hushed-obscenities:

iicraft505:

hushed-obscenities:

iicraft505:

unbossed:

iicraft505:

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iicraft505:

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iicraft505:

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class-war-hooligan:

eldritch-universalism:

iicraft505:

Anarcho communism is cool and stuff but you do realize that human nature wouldn’t allow for it to work, right? Humans are selfish. They will try to take power.

citation needed

Emma Goldman just rolled her eyes in her grave.

And wild bears break into houses because they’re looking for a tricycle to ride.

What does that have to do with anything?

Bears in captivity ride tricycles so it’s obviously “ursine nature” to behave that way.

I’m not really sure how animal abuse in captivity is relevant to the selfish nature of humans.

http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/539611/Scientific-Study-finds-humans-selfish

And anarchism would turn into a world of what is now considered crime. Look at what people do with laws, and imagine what they would do without them.
Look at the book Animal Farm, for example. Even The Lorax works as an argument. Animal Farm was originally written as satire for Stalinist Russia. However, it has grounds in society today. Why does the US have “checks and balances” to keep one branch of government from becoming too powerful? BECAUSE HUMANS WILL TRY TO TAKE POWER IF GIVEN THE OPPORTUNITY, AND IT CORRUPTS. In Animal Farm, the pigs took power because they were the smartest. They originally were (at least supposedly) there to help the other animals. However, as time went on, since the other animals weren’t smart enough to notice or fight back, the pigs started to take advantage of them. Sure, they were animals in the book, but they were personified animals. They were showing what humans would do in that situation.

Now, I know that’s Stalinist communism, not Marxism. I think communism is a beautiful idea, but I don’t think that it is possible to totally implement it in a way that would work. I don’t think humans can’t be taught. Our current way of life is too far ingrained into us, and by the time we got it learned, I find it hard to believe that the group teaching us wouldn’t have taken power. 

I’m not saying I don’t like communism, I just don’t think it can be implemented properly given how ingrained in our current lifestyle we are without it backfiring somehow.

(Also if capitalism has been around longer than communism I think that it would be our nature not just conditioning) 

The point I am making is that humans, like all animals, adapt to the circumstances and conditions of their environment. The economic/social environment that we currently live in conditions us to act selfishly, much as so many captive bears have been trained to behave in a way they wouldn’t outside of that similarly coercive environment. The only provable characteristic of human nature is to adapt to our surroundings.

As for the study you cite, it proves that the subjects’ previous training from society still held sway over their choices in the game. Would the outcome have been the same if they had been raised in a gift economy, such as was the norm for many, many human cultures for the majority of history? I highly doubt it.

Edited to add that I somehow completely missed the final, utterly ignorant assertion that capitalism is older than communism.

Right, I get that. I understand that it is ingrained into humans through conditioning. I’m just not sure how you’d change that since most people are used to capitalism.

Right, their PREVIOUS TRAINING FROM SOCIETY. How would you override that for the superior (admittedly) idea of anarchist communism?

I said if, I don’t know. Is it not?

And please, I want sources.

(I have to take something to my son at his job sort of soon so this won’t be as thorough a reply as I’d like. I can be pretty bad at coming back to things if I don’t immediately address them, though.)

I believe it starts with building alternative relationships within our immediate communities. It starts with learning what much of life was like before commonly held land was stolen by the state and turned into the private property of the  predecessors of today’s capitalists. It’s not going to be an immediate transition, of course. The invention of capitalism took a while and growing out of it will, too. As an old Sergeant Major once told me during an especially tedious training exercise, “You don’t eat the whole horse in one bite, son. Start with his nose and gnaw your way to his ass.”

Building a culture that values sharing and de-emphasizes consumption as status-seeking will take a lot of different and varied approaches. Diversity of tactics applies in the social aspects of the process of revolution just as much as it does in direct clashes in the streets. Things like neighborhood “tool libraries” where infrequently used tools like lawnmowers, hedgers, shovels, etc. are shared, backyard-sharing garden clubs (and canning clubs) where people with growing space to spare share it with others who don’t have as much, and other forms of cooperative living aren’t the full solution, of course, but they can begin to build a foundation. (I’m not talking about trying to bring back the good old days of slit-trench shitters, cholera, and burying grandpa at the ripe old age of 40, though. I also don’t pretend that backyard gardens are enough to feed humanity. These are simply tools to change the way we relate to one another.)

I dashed off a first-thought, half-assed, but better explanation for this foundation building elsewhere. One of these days I might get around to fleshing it out in more depth but here it is, as it is. I’m past the halfway point in life for men in my family, though, so I know I won’t live to see more than seeds and saplings being planted. I’m content to be one of those “old men who plant trees whose shade they’ll never nap in.”

