Those are still statist organizations, at least per the cursory information presented; they have just chosen to allocate power to individuals in different ways than the democratic republicanism common in western countries. In the Symphony Way example, the people in question have formed various committees to address internal issues and appear to use state resources (courts) on basis of need.
Some of that is no doubt by necessity as they are coexisting with/within a statist government, but still.
additionally it might be helpful in the future to go ahead and provide examples to begin with
ed: I mean, you're talking about collectivizing resources. How can you 'collectivize' anything without a central authority to which individuals are accountable?
Eat it You Nasty Pig. on
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
One last point, this time rhetorical and not logical: You keep insisting and insinuating that we are indoctrinated. Yeah, so what? Everyone is indoctrinated to some degree. Show us how we are blind rather than telling us that we are.
Yeah. It is kinda cute when one side claims that the other side is indoctrinated and unthinking. Yet while it's cute, it doesn't seem to be terribly helpful. If only because the sentiment seems to be, "if you just sat down and thought about it, you'd be an anarchist, too."
I told my father I'd blow up a government building if Australian soldiers were ever ordered to shoot illegal refugees. The main problem I have with the notion is whether I'm ok with killing a bunch of secretaries and public workers, because let's face it: explosives aren't that hard to make.
What's strange to me is that 'The State' is held to be this abstract evil that controls people via manipulation. But when anarchists decide to fight back, what they shoot / blow up are not abstractions.
It's as if they're making a category mistake, but with guns and fire.
We are talking less about a body of theory, then, than about an attitude, or perhaps one might even say a faith: the rejection of certain types of social relations, the confidence that certain others would be much better ones on which to build a livable society, the belief that such a society could actually exist.
This will always be where it loses me.
Skeptic: Well, I might take this whole anarchism idea more seriously if you could give me some reason to think it would work. Can you name me a single viable example of a society which has existed without a government?
Awesome! This is one of my arguments!
...accept that anarchist forms of organization would not look anything like a state. That they would involve an endless variety of communities, associations networks, projects, on every conceivable scale, overlapping and intersecting in any way we could imagine, and possibly many that we can’t... ...the process of one system replacing the other will not take the form of some sudden revolutionary cataclysm—the storming of a Bastille, the seizing of a Winter Palace—but will necessarily be gradual, the creation of alternative forms of organization on a world scale, new forms of communication, new, less alienated ways of organizing life, which will, eventually, make currently existing forms of power seem stupid and beside the point. That in turn would mean that there are endless examples of viable anarchism: pretty much any form of organization would count as one, so long as it was not imposed by some higher authority, from a klezmer band to the international postal service. Unfortunately, this kind of argument does not seem to satisfy most skeptics
I don't have confidence that one of the endless examples of viable anarchism would necessarily be utopia, or close enough to it. I don't have the capacity to put Faith in something nebulous. I thought it was a crock when I was in Catholic school, and the real world has strengthened my lack of it since then. And telling someone that the answer is an endless example of imagined and unimaginable possibilities is as lame as telling them that their reward is in Heaven.
So far, I'm not convinced that the anarchist utopia is the next step once we drop the shackles of the state. It seems like anarchist collectives or organizations can exist within the state or even influence it though. I'd be much more willing to accept 'anarchy' if it were under those terms.
Unfortunately, this kind of argument does not seem to satisfy most skeptics
well of course not, because it isn't actually an argument at all.
ed: I further find it ironic that he describes an anarchist organization as something not at all like a state... only to describe in the very next sentence something that sounds very much like a federalized state.
Eat it You Nasty Pig. on
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
I told my father I'd blow up a government building if Australian soldiers were ever ordered to shoot illegal refugees. The main problem I have with the notion is whether I'm ok with killing a bunch of secretaries and public workers, because let's face it: explosives aren't that hard to make.
Why do states keep popping up? First off, I never said they wouldn't. This is a world that has for the last century or so in particular been thoroughly colonized by states. They seem like the only game in town. But look closer and they're not. The Mapuche (who none of you have seemed to address) are an anti-State people still struggling against colonization.
So, uh, is there any example you can give us of a uniquely Mapuche technology/theory/invention/anything that has come from them exported to the world at large?
I'm not trying to be culturally insensitive here, more power to the iron-boned bastards who've resisted the Incan, the Spanish, and even current Chilean government disenfranchisement and discrimination. But by their own words they just want to maintain their traditional way of life, all weaving an' shit.
Currently, many Mapuche women continue making the tissue according to the customs of their ancestors and transmitting their knowledge in the same way: in the domestic scope and family, from mother to daughter, from grandmothers to granddaughters, as happened in the past. This form of learning is based on gestural imitation, and only rarely, and when strictly necessary, the apprentice receives explicit instructions or help from their instructors. This means that knowledge is transmitted in the moments of realization of fabrics: and “make” and transmission of knowledge go together
Realized my shift doesn't start for another hour. Yaey!
sanstodo, you're incorrect, the Mapuche conflict for independence is ongoing. Check out the documentary La Voz Mapuche. http://www.cultureunplugged.com/play/6068/The-Voice-of-the-Mapuche ... and undoing yall's indoctrination is what I'm attempting with this and the other examples, but nobody seems to be treating them, instead they're just going on with these abstract arguments that I don't really have an interest in. Anarchy working in the concrete refutes them well enough on its own.
