451
"b...but we can fix capitalism"
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2025
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I’m not sure what system would work. The problem is people. Once the wrong people are in charge, they’ll ignore or break laws with impunity.
Capitalism has definitely proven that it’s not the answer, though.
There's a solution to that: don't have 'in charge'.
People are shaped largely by material conditions of our world, and liberalism does encourage horrible qualities that we can see doing active harm today such as individualism, competitivism, selfishness, greed, dogmatism, etc. A great proof of this is looking at today's tribes that still exist and see how they behave much differently than us in the civilized world - they put more emphasis on community, mutual survival rather than individual property ownership.
Therefore, the goal is not to refuse change because "human nature" or whatever, but change material conditions of our world to change our behaviors and values as well. Kind of a catch 22 situation, but given how we transformed our "nature" over the tens of thousands of years constantly it is possible.
Anarchism avoids this problem by putting no one in charge
Correction: Anarchism avoids this problem by putting everyone in charge. It's not an arrangement in which nobody is empowered, it is an arrangement in which everyone is empowered.
True, you can argue it either way.
When there's no one in charge, everyone is in charge.
I guess making "in charge" synonymous for "an authority" squares the circle too.
so i have trouble understanding the anarchistic society.
how do you build public works? how do you get everyone to agree to sacrifice for the public good? how do you stop the warlord from seizing control? even worse, how do you solve the tragedy of the commons? if peer pressure alone of a group becomes impossible after 50 participants, are you stuck in fractals of 50?
It's important to understand that anarchism is a bottom-up system of governance rather than top-down. Solutions to problems are discovered procedurally and organically by a society of individuals that agree from the outset to basic, simple rules which merely allow that process to occur: Stripped down, simply mutual respect and direct communication. Therefore if you try to understand anarchism as a pre-defined system like a democratic republic, your understanding will be frustrated. There are no singular answers to the questions you pose as there is no singular anarchist system. What is important and constant is that a group agrees from the outset to behave as a cooperative community of equivalent individuals. Anarchism is emergent, rather than prescriptive. And if you do not have that mutual agreement from the outset, you cannot yet do anarchism.
A solution to the group size issue you pose is nested communes, a proven system for scaling anarchist society. It's basically an inverted hierarchy: Hyperlocal communes of 50-100 individuals make all the final decisions right from the outset, on all matters that are destined to affect them. Then they send usually two messengers from their commune to a "higher" coordinating commune where they meet with the messengers from 25-50 other communes. These messengers are not "representatives" like in a democratic republic! They do not make new decisions. They are merely delivering their commune's decision. It is then the job of this coordinating commune to cohere all of the delivered decisions from their constituent communes, through a number of pre-decided procedural conflict resolution methods. If there are conflicts between commune decisions that cannot be cohered and resolved through these methods, the decision can go no further and the issue gets passed back to the constituent communes to discuss again. Messengers don't make new decisions without their home commune! The members of each commune know this, so they're aware that sending out decisions that are bullheaded / undiplomatic / selfish / uncompromising are likely to cause a lockup and be rejected, therefore are incentivize to come to decisions that are agreeable and readily negotiable in advance. They are likely to phone up the next commune over when they make these decisions to double check that they're on the same page, and negotiate changes to their decisions in advance. Many lines of direct communication are incentivized even before the messengers are sent to the coordinating commune. Everyone in this web is incentivized to be in dialog, or they could possibly delay getting what they want.
So, one coordinating commune can contain the regional consensus of ~5,000 people across 50 constituent communes. Once the decisions within that level 1 coordinating commune are cohered, if they also concern people outside of that 5,000 person region they can then proceed to a level 2 coordinating commune via another two messengers from the level 1! Same process as before, and 5,000 people grows to 250,000. The largest branch of governance in AANES, the Kurdish-led region of northern Syria, is a nested commune like this one (Liberal-style political parties exist in a separate, smaller branch). With roughly 4.5 million participants, they require IIRC 4 levels of this system and decisions can go from top to bottom (Or bottom to top, depending on how you see it) in a few weeks. AANES is liberalizing and top-down structure has been formalizing out there, re-colonizing the social sphere, but last I heard most of these communes still meet daily.
