Log in

View Full Version : Fuck you, I'm an anarchist and here's why -_-



Pages : 1 [2]

pinups4
03-29-2011, 02:58 PM
Without any government or laws, I (whose family has had lots of guns/money for centuries) would own and abuse your ass as a sex slave because....well...no one to stop me!

Seems like a great idea. Not!

jack0177057
03-30-2011, 12:57 PM
Anarchy was how people transitioned from one form of government to the next (i.e., from monarchy to military dictatorship).

In the US, we are highly evolved and transition peacefully between Republicans and Democrats.

Um,... maybe it is time for some anarchy. :-\

firemaiden04
03-30-2011, 04:01 PM
^ Americans are too lazy for anarchy. We protest by signing online petitions or taking our lawn chairs and coolers to fucking Glenn Beck rallies.

tempest666
03-31-2011, 05:58 AM
^ Americans are too lazy for anarchy. We protest by signing online petitions or taking our lawn chairs and coolers to fucking Glenn Beck rallies.


LMAO!!!!!!!:rotfl:

sexandgrammar
03-31-2011, 06:38 AM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ScFU0UxKWA

Now this song is playing on loop in my head. Not that I'm complaining :)

Slin
04-02-2011, 04:46 PM
Still waiting for a written explanation of why anarchism is good. I'm not holding my breath.

K Sweet
04-09-2011, 05:59 PM
Concentration of power has the tendency to run into corruption (whether capitalist or communist). Anarchy is not chaos, and no government does not have to be chaotic either, though transitioning from one governing system to another is often chaotic. Anarcho-syndicalism is actually a pretty well structured system that puts production into the control of the workers.

Here's an informative youtube video on the Spanish Anarchist movement in the 1930's:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUig0lFHDDw
These folks were REAL anarchists. Not kids who shop at Hot Topic and just like the way "circle As" look.

Hopper
04-09-2011, 08:47 PM
^Anarcho-syndicalism is not really anarchy in the dictionary sense of the word. It was just another faction of the wider socialist movement which believed that a stateless, cooperative society could be achieved through the labor union movement. Marxists believed the same type of society could be achieved through a revolutionary socialist phase. The real name for this type of society is the one Marxists used: communism. Actual communism is not a totalitarian system, it is a system of stateless, collectivist, worker cooperation. The "communist" regimes which now exist are still in the socialist phase. Since a stateless, collectivist system of cooperation is completely unrealizable in practice, nothing more than a bad theory and a false promise, they will stay socialist for fucking ever.

In that youtube video, note that the "workers" in Catalonia were still managed by committees. Committees are really just governing bodies - i.e. a form of government. Note that the "anarchist" interviewed also referred to "leaders" who gave the workers "instructions" about when to turn up for work at their factories. The leaders held meetings with the owners of the factories to tell them how they would be run from then on. Yep - no government here! You just can't impose collective cooperation without some type of centra, governing body. The anarcho-syndicialists get away with calling their system "stateless" merely by calling their governing body something else - committee, worker's council, etc. Well they are just words for government. Communist regimes are governed by party "committees" or "soviets". Communists play the same word game.

Note also their irrational opposition to money in favor of barter, as if money is the cause of some evil. Money is nothing more than a convenient means of exchanging goods and services (e.g. easier to carry around). Comically, the Spanish anarchists replaced money with "vouchers" which represented hours worked. LOL - not the same as money at all.

Anarcho-syndicalism requires the abolition of private property. In other words, the people are not free to own and individually use their own property. How is freedom possible without one's own individual property? Do people even own their own bodies and thoughts under this system? Bodies and thoughts are private property too - all other private property is merely an extension of one's own person and thoughts. Without such extensions, one's actions and even thoughts are severely restricted, virtually impossible. Without private property, one is completely subject to the collective. There is really no individual freedom at all. Even if there were no government, the collective will would dominate individuals.

