Topic: My doubts about anarchy - page 2. (Read 18191 times)

The ultimate question over Anarchy is exactly that... "is doesn't appeal you". No matter what FAQs are or not written they represent the vision of one claimed to be Anarchist without any value whatsoever to the whole "Anarchist community", taken under such seams everyone does as he pleases and everybody pleases differently.

Playing semantics are we... anyway, by your words you ended up stating exactly the core of Anarchy and what it is all about; the worse of Capitalism and extreme individualism.
For the record, nobody owns you nothing also... but probably, because we're a social sort of animal people care about people. Go figure! How silly of them when they could just lay down and die or watch you die.  

Luckily for the human species, Anarchy has 0% chances of survival. You see... the lack of hierarchy makes it the most easy target and sitting duck on the planet, standing no chance whatsoever against even quite small organized armies. Organization is the core of success - even for hunting by the way, taken we're, in the relation speed/strength/size, the weakest and slowest animal around and more up to be a pray than a hunter; unless we use our advantage: Organization and Strategy, that's why we have brains...

"No true Scotsman" fallacy.

You should read some more of my posts or peruse that FAQ some more.

Stepha Kinsella is not an anarchist. He is a capitalist.

I've been using the word work to indicate the process of creating something new, or restoring something, by your own labor. That which you create or restore by your own labor is rightfully yours. So, if I go and farm a potato myself, that potato rightfully belongs to me. One can only own the product of some labor if he himself does that labor. So, if someone simply claims to own the farm on which I farmed the potato, a landlord, he does not rightfully own that potato. I believe that people can use markets to determine the value of that which they produce and trade it accordingly. However, under capitalism I cannot freely access a market. I have to go through the landlord, a middleman, who will give me less for the potato than what he can get selling it on the market. He will gain the difference between the market value of the potato and my wage without having done any work. Because I rightfully owned that entire potato, I will have lost that difference. The only way landlords can get away with being landlords is if they have the authority to do so. Either a larger state grants them this authority, or they establishes it themselves by whatever forces they can muster, thereby creating their own little states. If I try to bypass him and keep the potato or the entirety of that which I can get on the market for it, my landlord will persecute me. Capitalists love gaining without doing work and therefore strive to become landlords, employers, and usurers. You can throw intellectual property holder in there, too. But, capitalists cannot be these things without some kind of state.

To be fair, other anarchists have different, non-market ways of valuing and exchanging the products of labor. An Anarchist FAQ describes some, but they don't really appeal to me.

There is no such thing as need vs. want. All human desires are wants. I want to live. I want to eat. I want to be happy. Etc. There is no need to live or anything else. Needs are just fudge words used in an attempt to make certain desires seem more important.

If you are alone on this Earth, you have to hunt, fish, farm or forage to survive. If you don't, you will die. Is nature somehow forcing you to do any of that stuff against your will? No, that's absurd, you want to live so therefore you do what it takes to survive.

So why is it that when we add other people to this equation, suddenly you start making demands on them? They don't owe you anything. If they offer you some food to do some work, they are only increasing the number of opportunities you have. You could still go hunt, fish, farm or forage to survive, or just lay down and die. The choice is yours and it's all completely voluntary. The world does not owe you a living.

Dooood, "cash" has no value whatsoever, it's just a way to set a "neutral value" which can be traded for anything you need. On the bitcoin2cash example, what if I've the bread but don't like fish? We wouldn't be trading... if no "neutral value" can be set - like cash - than either I wouldn't be giving my bread over your stinky fish or your will riot over the need of bread and try to rip it off from me.
Put "cash" as neutral, you trade your fish with anyone up to it, I receive the "cash" and go buy meat from somebody else.

To the end, anything basically is more valuable then than cash, cash is a mean not an end - unless you're a coin collector or something.

Also you do trade for need, not quite voluntarily. You need one thing and have something that person having the thing you need needs... All around one word: NEED.

As for people complaint on prices... don't bother, you could give it for free and they would still complaint. Complaint is an odd feature of the human nature, 90% of it you forget right away. Like in couples, most of weddings they spent the time complaining of each other and still keep together the whole life.

0.62

I agree. It reminds me of when people go to the store to buy something and the price is much higher than they expect but they buy it anyway, and then complain about the transaction.

Well if you didn't think the can of beans was worth $12, then why did you trade for it? Because you were hungry?

That voluntary trade by it's very definition means you deem the beans more valuable than the cash (at that moment).

It's not me who's denying "anarchism rules", it's you who are creating them in an (poor) attempt to make it look nicer. Call it "Minimalistic State" or something else, because as long as you call your "thing" Anarchy and at the very same time you try to sell rules for it, it's a bogus Anarchy.

You forget the subjectivity or morality; you kill a passing-by guy and get arrested / you kill an enemy at war you get yourself a medal; to the practical terms you would be doing the same; killing someone. That's how the World is, this is what morality sums up to be.
Other than subjective, morality is also subject to the time and circumstances factors, at certain age certain circumstances would justify something, at other age the changes on those circumstances may make the very same action immoral.

Violence and coercion are the only effective ways to deal with indigents; it wasn't "invented yesterday" nor "the unjustified violence of the state", it has been as so since it evolved from tribes to complex societies; where people not family related have to deal with each others, with degrees on empathy to be very lower towards general society than family and friends for obvious reasons and as eventually people will have collision of interests some ruling is needed and ways to enforce it. What really (and only) matters is to set a fair or as fair as possible rules to determine what is or isn't an indigent - as this is relative to the morality being applied.

Here's my two cents on anarchy. Regardless of whether its a good idea or not, its impossible, and I'll explain why.