Anyway, _J_, the sociological definition of the State as I understand it is that entity which holds a monopoly on the use of force. I think I already said that even, so please go back and read my text. This isn't just my definition, as far as I'm aware it's the standard for academic writing about the State. "Organized society" of course has no such commonly agreed definition, but it's a leap and a jump to equate societal organization and a monopoly on the use of force.
Also-- I've read Graeber before, including that article plus a couple of his books. By all means everyone else should read the article. Graeber's also given some great interviews that are worth a read too.
As to your nature/culture thing, again, I don't think these concepts are very fruitful for the understanding at all. Nature is a really wishy-washy (not to mention subjective) term and it only gets worse the harder you think about it and the more you discuss it, so if you don't mind I'd like to put the lid back on that can of worms and I kind of regret opening it. Let's stick to the real world sans the expansive and airy abstractions. If you don't mind.
I think an anarchist utopia could totally work, if we had (at least effectively) unlimited resources and an omni-benevolent, uncorruptable central authority with absolute power to distribute the resources and keep anyone from overthrowing anyone else. Which is pretty much the opposite of an anarchist utopia, but is probably also the only way that you could get the stateless-living lifestyle day-to-day on a global scale without it all falling down around your ears the first time someone decides they want rape for dinner and talks 1000 or so of their buddies into going along with it.
As to your nature/culture thing, again, I don't think these concepts are very fruitful for the understanding at all. Nature is a really wishy-washy (not to mention subjective) term and it only gets worse the harder you think about it and the more you discuss it, so if you don't mind I'd like to put the lid back on that can of worms and I kind of regret opening it. Let's stick to the real world sans the expansive and airy abstractions. If you don't mind.
First thought: How is an anarchist utopia not an airy abstraction?
You've written multiple times that you don't want to deal in abstractions, or that it's impossible / unhelpful. But as Malkor quoted, Graeber's account utilizes an abstracted ideal in his story. We currently live in The State, then something magic happens, and then we're in an Anarchist society.
At the risk of sounding too much like a philosopher, what are "the real world" and "airy abstractions"? At least, how are they qualitatively different in a conversation focused upon the ideal way to organize a society?
I'd argue that the conversation is fundamentally about abstractions.
So, I'm not sure what you mean by those terms. You definitely want to include some notions while including others. I just don't know what ideas fit into the category of "abstraction" rather than "real world".
I think an anarchist utopia could totally work, if we had (at least effectively) unlimited resources and an omni-benevolent, uncorruptable central authority with absolute power to distribute the resources and keep anyone from overthrowing anyone else. Which is pretty much the opposite of an anarchist utopia, but is probably also the only way that you could get the stateless-living lifestyle day-to-day on a global scale without it all falling down around your ears the first time someone decides they want rape for dinner and talks 1000 or so of their buddies into going along with it.
I'm all the the limitation of force by the state. And I'm super critical and suspicious of the police, especially when they're in blue wall of silence mode. But they serve a valuable purpose that can't be replaced if the state is gone.
Unless you just pretend that they're not a part of the state.
Earlier in the thread I posted how there were drunk people outside making noise while I was trying to sleep. My options were either going down there and talking it out or calling those bastards to perform an intervention that society pays/trains/expects them to perform. They did it, and since no one got maced or beat up or thrown in the back of their squad car I think it went pretty damn well. Those interactions happen thousands of times a day. We only hear about the bad police do occasionally when someone thinks to either film it or something egregious happens and it can't be ignored. And fuck those men or women who take the trust that the public has placed in them and abuse it, but that doesn't means that as a whole the institution is flawed.
I think an anarchist utopia could totally work, if we had (at least effectively) unlimited resources and an omni-benevolent, uncorruptable central authority with absolute power to distribute the resources and keep anyone from overthrowing anyone else. Which is pretty much the opposite of an anarchist utopia, but is probably also the only way that you could get the stateless-living lifestyle day-to-day on a global scale without it all falling down around your ears the first time someone decides they want rape for dinner and talks 1000 or so of their buddies into going along with it.
I see we have an Iain M Banks fan!
I am continually saddened that I just can't enjoy Banks' writing, but it doesn't stop me trying ;p
The Culture is pretty much the only way that I can imagine a large-scale anarchist society actually working. All of the stuff that absolutely needs to happen to keep humans from wiping out and enslaving one another goes on behind the scenes, managed by intelligences that, unlike humans, don't give a shit about all the things that humans' propensity to give a shit about ultimately leads them to anti-communal behavior.
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
I think an anarchist utopia could totally work, if we had (at least effectively) unlimited resources and an omni-benevolent, uncorruptable central authority with absolute power to distribute the resources and keep anyone from overthrowing anyone else. Which is pretty much the opposite of an anarchist utopia, but is probably also the only way that you could get the stateless-living lifestyle day-to-day on a global scale without it all falling down around your ears the first time someone decides they want rape for dinner and talks 1000 or so of their buddies into going along with it.