Abolition of private property is in reality the transfer of property from "the masses" to those appointed to manage that property. Ownership is the right to control, so control is effectively ownership. Whether or not the "collectively owned" property is managed on behalf of the masses and in the interests of the masses, those managing it effectively own it. And it probably won't be managed in the interests of anyone other than those who are doing the managing. Any kind of socialism just creates a powerful and wealthy elite. It's just another word for monopoly. It is a throw-back to the time of kings, who used their power over the people to further their private interests.

Read just the first section of the Wiki article on anarcho-syndicalism. It tells you that it is a form of "socialist-anarchism". In other words, it is nothing but a type of socialism or collectivism.

K Sweet
04-10-2011, 02:01 PM
You're correct, anarcho-syndicalism is essentially libertarian socialism.

In terms of governance, it means to do away with representative democracy and replace it with direct democracy, granting individuals more participation rather than being represented by a party that may not share all their values, possibly just most of them. So while the committees (like mentioned in the youtube video) would essentially be the "governance", they are made up of the very people they are meant to govern. More appropriately, this wouldn't be called governance. It is actually self-management, and on a non-hierarchical level which would be fundamentally against anarchist principals.

"Since a stateless, collectivist system of cooperation is completely unrealizable in practice, nothing more than a bad theory and a false promise, they will stay socialist for fucking ever."
Can you explain why you believe this? How do you feel about worker collectives?

Not all places actually used vouchers in Spain. However, the purpose of the voucher was to eliminate concentration of wealth. So having 100 vouchers would not make you more powerful than someone who had 50, whereas 100 dollars would.

"Anarcho-syndicalism requires the abolition of private property. In other words, the people are not free to own and individually use their own property."
Almost. People ARE free to use property, land or machinery (more appropriately called by what it is). But private ownership (of productive property) would mean that someone else would own the means of production, thus making the worker no longer the owner of their own production. Of course, this creates an inequality and adjusts how the worker is compensated for their labor.

It seems like the differences we're seeing are related to the definition of words. Many of the words you use you equate to being the same thing as what they could go against, like "control" and "ownership", or "committee" and "governance". It is my belief that while these words can be similar in a thesaurus, in theory and practice they become completely different things.

Hopper
04-17-2011, 02:08 AM
You're correct, anarcho-syndicalism is essentially libertarian socialism.

The two branches of the socialist movement in the 19th century were "authoritarian socialism" and "libertarian socialism". "Libertarian socialism" is really a contradictory term, if socialism is taken to mean a centrally managed society where private property is abolished. How can something be abolished without an authority to abolish it? How can something be centrally managed without an authoritarian government to manage it?

Libertarian socialists reconcile these terms by claiming that the goals of authoritarian socialism (collective cooperation, abolition of private property and profit etc.) can be achieved without government enforcement and central management. These goals are what they had in common with authoritarian socialists, so despite the fact that they advocated a different system to implement these goals, despite disagreement over something as fundamental as whether to have totalitarianism or libertarianism, they could still be part of the same movement.

The socialist claimed that free market leads to elite dominance and claimed the solution was to abolish private property and profit, i.e. capitalism. At first they proposed that central management and communal ownership and living would get around this alleged problem. They believed that man could live communally and could manage his society collectively. From the beginning, experiments with this idea (such as those set up by Robert Owen in the early 1800's) failed. This notion was based on the belief in the "perfectibility" of man, i.e. that social engineering, change of environment, change of social system, education, eugenics etc. could transform man into a perfectly moral and socially cooperative being. But since libertarianism (real libertarianism) also arose in the same era, and socialism had been proven not to work, some socialists modified their ideology to a supposedly libertarian one, claiming that man could cooperate communally without a central government to manage society. Hence "libertarian socialism" or socialist "anarchism".and Marx's vision of communism. They believed that man would be "perfected" just by taking him out of an imperfect or immoral system.

