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Comment by culi | Hacker News Reader

If you're a member of the largest workforce (service sector) in America, when you go to work every day what say do you actually have in the way things are done? Is there any real democracy happening there? The ideal of democracy has been abstracted away from the personal and lived realities of many people to getting to vote for one of two options for president every 4 years (obviously you can vote in more elections, but whose got time to look into that you got work the next day?)

For many people capitalism is just a reincarnation of feudalism for the industrial age

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There hqve been gains in democracy in the capitalism context. From the 19th century to the 1970's power was slowly whittled away from the rentier class, but ever since then they have made a huge comeback and now the financilisation kf the economy is becoming a drain due to the debt servicing costs. Michael Hudson writes a great deal about it.

What's unclear is whether shrinking everything to state control actually improves matters.

Possibly concentrating all the power worsens the situation.

Anarchism implies no state control.

Dictatorships, monarchies, oligarchies, and corrupt politicians worsen situations. Putting power back into the hands of the community and it’s workers shouldn’t do that.

Some people have a hole in their brain that makes anarchism invisible to them. The only way they can respond to a critique of authority is to ask "have you considered the benefits of this other authority?"

You say "benefits", I say "inevitability".

Neither Communism and anarchism seem to model well the requirement for a management layer, or its effects.

These negatives are only transparent in capitalism, somehow.

QED

I don't think that's what critics of anarchism are thinking. They just believe that anarchism is a metastable state (with a very short half-life) that inevitably reverts back to either a strong central authority or multiple vying strongmen making & enforcing claims on various regions.

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