‘Mutual aid’ is a radical ideal. Some live its communal spirit | Hacker News Reader

‘Mutual aid’ is a radical ideal. Some live its communal spirit

csmonitor.com

140 pointsTomte210 comments

The conundrum with mutual aid is that it's non-trivial to identify the right size community for a given type and/or level of aid.

For example, a block or 3 of mixed income households can certainly help ameliorate temporary "food insecurity" for some of its members. A slightly larger community can probably offer significant aid when it comes to providing at home care for people with temporary illness or ill health.

But ... covering unemployment or serious illness ... these are examples of things that require a much (much) larger societal unit to be really effective. The same is probably true for providing long term at-home care for the elderly or chronically ill.

That doesn't mean that mutual aid makes no sense - there are plenty of good reasons to operate with different types of organization at different levels. It just means recognizing what the limits of a given societal unit are likely to be, and making sure there are other structures/organizations in place to deal with things that go beyond those limits.

> But ... covering unemployment or serious illness ... these are examples of things that require a much (much) larger societal unit to be really effective.

Really? How many hours of labour per year does it actually take to feed, shelter and provide medical care for a person? I'd be surprised if it was more than 20 % of the hours I work today, meaning I could – barring a system that concentrates the spoils of my labour in the hands of the few – provide this assistance for four people besides myself. As you may know, the unemployed and seriously ill number fewer than half of the population, so I think we'd be fine.

I mean yes, that stuff takes specialisation, and that probably requires a larger community. (If only 0.1 % of the population are medical doctors, then we need 1000 people to have one doctor). But those numbers sort of work out in the world today, so I don't know why they wouldn't in a different world.

The argument of linear transfers, which is "my work could feed five people," seems logically false since there is a very real marginal productivity incentive. If your job pays you 20% of your current salary, do you want to work as hard? Typically, though of course not always, the answer will be no. You'll work less, you'll take on less high-effort-required activities, and so on. This effectively means transfers are subadditive and you couldn't perform such algebra across a society.

EDIT: Note for the numerous driveby downvoters that have failed to engage in discussion, thereby decreasing the quality of conversation. I am not against using wealth transfers where appropriate. My comment simply calls out that "my work is enough to feed five people" does not equate to "my work will feed five people through wealth transfers."

I think you have a fair point, but it is important to note that the drop off in effort and utility depend on whether the worker is directly involved in the support of others.

That is to say, it is very different if I take 20% of my time and directly give it to someone as support versus if I just trust that 20% of my time is taxed and somehow makes it too to one of 350 million people in the country.

Correct. There are decreasing returns to scale on taxation (which also justifies the Laffer curve/supply side/Voodoo economics, but that's another set of philosophical problems). The literature on optimal taxation is large and interesting.

I agree that someone could make an argument about losses and effectiveness, but my point was even simpler than that. When it comes to someone's willingness to work more to help another, I think contact and proximity to the recipient plays a big factor in what people are willing to do.

the laffer curve is an abstraction, a thought experiment with no axis labelling, and no understanding of whether the axes scales are linear or not. it is therefore completely useless when it comes to making policy, because it provides absolutely no information on whether an X% tax will increase or decrease revenues. there are possible (imaginary) scenarios where the actual shape of the curve will result in increasing tax revenues up to above 90% taxation, and others where revenues drop with anything above 0% taxation. nothing about the concept of "decreasing returns to scale on taxation" is quantitative, and it is therefore essentially useless. I mean, sure, you can make the theoretical argument that "surely above some level of taxation, any further increase will result in decreased revenues", but since it is impossible to know what that level is, the argument is pointless.

Indeed. Though there are studies that seek to estimate this in various ways (e.g. "no happier once you have $75k in wealth").

It seems to me that you have confused "decreasing returns" vs "negative returns."

in what sense?

Negative returns could indeed happen in cases of enforcement cost increases, but otherwise I think you're right.

> If your job pays you 20% of your current salary, do you want to work as hard? Typically, though of course not always, the answer will be no.

If my job pays me 20% of my current salary, and gives the other 80% to the CEO, no, I would not work as hard. That's the situation we're in. That's what "quiet quitting" is.

It's bizarre to look at the current incredible pay imbalances in America and assume that a more equitable society would give less incentives for the average person.

Not quite the same analogies and drivers from my earlier comment (your tangent on CEO to worker pay ratio versus the discussion on high taxation rates).

I think you might be missing their point. I'm already paid (less than) 20 % of the value of my output, because someone who is already very rich pockets the rest.

If I could continue working as much as I do and get paid the same and also know that the other 80 % of my output feeds the homeless and seriously ill, that would be amazing. I would very likely work even harder.

That's exactly the point. If you're worried that people won't produce enough because they aren't paid enough, fine. Even if we buy your view of the world where everyone's a sociopath and the only thing that motivates people is money, why are you insisting that the money to motivate people to produce has to be obtained by helping people less? Can't we help people, and pay CEOs less?

Ultimately, you're not arguing that workers need to be paid to be motivated, because I'm not arguing against that. You're arguing that we can't help people because we have to pay CEOs exorbitantly.

> How many hours of labour per year does it actually take to feed, shelter and provide medical care for a person?

To medieval standards of medical care and food, sure. Past that we need training and specialisation, both of which increase the number of people the average person can support.

The standard of care many americans get is already well below medieval standard (none)

> standard of care many americans get is already well below medieval standard (none)

This is nonsense. Emergency care, accessible to all, is practically magic compared to that time. And preventative care largely wasn’t a thing.

As long as you're okay with being bankrupt

> long as you're okay with being bankrupt

One, dead or debilitated versus bankrupt.

Two, no: Medicaid, charity, et cetera. It’s not a good system. But comparing it to pre-medical care is stupid beyond belief.

Charity and medicare don't cover everyone. There are people who make a little too much to get on medicare but are still close to the poverty line. Charity is wildly hit or miss with luck as the biggest factor

> there are people who make a little too much to get on medicare but are still close to the poverty line

Yet you're still going to pretend this is the same as nobody having medicine.

>nobody having medicine.

As far as I can see, you're the only one making this statement

> you're the only one making this statement

What do you think medieval medicine, which pre-dates even the germ theory, means?