I see we have an Iain M Banks fan!
I am continually saddened that I just can't enjoy Banks' writing, but it doesn't stop me trying ;p
The Culture is pretty much the only way that I can imagine a large-scale anarchist society actually working. All of the stuff that absolutely needs to happen to keep humans from wiping out and enslaving one another goes on behind the scenes, managed by intelligences that, unlike humans, don't give a shit about all the things that humans' propensity to give a shit about ultimately leads them to anti-communal behavior.
Realized my shift doesn't start for another hour. Yaey!
sanstodo, you're incorrect, the Mapuche conflict for independence is ongoing. Check out the documentary La Voz Mapuche. http://www.cultureunplugged.com/play/6068/The-Voice-of-the-Mapuche ... and undoing yall's indoctrination is what I'm attempting with this and the other examples, but nobody seems to be treating them, instead they're just going on with these abstract arguments that I don't really have an interest in. Anarchy working in the concrete refutes them well enough on its own.
Anyway, _J_, the sociological definition of the State as I understand it is that entity which holds a monopoly on the use of force. I think I already said that even, so please go back and read my text. This isn't just my definition, as far as I'm aware it's the standard for academic writing about the State. "Organized society" of course has no such commonly agreed definition, but it's a leap and a jump to equate societal organization and a monopoly on the use of force.
Also-- I've read Graeber before, including that article plus a couple of his books. By all means everyone else should read the article. Graeber's also given some great interviews that are worth a read too.
As to your nature/culture thing, again, I don't think these concepts are very fruitful for the understanding at all. Nature is a really wishy-washy (not to mention subjective) term and it only gets worse the harder you think about it and the more you discuss it, so if you don't mind I'd like to put the lid back on that can of worms and I kind of regret opening it. Let's stick to the real world sans the expansive and airy abstractions. If you don't mind.
I honestly don't care about the rest of the argument although I disagree with your characterization of the Mapuche. What matters is that you address your assumption, that freedom matters more than other things, like security. That's the crux of the argument. If you can't prove that assumption, the rest of your argument falls apart.
Guys, I never claimed anarchy would be a utopia. It'll probably be just as messy as all human history ever, just with more freedom and cooperation than is currently the standard, and more like what was the standard back before farming and bronze mining. I think you all are struggling with some straw man, who isn't me, and this is impeding your understanding of what I am actually saying. I am not a utopian, a utopia would be stifling.
Octoparrot, yeah you're being a dick as you seem to acknowledge. Go watch the documentary. Unlike the "civilized" settlers, the Mapuche actually know how to take care of the local ecology. I mean, indigenous societies in general are pretty good at that. We sub/urbanites don't know jack shit about plants unless it's our specialty or we were just a really really competent boy scout. Individuals in indigenous societies (and rural folk in general, depending where you are and what histories are involved) are all, predictably, knowledgeable about hundreds of plant and animal species and what they can be used for. I think that's one thing our "advanced" civilized cultures have definitively lost, and it's worthy of regret.
And, you know, they also don't screw up the atmosphere by filling it with all the fossil carbon that can possibly be extracted. But I guess that's a separate issue, huh?
Anyway, I do have to go to work. Sorry I can't address absolutely everybody, but this is kind of a dogpile. But a lot of the points I have already addressed, so if you don't see an answer it may be on the last page. Anyway, later.
I think an anarchist utopia could totally work, if we had (at least effectively) unlimited resources and an omni-benevolent, uncorruptable central authority with absolute power to distribute the resources and keep anyone from overthrowing anyone else. Which is pretty much the opposite of an anarchist utopia, but is probably also the only way that you could get the stateless-living lifestyle day-to-day on a global scale without it all falling down around your ears the first time someone decides they want rape for dinner and talks 1000 or so of their buddies into going along with it.
I see we have an Iain M Banks fan!
I am continually saddened that I just can't enjoy Banks' writing, but it doesn't stop me trying ;p
The Culture is pretty much the only way that I can imagine a large-scale anarchist society actually working. All of the stuff that absolutely needs to happen to keep humans from wiping out and enslaving one another goes on behind the scenes, managed by intelligences that, unlike humans, don't give a shit about all the things that humans' propensity to give a shit about ultimately leads them to anti-communal behavior.
That's not really anarchy.
That's dictatorship by robot.
That's why I said it's essentially the opposite of an anarchist utopia. You get the day-to-day experience of living free of the state in a happy-go-lucky communal society, but, in fact, the state is a (hopefully) benevolent robot dictator. The fact that robot dictator with infinite resources seems, to me, to be the only way to actually make a large society of anarchist humans work was my commentary on the feasibility of anarchist utopias.
Octoparrot, yeah you're being a dick as you seem to acknowledge. Go watch the documentary. Unlike the "civilized" settlers, the Mapuche actually know how to take care of the local ecology. I mean, indigenous societies in general are pretty good at that. We sub/urbanites don't know jack shit about plants unless it's our specialty or we were just a really really competent boy scout. Individuals in indigenous societies (and rural folk in general, depending where you are and what histories are involved) are all, predictably, knowledgeable about hundreds of plant and animal species and what they can be used for. I think that's one thing our "advanced" civilized cultures have definitively lost, and it's worthy of regret.