Oh and as for the "tragedy of the commons", that is a problem specific to capitalism and other hierarchical hoarding systems. If you ask an anthropologist they'll tell you that this problem literally does not occur outside niche situations where people normalized to capitalism suddenly find themselves outside of that system having to manage resources for themselves (Like a shipwreck stranding). It simply does not occur in societies that have not been introduced and normalized into hierarchical hoarding. In fact the sheep pasturing example generally used to illustrate the myth is a situation that was managed through anarchist-style mutual aid back when people really did have to communicate and cooperate with their neighbors to share a commons like grassland. Tragedy of the commons is straight up capitalist propaganda.
i am afraid that my worries can not just be hand waved away as if not part of human nature.
I see compounding problems in a purely bottom-up society. You can’t expect everyone to agree on all possible decisions at the outset and assume nothing will change. Human contrarianism alone makes it likely that decision “jams” will happen often, and I don’t see the incentive to compromise when a decision benefits the majority but weakens one commune. Why would the “damned” commune agree?
You cite anthropologists claiming the tragedy of the commons doesn’t occur outside capitalism. But from what i have seen, they don’t say it as such an absolute. At best, they show it can be less common or better mitigated in certain structures, but even then, it requires enforcement like informal peer pressure, which is the most benign but it’s also the weakest form of control.
Historicaly, the tragedy of the commons isn’t a capitalist invention; it’s a human tendency, though capitalism can amplify it. but societies have fallen due to abuse of the resources, extinctions of hunted animals and in fighting, fracturing, falling to the warlord without capitalistic influence.
You also point to northern Syria, but they do have the Asayish as an internal security force enforcing the will of the majority. That’s still a form of control over dissent and provides that same issues as a police force.
Finally, large public works like hospitals require hundreds of specialized roles to build and hundreds more to operate. I don’t see how you achieve that scale and coordination through purely nested, bottom-up communes without some binding authority. we can’t even get an agreement on vaccines and public schooling funding, or if children should be fed. and wile you could argue that these are effected by capitalism, the issue is primarily he different values of different individuals.
Oh I see. You weren't seeking information, you were seeking a debate. I have to admit I feel a little manipulated right now. I didn't reply to you for a day or so because I wanted to give you a comment that was both helpfully descriptive and reasonably concise. I spent about an hour of my time and energy on that comment.
I'm not interested in a debate about anarchism. It's a participatory system driven by material need. The potential utility of trying to convince a liberal subject of it's use if they're currently opposed is near zero. It's a waste of time, energy, and spirit. I do wish you'd made a better effort from the outset to indicate your intent. The world is full of staunch anti-anarchists and the internet is not where they'll be convinced otherwise.
If you feel like this is me losing the debate... Then yes, I just lost the debate. Tell your friends that you beat an anarchist in a debate about anarchism. Link them to these comments as your trophy. You're a winner.
i didn’t look to win an argument. it’s obvious capitalism has problems. seemingly needing to be completely upturned every few decades. but my fear was that anarchic systems would either require fighting human nature, which is a non starter, or would require such a small grouping, that the large projects we rely on would no longer be feesable, not to mention that people would also be tied to the land as surfs. the discussion around this critiqued capitalisms monopoly on violence, and i just don’t see any way around needing such a group, such as with North Syria.
there was no intention to deceive
Your reply was the first thing I read when I woke up this morning, my reply was the first thing I wrote. Maybe I was too quick to be crestfallen.
I did spend two long paragraphs describing the most common and proven way that anarchism scales. In a way that ties in and leans on some of the best aspects of human nature (Human nature is not a static thing, it's always contextual and conditional). Hopefully that wasn't too wordy and winded, I was specifically looking to make it concise while remaining decently foundational.
That organizational model is more than enough to manage the largest projects that anarchism pursues. But anarchism tends to not pursue projects of the same megalithic scale as hierarchical civilization though, as 1) many mega projects tend to be the result of desires for centralization and aggrandizement, either of an individual or an institution and 2) in a word full of hierarchy, anarchism often doesn't get the room to do so.
