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RE: Peaceful People Deserve To Die

in #anarchy6 years ago

I don't know about the debates you've been having, but almost every anarchist I know is a non-capitalist. I don't know any that are communists, mostly because the idea of eliminating the market (by consolidating everything into the state), and THEN trying to eliminate the state is absolutely ridiculous.

Capitalism, or any inherently competitive, power-focused model is going to lead to violence, and sociologically speaking relative poverty (inequality) is wildly destructive for the human psyche. As we can see from the open-source movement & academic fields with open discussion, human advancement is maximized through cooperation, free access to information, and not through competition over profit.

The State is a natural evolution of the competitive market. Those with power/capital are of course going to do what they can to consolidate power, to maximize "market share" by eliminating competition, to keep costs down (to maximize profit) by lowering quality & paying employees less than what their labor generates, etc. All it takes is some of those capital accumulators to not be moral, and all of the sudden we have organized crime syndicates basically.

Again, I've never met someone who was actually an "an-com", to me it seems to be a term used about 50/50 by ancaps for anyone who disagrees with them and by antifa-type authoritarians for themselves. Kinda like the "anarchists" wearing black masks and breaking shit at events like the WTO riots in Seattle (government agents generally).

My point is never that one particular old idea (capitalism/communism/etc) is any good, but always that we can do better than any of those old systems with our current & expanding technology, understandings, and capabilities.

Personally, if anarchism (the recognition of individual sovereignty & non-aggression) is actually the foundation, then any of the authoritarian arguments don't exist, so we're actually just talking about competetive vs cooperative. Personally, I vote cooperative every time.

If a bunch of an-caps want to go create a community where they all have to make quid-pro-quo exchanges and interact with each other based on economic gain they're free to do so, but that sounds like the kind of place that kills human connection, empathy, and creativity.

I've also found that most capitalists have little to no concern for the environment, non-human life, or much of anything else. Not necessarily a personal-level thing, but certainly the game of capitalism itself doesn't account for those negative externalities.