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.
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.
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
Macrophages, though your immune system broadly [1]. (Every cell has a variety of programmed death processes built in, too.)
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
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
It's a thought provoking book worth reading.
“Challenges” and “theory” may be better terms than “dispels” and “ideological myths,” then.
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?
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.
There’s about a million places to source this, but I might start with something like James C. Scott.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
None of that addresses how to allocate actually scarce things.
Can you come up with a solution?
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.
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-...
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.
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...
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.
[1] https://www.rsb.org.uk/biologist-features/who-was-peter-krop...
[2] https://digitallibrary.amnh.org/handle/2246/6494?show=full
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The alternative is not to dismiss literally every piece of evidence, from the real world, that gets shown to you.
look back, that's not the context in _this conversation_.
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.
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...
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).
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.