Sidenote: That's a really weird way of writing his first name. While the Russian does have a letter that visually resembles ë (unicode: ё), it is not a variation of the letter e as this transcription suggests, but invariably pronounced something like 'yo'. The name is pronounced "Pyotr", and of course corresponds to Peter, by which name Kropotkin was also known. I've no idea where this spelling comes from, but it's like writing Bladimir or Cergei instead Vladimir Sergey. Weird.
Of all the choices[1], I’ve always been partial to the ISO 9 / GOST approach with Czech/Slovak-style diacritics (either version), even though those same diacritics make it impractical in most ASCII contexts. Just now I went to check the table and learned it actually prescribes ë for ‹ё›. Huh.
I actually like this spelling. The sounds that have exact equivalents use the Latin alphabet and those that do not are replaced by the character's native system. Cause his name is not Pyotr or Peter or Pierre or whatever else. It is Pëtr indeed.
I'd say Pötr would be a (technically) correct transcription, although it looks super weird.
On pronunciation: “Pyotr” is most close, if you use the “y” just to note that the “p” is soft and not as a separate sound – i. e. “Pjotr” would be incorrect.
Seems Kropotkin was always doomed to be dubbed a "revolutionary" (in
the negative sense) purely by dint of his observations. Humans don't
live "in nature". We live within systems we build. The cooperative
struggle against a hostile environment naturally becomes one against
the incumbent system [1]. The system therefore naturally mobilises to
disrupt cooperation, to divide and disorient. And therein lies the
paradox of digital communication, that the more we are connected - via
the system - the more we are divided.
[1] worth comparing to William James' "Moral equivalent of war"
> And therein lies the paradox of digital communication, that the more we are connected - via the system - the more we are divided.
Its only because people are easily losing the sight what's important when the establishment manipulates them using emotional triggers. From nationalism to religion, from social issues to pop culture, everything is used to take people's attention away from economic issues.
"Conquest of Bread" had a huge impact on my politics. It cut through the capitalist realist narrative that we're all in economic competition and that capitalism is the only sane solution. It made me feel like another world is possible. I changed my life to pursue these other possibilities ever since.
I heard (of course) of anarchism a long time ago, but I always wrote it off as impractical: since without government, there's nobody to stop somebody from starting one. However, this may be incorrect, but it does require a population that is always willing to fight against the formation of a government. I think now that anarchism is practical, at least for a population of committed anarchists, and in the absence of hostile external forces. There's no way that anarchism could be imposed on people who don't want it (a contradiction), and it's going to be a stretch to expect people who grew up with capitalism or authoritarianism (or both) to accept it.
It was in Le Guin's novel "The Dispossessed" that I first read a convincing account of such a society, and I only later read some of Kropotkin and Bakunin's work.
Edit: Other forms of society are based on a carrot and stick system; people believe that without threats or rewards, people won't bother to work; they don't believe in mutual aid as sufficient in itself.
I call this the "you and what army" problem: if you look around the room and you don't see the State, l'Etat, c'est vous.
Council mutualism is not only practical, it's practiced, but it's practiced by Hutterites.
Can it be done without Anabaptist convictions? I don't see any reason why not. Has it? Not with that level of success, no.
The you and what army problem being obvious, inescapable, and inherent, political anarchism will, insofar as it plays a role at all, continue to be a way that people more inherently l'Etat c'est moi about it seize power, often jailing and killing the anarchist leaders (the anarcharchs, if you will) in the process.
> It was in Le Guin's novel "The Dispossessed" that I first read a convincing account of such a society
It's been a minute, but _was_ The Dispossessed a convincing account of such a society? From what I remember, the protagonist encounters academic gate-keepers who effectively control who gets to do teaching and research or what gets communicated to the main planet, centralized systems choose things as personal as what you're named, resources (food) are distributed unequally and untransparently (Shivek is surprised when the big university cafeteria has more/better food?). Coercive hierarchies still develop, but they're cloaked in the dogma of anarchism.
I read this as showing that even if you can isolate to an extreme (by being on a resource-poor moon), and have a language and education system which tries to suppress concepts of ownership, and a population goes through the shared trauma of fighting to feed themselves, people will still find a way to limit each other's freedom, and exercise power, and accumulate or control resources.
On your last sentence I like saying this as follows "Humanity still hasn't found a way to deal with people that don't mind a large piece of a small pie"
It wasn't perfect anarchism, by any means. Apparently Le Guin was well aware of how anarchism and human nature would tend to conflict, and she described only an "ambiguous utopia".
> since without government, there's nobody to stop somebody from starting one.
IMO, this is not the actual problem with the practicality of anarchism.
The problem with anarchism is that the absence of government will recreate the problems which motivate the creation of government, just as excessive government creates the motivation for abolition of government.
Particularly, retaliatory (including lethal) violence—not merely proximate individual and mutual self-defense, but individual and mutual action aimed at preventing future threats from past malefactors, is the common anarchist solution to the problem of perceived-as-unjustified use of force (what, in the context of government, would be “crime”).