This kind of thing always cheeses my crackers. We haven't 'forgotten' about plants and animals and whatnot. We've just delegated it. Having been a fairly competent boy scout, I do actually know a fair bit about plants and animals, but I'd agree that the average person doesn't. But they don't need to. They also don't need to know exactly how their computer works, or their car, or 95% of the shit in their house, job, and day-to-day life. They need to know about the things that they do which feed into their society. I write software for a living, so it's my job to know as much about software as that dude whose job it is to grow plants that I eat and/or use in medicines.
When you're a community of a few hundred people living either directly off the land as-is or in a primitive sort of agricultural state with very little in the way of technology or specialized know-how, everyone knowing about everything that's going on in their day-to-day lives is an option. Our "advanced" civilized cultures, as you put it, are vastly too complicated for everyone to know everything. You can spend a lifetime devoting yourself to any little nook or cranny of inquiry because there are probably tens- or hundreds-of-thousands of people in past generations who have also dedicated their lives to exploring that cranny, writing down all the things they learned.
We haven't lost anything by compartmentalizing our knowledge; we've gained a vast breadth of more knowledge. Your average Mapuche would know, in total, what he or she had learned from the living members of his or her village and the stuff he or she had figured out on his or her own during their lifetime. That's all the knowledge they had, and all the knowledge they could hope to have. I know a lot about software, physics, math, and a good bit about a lot of other things. But I could, very easily, go and find out anything that any Mapuche tribesperson could possibly have known, and then a near-infinite amount more than they could have known about any topic I might care to.
How is that bad? How is that loss compared to the noble savage?
Octoparrot, yeah you're being a dick as you seem to acknowledge. Go watch the documentary. Unlike the "civilized" settlers, the Mapuche actually know how to take care of the local ecology. I mean, indigenous societies in general are pretty good at that. We sub/urbanites don't know jack shit about plants unless it's our specialty or we were just a really really competent boy scout. Individuals in indigenous societies (and rural folk in general, depending where you are and what histories are involved) are all, predictably, knowledgeable about hundreds of plant and animal species and what they can be used for. I think that's one thing our "advanced" civilized cultures have definitively lost, and it's worthy of regret.
I'm sure they are just lovely.
However their lifestyle can't support 7 billion people. Utopia be damned, if we tried anarchy, we'd have billions of people starve. You can enjoy that precious freedom as you wither away from hunger and preventable sickness.
What matters is that you address your assumption, that freedom matters more than other things, like security. That's the crux of the argument. If you can't prove that assumption, the rest of your argument falls apart.
To be fair, asking for someone to defend the position "freedom is important" requires that they are able to question the culture in which they've been raised their entire life.
However their lifestyle can't support 7 billion people. Utopia be damned, if we tried anarchy, we'd have billions of people starve. You can enjoy that precious freedom as you wither away from hunger and preventable sickness.
They are agricultural. Not hunter-gatherers. Agriculture can totally support that many.
And sanstodo, uh, what? What of my characterization do you disagree with? What do you know about the Mapuche that I don't? Please enlighten me. I'm sure as hell you didn't watch that documentary... As for your "prove the assumption" thing... This isn't a math theorem. None of it can be abstractly, ex-nihilo "proved." The State can't "prove" that it's necessary, either. This is politics, which is quite a different beast. There is a sense in which I can "prove" some things, such that anarchist societies are viable. And I've given examples. Again, the problem isn't that the societies fail or are somehow unproven, it's that *you all keep fucking shooting at us.* I'd just like yall to acknowledge that, and either remain Statists and thus come out and support it, or realize it's fucked up and wrong and see us as human beings with legitimate opinions and a legitimate cause that maybe-just-maybe you never bothered to learn much about.
They are agricultural. Not hunter-gatherers. Agriculture can totally support that many.
This claim is supported by <evidence missing>.
It'd be nice if we could get beyond "it'll work" and "no, it totally won't work" arguments.
Well, agriculture can support 7 billion, 'cause that's how we do it. The problem isn't so much the agriculture, it's the not having a delivery infrastructure capable of bearing the 7 billion people worth of food from the arable land to the actual 7 billion people without it spoiling or being stolen along the way. Which is pretty much what's stopping us from feeding everyone on Earth as-is, just like a billionty-five times worse because pre-technological agrarian cultures don't even have cargo containers and walmart.
What matters is that you address your assumption, that freedom matters more than other things, like security. That's the crux of the argument. If you can't prove that assumption, the rest of your argument falls apart.
To be fair, asking for someone to defend the position "freedom is important" requires that they are able to question the culture in which they've been raised their entire life.
Not really. He has to show that it's more important than anything else. I'm questioning the extreme position, not the more nuanced opinion you posited.
What matters is that you address your assumption, that freedom matters more than other things, like security. That's the crux of the argument. If you can't prove that assumption, the rest of your argument falls apart.
To be fair, asking for someone to defend the position "freedom is important" requires that they are able to question the culture in which they've been raised their entire life.
Not really. He has to show that it's more important than anything else. I'm questioning the extreme position, not the more nuanced opinion you posited.
