On Sat, Sep 21, 2019 at 11:06:13PM +0000, jim bell wrote:
On Saturday, September 21, 2019, 03:30:56 PM PDT, jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
On Saturday, September 21, 2019, 01:31:49 PM PDT, Razer <g2s@riseup.net> wrote:
Republicans who like to party and say stupid shit like 'anarchism and capitalism can coexist.'.
It would be false to say, "anarchism and CRONY capitalism can coexist". The "crony" in "crony capitalism" comes from the existence of government. So, if there is no government, there is no "crony".. (As in, capitalism as it is now known in America, and other places, which has the crony aspect.) But it is not false to say 'anarchism and capitalism can coexist.' And 'capitalism' is merely 'crowd-sourced capital', which is merely one aspect of what would be a free-market. Jim Bell
I should also point out that my use of the term "anarchism" above is based on what I believe to be the correct definition of 'anarchism', the believe that there should not exist any government, and certainly not that whose existence and practice violences the Non-Initiation of Force Principle (NIOFP, which many call the NAP, "non-agression principle". One big problem is that many, and quite possibly most people who call themselves "anarchists" (or are called that by others) are really just big-government-loving Leftists, those who are forced to find another rhetorical 'home': Their favorite political system, Socialism, or even Communism has so seriously failed in the last 30+ years (and in fact over the last 100+ years), that they feel the need to portray themselves as "anarchists", a system which HASN'T yet obviously failed. See: https://attackthesystem.com/2017/12/19/free-association-is-not-fascism-how-m... which I have quoted before. [begin long quote]
Another claim is that anarchist communities and associations must be “inclusive.” Of course, anyone who has spen time around the general anarchist milieu knows how exclusionary anarchists actually are. I generally like to cite this comment made by a former an-com some years ago as an illustration:
I used to be an anarcho-communist. Actually, I started out as someone who was vaguely sympathetic to mainstream libertarianism but could never fully embrace it due to the perceived economic implications. I eventually drifted to social anarchism thanks to someone who’s name I won’t mention, because it’s too embarrassing.
After hanging around them for a while I realized that, for all their pretenses, most of them were really just state-socialists who wanted to abolish the State by making it smaller and calling it something else. After about a year of hanging around Libcom and the livejournal anarchist community, I encountered people who, under the aegis of “community self-management”, supported
- smoking and alcohol bans - bans on currently illicit drugs - bans on caffeinated substances (all drugs are really just preventing you from dealing with problems, you see) - censorship of pornography (on feminist grounds) - sexual practices like BDSM (same grounds, no matter the gender of the participants or who was in what role) - bans on prostitution (same grounds) - bans on religion or public religious expression (this included atheist religions like Buddhism, which were the same thing because they were “irrational”) - bans on advertisement (which in this context meant any free speech with a commercial twist) - bans on eating meat - gun control (except for members of the official community-approved militia, which is in no way the same thing as a local police department) - mandatory work assignments (ie slavery) - the blatant statement, in these exact words, that “Anarchism is not individualist” on no less than twelve separate occasions over the course of seven months. Not everybody in those communities actively agreed with them, but nobody got up and seriously disputed it. - that if you don’t like any of these rules, you’re not free to just quit the community, draw a line around your house and choose not to obey while forfeiting any benefits. No, as long as you’re in what they say are the the boundaries (borders?) of “the community”, you’re bound to follow the rules, otherwise you have to move someplace else (“love it or leave it”, as the conservative mantra goes). You’d think for a moment that this conflicts with An-comm property conceptions because they’re effectively exercising power over land that they do not occupy, implying that they own it and making “the community” into One Big Landlord a la Hoppean feudalism
So I decided that we really didn’t want the same things, and that what they wanted was really some kind of Maoist concentration commune where we all sit in a circle and publicly harass the people who aren’t conforming hard enough. No thanks, comrade.
Of course, it is also true that these “anti-fascist” folks really don’t care about “exclusion,” anyway. As I mentioned, many of them are Communists, state-socialists, and social democrats, and even the anarchist contingent among them seems to be little more than dupes and useful idiots. What they are really concerned about is “exclusion” on politically incorrect grounds, while insisting on retaining the right to “exclude” whomever or whatever they want for themselves. Therefore, an Anarcho-Marxist Politically Correct Commune=Good, Conservative Religious White Folks Enclave=Horrible, and People of Color Racial Separatist Community=Understandable Because History Except That Ikcy Homophobia Part. [end of long quote]
Ha! Yes, nailed it :D If 15 years has taught me one thing it's that when many folks hear the word "community", what they most often actually hear is "free shit for me, others will do the work, and while I'm grabbing at it, I get to tell everyone what they're going to do".