Radical politics

[Marvin]

I like this discussion but I am an extreme realist so all this talk of ideals and execution of ideals doesn't sit well. I'm going to try to spin things around and give a view that faces reality, hopefully without sperging too much.

There is an objective political reality. It is made up of borders, capitals, laws, institutions, armed forces, security apparatuses, loyalties, individuals, groups, a money economy, patronage schemes, and quantities of people. Although it is popular to see politics as an idealistic pursuit, "ideals" per se do not affect any of these directly.

Yet radicalism and radical movements exist. One of my medieval Muslim scholars says, "If all the quantities of wealth, properties, loyal men, soldiers, etc., could achieve absolutely anything, then no ruling house would ever have given up power to another." Only God/natural selection can do absolutely anything. Yet history is littered with fallen dynasties. So apparently we live in an intensely competitive world, and there is some opportunity to decide what we want from the political reality.

I guess what I want to ask is: does it make more sense to criticize the dodo bird, or the wildesbeest? The dodo is gone; nothing you can say can degrade it more than it has been already. God/nature already decided. And there are millions of wildebeest. It doesn't need you to talk it up, and if you need to coexist with it then criticism will be of no use.

So although it popular to say, "I don't think a communist system would work, and it appears that none have," it really isn't up to you. What has competition under natural selection shown us? Communist takeovers succeed sometimes. And notice that Vietnam resisted 3 foreign invasions. Cuba survived in an unstable neighborhood. Russia and China have not been conquered by Turks or seen their independence subverted by capitalists. Communism has proven to be a route from being a colony or a failed state to being viable and independent. Even North Korea, for all its suckiness, has maintained independence and self-sufficiency among powerful neighbors.

How can a state be radical, anyway? A state must be responsible for stability. Does it make sense to criticize it for not engaging in permanent revolution and ultimately killing itself? You would have to be a Trotskyite to do that sincerely. This would be like talking up the dodo.

Think about this: absolute rule is absurd. But rather than say, "that system is absurd," I'm suggesting, "that belief is absurd." It's impossible. You would have to be some superhuman, like Magneto and Professor X put together.

Notice that monarchies and patriarchies have ruled most people on earth since prehistory, yet "absolute monarchy" was not described until the 1600s in France. So why describe it that way? Every ruler depends on networks of supporters. The difference between "constitutional" and "absolute" forms is that the constitutional ruler has learned to let his power rest on regular (ie lawful, hierarchic) institutions that protect his rule as well as stand up to him; whereas the absolutist has not found the courage or interest to do this (he keeps an informal, irregular network).

This is true of fascism and communism as well. Everyone wants to say fascism and communism are about statism, but they can only be pursued through anarchy. No elite class will hand over their property to a revolutionary party, nor will some bourgeois parliament dissolve itself. The party will have to use its competitiveness and ability to act spontaneously to break the law and take over (ie anarchy). This is why Marx was openly anarchistic, although he is seen differently now. And how could Hitler have taken over while practicing statism? He didn't use state organs to pass legislation, file official decrees, and dispatch the police. He used his own personal following to terrorize, intimidate, and seize. This is anarchy, not statism.

My point is, rather see some "radical political system" as hypocritical or faulty, see it as a reflection of someone's political agenda at a particular moment. Do not see radicalism as an attempt to install the perfect system. That's an absurd proposition that makes everyone wrong. Radicalism is an attempt to overthrow what is in place. This makes a lot more sense and allows you to appreciate radical movements as things that can matter in reality.

tl;dr: Radicalism is a ruse; a pitch tailored to a particular end in particular circumstances.

While it's important to keep the big picture in mind, this perspective is too meta to be useful when talking in real conversations.

Like yeah, we can sit back and acknowledge that a lot of the terms we throw around are only approximations of what's actually happening. That's a good thing to remember. But regardless, those terms are still useful because they communicate ideas effectively. They're concise. For example, I can use the term "communism" and I can have a reasonable conversation with someone without delving into the minutiae.

