Portland Anarchist Road Care Fixes Potholes Anonymously (2017)
citylab.com
citylab.com
Are they suggesting that the city can be held liable when a pothole they _haven't_ fixed jacks up my car or its tires? I've not really heard of that working in practice. From Portland's own website [0]:
> Most pothole claims are not paid.
Yea, figures - I think I'll take my chances with the anarchist-repaired potholes.
The city is just giving advice in this case. If someone where to harmed by one of these fixed potholes, the lawsuit would be between that person and these "pothole vigilantes".
You have clearly never lived in the town where I grew up :)
Perhaps compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10367855.
My first thought would be using substandard or incorrect materials. Say, using concrete in an asphalt surface. You quasi cover this with your cardboard part of the comment. Perhaps an incorrect mix of aggregate to asphalt might have different thermal properties. If the pothole expanded more/faster than the surrounding material, it might make it a lot worse. Also, if your materials are not safe to drive on while setting (like my example, filling a hole with concrete). You'd also be endangering yourself and others while attempting such work as you'll be unsuitably marked and lanes won't be properly barricaded for your work.
(that's literally where the double standard comes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity )
I don't know about Portland or Oregon, since it's a state/city level issue I assume laws vary all over the USA there. However, in my state that is absolutely the case on state roads, not "liable" so much as "you can be reimbursed for documented damages up to some limit", and the process is a quite straightforward one that I've personally taken advantage of. A few years back I hit a fresh major pothole on a state highway (50 mph speed limit) and it destroyed tires on the passenger side, though at least I avoided serious damage to my shocks. I documented the tow, repair, and tire replacement cost, downloaded the state reimbursement form, and sent it all in. 3 weeks later the state sent me back a check for the $500-someodd it cost no questions asked.
I suspect a lot of people don't know about such laws but from a brief glance they do seem reasonably widespread around the country, so it's always worth checking. Maybe another one of those many things that can work quite well and easily in your favor if you know about it, but that most people don't even know to take advantage of in the first place. Certainly didn't come up in driver's ed, I only learned about it while talking shop with other people volunteering to help a campaign for state office.
We all have those "little" things that bug us, that we just wish we could throw our hands up and fix but naturally never do. The most we'll do is send a comment/email that will never get action-ed.
Not legal? Everything starts being illegal when it's an embarrassment for the governement. As in capitalism's paralyzie? Let these guys decide if they want to run the risk to be injured.
Our roads received the minimum possible care they could receive this winter; the state just couldn’t afford more.
My parents lost nearly everything except 2 vehicles and the pets. The fire started on federal land, and federal officials set the fire that burned down my parents' house.
No compensation to them, yet, except from their insurance.
I know back-burns are not precise, but given that the fed took preventative measures sure as bulldozing a multimile fire line and laying pipe to power sprinklers, then they set the fire and didn't turn the sprinklers on, feels like arson to me. Also, that they started it at one of the worst times of the day. Everyone in Montana knows that winds pick up in the afternoon. When did they start the back-burn? Roughly 1-2pm local, depending on conditions. That's usually about the cutoff for regional slash burns. By cutoff, I don't mean start, I mean, they have to be stopped by then.
Coupled with reports from neighbors, that refused to evacuate, that fire fighters stood by and simply watched while 2 houses & a neighborhood water system burned to the ground.
Am I pissed? Of course. I think there was a huge failure of management in this fire. Will my parents every be properly be compensated? I doubt it. They, and the rest of my family, have lost a lot due to federal mismanagement.
My parents' house was not lost due to a wild fire. It was lost due to federal action to combat a wild fire, and they fucked it up.
Cities are the most efficient way we've discovered to live as humans. They're less wasteful, they consolidate resources, etc.
> “Don’t get us wrong, we believe that many of these services are crucial for society, like healthcare, education, and maintained roadways, but we believe that the way to achieve access for all is by deconstructing the state and capitalism, as well as other coercive hierarchies that exist in our society. It is this driving philosophy that motivates our actions, not only to fix the potholes, but to take power back from the state, into the hands of the people.”
Centralization and urban living were invented thousands of years ago and has made these services possible and more efficient over time.
In lieu of mandatory dues, they will always be strapped for cash and either begging for donations or coming up with annoying fundraiser ideas. They might fork, and one or both parts of the fork will fail, because some of the critical support went to the other part of the fork.
And some of them will actually be more like organized crime families or street gangs than the PTA.
In other words, anarchy is happening right now, and you can see how it works right now. A bunch of crazies devoted to renegade pothole repair is a perfect example. They come together because of potholes. They fix potholes. People pay attention to them as long as they care about potholes. When the pothole problem is fixed, everyone forgets they ever existed, then stop paying attention and giving money. They either drift away to find something else to do, or become the lonely, ignored crusaders against potholes that people remember hearing about that one time, but had no idea they were still around and still fixing potholes.
It doesn't scale, though. Anarchy can only exist at the local level because governments tackle many of the big problems and force people to pay for the solutions with taxes. Imagine if your city government operated like the mafia (Chicago!), or if your state government operated like a giant PTA meeting. It might get as far as agreeing to set a budget of $500 for the spring graduation party before removing someone from the gallery for shouting about invading foreign armies, and would still be answering stupid questions about the dress code for service dogs when the soldiers started dragging everyone out.
Mr. Humungus (a reasonable feller) is president of the Juicetakers Committee, Toecutter vice president, Feral Kid as secretary, Gyropilot as treasurer, and someone that looks exactly like your Mom covered in warpaint as the member-at-large. The president has advanced a proposal that you just walk away and give us your juice. We took a vote, and it passed unanimously. We are also selling cookie dough as part of our fall fundraiser. So give us the juice, and please buy some cookies on your way out into the desert.