I'm not sure where the conception that anarchism ties people to the land like serfs comes from. What leads you to think that? Working anarchism definitely makes people directly responsible for their land and in the consequence of it's care, but it doesn't prevent travel or migration. The primary concern of anarchism is autonomy, it's not anarchism if you can't leave.
Also culture, education, enlightened self interest, conscience, ego, the primal urge to act, boredom, laziness, scifi fandom...
Not everything has to be coercive.
Created by the capitalist bullshit ownership. Not a real thing. Wasn't a real thing for thousands of years and had to be enforced at gun point for centuries before it kicked in.
Literally the opposite of how it works. Provably: there are books on the topic.
The concept of ownership works more to inhibit industrius impulses and accomplishment than to nurture them. The threat of coercive violence fractures more than coheres social efforts. The mechanisms of that violence and their maintenance enable and necessitate a lot more violence than they stop. And they keep people from growing into fully mature adults. I dont think you genuinely outgrow childhood until you live as an outlaw or face state repression for a couple years.
But part of the beauty of this society is that everyone has a say. Nothing that you can see before it's into the process of being made can or will be an accurate representation of it, because the collectivity of imagining it, which is so foreign to us here, is both such a huge part, and so impossible to do on your own.
ok, so there are fundamental things here i don’t agree with.
when mentioning peer pressure, i am talking about the need for acquiescence in matters which a person would otherwise not agree to. all the other methods you mention are way to reach understanding sure, but you will have the contrarian, it’s a fact of life and i mention peer pressure as the only known way to compel without resorting to “violence” which i am using broadly. as the threat of the police can be considered a violence against citizens. plus all the same methods you mention can be the cause of the division in the first place…
we also seem to have a different understanding of the tragedy of the commons. the claim that humans, unless under the duress of the capitalist system would not exhibit these weaknesses is completely alien to human nature. even when you consider the most pure example of such society, the family. children having no real needs unmet, and even most wants satisfied, will still take every inch available, wether it’s warranted. this quirk in humans is seen before the advent of capitalism which tracks as those who did not act it were less fit then those who did. this is akin to claiming that of capitalism didn’t exist, people would not lie, chat, or steal.
i don’t remember saying people will become evil during crunch time, but i take it that is your understanding of the tragedy of the commons. i think evil may be a bit strong, but i understand the tragedy is just ‘being in the wrong’ … that the tragedy didn’t start at crunch time. the tragedy started during good and plentiful times, a but the consequences didn’t happen until crunch time. the parable has the neighbors taking more then they needed from the public trust during the good time to prepare themselves incase there would be bad times. if you were to try to convince me that people are only self serving because of capitalistic pressures, that would be an uphill battle. and to assume that all people would be the same in this matter is overgeneralizing individuals, and sadly the true tragedy is that this qirk is infectious, it only takes one. usually this is held in check via threat of societal ‘violence’.
to say that coercive violence is bad for people and society is not anything i can argue one way or the other. i could and may agree, but its purpose was never to establish a bother/sisterhood, but to change the risk calculus for taking advantage of the collective. now i am not fully defending capitalism here. it’s beyond obvious that this benefits the chosen few at the extreme detriment of the meny. that capitalism can’t last 100 years without having to be burned down and started over.
without squaring what i consider fundamental human flaws, i do not believe an anarchistic society could run beyond groups larger then that of a family, or real small village. and if that’s the goal… then great sacrifices will have to be made, no public works, no schools, no job specialization, no technology, just survival. art may survive in some limited capacity
You act like authoritarianism is cohesive. Thats absurd. It is by nature turned against itself.
Not everyone needs to be in lock step on everything. People can disagree and shit can still get done.
Lol sure. Totally natural.
Who of course have fully developed brains and exist in a vacuum.
Hot
Lie, sure. Cheat, probably. Nothing stops this. Tyranny only puts it on steroids. Stealing... Gets harder with different concepts of ownership. For a little while i had this weird ascetic thing going, almost compulsively shared everything i had. Could leave my stuff out in a homeless camp, and as long as people knew it was mine, it was not taken.
This is cultural. The idea that readiness and resilience are fractipus, individual.