I think you misread my original statement. I was arguing that emergency care is actually not accessible to all

> Emergency care, accessible to all, is practically magic compared to that time.

The absolute minimum of emergency care which is actually available to all, by itself, is fairly useless show magic. If you've broken something, they don't have to do anything for you: I discovered this after breaking a bone in a different state from where I was insured. If the person is on the verge of dying, you only have to stabilize the person enough so they're not immediately dying, and you can kick them to the curb.

> And preventative care largely wasn’t a thing.

Preventative care largely isn't a thing for many Americans.

Perhaps comparing to "medieval" standards is perhaps a bit too far, but the US healthcare system is indefensibly bad for many Americans. Third world countries have more available healthcare.

> broken something, they don't have to do anything for you

Usually, yes. I also have a friend who lost range of in a finger, a limitation which became apparent only a year after the fracture, due to a small mis-set. (It had to be surgically re-fractured.)

> the US healthcare system is indefensibly bad for many Americans

100% agree.

No, it's true. The US has the worst and by far the most expensive healthcare outcomes in the developed world. Cuba has a higher life expectancy, lower infant mortality rate than the US, and generally better outcomes.

I would argue preventative care was very much a thing in the Middle Ages. There was an idea that “virtue”/strength would prevent disease. Not unlike todays health obsessed people.

“Virtue” literally means “manliness”. There’s a quote about how “a warriors strength in battle has come to mean a woman’s abstinence in bed” - but I don’t know the source.

We're not discussing a different world, we're discussing this one. Your doctor example is a good one. If you actually need 1000 people to have 1 doctor, and 1 doctor can treat and care for 999 people, then you need a community of around 1000 people to have "mutual aid" function for medical care (or very good luck in happening to have a doctor in a smaller community).

This means that mutal aid care based in units of city blocks is not likely to work, but basing it in units of neighborhoods or larger probably will.

Just to put your numbers to reality: I just roughly estimated the density of doctors in my childhood in 70s Germany: around 1:5000 to 1:10000. And the density of psychologists/psychatrists was around 1:100000.

IMHO, that was and is enough.

> How many hours of labour per year does it actually take to feed, shelter and provide medical care for a person?

If said person has Parkinsons, dementia, etc. the medical care/assistance alone is likely to be measured in hours per day. Easily approaching most of one's waking hours for bad cases.

As boomers enter senescence the strain on the healthcare system will be immense, I predict. Whole lot of asses to wipe.

If only we had things like mutual savings banks, or cooperative insurances, or...

i never mentioned savings banks as an example requiring large scale. and indeed, they appear to need the "more than a block or 2, less than a city" scale.

health insurance is a different story, at least in the era of modern health care where particular treatments can cost tens or hundreds of thousands of currency units. it is hard to make the insurance pool concept work without enough people (and enough health-diversity) in the pool. In my home state (new mexico) this is a problem given a state-wide population of only 2M people and multiple insurance possibilities. i don't know what the limit is, but i'd guess that it's at least several hundred thousand and possible a few million.

Public health insurance seems to work fine for Iceland—a country of less than 400,000. I suspect dozens of thousands should be plenty given a healthy and diverse economy and plenty of preventative care.

Good data point - thanks.

It also works in Liechtenstein, which is approx. 39000 folks.

Now that does seem surprising. The insurance system is entirely internal to Liechtenstein ?

I'm not an expert on their affairs but from what I understand, largely yes. There may be some procedures that require travel to a larger Swiss hospital.

It is the same in Iceland (although you’d more often travel to a Swedish hospital), but it is my understanding that it is still (mostly) covered by the national insurance.

Hello from Switzerland: the biggest health insurer is about 2 million people, the 10th big is 200.000 and still works fine. Yes they're private but the strong regulations make them work very much the same - and work they do. I'm not sure why some US people keep arguing that stuff cannot work because it doesn't work in the States, when all evidence points to the contrary.

> The conundrum with mutual aid is that it's non-trivial to identify the right size community for a given type and/or level of aid.

I don't think this is actually a hard problem at all. The algorithm is quite simple:

1. Start with the individual as the smallest community (a community of one). 2. Does the current level of community have the resources to deal with the problem? If so, problem solved, exit. 3. If not, go to the next larger level of community. 4. Return to 2.

The problem is that greedy people refuse to provide aid because they don't think they'll need aid. In fact, greedy people insist on acquiring all the resources which could be used to provide aid to others.

Zuckerberg or Musk could end homelessness in the US easily and still be in the top 10 richest people in the world.

> Does the current level of community have the resources to deal with the problem?

and you propose to establish this how, precisely?

ps. I'm skeptical about the "end homelessness" claim. I agree that (a) the current superrich should be forced to give up some of their wealth (b) that most of it should be diverted towards the poor (c) it would help many of them substantially. However, problems like poverty (and its sidekick, homelessness) are systemic, and recurrent. The US has spent several trillion since the 1960s on poverty, and while it caused a substantial reduction in levels of poverty (especially among the elderly), poverty remains with us as a problem. So by all means take from the rich and give to the poor, but don't expect that to "end" poverty.

> and you propose to establish this how, precisely?

Depends on the community. Doesn't mean it's difficult.

> The US has spent several trillion since the 1960s on poverty, and while it caused a substantial reduction in levels of poverty (especially among the elderly), poverty remains with us as a problem.

The US has spent several trillion on "end poverty" theater. US anti-poverty programs are intentionally designed to exclude as many people as possible. Much of the money spent, is spent on ensuring that people who conservatives have decided don't deserve aid, don't get aid, with reams of paperwork to validate that those in need are deserving. These barriers are severe enough to prevent many people from even being able to apply, and instead of reducing the barriers, the solution has been to pay case workers to leap some of the barriers for those in need--not only does this not work, it also is expensive.

The solution to homelessness is homes. Not shelters where you have no privacy or ownership of the space where you can keep pets or possessions. Homes. This is not complicated. Poverty, mental illness, bigotry, unemployment, etc., are all related problems, but they don't have to be solved to solve homelessness.

