It’s not enough to not understand economics, you also need to lack empathy and self-reflection.
I thought that was well covered by “incel”.
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Don’t sell them short; incel lifestyle is about so much more than (no) sex. I’d challenge you to find any incel posts that exhibit empathy or even a reasonable understanding of human interaction.
Incel as a term describes something much more specific than “virgin (but they don’t want to be).” That may be the literal meaning of the words, but like, we all know that the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea is not democratic, people’s, or a republic.
Incel, the way it’s typically used, describes a particular type of person who’s embittered by their long-lasting virginity, and because of that, views most or all members of the opposite sex as lesser than them, believing that they’re in some way owed sex, and have been denied that ‘right.’
Why everybody has to be so concerned with who does and who does not get laid and the reasons why?
Well sometimes the ones that can’t get laid bring guns to school.
Yes?
The word “incel” colloquially covers quite a bit more territory than its acronym expansion implies, much like MAGA means quite a bit more than just a collective of individuals who want to see America succeed. But of course you know this, so why exactly are you asking?
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Of course! If you aren’t getting laid, it’s clearly because you’re a terrible person.
But if you are getting laid that means at least one other person can stand you.
Phew, thank god I understand economics
Every Man is an Island motherfuckers realizing that No Man is an Island.
Humans specifically only were successful because of pack hunting. We died quickly in nature as individuals. Anarcho-capitalism rejects this need for each other replaced with the unsound idea that each individual can handle everything on their own.
Works great until you break your fucking ankle and realize nobody decided being a doctor was important or the only person with medical skills has decided they don’t want to do business with you.
The ironic thing is that they because successful because of civilization and pack mentality, but are so conceited, they think all that infrastructure (public roads, doctors, restaurants, etc) exists simply because they exist. It’s weirdly how toddlers see the universe, and why tantrums between the two groups are so similar.
Nor weird at all. It requires a social and emotional maturation process to occur before an adult can appreciate the golden rule. When this developmental process fails you have a chronological adult who is developmentally immature. One of the technical names used to refer to this outcome is narcissism. Such people have prominent narcissistic traits.
Yeah, the old “you don’t find libertarians in poor countries with bad infrastructure” trope.
Wouldn’t that be the cartels’ upper echelon?
Kropotkin identified mutual aid as a key factor in evolution, not only but especially in humans
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It’s literally just libertarianism under a new and more descriptive name.
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Yes. I was not contradicting that.
Capitalism (strictly defined as the private ownership of the means of production) can’t exist without the premise of private property being protected by laws that are collectively agreed upon, enforced, and adjudicated by peers within your community.
This implies that any capitalist society is compatible with democracy, as in, “the will of the masses controls society” and not as in “you get to vote for genocidal liberal who will make us richer, or genocidal fascist who will make us richer”
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Capitalism is an economic system, while democracy is a political system.
Economics is politics. The two are intertwined in every practical regard.
To repeat myself a bit, my argument is that capitalism can’t exist without collective agreements on legislation, enforcement, and adjudication, along with strong protections for an individual’s rights.
This is ahistorical. Colonialism does not require consensus or respect for individual rights and is a central feature of any capitalist system that is successful enough.
If you believe that supposed self-described “socialists”, “communists”, “leftists”, and other “cHaMpIoNs Of tHe PeOpLe” have never been or are incapable of being genocidal maniacs, please promptly fuck your own face with your tankie butt-plug and jump off the nearest cliff.
Oh yeah, socialists have done some horrible things. They pale in scale to the crimes of capitalism. The British empire, the nazi empire, the American empire. Socialism is a less violent system but that doesn’t mean that violence stops.
I will never entertain any authoritarian of whatever economic stripe or their apologists for even a nanosecond.
If you support capitalism you literally support an informal caste system where a small caste owns the collective accumlated fruits of labor of the whole human race stretching back to the start of agriculture, where any attempt to change the state of affairs that has any chance of success gets jakarta methoded. That is much more authoritarian than a red terror.
Anarchy (as a political philosophy) is about an absence of coercion.
Capitalism is about the supremacy of property rights over all other rights, backed up by the threat of violence against anyone who doesn’t play along.
How anyone can think those two concepts are compatible is beyond me.
backed up by the threat of violence against anyone who doesn’t play along.
Every political ideology includes that. What good are rules without enforcement? Just because the enforcers are supposed to be random individuals in some ideologies doesn’t mean the threat of violence for not playing along is gone.