But we have plenty of experience with that approach ib areas with no accepted government, weak government, or disinterested government, and what tends to happen is that differences of opinion over whether the initial violence was unjustified (or even if it factually occurred) or the retaliation disproportional (and thus itself unjustified violence) devolve into cyclical violence, the relief for which is establishment of a mechanism for settling disputes about justification and thus either legitimizing or delegitimizing and authorizing corrective responses to force, creating the monopoly on legitimate use of force which, whether called a government or not, defines the state.
> I heard (of course) of anarchism a long time ago, but I always wrote it off as impractical: since without government, there's nobody to stop somebody from starting one.
Without knightly orders there is nobody stopping people from forming knightly orders.
>I think now that anarchism is practical, at least for a population of committed anarchists, and in the absence of hostile external forces.
I too classify all my physics problems as 'spherical cows in a vacuum', but unless you've ignored Twitter your entire life you should realize powerful forces of propaganda exist that ensure that this will never exist. Threats exist in the form of ruthless humans that will ally with the corruptible and greedy to consolidate power to the point of acting with wonton violence. These people use ideas of nationalism and shared identity (cooperation) along with propaganda that militarizes the group against common enemies, generally being other groups that have resources they can take.
In general having a 'stable' society with wealth can be an inoculation against this human behavior of falling for propaganda, but again, it requires stability against the environment, against disease, against economic swings, against competing ideas. Anarchist societies just seem to handwave these issues away.
Economic swings can be explained very easily. A currency where the circulation velocity isn't stable can have booms or busts from an increase or decrease of the circulation velocity. In practice the problem is that the circulation velocity is going down too much, to which the response so far has always been to increase the money supply rather than the velocity.
A minority in a prejudiced society is always fucked, but especially fucked in a democracy. Democracy is literally legitimization of force against the minority, by virtue of vote. Even the constitution, which supposedly protects minority rights, can be amended to remove those rights by a prejudiced majority.
IMO the prejudiced minority has the best chance when they can make it as painful as possible for the majority to harm them. That is, to disable the state's law as much as possible from being wielded against non-aggressor minorities.
>How does this work when one is a minority in a prejudiced society?
In practice in places like Northern Syria, which much of is essentially devoid of strong government, Syriac Christians banded together with machine guns and literally kill anyone who comes to aggress against them. Sure, Assad / the Kurds (who are their allies) / other majority around them could fuck them up if they like, but it's not worth the trouble.
No one is disagreeing that governments are the biggest perpetuator of killing in the past 100 years. Government is responsible for far more killing than by non-government actors. Using your interesting logic, one would disagree with the existence of government if one were trying to minimize these deaths. Is this your argument in support of anarchism?
There are complaints that an anarchist society wouldn't be perfect, as though any perfection can be found in any of the well-over 100 governments run on the principle of capitalism plus government authority. Not even the capitalist ideal is respected (freedom to use your private property however you like), since it would cause so many problems in practice.
The history of the supposed poster child of "democracy" w.r.t. its handling of the native peoples inhabiting its territory disagrees with your disagreement.
Or "conditional probability" territory. Of the people who would choose to espouse a philosophy of treating everyone as equal, it is unlikely to find someone significantly prejudiced.
Espousing ideology isn’t the same as believing it or living it. The moment the threat of the state recedes, and sometimes before, anarchist violence turns inwards; race, sex, and gender expression are just as suitable as status markers for anarchists as anyone else.
At least to the point that the society is left to itself without being invaded. That was the issue for the anarchist experiment in 1930s Spain, it was shut down by fascists and Soviet-aligned communists. Would it have survived if left to itself? I guess we'll never know.
I find the general unwillingness to experiment with alternative models of society, whether they are libertarianism, or anarchism, or whatever, quite disappointing. A few "special economic zones" doesn't seem like too much to ask for.
Instead, we just replicate the same old model, which these days is a mixture of capitalism and government authority. The government authority supposedly either suppresses the worst outcomes of capitalism, or is a source of corruption and abuse in itself. Now we have well over 100 such governments around the world, with varying degrees of success for the majority of their populations, and I'm not sure we are really learning anything.
Yeah, if everyone was like me, I bet AnCap would work (very different from most-common versions of anarchism, and in my view, the only non-morally-repugnant one - but still impractical). Heck I bet if you could clone some saints old-school communism would work just fine :)
The main problem is how a society can work without such restrictions...
Anarcho-capitalism is nothing like the communist anarchism that Kropotkin was writing about. There's no pretence at equality, you've basically just replaced government repression with private repression by the wealthy.
It's a choice of economic system, not morality. There's nothing immoral about making all work voluntary and eliminating private property, it's just a different system with different expectations.
The rule about property in communist anarchism would be something like: it's yours for as long as you are using it, but once you no longer need it, somebody else can take it to use (or repurpose the materials).
You are comparing an idealized version of one system with reality-fied version of another; the an-cap that Rothbard was describing doesn't have much private repression by the wealthy. Idealized to idealized, they are all great. FWIW in reality, I think both will quickly evolve into control by gangs, then larger gangs/cartels; then either the latter will gradually develop manners and it will become something like feudalism, or if there's a strong contender + some symbol to rally around like religion or the old state itself, mafia state. Source: pretty much every place with central government that cannot reliably enforce law, from the remnants of Western Roman Empire to China 100 years ago to Russia 25 years ago to, it appears, modern Mexico or South Africa. And they still have/had some governance going on, at least. I don't think less governance will suddenly reverse the direction they were/are heading in.