Look at Zuckerberg and Musk's net worths, then look at the number of homeless, then look at the cost of land and building a modest house, and do some napkin math. Yes, I'm aware a sudden demand for housing would drive up the cost of land and building houses: double it and the numbers still work. Yes, there are other potential issues, but none of them are unsolvable.

We need to stop pretending this is more complicated than it is.

"Zuckerberg or Musk could end homelessness in the US easily and still be in the top 10 richest people in the world."

[citation needed] Major cities spend 100s of millions per year each on homelessness (LA is $500m-1B iirc, depending on how you attribute), for combined spending of a few B per year, and they cannot even make a dent. As much as I would be receptive to an argument that this is because most public employees are malicious, incompetent grifters, (1) I doubt Musk/etc. could do even an order of magnitude better, especially in the real world, with real-world employees and regulations, (2) even if Musk himself "could" somehow be much more efficient, mutual assistance schemes that would expropriate and use his wealthwould attract, and would be taken over by, the same kinds of structures - public sector unions, etc., as they were pretty much everywhere anything like this has been attempted. With predictable results.

> Major cities spend 100s of millions per year each on homelessness (LA is $500m-1B iirc, depending on how you attribute), for combined spending of a few B per year, and they cannot even make a dent.

The solution to homelessness is homes. If you aren't spending money giving homeless people homes--not shelters, homes--you're not spending anything on homelessness. You're spending money on compassion theater to make people feel better.

Which cities are spending money on giving homeless people homes? There was a Dutch program at one point, but as far as I can tell there hasn't been a single government program that did this in the US.

Note that programs which require extensive paperwork to validate that you need assistance, are effectively unavailable to most homeless people, as mental illness makes it difficult to go through extensive application processes. This is by design, so that people can point at spending on "assistance" and say it doesn't work, as you are doing. I'm not saying that's your motivation, but it's certainly the origination of the ideas you're promoting.

> As much as I would be receptive to an argument that this is because most public employees are malicious, incompetent grifters,

That's not what I said at all. On the contrary, I think that most public employees are doing the best they can to do as much good as they can within a system that isn't designed to fix homelessness.

> (1) I doubt Musk/etc. could do even an order of magnitude better, especially in the real world, with real-world employees and regulations, (2) even if Musk himself "could" somehow be much more efficient, mutual assistance schemes that would expropriate and use his wealthwould attract, and would be taken over by, the same kinds of structures - public sector unions, etc., as they were pretty much everywhere anything like this has been attempted.

Again, actual attempts to address homelessness have never been attempted on any scale (in the US), because real estate owners, NIMBYs, and people who oppose any public assistance have blocked it at every turn.

>require a much (much) larger societal unit to be really effective.

Larger, yes, and also I might add smarter. When groups that are not so smart get larger they're prone to politics and/or corruption and/or infighting. Nation states are a classic example.

good to see the ideas of kropotkin, an anarchist, being presented in a positive light. there were a number of anarchist ideas being attempted to be put into practice in the last century - for example, the wobblies. not so much now.

The thing is Kropotkin's actual book presented it as a scientific principle of evolution, which is nonsense. Yes, there are biological examples of cooperation (such as eusocial insects like bees and ants), but this only works because of the unusual reproductive strategy they use where all the members of a hive are siblings. That doesn't mean that humans can't choose to cooperate, but this choice has nothing to do with biology or evolution.

Arguably all multicellular life on earth is an example of biological cooperation.

If you are looking at the cells of that multicellular life. But if you look between multicellular organisms it's not so cut and dry. The lion and its prey are in cooperation only in some abstract sense of keeping their shared ecosystem alive, but are very much antagonistic in practice.

> The lion and its prey are in cooperation only...

Lions cooperate with other lions, humans cooperate with dogs, symbiotic organisms are all over the planet.

Humans are apex cooperators. Our civilization, from planes to schools, from the banana that you eat this morning to the microchips of your computers, all comes from a very complex cooperation between humans. Remove the trust to cooperate and we go back to live in caverns. Nobody cooperates better than humans, ants or bees cooperation is just on basic functions, we are way better than that.

The mammalian genes survive regardless. The gene for having a neocortex survives in both lions and antelope. And that survival may be at the expense of other more distant species.

but between cells that have the same genome.

Or biological totalitarianism.

Is easy for your privileged brain and nerve cells to claim such high-minded ideals.

Meanwhile, your skin cells are treated as disposable and have a medium lifespan of 14 days

that must mean there's a class of cells that keep skin cells in their station. which cells are those?

> which cells are those?

Macrophages, though your immune system broadly [1]. (Every cell has a variety of programmed death processes built in, too.)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apoptosis

When cells try to "get above their station," it's called cancer, and there are classes of cells and other mechanisms in the body constantly fighting against it.

why'd you put "get above their station" in quotes? is it because the whole metaphor is kind of stupid?

I was merely setting the metaphor apart from the rest. I'm not sure if the metaphor is stupid or not.

Even singled celled life is cooperation between the many genes using those cells to reproduce.

At that level personification of biology breaks down completely. Genes are not cooperating. Genes are pieces of a self-replicating pattern. Those patterns get shuffled and mixed a lot, but they also just get copied over and over even more. Some patterns are easier/faster to copy than others, and some are uncopyable. Over time, some patterns remain stable while others disappear, but that's not a result of work and cooperation - it's just a purely statistical phenomenon.

Humans are biologically non-social?

I'm sure his science is bunk. But I'll note that no less a person than E O Wilson argues that humans are eusocial: https://bigthink.com/culture-religion/human-eusociality/

That implies that there is a minimum set of relatedness that is required for alturism to improve survival. That is just not true. And it is not just about direct relatedness but shared genes.

In more traditional societies, the family is the primary social structure (and support structure). It's only in "modern" society that we let go of that idea and handed the responsibility over to government. And when said government fails, family is the first thing people fall back on. So I wouldn't be too sure that humans are biologically solitary animals.

Humanity spent 200,000 years living communally in social abundance. This is settled science in anthropology and biology [1][2][3]

Social community is an essential requirement for human life and the loss of community has now been used as proof of some kind of lamarckian anti-social evolution which has zero evidence.