Anarchism claims to be different. But yeah, that’s a big part of why I see anarchism as a thought experiment and not a serious ideology.
I’m an anarchist, and my take is that anarchism isn’t pacifism, and “no coercion” is a bad summary. It’s more about the absence of hierarchical coercion and instead distribution of power to all people and communities.
If you’re going around burning down houses, your anarchist neighbors are going to use force to take away your matches and gasoline if you don’t stop.
Yup, that is my understanding as well. Likewise, if you’re going around stealing, and someone happens to think that’s bad, they can use force to stop you because there’s no state telling them otherwise.
The idea that if there’s no state we’d automatically be living in communist utopia where everything is shared and nobody owns anything is flawed on its face. It’s certainly possible that there would be groups or tribes of people that choose to live that way, but other tribes would form around the idea that property rights should be protected and build a community around that.
You’re very much misrepresenting how anarchism is supposed to work with that “automatically” statement. No one thinks if will happen by itself, there’s a whole library on thought on how to go about making it the societal norm, with quite a lot of good points that humanity already largely acted like this for most of its two to three hundred thousand years of existence.
Supposedly, anyways. I suppose paleolithic man might well have been selling mammoth futures and executing debtors in the street.
But I also don’t really buy it in a urban society unless that society is largely run by the Culture’s Minds.
I only put that there because the thread starter seems to be an anarcho-communist who thinks that in absence of a state enforcing property rights, property rights simply won’t be enforced. That is not the case. They may or may not be enforced, either by the property owner themselves or their tribe/community.
Ok I should preface by saying I think ancap is dumb and having a slight disagreement with what you’ve said does not mean I’m not defending them. They’re asshats.
But: imo, anarchist thought escapes definition. There’s no such thing as anarchism (in the sense of an agreed-upon political philosophy), only anarchists.
Readers of Rene Girard might describe coersion (insofar as it’s a natural result of hegemony), as a sort of force of nature, like violence, that, if society doesn’t find a healthy way to express, will come out sideways, in ways that are anti-social.
Anarchism can only exist when there’s a single individual not interacting with any other person, period. Every human interaction immediately breaks any sort of anarchism, there will always be some agreed upon behavior, whether implicit or explicit, violently enforced or not.
I suppose most ancaps are actually minarchists, or “minimal state” proponents, because capitalism fails terribly without laws and some way to enforce them. Without a state (even as small as a group’s leadership), “ownership” doesn’t exist, whoever’s stronger owns the thing. You blink, you lose. You die, it’s first dibs. Fell for a scam? Too bad, you should’ve been smarter. Got captured and sold into slave labor? Too bad, you should’ve seen that coming. Someone stole your stuff? Too bad, you should’ve secured it better.
Capitalism is primarily an economic system, not a political philosophy. And while it requires property rights in order to function, it is primarily concerned with solving problems in the absence of coercion, so it is absolutely compatible with anarchy.
You’re making a fundamental error when you think that property rights would not or do not exist in anarchy. What doesn’t exist in anarchy is the enforcement of such rights by a STATE. A property owner (or in this case, really anyone who lays claim to a property, since a state that could issue official deeds does not exist) still has the right to defend their property using violent means if necessary.
So yes, capitalism and anarchy are absolutely compatible.
Anarchy requires the absence of a state… And private property… Anarchy is to the left of “workers siezing the means of production”.
But anarcho-capitalists are, as you’ve said, only focusing on the economic system of their politics. If you ask them about the politics and government of their fantasy? Well, they all reveal a desire for a deeply coercive state. Anarchy, and also Libertarian, are words being co-opted.
Nope, anarchy is only the absence of a state. Like I said, it is still possible to enforce property rights in such a scenario… as long as you do it yourself.
This likely WOULD lead to less hoarding and more wealth distribution, because you cannot keep what you cannot defend. But it’s definitely wrong to assume all property would automatically become public and “free use” and everyone would share freely as in a communist utopia, because that requires agreement between people. And in the absence of a state, there is no authority that could enforce such an agreement.
I’m not convinced about the second paragraph. How do you think we ended up where we are? In the stone age there was no government either, and yet some people became royalty and he and his friends became wealthy
I’ve always wanted someone to explain how you eliminate capitalism or the symbolic exchange of value to achieve a socialist/ anarchist state without violence.
The nice part about anarchism is both systems are free to coexist in the absense of the state. That cannot be said under communism and socialism.