Marxists were in the authoritarian camp. Although communism is a supposed stateless system of collective cooperation, Marxists believed that it could only be brought about through a phase of socialism. i.e. an authoritarian, totalitarian phase would oversee the transition from the collapsed capitalist system to a stateless cooperative system. However, even Marxists today like to refer to communism as socialism, either to evade criticism of socialism as being totalitarian or to avoid the bad connotations which communism has from oppression by "communist" regimes (i.e. socialist regimes which are "working toward" communism). It's a wonder Marxists don't get dizzy walking in a straight line.


In terms of governance, it means to do away with representative democracy and replace it with direct democracy, granting individuals more participation rather than being represented by a party that may not share all their values, possibly just most of them. So while the committees (like mentioned in the youtube video) would essentially be the "governance", they are made up of the very people they are meant to govern. More appropriately, this wouldn't be called governance. It is actually self-management, and on a non-hierarchical level which would be fundamentally against anarchist principals.

So everybody is on the committee? That would require a very large room and discussion would take a very long time if everybody is to be heard and differences were to be resolved. Or it would mean a large number of more committees managing smaller, local areas. But how would the committees for each local area cooperate among themselves, to jointly manage the larger geographical region? For that there would need to be another level of management made up of representatives from all the local areas, which would form a hierarchy. (BTW this is how communist regimes are organized - levels of committees from the central party committee down to local committees.)

Self-management is a misleading term. People are not managing themselves, they are managing each other. It is collective management. The group decides what every member of it does. All you have done is make everybody a member of the government. That does not make it something else besides a government. There is still no individual freedom from the group - the individuals are controlled and directed by the group. Since private property is abolished and all property is common to the group, everybody is forced to live under group management of that property or go without property.

As I've been discussing in the Right-Wing thread, democracy (representative, participatory or direct) is just dictatorship of the majority over the minority. It is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for lunch. It is the submission of the individual to the vote of all other individuals. It is the submergence of the individual in the group. In that way, it is a dictatorship. It cannot be libertarian. It still allows dominance by a stronger section of society to emerge. It can even vote itself out of existence.


"Since a stateless, collectivist system of cooperation is completely unrealizable in practice, nothing more than a bad theory and a false promise, they will stay socialist for fucking ever."
Can you explain why you believe this? How do you feel about worker collectives?

Because no matter which way you slice it, any form of collective cooperation, with common ownership of property, in reality requires some type of managing body which determines the actions of all members of the group. That is what a government is: a body which controls the actions of members of a society.

Man is by nature an individual. That is an unavoidable physical and psychological fact. He is not an ant or a bee subordinate to the colony or the hive. He is also a social being and it is in his interests to cooperate with other members of society for economic advantage, but he does so best on a voluntary basis, not on a collective basis. He is an individual, so he acts as an individual, not as a subordinate to the group. Place property in collective or communal ownership and immediately individuals argue and fight over the best way to use it and over who's individual interests are being served or neglected. Putting a man in a collective does not make him any less an individual. Whenever my grandmother saw a football game on TV, she would say: "They should give them all a ball so they can stop fighting over it and go home". She'd also buy us each a toy because she knew that if we had to share one we would fight over it. That's how you prevent arguments: by each person minding his own business. I wish socialists all had as much sense as my grandmother. I don't know how so many of them got jobs in government and academia.

Disagreements over how the collective should be run and over who's interests aren't being fairly recognized would result in factions. All people have limited knowledge and intelligence. That is why people have different points of view and disagree so often on so many things. We simply can't all know and see everything and arrive at one certain truth. Therefore any group forms factions, no matter how much it's members have in common or how disciplined they are. And the factions divide into factions. Soon, instead of cooperation, you have a struggle for dominance. Free cooperation is all very nice, but if people aren't going to run things properly, then my faction will FORCE them all to do it properly. So you end up with a dictatorship.

Even in the absence of factionalism, the sheer scale and complexity of the problem of keeping track of every individual in a given society and coordinating their services, needs, etc all with one another for a desired common end makes it humanly impossible. Such a thing just cannot be centrally managed, either by democracy or dictatorship.