I'd prefer it if they were shooting guns at me.
In other words, they would say that people who are capable of being doctors should provide medical care, and organize themselves in a way to make sure that care gets provided sensibly. When potholes need fixing the community should meet and figure out how to get it done. They believe we can do all of these things with out needing an organized state that gets to dictate anything, money to incentivize, or police as coercive enforcement.
I'm sure I'm butchering it a bit. It might not be quite that simple, but it's along those lines.
And yes, it's idealistic as hell. That said, I know a lot of anarchist activists and damn, do those guys know how to get shit done.
But that doesn't necessarily mean they couldn't, if we put some effort and education into training people how to operate in them better. I'm less skeptical of the idea that we could operate in self organized non-heirarchies than I am of the idea that would could do away with the money and all formal organizations.
The idea that we could do everything by informal agreement just seems really unstable to me. Like you'd never quite know what the rules were and like they could change at any moment.
Not really. In countless rural societies, throughout the world and through history, it's been commonplace for people to help each other with building their homes, making dirt roads and small bridges, making food and many other tasks - without charging each other for money or bartering.
Essentially a small village can work much like a very large family and people would use money almost only when interacting with strangers in a different village.
I'm pretty sure you're referring to the Bridge to Nowhere [1] here (~$400M), but one could argue for a number of public works projects that are unnecessary, stupid, or the cause of recurring large expenditures.
Chicago, built on a swamp, still constantly has flooding issues. The Deep Tunnel project [2] is currently at > $4B, and still can't handle a relatively common spring storm without dumping sewage into either Lake Michigan or the Illinois-Michigan Sanitation Canal. Not to mention the other regional estuaries that get polluted by overflows such as the Des Plaines River or the Salt Creek (which just happens to run by the Chicago area's premier zoo: Brookfield).
Also, Washington DC, also built on a swamp (literal, not the figurative "drain the swamp"). Not sure what measures the city takes to prevent/handle flooding. Also potential hurricane target.
New Orleans, built below sea level...right next to the sea, and also a prime target for hurricanes, the worst in recent memory being Katrina. Response to that? Rebuild. Should have been relocate. First search from Google I found says costs from the recovery on that were ~$108B [3] (I don't know the accuracy of this - first time I've ever visited the site). I don't know how much the Army Corps of Engineers has spent rebuilding the dikes & levies that failed after Katrina, but I'd put money down that it is far beyond the $400M spent on the "Bridge to Nowhere".
Point is, the Federal government is there to help all citizens, those in small & large communities/cities alike. Infrastructure projects cost money, period. They're actually cheaper in rural areas due to cheaper local labor, sometimes material, and usually (but not always) less corruption and cronyism (road repairs around Chicago are generally of very poor quality, do not last long and are poorly planned - e.g. in Cook County, a road will often be repaired one week, and then promptly torn up the next to replace a sewer/water/gas main).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravina_Island_Bridge [2] http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/367.html [3] https://www.thebalance.com/hurricane-katrina-facts-damage-an...
I never said that model is meant to be applied at large scale.
> projects like research in medicine
You could have chosen an example like building a dam. In many countries academia works in a highly decentralized fashion and is less money-driven than other fields. Also see FLOSS.
> doesn't seem like something that could emerge from a anarchist society
Not from a handful of individuals. However anarchism does not reject large and complex organizations (on the contrary):
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Anarchist_FAQ/Why_do_anarchist...
The fact that X works in a small village should not be considered as evidence that X would plausibly work in a mid-sized town. For homo sapiens and groups of them, scale matters a lot.
OK.
> They believe we can do all of these things with out needing an organized state
Well, see, we met and decided that that's how we're going to get things done. It happens at the time a town decides to incorporate. How does it decide to do that? Usually by a referendum passing among the town's voters.
“There can be no ethical services provided by the government because they are facilitated through the power of the gun,” writes PARC, presumably while flipping the bird like in the top photo. “Don’t get us wrong, we believe that many of these services are crucial for society, like healthcare, education, and maintained roadways, but we believe that the way to achieve access for all is by deconstructing the state and capitalism, as well as other coercive hierarchies that exist in our society. It is this driving philosophy that motivates our actions, not only to fix the potholes, but to take power back from the state, into the hands of the people.”
Fascinating, seeing as many people's experience of self-identified 'anarchism' is through the power of the fist.
It's odd: anarchists openly justify violence in defense from 'fascism', whereas fascism is correctly defined as obtaining and maintaining power through violence, without seeing the irony.
As an anecdote, I live near a left-wing anarchist group called the Center of Libertarian Culture, and I can assure you they're all pacific people.
It's odd: anarchists openly justify violence in defense from 'fascism', whereas fascism is correctly defined as obtaining and maintaining power through violence, without seeing the irony.
There's no irony; anarchists don't want to obtain and maintain power, just to prevent others from doing so.
By beating the shit out of people you're obtaining power for yourself. Modern anarchism is fascism, masking itself as the opposite.
Saying 'violent thugs don't represent the original priciples of anarchism' is missing the point, in the same way that people who say 'real communism hasn't been tried' and ignore the 100M dead people.
2. Civil rights activists aren't primarily known for violence. Anarchists are.
3. Saying their actions have nothing to do with the principles of fascism is like staring at a wall of human skulls in Cambodia and saying this has nothing to do with the principles of socialism: you're missing the point.
So, the American Revolutionaries were fascists?
Fascists, even in the lose sense theat doesn't refer tons particular historical Italian political group, are a much narrower label.