 

[Dudeofteenage]

The anarchists you are referring to might not be anti-state, but there are others who would love to see the world torn asunder and returned to a state of nature. They are "radical" and they are what we are referring to.

Speak for yourself there matey. Both kinds of anarchists are radical in that their preferences are well outside the political consensus as it exists. Given that this thread is about radical politics as a whole, I think we have to consider all kinds of anarchists (unless there are non-radical anarchists, but I'd argue that's impossible at present).

There is an objective political reality. It is made up of borders, capitals, laws, institutions, armed forces, security apparatuses, loyalties, individuals, groups, a money economy, patronage schemes, and quantities of people. Although it is popular to see politics as an idealistic pursuit, "ideals" per se do not affect any of these directly

This is demonstrably false. Laws, borders and institutions only exist as the creations of ideologies. With different ideologies, we would have different laws, different institutions and fiferent borders. To argue that ideologies do not affect these 'objective political realities' is false.

But it goes beyond that. Does a border objectively exist? It exists as lines on a map, but maps are drawn by people based on their ideas about where one country ends and another begins. There are often various structures, ranging from border markers to massive fortifications, but those do not constitute some objective reality - people chose to put them there. If you stripped away every product of human activity, there would be no way to tell where the border was. Indeed, for most of human history, the precise location of borders was impossible to pin down. And of course there are plenty of places, even today, where the location of the border can't be agreed on. These hardly represent some kind of objective reality. On the contrary, a border is an almost axiomatic example of a subjective object whose location, character and even existence exist only as a facet of human activity, activity which is motivated chiefly by ideology (primarily, in this case, nationalism).

 

[Marvin]

This is demonstrably false. Laws, borders and institutions only exist as the creations of ideologies. With different ideologies, we would have different laws, different institutions and fiferent borders. To argue that ideologies do not affect these 'objective political realities' is false.

But it goes beyond that. Does a border objectively exist? It exists as lines on a map, but maps are drawn by people based on their ideas about where one country ends and another begins. There are often various structures, ranging from border markers to massive fortifications, but those do not constitute some objective reality - people chose to put them there. If you stripped away every product of human activity, there would be no way to tell where the border was. Indeed, for most of human history, the precise location of borders was impossible to pin down. And of course there are plenty of places, even today, where the location of the border can't be agreed on. These hardly represent some kind of objective reality. On the contrary, a border is an almost axiomatic example of a subjective object whose location, character and even existence exist only as a facet of human activity, activity which is motivated chiefly by ideology (primarily, in this case, nationalism).

Eh, no, not really.

Borders are one of the more concrete social interactions we have. No one claims that borders are immutable (aside from retards).

 

[Dudeofteenage]

Eh, no, not really.

Borders are one of the more concrete social interactions we have. No one claims that borders are immutable (aside from retards).

Well it's concrete, sure, but concrete and objective aren't the same thing. If there was an objective reality to borders, we'd all be able to agree where they were by referring to this objective standard.

 

[DuskEngine]

Borders are one of the more concrete social interactions we have.

Only when people on both sides agree on where they are. I'm from South Asia, and the whole region inherited a huge clusterfuck of border disputes after WW2 and decolonization.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that borders aren't objective, but the power that enforces them is.

 

[Holdek]

Only when people on both sides agree on where they are. I'm from South Asia, and the whole region inherited a huge clusterfuck of border disputes after WW2 and decolonization.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that borders aren't objective, but the power that enforces them is.

No human construct is "objective," but some are more "obvious" than others. The Rio Grande River is a pretty obvious border between the US and Mexico (post-war, that is). Geological elements, which are objective, can be pretty useful this way.

 

[AnOminous]

No human construct is "objective," but some are more "obvious" than others. The Rio Grande River is a pretty obvious border between the US and Mexico (post-war, that is). Geological elements, which are objective, can be pretty useful this way.

Of course rivers change their course, which has led to many a border dispute when such geographical features have been used as borders.