There's also the fact that he's not telling us his definition of freedom, which I am willing to wager is solely based on negative freedoms.
They are agricultural. Not hunter-gatherers. Agriculture can totally support that many.
This claim is supported by <evidence missing>.
It'd be nice if we could get beyond "it'll work" and "no, it totally won't work" arguments.
Well, agriculture can support 7 billion, 'cause that's how we do it. The problem isn't so much the agriculture, it's the not having a delivery infrastructure capable of bearing the 7 billion people worth of food from the arable land to the actual 7 billion people without it spoiling or being stolen along the way. Which is pretty much what's stopping us from feeding everyone on Earth as-is, just like a billionty-five times worse because pre-technological agrarian cultures don't even have cargo containers and walmart.
My understanding is that along with destroying The State, anarchism also wants to destroy the economic systems currently employed by The State.
The reason for which we have agricultural production in its current form is the economic incentive. If you grow enough peaches we'll give you money, and you can use that money to buy a flatscreen.
If we remove The State, and remove the economic system, why would anyone grow more peaches than they, themselves, need? Even if we're going to strive for an antiquated bartering system, it'd significantly change the current system we have in place for food production.
So, when Chaos claimed that "Agriculture can totally support that many", what he meant was that, in our current system we produce enough food to feed everyone.
But if we change the system, we'd also change the amount of food that is produced. Or, at least, we'd have to significantly change the motivation / incentive to produce food in the way we currently do.
And many anarchists want to get away from the factory farming / factory agriculture model.
We probably can't feed 7 billion people by means of family farms.
Octoparrot, yeah you're being a dick as you seem to acknowledge. Go watch the documentary. Unlike the "civilized" settlers, the Mapuche actually know how to take care of the local ecology. I mean, indigenous societies in general are pretty good at that. We sub/urbanites don't know jack shit about plants unless it's our specialty or we were just a really really competent boy scout. Individuals in indigenous societies (and rural folk in general, depending where you are and what histories are involved) are all, predictably, knowledgeable about hundreds of plant and animal species and what they can be used for. I think that's one thing our "advanced" civilized cultures have definitively lost, and it's worthy of regret.
This kind of thing always cheeses my crackers. We haven't 'forgotten' about plants and animals and whatnot. We've just delegated it. Having been a fairly competent boy scout, I do actually know a fair bit about plants and animals, but I'd agree that the average person doesn't. But they don't need to. They also don't need to know exactly how their computer works, or their car, or 95% of the shit in their house, job, and day-to-day life. They need to know about the things that they do which feed into their society. I write software for a living, so it's my job to know as much about software as that dude whose job it is to grow plants that I eat and/or use in medicines.
When you're a community of a few hundred people living either directly off the land as-is or in a primitive sort of agricultural state with very little in the way of technology or specialized know-how, everyone knowing about everything that's going on in their day-to-day lives is an option. Our "advanced" civilized cultures, as you put it, are vastly too complicated for everyone to know everything. You can spend a lifetime devoting yourself to any little nook or cranny of inquiry because there are probably tens- or hundreds-of-thousands of people in past generations who have also dedicated their lives to exploring that cranny, writing down all the things they learned.
We haven't lost anything by compartmentalizing our knowledge; we've gained a vast breadth of more knowledge. Your average Mapuche would know, in total, what he or she had learned from the living members of his or her village and the stuff he or she had figured out on his or her own during their lifetime. That's all the knowledge they had, and all the knowledge they could hope to have. I know a lot about software, physics, math, and a good bit about a lot of other things. But I could, very easily, go and find out anything that any Mapuche tribesperson could possibly have known, and then a near-infinite amount more than they could have known about any topic I might care to.
How is that bad? How is that loss compared to the noble savage?
Whew I'm glad I reloaded the page before going on about the noble savage myth. I will try to be civil.
To use your riff, Cpt, we now have online plant indexes, huge fucking 1000 page herbal almanacs, OR we can go to a botanist. All of those are on the table. Or instead of finding the right plant to get our sticky sap from, we run out and get some superglue.
Chaos Theory, if the wanton production of chemicals (ex. my superglue) is ecologically unsustainable, then I contend the answer is a government with a healthy interest in its citizens AND the teeth to enforce regulation. Because a lack of oversight, a lack of state regulation will only make matters worse. If you've read the thread, you've seen the "Village Upstream" or "Let the grandkids worry about it" examples.
Groups like the mapuche are using the fruit of research only made possible by the modern state's labor specializations.
This is politics, which is quite a different beast.
If it's politics you have to convince people of something. Of your divine right to rule, or that you're a god, or your small group of senators is saving you from the uncivilized hoard, or that in the last election you've held you didn't just burn all the ballots. If it's faith then you still have to get people to believe something, but you don't have to be specific. You can just tell people to use their imaginations and wait for it all to fall down by itself.
But don't forget to sell them t-shirts, buttons, and stickers!
Its also totally missing the point that hunter gatherers are just a specialized as a modern office worker - they don't have a communion with nature, they just know a shit load about a certain area, something their ancestors worked out slowly and gradually as they moved into said area. Drop a Mapuche in the middle of the Congo Basin or the Finnmarksvidda and they'd be dead just as soon as the office worker. Why is one specialism more 'valuable' than another specialism?