> All fascists suck, whether left or right.
There are left wing tyrants (tyrants, while broader than fascists, are still narrower than you have attempted to paint fascists), but they aren't fascists.
But anarchists aren't that, either (some of the subelements of the antifa movement, particularly the Maoist ones, might be inclined in theat direction, but Maoists and anarchists, even anarchocommunists, aren't the same thing.)
> Civil rights activists aren't primarily known for violence. Anarchists are.
During the period of major activity, most anti-estsblishment groups are tarred with the violence of their most extreme subcomponents (which may actually be provocateurs) or even the most extreme groups with similar objections, even if they are outside the main group. This was absolutely the case with the civil rights movement.
> Saying their actions have nothing to do with the principles of fascism
They have nothing to do with the defining characteristics of fascism, either. The only association is that fascism is broadly accepted as a negative label and you wish to brand anarchists negatively.
Civil rights activists fight against power systems, revolutionaries fought for representation: anarchists are violent thugs who pretend to be activists to justify violence towards anyone who doesn't share their ideology.
Understanding the obvious discrepancy between the words of anarchists and their actions is important part of being politically mature.
Anarchists already have a negative label: edgy people who pretend to be brave by wearing a mask and beating people / phone boxes because there's something wrong in their lives. If you don't believe that fine, trying to convince you of anything would be like trying to convince any other (moon landing / flat earth / building 7) conspiracy theorist. Enjoy your early twenties.
Left of center people attack libertarians these days using parallel rhetoric, identifying them as equivalent to the worst right wing types and responsible for everything about capitalism that can be criticized (e.g. the body count from everything bad). Are you on the same page, or do you reject that as invalid nonsense? Do you agree libertarians are fascists too?
Have you ever noticed how ubiquitous the fasces is in Washington, DC, on statues (e.g. Lincoln) and things? That doesn't make our government fascist to be sure, but it's about as good an argument as the one you are making about other people.
Sure, "no true Scotsman", but still; what you're describing is indeed fascism, it has nothing to do with any principles of anarchism I'm aware of.
Much as been written about the organization of anti-capitalist anarchist societies. One work on that is An Anarchist FAQ[1], but beware that like any other political group - an especially on the left - there will certainly be other anarchists decrying that text as nonsense and false anarchism and such.
[1] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-ed...
"We are going to offer all the services the state offers now but only better" is the silliest argument ever. You run into the exactly same resource and distribution problems as the government has, and you are going to start instituting the same sort of structures sooner or later.
Hierarchical systems are not enforced on people by malificient power hungry lords. Humans self organize into hierarchical system. If you are planning this "total-decentralization" you better have a plan on how to negate this natural "follow-the-leader" instinct most people have.
The second is the historical example. The only time anarchists come to power is in time of great trouble. Mainly because the dominant political force has fallen, and everything is in chaos. Another political force has risen sooner or later, only to install hierarchical power structures. With great misery to most involved.
Doing anonymous good deeds is one thing.
Speaking of a revolution is another.
The best rule of figuring out fair playing rules in a society is thinking you are someone else, and what would you like to happen in their shoes. Once you find something that seems more or less fair for all parties it's a good sign it's not obviously bad.
Slavery almost immediately fails this test.
For example, it's not obvious to me how anarchistic societies will deal with violence and crime. Mob justice? Public opinion is extremely sensitive to mass paranoia. If we apply the test of "stepping into the shoes of someone else" and imagined myself as the suspect of a crime, I would much rather take the process system of a modern state over mob rule to handle my case.
Could you offer a counter example, from this fairness point of view, where an anarchistic society would outperform the state as implemented by western democracies?
So much packed into one sentence! If you think of anarchism as ever having been suggested as "a better way to govern", please go back to the beginning and try again. It is instead a better way to live. This thing you think we need, we don't actually need. And what "retribution"? Would it be "retribution" to tell "the elites" sorry you can't continue spending trillions of our public dollars bombing innocents for no discernible reason?
Also, I would object to the form of your discourse. You asked for a counterexample, and multiple people have provided those. Please either argue against the counterexamples or concede the point.
Like I wrote above, I don't really see 'not being anarchistic' as the root cause of whatever ills anarchism is claimed to cure.
Look, if I could choose the psychological characteristics of my species I'd want to live in a communist utopia with actual egalitarianism. But it just does not work. It's been tried with a heavy human toll. Likewise for anarchism. If someone is pedddling a system for you that has no chance of working in the current world we are living in I would really question either the motives or the rationality of the proponent.
This is turning rapidly quite political... I think our main difference is in how we believe a large ensemble of human beings is capable of behaving. We both would like that humankind could live as a huge trusting family. I don't see how that could be possible at the present moment.
One wouldn't expect anyone from Finland, Switzerland, etc. to complain too much about the government. For the time being, these nations have "good" governments. Voters have some effect on national policies, police aren't slaughtering innocents with impunity at home, military isn't doing the same in numerous locations abroad. Please have some sympathy for the majority of humanity! You'll turn into us before we turn into you, if for no other reason than by a reversion to the mean. After all we export our delusions. Some people have seen enough American news to believe that it's an advantage to be on our "side" in an armed conflict.
I have really enjoyed the TV series "Okkupert", and I do sympathize with any nation that borders a schizophrenic totalizing militarist kleptocracy, because the in the long term there will be violence. That's why I sympathize with Mexico.
I know lots of places have turned to shit thanks to US, so, I have no idea how to balance this fairly.
As long as its profitable, I can only see there being less constraints in doing so than there is now.