[1] Chan, E.K.F., et al. human origins in a southern African palaeo-wetland and first migrations. Nature 575,185–189 (2019)

[2] Graeber, David, Wingrow, David (2021), The Dawn of Everything. (126)

[3] Sahlins, Marshall (2009). Hunter-gatherers: insights from a golden affluent age. Pacific Ecologist. 18: 3–8

The everyone is out for themselves, greed is king, insurance instead of family, sue thy neighbor is not backed by evidence? who knew?

That period was also incredibly violent, as the unit of competition was the family, not the individual. Economies of scale were similarly inaccessible, which is why agrarian societies outcompeted their hunter-gathered kin. We can absolutely model our post-industrial society on that pre-historic ideal, but that also requires acknowledging its brutality and shortcomings.

Graeber’s last book, The Dawn of Everything, does a great job of dispelling a lot of these “brutal and short” notions as mostly ideological myths.

This is the same guy who believed Apple was founded in the 1980s by Republican ex-IBMers using laptops, though.

> Graeber’s last book, The Dawn of Everything, does a great job of dispelling a lot of these “brutal and short” notions as mostly ideological myths

Anyone casting this as settled science immediately attracts scrutiny. Our data from the epoch are spotty. But there is evidence it was very violent on a per-capita basis [1].

[1] https://stevenpinker.com/reviews-better-angels-our-nature

I agree that calling this "settled science" is problematic, but a large point of the book in question is to introduce new evidence from the epoch in question that directly challenges some of the common narratives, especially Pinker's.

It's a thought provoking book worth reading.

> new evidence from the epoch in question that directly challenges some of the common narratives, especially Pinker's

“Challenges” and “theory” may be better terms than “dispels” and “ideological myths,” then.

I've noticed more and more often that many commenters on HN simply don't read the parent comment.

Not sure if directed at my or the preceding comment, but I’d note that the top-level comment states “social abundance” in pre-historic times is “settled anthropology and biology.”

It's considered rude when someone attempts to speak for the entire reader-base on HN.

This is the second identical reply you made to one of my comments, so this seems a lot like low effort trolling instead of an honest mistake.

The other one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34785689

It's odd that someone with a 2013 account and a decent posting history would choose to self-destruct like this. So I'm inclined to believe the account got hacked?

Graeber directly addresses this in the book and in my opinion completely nullifies Pinker's argument

Some years ago, I read a scientific article that compared the number of murders per capita in the stone age to nowadays. The authors came to the same conclusion: stone ages where way more violent than the present.

But I then calculated/estimated based on the numbers in the article and the assumption of hunter-gatherer groups of 50-100 people, that experiencing a murder in your group in that time was a once-in-the-lifetime chance.

I am in my mid-fifties, lived most of my life in a not so poor region in Germany, in a small village, and I know (knew) at least 2 person who got murdered, and a good handful who commited suicide. And I know personally at least 3 person who committed murder.

My mother was child in WWII, my father even faught in a 'hot-spot' as an 18 year old, I have heard really many first-hand stories about killing.

Furthermore, television is pretending a ridiculous violent world, and I think this does have a really negative influence on peoples mind.

Are raw numbers to be valued more than the well-feeling of the people?

If a fairy would ask me to choose when to live, I would not hesitate a split-second and choose the pre-neolithic.

If social community/communal existence is an essential requirement, then how do you explain the past several thousand years, where civilization has come to dominate, and the human population has grown to 8 billion? Civilization didn't just develop in the middle east, it cropped up separately in several different regions, including the Americas.

Competition in its recognizably modern form only recently became the foundational organizational system for civilization, and civilization “won” because (in part) a) it generally has no problem deploying incredible levels of violence and coercion, against people and the environment, and b) it promotes continuous population increase, even beyond what may be sustainable.

There’s about a million places to source this, but I might start with something like James C. Scott.

Competition for resources and violence is seen in primates and many mammals. Smaller social groups does not necessarily remove this element.

The main difference with humans is that we are capable of organizing and coordinating larger social structures.

Large Organizations of individuals require other large organizations to defend against

Tribal groups did also compete, and our hominid cousins, several of who were around the same time as modern humans, went extinct.

I'm excited you asked as I have a theory that is getting real traction that answers precisely that:

https://kemendo.com/Myth.pdf

How do you address desirable goods that are really scarce?

Such as downtown penthouses, beachfront property, spectrum licenses, etc...

Since there will always be some fraction of the population who will desire to gamble the shirt on their backs for a chance at a larger prize.

You are implicitly asking "Who decides how much is enough"

As I say in the paper "There exists no regularized measure of relative deprivation that can be agreed on across all cultures and all time periods."

I have no solution to the problem of relative consumption, I am simply suggesting that it is fundamentally destructive in the current structure.

The only thing I can think of is to create systems that do not incentivize the risk taking behavior as you describe (and I was/am probably the most extreme version of what you describe by the way).

My personal answer is to minimize my consumption as much as possible while still being able to carry out my personal values until I die. I have no advice for anyone else as I don't know what their circumstances are.

I can't see how this desire is 'fundamentally destructive in the current structure'.

Beaches, frequency bandwidths, etc., will exist regardless of whatever form human organizational structure takes.

Any workable system will have to address how they will be allocated, since they can't be shared 8 billion ways.

In the paper it is laid out carefully. Said simply: Every watt of energy that goes to creating bullets is a watt not being used on creating and distributing necessary goods to those in the most need. That is how it is fundamentally destructive - The pie is fixed to the productive capacity of the planet. Every beanie baby created crowds out healthcare in rural missouri.

The workable system is one where we memetically return to sharing economies via example and not coercive force. I think it's going to take centuries of non-violent mutual aid and cooperative organizations that do not follow into the trap of strict excludability, for us to get back to peace and health. These organizations and societies exist at small scales and often temporally at large scale (Think Sept 12th etc...), we just need more people to do it all the time everywhere. That's actually kinda all we need to do.

Unfortunately we have 12000 years of trauma we're all reacting to so it's layers upon layers of structural and emotional fear.

Huh?

None of that addresses how to allocate actually scarce things.

Again, I don't give a solution because that is not within the scope of the paper.

