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Bethesda Game Studios workers have unionized
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this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2024
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Ancaps are like monotheists to anarchism's atheism. You've given up MOST oppression and hierarchy but for some reason you still worship the inequalities of capitalism.
Abolish all hierarchy, end all oppression.
We actually don't, we worship voluntarism, taboo on aggressive violence and personal borders, the rest is up to free interpretation from these axioms.
Also it's not monotheism, rather a system like Taoism in the wild.
But I'll return to this:
There's an issue with no evolutionary mechanisms in a society.
A person who doesn't know how to survive and doesn't get help from others dies. A person who knows or gets that help doesn't. On this level there are no problems as we assume that people help each other, if we are talking about "usual" anarchism.
Now, people form communes. Communes require organization. We don't want them to have hierarchy, but the situation where everybody respects the rights of others won't hold by itself. If you expel those who make trouble, then a sufficiently intelligent sociopath may persuade the majority to expel those they don't like. Other than it being the problem in itself, this will eventually make sociopaths more likely to be the leaders of communes, and form hierarchy. If you don't expel those who make trouble, you'll need hierarchy right away to re-educate or jail or punish and otherwise discourage them somehow. These are all with the assumption of common property.
But if we have private property and voluntarism, so every person is a faction in itself, as if they, pun intended, had sovereignty, - we have an evolutionary mechanism which reduces the advantage sociopaths have. It doesn't negate it, but you may collect power, expressed in property, as an alternative to power expressed in social ties, and the existence of the latter you can't abolish. So we prolong the life of communities.
And there's another consideration - property can be collected both by honest and dishonest means, the former meaning someone's opinion is more valuable on practical subjects. Power as social ties is usually of the "dishonest" kind. Even without private property, frankly, someone of more use for the commune has more weight, but private property allows to account for that more easily. When your understanding who is more useful for the commune and who is less useful for the commune is skewed, it'll have smaller chances of survival.
And then how do you share resources with a commune part of which you don't want to be? What will make them behave in the spirit of brotherhood and equality and such? Same if you are a smaller commune. Will they declare you antisocial or something, capture all those resources for themselves and leave you to die?
(With ancap to share resources and various devices of existence property is preserved, and other borders erected, and systems on basis of voluntary agreements are offered to prevent violence.)
weird how this flavour of "anarchism" is pretty identical to conservative politics
I've specifically put parentheses to leave the hypothetical situation where I'd like to see answers as the last paragraph without them.
I've literally explained how with property you get a mechanism for communal cooperation without hierarchy.
You don't seem to differentiate private property and personal property and also I learned long ago not to bother debating with ancaps because the rational ones tend to un-cap themselves on their own eventually
The difference would exist in a world where you have a mediator making it. How would you differentiate them without such?
Say, I have a longbow, a tunic, leather pants and shoes and arrows on me and a piece of cloth I sleep on. Is that piece of cloth personal or private property? Say, for me they are all the same, but somebody near me needs that cloth. I say no, because I need it too. They say I'll be fine with half of it. I say no without disputing whether half of it is enough for my needs. Who's right?
EDIT: Ah, also I've already, as you say, "un-capped" myself like 10 years ago, being tired of the emotional component of ancap, and was trying to be realistic and open to new ideas and such. I don't regret it, I've learned a few more things, it was cool and all.
But in the end realized that what I have is simply an evolution of ancap. Even when I've been reading Trotskyist articles and imagining ways to build that. Thus I'm calling myself ancap.
The only things comprising ancap are moral constraints, all the rest is good until it doesn't violate them. Say, ancaps are fine with ancom communes existing and interacting between each other in pretty ancom ways. The only situation where ancom won't be a valid ancap is when ancoms prevent someone from leaving their heaven if that someone wishes so or try to conquer the neighboring Ancapistan for agricultural land.
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what private property is. Also I'm not sure if you understand exactly where capitalism begins and ends compared to other concepts like money, trade, and markets.
