My idea of pleasant is a world where everyone's needs are met as well as some of our wants. Production matters only insofar as it meets those needs and wants. Excess production, like we're seeing today, only destroys us and the planet.

So then is your argument that a productive world is better than one that is pleasant to live in?

In the absence of greed or threat, we'd live in a nice world.

I never argued for chasing buffalo or living in a tent. I don't think any of these are required. Are you responding to someone else's post or confusing me with someone else?

What I said is that the primitive life is objectively better than being a child laborer in a toxic metal mine or a wage slave in a sweatshop.

I don't think we have to give up a comfortable lifestyle because we transition to a more functional and ethical system than capitalism.

But a group of hunter-gatherers who have free time, personal autonomy, and the basic necessities are a lot richer than the coffee plantation workers that drug LA, the meat industry workers that prepare the flesh they consume, the sweatshops that churn out their fast fashion, and the children in lithium mines that supply the raw material for their "green" transportation.

Where the hunter-gatherer doesn't have many luxuries, the average LA resident's luxuries come at the expense of human dignity and happiness elsewhere.

Well, it's not my Nordic model to be fair.

Inequality today is the highest in recorded history, so technically, all other economic systems have a better track record for reducing poverty. Additionally, crashing every 4-7 years, capitalism is the least stable of all historic economic systems. It isn't the dominant system because of either of these reasons.

Yes, we would be more prosperous. Poverty is often a form of violence inflicted on a population, and that violence ripples out and comes back and affects us negatively. Things don't have to be perfectly even, that's a strawman, but by elevating the bottom we also lift the top. Certainly the inequality should be reduced, though, because a top elevated too high causes instability for everyone. It's impractical.

No, I am suggesting that we are "happier" in the wealthy parts of the capitalist economy because others are put into fields in slave-like conditions.

The whole world is integrated into capitalism, and the Southern hemisphere (other than Australia / New Zealand) has been extracted to make the Northern hemisphere (primarily Western Europe / US / Canada) wealthy.

We do have a world where people in imperial neocolonies toil in fields. If you don't know that, then you're in one of the empires using that labor for cheap (but increasingly less cheap to feed the owning class) commodities.

When wealth is consolidated, that means it moves from a lot of places and into few places. That's why the majority of the world is poor and only a very tiny portion is rich.

Yes, well, if everyone will have more tomorrow that sounds like socialism, not capitalism. Capitalism is "I will have more tomorrow and you will have less".

We don't put those kinds of people in charge of society like we do under capitalism.

I don't know how to respond to this because it's clear it would be an uneven conversation. You're missing very basic required knowledge here. Inequality, for instance, is at its highest point in recorded history. Capitalism is a form of authoritarianism. Economic conflict turns into military conflict which increases the risk of nuclear war. Capitalism is not human nature; it's actually pretty recent and radically different from its precursors in several important ways. I have no idea what you're even talking about regarding communism or how it's even relevant.

Well, the fundamental problem with capitalism is that it just doesn't work. Not in the long run. Infinite exponential growth is a problem, especially as an economic system. Eventually, in order to maintain that growth, you have to sacrifice all morality. In the end, you have to sacrifice life itself if you wish to maintain it. Look at the promises vs. the consequences of automation for a great example of how capitalism, as a system and an ideology, ruins everything it touches. You don't need forced altruism to have some decency in the world; you just need a system that doesn't go out of its way to eliminate every possible hint of altruism in the world to feed its endless hunger.

Indeed.

I think we could conceive of AI and automation that is a boon to humanity (as was the original intent of automation), but any form of power and control + capitalism = immoral behavior. Concern over AI is really concern over capitalism. Even the fear of an AI rebellion we see in fiction is just a technologically advanced capitalist fear of the old slave uprising.

Yes; capitalism is the first system that seems poised to lead to human extinction if we don't choose to overcome it rather than reacting after it does its damage and self destructs.

The AI the author is referring to is either what we have today, which is just old mechanical automation, or the AI that is imagined to have intelligence. Either way, it's the motives of the creators of those systems that are the core problem of those systems.

Yeah, applying the concept of "banality of evil" to something imaginary like an AI when capitalism is right there being the most banal and most evil thing humanity has yet to contend with is a kind of blindness one might expect if you're living within a banal enough evil.