Thats some strongly counterfactual kool-aid. Literally the opposite is true. Actual tests of policies show reducing violence or generalky sucking less is how you make people suck less. Look some up! Evidence based policies exist! But the absolute myth that coercive violence stops anything bad is nonsense.
Yeah, it totally stops interpersonal horrors war exploitation and a few delusional shit heads literally ending the world for their imaginary line. So glad weve got coercive violence to stop cops from murdering children in the streets and keep people from kidnapping my neighbors and keep people from using chemical weapons on my friends to keep them from taking my neighbors.
Im so glad coercive violence has kept forever chemicals out of the rain. To keep endangered species from being hunted. To keep gangs of armed men using our tax dollars to smuggle in drugs of abuse then smash up safe injection sites. I'm so glad we have coercive violence to keep us fucking safe. Im glad it doesnt incentivize cutthroat individualist desperation that takes a the worst of what you pretend it stops up to 11.
Okay, so, i know such rigorous histiographical and archaelogic texts as milton's 'paradise lost', 'the lord of the flies’ and 'some shit tom hobbes said while he was tripping balls on moldy grain and everyone i know jas been translating over and over again for the past like five hundred years so they cpuld use the clichés for their rich self justifying thought terminating qualities. (Love em btw. "People suck" is like my fav thing to shout as try to localize entropy and de-escalate from complex life in rhe local area with greatest possible rapidity.)
But there are, if you want to wear some pretentions of 'objectuvity', some actual academics who have done actual research on these topics, and cite actual sources. Davids graeber and wengrow have some lovely work, especially graeber! And rebecca solnit's 'a paradise built in hell' on how people actually function in stress when they dont have a strong incentive to suck. For those to whom actual distress is a purely acafemic exercise. You know; in case you wanted to see some footnotes. Though, it should be noted that none of solnit's citations are 'the bible', so it is admittedly a weaker argument than it could be.
There's also work about how this happened in and across other species, gping back to kropotkin and fucking darwin i think but you dont actually care because thats all lizards and trees and crap Fuck em. You're just here for the monkrys.
And hobbes admittedly was a pretty good storyteller who had some pretty damn strong drugs. But. if we're doing this based on who has better drugs; a perfectly lovely criteria: im currently tripping on shit like twenty orders of magnitude nore psychoactive than anything your boy hobbes could possibly have had, and im telling you: he was wrong and you are wrong and you can only be as wrong as you are because of the frankly delusional level of abstraction at which most of us live the overwhelming majority of our bullshit lives. You literally wpuld not have the tools of thought to imagine being this wrong, unless you were.
and im willing to tell you some trippy just-so stories to that effect. I cant guarantee that my stories will be better, but my drugs are.
That’s a lot of homework, and I’ve only had a bare glimpse at the synopses. I’m not sure when I’ll have time to fully dig into them. So let me just ask directly: when you advocate for an anarchistic society, do you envision people living in communes of no more than ~100, tied to the land they live on, and forgoing large public projects like hospitals, roads, and telecommunications?
No. Where the fuck did i say that? That's your thing.
I was on a train this morning with at least that many in the car. We vibed. It was fine. I mean, it wasnt fine; at least like a dozen of us had hangovers and i think most of us were headed to shitty exploitative coerced capitalist labor, but, like, we were fine with each other.
Closest i would ever advocate to your '100' limit is bookchin's municipalist thing, and that isnt strictly anarchist.
Not unless they wanna be? Or like have emotional reasons for it?
I try not to do that alone too much, not that im always successful. Part of the point of a truly free society is that everyone is a part of it, everyone shapes it, everyone leaves their mark, and so is invested in it. A vision that's totally mine doesn't leave much room for that.
I do not expect or aim for perfect harmony. There would still be friction, communication and collaboration are made of hard work, not of magical fairy dust, and that work cannot should not (even if it could, which it can't) come from a single actor.
Tragedy of the commons is more applicable to capitalism, it's competing groups trying to get as much resourses as possible when there is limited resources.
Public works can be done on a cooperative basis, by unions of workers.
The Conquest of Bread is a book that outlines how an anarchic society may function, here's an excerpt from it about rails:
If capitalist rail companies can cooperate to build a rail system, rail companies owned by the workers would cooperate much more freely.