Actually capitalism wouldn't work even if you could clone yourself assuming you play by the rules instead of using your cooperation with yourself to ignore them.
Why not? I don't mean literally clone, I mean if everyone had my level of commitment and aversion to initiating violence. Communism/anarchism wouldn't work cause I'm lazy, I would take all I need as long as I can, but work on socially-useful projects that do not interest me as little as I could get away with. But capitalism would work just fine.
> However, this may be incorrect, but it does require a population that is always willing to fight against the formation of a government
It's kind of akin to the paradox of tolerance. A tolerant society cannot remain so unless it remains vigilant against intolerance, and likewise a stateless society cannot remain so unless it remains vigilant against the state. Both sorts of vigilance are possible; the question is whether or not they're practical (and my hope is that the answer to both is "yes").
Well, if we lived in a society which was based on voluntary social interactions - which are by definition mutually beneficial - and where bodily attacks and forcible expropriation by dint of the "right" of superior force was deplored and defended against by the majority, I'd call that a capitalist society.
How can private property exist in such a society? If you and I both claim to own some land and we can't come to an agreement, isn't it going to be decided with superior force?
How is this society mutually beneficial by definition? If I own the fields and decide to destroy the produce (it's mine, I can do whatever I want?) while the locals starve, this is fine right?
> isn't it going to be decided with superior force?
Yes. There is always going to be a superior force and it decides who owns what.
Practically, the point of anarchism is that the force should be limited (voluntarily, like how armies in a healthy democracy voluntarily subordinate themselves to the voters) to the absolute minimum role possible. For example, the popular configuration right now is that the group that controls the strongest army (ie, 'the government') is also seen as responsible for providing healthcare and welfare. The anarchists think this is stupid because there is no reason to think that there is an organization that is simultaneously good at so many things at once.
> How is this society mutually beneficial by definition?
Anyone using force to achieve their aims gets removed from society, so all that is left is people transacting mutually beneficially. It isn't so radical, that is close to what we have now. The vision is basically you go to the shops and buy stuff.
That there is any barrier for the force to remain limited beyond the barriers already established in our current governments. In this argument it seems that we've established that force is needed. But there is no compelling argument put forth by anarchism that establishes a reasonable control mechanism for limiting said force. Yea "You can't tell my what to do by force" seems like a good mantra, but it really sucks the moment someone else gathers up enough people voluntarily (or monitarialy) to subdue the limited resistance your type of governance allows. The "We'll all get together and fight the enemy" sounds good until you realize that about half the battle put forth by the enemy will be psyops in getting the anarchist to fight themselves allowing them to be even more easily defeated. Once a significant portion of the anarchist are convinced to give up and not fight the enemy, and if they give up those that will fight they will be spared, the remaining pockets of resistance will much more easily collapse. You're back to 'anarchist nationalism" to prevent just this from happening.
> But there is no compelling argument put forth by anarchism that establishes a reasonable control mechanism for limiting said force.
That is already a solved problem. The force chooses to exert itself in a limited way. The largest military in the world currently works like that - the US army does whatever the US Congress tells it to. They don't have to, the army has the guns and the US Congress only has annoying geriatrics and comfortable seats - not much of a contest if the army makes it one. The army chooses to limit itself because they understand it will lead to the best outcome for them.
The radical part of anarchism isn't the use of force, it is the argument that the people who exert force shouldn't be trying to solve social problems with force. The barrier to that isn't the behaviour of the army, it is the beliefs of the polity.
> How is this society mutually beneficial by definition
I wrote "voluntary social interactions [...] are by definition mutually beneficial". A voluntary interaction implies that all participants in the interaction have chosen to do so by their own free will. That implies that they value going through with the interaction higher than to forego the interaction. Hence, it benefits all of them.
> If you and I both claim to own some land and we can't come to an agreement, isn't it going to be decided with superior force?
That's merely a technical problem. A land register might be a solution.
The cited article quotes Kropotkin talking about ants and how they cooperate. It says if an ant does not cooperate by sharing food, they are treated as an enemy.
This is what he meant by mutual aid.
> Kropotkin was fascinated by how ant cheaters (those who refuse to dispense aid) are dealt with: “If an ant which has its crop full has been selfish enough to refuse feeding a comrade, it will be treated as an enemy, or even worse. If the refusal has been made while its kinsfolk were fighting with some other species, they will fall back upon the greedy individual with greater vehemence than even upon the enemies themselves.”
A 19th century Russian prince that became a socialist perhaps thinks of something different when he thinks of "beaurocracy" or "government" than a 21st century HN reader does.
Yes, I know. I read the article. I also think it is sensible to be aware of cheaters and treat them accordingly, though we're not a haplodiploid species. Bear in mind that dealing with cheaters must not be taken as an excuse for violence or robbery.
What is your point regarding my answer to gp post? I didn't even mention the words "bureaucracy" or "government". Rest assured though, that I despise them both.
The article used those terms, in a way that cast Kropotkin in a "right libertarian" light which struck me as anachronistic given his time period.
