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Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

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Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#101

Post by imtringued »

_0ffh wrote: post #13
bbzealot wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. Growing up fully immersed in the capitalist world it’s easy to think that this is the natural state of things. This book, among others, helped me change perspective and challenge my assumptions about the world. Totally recommended.

Well, if we lived in a society which was based on voluntary social interactions - which are by definition mutually beneficial - and where bodily attacks and forcible expropriation by dint of the "right" of superior force was deplored and defended against by the majority, I'd call that a capitalist society.

I am very confused. Such a society wouldn't be obsessed with capital or money. It can't even be any form of -ism.

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#102

Post by imtringued »

_0ffh wrote: post #17
public_defender wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would not be an accurate label. Nothing you wrote implies any economic system. Of course the society you describe would allow for capitalism, but it equally allows other models.

> That would not be an accurate label ...in your estimation. I and many others would call it such, and with good reason. In our estimation it is capitalism that allows for other models, as long as they are peaceful and respect property rights. Nothing about capitalism hinders you to follow your social instincts. You are free to share your possessions with whomever you choose. You can jointly own whatever you want wit…

I can't run my own bank and abolish the capitalist system. I first need ten million dollars worth of capitalist money just to get started. Every clever path to eliminate capitalism from within is blocked through absurd licensing requirements by the government.

The amount of loopholes I have to go through just to end capitalism from within are ridiculous and can hardly be described as voluntary.

To abolish capitalism you need to provide cost effective liquidity, this means you will have to start an alternative money or payment system with a demurrage fee. The challenge is using existing constructs in the law to create something that cannot be banned by the government or the central bank. How voluntary...

After you have done that you must now gather members and build the actual payment network because liquidity isn't provided by money, it is provided by the people trading with money. This is in fact the easiest problem because demurrage currencies are superior competitors to the capitalist system which is why they had to the banned before world war two or else people wouldn't become polarized enough to want Nazis in power.

Third you will have to bypass banking regulations and somehow offer most of the services banks offer without a banking license. I haven't found any, de facto illegal. There is nothing voluntary about this.

Finally, you have to somehow convince the government to adopt the non capitalist system for tax payments. If you cannot do so, you must wreck your brain trying to find an incentive structure that is competitive enough to make people who have freshly received money from the government put it into your money system faster than they pull it out by paying their taxes. Again, the fact that the government forces all economic activity to go through the capitalist system is not very voluntary. If anything, it is lipstick on a pig.

I believe the banking loophole and the tax incentive structure can be solved but that only shows how fragile and ridiculous capitalism is, if an obviously superior system has so much trouble establishing itself even though it is superior in almost every respect and it is highly competitive.

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#103

Post by dragonwriter »

incompatible wrote: post #8
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.

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…

> since without government, there's nobody to stop somebody from starting one.

IMO, this is not the actual problem with the practicality of anarchism.

The problem with anarchism is that the absence of government will recreate the problems which motivate the creation of government, just as excessive government creates the motivation for abolition of government.

Particularly, retaliatory (including lethal) violence—not merely proximate individual and mutual self-defense, but individual and mutual action aimed at preventing future threats from past malefactors, is the common anarchist solution to the problem of perceived-as-unjustified use of force (what, in the context of government, would be “crime”).

But we have plenty of experience with that approach ib areas with no accepted government, weak government, or disinterested government, and what tends to happen is that differences of opinion over whether the initial violence was unjustified (or even if it factually occurred) or the retaliation disproportional (and thus itself unjustified violence) devolve into cyclical violence, the relief for which is establishment of a mechanism for settling disputes about justification and thus either legitimizing or delegitimizing and authorizing corrective responses to force, creating the monopoly on legitimate use of force which, whether called a government or not, defines the state.

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#104

Post by sershe »

imtringued wrote: post #99
sershe wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Capitalism is a system dependent on perpetual GDP growth" is it? If it is, why does GDP matter - GDP is a highly abstract metric, so what is the underlying thing that capitalism needs? And to the extent that it exists, is it unique in that?

I am not sure why you are claiming that in particular, that's why I'm asking.

Also planned obsolescence doesn't have anything to do with a goal to increase GDP, it is an example of a somewhat perverse incentive, not a systemic issue. I mean people wouldn't buy a phone that breaks in a week, but they are indifferent between the one that breaks in 2 years or 10 years - there's a balance. It again has to do more with material success - my grandma used to constantly tell us to not throw away any glass jars - not out of high moral impulse to reuse/reduce/recycle, because she lived in the USSR where they apparently were hard to come by for pickling and making jams. I on the other hand just yesterday couldn't find my paint brushes, so to touch up a wall, instead of reorganizing the shed I ordered new ones on Amazon for $15. I can afford the waste. The way to make me care about preserving my paint brush instead of obsoleting it, or jars for jam, is to make me poor. Same is apparently true for most people.

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#105

Post by sershe »

incompatible wrote: post #89
sershe wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Anarcho-capitalism is nothing like the communist anarchism that Kropotkin was writing about. There's no pretence at equality, you've basically just replaced government repression with private repression by the wealthy. It's a choice of economic system, not morality. There's nothing immoral about making all work voluntary and eliminating private property, it's just a different system with different expectations. The r…

You are comparing an idealized version of one system with reality-fied version of another; the an-cap that Rothbard was describing doesn't have much private repression by the wealthy. Idealized to idealized, they are all great. FWIW in reality, I think both will quickly evolve into control by gangs, then larger gangs/cartels; then either the latter will gradually develop manners and it will become something like feudalism, or if there's a strong contender + some symbol to rally around like religion or the old state itself, mafia state. Source: pretty much every place with central government that cannot reliably enforce law, from the remnants of Western Roman Empire to China 100 years ago to Russia 25 years ago to, it appears, modern Mexico or South Africa. And they still have/had some governance going on, at least. I don't think less governance will suddenly reverse the direction they were/are heading in.

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#106

Post by sershe »

imtringued wrote: post #98
sershe wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why not? I don't mean literally clone, I mean if everyone had my level of commitment and aversion to initiating violence. Communism/anarchism wouldn't work cause I'm lazy, I would take all I need as long as I can, but work on socially-useful projects that do not interest me as little as I could get away with. But capitalism would work just fine.

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#108

Post by yellowapple »

incompatible wrote: post #8
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.

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…

> However, this may be incorrect, but it does require a population that is always willing to fight against the formation of a government

It's kind of akin to the paradox of tolerance. A tolerant society cannot remain so unless it remains vigilant against intolerance, and likewise a stateless society cannot remain so unless it remains vigilant against the state. Both sorts of vigilance are possible; the question is whether or not they're practical (and my hope is that the answer to both is "yes").

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#109

Post by yellowapple »

davidgay wrote: post #66
notch656a wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A minority in a prejudiced society is always fucked, but especially fucked in a democracy. Democracy is literally legitimization of force against the minority, by virtue of vote. Even the constitution, which supposedly protects minority rights, can be amended to remove those rights by a prejudiced majority. IMO the prejudiced minority has the best chance when they can make it as painful as possible for the majority t…

> 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.

The history of the supposed poster child of "democracy" w.r.t. its handling of the native peoples inhabiting its territory disagrees with your disagreement.

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#110

Post by slim »

dottedmag wrote: post #23
Onanymous wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually like this spelling. The sounds that have exact equivalents use the Latin alphabet and those that do not are replaced by the character's native system. Cause his name is not Pyotr or Peter or Pierre or whatever else. It is Pëtr indeed.

Well, it is Пётр. Russian П is not P, Т is not T, Р is not R.

T is not T is not correct
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