Its also totally missing the point that hunter gatherers are just a specialized as a modern office worker - they don't have a communion with nature, they just know a shit load about a certain area, something their ancestors worked out slowly and gradually as they moved into said area. Drop a Mapuche in the middle of the Congo Basin or the Finnmarksvidda and they'd be dead just as soon as the office worker. Why is one specialism more 'valuable' than another specialism?
Just because it's awesome and relevant, some anarchist graffiti in Cairo:
You'll also see the slogan ACAB painted all over the place too. Meaning "all cops are bastards." It's popular among anarchists as you might expect.
I do believe we just got "I have no idea what you're talking about, so here's a bunny with a pancake on its head"-d.
I wish. We got, like, some kind of ballet vs. hazmat suit scrawl, thing. I'm not really an 'art guy' but I'm not getting the anarchist context here.
Lemme fix that for him.
Oh, now I get it.
The pancake is The State. The rabbit is our freedom. That drawer is society. The carpet is nature.
It all makes sense now.
No, no, no. The carpet is the State, because it is always underfoot. The bunny is man, who only wishes to run free and whose nature is to be defenseless in the eyes of war because he is noble and fuzzy. Man's claws, meant only for gaining traction, become enmeshed in the fibers of State. Thus the Pancake of Force Monolopization descends, crushing the Ears of Freedom which would, otherwise, naturally stand proud from the noble brow of bunny-Man.
The drawer is representative of the conflict between man's own desire for self-destruction and his biological imperative to procreate, but I'm afraid that the symbolism of the wicker is more than I have time to go into right now.
Edit: I misspelled monopolization, but I'm not changing it because 'monp-lop-olization', get it? *nudge nudge*
There's also the fact that his assertion that indigenous societies are better stewards of the environment is a blatant lie.
Yeah, it seems like most of that "environmental stewardship" stems more from smaller populations than anything.
Yes, hundreds of millions of people cause more environmental damage than an order or magnitude (or two) less. Duh. That doesn't solve the issue of who gets culled out to achieve this.
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Some of that is no doubt by necessity as they are coexisting with/within a statist government, but still.
additionally it might be helpful in the future to go ahead and provide examples to begin with
ed: I mean, you're talking about collectivizing resources. How can you 'collectivize' anything without a central authority to which individuals are accountable?
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
What's strange to me is that 'The State' is held to be this abstract evil that controls people via manipulation. But when anarchists decide to fight back, what they shoot / blow up are not abstractions.
It's as if they're making a category mistake, but with guns and fire.
Awesome! This is one of my arguments!
I don't have confidence that one of the endless examples of viable anarchism would necessarily be utopia, or close enough to it. I don't have the capacity to put Faith in something nebulous. I thought it was a crock when I was in Catholic school, and the real world has strengthened my lack of it since then. And telling someone that the answer is an endless example of imagined and unimaginable possibilities is as lame as telling them that their reward is in Heaven.
So far, I'm not convinced that the anarchist utopia is the next step once we drop the shackles of the state. It seems like anarchist collectives or organizations can exist within the state or even influence it though. I'd be much more willing to accept 'anarchy' if it were under those terms.
well of course not, because it isn't actually an argument at all.
ed: I further find it ironic that he describes an anarchist organization as something not at all like a state... only to describe in the very next sentence something that sounds very much like a federalized state.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
I thought you were in jail, Mr Breivik?
So, uh, is there any example you can give us of a uniquely Mapuche technology/theory/invention/anything that has come from them exported to the world at large?
I'm not trying to be culturally insensitive here, more power to the iron-boned bastards who've resisted the Incan, the Spanish, and even current Chilean government disenfranchisement and discrimination. But by their own words they just want to maintain their traditional way of life, all weaving an' shit.
I mean, this is some real Darmok shit right here.
And ultimately this is a discussion on why would "libertarianism, anarchism" etc. be better than what we have now. The Mapuche are not an example.
sanstodo, you're incorrect, the Mapuche conflict for independence is ongoing. Check out the documentary La Voz Mapuche. http://www.cultureunplugged.com/play/6068/The-Voice-of-the-Mapuche ... and undoing yall's indoctrination is what I'm attempting with this and the other examples, but nobody seems to be treating them, instead they're just going on with these abstract arguments that I don't really have an interest in. Anarchy working in the concrete refutes them well enough on its own.
Anyway, _J_, the sociological definition of the State as I understand it is that entity which holds a monopoly on the use of force. I think I already said that even, so please go back and read my text. This isn't just my definition, as far as I'm aware it's the standard for academic writing about the State. "Organized society" of course has no such commonly agreed definition, but it's a leap and a jump to equate societal organization and a monopoly on the use of force.
Also-- I've read Graeber before, including that article plus a couple of his books. By all means everyone else should read the article. Graeber's also given some great interviews that are worth a read too.