If you think about it, such communities probably already exist: most families, even in capitalism, are communist internally: the parents contribute far more to the household than the children do, who tend to consume far more than they produce. From each according to their ability to each according to their need.
This likely also explains the continued popularity of communism as a political philosophy, especially among young people. Going out into the world, where there is competition and conflict is jarring, and the wish for society to be organized more like a family unit is understandable, although it is far more difficult to organize a large country in this way than a household of no more than, say, a dozen people.
Communism is a classless stateless society, parents within our society literally own their children as property.
This likely also explains the continued popularity of communism as a political philosophy, especially among young people. Going out into the world, where there is competition and conflict is jarring, and the wish for society to be organized more like a family unit is understandable, although it is far more difficult to organize a large country in this way than a household of no more than, say, a dozen people.
Remind me again, what is the political ideology of the new world superpower? The one with 1.4 billion people? You know, now that the capitalist US empire is in obvious terminal decline.
Are you talking about China? If so, I’m afraid they’re communist in name only. They realized many years ago that Marxist economic theory doesn’t work and began to integrate capitalist principles into their economy. There are banks, there is a stock market, and there is private ownership of the means of production, although all of these are tightly regulated by the state and can be rescinded at any time or for any reason (such as not paying enough bribes).
De facto, China is a capitalist-fascist state more comparable to WW2 Germany than anything Marx ever came up with.
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Okay, fair enough.
Private Property cannot exist without a state. That which gives private property legitimacy is a monopoly of violence, otherwise you have a winner-takes-all might makes right system.
Collective ownership of property can be enforced via the collective itself, without a need for a governing body.
Anarchism is certainly idealistic, but Anarcho-Capitalism is pure fantasy.
If the collective has to enforce collective ownership, isn’t that just a monopoly on violence again?
Private ownership doesn’t require a collective, or a monopoly on violence. You only get to keep what you can defend.
If everyone has equal ownership, there is no "mono"poly.
Private ownership requires a monopoly on violence to exist, if you can’t defend it there are no rights.
I have a gun. Try taking it from me.
There are no laws saying I can’t have one, and there are no laws saying I can’t shoot you if you try to take it.
You cannot seriously believe in a might makes right society, can you?
I mean, first of all, have you taken a look at our current society, and second of all, this is just a thought experiment to prove that anarcho-communism is pure fantasy, or at the very least not inevitable.
Do you believe that collective forms of ownership would win on an even playing field?
Yes, absolutely. How would one win over with individual ownership? One dude with a couple guns vs an entire community?
Then we gradually dismantle corps by eliminating regulatory capture, IP and limited liability over time and we all win.
I dont know, let’s ask Chinese feudal lords how their ability to enforce private property went after the CPC stopped enforcing their private property rights for them like the old government did.
LOL.
A property owner (or in this case, really anyone who lays claim to a property, since a state that could issue official deeds does not exist) still has the right to defend their property using violent means if necessary.
Okay, but if there isn’t a state, who is to say the workers don’t have the right to protect their surplus labor value from theft by seizing the means of production, through violence if necessary?
This is one of the reasons why anarcho capitalism is an incoherent ideology. People who believe in it think that the right of private property is just something everyone agrees should be held sacred, when it only exists because of state violence.
Okay, but if there isn’t a state, who is to say the workers don’t have the right to protect their surplus labor value from theft by seizing the means of production, through violence if necessary?
Nobody. But conversely, if there isn’t a state, what’s to prevent property owners from banding together and protecting their property with violence?
Before you say “but there’s more workers than property owners”, keep in mind that given enough money or gold or whatever, they could also hire mercenaries to prevent workers from rebelling.
It really all comes down to who is better at organizing. So it’s possible that in one scenario, workers would seize the means of production successfully, and if they are good enough at keeping it running, they’d operate as a commune, while in another scenario, there’d be a more hierarchical, capitalist structure of organization.
You’re simply arguing from a standpoint of “but I like THIS approach better” when it’s a question of “but can you make it WORK?”
But conversely, if there isn’t a state, what’s to prevent property owners from banding together and protecting their property with violence?
That would literally be a capitalist state in every meaningful sense.
keep in mind that given enough money or gold or whatever, they could also hire mercenaries to prevent workers from rebelling.
Sorta like a police force of some kind?
