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Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

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Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#91

Post by einpoklum »

incompatible wrote: post #11
einpoklum wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on what you mean by democracy. For people who mean a government by a parliament of elected representatives making laws and a centralized state government running the state by those laws - then that tends to go with capitalist relations of production; and it is an accessible and useful structure for commercial corporations, which will have their property ownership enforced by the state, and will not have to…

I think anarchists typically support direct democracy, but oppose representative democracy, which gives the representatives excessive power. Any society will have to make decisions at some point which can't be left to individual preferences. E.g., we have a large natural forest, should it be preserved for nature, or cut down for timber and farmland? If left to individuals, the people who want to cut it down will win…

> should it be preserved for nature, or cut down for timber and farmland?

Perhaps the main question would be what happens when people disagree with the decision, regardless of how it was taken. Many Anarchists would be concerned more with that than with the question of how such a decision is taken.

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#92

Post by incompatible »

notch656a wrote: post #69
davidgay wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A minority in a prejudiced society is always fucked, but especially fucked in a democracy. The history of genocides and ethnic cleansing, plenty of which happened historically and recently outside democracies, disagrees.

No one is disagreeing that governments are the biggest perpetuator of killing in the past 100 years. Government is responsible for far more killing than by non-government actors. Using your interesting logic, one would disagree with the existence of government if one were trying to minimize these deaths. Is this your argument in support of anarchism?

There are complaints that an anarchist society wouldn't be perfect, as though any perfection can be found in any of the well-over 100 governments run on the principle of capitalism plus government authority. Not even the capitalist ideal is respected (freedom to use your private property however you like), since it would cause so many problems in practice.

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#93

Post by pixl97 »

roenxi wrote: post #90
pixl97 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Anyone using force to achieve their aims gets removed from society, I think I see a fatal flaw in the logic here....

That part is also something that most societies do right now. What do you see as the flaw there?

That there is any barrier for the force to remain limited beyond the barriers already established in our current governments. In this argument it seems that we've established that force is needed. But there is no compelling argument put forth by anarchism that establishes a reasonable control mechanism for limiting said force. Yea "You can't tell my what to do by force" seems like a good mantra, but it really sucks the moment someone else gathers up enough people voluntarily (or monitarialy) to subdue the limited resistance your type of governance allows. The "We'll all get together and fight the enemy" sounds good until you realize that about half the battle put forth by the enemy will be psyops in getting the anarchist to fight themselves allowing them to be even more easily defeated. Once a significant portion of the anarchist are convinced to give up and not fight the enemy, and if they give up those that will fight they will be spared, the remaining pockets of resistance will much more easily collapse. You're back to 'anarchist nationalism" to prevent just this from happening.

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#94

Post by bxjx »

greenie_beans wrote: post #73
bxjx wrote: post #3

"Conquest of Bread" had a huge impact on my politics. It cut through the capitalist realist narrative that we're all in economic competition and that capitalism is the only sane solution. It made me feel like another world is possible. I changed my life to pursue these other possibilities ever since.

haha, i submitted a pdf for "capitalist realism" yesterday: https://files.libcom.org/files/[Mark_Fisher]_Capitalist_Real...

haha great! You are correct - this is where i pulled the term from! Such a great book.

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#95

Post by bxjx »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #21
bxjx wrote: post #3

"Conquest of Bread" had a huge impact on my politics. It cut through the capitalist realist narrative that we're all in economic competition and that capitalism is the only sane solution. It made me feel like another world is possible. I changed my life to pursue these other possibilities ever since.

What else can you recommend reading on the topic?

I think my biggest recommendation is David Graeber. Perhaps something like Towards an Anarchist Anthropology. In a similar way to Kropotkin, Graeber challenges a lot of narratives that form the basis of capitialism e.g. that all we did was barter before we had money, that it was the enlightenment that first introduced the world to freedom and equality etc.. Instead, he shows that there are many cultures in the past, and contemporary, that have significant anarchist tendencies (mutual aid, direct democracy, solidarity etc). I believe understanding this is key to expanding the anarchist tendencies in our own culture.

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#96

Post by imtringued »

bxjx wrote: post #3

"Conquest of Bread" had a huge impact on my politics. It cut through the capitalist realist narrative that we're all in economic competition and that capitalism is the only sane solution. It made me feel like another world is possible. I changed my life to pursue these other possibilities ever since.

Capitalism is irrational.

What sense does a fixed positive profitability constraint make? It makes no sense. It discourages people from economic activity. People talk about the profit motive but when you really think about it, profit is a demotivator.

