competion?

 

[kyser_soze]

Why would we want to? Competition provides the friction that's needed to advance and change society, from ideas and philosophy to how we work. If you try and remove competition from a living organism it will die off slowly - life is change, and competition is part of that. It's HOW that competitive rge is expressed, and the balance struck with co-operation that is key.

 

[rhys gethin]

Why would we want to? Competition provides the friction that's needed to advance and change society, from ideas and philosophy to how we work. If you try and remove competition from a living organism it will die off slowly - life is change, and competition is part of that. It's HOW that competitive rge is expressed, and the balance struck with co-operation that is key.

One of the key points is that under capitalism, competition is SERIOUS (rather than a useful game about our monkey-mind status-obsession) and also FIXED, so that those with the money and the right connexions almost invariably win. Under any sensible system co-operation is serious and the 'winning' idiocy is about laurel wreaths, medals or other silly bullshit, not power over people.