As to your nature/culture thing, again, I don't think these concepts are very fruitful for the understanding at all. Nature is a really wishy-washy (not to mention subjective) term and it only gets worse the harder you think about it and the more you discuss it, so if you don't mind I'd like to put the lid back on that can of worms and I kind of regret opening it. Let's stick to the real world sans the expansive and airy abstractions. If you don't mind.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
First thought: How is an anarchist utopia not an airy abstraction?
You've written multiple times that you don't want to deal in abstractions, or that it's impossible / unhelpful. But as Malkor quoted, Graeber's account utilizes an abstracted ideal in his story. We currently live in The State, then something magic happens, and then we're in an Anarchist society.
At the risk of sounding too much like a philosopher, what are "the real world" and "airy abstractions"? At least, how are they qualitatively different in a conversation focused upon the ideal way to organize a society?
I'd argue that the conversation is fundamentally about abstractions.
So, I'm not sure what you mean by those terms. You definitely want to include some notions while including others. I just don't know what ideas fit into the category of "abstraction" rather than "real world".
You'll also see the slogan ACAB painted all over the place too. Meaning "all cops are bastards." It's popular among anarchists as you might expect.
I see we have an Iain M Banks fan!
Unless you just pretend that they're not a part of the state.
Earlier in the thread I posted how there were drunk people outside making noise while I was trying to sleep. My options were either going down there and talking it out or calling those bastards to perform an intervention that society pays/trains/expects them to perform. They did it, and since no one got maced or beat up or thrown in the back of their squad car I think it went pretty damn well. Those interactions happen thousands of times a day. We only hear about the bad police do occasionally when someone thinks to either film it or something egregious happens and it can't be ignored. And fuck those men or women who take the trust that the public has placed in them and abuse it, but that doesn't means that as a whole the institution is flawed.
I am continually saddened that I just can't enjoy Banks' writing, but it doesn't stop me trying ;p
The Culture is pretty much the only way that I can imagine a large-scale anarchist society actually working. All of the stuff that absolutely needs to happen to keep humans from wiping out and enslaving one another goes on behind the scenes, managed by intelligences that, unlike humans, don't give a shit about all the things that humans' propensity to give a shit about ultimately leads them to anti-communal behavior.
That's not really anarchy.
That's dictatorship by robot.
I honestly don't care about the rest of the argument although I disagree with your characterization of the Mapuche. What matters is that you address your assumption, that freedom matters more than other things, like security. That's the crux of the argument. If you can't prove that assumption, the rest of your argument falls apart.
Octoparrot, yeah you're being a dick as you seem to acknowledge. Go watch the documentary. Unlike the "civilized" settlers, the Mapuche actually know how to take care of the local ecology. I mean, indigenous societies in general are pretty good at that. We sub/urbanites don't know jack shit about plants unless it's our specialty or we were just a really really competent boy scout. Individuals in indigenous societies (and rural folk in general, depending where you are and what histories are involved) are all, predictably, knowledgeable about hundreds of plant and animal species and what they can be used for. I think that's one thing our "advanced" civilized cultures have definitively lost, and it's worthy of regret.
And, you know, they also don't screw up the atmosphere by filling it with all the fossil carbon that can possibly be extracted. But I guess that's a separate issue, huh?
Anyway, I do have to go to work. Sorry I can't address absolutely everybody, but this is kind of a dogpile. But a lot of the points I have already addressed, so if you don't see an answer it may be on the last page. Anyway, later.
That's why I said it's essentially the opposite of an anarchist utopia. You get the day-to-day experience of living free of the state in a happy-go-lucky communal society, but, in fact, the state is a (hopefully) benevolent robot dictator. The fact that robot dictator with infinite resources seems, to me, to be the only way to actually make a large society of anarchist humans work was my commentary on the feasibility of anarchist utopias.
I'm all about robot dictatorships.
This kind of thing always cheeses my crackers. We haven't 'forgotten' about plants and animals and whatnot. We've just delegated it. Having been a fairly competent boy scout, I do actually know a fair bit about plants and animals, but I'd agree that the average person doesn't. But they don't need to. They also don't need to know exactly how their computer works, or their car, or 95% of the shit in their house, job, and day-to-day life. They need to know about the things that they do which feed into their society. I write software for a living, so it's my job to know as much about software as that dude whose job it is to grow plants that I eat and/or use in medicines.
When you're a community of a few hundred people living either directly off the land as-is or in a primitive sort of agricultural state with very little in the way of technology or specialized know-how, everyone knowing about everything that's going on in their day-to-day lives is an option. Our "advanced" civilized cultures, as you put it, are vastly too complicated for everyone to know everything. You can spend a lifetime devoting yourself to any little nook or cranny of inquiry because there are probably tens- or hundreds-of-thousands of people in past generations who have also dedicated their lives to exploring that cranny, writing down all the things they learned.
We haven't lost anything by compartmentalizing our knowledge; we've gained a vast breadth of more knowledge. Your average Mapuche would know, in total, what he or she had learned from the living members of his or her village and the stuff he or she had figured out on his or her own during their lifetime. That's all the knowledge they had, and all the knowledge they could hope to have. I know a lot about software, physics, math, and a good bit about a lot of other things. But I could, very easily, go and find out anything that any Mapuche tribesperson could possibly have known, and then a near-infinite amount more than they could have known about any topic I might care to.
