Non-states or weak states very quickly run into collective action problems which are made significantly worse at large scales. Generally, they work when the material conditions allow for it, for example, the Zapatistas are in rural mountains that nobody really cares that much about. If they happened to be sitting on top of a bunch of oil, then the situation would be quite different.
States are the most effective means of solving collective action problems that currently exist. Even the fundamental goal of keeping people safe from other states cannot be achieved in most cases without some degree of centralization. “I can’t go up and defend the pass, I have to stay here and protect my farm.” That’s what decentralization gets you, and the result is that the enemy, who is solving such collective action problems through the mechanism of a state, is (generally) able to subdue each individual with overwhelming force. But it extends beyond defense, “I can’t help build that bridge so we can all trade with our neighbors, I have to tend to my crops or I’ll starve.” While these problems can be solved on a very small scale, on a local level where people know and trust each other, it generally cannot be scaled up to similar situations beyond that.
Yeah and white people have also done that while having teeth so clearly that means we need to knock out all our teeth.
The state has been used to persecute and exploit people because it is an effective means of wielding power, so virtually everyone everywhere uses it, if they can. There’s just this silly martyr complex where people would rather lose and get themselves killed in practice, so that they can remain pure in their ideals. I suppose it’s useful for winning arguments. Not so much at actually achieving anything.
I think I could chill with Marx¹, he was a shockingly decent guy for the time. Engels was a piece of fucking shit and I’m not reading anything else he wrote.
¹teaboo capitalism-loving steam engine fetishist that he was
Engels’ contributions to Marxist theory are critical works, such as Anti-Dühring and On the Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, and neither him nor Marx by any means loved capitalism. He was crucial to the development of dialectical materialism and scientific socialism, and was Marx’s biggest sponsor and comrade.
Kinda, at least compared to feudalism, though he also hated it and wished it abolished. Capitalism’s advent was both progressive, and resulted in incredible immiseration for the new proletariat as compared to their earlier yeomanry and serfdom.
Dunno why you have to phrase it in a sexual manner. Engels sponsored a lot of Marx’s work, and was a valuable comrade when writing theory together. Engels is one of Marxism’s most important theorists, and by no means was simply regurgitating Marx; he was the one Marx bounced ideas off of and they together grew to develop Marxism.
Dunno why you have to phrase it in a sexual manner
Interpreting “sugar daddy” in a sexual manner says more about you than the usage of the word does about me. (As does remarking on it at all: I don’t care whether or not Marx and Engels were in a sexual relationship… do you?)
“Sugar Daddy” implies Marx gave Engels sexual favors in exchange for cash or other goods, housing, etc. That’s the meaning of the “Sugar” part of the phrase “Sugar Daddy.” You made it sexual, not me. No, I would not have had any issue with them being gay, except for that being cheating in presumably monogamous relationships. I myself am pan, so I don’t know what you’re doing here.
I do think hating socialist states with the same or worse ferocity that capitalist states get is a serious misjudgement. Administration is necessary for large scale production and distribution, whether you count that as a state or not. Communism as a stateless, classless, moneyless society would have no class, but would still have administration.
Administration and protocols do not need to be centralized, and in fact centralization is a weakness.
The fediverse, and TCP/IP more broadly, even the physical structure of the internet kind of prove that, even compromises by existing within the context of forced hierarchal structures like capitalist ownership and legal accountability by authoritarian states.
Centralization and authority is a weakness and allows for corruption and everything to go to shit. Do we not remember reddit, here?
Shit just needs to make an effort towards compatibility. A little slack to kludge things together where it’s needed, and people who genuinely give a shit about systems working.
Coordination has costs, and pretending you can force it with men with guns is just absurd. Let everybody bend, dont pretend you can have a system with perfect efficiency, and allow slack where it’s needed. You’ll end up with a better more efficient system overall.
It does not require authority, centralization, or punishment. Openness is a perfectly good substitute.
Centralization is a tool that has uses, as does decentralization. Coordination at scale, with critical safety conerns, often requires centralization. Decentralization is just as vulnerable to corruption. Socialist states have used both in combination to achieve dramatically positive results, with collectivization and central planning being the backbone of said systems.
