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People have always worked to make their environment better for themselves and everyone prior to capitalism. Perhaps you're the one who bought into the propaganda and claim for capitalism properties that have nothing to do with it as a mode of production.

You don't need propaganda to value capitalism. Capitalism is the natural product of freedom. It is not a designed system, it is an emergent system.

You are thinking of markets. Capitalism requires the state. Property rights do not enforce themselves.

These days sloppy use of the word capitalism by both its proponents and critics means that colloquially capitalism == free markets, vs "the acquisition of capital as its own virtue"

> Capitalism is the natural product of freedom.

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.

These people who existed “prior to capitalism”, what political and economic model did they have?

You might enjoy David Graeber’s book Debt: The First 5000 Years, which goes into great detail about the extremely varied social/economic relationships found in cultures around the world.

The book is full of interesting informal systems of exchange, slyly presenting them as alternatives to the quantitative capital system we have today, but there are always tradeoffs. Reading the book I kept thinking how terrible it must have been to argue being wronged if you are a party that suffers a violation of the social exchange system and you're on the socially lower end (of power, popularity, etc.), Without a formal system. At least in our capital system if you are socially dispossessed and the numbers don't add up, there is the possibility of audit and petioning being the victim of fraud.

Which business pays for it? I don't want mine to pay for it, because someone else will. And I can keep using the road because who's gonna stop me?

> 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?

Them. Unfortunately, a single person has very little ability to impact his or her government. That, combined with the observed fact that the goal of any government organization eventually becomes the perpetuation of that organization, is why the answer to your question cannot be "both".

Everyone is a single person, and yet almost everything we've ever accomplished has been collaborations.

> 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.

>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

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.

> Note that we have never asked whether or not I fish sustainably.

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.)

The most successful people change with the times. In this case some kind of fish farming is your best bet for long term sustainability. Just like foresters plant trees, or hunters are involved in wildlife conservation efforts.

Obviously they don't always do that, but to assume you can simply run things the same exact way as your ancestors is foolish.

The "owner of the fish" is mankind in common, of course. Generally, the owner's interest is defended by the government of a given territory. But the government is not always the best steward of the long term sustainability of the land or its resources. This is for the same reason as before: it is very easy to measure short term success, but difficult to measure long term success. And even when you can predict long term success, many people will argue that you shouldn't take it into account.

You're just begging for a tragedy of the commons, which is a tragedy for a reason.

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.

...unless it violates someone else's property rights. The point of capitalism is that people can own things, and you can do what you want as long as you don't violate that system of ownership. The point of anarchism is that you can basically do what you want.

> The point of anarchism is that you can basically do what you want.

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.

Well, but in the absence of an overriding rulership, i.e. anarchy, you actually can do what you want even if you're restricting the individual freedom of others and denying them access to the same means and rights as you do. There's clear motivation for some people to do that, and what's going to prevent them from doing that to weaker or less resourceful people? And a system capable and intent on effectively doing that essentially becomes a de facto system of governance, and the situation ceases to be an anarchy.

System of governance is different to a state. Anarchists are against the state but not necessarily against government, as long as that government's power comes from voluntary association and not by coercion.

This is a great clarification, not sure why the downvotes.

“Right now we can’t do what we want...”

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?

Anarchists are not a monolithic block.

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.

I don't consider anarchocapitalists part of the Anarchist tradition. Even Rothbard said "We must therefore conclude that we are not anarchists, and that those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical."

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.

Anarchocapitalists are not strongly connected to the anarchist tradition, though they do inherit a thin thread via Benjamin Tucker, and American libertarianism. They are still anarchists in the strictest sense in that they are for the abolition of the state (open question of if property rights make sense in a stateless society), even if they got there via a largely different tradition. Classless and moneyless attributes are optional in anarchism though they are features of some branches of the tradition, in particular those that emerged from the Marx branch. I doubt Tucker, for example, would have claimed a moneyless and classless society as necessary attributes of his social ideal, and he was definitely a classical socialist anarchist.

It is likely that they view the speakers as advocates of ideas that limit the individual freedoms of others. Making it about free speech is a bit of a misdirection. When that speech furthers a system they disagree with, they are likely to make a stand against that speech.

In most cases, the antidote to dangerous speech is more speech.

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.

Cool. I’m glad you said that.

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.

You are really stretching the idea of free speech. The point is that you are free from state repression of your speech because the state is supposed to have a monopoly on force. If the only legitimate use of force in society is used against those that speak out against it, you are living in a very unfree society.

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.

I asked for quotes and got:

“Shapiro and Yiannopoulos have absolutely said fascist things.”

So no quotes then? We’ll just take your word for it?