The more borrowed capital you use the more profit you have to make. But in principle any economic activity that breaks even is worth doing even at no profit. So in theory the return on capital should represent that competitors know how to use the capital better than you, but at the same time this would imply that unemployment and recessions are impossible. It's entirely possible for the interest rate to be so high and money to be so tight to cause mass unemployment throughout the entire economy as we have seen in the great depression.

Marx treated money as a simple "medium of exchange" and therefore sought for an answer in the sphere of production. In reality it is money that has the power to cripple capital and land.

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#97

Post by imtringued »

pixl97 wrote: post #82
incompatible wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard (of course) of anarchism a long time ago, but I always wrote it off as impractical: since without government, there's nobody to stop somebody from starting one. However, this may be incorrect, but it does require a population that is always willing to fight against the formation of a government. I think now that anarchism is practical, at least for a population of committed anarchists, and in the absence of h…

>I think now that anarchism is practical, at least for a population of committed anarchists, and in the absence of hostile external forces. I too classify all my physics problems as 'spherical cows in a vacuum', but unless you've ignored Twitter your entire life you should realize powerful forces of propaganda exist that ensure that this will never exist. Threats exist in the form of ruthless humans that will ally wi…

Economic swings can be explained very easily. A currency where the circulation velocity isn't stable can have booms or busts from an increase or decrease of the circulation velocity. In practice the problem is that the circulation velocity is going down too much, to which the response so far has always been to increase the money supply rather than the velocity.

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#98

Post by imtringued »

sershe wrote: post #68
incompatible wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard (of course) of anarchism a long time ago, but I always wrote it off as impractical: since without government, there's nobody to stop somebody from starting one. However, this may be incorrect, but it does require a population that is always willing to fight against the formation of a government. I think now that anarchism is practical, at least for a population of committed anarchists, and in the absence of h…

Yeah, if everyone was like me, I bet AnCap would work (very different from most-common versions of anarchism, and in my view, the only non-morally-repugnant one - but still impractical). Heck I bet if you could clone some saints old-school communism would work just fine :) The main problem is how a society can work without such restrictions...

Actually capitalism wouldn't work even if you could clone yourself assuming you play by the rules instead of using your cooperation with yourself to ignore them.

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#99

Post by imtringued »

sershe wrote: post #81
mellavora wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your point that strong "mutual aide"/kin institutions often (but not necessarily) lead to low economic growth. And clearly surplus extraction + capital accumulation (leading to productive investment) strongly enhance economic growth. However, capitalism in its current form of all-consuming consumerism, a system that must eat everything including itself, I'm not so sold on. Just finished reading the Laund…

I don't think consumerism and capitalism are related in this way. Consumerism just happens to be what people want to do. Capitalism as a better substrate allows people to do more of what they want to do... people in different systems (like Soviet Union) for the most part were just as "consumerist", they simply couldn't do as much consumption because the system sucked. That "consumerism" is bad is your personal value…

Capitalism is a system dependent on perpetual GDP growth. GDP growth is an increase in trade of newly produced products or services or the inclusion of already provided goods and services into the transaction based economy.

Short lived products create a greater increase in GDP than longer lives products. For GDP growth to continue the additional output must be consumed or otherwise less and less people who insist on full time jobs will be needed to provide for the needs of everyone. Unemployment is the result of an inefficient allocation of entire 40 hour work weeks. We are unable to trade an increase in productivity into more free time.

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#100

Post by roenxi »

pixl97 wrote: post #93
roenxi wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That part is also something that most societies do right now. What do you see as the flaw there?

That there is any barrier for the force to remain limited beyond the barriers already established in our current governments. In this argument it seems that we've established that force is needed. But there is no compelling argument put forth by anarchism that establishes a reasonable control mechanism for limiting said force. Yea "You can't tell my what to do by force " seems like a good mantra, but it really sucks…

> But there is no compelling argument put forth by anarchism that establishes a reasonable control mechanism for limiting said force.

That is already a solved problem. The force chooses to exert itself in a limited way. The largest military in the world currently works like that - the US army does whatever the US Congress tells it to. They don't have to, the army has the guns and the US Congress only has annoying geriatrics and comfortable seats - not much of a contest if the army makes it one. The army chooses to limit itself because they understand it will lead to the best outcome for them.

The radical part of anarchism isn't the use of force, it is the argument that the people who exert force shouldn't be trying to solve social problems with force. The barrier to that isn't the behaviour of the army, it is the beliefs of the polity.

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