Doubt. Please explain, possibly with examples; practices incidents etc.
just as vulnerable
It’s not immune. It’s not ‘just as vulnerable’. You have to compromise a lot more stuff to fuck a decentralized system. If you’ve ever read cop doctrine; even they know this. They really love finding leaders; makes their jobs so much easier.
A quick example is local government vs regional government. Local governments do not have the same focus at a regional level that regional governments would over several local governments, while regional governments do not have the same view local governments would in detail.
As for decentralization being just as vulnerable, I mean that in the sense that fractured systems are easier to pit against itself. The US is a two party dictatorship, and is incredibly corrupt because of it.
Okay i think I can safely stop taking you seriously here
and is incredibly corrupt
Not a bug, working as intended (posadism looking real good about now)
because of (being two party instead of one?)
Um… So, wow, have you watched the news in the past decade?
local vs regional governments
Again, you’re thinking in the paradigm of what is and pretending you can understand everything, thinking a more abstracted perspective should necessarily corellate with authority, and thinking perspective and authority should be both bundled and personalized.
Some cases need binding control, especially related to industrial environments and hazardous working conditions. We develop methods of organizing and structuring ourselves often because it’s useful, not because it benefits the person with a broader scope of responsibility, kinda like strategians vs tacticians. Those in these positions can be elected, chosen based on merit, etc, and will serve for greater prosperity than had these positions been avoided out of a moral objection to hierarchy.
Sure, let’s say something like a lock out tag out mechanism. Person unplugs dangerous machine, puts a sign on the power button, and either nobody turns it on until its fixed, or nobody touches it until the person who put the sign on is out of its guts. This is not hierarchal authority, and in fact everyone having this power, levelling it, increases workplace safety. This is in fact communication. It’s a veto.
Identifying roles with individuals² necessarily creates hierarchy and reduces communication bandwidth. I think the idea that you need to have one consciousness one individual one will responsible for things above a certain scale is insane and backwards, it comes from an insecurity and an unwillingness to adapt.
Quite frankly, you cannot comprehend all of a large system. You can’t comprehend all of the road traffic in a medium sized city. Can’t be done. Your brain just isn’t enough, and the more you try, the more you abstract and reduce, the more you enforce demands based on your reduced abstract understanding, the more you get into the surreal shit show that was the late soviet union’s industrial system¹. The atrophy and distortion is unavoidable unless you work from the bottom up.
Even in your industrial example, having everyone’s eyes and everyone’s³ voice, including their veto on a process will get you a better end result.
The harder you squeeze the higher functions of society, the more easily they slip out of your grasp. You must trust, you must allow others agency, you must understand that you do not understand and not fucking pretend.
If you must have a hierarchal model, I can recommend maszlow’s–which on a civilizational level isn’t all that far off a Marxian analysis of progress. Sorry for the ramble; am very high rn.
¹not that there was a single thing wrong with the USSR at its worst that isn’t wrong with the united States today, and worse besides that make it harder to use as a clear example, please read like an adult and dont make me baby your tankie ass because your imaginary fantasy of your state-daddy you’ve never been to built from 50 year old propaganda pieces is beyond criticism and was without flaw. You can love shit that wasn’t perfect, it’s fine.
² a lunch huddle, Bob being kind of a safety nerd, and the informal back channels kludges and black markets that literally always grow organically in any rigid authoritative system that needs to actually work, sometimes to everyone’s benefit and nobody’s acknowledgement, sometimes at great cost. When roles like coordination and safety are a group responsibility everyone keeps at least half an eye out, and some fucking nerd always does at least as much as a dedicated manager would.
³everyone who gives a shit, at least. Workers at a factory cross training and coming up with ways they could do better, all reading different industry publications giving them different perspectives at the weekly meeting or next refactoring is going to get you better productivity safety efficiency and QOL gains than any amount of distant bosses or consultants could do, and the same between factories, industries, etc. The same is true for farms, gardens, cottage industry, mines, etc.
You’re dramatically misunderstanding my point, to the point that you’re making the same strawman argument Mises did to try to “debunk” socialism. Coordination and administration does not require a single person having total view, that’s not how broad systems work. You need several levels of abastraction and coordination, which can be done by teams of people, you can’t have a fully flat system at large scale without running into massive problems.
The people doing the actual work, if allowed to see the bigger picture, even piece by piece, will do this better than ‘bosses’.