They love this myth you perpetuate, of stealing foreign oil for fame and profit. As a nation, we have yet to see dollar one for all of our Middle Eastern atrocities dating back to the 1950s. All of this evil and violence has only ever profited the war pigs and their cronies. The rest of us have been stuck with the bill.
This line of thinking reminds me of the drug prohibitionists. "If we stop killing drug dealers, they'll be even wealthier and they'll kill everyone!" No, silly, if drugs could be sold without fear of violence then drug sales would not require violence. Our fifty-year prohibition has created a cohort of thugs who would have to age out of the business, but if we stopped giving them vast sums of money then they could be dealt with like any other violent people.
Right now, in Kurdish Syria (otherwise known as Rojava), there is a society built on principles that resemble anarchism pretty closely. They have very interesting decision-making processes, resource-management, and systems of justice. They also have pretty much no police as it isn't seen as necessary. There are lots of resources to learn about the details, here's one account I think is pretty good:
I just don't see how anarco-syndicalism would improve our lot.
With this background, I would search solution to the worlds problems from somewhere else than pitting ananrchism against democratic hierarchy.
I would suggest you look into the current situation on gender equality in kurdish nation before claiming it all together a 'better way'.
(0) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/14/finland-happie...
One of the major components of the kurdish revolution is gender equality and female liberation, that's why the YPJ units have been so popular in the media...
This is spot on. I think we would have to radically change our species behavioral tendencies before anarchy based societies would ever work like they think they should.
Yes. Volunteers fixing potholes seems fine.
But when about when a bridge needs replacing? I want to know that someone is following standard engineering and construction practices and that they're accountable to do so. I don't want to learn about Jimmy's Artisinal Welding by plunging to my death.
There's also no good reason to believe that anarchists wouldn't follow standard engineering and construction practices. Look at open source software, there's no state in control of practices there yet engineers tend to do just fine. In fact, there are plenty of examples where people cut corners on safety procedures within a capitalist society in order that they can get a competitive advantage in the market. I'd say the incentives of capitalism are more detrimental to good bridges than those of anarchism.
There's also then no accountability for when it fails. Not that we have that now, necessarily, in software "engineering", but in other engineering disciplines, we do.
A licensed engineer can lose their license (a huge professional blow) and be potentially civilly and/or criminally held liable for designs they signed off on that fail or violate appropriate ethical standards of their governing body, e.g. IEEE for electrical engineers.
Eventually they might even make it official by referring to those people as a "government".
A very large fraction of open source software is crap. Fortunately we get to choose which OSS programs we use. Not so for bridges.
I don't know why you think that a different organizational scheme would prevent corruption.
If you're going to build a bridge, somebody has to do the work. Everybody else is going to pay them somehow. And if you're going to pick someone to do the work, somebody has to choose. It's untenable to have every decision made by all people, so everyone will delegate, say, construction hiring decisions, to someone.
Now the Construction Hiring Decider can pick who gets paid to work. Who will he/she choose? Will it be based on skill, personal connections, ethnic bias - or maybe kickbacks?
You can't run any large group without delegating some responsibilities. As soon as anybody has any decision-making power delegated to them, they can misuse it. There is no system that can totally prevent that. And the more structures of accountability and shared decision-making you build to safeguard power, the more it looks like a democratic government.
You do raise good points but anarchists are not all juvenile and naive as many think and, seeing as anarchism has been around for >100 years, people have thought of these issues before you. Decision-making definitely has to be delegated to people sometimes and the manner in which this is done is important. Usually anarchists emphasise frequent rotation and possibility for immediate recall in order that no one may abuse their power.
I think of it as being similar to how science is funded by national agencies. There is a big pool of resources and it gets dispersed among researchers according to some process. That process usually involves nominating a team of scientists in the relevant field to judge where the resources would be best spent. Everyone ultimately has the same goal of advancing research most effectively and so they usually make the best choices possible. The panel is different every year so there it's hard to have collusion going on. Academia definitely has its problems with entrenched hierarchies of course but those come about for different reasons.
It's impossible to make a perfect system but it's clear we could do better. Anarchists just want to dilute unjust power structures as much as possible. There are examples of organisations that are successfully run like this so it's not like these are utopian ideas.
You and others in this thread seem to think that anarchists oppose all forms of authority, social organization and rules.
This is not correct. Anarchists oppose only irrational authority as explained in:
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Anarchist_FAQ/Why_do_anarchist...
I never asked for this system, let alone actively tried to organise it
It's always "only capitalism" or "only communism" or "no money" or "no government" or etc etc.
It seems pretty obvious to me that the optimal solution isn't based purely on some philosophical idea about how things 'should' be (whatever 'should' even means!), but instead would be a pragmatic, adaptive solution based on what actually happens and works on a case-by-case basis.
It would be a patchy, ugly system, compared to the perfect elegant algorithm people want. And indeed that's kind of what we have. We just gotta keep patching and amending. There are a lot of existing problems, but we have the framework for fixing them, and no doubt it is a difficult process. But to insist that the solution is to start over is naive and dismissive of the generations of sacrifice made to get to this point.
It's frustrating when people argue that all evil is because of capitalism, or that capitalism is purely good. Can't we just acknowledge that there are good and bad aspects of all systems, and work to boost the good parts and improve or attenuate the bad parts? And work in the good parts of other "competing" systems too? Yes, things don't have to be 100% pure capitalism or not. Hybrid solutions exist! That's basically what is happening, I just wish people would stop arguing by simplifying everything into some catchy moral gimmick.
Things work well enough that we can afford the luxury of chasing a feeling of moral superiority. Under worse conditions, most people don't have time for that.