Your comment seemed to echo that, talking about some Anarcho-capitalist libertarian ideal buzzword society, linking that to his anarchism and then further attaching the generic word 'capitalist' to it.
> Anarcho-capitalism is also distinguished from anarchism, an anti-capitalist movement that opposes unnecessary coercion and hierarchy, and social anarchism, a branch of anarchism that sees individual freedom as interrelated with mutual aid. Unlike anarchists, anarcho-capitalists support private property and private institutions. Anarcho-capitalists also reject the libertarian socialist economic theories of anarchism, arguing that they are inherently authoritarian or require authoritarianism to achieve, while believing that there is no coercion under capitalism. Despite its name, anarcho-capitalism lies outside the tradition of anarchism and is more closely affiliated with capitalism, right-libertarianism, and liberalism
Having an obscure historical claim to a word commonly associated with people who you disagree with is the best kind of Technically Correct, but not great for communication.
I was mostly trying to point out that there are disagreements about what "anarchist" means and avoid confusion.
This seems like a horrible notion of how to run a human society and is shocking if that is a foundational observation leading to his anarchist outlook. In a capitalist society, someone who refuses to share also fails to thrive as much as they could (natural consequence), possibly falling into poverty. But there is no need to violently rip them apart. In a society in which all is given freely, the only alternative for lack of cooperation would seem to be active punishment, either violence or some kind of exiling.
Even if one is okay with punishing those who refuse to work for the good of all, when does it get invoked? Who decides? What if there is a mistake in that notion?
And this is in the context in which work is generally simple to observe and equate. In a modern society, work is very unequal. How do you figure out appropriate levels of working across nursing, serving coffee, working in a sewage treatment plant, mining, farming, teaching, walking dogs, long-distance hauling, programming, managing, etc. Who would make those decisions? Do you have agreed upon shifts? If someone shows up late or doesn't show up, is there some consequence meted out by someone?
In an economic system, one has the price system where all of that gets figured out. If you think you are underpaid in such a system, you can seek to get paid more by doing something else. If you think someone is overpaid, you can undercut their prices. If you don't show up for work, you don't get paid. This creates the changing conditions that lead to better allocation of resources, including labor. It is unclear how this could work in a society where everyone just works for the betterment of society and the fruits of all labor are distributed "equally" (things are not equal, so someone has to decide some kind of price-equivalent system for this, I presume)?
> Who would make those decisions?
Some anarchists have everyone vote on such matters. Some have a legal system that is elected.
> Do you have agreed upon shifts?
Yes. These are established by vote of the workers.
> If someone shows up late or doesn't show up, is there some consequence meted out by someone?
Yes.
Rather than using prices to set which work is desirable people vote on it. Some anarchist societies today distribute undesirable work across the entire community. Everyone takes one cleaning shift a week for example.
If you're curious, you should read The Dispossessed. I especially recommend that book because it does not paint a utopian picture of an anarchist society. And most anarchists will be honest that you will loose benefits moving from a capitalist-statist political economy to an anarchist one. The goal in moving to an anarchist society is not to create a society where individual access to material wealth is the same as in a capitalist society. The goal is to create a society in which the unstated forms of domination that exist in "free" societies today are weakend.
There's all sorts of interesting arguments about how various libertarian societies would enforce their non-aggression, property rights and contract law etc.
It's very lazy to claim that any society doesn't have this requirement.
Also, anarchism (or socialism) and markets are not necessarily mutually exclusive, there's many different types, though some of those may claim they are exclusive and only theirs is the true anarchism/socialism.
That's not a capitalist society. This is the correct definition for Capitalism:
> an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.
It doesn't imply voluntary social interactions, it doesn't imply some sort of protection against the "superior force" you mention.
The values you enounce belong to any healthy society as voluntary social interactions happen in socialism too, where the majority (the proletariat) is protected against the use of superior force by the rich.
Now, would you please explain how can social interactions be voluntary in a system where property-less people have no other choice to survive but to accept the least bad offer from those who own the means of production?
Interactions can really be voluntary once neither of the parts depend on the interaction to survive. Once we free exchanges from such power play, then we can talk about will.
This is why the only just and free system can be one where nobody has to struggle for the material needs necessary for their survival.
And how would you suggest that someone could become and stay wealthy, if their only legal means to acquire wealth is to provide value to society?
Would you rather take what you desire by force, under the pretense that you somehow deserve to own what others have peacefully acquired? That would be the mentality of a street thug.
> And how would you suggest that someone could become and stay wealthy, if their only legal means to acquire wealth is to provide value to society?
The possibility of "someone" becoming wealthier than others has no value to me. I care much more about the possibility of people starving or living a terrible life due to lack of basic material needs.
> Would you rather take what you desire by force, under the pretense that you somehow deserve to own what others have peacefully acquired? That would be the mentality of a street thug.
Capitalism thrived during Nazism and Fascism. An entire economy was born out of the extermination of the Jews, and capitalists made tons of profits out of it. They also profited immensely from the now cheap and union free labor force, all thanks to the fascist police beating and arresting any unionist.
There were also wealthy people during periods where only birth right could give you wealth, and those aristocrats would not hesitate to abuse of the population with violence.