The gap there is again the concept of private property and how economic production capability is owned and operated.
It's shocking to me how much trouble people have imagining non-capitalist systems, propaganda has successfully conflated the idea of capitalism with economy, and with freedom. You're more a victim of that than anything else, so no hard feelings.
Anarcho-capitalism is a contradictory ideology and there's no way to reconcile those two things together. Capitalism must be rejected in any egalitarian society.
That's damn certain, I've only seen any discussion on the possible separation of such 1) in Russian language, 2) it's specific to your ideology, so requires clarification of terms.
Same with this. People mean all kinds of things saying "capitalism". It requires clarifying which exact meaning you are using.
Well, no hard feelings, but when I try to extract specific statements from this sentence, I get none. A bit similar to the Imperial ambassador's words from "Foundation" book.
Anarcho-capitalism does not necessarily involve capitalism (depends on the definition of that). It's a name that stuck.
Yikes dawg how does one communicate with someone whose ideological landscape is full of missing definitions and contradictory definitions? There's a lot to untangle here and I'm not willing or able to do that for you. I can only suggest reading more anarchist sources. I typically share this one as a decent conceptual intro https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-anarchy-works although I don't agree with everything it says.
I'm finding it difficult to be talking to an "anarcho-capitalist" who doesn't seem to agree or identify with either anarchism or capitalism nor have confidence in their understanding of the terms.
Maybe don't be so quick to label yourself, let your mind explore without the baggage of assuming what you are a priori.
That's not what I've said. I've said that your definitions are subjective to your own ideology. Thus they require clarification when used.
I've read Kropotkin. For everything good, against everything bad, no specifics, no mechanisms, and how animals don't hurt each other for power (in fact they do).
I've even explained to you how ancap is just a common name and what the ideology called that actually is. That your brain skips anything you don't expect from this conversation is your own flaw, sorry.
That's amazing.
Here are a few anarchist and anarchist-adjacent sources to go into specifics about institutions that an anarchist society might have:
The Possibility of Cooperation by Michael Taylor - A critique of Hobbes's argument for the state with modern game theory
https://www.radicalxchange.org/media/blog/plural-money-a-new-currency-design/ - A currency design that encourages mutual aid. Mentions how collective ownership can be achieved without a state.
Ancaps support employment contracts. This is contradictory: https://www.ellerman.org/inalienable-rights-part-i-the-basic-argument/
@technology
Thank you, this is exactly what I dream of getting when engaging in arguments over anarchism in the Web.
Capitalism is inherently based on dishonesty. It routinely treats people as things in the employer-employee relationship. When the factual and legal situation don't match, that is morally a fraud.
Postcapitalism would consists of various intersecting and overlapping voluntary democratic associations managing their own collectivized means of production. Within these groups, there would still be a notion of possession of the shared asset.
@technology
No. A contract can only be signed by two equal sides. If you mean emotionally and in planning - well, do you treat your employer as people or as that thing, system, which allows you to get money in exchange for work?
Does this mean that such an association is the basic entity? Because any system where a human is not the basic entity is unacceptable for me.
Specifics? When I leave that voluntary association, what of possessions stops being managed by it? If I enter it with some "means of production" and leave it after some time, with what I leave?
How does possession of those means overlap between associations?
Does the described mean that a person can't have property, but an association can?
Capitalism puts de facto persons into a thing's legal role. Consenting to a contract doesn't alienate personhood. As labor-sellers, workers are treated as persons. The issue arises with the workers as labor performers. The employees are jointly de facto responsible for using up inputs to produce outputs, but get 0% of property and liabilities for the results of production. Instead, the employer has 100% sole legal responsibility.
Individuals are the basic entity. Groups' rules vary
@technology
That's true, but cooperatives can legally exist where workers share those.
It's rather that dynamic of power makes bad behavior advantageous, but what would change this in "simple" anarchism?