However, I strongly disagree that principles and morality aren’t essential. This is because when figuring out, as you say, ‘what works best’, there is no single definition of ‘best’. In fact, as a general rule, there’s thousands of competing ones. Principles are how you do a reasonable job of making consistent decisions towards meaningful change.
In addition to a system working well, it also needs to be understood to be working well by the people that live in it. If some definition of a ‘best’ metric was delivered by a Kafkaesque convoluted system that people found confusing, one which works well-enough on simple principles might be preferable.
I feel like the principles we come up with are just rough approximations of what we intuitively know but can't elegantly express. The true moral principle for society is probably a monstrous concatenation of if-else statements. If the zoom-out view of society still follows the principles, then I think that ought to be sufficient for its citizens' concerns about the society's effectiveness and direction.
Then it hit me- this form of government already exists, and it is called the Mafia.
That said, addressing this and other concerns isn't rocket science. The city could easily publish a detailed guide to filling potholes (what materials are ok, what materials are not, what process to use, etc).
It's much easier to just allow citizens to call a number and report a pothole. Seattle does that and potholes get filled fairly quickly, they even have a phone app that allows you to report all kinds of problems.
Here's Seattle's pothole map showing where and when they have been fixed.
We must have different definitions of quickly! Or perhaps different standards for “pothole”.
Council crews everywhere could realistically have best-practice blogs detailing all sorts of stuff to encourage residents to aim for a certain standard (verge upkeep, etc) or achieve other targets (water usage and the like).
It doesn't take rocket science to shovel in a bunch of cold-patch and sand and tamp it down.
And that is what they do, unless they are completely repaving the road.
Many local governments grab any able bodied people to shovel semi-hot asphalt into the holes and let the traffic pack it in. This is not the recommended procedure by any standard, but people have gotten used to the incompetence and actually believe that this is proper, just because someone official is doing it.
[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/32448103/mystery-artis...
"They also run the risk of being held personally liable if someone were to be injured by the pothole they attempted to fix"
This makes me uncomfortable - are municipalities held accountable for injuries caused by a pothole? Are they held liable for injuries caused by a fixed pothole?
I know some municipalities will pay claims for tire/wheel damage caused by roads in disrepair if you file a claim with evidence. Presumably this same admission of liability could be upheld by courts if injuries had resulted from a problem like this.
One thing that always struck me, was in a capitialistic society we are actually all incentivised to fix potholes ourselves... Basically the improved potholes keep us safe, improve business, etc. I think many are just so short sighted, that when they think of capitalism they think of the standard "greedy corporation"
If people actually thought two steps ahead (including said corporation) theyd be more like Amazon, improve logistics and you improve the world. Literally, everyone profits. That's the point of capitalism, you can basically do what you want. These guys are filling potholes for themselves, they said as much. That's a selfish, capitalism-centric act
This is a simplistic characterisation. Anarchists hold individual liberty in the highest regard but also believe in solidarity and mutual aid. You can "basically do what you want" as long as you aren't restricting the individual freedom of others but rather supporting everyone in having access to the same means and rights as you do. Since exploitation of people is so endemic in our society, anarchists work mainly to free themselves and others from oppressive systems. Right now we can't do what we want, so anarchists fight against the social dynamics which are preventing this.
What is it you want to do that you’re not allowed to?
Also, why are anarchist teaming up with communist in order to limit free speech?
I’m specifically talking about Antifa trying to stop a jew (Shapiro) and a gay man married to a black man (Milo) from speaking at Berkeley?
Do anarchists support free speech or not?
Communism is an anarchist philosophy, ultimately... Agree with it or not, a (simplified) original reading of the Marxist historical programme involves a dialectic model whereby you wind up in a stateless society by building up and tearing down a central state.
This would contrast with anarchocapitalists who arguably advocate a more direct route to anarchy, usually tinged with crypto conservative sentiments...
And probably a classical socialist (as in Benjamin Tucker) take on anarchism would be still different, but I don't think there are many of them left, though there might be some contemporary philosophical adherents to Max stirner that live in that space there.
Anarchists, like other communists, have as their goal a "classless, moneyless, stateless society". This absolutely cannot include capitalism because any capitalist society inherently allows for classes to exist and would probably require money. Furthermore, it is pretty evident that capitalism cannot exist without a state and therefore the term "anarchocapitalism" is an oxymoron.
But history shows that when fascists have free speech, they use that freedom to take away the right to free speech and free assembly from their opponents.
And it gets much, much worse after that.
Fascism is so dangerous that it cannot be allowed a foothold. That's why Antifa shut down fascist speech.
Being gay, black or Jewish has nothing to do with it.
Who dictates what is dangerous speech? You? A mob?
Now do yourself a favor and go and watch their speeches, then come back and quote the facist bits. I bet you can’t...because I know you can’t.
I'll frame the antifa situation in more microcosmical terms that make it simpler to understand: Say some survivors from a natural disaster at a village down the road have shown up in your town and are camping at the outskirts, trying to get back on their feet. There have always been some cultural animosities towards these people but they haven't done any harm to the townspeople. Some farmers have recently lost some chickens, probably due to an increase of the local fox population as the foxes also move away from the natural disaster. A local schemer sees an opportunity to gain power and starts convincing everyone that the villagers from out of town have been stealing chickens and that it is the current mayor's fault for allowing them to stay at the outskirts.
The schemer never says to do so himself, but knows that there are other townspeople that are willing to commit violent acts towards the blow-ins, particularly some of the farmers that have been poorly affected by the loss of chickens. Despite the knowledge that his words - especially when amplified by an audience of followers - will embolden the more violent factions in their aims, he continues to speak out loudly against the outsiders because it is gaining him so much popularity.