It is clear that the existence of wealthy people does not guarantee free and voluntary exchanges. If nothing, it usually pushes for the opposite.
> The possibility of "someone" becoming wealthier than others has no value to me.
In a system of voluntary exchange ("capitalism") they can only become wealthier if they are freely given their wealth by someone, even if that someone's not you.
> I care much more about the possibility of people starving or living a terrible life due to lack of basic material needs.
I hold with Kropotkin, we are a social species. As long as there is sufficient wealth, people will be cared for. The best way to make sure that is the case is to maximize that wealth. That's what free, voluntary exchange does. It's not a zero-sum game but it's always win-win. Only the economically illiterate would claim otherwise.
> Capitalists thrived during Nazism and Fascism. An entire economy was born out of the extermination of the Jews, and capitalism made tons of profits out of it.
Nazism and Fascism both were self-avowedly anti-capitalist Ideologies. Insofar as neither cared for peace nor for property rights, this self-assessment must be judged entirely correct.
> There were also wealthy people during periods where only birth right could give you wealth, and those aristocrats would not hesitate to abuse of the population with violence.
Hence not capitalist. I argue for voluntary exchange and your counter-argument is "thugs, murderers and slave drivers existed, therefore capitalism bad"?
> It is clear that the existence of wealthy people does not guarantee free and voluntary exchanges. If nothing, it usually pushes for the opposite.
That was not the argument. You got it exactly backwards.
> Nazism and Fascism both were self-avowedly anti-capitalist Ideologies. Insofar as neither cared for peace nor for property rights, this self-assessment must be judged entirely correct.
This is just refuting historical truth without providing any evidence. It doesn't matter that Hitler used a kind of anticapitalis rethoric before getting in power. What happened once he did, is that the capitalist of the country got cheap and obedient labor force provided by the nazist police. They got rich out the war and the extermination of Jews as well.
> Hence not capitalist. I argue for voluntary exchange and your counter-argument is "thugs, murderers and slave drivers existed, therefore capitalism bad"?
No, not really. You argue for the possibility of becoming wealthy. I tell you that I don't think a right to become wealthier than others should exist, nor that people being wealthy is a guaranteed benefit for society, as shown in my examples.
You also keep mixing capitalism and voluntary exchange, and again as I've proven you those are not necessarily linked. I restate this, capitalists thrived during nazi germany due to the subjugation of the labor force.
> As long as there is sufficient wealth, people will be cared for.
This has been disproven time and time again, you're ignoring the matter of wealth inequality. The existence of wealth improves the general life conditions of the people only if such wealth is properly distributed. All the reductions in poverty we've seen in recent times are due to the conquests of the social movements, taking from the wealthy things like healthcare, retirement, decent working hours, safety on the job, unemployment benefits, public education, etc.
That you do not agree with the definition of capitalism that was given at the origin of this exchange does not mean that I have to abide by yours.
You can argue against your strawman-capitalism all you want, I do not care. If you insist that capitalism is not about protecting everyone's right to their property, I see no point in carrying on.
That's not my definition, it's the Wikipedia definition. Where does yours come from?
Also would you answer to my initial request to explain how transactions can be voluntary in a capitalist system where most people dont own property, the means of production.
Even the very same Wikipedia article you quote admits that central characteristics of capitalism include competitive markets, private property, property rights recognition, and voluntary exchange.
Neither National Socialism nor Fascist corporatism had strong protection of
- competitive markets: markets where heavily regulated and great parts of national production and ressources where directed and allocated by the government, preventing competition and free exchange
- property rights: lots of property was outright stolen from their rightful owners, the means of production were ultimately controlled by the government
- voluntary exchange: lots of people where forced into slave labor, which is decidedly involuntary
So yes, these were state socialist societies, not capitalist ones.
Oh, you probably meant "state capitalist". The definition of that fits to a tee.
> State capitalism is an economic system in which the state undertakes business and commercial (i.e. for-profit) economic activity and where the means of production are nationalized as state-owned enterprises (including the processes of capital accumulation, centralized management and wage labor). [...] Other examples include Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew and Turkey, as well as military dictatorships during the Cold War and fascist regimes such as Nazi Germany.
Lol, "Marxist literature defines state capitalism as a social system combining capitalism with ownership or control by a state".
Excuse me, when I respectfully decline that definition. What makes or breaks capitalism is private property, including and specifically of the "means of production", also called "capital goods".
"Engels argued that the tools for ending capitalism are found in state capitalism", that's like saying that eating your steak well done gives you the tools for slaughtering the cow.
OTOH, "It is not commonly realized that State Capitalism covers nothing more than what used to be called Planned Economy and State Socialism, and that State Capitalism, Planned Economy, and State Socialism diverge only in non-essentials from the classic ideal of egalitarian Socialism". At least one can find some sensible definitions in the article.
Look at where there were massive famines with people starving to death. Were those capitalist societies? How many people have starved to death in the semi-capitalist countries such as the US? How many starved to death in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea? When China pivoted to a kind of capitalism, did people start starving or did they start prospering? Allowing individuals to accumulate wealth by being of service is the key to general prosperity. This is the heart of capitalism.