 

[Dudeofteenage]

No human construct is "objective," but some are more "obvious" than others. The Rio Grande River is a pretty obvious border between the US and Mexico (post-war, that is). Geological elements, which are objective, can be pretty useful this way.

Yeah, one of the main ways borders are legitimised is to tie them to obvious geographical features, which obviously has practical benefits when it comes to enforcement. But you're right, no human construct can truly be considered objective.

I only used borders as an example because it's a personal interest of mine, but one could equally pick apart the ideas that laws represent objective facts. Probably even moreso.

 

[I AM STRAIGHT!!!!]

This is demonstrably false. Laws, borders and institutions only exist as the creations of ideologies. With different ideologies, we would have different laws, different institutions and different borders. To argue that ideologies do not affect these 'objective political realities' is false.

Woah! I don't think so. This is so mistaken it's making my head spin.

Laws exist to protect interests. Interests can be moral, material, or personal, but they are real. Interests shape institutions, and institutions in turn shape interests. It's like Rousseau said: political actors make their schemes rotate. They pursue power to become wealthy, and wealth to exercise power, justice to become strong, and strength to protect just institutions. "Ideology" does not enter the picture directly. Countries have different laws and institutions because different individuals have cultivated different interests in different ways.

If "ideology" exists, it is a reflection of these things, not the cause. I'm thinking of what Erik Erikson said, that ideology reflects “an unconscious tendency underlying religious and scientific as well as political thought … to make facts amendable to ideas, and ideas to facts, in order to create a world image convincing enough to support the collective and individual sense of identity.”

And there is the version of ideology that Leon Baradat described, which I don't have handy but which basically says that ideology is 1) briefly stated so that it can be communicated, 2) assumes a manner in which politics operates, 3) suggests an achievable goal with a moral reason, and 4) describes a project in which the listener's participation would help achieve that goal.

So basically, "ideology" is how one describes a reason to vote a certain way, or to engage in revolt. It effects things episodically, during elections and revolutions, and that's it.

Does a border objectively exist? It exists as lines on a map, but maps are drawn by people based on their ideas about where one country ends and another begins. There are often various structures, ranging from border markers to massive fortifications, but those do not constitute some objective reality - people chose to put them there. If you stripped away every product of human activity, there would be no way to tell where the border was.

So what kind of human activity creates a border? "ideas about where one country ends and another begins." Wow, no. Let's subtract "ideas about". You've admitted that "where one country ends and another begins" is objectively real, so this is what we must describe. If you say the cause is "migrations" or something, then it needs to be described why the migration ended where it did.

Clausewitz is right about this. Borders are not drawn deliberately, in that no one party gets to create them. If they were, they would look extremely squiggly, like representative voting district boundaries, or else be straight lines, like most of the US-Canada border or the Iraq-Syria border, which were drawn deliberately. International borders are drawn through the reciprocal interaction of warring parties, each of whom acts independently according to their strategic interests. In the course of war, each party will shift from a strategy of concentrating forces for attack to one of distributing forces to best take advantage of the superiority of defense over offense. Logically such a defensive line will be relatively straight in order to best employ forces (straighter than a voting district boundary) and will be mostly consistent with where each side's supporters/countrymen are already (never really a straight line) because of how they affect the superiority-of-defense principle. To what extent the frontier and the inhabitants are not consistent, they may be changed through colonization, expulsion, or exchange. In the sum of things, this is why borders are largely consistent with populations, and why appear as they do. Saying that borders are drawn by ideas is no explanation at all.

Indeed, for most of human history, the precise location of borders was impossible to pin down. And of course there are plenty of places, even today, where the location of the border can't be agreed on. These hardly represent some kind of objective reality.

I don't think its true that precise borders have ever been hard to pin down. Everyone knows who to pay rent to and where to seek legal redress. As a history nerd I can recognize that in some times and places obligations become hard to generalize about, but they are always definable to the people involved. Think about the Reaverlands between England and Scotland. We can say there isn't a firm boundary, but I think that to the people who lived there, when a raiding party gathered, they knew which direction to ride.