Another group, who are friendly towards the poor sods that lost their homes and entire livelihoods, have noticed the dangerous dynamic that is brewing among the violent groups that are threatening the outsiders. They see that the dangerous words of the schemer are turning more people to support the violent acts. They see that the mayor has been put in a tough place by the schemer's words, and any denunciation of the schemer's agenda would appear an abuse of his power - shutting down the "free speech" of the schemer - or an intolerance that would lose him the chance of re-election. They decide to take matters into their own hands and themselves denounce the schemer and his tirades. They go to his speaking events to disrupt them and point out his hypocrisy. This leads to clashes between them and the violent followers of the schemer. The schemer appeals to the townspeople as a victim, claiming that the friendly group are violent instigators of injustice against his freedom to speak ill of the outsiders...
I think it's obvious who's who in the story. Shapiro and Yiannopoulos have absolutely said fascist things. (Hitler sounded reasonable to many people at the time too.) Even if they don't themselves believe in fascism, their failure to denounce the violent groups who have used their rhetoric to justify violence is damning enough.
> Who dictates what is dangerous speech?
Maybe the people that are on the receiving end of actual violence that is being motivated by said speech. It's all around you and you're just choosing not to see it because it's not affecting you personally.
“Shapiro and Yiannopoulos have absolutely said fascist things.”
So no quotes then? We’ll just take your word for it?
This is true in the sense that it is the natural products of a very specific conception of property rights that was advanced by the commercial class (they became the capitalist class) for their own benefit, and for which, several centuries after the model began becoming dominant in Western Europe “natural rights” justifications were concocted.
> It is not a designed system, it is an emergent system.
It wasn't “designed” in the sense of deep theory and engineering, and it is “emergent” in the sense that it is a product of individual advantage seeking by members of a particular social group.
> One thing that always struck me, was in a capitialistic society we are actually all incentivised to fix potholes ourselves
Is it not the case that in any society, we are all incentivised to fix it ourselves. Who is the government in your society? Us or them? Why not both?
> That, combined with the observed fact that the goal of any government organization eventually becomes the perpetuation of that organization
That may or may not be true, but regardless, it's then good that most developed countries have established a form of government where organizations within that government don't have complete autonomy and always answer to some form of elected representative of the people.
Everything can be reduced to egoism if you look in close enough. The problem is that when taking an approximation capitalism is short sighted. Short term profit is taken to be a good approximation for long term profit, which in turn is taken to be a good approximation for continued sustainability. Consider: if I start a business, I probably expect it to be profitable a year from now. If I am making an ambitious startup, I might allow five or ten years to be profitable. If I am Jeff Bezos, I might allow thirty years to be profitable. All these are assumed to approximate the very long term. If my business is profitable next year, I assume I will be able to keep running it for ten years. If I've run my business for ten years, then I assume I will be able to pass it to my children. If I get my business from my parents, then I assume it will be with the family forever.
Consider: I start a fishing business. I take a loan out for a boat and some nets, and pay them off by years end. Now I make a profit selling my fish. This is a success under capitalism. If I am very successful, and manage to buy a few more boats and hire some workers to man them, and am raking in money in ten years, this is considered a major success under capitalism. Note that we have never asked whether or not I fish sustainably. What if by the eleventh year the fish have run out, and I go bankrupt? What if people who survived off my fish starved to death? This is no longer a success, either from a capitalist or egoist perspective. But if we use profit as a proxy for success, for the first ten years it /was/ a success.
Now if we had called Bezos in to consult, he would have told us this would happen and advised us to start a different business. But most people aren't Bezos. Furthermore, capitalism doesn't encourage us to think like Bezos. If I'm raking it in for ten years, why don't I squirrel away a couple million into a savings account, and live off that as my retirement? If I do, why should I care about the business going bankrupt (limited liability FTW), and the people starving? In other words: Jeff Bezos is worth 100 billion dollars. Why doesn't he buy up a small nation, along with all the people living there to take care of him, and live the highest life imaginable until he dies (and pass it on to his children until they die)? The answer to this question sure as hell isn't because of capitalism.
That's up to the owner of the fish, who will raise the price of your license if you start destroying his capital. You are talking about capitalism, where the fish is owned by someone - right?
(With the last paragraph you seem to argue against yourself. It is very disturbing.)
Obviously they don't always do that, but to assume you can simply run things the same exact way as your ancestors is foolish.
I am an anarchist (the capitalist sort, not the weird "we're really liberals" socialist one) and I don't want the government to defend my anything. In any case, who defends what was not in question; I was just pointing out that sustainability is not an issue in a (truly) capitalist society, because the owner of a resource can always decide to limit consumption.
I tried to work with the county to make it official, the idea was to form a group of trained, careful people that would be to public works what the volunteer fire department is to Cal-Fire. Then we could be insured, etc.
The county wanted no part of it even though their budget, at the time, was about $1M/year for 600 miles of roads (that's pathetic and the roads show it. The road I'm on hasn't been paved or screened for decades and it's falling apart, just like many others).
I was hoping we could pioneer a model that other states/counties could emulate. Still am but don't know how to get there. We can bring way more people to the table than the county can. For example, they fill potholes with 2 people, one guy driving a pickup, one guy on the back shoveling patch. We did that (as you'll see below) with 7 people and two trucks (my flatbed and my 1/2 ton). Our protocol on busy roads was to park the flatbed facing into traffic, lights on, flashers on, safety LED flashers up high on, then cone off a buffer behind and in front, put two people with slow/stop signs just inside each cone zone, a person at the middle that directs traffic (everyone had radios on them), a driver for the flatbed (used to tamp in the patch) and shoveler. That's 7 people where the county had 2. We were dramatically safer. We could do that because we all volunteered.