The more a society is capitalist, the more wealth gets created and that wealth is spread out to all. The less a society embraces capitalism, the more desperate the poor become. Inequality does increase with capitalism which is a problem for stability, but the government exacerbates that issue by imposing laws that prevent competition and take from the poor to give to the rich. In a freer society than we have in the US, it would be harder for the rich to become super-rich. They have to keep being useful in such a society.
Begnal famine: Controlled by the British during WWII with rice imports blocked due to Japanese occupation of Burma, wartime inflationary policies, trade barriers imposed, food forcibly diverted to those important to the war effort, etc. These were not capitalist policies, but rather statist policies.
Ireland: Reading the description of Ireland, it sounded like aristocratic English landlords brutalizing tenants. I could not find a definitive claim about how the land was acquired, but it did not sound like capitalist acquirement of lands, but rather forceful appropriation. A significant factor was the inability of tenants to profit from improvements which could be taken away from them at anytime by the absentee landlords except in Ulster which then prospered more than the rest. It should be noted that the migration of the Irish to a much more capitalist society (US) is what helped minimize the deaths of the famines. This can certainly be a warning about potential dangers of massive land holdings and could arise from capitalist accumulation, but it is not clear that it actually was such a thing. Rather, it seems more akin to imperialist extraction.
Cuba: Not sure what you mean. Do you mean the various periods of famine under communist rule? Are you blaming the US statist policies of trade embargos? I found the following article to be a succinct and seemingly balanced history of Cuban farming in the past few decades: https://www.anywhere.com/cuba/travel-guide/agriculture Despite embargos, the US has supplied a lot of food to Cuba. Cuba got out of some of the worst famine by doing half measures towards privatized farming though they never let the markets really work as they should.
Dust bowl: I can't find any statistics about deaths. There was massive migration to more profitable areas which allowed these people to survive. It isn't pleasant, but it is better than starvation. This is how capitalism works when disaster strikes. It doesn't prevent the problems, but it does mitigate them by allowing people the agency to adjust their lives to maximize their chances for success. Is your blame on capitalism about the bad farming practices employed? I am not sure that any other governing ideology would have had different outcomes. But the farmers learned what needed to be done and have implemented it such that those conditions have not returned for almost a century. It should be noted that the 1930s time period coincided with strong federal government intervention in the economy as they implemented work restrictions, price controls, wage controls, and explicit governmental crop destruction policies. In fairness, they also implemented measures to deal with the underlying problems causing the Dust Bowl.
That would not be an accurate label. Nothing you wrote implies any economic system. Of course the society you describe would allow for capitalism, but it equally allows other models.
...in your estimation. I and many others would call it such, and with good reason. In our estimation it is capitalism that allows for other models, as long as they are peaceful and respect property rights.
Nothing about capitalism hinders you to follow your social instincts. You are free to share your possessions with whomever you choose. You can jointly own whatever you want with whomever you want. That is capitalism.
I can't run my own bank and abolish the capitalist system. I first need ten million dollars worth of capitalist money just to get started. Every clever path to eliminate capitalism from within is blocked through absurd licensing requirements by the government.
The amount of loopholes I have to go through just to end capitalism from within are ridiculous and can hardly be described as voluntary.
To abolish capitalism you need to provide cost effective liquidity, this means you will have to start an alternative money or payment system with a demurrage fee. The challenge is using existing constructs in the law to create something that cannot be banned by the government or the central bank. How voluntary...
After you have done that you must now gather members and build the actual payment network because liquidity isn't provided by money, it is provided by the people trading with money. This is in fact the easiest problem because demurrage currencies are superior competitors to the capitalist system which is why they had to the banned before world war two or else people wouldn't become polarized enough to want Nazis in power.
Third you will have to bypass banking regulations and somehow offer most of the services banks offer without a banking license. I haven't found any, de facto illegal. There is nothing voluntary about this.
Finally, you have to somehow convince the government to adopt the non capitalist system for tax payments. If you cannot do so, you must wreck your brain trying to find an incentive structure that is competitive enough to make people who have freshly received money from the government put it into your money system faster than they pull it out by paying their taxes. Again, the fact that the government forces all economic activity to go through the capitalist system is not very voluntary. If anything, it is lipstick on a pig.
I believe the banking loophole and the tax incentive structure can be solved but that only shows how fragile and ridiculous capitalism is, if an obviously superior system has so much trouble establishing itself even though it is superior in almost every respect and it is highly competitive.
Yes and we've been taught from a young age that capitalism and democracy are joined at the hip. But when we look back we can see how capitalism accommodated itself quite nicely to domination starting from the early modern period.
It depends on what you mean by democracy. For people who mean a government by a parliament of elected representatives making laws and a centralized state government running the state by those laws - then that tends to go with capitalist relations of production; and it is an accessible and useful structure for commercial corporations, which will have their property ownership enforced by the state, and will not have to have continuing agreement of local populations to their activities.
The dictionary says Democracy means: "Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives." - so there's already the question of decision by representative yes-or-no. Plus, there's the question of what the 'government' part means. Some Anarchists would say they oppose democracy because of it. Does it mean that decisions get enforced by a special social structure? Are decisions majoritarian? etc.