Anarchic societies actually saw production increase, since it eliminated a lot of useless jobs, In an anarchist reigon of spain, they produced so much bread and oil that after giving it away for free they were still able to export some (source). (I highly recommend you read Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber, its a great book).
If people were able to overthrow a government once, they can surely do it again for a warlord. If anything, it would be harder to re-establish a government since people will see their lives materially improve with anarchism. Outside forces are a problem, but they're a problem with capitalism as well.
But that's how we started. How are you gonna stop the people that then gather and creates groups with leaders that ravage the land like the golden horde?
I recommend you read this: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/crimethinc-frequently-asked-questions-about-anarchism#toc7
More specifically,
That entire FAQ is a hodge podge of logical fallacies; apparently written by someone who's read lots of 20th century history books but has zero understanding of real life civics.
Calling everyone who disagrees closet-oppressors is an ad hominim not an argument.
That's a hasty generalization that US interventions abroad patently disproves.
That's just reinventing the wheel. Relationships need to be formalized in order to consistently deliver at scale. Likewise power structures inherently exist because of the would-be rulers.
This is an appeal to ignorance on multiple levels.
Also: You are assuming that just because the text contains a fallacy, it is incorrect or worthless. That is a fallacy in itself.
Assumptions are not logical fallacies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy
Assuming that the text is wrong because it's fallacious is a fallacy.
Except I didn't just point out the fallacies. So you're wrong.
How does it appeal to ignorance? It would be hard for a feudal peasant or lord to envision a capitalist society.
And even harder, some might say impossible, for either of us to know what someone 500 years ago was thinking or could comprehend. The argument appeals to our ignorance as evidence of it's merit.
You should look into Capitalist Realism (people won't read the book, so here's the wiki article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism#HeroSection). It's easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.
Please understand. I can envision a path beyond capitalism. It's the vast majority of leftists/libertarian housecats who fail to inspire confidence.
Out of interest, what is that path?
TLDR "liberalism". We need educate the working class and use democracy to enforce regulation on the economy. Scarcity is the driving force behind capitalism. We need to deal with that first. Violent revolution will only traumatize society further from the culture of socialism.
So, reformism?
I'm not convinced. What if the government was just weak at the time
By meeting with them regularly as their neighbor and getting to know their needs through continuous dialog and figuring out how to make you and them materially reliant on one another in order to create an organic, interdependent, cooperative community in which the wants and needs of individuals become aligned.
This has literally always been the only way to dependably avoid your scenario under any system, regardless of institutional obfuscations to the contrary.
It's also a terrible argument since hunter gatherer societies largely avoided conflict due to humans being so sparse. It was simply much, much, easier to move on than to fight prior to the agricultural revolution.
Meanwhile we have archeological evidence of subsistence marauders from the stone age. They found a village that lacked contemporary agriculture. It also had a mass grave of victims who had been killed violently but their deaths spanned over a decade.
Okay, but weapons exist. Any country that declared that it had no government would be taken over in less time than it’s taking me to type this (granted, I’m on a phone, but still).
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin is a great book that explores an anarchist society. It works because the anarchists are on an unwelcoming moon with very few resources.
Zapatistas seem to doing a good job.
They dissolved MAREZ, and while they still operate their community help centers, they no longer govern the area. While the whole list of reasons for this is unknown to anyone but the Counsels of Good Government, the greater issues they spoke about was a combination of the government bodies of Mexico applying more pressure, at the same time Cartel territory has expanded into their area, and the violence, and threats to the counsel that came from this.
So the Zapatistas are not in a good way at the moment.
Anarchism isn't about pretending harm doesn’t exist either. The people that want to do real harm and will cause harm (will in bold because it's important to distinguish people who want to do harm and people who will do harm) can just as easily get into positions of power in our current system. Most people don’t want chaos, so why should we organize society around the assumption that we need rulers to prevent it? Basic morals are very, very easy for a super majority of a society to get behind.
Bad actors will mess up any polity, to any degree. That's not a unique fault of anarchism, my friend.
Didn’t say it was.
Weapons exist for both sides :)
Prison style.