Edit: Angry rate downs despite rising inequality, authoritarianism, climate change, and the threat of nuclear war - all at once.

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.

> 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.

> It doesn't scale and so isn't really workable in the modern world where we need systems that account for millions of people at a time.

The thing about horizontal power structures is that, unlike hierarchical structures, they don't scale. Scaling happens when a system grows and it becomes more difficult to centrally plan and manage. Natural systems like the universe itself can be as small or large as they like for this reason. Same with animal populations. Of course such a manmade system wouldn't resemble what we have now, but that doesn't mean that such a thing can't exist. Hierarchies are the exception in nature, not the norm. To frame horizontal structures as unrealistic is to claim that reality is unrealistic.

> Science is a great example of something a tribal communist/anarchist society could not have. Science requires allowing for specialization, which means one less person working towards the survival of the group.

You mean like the specialization of Aristotle, who did philosophy, physics, metaphysics, and other subjects? Or do you mean the mathematician, philosopher, and scientist that was Isaac Newton? Perhaps you are referring to the specialization of Albert Einstein, who was a philosopher, a mathematician, and a scientist. Also a socialist.

The greatest contributors to the advancement of human knowledge rarely resemble the hyper-specialist we see under capitalism and more closely resemble the holistic thinkers of broadly talented people like Leonardo deVinci. Some degree of specialization is necessary, even in the primitive societies you're referring to, but too much specialization and there are no longer any advancements.

In fact, the factory method of industry was in part designed to keep workers so specialized that they'd never command a better wage or grow into potential competition. Like anything, specialization is not always beneficial at all levels of extremity.

> Communism is impossible, not because every society who's tried it failed, it's impossible because it fails to account for human nature. Communism can only work if everyone always buys into the shared collective efforts of the group. But there will always be people who seek to take advantage of situations to gain advantages for themselves over the group, which is exactly what happened every single time it's been tried.

This is based on the idea that because you observe capitalist behavior under capitalism that this means that capitalist behavior is "human nature". It's a common fallacy to assume that your era or culture represents the sum total of human capacity. In reality, communism represents one potential path among many that people can take. A great example of everyday communism is the household. Some households are feudal in structure where the income earner controls everything and dictates everything. More commonly, though, families in a household pool their resources and share for the benefit of the family. This is especially true in poor families that cannot afford the more authoritarian alternative. The fact that both of these kinds of households exist, though, demonstrates the amazing plasticity of so-called "human nature".

> It gives ownership of capital to those who work it rather than those who own it.

The workers use what they own and keep what they produce, the factory is no longer capital (someone else's private property) and the product is no longer capital (someone else's private property). Communism as defined by Marx takes this a step further and removes money and the state as well.

> An interesting thought experiment perhaps, but certainly nothing to actually take seriously. Unlike environmentalism and feminism, which can and do exist.

And criticism from the right of feminism is that it's a utopian fantasy about putting women in charge. Criticism from the same towards environmentalism is that it's a utopian fantasy that nature above humans. How is your critique different from this? Ultimately not. Like with the others, it's born from a misunderstanding of the subject.

All of these are frameworks which approach problems from a particular lens. Feminism from power relations between men and women. Environmentalism from power relations between humans and non-humans. Marxism from power relations between owners and workers. Anarchism from power relations between the government and the governed. None of these are proposed utopias.

Okay, and I generally agree with this, but the issue seems to emerge when we're talking about organizing a society in a way that those with "merit" have undue power over those who supposedly don't.

Does Elon Musk have more merit than his Tesla or Twitter employees?

Does Joe Biden or Donald Trump have more merit than most of the US?

What even are the merits of Exxon? The Federal Reserve? The World Bank? The CIA? NATO? Do they have justification for the immense power they have over so many people's lives?

It's simple when we're talking about simple roles like a doctor or a janitor, but it gets far more complicated when we structure entire governments and massive national and transnational organizations around vague ideas of "merit". Can we even justify the existence of many of these organizations at all? What do we even mean by "merit" with reference to them?

Most of the discussion surrounding the failures of these organizations concerns the idea that the "wrong" people are at the top of them. If only Trump were president, then X would happen. If only Biden were president, then Y would happen. Yet the same system elevates both equally. Perhaps the fact that the wrong people keep getting into power comes down to the system simply working as it's supposed to work and that the ideas that went into the system are what's at fault. This would be the anarchist critique.