I think anarchists typically support direct democracy, but oppose representative democracy, which gives the representatives excessive power.
Any society will have to make decisions at some point which can't be left to individual preferences. E.g., we have a large natural forest, should it be preserved for nature, or cut down for timber and farmland? If left to individuals, the people who want to cut it down will win by default.
It's sort of a different thought pattern than most of us are used to using. Imagine the anarchists vote: 49 for logging, 51 against. The question is then whether 51 anarchists foresters will mobilize to stop 49 anarchist deforesters. Will there be a civil war? Will the 49 weigh the benefits of whole community over wood and yield? Will someone burn the chainsaws in the night? It's less about whether we vote directly or through an intermediary, and more about how we hold the community together (or don't) through tough decisions.
It's not just that representatives in a typical representative democracy wield disproportionate amounts of power, it's also that the people who are able to become popular enough to get a significant share of votes are people who have time and resources and connections for campaigning, PR, and so on. This is a very specific stratum of the population. It's an elective kind of aristocracy, basically.
> should it be preserved for nature, or cut down for timber and farmland?
Perhaps the main question would be what happens when people disagree with the decision, regardless of how it was taken. Many Anarchists would be concerned more with that than with the question of how such a decision is taken.
Of course it's possible, it existed before capitalism and had tons of mutual aid and resilience. It's called "subsistence farming". Without surplus extraction + capital accumulation, it was always stuck at low equilibrium where everyone is poor. See e.g. [1] Also as a side note I don't discuss here, anyone quick enough to band together and abuse the mutual-aiding community was easily able to do so, hence feudalism, or e.g. cartels in our times.
In fact they observe it even in existing cultures where strong kin institutions prevent saving, both via "mutual aid" itself, but also cultural expectation of mutual aid creating an incentive to spend ASAP - cause if you don't, your family/friends/... are going to ask you for money. Meaning again everyone ends up poorer. Breaking kin institutions and "mutual aid" is one of the keys to actually improving QoL for most people [2]
I agree with your point that strong "mutual aide"/kin institutions often (but not necessarily) lead to low economic growth.
And clearly surplus extraction + capital accumulation (leading to productive investment) strongly enhance economic growth.
However, capitalism in its current form of all-consuming consumerism, a system that must eat everything including itself, I'm not so sold on.
Just finished reading the Laundry Files (Atrocity Archives/Charles Stross) thanks to a recommendation on HN. One of the terrible beasts mentioned in the book is a creature that eats all the information in its universe, rushing the universe to entropy death.
The analogy to bottomless consumerism is too obvious in my mind for me not to draw it.
I don't think consumerism and capitalism are related in this way. Consumerism just happens to be what people want to do. Capitalism as a better substrate allows people to do more of what they want to do... people in different systems (like Soviet Union) for the most part were just as "consumerist", they simply couldn't do as much consumption because the system sucked. That "consumerism" is bad is your personal value judgement (and mine, but I recognize it as such).
It's kinda like, most major cultures wanted to, let's say, (among other things) study the stars and enslave other people. Primitive technology and economy produced a lot of cultures with calendars and simple systems of slavery. Stable empire like e.g. Caliphate was able to leverage their economy and better technology to do better at astronomy, and to do some real large-scale enslaving. Western countries eventually used even better technology and economic system to do things like send people to other planets and do some truly industrial-scale slavery. Everything just works better with technology - what you choose to do and how to change values to want astronomy and not want slavery is a separate question. Ditto capitalism vs consumerism.
Capitalism is a system dependent on perpetual GDP growth. GDP growth is an increase in trade of newly produced products or services or the inclusion of already provided goods and services into the transaction based economy.
Short lived products create a greater increase in GDP than longer lives products. For GDP growth to continue the additional output must be consumed or otherwise less and less people who insist on full time jobs will be needed to provide for the needs of everyone. Unemployment is the result of an inefficient allocation of entire 40 hour work weeks. We are unable to trade an increase in productivity into more free time.
"Capitalism is a system dependent on perpetual GDP growth" is it? If it is, why does GDP matter - GDP is a highly abstract metric, so what is the underlying thing that capitalism needs? And to the extent that it exists, is it unique in that?
I am not sure why you are claiming that in particular, that's why I'm asking.
Also planned obsolescence doesn't have anything to do with
a goal to increase GDP, it is an example of a somewhat perverse incentive, not a systemic issue. I mean people wouldn't buy a phone that breaks in a week, but they are indifferent between the one that breaks in 2 years or 10 years - there's a balance. It again has to do more with material success - my grandma used to constantly tell us to not throw away any glass jars - not out of high moral impulse to reuse/reduce/recycle, because she lived in the USSR where they apparently were hard to come by for pickling and making jams. I on the other hand just yesterday couldn't find my paint brushes, so to touch up a wall, instead of reorganizing the shed I ordered new ones on Amazon for $15. I can afford the waste. The way to make me care about preserving my paint brush instead of obsoleting it, or jars for jam, is to make me poor. Same is apparently true for most people.
Arab capitalism in this era did not depend on perpetual GDP growth.
Western capitalism, like so much of Western thought from around the Renaissance, draws deeply on the Arab tradition.