Can you come up with a solution?

> I don't give a solution because that is not within the scope of the paper.

Are we reading the same paper titled "The Myth of scarcity and its threats to human society" by Andrew Kemendo?

There are five 'Propositions' enumerated that concern the scarcity, or alleged non-scarcity, of resources. And as we've discussed some resources, desired by many, truly are profoundly scarce.

Those things aren't scarce it's a complete fabrication - like Diamonds. It's artificial scarcity

People desire non-mandatory goods (you don't need them to live in health until old age) that are artificially scarce (could be produced at a higher rate than they are but are not because producers require a capital return) because they have more resources than they need.

Stray Kids "Official lightsticks" are "scarce." [1] Nobody on the planet needs an official stray kids lightstick for health, safety, reproductive success etc... The creation of the lightstick by a marketing manager induces a fear of being left out (anxiety) of being part of the cool kids (read: rich kids) in order to make more money for the band and the supporting businesses of the band.

The creation, marketing, production and purchasing of the stray kids lightstick - which will eventually wind up in a landfill - is a net drain on the overall productive capacity of Humanity.

Labor and capital that is not being used to provide someone else in REAL deprivation actual necessity goods - because the imbalance is real

You seem to miss the key point: As a species, we have enough of everything we need to survive and thrive, but too many of the wrong people have too much of the resources.

I'm just here to tell you it's fucked, someone else can figure out how to distribute it all without violence.

Read the paper again

[1]https://www.subkshop.com/products/stray-kids-official-light-...

What does this have to do with the allocation of beachfront property and the electromagnetic spectrum?

You need to allocate them somehow, it's not credible to suggest people won't compete for desirable goods.

They exist regardless of the specific form of human society, or indeed even if there isn't a society at all.

Whether or not this is the case (although a handful of papers and one of Graeber's pop-sci books hardly makes it "settled"), all this deals with time periods far too recent for evolutionary biology to play a role in human behavior. Cultural "evolution" has nothing to do with actual evolution.

> Cultural "evolution" has nothing to do with actual evolution.

I can't imagine this could be strictly true. It's not as if human's social capacity turned on one day at full capacity, and the social hardware was complete.

I do think it's fair to say that society evolves at a different pace given the capabilities of our current social software, but all such change is still underpinned by biological evolution before it.

I sometimes wonder how far we can go as a species before we start malfunctioning widely, e.g. recent study [0] about schizophrenia that finds it non-existent in hunter/gatherer societies, and city living potentially playing a factor for some individuals.

- [0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014976342...

Nor am I suggesting as such

This is totally wrong - people are much different in 2023 compared to earlier in our lifetimes, even people from 1990 would seem completely different to us now. Cultural evolution is a type of evolution, it's not a "fake" version or something like that.

The book was a direct answer to social darwinism (which has very much been proven to be bunk, but many people still argue like this almost a 100 years later), not to contradict darwinism.

I'm not sure what exactly you call bunk, Kropotkins whole point was that for many species communal support and altruistic behavior is an integral part of their existence. That does not only apply to hive societies. There are for example many bird species where young (often males) help with raising children even they are not their own. Similarly you can find many mammals who live in larger communities and where individulas exhibit "altruistic" behavior because it is to the advantage of the survival of the community.

Its pretty rich to dismiss Kropotkins theories as bunk without evidence btw. He is actually recognised in biology for his contributions: see [1]. I mean Stephen Jay Gould one of the most eminent evolutionary biologists wrote an essay about him tilled Kropotkins was no crackpot [2]

[1] https://www.rsb.org.uk/biologist-features/who-was-peter-krop...

[2] https://digitallibrary.amnh.org/handle/2246/6494?show=full

Gould is a controversial figure. He was a popularizer who mixed politics and science to a degree that made some uncomfortable.

>because of the unusual reproductive strategy they use where all the members of a hive are siblings

Specifically, eusocial insects are haplodiploidic, where workers are more related to each other (sharing 75% of their genes) than they would be to their own children, which reduces the genetic incentive to defect from the cooperative structure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy

This sounds outrageously strange, but something similar can happen in humans: identical twins are also more related to each other than to their children.

The problem is that the Bolsheviks killed it all off and replaced it with an authoritarian hellscape. When left-wingers say "true communism has never been tried", which sounds and is outrageously stupid, this is what they mean.

Any kind of libertarian[0] ideal is the sort of thing you don't implement with an immediate revolution, but frustratingly slow long-term change. You don't smash the state pinata and all the mutual aid candy pours out. You build mutual aid societies and cooperatives from the bottom up and make the state and capitalism obsolete. But that kind of work is both boring and doesn't feel radical - you're not burning any cop cars or blowing shit up until the very end when you're actually a threat.

The Free Software movement is arguably an example of this; since Stallman is a devout left-libertarian. Hell, it's why Gates and Ballmer called it[1] "communism".

[0] I specifically refer to left-libertarian ideas, though Louis Rossman has said the same thing about right-libertarian ideas too.

[1] Ok, they were referring to "open source". But that's just the "apolitical" version of the Free Software manifesto. The politics of Free Software are inherent in the licensing structure, not just the page-long manifesto Stallman put in the GPL.

> When left-wingers say "true communism has never been tried", which sounds and is outrageously stupid, this is what they mean.

i can't say what other people mean, especially when it comes to me secondhand like this, but what left-wingers should mean to say, (and probably do say, but it got garbled in your head), is that a communist society has never existed. a communist society is a speculated state of social development that has never existed. refer to:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_society

you could make the same argument that democracy has never existed, and any government calling itself a democracy really means--if you're using the most generous interpretation--they are self-consciously structured in a way that is more democratic than some earlier government. and you'd be right about that, btw.

You are not understanding the context of this very common "true communism has never been tried" statement.

The context is that says "Communism is bad. Look at every single example of all of these people who call themselves communists. Their societies suck!"

And then, in order to divert from this valid criticism, someone will say "true communism has never been tried", and they will do this for every single possible example, of criticism of actual real life attempts at communism.

So, the context is that these statements are used to ignore criticism of communists.

This is why such a statement is stupid. It is pretty silly to say that nobody can criticize communism, because apparently every example that people use of communism failing or having problems, doesn't count.