People with different experiences and who tend towards different roles will have different perspectives, different understandings all rooted in some aspect(s) of the actual function of the thing.
Having a weekly team meeting or culture of conflict resolution serves all the same purposes as a dedicated executive, with none of the inefficiencies and substantial gains in both psychological maturity and worker agency to do their shit better.
Responding to inputs from all directions rather than a rigid up/down tree based structure makes more adaptive more realistic systems with fewer kludges and more honesty.
Strategians and tacticians serve different roles because they see different levels of the battlefield, and footsoldiers can see what they directly interact with but are not privy to understanding the full battlefield. Having a fully horizontal organization is shooting yourself in the foot, we develop intra-class hierarchies like managers not because of class society, but because of the added complexity of large-scale production and distribution.
No, I have heard and understand your explanations, I just disagree with them. I used to be an anarchist myself, you aren’t explaining anything foreign to me.
ML’s explicitly are anti-state and believe it to be in charge of managing irreconcilable class differences so it must be destroyed and replaced with something else. This is written explicitly in Lenin’s State and Revolution.
Almost, MLs understand that the state is necessary until class is abolished, so what replaces the bourgeois state is a proletarian state that withers with respect to collectivization of production and distribution. Revolution for MLs doesn’t get rid of the state overnight, but creates a new state that cannot but wither.
Careful, you mention hating the state get everyone riled up. Conservatives, Liberals, Communists, all of them.
Really, just about anybody that looks to historical examples to inform their perspective.
There are examples of non states working, but it is unclear if it would be possible to maintain large societies.
Non-states or weak states very quickly run into collective action problems which are made significantly worse at large scales. Generally, they work when the material conditions allow for it, for example, the Zapatistas are in rural mountains that nobody really cares that much about. If they happened to be sitting on top of a bunch of oil, then the situation would be quite different.
States are the most effective means of solving collective action problems that currently exist. Even the fundamental goal of keeping people safe from other states cannot be achieved in most cases without some degree of centralization. “I can’t go up and defend the pass, I have to stay here and protect my farm.” That’s what decentralization gets you, and the result is that the enemy, who is solving such collective action problems through the mechanism of a state, is (generally) able to subdue each individual with overwhelming force. But it extends beyond defense, “I can’t help build that bridge so we can all trade with our neighbors, I have to tend to my crops or I’ll starve.” While these problems can be solved on a very small scale, on a local level where people know and trust each other, it generally cannot be scaled up to similar situations beyond that.
Very white take, congratulations.
Only white people have states, yes.
Very disingenuous of you to not recognize white people wielding the state have persecuted indigenous people all over the world.
Yeah and white people have also done that while having teeth so clearly that means we need to knock out all our teeth.
The state has been used to persecute and exploit people because it is an effective means of wielding power, so virtually everyone everywhere uses it, if they can. There’s just this silly martyr complex where people would rather lose and get themselves killed in practice, so that they can remain pure in their ideals. I suppose it’s useful for winning arguments. Not so much at actually achieving anything.
Show me a state that’s never persecuted people.
That’s an impossible standard, and doesn’t really have anything to do with anything. I’m not interested in impractical moral perfectionism.
Damn I was really hoping you’d prove me wrong.
Especially on an ml instance. I’m waiting for some bozo to post Engels’ “on authority” again.
I think I could chill with Marx¹, he was a shockingly decent guy for the time. Engels was a piece of fucking shit and I’m not reading anything else he wrote.
¹teaboo capitalism-loving steam engine fetishist that he was
Engels’ contributions to Marxist theory are critical works, such as Anti-Dühring and On the Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, and neither him nor Marx by any means loved capitalism. He was crucial to the development of dialectical materialism and scientific socialism, and was Marx’s biggest sponsor and comrade.
Its not Engels that is a capitalism lover (in the eabove comment) its Marx.
Kinda, at least compared to feudalism, though he also hated it and wished it abolished. Capitalism’s advent was both progressive, and resulted in incredible immiseration for the new proletariat as compared to their earlier yeomanry and serfdom.
I just wanted to point out that Cassandra said that Marx was a capitalism lover, not Engels as you replied.
Yep, gotcha. I see now.
Then I suppose I will never fully explore Marxist theory. How sad.
Guess not. I agree, it is sad.