Worker collectives are just that - collectives. They are collectively run, whereas individually owned properties are run freely and independently by the individuals who own them. Of course a person may freely decide to join a collective if the particular collective suits him, or if he is happy to do everything as he is directed, but that is not the same thing as organizing society on collective lines so that people don't have a choice whether or not to join a collective. Workers' collectives are necessarily democracies, and I have explained why democracy is not good.


Not all places actually used vouchers in Spain. However, the purpose of the voucher was to eliminate concentration of wealth. So having 100 vouchers would not make you more powerful than someone who had 50, whereas 100 dollars would.I don't follow. A man with 100 vouchers presumably can purchase twice as much as a man with 50 vouchers, but he is not financially more powerful?

Concentration of wealth does not occur in a free market. The monopolistic cartels we see dominating the market and politics today have been made possible only by the intervention of government in the market and in public and individual private life, which is exercised in the interests of the highest bidders. (We are told that interventionist government restrains business, but we should know better from what we see actually happening on daily basis.) In a free market, such dominance cannot arise - the number of competitors is too great and they all compete on a level field.


(Continued below - allowed length exceeded.)

Hopper
04-17-2011, 02:08 AM
"Anarcho-syndicalism requires the abolition of private property. In other words, the people are not free to own and individually use their own property."
Almost. People ARE free to use property, land or machinery (more appropriately called by what it is). But private ownership (of productive property) would mean that someone else would own the means of production, thus making the worker no longer the owner of their own production.Of course, this creates an inequality and adjusts how the worker is compensated for their labor.

That's not even "almost" private ownership. You are saying nobody is allowed to own land or machinery and hire others to work for him on it. People are not "free" to use land or machinery if such heavy restrictions are placed on their use of it. Either each man has to work his own property alone, in which case what he can produce with it is limited to the efforts of one man, or any number of people can work the property in joint ownership. The fewer there are, the less they can produce; the more there are, the harder it is to agree on how it is to be managed and the greater the division of the rewards.

This is what is economically backward about communism or "anarcho-socialism" - it removes any personal incentive to work. Man is by nature self-interested. This is a trait which socialists and communists refuse to acknowledge. They believe self-interest is just a result of living in an economic system which operates on self-interest. They don't explain how, if self-interest didn't exist before economic system existed, a system based on self-interest came to exist in the first place.

A man will not have as much incentive to produce for some invisible and vague social end as he will have to produce directly for his own benefit. Therefore a society which forbids free enterprise is less prosperous. It is also less technically advanced, since technical advancement is also the product of ingenuity which springs from personal incentive. And technical advancement increases productivity and therefore prosperity.

History has proven this time and again. It is the reason primitive societies and medieval societies experienced frequent and regular famines and shortages. It is one of the main reasons for the economic failure of socialism and communism whenever they are attempted. Lenin's maxim "From each according to his ability and to each according to his need" is at odds with human nature. The Christian Pilgrims to America were communists and they abandoned communism after applying it for six months because of sheer starvation.

http://hubpages.com/hub/THE-PILGRIMS-COMMUNISM-STALIN-AND-MAO
http://www.nocommunism.com/communism-and-big-government-articles/pilgrims-failed-communist-experiment/
http://standardspeaker.com/opinion/letters/communism-didn-t-work-for-pilgrims-1.1068209

Ironic, isn't it, that the an ideology now advocated by (supposedly) anti-religious or atheist people originated with medieval Christianity.

Owning property and hiring people to work on it does not create inequality. Those people have the equal right to purchase their own property and start their own enterprise if they wish to. They are not forced to work for somebody else. It is not feudalism or some other type of slavery. If they do choose employment, they choose who they work for and negotiate terms. They ARE the owner of their own production - that's what they are charging their employer for, the work of procuction. They just don't get to keep what they produce. This arrangement does not "adjust" the amount the workers are compensated for their labor - they get fully paid whatever the market value of their labor is. The employer/property owner has every right to make a profit on selling the product - that is the only reason he ever started the business, without which the workers would have no work. It is the profit which creates the incentive for any kind of production at all, and which increases the level of production - the effort and the efficiency. Since more is produced with this profit motive than would be produced without it, more money is available with which to pay the workers. This "adjustment" more than cancels any downward "adjustment" the workers "suffer" by not directly getting the full amount of income from sales of the product.