I think it’s a pointless argument all around because there is too much bias in both defining a state as failed and agreeing on that’s state’s political orientation.

I could argue that there are far more examples of failed capitalist states, but it would just devolve into endless debates of those definitions above based on differences in ideology. Even if my goal is to address the many misconceptions of “communist” states, it’s just not a useful way to go about it.

Just to slide a point in here, nearly every leftist of every tendency has a long list of criticisms of countries who have declared themselves communist. The points just tend to be more nuanced than the cartoonishly evil story we are taught in the US.

> I could argue that there are far more examples of failed capitalist states

You might be able to yes. But the whole point is that it is disingenuous to dismiss literally all criticism, of any attempts at either capitalism or communism, by just saying "Well thats not real X!"

Eventually, yes, you have to accept criticism of your ideology, by looking at the actual real life attempted examples of that ideology.

I am not saying that literally every single bad thing, done by a group that calls themself communist is valid criticism of communism.

But some actual examples of attempted communism can be used as criticism of communism.

So no, you cannot just ignore literally every single example of attempted communism. Yes, eventually we have to look at those examples. Some of them, at least.

> it’s just not a useful way to go about it.

Of course it is a useful way to look at problems with a system. A good way to find problems with a system, is to look at actual attempts to enact that system.

It does not answer every single possible benefit or criticism of a system. But yes, it is useful to look at the actual examples of a system. Thats called empirical evidence.

> But yes, it is useful to look at the actual examples of a system. Thats called empirical evidence.

yeah, but the studies have all been tampered with. so they don't tell you what you might want to know, which is the merits of communism. what it tells you is how powerful the established ruling class is, in the same way that failed slave rebellions don't tell you much about the merit of the rebelling slaves, they show the strength of the slave owners.

> what it tells you is how powerful the established ruling class is

This is a cope unfalsifiable argument and is exactly what I am criticizing.

No matter what evidence someone shows, the defense is to ignore it and say it is fake.

You are engaging in exactly the problematic behavior that I was attacking, because literally no matter what evidence someone shows you, you can just ignore it.

It is an invincible, unfalsifiable defense that allows someone to believe literally almost anything, because any counter evidence can just be ignored because of excuses like what you bought up.

Unfalsifiable beliefs, like yours, are, almost by definition, impossible to refute and bad faith almost by definition.

i think the problem you really have is that counterfactual conditionals are tautologies. all i've said is that the cold war did in fact happen, and it had an effect on every communist state. maybe if there was no cold war (a counterfactual), things would've been different. it's unfalsifiable like every counterfactual because you can't change history. big deal, everyone knows that and they give counterfactuals their appropriate weight.

but what's the alternative? pretend the cold war didn't happen? it's also counterfactual reasoning to critique the communist countries without acknowledging that war was being waged against them.

but, the cold war did happen. that's just a fact.

> but what's the alternative?

The alternative is not to dismiss literally every piece of evidence, from the real world, that gets shown to you.

i didn't.

> So, the context is that these statements are used to ignore criticism of communists.

look back, that's not the context in _this conversation_.

I kinda make this argument and think every time than the OG democracy's in ancient greece had also slaves on it's society. (which couldn't vote unless freed and given citizenship after serving their masters well)

> You build mutual aid societies and cooperatives from the bottom up and make the state and capitalism obsolete.

That's respectable if it can work, and we end up in a Star Trek-like future, maybe aided with AIs/robotics creating a post-scarcity society. Although some things, like location or rare artifacts, will always be scarce.

>The problem is that the Bolsheviks killed it all off and replaced it with an authoritarian hellscape.

I'd rather live in the Soviet Union than in some mutualist neighbourhood association because the former was positively productive in comparison. There's a good essay called "The Tyranny of Structurelessness"[1], showcasing that getting rid of formal hierarchies doesn't get rid of power structures, it just renders them informal, you're essentially back to the state of nature. There's no position on earth that attracts worse people than "neighbourhood captain" or the local school or housing committee.

Nobody wants to live in a community where you have to vote ten times per week if you want to replace a broken door lock. And that's not a sarcastic hypothetical, that is a real thing I experienced when I lived in a cooperatively owned housing complex in Hamburg as a student.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne...

Well said, voting 10 times a week does sound like a drag, but surely it's better than decades in the gulag or a bullet in the back of the head.

You'd get both if your HOA took over your country, staffed the senate with the people who regularly attend the HOA meetings, and put courts in the hands of your local school boards.

We can talk a lot about how the hierarchies should be managed, but I think it's pretty clear that hierarchies themselves are a fundamental, natural part of human societies, and you can't just do away with them.

The way I see it, our intuitive social skills work best when living in groups under roughly the Dunbar's number[0]. At that level, everyone knows everyone else personally, so you don't need laws and power structures: everyone keeps everyone else in check, people cooperate and self-organize naturally. When a group grows above that, and two random members are unlikely to know each other well, those natural, automatic methods stop working, and the group risks disintegration.

The group can always split into two at this point, and this is what often happens in practice, but then two independent groups competing over shared resources will eventually start fighting[1]. The alternative is to scale up, and the tried and true method humans historically keep arriving at is hierarchies. A ruling group can coordinate multiple independent Dunbar-strong subgroups, but the coordination mechanisms need to become explicit now: hence laws, policing, monopoly on violence. This trick allows a society to scale up some two orders of magnitude, but then the ruling group hits a capacity limit. The solution is... to add another level to hierarchy. This buys you another two orders of magnitude. Repeat as needed.

I don't know of any studies to link here that would back this reasoning up - but it does track per my understanding of group dynamics, economics, and of course it seems to map well to modern and historical administrative divisions, when looking at population numbers.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

[1] - I can imagine this being the original reason people started forming larger groups: in a world full of ~100-person strong competing tribes, scaling your tribe up to 200 or 500 people makes you invulnerable against all the other 100-people tribes (at least individually).

I completely agree that "hierarchies themselves are a fundamental, natural part of human societies, and you can't just do away with them."