True dat. AFAIK, Engels mostly regurgitated Marx anyway. So nothing much lost in terms of theory.
Engels co-developed dialectical materialism and scientific socialism, Marx could not have done what he did without his best friend and comrade.
I’m sure Marx’ sugar daddy was very important for him.
Dunno why you have to phrase it in a sexual manner. Engels sponsored a lot of Marx’s work, and was a valuable comrade when writing theory together. Engels is one of Marxism’s most important theorists, and by no means was simply regurgitating Marx; he was the one Marx bounced ideas off of and they together grew to develop Marxism.
Interpreting “sugar daddy” in a sexual manner says more about you than the usage of the word does about me. (As does remarking on it at all: I don’t care whether or not Marx and Engels were in a sexual relationship… do you?)
“Sugar Daddy” implies Marx gave Engels sexual favors in exchange for cash or other goods, housing, etc. That’s the meaning of the “Sugar” part of the phrase “Sugar Daddy.” You made it sexual, not me. No, I would not have had any issue with them being gay, except for that being cheating in presumably monogamous relationships. I myself am pan, so I don’t know what you’re doing here.
I do think hating socialist states with the same or worse ferocity that capitalist states get is a serious misjudgement. Administration is necessary for large scale production and distribution, whether you count that as a state or not. Communism as a stateless, classless, moneyless society would have no class, but would still have administration.
Administration and protocols do not need to be centralized, and in fact centralization is a weakness.
The fediverse, and TCP/IP more broadly, even the physical structure of the internet kind of prove that, even compromises by existing within the context of forced hierarchal structures like capitalist ownership and legal accountability by authoritarian states.
Centralization and authority is a weakness and allows for corruption and everything to go to shit. Do we not remember reddit, here?
Shit just needs to make an effort towards compatibility. A little slack to kludge things together where it’s needed, and people who genuinely give a shit about systems working.
Coordination has costs, and pretending you can force it with men with guns is just absurd. Let everybody bend, dont pretend you can have a system with perfect efficiency, and allow slack where it’s needed. You’ll end up with a better more efficient system overall.
It does not require authority, centralization, or punishment. Openness is a perfectly good substitute.
Centralization is a tool that has uses, as does decentralization. Coordination at scale, with critical safety conerns, often requires centralization. Decentralization is just as vulnerable to corruption. Socialist states have used both in combination to achieve dramatically positive results, with collectivization and central planning being the backbone of said systems.
Doubt. Please explain, possibly with examples; practices incidents etc.
It’s not immune. It’s not ‘just as vulnerable’. You have to compromise a lot more stuff to fuck a decentralized system. If you’ve ever read cop doctrine; even they know this. They really love finding leaders; makes their jobs so much easier.
A quick example is local government vs regional government. Local governments do not have the same focus at a regional level that regional governments would over several local governments, while regional governments do not have the same view local governments would in detail.
As for decentralization being just as vulnerable, I mean that in the sense that fractured systems are easier to pit against itself. The US is a two party dictatorship, and is incredibly corrupt because of it.
Okay i think I can safely stop taking you seriously here
Not a bug, working as intended (posadism looking real good about now)
Um… So, wow, have you watched the news in the past decade?
Again, you’re thinking in the paradigm of what is and pretending you can understand everything, thinking a more abstracted perspective should necessarily corellate with authority, and thinking perspective and authority should be both bundled and personalized.
I’ve tried to explain to you for soo many times that anarchists argue that administration does not equal a command-and-control authority.
Some cases need binding control, especially related to industrial environments and hazardous working conditions. We develop methods of organizing and structuring ourselves often because it’s useful, not because it benefits the person with a broader scope of responsibility, kinda like strategians vs tacticians. Those in these positions can be elected, chosen based on merit, etc, and will serve for greater prosperity than had these positions been avoided out of a moral objection to hierarchy.
Sure, let’s say something like a lock out tag out mechanism. Person unplugs dangerous machine, puts a sign on the power button, and either nobody turns it on until its fixed, or nobody touches it until the person who put the sign on is out of its guts. This is not hierarchal authority, and in fact everyone having this power, levelling it, increases workplace safety. This is in fact communication. It’s a veto.
Identifying roles with individuals² necessarily creates hierarchy and reduces communication bandwidth. I think the idea that you need to have one consciousness one individual one will responsible for things above a certain scale is insane and backwards, it comes from an insecurity and an unwillingness to adapt.
