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"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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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.
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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.