You're not wrong. It's sort of what I was alluding to with the whole "you can't just smash the state" comment. Kudos for providing a citation for an idea that's been bouncing around my head for a long while now, hopefully I'll remember the name this time.

Certain things should not actually be under democratic control. Changing out the door lock, for example, has absolutely no reason to be a thing that should require a vote, because it only affects you. The whole concept of an HOA is a parody of the democratic form, because it involves forcing people to agree on things where agreement is not actually necessary. This is not liberty, it is tyranny.

"Helping each other" is a radical idea ... what a strange world we live in.

Interesting podcast episode from Freakonomics talking about the loneliness epidemic[1] and a related episode from Freakonimics MD[2] both mentioning the 1995 Chicago heat wave and how it impacted different neighborhoods differently. Living in a neighborhood with a communal spirit increases your chances of survival.

But here's the kicker: It seems that certain neighborhoods are specifically targeted by policies to disrupt said communal spirit. Primarily through zoning regulations and methodical removal of "3rd places".

[1] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-there-really-a-lonelines...

[2] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-will-we-handle-the-heat...

Neither of your links (nor the source article) references zoning or 3rd/third places, let alone "methodical removal". Do you have a source for that?

Pretty sure I heard it mentioned in the podcast episodes, perhaps between the lines. Freakonomics transcripts aren’t word-for-word from what I’ve noticed.

I could also be mis-remembering or mixing in yet a 3rd episode from the same hosts.

But here is a source for how freeways were designed to primarily go through black neighborhoods (and thus disrupt them) -> https://www.history.com/news/interstate-highway-system-infra...

> Neither of your links (nor the source article) references zoning or 3rd/third places, let alone "methodical removal". Do you have a source for that?

His links support the paragraph they're referenced in. Why would you assume they support a different paragraph where me makes a tangential point?

Klinenberg's book "Palaces for the People" is very worth a (quick) read. Talks about the importance of physical, "social infrastructure" (similar to the idea of "third places") in cities that enable people to weave communities ties that then lead them to be resilient in times of stress.

What really kills communal spirit is low rate of home ownership. I can walk down my street and tell who rents vs who owns based on the front yards. People who own actually invest into making it nice, and will be out front gardening or wave when you walk by. Why would you do any of that when you're going to be gone in a year or two?

It makes more sense that people riot and burn their own communities when you realize they are just renting everything they have.

I think what destroys communal spirit is a sense of futility, a sense that good deeds get discouraged or outright punished.

Whether that's just local to some environments, I don't know.

Many countries have much higher rates of renters and still more communal spirit, so I don't think you can just attribute it to renting. One thing that those places typically have is protection for renters so they have an actual long term perspective. In contrast to other places where your landlord can throw you out or raise rent with little notice. Moreover in many places renters can't even make improvements to their house, I mean in Australia you are not even allowed to put a nail in the wall when renting.

Two things worth noting about the black panther free breakfast for children thing mentioned in passing in the article:

1. It was forcibly shut down by the federal government as a means to undermine the black panther's most visible community support. Both through subterfuge and direct raids.

2. The federal government then later realized that free breakfast for poor kids was a good thing, and re-implemented it

> 2. The federal government then later realized that free breakfast for poor kids was a good thing, and re-implemented it

I have a more cynical worldview. they always knew that free breakfast was (indeed, is) a good thing, but it was more important for them back then to fuck over this rebellious group than feed some poor ol' kids.

Those poor malnourished children? a 'cost of policy' or some other rationalized argument with which to ignore the harsh truth, that we often prefer to keep our own power safe, than feed some other's 'poor' children.

The federal government didn't like that a self declared insurrectionist group was spending a lot of time with young kids.

Or put another way, would you support "OathKeepers Breakfast for Kids"?

I have a different and possibly more cynical (or not?) take.

The government decision-makers actually had no opinion at all about whether free breakfast was a "good thing", and didn't particularly care about the welfare of poor Black children at all. They implemented government free breakfast only to undermine the possibility of the Black Panthers or a similar group getting support for implementing it themselves.

The Panthers effectively forced the government to implement it, by showing them up, they never would have done it at all if the Panthers hadn't done it first, and did it only to take away the possibility of a group like the Panthers getting credit for doing it and using it to build support and power. Had nothing to do with the kids or whether it was a "good thing" at all.

Here's an alternate but still cynical take: Business / The Govt needs somewhat educated people in the modern economy and its easier to study when you had some breakfast.

"The goverment" is composed of many different people. I assure you that some people cares a lot about what is better for children, and fight to get this kind of policies implemented. Others vote in favor just because it looks good on them. Some does not care and may vote against just because they can profit from it.

So any cynical view will be true for a few politicians, but never for all.

My personal meta-cynical view is that politics is all about relationships: nobody gets anything done using their own power alone, and nobody has enough broad and direct influence to even try. Getting anything done requires aligning a lot of people, each holding either a direct ability to implement a part of the solution, or the connection and ability to influence someone that does. This includes not just outward-facing projects and decisions, but also politicians' own careers - whether you get in, and where you end up, is more to your colleagues than it is to you.

As a result, the whole system strongly selects for people best able to navigate that complex web of relationship. Which means it selects against people with goals they're not willing to compromise on.

This is why, I think, in modern (democratic) countries you can't really achieve anything specific by becoming a politician. If you come in with a concrete and inflexible goal (like, to reuse the example, making the government fund free food for children), you'll likely just wash out or get sidelined by your own colleagues: if you're not willing to help with whatever others need from you, even when it means compromising your principles or going against your initial goals, then nobody else will be willing to help you with your schemes. The rules of thumb thus are:

- If you see someone going into politics to achieve a specific goal, you can assume they'll fail and the goal will not be achieved;

- If you want the politicians to do something, you need to go about it indirectly, exploiting the incentives of the entire system - for example, as alleged upthread with the food for children, by setting things up so the government will lose face / influential politicians will lose public support if they don't implement the very thing you want them to.

- Everything that's actually being achieved is achieved in a roundabout way, because the limiting factor isn't any politician's ethics, understanding, or budget - the limiting factor is the ability to align enough politicians and administrative workers to make something happen.

> My personal meta-cynical view is that politics is all about relationships: nobody gets anything done using their own power alone, and nobody has enough broad and direct influence to even try.