To go back to definitions, "capitalism" was defined by Max Webber. He saw it as part of the Reformation, individuals finding their own connection to God not mediated by the church. Not much GDP growth in that.
I think my biggest recommendation is David Graeber. Perhaps something like Towards an Anarchist Anthropology. In a similar way to Kropotkin, Graeber challenges a lot of narratives that form the basis of capitialism e.g. that all we did was barter before we had money, that it was the enlightenment that first introduced the world to freedom and equality etc.. Instead, he shows that there are many cultures in the past, and contemporary, that have significant anarchist tendencies (mutual aid, direct democracy, solidarity etc). I believe understanding this is key to expanding the anarchist tendencies in our own culture.
A book that made the idea of a lack of government believable and appealing to me is David Friedman's Machinery of Freedom. He presents a flushed out vision of a withered state and it is the anarcho-capitalist version of anarchy, the only version which I feel is realizable without force-based coercion.
The idea is to envision a society which is stable, but has no government and yet not perfect people. There can still be theft, violence, laziness, polarizing differences of opinion, etc. but the society thrives despite the absence of a government and nimbly handles these problems. He presents a vision of how it could work. It is not a prescription since it is impossible to prescribe an anarchic society as there is nothing to prescribe to. The criminal justice system becomes a bunch of competing rights organizations, similar to competing insurance companies. It allows for economic evolution of laws as everyone can choose what kind of system they want to be governed by and conflicts of competing legal systems get negotiated and arbitrated. One can choose not to be governed by any laws, but if that individual comes into conflict with others, then there is no one to defend them. They are not automatically cast out for not being part of anything.
Most other anarchic systems seem to assume unity of purpose, a good work ethic, a lack of criminality, and an inability to fundamentally dissent from what the larger group wants. They often get presented as more of a direct democratic government that everyone belongs to while Friedman's approach is literally a lack of any coercive government. There is no governing body that all must yield to, including the collective. The fundamental transactions between people are voluntary and coercion to produce societal needs is both unnecessary and rejected. I find it to be a believable society with the people we have.
The idea of an anarcho-capitalist society functioning peacefully is pure delusion and ignores basically everything from history and observations of reality. It most importantly ignores the concept of power. There would be no free exchange at all. It would be all coercion all the time, an actual hellworld.
What sense does a fixed positive profitability constraint make? It makes no sense. It discourages people from economic activity.
People talk about the profit motive but when you really think about it, profit is a demotivator.
The more borrowed capital you use the more profit you have to make. But in principle any economic activity that breaks even is worth doing even at no profit.
So in theory the return on capital should represent that competitors know how to use the capital better than you, but at the same time this would imply that unemployment and recessions are impossible. It's entirely possible for the interest rate to be so high and money to be so tight to cause mass unemployment throughout the entire economy as we have seen in the great depression.
Marx treated money as a simple "medium of exchange" and therefore sought for an answer in the sphere of production. In reality it is money that has the power to cripple capital and land.
It could tie into how neoliberal establishements are failing and people are looking for alternatives (which could be the reason that nazism is suddenly more popular). But yeah, I was pretty suprised seeing this post.
My main takeaway from this is that the seemingly contradictory notions like "mutual help" and "competition" are just too vaguely defined, and exist on a wrong level of abstractions, to have any formal discussion about them.
Sometimes the initial introductions are, in fact, quite high level. You might need to dig more to understand the nuances. One blog is not going to get deep enough.
For some weird reason, people misunderstand the concept of anarchy, always using this word as a synonym for 'chaos'.
In fact, anarchy is a theoretical and highly organized society that relies not on leadership and coercion to function, but on all members of society, who are educated and know their duties. For some weird reason, people believe it to be impossible, but we clearly see it happen in many circumstances, especially if you gather small-to-medium group of intelligent people together.
>especially if you gather small-to-medium group of intelligent people together.
Hasn't everyone on HN read the Mythical Man-Month? Or, if you're a parent a corollary statement would be "The more boys you put in a group the faster the sum IQ reaches a negative number"
Small groups tend to be self selecting and typically more compatible. Large populations are not. If you have one group that wants to piss in the river because it's close, and another group that does not want that because it is poisoning the water, there is going to be conflict. Now, this could be settled economically/infrastructurally by providing a sanitary sewer system, or by the down river group getting cholera and dying off, or the downriver group violently killing the upriver group off. But at the end of the day you'll have an loss of happiness cause by one group being dead, or both groups paying taxes so the system works.
Anarchists tend to offer no solutions even for already solved problems, much less without introducing new ones.
Well, this has never been tried, because existing power structures are actively resisting such society reorganization. You make your statements about society behaviour with such confidence, but you miss a certain factor: the society can't start to behave correctly out of a sudden. First, it must be educated. And from my life experience most people (like >90% of the total population!) already do work and coexist with others quite successfully without any coercion or governance, so ruling out anarchy as something 'impossible' is quite bold. What we need to try it is to get rid of some existing government (preferably, finding one where the constituents would want to convert to anarchy), and then figure out the common policy toward criminals.
Many years of brainwash from the slave masters have convinced the slaves that they need to be ruled because they cannot govern themselves individually.
PS: Read Kropotkin, he's good.