That's a lot of man power for free, it's less risky, it still blows my mind that the county can't get behind that. Someone decided it made them look bad. Personally, I think not using that man power makes them look bad but what do I know?
https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/03/17/mountain-vigilantes-t...
https://new.devon.gov.uk/communities/casestudy/100000-fundin...
In my city in Australia, the council just fixes potholes, generally within a week or two... A while back my mother made a complaint about a keep-left sign that blocked visibility on a corner, and they had it changed to lower it out of the way that week...
If not, I'd say they have a different pattern of activity than almost any other municipal work: plenty of downtime with unpredictable peaks that might require huge numbers of people at a very short notice. This makes hiring professionals a huge waste except in large cities, because they'll be twiddling their thumbs most of the time.
Fire depts are not sitting around twiddling their thumbs. Plenty of work to be done. To respond to a lot more than just fires too FYI.
Volunteer firefighters are there to help out in areas not served by firefighters such as being out in a super rural area or when theres a big fire and there simply isn't enough staff, like wildfires. They're not volunteering to take away someones job. Some of them are just retired firefighters or veterans that want to look out for their community.
Right. But why are those areas not served by a professional team? Because there isn't enough work to keep them busy.
Same thing with wildfires; you might need 20x more people during a wildfire than the rest of the time. It's not like you couldn't hire 20x professional firefighters to handle them - it's just that it would be a huge waste the rest of the time, as I said.
My point is that firefighting is not like pothole fixing - there's no such thing as a wildfire of potholes. Which is why municipalities supporting volunteer firefighters makes sense, whereas supporting volunteer pothole fixers doesn't, in my opinion.
No, you get a lot of potholes. That's annoying, but nobody will die if the fixers take a few days to fix them.
My knowledge of the pnw pothole situation is irrelevant to my point.
In any case, you can't have an anarchist society ... its always going to turn into an anarcho-capitalist society. People are always going to join together into mutually beneficial joint-enterprises ... and they are going to want to share in the proceeds from such enterprises ... and that is what capitalism basically enables.
Worker cooperative (can be seen in communistic/socialistic/anarchist/democratic light) are where everyone has shares and ownership of the cooperative.
What do you need to make a modern enterprise? You need tools and you need labor. Some people provide labor, and others provide the tools. Some people who can provide tools, don't necessarily want to provide labor. They are shareholders without being workers.
If all the workers bring their own tools, then the enterprise can be 100% worker owned. If some workers need someone else to provide tools, they need some outside capital. That outside capital is basically outside people providing tools in exchange for some ownership in the enterprise.
As enterprises become more complex, you may need more and more complicated and expensive tools ... and the people who provide the labor and the people who provide the tools can become highly specialized.
There you go ... shareholder capitalism again.
Its pretty oversimplized to describe the capital acquistion process, small businesses can last 20 or 30 years without any actual outside investment. Most small businesses dont become corporations that require extensive outside investment because its hard, thus your case is only certain if every small business becomes a corporation through outside investment but it doesnt occur everytime and is only an edge case.
The anarcho-syndicalist solution is simple. If an enterprise is bigger than say 30 people, by law you cannot gain ownership of it by providing capital. In fact, the shareholding system is rather simple. If there are N people who provide labor to the enterprise, then each of them get roughly 1/Nth ownership of the enterprise. Sure, people doing more technical or more difficult work might receive a bigger salary than people doing more manual labor but it will be very difficult for anyone to amass relative massive wealth.
Sure, in such a economic system, collecting capital will be hard to enterprises. "Growth" might slow down etc etc, but at least people will be fairly reimbursed for their labor.
How do you stop (say) a hundred people getting together and agreeing to do just that, without having a state? Most people prefer job security rather than part ownership (revealed preference).
This methodology is not very different from that of socialist democracies, who very slowly over decades have expanded the network of protections and services offered by the state, in service of their goal of a benevolent democratic state that takes care of all its citizens.
[1] Remember, anarchists (Chomsky style at least) want a society free of unreasonable hierarchies - where "unreasonable" is up for debate.
This differs from what we have today how?
I think every politico-economic system stops people from doing certain things - that is an inevitable consequence if a group of people with possibly conflicting goals want to cooperate for mutual benefit. The whole debate between different ideologies is what to stop people from and why.
As I said anarcho-syndicalists are evolutionaries who want to start by making one simple change to our current democratic-capitalist systems - nerf the power of capital to further gain wealth (what). And they want to do this to reduce income inequality in society (why).
This proposal changes our current systems in just this way. Its not intending to change the fundamental framework of law, order, economy, politics; just merely changing some laws and economic subsystems of of current framework. Anarcho-syndicalists are not rosy-eyed people that believe in the fundamental goodness of people - but realists who want to improve society through standard democratic ways.
I hope I answered your question; if not I would happy if you explained a bit more.
Anyway, I understand your position and I'm just quibbling about terminology, so I believe I'll stop here.
In my experience Anarchists are some of the most well read community of political activists around. May I suggest that you don't know what capitalism is and should spend some time actually reading some theory? Or perhaps engage in conversation with some anarchists? I think you'd find their views and philosophy much deeper and valid than you've conceded in your post.
They only way it doesn't is if you define capitalism to be some sort of corporatism ... which means you aren't "well read" as you put it.
>What do you need to make a modern enterprise? You need tools and you need labor. Some people provide labor, and others provide the tools. Some people who can provide tools, don't necessarily want to provide labor. They are shareholders without being workers.