That is not cynical, that is the great power of democracy. No one can change rules by themselves but agreements are needed. When one person can make big changes alone then it usually a form of dictatorship and things do not go so well.

> you need to go about it indirectly, exploiting the incentives of the entire system

Politics are complicated, I also believe that. But many politicians go thru all that pain to achieve good things, not just to profit personally.

> That is not cynical, that is the great power of democracy. No one can change rules by themselves but agreements are needed.

I guess the cynical bit is my belief that the flip side of this "great power" is that a democracy quickly becomes structurally incapable of doing anything significant, good or bad, to meaningfully improve things or to solve a problem ahead of time, before it turns into a crisis.

> When one person can make big changes alone then it usually a form of dictatorship and things do not go so well.

That's true, unfortunately. If it wasn't the case, democracy would not look appealing at all.

> But many politicians go thru all that pain to achieve good things, not just to profit personally.

The cynical part of my view is that no politician can "go thru all that pain to achieve" arbitrary things, good or bad. They can only directly achieve things that are already neutral or beneficial to most of their colleagues. For all the other things they'd want to achieve, a direct attempt to push the issue through will only get them sidelined or forced out, and indirect attempts (through the long process of compromising and trying to gather allies) will just wear them down and turn them into just another self-interested politician.

Nothing scares those in power quite like poor people organizing. If poor whites in the U.S. could be made to realize that their oppressor is the same as for poor blacks, Hispanics, and other ethnic groups then real progress could be made.

You say this as if you assume poor whites are racist by default and the poor of the other races are "enlightened" by default.

No. I say this because media and those in power have perfected the ability to portray black organizing in a menacing way. And portraying programs that help poor people in racial rather than class terms. So a farmer getting government subsidies or a poor white person getting welfare can be pissed off at “welfare queens” because the latter are associated with being lazy blacks and the former with being down on their luck.

Another thing that the media has perfected is jumping to conclusions about the inner workings of minds like “blacks” and “the white working class”. It was for example simply assumed that Trump was solely boosted by “poor whites”, when in fact it seemed that more affluent, petite bourgoisie whites played a large role in boosting him.

But to the media? Nah, don’t have to look too closely at the seams: just assume that it is the powerful trailer park whites who caused Trump. And then upper-middle class [white] liberals—irony of all ironies—lament the class-unconsciousness of poor whites, simply because the NYT told them that that is how they operate. Oh, but if those materially poor whites would only see some reason; then we could all band together against the 1%.

Don’t count on the upper-middle class to help unify anything or anyone, though. Not post-Occupy Wall Street.

I’m under no illusion that upper middle class want to actually effect change. Upper middle class whites are content to put BLM signs in their yards so long as “they” don’t move into their neighborhoods.

I think though that one should not discount racial politics and media bias as a major contributing factor to why so many poor whites vote against their economic interests. I think LBJ had it right with his quote:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-convince-the-lowest-wh...

I like how Faulkner put it: In the South they love the man and hate the race and in the North they love the race and hate the man. Desegregation lead to closed pool politics and helped with the decline of union membership. There is definitely an aspect of spite within white politics. To wit: let’s all suffer to keep an undeserving minority from getting something.

Nothing ironic about everyone pointing the finger at each other for not “getting” their common interest. Nothing at all.

Keep getting in touch with the soul of the working man through LBJ.

Nothing quite like sarcasm whilst making a sweeping, incorrect generalization about what I wrote. LBJ, like all people, had faults but his statements should be assessed on their merits and not discounted simply because of his flaws.

Free meals for kids is a good thing and very important to a child's ability to learn at school and a family's ability to fight poverty. Take notice which elected officials try to end these programs and hold them accountable.

This isn't true at all. The federal government's School Breakfast Program started 3 years before the Black Panther's program. During it's first year, it was already serving many times the number of children than the Panther's program served at its peak (despite being a pilot program at the time)[1]. It was part of the much larger Child Nutrition Act, which itself built on the even earlier National School Lunch Program and Special Milk Program.

[1] https://www.fns.usda.gov/sbp/program-history [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_Breakfast_Program

Mutual aid fraternal societies used to be widespread and provided things like cheap healthcare services. Then various government policies led to their demise:

- social security / medicare

- AMA licensure monopoly

- minimum lodge rates

http://www.freenation.org/a/f12l3.html

There might have been a few more aspects to the decision to implement those policies.

Capitalism lead to the demise.

Capitalism is 'mutual' aid, we just exchange with 'aid credits' aka 'money' and it's vastly more efficient because people can choose their form of 'aid': books, food, video games, and chose their form of 'contribution' via division of labour aka one guy fixes cars the other makes coats.

The healthcare one is complicated.

Blank panthers are better off just giving money to people if they need breakfast. Now, of course we get into the ugly problem that said people may not be spending those 'aid credits' appropriately in which case you end up down an ugly dark hole of social realpolitik that people don't want to go down ...

This sounds... not actually that much better, just bad in different ways?

Healthcare should be a thing everyone just has by default, not a thing you have to (in practice) get by joining a group that comes with tradeoffs for other parts of your life[0]. I should be able to replace a bad doctor immediately without switching insurance companies or waiting for the rest of my insurance company to vote on it.

[0] Which, yes, is approximately the employer-provided system we have today. This is absolutely not intended as a defense of that disaster.

A solution to this government interference appears to be to clandestinely form these fraternal societies, similar to what certain persecuted religious groups did.

With photos: https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2023/0130/Mutual-aid-is-a...

"Each street in East Boston had a “captain”", whose job was to connect with residents and find ways to get them what they need.

What happens today, to attempts to create that "missing middle" structure?

This is an opportunity to shill my efforts with a similar goal, check my profile for the link. Below is a summary:

- It exclusive, given that the aim is to co-operate and potentially take on major projects. To pull of major projects a certain threshold level of IQ and wisdom is required.

- An example would be to collectively provide financial security. (IMH insurance companies and govt. are failing except for the simplest of cases)

- Another example would be say health care: say put up a surgery ward for the participating members are willing to bend or break the law to avail of a life saving procedure.