And I would argue that all borders are "agreed upon" today, just that there are those who hold out the actual prospect of changing them. Like, an Azeri will argue that Nargono-Karabakh is part of Azerbaijan. He's "wrong" in that the Azeri government has let go of the issue, but it could actually change. This isn't ideological. That's like calling a stock investment ideological.

On the contrary, a border is an almost axiomatic example of a subjective object whose location, character and even existence exist only as a facet of human activity, activity which is motivated chiefly by ideology (primarily, in this case, nationalism).

I guess I don't think human activity is automatically subjective. When two parties agree upon a border, then that's the border. It is changeable, but I call it objective reality. It's just as if two parties settle a lawsuit: you can hold the idea that there should be a more just resolution, like a dismissal or a verdict, but once it's settled there is a payment and a release and now that's the objective reality.

Nationalism does not cause wars or borders. Tribalism, feudalism, and imperialism could be said be the cause of wars and borders as well, but my (Clausewitz's) description is always correct notwithstanding how it might be attractive to attribute them to some idea or ideology.

 

[DNJACK]

tldr

 

[Dudeofteenage]

So what kind of human activity creates a border? "ideas about where one country ends and another begins." Wow, no. Let's subtract "ideas about". You've admitted that "where one country ends and another begins" is objectively real

Where did I admit that?

Honestly, I could argue with you, but I'm just going to point you to Benedict Anderson's "Imagined Communities". He makes the case far better than I can. If you read that and still think that borders (and laws) reflect some kind of objective reality then there's nothing more I can do for you.

 

[RepQuest]

I can see why anarchism is appealing, but at the same time I find it baffling that people can come to the conclusion that it wouldn't be completely and totally contradictory when economic systems are involved. Both the main socialist and capitalist variants of anarchism would require an entity with the monopoly on force to enforce their main tenets, "laws" if you will; in other words, a government. How would the communal ownership of property be maintained and wealth be redistributed under a socialist system without a government in place, and how would private property rights be protected and contracts be enforced under a capitalist system without one? I doubt that most people would be so righteous and dedicated to their ideologies that such a system would survive without a government forming and indoctrination on a massive scale, which would most likely require a government to perform in the first place.

 

[AnOminous]

I can see why anarchism is appealing, but at the same time I find it baffling that people can come to the conclusion that it wouldn't be completely and totally contradictory when economic systems are involved. Both the main socialist and capitalist variants of anarchism would require an entity with the monopoly on force to enforce their main tenets, "laws" if you will; in other words, a government. How would the communal ownership of property be maintained and wealth be redistributed under a socialist system without a government in place, and how would private property rights be protected and contracts be enforced under a capitalist system without one? I doubt that most people would be so righteous and dedicated to their ideologies that such a system would survive without a government forming and indoctrination on a massive scale, which would most likely require a government to perform in the first place.

This conundrum is best captured in Federalist #51 by James Madison.

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

In short, "perfect" forms of government (or lack of government such as anarchy) would require perfect humans to work. There aren't and will never be perfect humans.

 

[DNJACK]

it pretty much only requires a lack of government and a will to survive.

 

[I AM STRAIGHT!!!!]

Where did I admit that?

Honestly, I could argue with you, but I'm just going to point you to Benedict Anderson's "Imagined Communities". He makes the case far better than I can. If you read that and still think that borders (and laws) reflect some kind of objective reality then there's nothing more I can do for you.

Well when one says "ideas about ______" one has to refer to something real in the end. Everything we observe can't be perceived images of ideas about conceptions about ideas. People are real, and space is real. I think you and Anderson have made the connection that you think nations are about ideas, and ideas are imaginary, therefore nations are imaginary, but you haven't stopped to see the real thing. I like Jorge Luis Borges' story "Tlon Uqbar Orbis Tertius." Its a satire on that view that really destroys it.

 

[DuskEngine]

People are real, and space is real.

But the ways in which space is apportioned and people are categorized aren't. A nation is real in the sense that there is an objective reality regarding who you need to pay tax to, who you can reliably turn to for protection or legal redress, and so forth, but it's based upon a shared consensus.

