tcl33 t1_j10uoe3 wrote on December 20, 2022 at 9:12 PM

Reply to comment by Meta_Digital in Anarchism at the End of the World: A defence of the instinct that won’t go away by Sventipluk

But let's just be clear, you do endorse the existence of a regime sufficiently dominant to forcefully prevent the establishment of an inn? And therefore you reject the author's call for an "anarchy" that precludes dominance? Furthermore you agree with my original claim that...

> If we allow people to engage in voluntary market exchange, something looking like capitalism will organically emerge. It takes authoritarianism to disrupt that. You have to use force to stop it, or to rearrange it.

...and you believe that this is a good thing?

Meta_Digital t1_j10vju5 wrote on December 20, 2022 at 9:18 PM

No, I do not think capitalism is predetermined by the existence of markets. Capitalism didn't emerge organically; it emerged through violence. The enclosure of land and the privatization of the world was militaristic; as was the suppression of labor and of women, who were burned as witches. Even today witches are burned where capitalism is getting established. This is not something that just happened on its own.

Yes, some forms of authority are going to exist, but that isn't contradictory to anarchism. Just like authoritarianism doesn't mean pure 100% control over the oppressed (which is impossible), it's opposite is not 100% pure freedom from control. What anarchism represents is the minimizing of hierarchy and control. Instead of thinking about this as a struggle between two imaginary extreme ways of being, think of it as the struggle between two opposing processes of movement - one towards greater control over others and the other towards lesser control over others.

tcl33 t1_j12ny6w wrote on December 21, 2022 at 5:36 AM

> I do not think capitalism is predetermined by the existence of markets.

But according to your definition of capitalism (which is owning things you don't use to produce an income for yourself) the moment someone's ranch, farm, plantation, or vineyard produces more meat, wheat, spice, cotton, or grapes than the owner uses, and he sells them for income, capitalism emerges. In what world is that not virtually guaranteed to happen for somebody?

And then, if in addition to simply producing goods out of the earth, some enterprising people see an opportunity to build something people will pay to use (like an inn or a stable), will they not build it if they have the means and incentive? Will someone not build a boat to ferry people across a river, for a fee? Will someone not build a carriage to pull with a horse to transport goods for a fee? Is it not virtually guaranteed all of this will organically happen for somebody because people need/want all of it to happen?

> Yes, some forms of authority are going to exist, but that isn't contradictory to anarchism. Just like authoritarianism doesn't mean pure 100% control over the oppressed (which is impossible), it's opposite is not 100% pure freedom from control.

OK, but to all the owners of goods/service producing farms, ranches, plantations, vineyards, inns, stables, ferry or delivery services, what you think of as "minimizing hierarchy and control" is going to look like some pretty strict control. Basically, you want to make all of that illegal, and you stand ready to deploy state violence to ensure none of it is allowed.

> one towards greater control over others and the other towards lesser control over others.

It sounds to me like you're all for greater control over others as long as "others" are people who create things people want to pay for. And you need a strong state to ensure that this control is effective.

But your state is going to need to be even stronger than that. Not only is it going to have to enforce these prohibitions on capitalism, now without anybody else to do them, the state is going to have to provide all of these goods and services itself. And a state that powerful is going to need a well defined command and control hierarchy if it's going to work at all. And now you've just brought the Soviet Union back online.

This isn't anarchism at all.

What am I missing?

Meta_Digital t1_j146rje wrote on December 21, 2022 at 3:27 PM

> In what world is that not virtually guaranteed to happen for somebody?

No, capitalism is merely the existence of capital. Capital is a very complex concept, but it can be easily understood as private property which exists only for the purpose of producing more capital. So, a ranch is a capitalist ranch if it's someone's private property. If there's an employer and employees (which only exist under capitalism, as lords and serfs only do under feudalism). If the employee produces someone else's property through their labor which is sold as capital for the sake of capital accumulation.

> Basically, you want to make all of that illegal, and you stand ready to deploy state violence to ensure none of it is allowed.

No. Simply the secession of state protection of private property through violence (such as through the police) makes the existence of private property impossible. It requires violence to preserve, not end.

> Not only is it going to have to enforce these prohibitions on capitalism, now without anybody else to do them, the state is going to have to provide all of these goods and services itself.

Again, no. Capitalism has to be preserved by a powerful state able to enclose land and protect property through the state apparatus. No it's not as easy as just getting rid of the state, nor is it as easy as what the USSR attempted (they killed anarchists along the way you know). I'd recommend maybe A Conquest of Bread for a more thorough explanation of what an anarchist society might look like and how we might get there. It's not such a small subject that a Reddit post can be sufficient.

tcl33 t1_j14blea wrote on December 21, 2022 at 3:59 PM

> Again, no. Capitalism has to be preserved by a powerful state able to enclose land and protect property through the state apparatus.

For capitalism to stabilize into something durable and predictable, and therefore to scale, what you're saying is true.

But this does no violence to my original point which is that capitalism will form organically. You can see the types of examples I outlined in places lacking an effective state apparatus. Consider Somalia. Or the American frontier (in particular Deadwood style illegal settlements in Indian territory).

Again, without an effective state to nurture and preserve it, capitalism is unstable and unlikely to scale. But it will occur organically. That's all I'm saying.

> Capital is a very complex concept, but it can be easily understood as private property which exists only for the purpose of producing more capital. So, a ranch is a capitalist ranch if it's someone's private property. If there's an employer and employees (which only exist under capitalism, as lords and serfs only do under feudalism). If the employee produces someone else's property through their labor which is sold as capital for the sake of capital accumulation.

All of this happens at a limited scale in the absence of an effective state. It will occur spontaneously, because that's what happens when people want to buy and sell things, and hire and work for wages. It just happens. It's been happening for thousands of years.

Meta_Digital t1_j14d74f wrote on December 21, 2022 at 4:09 PM

I think what's happening here is the conflation of a seed and a plant, or an egg with a chicken.

Everything in the universal contains potentialities. A thing has the potential within it to become other things, as a seed could become a plant (or be an ingredient in a meal).

So what you're seeing here is that. The capacity for capitalism exists within certain dynamics. The seeds of capitalism existed within the feudal system, for instance, and they matured through the adolescence of mercantilism. This was a potential which was unleashed through historical events like the Bubonic Plague and technologies like the steel plow or steam engine or ideologies like the Enlightenment. Historical events seemed to predetermine a capitalist system, which is pretty much what Marx and Engels argued.

But other potentialities also existed, and still exist. What could mature into capitalism could mature also into something else. Humanity is roughly 100,000 years old and capitalism makes up about 300 of those years. It doesn't look like it's going to make it much longer than that either due to its unstable nature. So it could be that capitalism is just a potential, a very rare potential, for human populations. The conditions were met, and opposing forces were incapable of stopping it (they certainly tried), and so we get it for a short time. But it's not inevitable, and it's not permanent. It just seems like that because it's the globally dominant system and has been for some time now, and that makes it hard to imagine that the world was or could be any other way.