Ancaps imagine aiming for maximal granularity and variability, so that the same kind of abusive behavior wouldn't fit all cases and rules' combinations (same as with epidemics) and there'd be market mechanisms functioning due to scale (things generally look better when there are, say, 100 microsofts instead of 1). They assume that those variability and granularity won't be reduced through open violence (conquering of subduing jurisdictions with differing rules on something) and enforcement of monopolies (trademarks, patents, licenses and such), because of everybody being armed to the teeth and usually there's still assumed some centralized state which will keep the situation from coming to open violence.
In case of "simple" anarchism I see contempt for ancap concepts of solving this, but what are the alternatives?
No anwer is too stupid for me, even new genetically altered humans (I've literally encountered an opinion that an anarchist society may require this to make humanity more empathetic, LOL).
This doesn't seem to be different from ancap+panarchy when described so abstractly.
Cooperatives existing doesn't solve the problem as it doesn't address the violation of inalienable rights in all non-coop firms. Consent doesn't transfer responsibility. The solution is to abolish the employment contract and secure universal self-employment as in a worker coop.
Markets have a place, but non-market mechanisms and mutual aid should flourish within groups. Ancaps see the logic of exit, but ignore the dual logic of commitment and voice e.g. democracy and social property
@technology
I agree.
Ancaps delegate this to free will.
Including
Only how do you form a group with its resources without property of individuals as its components?
So you agree that the employer-employee contract must be abolished due to it violating workers' inalienable right to workplace democracy?
The way collective property works is that each group member that possesses collective property self-assess and declares the price they would be willing to turn over the possession to another group member. Then, they pay a percentage fee on this self-assessed price to the group. Groups democratically decide what to do with the collective funds @technology
No, just that you can't offload responsibility via contract. I agree though that contract under clear pressure is negligible.
So a group can make the fee zero and thus have a usual ancap community?
The employment contract is such a contract. It involves a legal transfer of legal responsibility for the positive and negative results of production from the employees to the solely the employer. However, there is no corresponding de facto transfer of de facto responsibility. The contract is unfulfillable.
Groups set exit fees for transferring out community value. They can lower the exit fees for mutually-recognized groups, and exclude "groups" with no public goods funding
@technology
Funny that I have never looked at it from this particular point.
Can one person be a group?
1 individual can be a part of many groups. Being a part of zero groups would make people pay steep exit fees for every economic transaction with you and you wouldn't be able to access any group collective property, group currencies or receive mutual aid that these groups provide. There would be strong economic incentives to participate in these groups. Since all firms would be mandated to be worker coops, these groups would be a new way to provide startup capital to new firms
@technology
OK, the economical parts have more constraints than ancap, but the whole idea is similar and understandable.
What about violence? If a person commits murder or theft, how do the rest deal with it?
If there's an argument over something, how does it get resolved?
Same question as "how do law enforcement and courts work in ancap", only not for ancap.
Abolishing the employment contract isn't more constraints than ancap. It is part of legitimate contracts' non-fraudulent nature.
Groups enable the large-scale cooperation needed for an ordered stateless society.
Groups could have judicial systems. Judicial agreements could exist between groups. Thieves would pay damages to the victim. For serious crimes, there could be expulsion from group(s) and blocklists
For arguments, groups could subsidize agreement across social distance
@technology
I meant in general - two sides in ancap may voluntarily decide whatever concerns them both via any mechanism they come up with, but if that violates the rights of others, the others of course are not obligated by it in any way, or if it transfers responsibility in this case, others are not obligated to follow that transfer.
Here we have something less relative and more static.
OK. This is as bad or as good an answer as for ancap, because it's the same answer.
In general what you describe is technically a subset of ancap+panarchy, which is what I meant by more constraints.
The ancap vision lacks necessities for stable stateless societies besides the dual logics of exit and commitment. By having some rights be non-transferable, it prevents them from accumulating and concentrating maintaining decentralization and preventing collusion to form a state. There is no middle ground, in the ancap vision, between full economic planning of the firm and completely uncoordinated atomized individuals in the market. The groups I describe provide that.
@technology