Quite frankly, you cannot comprehend all of a large system. You can’t comprehend all of the road traffic in a medium sized city. Can’t be done. Your brain just isn’t enough, and the more you try, the more you abstract and reduce, the more you enforce demands based on your reduced abstract understanding, the more you get into the surreal shit show that was the late soviet union’s industrial system¹. The atrophy and distortion is unavoidable unless you work from the bottom up.
Even in your industrial example, having everyone’s eyes and everyone’s³ voice, including their veto on a process will get you a better end result.
The harder you squeeze the higher functions of society, the more easily they slip out of your grasp. You must trust, you must allow others agency, you must understand that you do not understand and not fucking pretend.
If you must have a hierarchal model, I can recommend maszlow’s–which on a civilizational level isn’t all that far off a Marxian analysis of progress. Sorry for the ramble; am very high rn.
¹not that there was a single thing wrong with the USSR at its worst that isn’t wrong with the united States today, and worse besides that make it harder to use as a clear example, please read like an adult and dont make me baby your tankie ass because your imaginary fantasy of your state-daddy you’ve never been to built from 50 year old propaganda pieces is beyond criticism and was without flaw. You can love shit that wasn’t perfect, it’s fine.
² a lunch huddle, Bob being kind of a safety nerd, and the informal back channels kludges and black markets that literally always grow organically in any rigid authoritative system that needs to actually work, sometimes to everyone’s benefit and nobody’s acknowledgement, sometimes at great cost. When roles like coordination and safety are a group responsibility everyone keeps at least half an eye out, and some fucking nerd always does at least as much as a dedicated manager would.
³everyone who gives a shit, at least. Workers at a factory cross training and coming up with ways they could do better, all reading different industry publications giving them different perspectives at the weekly meeting or next refactoring is going to get you better productivity safety efficiency and QOL gains than any amount of distant bosses or consultants could do, and the same between factories, industries, etc. The same is true for farms, gardens, cottage industry, mines, etc.
You’re dramatically misunderstanding my point, to the point that you’re making the same strawman argument Mises did to try to “debunk” socialism. Coordination and administration does not require a single person having total view, that’s not how broad systems work. You need several levels of abastraction and coordination, which can be done by teams of people, you can’t have a fully flat system at large scale without running into massive problems.
The people doing the actual work, if allowed to see the bigger picture, even piece by piece, will do this better than ‘bosses’.
People with different experiences and who tend towards different roles will have different perspectives, different understandings all rooted in some aspect(s) of the actual function of the thing.
Having a weekly team meeting or culture of conflict resolution serves all the same purposes as a dedicated executive, with none of the inefficiencies and substantial gains in both psychological maturity and worker agency to do their shit better.
Responding to inputs from all directions rather than a rigid up/down tree based structure makes more adaptive more realistic systems with fewer kludges and more honesty.
Strategians and tacticians serve different roles because they see different levels of the battlefield, and footsoldiers can see what they directly interact with but are not privy to understanding the full battlefield. Having a fully horizontal organization is shooting yourself in the foot, we develop intra-class hierarchies like managers not because of class society, but because of the added complexity of large-scale production and distribution.
… and you refuse to understand again.
I understand, I just disagree with you.
No, you refuse to understand what anarchists understand as authority (just like Engels did).
It’s been explained enough to you already that I can rule out anything but refusal to understand.
No, I have heard and understand your explanations, I just disagree with them. I used to be an anarchist myself, you aren’t explaining anything foreign to me.
ML’s explicitly are anti-state and believe it to be in charge of managing irreconcilable class differences so it must be destroyed and replaced with something else. This is written explicitly in Lenin’s State and Revolution.
Almost, MLs understand that the state is necessary until class is abolished, so what replaces the bourgeois state is a proletarian state that withers with respect to collectivization of production and distribution. Revolution for MLs doesn’t get rid of the state overnight, but creates a new state that cannot but wither.
Tell that to this MoFo.
I’ve lost count of how many times MLers were trying to school me of how anarchism’s end-goal is delusional.
What an insufferable human. Fuck the police and fuck the state.
that’s why they’re on crazypeople.online. lol
Yeah, I don’t identify as a ML I just read books lol. Most people don’t