Okay, I get the little things. But eventually we’ll have to “attack” big corporations, won’t we? How do we go about replacing those with a more equal (fair, whatever) systems? Do we just eventually run them out of business? What?
Also, what about clothes? I can imagine there’d probably be some sort of system to pass it down, would there not? I’m really confused with that part of it. It’s just hard to wrap my head around, but I am trying and I’m using the internet to learn.

And I’m not saying it’s likely, but somebody has to initiate this, right? How is it completely impossible for them to end up taking advantage of it? I’m not saying it’s likely, I just want to know how we’d assure this. (Maybe I’m just being ignorant here, though.)

History has given us plenty of examples of how the workers can “attack”, that is, collectivize, corporations so as to bring production and distribution under workers’ control. The formation of the soviets in the Russian Revolution and the process of collectivization in the Spanish Revolution are two great examples. Simply out-competing conventional firms with independently formed co-ops is not a realistic strategy. Private enterprise is at an enormous material advantage within the market, and it has the backing of the state to perfect it if it comes under threat. To achieve socialism, it will be necessary for the workers to take over their own firms–which they are completely justified in doing, as the producers of all of the firms’ wealth.

Some person or group will have to initiate revolutionary action at some point, but ideally the workers would be so organized by that time that the movement would very quickly become a collective effort, led by everyone and no one all at once. Opportunists may (in fact they will, inevitably) attempt to ride the wave and take the helm, as the Bolsheviks did in Russia, but a properly organized anarchist proletariat would be able to spot such threats and nip them in the bud before they gain too much power.

My main problem with communism, in fact the only one, is how it played out in Russia. It started out good but ended poorly, which is why I’m still a bit skeptical.

As long as it’s well organized enough to prevent the corporations from preventing a revolution from succeeding and it has already been determined as to what will happen after a revolution, I do see how it would work. I mean, “overpowering” corporations has happened before.
But also, once it’s there, how do we prevent a capitalist revolution?

And I guess it’s far out of my wheelhouse, so to speak, but I’m still finding it hard to wrap my head around it in reality. It’s probably because I’m used to corrupt American capitalism, heh heh.
And if environmentalism is part of this I’m definitely down. Is it? I feel like it would be a bit more valued in the that type of society because the amount of money in something wouldn’t be a concern.

Also, again, what about things like clothes? How do we do that part?

I actually think the example of Russia, as well as Spain, will make us more prepared for revolution, since their failures give us a more clear idea of what to look out for, what to do differently, and what to avoid. The Russian Revolution failed primarily because the workers put too much trust in the promises of a political party to implement communism via a state system, and in their justifications for the use of repression as a presumed defense against counterrevolution. The workers and peasants of eastern Spain largely avoided this, but were outmatched by a far greater counterrevolutionary military force. So the success of a revolution really depends on a combination of the proper politics and sufficient manpower, which is ultimately what anarcho-communist propaganda and organization is all about achieving.

The current crisis of environmental destruction is due to the nature of capitalism as a system of unlimited growth for its own sake, with no regard for the larger-scale environmental effects of production and transactions, making it completely unsustainable on a planet with limited resources and a limited capacity for waste. An anarcho-communist system, however, will be more rationally organized around satisfying needs (rather than profit), of which environmental sustainability is an important one.

Regarding clothes, I might have missed something, but do just mean how will they be produced and distributed? If so, then the answer is the same way as any other commodity. They will be produced by workers under conditions of autonomy and collective ownership/control of the workplace, probably according to the prescriptions of some democratic planning committee, and will be distributed as gifts to those who need them first, and those who want them second. There may also be some system for sharing or exchanging clothes that are no longer wanted, I don’t know for sure; these are developments that will have to be made as the revolution happens, for now they’re only suggestions.

If you’re referring specifically to a problem of demand exceeding supply, then my answer would be that the process of radicalizing the proletariat would by necessity involve a deconstruction of bourgeois notions of social status, meaning that people would not hoard excessive amounts of extravagant clothes for their own wardrobes for the sake of showing off.

Ah, yes, makes sense to use failures to learn and more successfully do something than people who have tried before and failed.

I get how a system that isn’t built on getting richer for getting richer’s sake would be more concerned about the environment. I definitely approve of that.
I have a question, though, since capitalist societies have managed to achieve a bit of it, do you think it’s at all possible for a capitalist system to become environmentalist? I don’t really think the nature of it really allows for complete environmentalism, but I don’t think it’s impossible to make a huge difference.

Oh, okay, that makes sense.

Would most of the sharing aspects of this have to be set up before a revolution, though, so that it would be better equipped to handle counters during a revolution?