Its a basic human desire to poses. To own bitcoins, dollars, a house and wife with 2.4 kids and a car in the garage, what have you. We all have the desire to acquire something. In an anarchic system those items, once acquired, have no security. There's nothing stopping anyone from just coming up and taking anything you have. So the general population would inevitably seek to secure their assets by hiring someone to protect them; to enforce the concept of ownership. Like an old west sheriff. The seed of governance. Humanity can not abide anarchy as it directly violates our instincts as beings that acquire and consume.

Can you tell me what your definition of "work" is, and how it is decided how much one person should rightfully collect?  This will help me understand your position better.

Then you don't understand anarchism. If you want to know what anarchism is about, ask an anarchist. Here comes one now...


*facepalm*

Sorry, if you've even one rule that's already no anarchism at all.
Anarchy has no statement against(or for) scam, fraud, violence/non-violence, etc... that's what makes Anarchists (or the ones we normally call them as so) nothing but dreamers unable to be taken seriously. You always need ONE rule. It doesn't matter which actually, but it's needed.

Take for an instance why most of the World drives by the right whereas English, Asians, Australians and South-Africans by the left. Does it makes difference whether you drive by left or right? No, it's a matter of habit. However it makes difference if you try to port your habits to somewhere else, like an English driving by the left on USA or an American by the right on UK.
Anarchy is just being erratic - without government or rules or anyone to enforce them -, "YOUR Anarchy" (the only place where your two rules exists) doesn't prevail over "OTHERS' Anarchy". And despite you don't like robbers, scammers, violence and so on, it doesn't mean at all that some "OTHERS'" don't either.

Furthermore on the fallacy of Anarchy comes the "me as others" and irrational belief on some sort of "objective or supreme morality". What YOU do and what YOU think is not or may not be what OTHERS do or think. So you can't say that just because you wouldn't go stealing, robbing and murdering, others won't either... specially because by practice we know some will and you will need someway to make them stop (that's what police is for).
Also by the practice of the closest thing to Anarchy to be presented as a State ever, Communism, they had to deal with those refusing to accept a rule that makes non sense at all, in such case the wack job theories of Marx with the wacker ones of Lenin, in the most violent of ways, being the Ukrainian genocide a fair example and the to the sum 70 million assassinations by the state in USSR and currently 90 million at China.

Anarchy is also the ultimate statement of individualism and as such the worse of Capitalism - unregulated one.

But it's pointless to discuss it as any reliable source of anything, Anarchy is too unorganized to ever be able to present itself as any sort of state.

EDIT: to the end it makes as much sense as the Jehovah Witnesses' heaven...
 

So because a minority of black people steal, all black people steal? Because a minority of Christians blow up abortion clinics, all Christians are terrorists? That's just absurd. Read my 2 rules above. Smashing the property of others violates rule number 1. They aren't very good anarchists if they are doing that.

I think you just have an axe to grind and don't want to learn why you're wrong.

I disapprove of joining protests to unleash violence for the sake of "smashing capitalism".

Actually I did, in practical terms. That site is yet another bogus pseudo-anarchist utopia bs.

which aims to create a society within which individuals freely co-operate together as equals. -> Is it? And what if they don't want to co-op? Will call the cops on them?

As such anarchism opposes all forms of hierarchical control -> Yeah! Everybody does the same... and everybody does nothing.

For all of the anarchist BS you end up always with the same; A HUGE LOAD OF RULES, even worse than the "archists" (with government). And to very bottom a nobody understands how lack of ways to enforce such rules.
Sorry... anarchism is plain non-sense. There's nothing to understand because other than break public stuff and join protests to unleash violence, anarchists themselves can't understand or even conceive in practice their own theories. Are just a sort of political hooligans...

I asked the same question of FatherMcGruder. Still don't understand it to this day.

That link makes my head want to explode! Socialism is fine as long as it's voluntary. You're free to go live in a monastery, hippie commune or what have you, but as soon as you start redistributing property by force, you're being immoral. I also find it hard to fathom how anyone could think that voluntary trade is ever exploitative. If I trade you a loaf of bread for a fish, obviously you value the bread more than the fish and I value the fish more than the bread. If not, why would we voluntarily trade? By trading, we each come away with something we find more valuable than we had originally. We are both better off. How is that exploitative? It's not.

That's chaos, not anarchy. Anarchy means that there are no arbitrary rulers.

There are actually two very important rules in anarchy.

1. Don't use aggression against other people or their property. (self-defense is fine, we aren't pacifists)

2. The only legitimate way of obtaining property is by homesteading unowned property or legitimate title transfer i.e. trading, gifting, gambling, etc. (no stealing or fraud)

That's it. If you stick to these two rules, you cannot have any form of state since states collect taxes which is theft. By the way, these aren't rules that anarchists idealistically expect everyone to follow. On the contrary, we acknowledge that there will always be people that violate these rules. In response to these rule breakers, we each will use force to protect ourselves and our property.

You have not described anarchy here. For a better understanding, I recommend you start here.

Ultimately Anarchists are the worse sort of... Capitalists.
"No rules" applies from rich to poor, the poor may try to rob the rich, but still the rich can hire muscle. You can't come with a "no rules" society and expect such to be even close to any sort of "utopia communism".
To the end, discuss anarchy is like discuss any other utopia, it's senseless and roundabout to a bunch of violent folks and spoiled kids in need of soccer (football if you're American) more often to play around with riot police. Nothing to take serious...

Discussing reliable alternatives to the current systems is however possible, one gaining force, is a semi or even direct Democracy. Removing the plain old and designed for societies with few to no communications at all, the "representative" (Representing who?!) party system.