How does Anarchism deal with conflict within its societies? - Page 4 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14357032
Matt24 wrote:Technology, I have a question. Which thinkers theorized these ideas of technological distributism? Could it have been Murray Bookchin? I've been reading more information about Anarchism and I found out that Bookchin expressed similar ideas to the ones we've been discussing in his book "Post-Scarcity Anarchism".
Was he the first one to propose this anarchist system? Do others advocate his ideas?


I'm not that familiar with Bookchin actually, but from what I understand he's coming at it from an angle that is radically environmentalist and distrustful of private property from a socialist perspective, whereas I'm not. We're possibly compatible, but I'll have to research this.

Karl Hess is an anarchist who advocated an early form of some of these things and was an "appropriate technology" enthusiast. Here we would probably still differ in our explicit positions, if not combatively.

How I came to my position was by modulating things I had previously believed into a new coherent whole without just throwing the baby out with the bathwater each time I found out something was a little wrong with a 100% pure application of the particular philosophy I was looking at.

My political philosophy is essential libertarian/ancap ethical standing points, with the details modified on property through the distributist and subsidiarity principles of the... Catholic Church (ugh), through history and class analysis by... Marxism (ugh), economic theory with Keynesian economics, and technological applicability to the problem by observation and futurist arguments, as well as some of the arguments of the appropriate technology folks.

I've pretty much tunneled through the political spectrum into another dimension by this point. As far as I'm aware, technological distributism is something I named even if I someone else thought of something similar. Thinking about principles that emerged from Catholic teaching and then applying that to a technological paradigm where it could actually be workable is not the kind of synthesis that just pops into your head unless you've been through a very specific political journey.
#14357636
Nunt wrote:That doesn't really change matters. Instead of calling people 100% stupid for buying non-usefull smarthphones, you call them 50% stupid for not spending their money at something more useful than smartphones.


Uhm, no, that's not my point. I'm not calling consumers stupid, period. On the contrary, I'm referring to the production side of the equation.

All I'm saying is, isn't it kind of dreadful that most of the big tech research and innovations are carried out for corporations that sell mobile phones, tablets, etc., instead of being done for groundbreaking new devices and stuff?

It is worth pointing out that, as Voluntarism argued, "spin-offs" can come out of the production of cellphones, tablets and stuff. I give you that. But consider this case, for example. This robotics professor is now working with Google on the creation of the "Google Glass" gadget. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/g ... asses.html). Now tell me, don't you think it would be so much better if this guy was hired to actually try to make robots? Obviously, it's not his fault that Google's one of the most profitable companies out there. But I wish there was more innovation outside of the business framework.

Maybe we need more government-sponsored research? It's amazing how much progress engineering can make with the help of government expenditure, as it's been proven by the development drones have had in the past few decades.
#14357670
Technology wrote:I'm not that familiar with Bookchin actually, but from what I understand he's coming at it from an angle that is radically environmentalist and distrustful of private property from a socialist perspective, whereas I'm not. We're possibly compatible, but I'll have to research this.

Karl Hess is an anarchist who advocated an early form of some of these things and was an "appropriate technology" enthusiast. Here we would probably still differ in our explicit positions, if not combatively.

How I came to my position was by modulating things I had previously believed into a new coherent whole without just throwing the baby out with the bathwater each time I found out something was a little wrong with a 100% pure application of the particular philosophy I was looking at.

My political philosophy is essential libertarian/ancap ethical standing points, with the details modified on property through the distributist and subsidiarity principles of the... Catholic Church (ugh), through history and class analysis by... Marxism (ugh), economic theory with Keynesian economics, and technological applicability to the problem by observation and futurist arguments, as well as some of the arguments of the appropriate technology folks.

I've pretty much tunneled through the political spectrum into another dimension by this point. As far as I'm aware, technological distributism is something I named even if I someone else thought of something similar. Thinking about principles that emerged from Catholic teaching and then applying that to a technological paradigm where it could actually be workable is not the kind of synthesis that just pops into your head unless you've been through a very specific political journey.


I just really respect you for having come up with your own political philosophy. I'm trying to find my own, and I swear it's just so hard to do it. There are so many factors to consider, and you also need to weigh the pros and cons. That's actually the main reason why I created this thread: to explore what I thought about anarchist systems. So really, thank you for taking the time to express your views.

Actually, we have very similar perspectives. I know I'm an idealist who would like to see inequality extinguished. I've been maintaining leftist views for some time, but I practically first started to discuss politics as a liberal, later as a socialist (and being disappointed by the experiments we've had) now I'm sort of a Keynesian. However, I know I need to find my accurate place in the political spectrum, as even right-wing and far left-wing parties can be Keynesians.