But the thing is, this only needs to exist this way in a capitalist society. In all your points, you seem to not grasp that the underlying economic system of an anarchist society would in no way resemble the current state of affairs.
In much the same way the economy under a feudalist society does not resemble a capitalist society, and yet fields were tilled and walls built without shareholders.
The fact is that if you abolish capital (by returning collective control over the means of production to the workers) there is no section of society, no "other that provides the tools". The people who provide the tools are other workers, working in other fields, and they supply the workers in the field which uses the tools with the tools. There is no unproductive segment of society such as there is today which lays claim to the wealth without doing any of the labour. This means that there cannot be the accumulation of wealth that we see today, as instead of being horded and spent on the whims of a few, it is immediately pumped back into society.
The state and capitalism are symbiotic. The state only exists to keep capitalist enterprise in check, that is why the state perform functions that we do not believe should be performed for profit (why so many countries have welfare systems, healthcare systems and militaries to maintain the states primacy).
Otherwise everything would be performed by private enterprise (i.e. your anarcho-capitalist ideal) which would very quickly lead to corporate feudalism and private armies.
There is no way for the state to not exist and capitalism to exist at the same time, and seeing as both structures are the root cause of many issues in society, the abolition of both is necessary through decentralization and worker led confederations of labor, rather than the current system of capitalist led governments and businesses.
John Locke would disagree. The state exists to protect the rights of people and the public good. "Wherever Law ends, Tyranny begins."
You have such a simplistic understanding of economics for somebody who asks others to read and study.
Where do tools come from? Are they descending from heaven like magic? Tools are the product of someone’s labor. Why would mr A who built tool X give it to mr B for his enterprise unless he gets some return?
Or do you imagine a world in which there is no shortage of tools? In that case just imagine a world where there is no shortage of anything and we can dispense with human labor altogether.
Anarchism is very possible when robots do everything. But not short of that.
Also, you should study why the anarchists ultimately lost and were butchered by the communists after the tsar’s regime was toppled in Russia.
As an aside, as I read this, you are not advocating for anarcho-capitalism, just pointing out where this scenario ends, but I don't think the people arguing you below understand that.
The real winner is the person who understands both sides and can pick out which people aren't capable of having an intellectually honest conversation and avoiding them.
Communism is great in theory but no matter how well read I am on Marx, Lenin, or Mao it won’t make communism work any better historically.
Tell me your thoughts on Revolutionary Catalonia, or the Free Territory of Ukraine? Or the EZLN in Chiapas?
You're so keen to claim a complete understanding of Communist History, please explain these attempts.
When you hold up small regions that survived for a short time (about 3 years), created nothing, then were defeated, I’m not sure you’re going to win against a system that created modern North America from nothing and has lasted over 200 years.
Anarchism is an abstract idea that has never worked, which is why all your examples are of anarchists that work with collectivist, squarely against their individualist ideals.
I'm guessing if someone said to you "USSR and China are not real socialism/communism", you would insist they are wrong?
That's a dishonest interpretation of my comment, and in fact I think you know exactly why I brought it up. OP gets to pick and choose which capitalisms are "true capitalism", but leftists are almost always denied the right to point out basic historic facts, such as maybe Stalin killed people because he was a paranoid dictator being blacklisted by all Western powers, rather than some non-sequitor about communism supernaturally compelling him to.
Not an ad hominem, just genuinely curious, does he literally think "not all capitalisms are true capitalism" then also claim "all socialisms are true socialisms" then not see any irony?
I highly recommend that episode: http://pca.st/YLdD
The city’s approach is “see no evil” until you submit a see click fix ticket.
But you need to submit them for individual holes. My street looks like a lunar landscape, but the crew will show up and fix the single hole pictured in the ticket.
In any case: fixing potholes is just about the least inefficient government service possible: it's a guy/gal making $x per hour, plus some extremely commoditised materials.
Meaning: it's extremely hard for anybody to screw this up. If your city isn't fixing potholes to your liking, it is almost guaranteed to be the result of a general lack of funds. With the perennial bogeyman of "wasteful spending", governments in the US have simply been starved of resources.
The behaviour you're describing makes perfect sense in this situation: moving on to the next pothole that someone complained about is simple prioritisation, even if it's slightly less efficient long-term to drive a block or two for every pothole instead of fixing a whole street at once.
Have you ever lived in a city? I cannot reconcile this proposition with my understanding of any municipal situation I have ever seen. Cities certainly have enough money to patch potholes. They already have a compactor and a dump truck, and asphalt is cheap. If any city is not fixing potholes, it is a question of priorities. There is probably some byzantine explanation of e.g. why potholes on this street are fixed while those on some other are not, but that can't be simplified to "we don't have enough money".
The act of filling a whole with tarred stone is trivial, managing a municipal government so that the guy is filling a hole instead of doing something less productive (like driving a truck around looking for leaf bags in February, for example) is filling holes is not.
Sure, it defaces public property, but it's with the goal that the potholes will be taken care of quicker. Unsure how true that is in practice.
Rewind 2000 years...
Wait, are these guys the People's Judean Front or the People's Front of Judea?
Fixing potholes yourself also takes a (few million) step(s) backward in time: it's the bartering of public service, forgoing the awesome benefits of specialisation and cooperation.
But you know where this sort of anarchy basically works: taxes! Almost all people send in their tax returns without a fuzz. It's almost as if they agree that everyone should chip in for shared endeavours, and that money is an excellent medium for coordinating it all.
(yeah, I know there's the threat of criminal law lurking if you don't pay your taxes. But taxes are probably the world's most universal policy, and only a select few lunatics and presidents seem not to get the concept)