It really all comes down to who is better at organizing. So it’s possible that in one scenario, workers would seize the means of production successfully, and if they are good enough at keeping it running, they’d operate as a commune, while in another scenario, there’d be a more hierarchical, capitalist structure of organization.
You know what is really fucking organized? A state. It is almost like at the beginning of the country all the large landowners and capitalists got together and made one of those to protect their interests.
You’re simply arguing from a standpoint of “but I like THIS approach better” when it’s a question of “but can you make it WORK?”
Lol. I am literally asking how your hypothetical system would handle class antagonisms, the primary concern of politics. I am very directly asking “but can you make it work”
So you just want the violence you prefer meted out by the state.
Is this meant to be a gotcha? What I prefer has nothing to do with understanding how states function and why they coalesce.
Not really a gotcha. I just forget I’m pretty alone in my (particular) distaste for violence.
Edit: didn’t really mean for that to sound so negative.
That would literally be a capitalist state in every meaningful sense.
In the same way that a collective of workers getting together to control the means of production would be a communist state in every meaningful sense.
Yes. The difference is I’m not claiming a proletarian democracy isn’t a state.
I prefer to call them “19th century robber barons” who yearn for the days of company towns, where they would own you from cradle to grave.
They aren’t robber barons.
They’re the simpering toady to the robber baron.
The robber baron loves the government, he buys as many politicians as he can.
I love watching them try to explain why it wouldn’t just become neo-fuedalism lmao
Cause they imagine themselves as the Lord and not the Peasants that they currently are in reality.
To be fair, some of these fucks are the Peter Thiels of the world that are part of the aristocracy.
But in a world without the state to enforce their bullshit they would fall quickly to violent people like back in the old days of feudalism.
Peter Theil needs to be hurt in a way money can’t fix. The only way he will start thinking about others is to need them.
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The thing is that’s what they want. They all want to be feudal lords.
Edgelords
I misread it as arachnid capitalism, and I was trying to figure out which spiders were apparently pro-capitalism lmao
They are really good at networking.
Is there anything worse than anarchocapitalism?
Fascism has done far more harm to the world. Barely any half-serious anarcho-capitalist has had a hand into influencing much practical policy. Even Milei is backing down from some of his campaign proposals, and he’s just gotten elected.
Anachrocapitalist groomers as the image implies?
Hmmm. What about anarchocapitalists that leave capitalist out of their descriptors and larp like they’re contemporary versions of the DK-listening, doc martens wearing, spiky hair having kids from the 1980s. And ancaps might be slightly better than the rich people at the top that use every advantage they’ve been given as a lever to suppress the success of everyone else. At least ancaps still have the potential to change.
There are voluntarists that believe we are ethically obligated to help each other, but aren’t willing to use violence to force others to do what we want.
Donkey Kong listening?
Donkey Kong wishes! No, Dead Kennedys
Yes, exactly that. Ancaps live in a right-wing fantasy world, like the rest of the right.
*volcels
Their shitty behavior is what keeps them from getting laid. That makes them volcels.
Then actual incels are exceedingly rare!
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Aka Pimping your population out to U.S. companies
What about the roads, who will pay for the roads?
Yesterday I saw a person say that they should all be privatized. Which is so insane I walked away and talked to someone else. Like I’m not going to convince a guy at a bar that his extremist ideology sounds like it wants to create just a godsawful way to live or that our country has tried the whole “minarchism” thing and it was a fucking disaster that led to us creating regulations, roads, etc.
Basically a bunch of toll roads where you pay to use them, right? But paying every time you use the road will get expensive quick, so road companies will offer subscriptions so you can save money if you frequently use their roads. Some companies will bundle subscriptions from many road companies together so you’ll only pay for one subscription instead of dozens. They might even offer discount if you use yearly subscription. Viola! Now you have road tax except paid to private companies.
Yeah but to some people that sounds good. It confuses and frustrates me, like yeah I don’t like the government, but I also acknowledge that publicly run companies tend to be screwed over by legislators not by lack of profit motive. Say what you will about Amtrak, but if you’ve ever rode a train in the northeast corridor you understand that it’s a pretty good deal. And it encourages a more pro-social habit.