> What are some examples of successful ones?

The untold thousands of years of primitive communism, which led to the domination of the human species over the planet, is often considered an example of humanity's success as a species. We could consider the end of these cultures, often eradicated by empires through conquest and colonization, as failure, but I think an argument could also be made that conquest and colonization were a response to the failure of empire.

I like to use science as a good example of a cooperative free exchange that betters humanity, and contributes one of the greatest successes of the human race. Science constantly rubs up against hierarchy, competition, and privatization, which have all inhibited its ability to better our lives.

> It looks like you're describing Communism, which we tried and doesn't work.

This is an overly simplistic understanding of what people mean by communism. You might be thinking specifically of the USSR, which was not structured as a communist (or even socialist) society, but an attempt to eventually evolve into one. It does demonstrate the difficulty in taking a feudal society and trying to make it communist in a capitalist world, but it does not prove that communism is impossible.

> But see both socialism and fascism (which isn't an economic model, but I understand what you're trying to say) are both extensions of capitalism, not new systems entirely.

Fascist regimes, thus far, have had capitalist economies integrated into their political system. Some have described fascism as the merging of capitalism with government.

Socialism is not capitalist as it doesn't have capital. The word "capitalism" was invented by early socialists to describe an economy system focused on capital rather than society. Socialism abolishes capital (private property, employers, employees, etc.) and thus is no more capitalist than feudalism or other alternative economies that don't contain capital.

> It isn't accurate to say that we are doomed to back pedal as a direct result of not engaging with a hypothetical utopian fantasy.

Anarchism isn't a hypothetical utopian fantasy. In fact, by definition, it is the opposite, as to presume that future generations would structure society exactly as historical thinkers imagined would be a form of inter-generational oppression. Anarchism is merely a critical framework, like feminism or environmentalism, directed at power dynamics in political structures.

If anarchy is a fantasy, then meritocracy is a form of insanity. There has yet to be a good definition of merit, and worse, there's hardly ever been an attempt at one. Merit gets defined by the people at the top of the system in order to preserve their position and elevate those who help them preserve their position. And so, without fail, every meritocracy is a scam, and the result is that those with something approaching a more objective definition of merit are not elevated. We're not even at the point where we can even conceive of an objective definition of merit.

For instance, merit under capitalism is profit maximization. So those elevated to the top of society are the ones who... well by and large started at the top. Even if they didn't, it turns out that you can maximize profits best by being parasitic on society and the natural environment, and so those in the greatest position of power under capitalism are also those most responsible for the world's greatest problems. This is a pretty typical result in historical attempts at a kind of meritocracy.

A society focused on the worth and autonomy of an individual person wouldn't discriminate for or against them based on merit. Ultimately, merit is just reducing a person down to the instrumental use they have for someone else's ambitions.

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.

> Besides wishful thinking and theoretical ideas, there is nothing tangible to suggest that this isn't just the way things will always be in one form or another.

Other than historical societies, which offer a wealth of alternatives to capitalism or destitution. None of this is any more "wishful thinking" than trying to be good or truthful.

> How would such a division of labor be equitably organized in our hypothetical utopia?

The focus here isn't on some fantasy of everyone being perfectly equal and having exactly the same outcome. It's about control vs. autonomy. A self-governing society would be just that; a collection of autonomous agents collectively forming a community. The material conditions of life will create some inequality, but it wouldn't be the kind of inequality imposed through force that is normal under capitalism.

> Moving on from the current capitalist model may indeed be inevitable, even desirable, but I think it's unreasonable to just assume that moving on from capitalism will automatically lead to a more equitable or environmentally balanced system.

Certainly. We're currently experiencing the decline of capitalism and the rise in the potential for alternatives - which will either move in the direction of a more egalitarian society such as in socialism or an even more stratified economy such as in fascism. The Nazis began as an anti-capitalist movement before Hitler came to power (and got rid of the original anti-capitalists along with the rest), so yes, not all alternatives are desirable.

Yet, critiques like the anarchist critique are the alternative to reactionary politics that results in worsening conditions. By ignoring the anarchist (and other) critiques, we only increase the risk of descending into something worse.