How is that bad? How is that loss compared to the noble savage?
I'm sure they are just lovely.
However their lifestyle can't support 7 billion people. Utopia be damned, if we tried anarchy, we'd have billions of people starve. You can enjoy that precious freedom as you wither away from hunger and preventable sickness.
To be fair, asking for someone to defend the position "freedom is important" requires that they are able to question the culture in which they've been raised their entire life.
They are agricultural. Not hunter-gatherers. Agriculture can totally support that many.
And sanstodo, uh, what? What of my characterization do you disagree with? What do you know about the Mapuche that I don't? Please enlighten me. I'm sure as hell you didn't watch that documentary... As for your "prove the assumption" thing... This isn't a math theorem. None of it can be abstractly, ex-nihilo "proved." The State can't "prove" that it's necessary, either. This is politics, which is quite a different beast. There is a sense in which I can "prove" some things, such that anarchist societies are viable. And I've given examples. Again, the problem isn't that the societies fail or are somehow unproven, it's that *you all keep fucking shooting at us.* I'd just like yall to acknowledge that, and either remain Statists and thus come out and support it, or realize it's fucked up and wrong and see us as human beings with legitimate opinions and a legitimate cause that maybe-just-maybe you never bothered to learn much about.
Ok, seriously. Gone now... fucking wage slavery.
This claim is supported by <evidence missing>.
It'd be nice if we could get beyond "it'll work" and "no, it totally won't work" arguments.
Well, agriculture can support 7 billion, 'cause that's how we do it. The problem isn't so much the agriculture, it's the not having a delivery infrastructure capable of bearing the 7 billion people worth of food from the arable land to the actual 7 billion people without it spoiling or being stolen along the way. Which is pretty much what's stopping us from feeding everyone on Earth as-is, just like a billionty-five times worse because pre-technological agrarian cultures don't even have cargo containers and walmart.
Not really. He has to show that it's more important than anything else. I'm questioning the extreme position, not the more nuanced opinion you posited.
There's also the fact that he's not telling us his definition of freedom, which I am willing to wager is solely based on negative freedoms.
My understanding is that along with destroying The State, anarchism also wants to destroy the economic systems currently employed by The State.
The reason for which we have agricultural production in its current form is the economic incentive. If you grow enough peaches we'll give you money, and you can use that money to buy a flatscreen.
If we remove The State, and remove the economic system, why would anyone grow more peaches than they, themselves, need? Even if we're going to strive for an antiquated bartering system, it'd significantly change the current system we have in place for food production.
So, when Chaos claimed that "Agriculture can totally support that many", what he meant was that, in our current system we produce enough food to feed everyone.
But if we change the system, we'd also change the amount of food that is produced. Or, at least, we'd have to significantly change the motivation / incentive to produce food in the way we currently do.
And many anarchists want to get away from the factory farming / factory agriculture model.
We probably can't feed 7 billion people by means of family farms.
Whew I'm glad I reloaded the page before going on about the noble savage myth. I will try to be civil.
To use your riff, Cpt, we now have online plant indexes, huge fucking 1000 page herbal almanacs, OR we can go to a botanist. All of those are on the table. Or instead of finding the right plant to get our sticky sap from, we run out and get some superglue.
Chaos Theory, if the wanton production of chemicals (ex. my superglue) is ecologically unsustainable, then I contend the answer is a government with a healthy interest in its citizens AND the teeth to enforce regulation. Because a lack of oversight, a lack of state regulation will only make matters worse. If you've read the thread, you've seen the "Village Upstream" or "Let the grandkids worry about it" examples.
Groups like the mapuche are using the fruit of research only made possible by the modern state's labor specializations.
I do believe we just got "I have no idea what you're talking about, so here's a bunny with a pancake on its head"-d.
Noble Savage. Romanticize the Past. Etc.
I wish. We got, like, some kind of ballet vs. hazmat suit scrawl, thing. I'm not really an 'art guy' but I'm not getting the anarchist context here.
Lemme fix that for him.
Oh, now I get it.
The pancake is The State. The rabbit is our freedom. That drawer is society. The carpet is nature.
It all makes sense now.
Only if there was some jam on top of the pancake.
No, no, no. The carpet is the State, because it is always underfoot. The bunny is man, who only wishes to run free and whose nature is to be defenseless in the eyes of war because he is noble and fuzzy. Man's claws, meant only for gaining traction, become enmeshed in the fibers of State. Thus the Pancake of Force Monolopization descends, crushing the Ears of Freedom which would, otherwise, naturally stand proud from the noble brow of bunny-Man.
The drawer is representative of the conflict between man's own desire for self-destruction and his biological imperative to procreate, but I'm afraid that the symbolism of the wicker is more than I have time to go into right now.
Edit: I misspelled monopolization, but I'm not changing it because 'monp-lop-olization', get it? *nudge nudge*
Yeah, it seems like most of that "environmental stewardship" stems more from smaller populations than anything.
Yes, hundreds of millions of people cause more environmental damage than an order or magnitude (or two) less. Duh. That doesn't solve the issue of who gets culled out to achieve this.