Your philosophy appeals to me a lot. Yet it's obviously dependent on future events and occurrences, so as you said, "technological distributism" is in another political dimension. I'll keep some of your basic ideas in my mind as I keep analysing different ideologies.

Oh, and by the way, this is what I had read about Bookchin (from Wikipedia):
"Post-Scarcity Anarchism is a collection of essays written by Murray Bookchin and first published in 1971 (...). It outlines the possible form anarchism might take under conditions of post-scarcity. It is one of Bookchin's major works, and its radical thesis provoked controversy for being utopian and messianic in its faith in the liberatory potential of technology.

Bookchin's "post-scarcity anarchism" is an economic system based on social ecology, libertarian municipalism, and an abundance of fundamental resources. Bookchin argues that post-industrial societies are also post-scarcity societies, and can thus imagine "the fulfillment of the social and cultural potentialities latent in a technology of abundance". The self-administration of society is now made possible by technological advancement and, when technology is used in an ecologically sensitive manner, the revolutionary potential of society will be much changed.

Bookchin claims that the expanded production made possible by the technological advances of the twentieth century were in the pursuit of market profit and at the expense of the needs of humans and of ecological sustainability. The accumulation of capital can no longer be considered a prerequisite for liberation, and the notion that obstructions such as the state, social hierarchy, and vanguard political parties are necessary in the struggle for freedom of the working classes can be dispelled as a myth."

Not sure what is meant from that last paragraph though. Nevertheless, he indeed sees the matter from an ecological perspective, as you said. It's an interesting framework to take, but nowadays it sounds almost impossible to imagine technological abundance without environmental damage. Even today, without actual technological abundance for everybody, electronical waste; pollution, etc. are taking their toll on our planet. And a circular economy is really difficult to achieve. That's just my opinion though, I may be wrong. After all, we don't know what the future's got in store.
#14357687
Matt24 wrote:It is worth pointing out that, as Voluntarism argued, "spin-offs" can come out of the production of cellphones, tablets and stuff. I give you that. But consider this case, for example. This robotics professor is now working with Google on the creation of the "Google Glass" gadget. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/g ... asses.html). Now tell me, don't you think it would be so much better if this guy was hired to actually try to make robots? Obviously, it's not his fault that Google's one of the most profitable companies out there. But I wish there was more innovation outside of the business framework.

The beauty and elegance of capitalism is that it tends to work like evolution. Incremental changes that are highly likely to be of benefit to people now are far more likely to be picked up before large step changes that are of uncertain benefit. This process actively encourages people to look for and support the development of speculative ideas whilst simultaneously reducing the real cost of actually implementing the speculative ideas. Some entrepreneurs can see a strong role of robots, others see a few key barriers to their near term profitable development and deployment but do see great opportunity in another product's development and deployment. To deny the latter is to force people to forgo the benefits of the near term innovations and improvements to consumer welfare that are within reach in favour of more speculative benefits of things that seem possible but currently aren't. It is to have the ambition to fly manned missions to the moon before unmanned missions have been undertaken (or some such bad analogy).

Matt24 wrote:Maybe we need more government-sponsored research? It's amazing how much progress engineering can make with the help of government expenditure, as it's been proven by the development drones have had in the past few decades.

Every dollar government obtains for its research is a dollar taken from other enterprises. If you throw a billion dollars at government funded research which sucks many very smart people and resources out of the rest of the economy then you'd damn well better expect to get at least [b]something[b] for your money. It'd be a bloody sad government research program that didn't produce anything of worth. These programs however come at the expense of an extensive amount of additional private R&D however. That which you see is actually at the expense of that which you don't.
#14357780
Voluntarism wrote:The beauty and elegance of capitalism is that it tends to work like evolution. Incremental changes that are highly likely to be of benefit to people......
Yes look at the European settle entrepreneurs. First of all they used a kind of Feudal exploitation of the Natives. About 1502 the transatlantic started, that was combined with indentured labour of Europeans, as social norms changed, indentured White labour became less economic for Sugar, tobacco and Cotton and slavery predominated. Yet further changes in social norms forced evolution from Black chattel slavery to the South African Apartheid system, itself an evolution of Southern America's Jim Crow.

The great things is that these European entrepreneurial settlers were able to bank (so to speak) oodles of money for their descendants who as moral fashions change are at liberty to regret their ancestors actions. And the wonderful thing about regret is its free.
#14357900
Voluntarism wrote:The beauty and elegance of capitalism is that it tends to work like evolution. Incremental changes that are highly likely to be of benefit to people now are far more likely to be picked up before large step changes that are of uncertain benefit. This process actively encourages people to look for and support the development of speculative ideas whilst simultaneously reducing the real cost of actually implementing the speculative ideas. Some entrepreneurs can see a strong role of robots, others see a few key barriers to their near term profitable development and deployment but do see great opportunity in another product's development and deployment. To deny the latter is to force people to forgo the benefits of the near term innovations and improvements to consumer welfare that are within reach in favour of more speculative benefits of things that seem possible but currently aren't. It is to have the ambition to fly manned missions to the moon before unmanned missions have been undertaken (or some such bad analogy).