We’re facing catastrophes both ecological and social due to failure to govern. We could be doing fine, but we keep choosing as a country that instead of regulating and taxing and investing in things we want to make taxes into a dirty word, kneel at the feet of our corporate overlords. If we want our country to be worth living in we need to invest in it for real
My in-laws live on a private road. They’re the fourth lot down from the main road (for the uninitiated, if your property would block access to another property, then there exists an access easement across your property, and you must allow people - principally the owners - to traverse your property so they can get to theirs). Everyone is responsible for (but not obligated to) maintaining the stretch of road in front of their houses. The first couple houses are owned by folks with a good chunk of change and the road is as nice as it gets. The third house down has never done a thing to their stretch of road and it’s a piece of shit for that little bit. You’re cranking the steering wheel from lock to lock to lock again to avoid holes 6 inches deep. Their house is in a sorry state so there’s not a chance in the world they have the money to fix the road up. My in-laws throw some gravel in the holes from time to time to make things a little easier on themselves.
The municipality can’t/won’t do a thing. They don’t own the road and it’s not like the neighbors are blocking people in or out. The road is only nigh (not completely) impassable.
Someone I know is a libertarian and when I asked how stuff like road maintenance would work on his ideal society, and he was like, “well everyone would pitch in to pay a company to do it.” Ok, so what if someone refuses, are there any mechanisms to penalize them? And who chooses the company and signs the contract and schedules the work? You guys gonna vote for people to do those things? Congrats, you just created government. He also had no real response to what happens if one neighborhood is full of good people willing to pitch in, and the next one says fuck it, we’re not doing any of that, so the roads are great for a mile and are undrivable the next mile.
So yeah, sounds a lot like what your parents are dealing with. Paradise!
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Sounds like the NPR model of funding. Even if you can get everything else to work, you still have a couple of weeks every year when you can’t go anywhere without having to stop and listen to Nina Totenberg lecture you 20 minutes about how important it is for everyone to pitch in as much as they can afford.
Honestly fuck the roads.
Fuck roads! We want an advanced system of High Speed and Light Rail to make roads obsolete for traveling!
That’s all well and good, but you’re gonna need roads for last mile delivery of goods, and a transit path for people that service homes and businesses.
That’s why I qualified my statement by saying obsolete for traveling.
I fail to see how debating the form of a transportation network is related to the necessity of funding one.
God i wish i didn’t need a car, they fucking suck so hard.
The slaves will be taxed, of course, FREEDOM B***
Cut. It. Out.
Dump. Alanis.
Ah yes, I have insulted my opponent in the genital area, therefore his arguments are invalid.
Nah their arguments are invalid because they aren’t based in logic or economic theory.
If it makes you feel any better I just think human interaction should be voluntary.
Please enlighten me as to how that is the case.
Because I dont want the most vulnerable folks in our society to just fuxking die. People have chronic conditions that require daily medical care that would not be available for the vast majority of folks in an anarcho capitalist society, if they were available at all. I used to love fantasizing about zombie apocalypses and the fall of society myself, untll i realized my partner who is a Type 1 Diabetic probably wouldnt live long in that future. Wanting an anarcho capitalist future is the highest indicator that you live a life of extreme privilege and dont care about fellow human beings.
Okay, fair enough, and I am by no means intending to criticize you for your kindheartedness here, but that’s literally the opposite of economic theory, which concerns itself primarily with achieving the maximum output possible given a certain input.
Also, consider that this does not mean that it is therefore by nature entirely inhuman and incompatible with caring about people, but rather that the ability to achieve a high productivity is required in order to have an excess of resources than can be used to care for those who cannot care for themselves.
If you think about it, this is in fact essential to maintain human life. Children for instance always require more resources than they can produce, so parents have to be able to produce more than they need for themselves if they want their children to survive. Same goes for society as a whole — the productive members have to be able to produce an excess or the unproductive (weak, sick, or old) will starve.
No shit it doesnt require economic theory when basic logic tells us its a terrible way to organize a society.
Yeah, okay, I get it. You’re an idiot and I’m wasting my time.
Ok, so if I ever meet you in our anarcocapitalist future I will bash your head in and steal your house. Gonna call the police?
Pot meet kettle
So you are saying we will produce in excess and give all of the excess to people who can’t produce (children, weak, sick, old…) So from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs?
No, I’m saying unless you want EVERYONE to starve, excess productivity is required even under communism.
I’m all for more productivity if the excesses are redistributed
We have the worst aspect of anarchism, but wait there’s more, we also have capitalism!
Man, I am so glad “anarchocapitalist” is starting to stick. I can’t believe they got away with the other word for as long as they did.
What other word? Minarchist?
Libertarian, which ought to be understood as left anarchist.
“job creators.”