Which do you want: More money or equality? Individual freedom or equality? Which is actually fairer? Is it fair for people to be forced to obtain less than the full benefit from the available resources? Is it fair for people to have to forgo actual material benefit for some "equality"? In fact, isn't fairness really when everybody benefits more, not less? Following the ideal is often not the fairest option.

Inequalities can exist without private ownership of property and enterprise. If property is communally owned, there is nothing to stop some individuals in the group from dominating others in deciding how the property should be used and in whose interests. One does not have to hire people to work on his own property in order to dominate other people. In fact, opponents of free enterprise tell us that the whole reason some people can hire others is that they are stronger to begin with. The inequality does not begin with the fact of one person hiring another.



It seems like the differences we're seeing are related to the definition of words. Many of the words you use you equate to being the same thing as what they could go against, like "control" and "ownership", or "committee" and "governance". It is my belief that while these words can be similar in a thesaurus, in theory and practice they become completely different things.I equate control and ownership in the sense that ownership is the recognized right to control something. If you own something, it means you decide what is done with it and by whom. Therefore if the government tells you what to do with "your" property, effectively you don't own it, at least not completely. If you are only part free, you are all slave, so it follows that if somebody is telling you what to do with "your" property, even just half the time, then you don't own it at all. If you own something, nobody may tell you what to do with it even some of the time. Actually it is impossible for one individual to completely control another individual, so it is senseless to talk of "total" control of one individual by another as a defining line for freedom or slavery. If you are part free, you are all slave.

To illustrate the point, say I sell you a car. On paper the car is yours - I sign all the papers over to you. But I make a condition on the sale of the car: You must phone me each day to get approval from me of what you plan to do with the car. It is a completely ridiculous arrangement and you would never agree to buy a car under those conditions. You would immediately realize that whatever the papers say, you don't really own the car. Yet daily we allow the government to tell us what to do with our property and still live under the illusion that we are the full owners.

What this means is that liberty and private property are inseparable. If you aren't allowed to own property, i.e. have full and free control of it, you are not free. If you do not have free use of your property, you do not really own it. Property is an extension of your person - your mind and body. (Your mind (thoughts) and your body are also themselves property.) You require property - land, tools, food, housing etc. - in order to DO anything useful. productive, beneficial or enjoyable. Therefore, the less property you own and control, the more restricted your activity and the less you are able to achieve through your actions. Therefore, you are also less free. If a person is only allowed the ownership of his own body and thoughts, then effectively he does not even own those. Usually though, even in the U.S., the "land of the free", a person does not have full control over even his mind and body.

This relates to what I said above in response to your comments about people being "free to use land and machinery" under anarcho-syndicalism. If they don't own the property, if they are not free to use it as they please, in this case, hire workers under their direction, then they are NOT free at all - they are slaves to the collective, just as much as blacks were slaves on the plantations. They don't own their own property and they cannot produce for themselves. (The workers an owner of property hires do have their own property, bought with the money they earn, and do produce for themselves in the sense that they do it in exchange for money.)

Committee and governance are the same thing because that is what a committee does: it decides how a group of people is to be run. A committee is a meeting of a group of people who discuss what they will do. That's what governments do too. They meet and talk about what they and the people who appointed them should do. The committee decides and the members obey. This is just as true even if all members of the group are on the committee.

Assuming we are using the same dictionary, I don't see a problem.

minnowflakes
04-17-2011, 05:33 AM
hey different strokes but if every form of government has its issues doesnt anarchy have even more?