Well, I beg to differ. The point of making the means of production abundant to everybody is that no person would be able to dominate another one on the grounds this or that man owns the capital. If we just rely on capitalism to develop the most fundamental technology humanity needs, then it could take a very long time for it to happen. It would make this perspective entirely dependent on the utopian idea that capitalists will eventually progress enough to allow for these groundbreaking tech artifacts.

I'm not denying capitalism's role in the technological advances of the last few centuries. Hand in hand with science, it has radically altered life in many aspects. I think your point is totally valid: once it is possible to create a certain innovation, then it's only a matter of time. Yet if we could speed up this process, then we would see the results much faster. That's why I don't see Government research on tech as a bad idea. That way, many great professionals will be able to focus on certain possible advances without having to come up with a profitable idea for a product.

Matt24 wrote:Every dollar government obtains for its research is a dollar taken from other enterprises. If you throw a billion dollars at government funded research which sucks many very smart people and resources out of the rest of the economy then you'd damn well better expect to get at least [b]something[b] for your money. It'd be a bloody sad government research program that didn't produce anything of worth. These programs however come at the expense of an extensive amount of additional private R&D however. That which you see is actually at the expense of that which you don't.


I don't see why it should replace R&D of private enterprises. That comes from an assumption that R&D takes a big role in companies (which is not always the case) or that smart engineers are scarce (which may be the case now, but it can be solved in the future with support by the State and universities of engineering students).
#14388235
Matt24 wrote:This is the one question that boggles me about anarchism, and I would love to know how those who advocate anarchist societies get around this issue.

I try to be as open-minded as possible, but I just can't see how a stateless society may work when humans (either by nature or by life in society) do and will get into conflict. Without laws, without a State "looking over" people, how would we impede a reign of chaos and conflict stemming from human ambitions, selfishness, jealousy etc.?


You can look at international relations to provide some examples of how an anarchic society would work. The international structure is anarchy...in other words, there is no "global government", and all countries can ultimately do whatever they want if they have the power/means to do so and/or are willing to face the consequences. Obama won't be arrested by a global police if he drops a nuke on Iran...but there will still be consequences from other forces (domestic and international).

It's hard to predict what conflict would look like in an anarchic society, but there likely would be organizations created to try to keep security stable. This is like in the international realm where the UN and NATO have been created to try to maintain security/peace.
Last edited by Unthinking Majority on 08 Apr 2014 17:03, edited 1 time in total.
#14388292
I agree.
People generally don't want conflict. Conflict is also far too expensive to continue for too long.
Conflict reduces the general wealth of society while the market and the division of labour increases it.
Conflict resolution in an anarchic society would not really be much different to what it is today. Instead of a police force there will probably be several police forces, in a similar way to how we already have several major insurance companies and several smaller ones all competing and generally getting along with each other and only occasionally having to go up the chain in dispute resolution (courts).
There is no reason at all to expect that free market conflict resolution would be any different.
#14388313
Unthinking Majority wrote:You can look at international relations to provide some examples of how an anarchic society would work. The international structure is anarchy...in other words, there is no "global government", and all countries can ultimately do whatever they want if they have the power/means to do so and/or are willing to face the consequences. Obama won't be arrested by a global police if he drops a nuke on Iran...but there will still be consequences from other forces (domestic and international).

It's hard to predict what conflict would look like in an anarchic society would look like, but there likely would be organizations created to try to keep security stable. This is like in the international realm where the UN and NATO have been created to try to maintain security/peace.
Yes exactly, so under Anarchy people would be free like the people of Bahrain. No interfering world government there oppressing the people. So on a world scale we can think of the United States as a private Corporation that generously provides the fifth fleet for free in order to defined democracy in Bahrain and the other Sunni Gulf democracies.
#14413663
In a stable anarchy, prevailing social norms would have to include an agreed form of peaceful dispute resolution. That common norm, existing in one form under government, is the only "feature" of government necessary to ensure stability and peace.

Beyond that, the shape of the anarchic society, just as with a democratic one, of course, depends on the values of its members.

The one I am advocating is based around the Non Aggression Principle, resulting in respect for private property rights as the core political value, but allowing a virtually infinite range of non-political values to be expressed. People can be Christian, Muslim, Jewish or atheist. Deeply socially conservative or libertines. Highly atomically individualistic or possessing of strong communitarian commitments.


If you start with a traditional Islamic society and add government, you get Bahrain (or worse). But if you start with the sentiments of modern liberal democracies, there is no reason to expect anything dystopian.
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