(I need to read more Borges)

 

[The Oddball from MLW]

I tend to lean towards socialist libertarianism (Or classical libertarianism.) as the best way to govern society. Libertarianism currently means a lack of government intervention to a lot of people, but it traditionally meant Socialist Minarchism. The people would have far more economic control in a democratic system. From that, they themselves would be able to decide more crucial decisions, meaning that education would hold a higher priority to the common citizen.

 

[Space_Dandy]

There are many who believe in a Socialist utopia, where wealth is redistributed, the government meets everyone's needs, and socially people are free to do basically whatever they want. The private sector is almost completely removed and replaced with non-competitive state-run efficient productions of what people need. Money may or may not exist, but will surely be downplayed and everyone will have about the same amount of it regardless of their profession.

Does anyone really believe such an idyllic system could sustain? The one rule of human society is that those who crave power will seek it out, acquire it more often than those who don't crave it, and try to expand it when possible. Nearly every government in history has overall gotten more authoritarian the longer it has remained unchallenged. When you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. The hammer being the law and the nail being anything that challenges your power.

Although I am no anarchist, I believe in a minimal government. Minarchism basically. We don't need to depend on the government for redistribution of wealth or medicare. In the long run, this dependance on the government WILL be exploited. Its a law of human nature.

 

[I AM STRAIGHT!!!!]

Although I am no anarchist, I believe in a minimal government. Minarchism basically. We don't need to depend on the government for redistribution of wealth or medicare. In the long run, this dependance on the government WILL be exploited. Its a law of human nature.

You characterized the law as something that sustains power, but is it not also something that sustains value by protecting your assets? And can assets not be employed to influence power?

I'm coming to believe that much of the difference between realists like myself and idealists who are inclined to radicalism is the different importance placed on the arbitrary nature of justice compared to belief in the rationality of interests.

If everyone perceives their interests rationally, is there ever a dispute that cannot be resolved through reason alone?

If the answer is absolutely not, as it is for me, then this

who you can reliably turn to for protection or legal redress [is] based upon a shared consensus.

is mistaken in that in reality, you have a strong compelling (not consensual) interest in submissiveness toward your government, for the sake of your assets which no other government has a stake in or responsibility to.

 

[autisticdragonkin]

Reposting here because I was threadbanned from the original thread and directed to post debates in this thread, added some content to my post and edited it a little

1. People who were incredibly wealthy and paranoid before the system fell apart, and used those resources to consolidate power immediately (essentially becoming the new ruling class, which just kinda defeats the purpose).

I think that they think they are this

Exactly. Why would anyone bother with any kind of market in a state of anarchy? You don't need to pay for anything owned by someone who's a worse shot than you are. And if the situation was reversed, why would they offer to let you buy or trade for something? If you had anything they wanted, they'd kill you and take it.
You know, for such an edgy bunch, they're almost overly optimistic. This belief that humans will behave civilly without a society that's built around forcing them to do so is bordering on childlike in it's naivete. I almost envy that level of faith in people; they must have a very pleasant view of the world.

Very few anarcho capitalists are against policing all together. Generally they are in favor of a free market of force in which there are several paramilitary organizations in a constant arms race with each other and are played off from each other by the capitalist class. Effectively what we have right now but with lower taxes because the private military companies will essentially just be governments in competition with each other except for that there will be more of them.

Anarchism is inherently unstable. A new society would simply arise immediately amongst those who did not want anarchism, and the disorganized anarchists would be unable to effectively oppose them.

Source: all of human history

I think that anarchism in the form of an opposition to the state as opposed to merely not following the law is incoherent for this reason

But that is, by its very definition, unsustainable.
Let's start with the paramilitary forces. For arguments sake, let's say I'm one such soldier. Why would I defend you for money? By virtue of you trying to hire me, you are uncomfortable defending yourself, so why wouldn't I just kill you and take whatever you'd planned on offering me? There is no reason to work for anyone in a situation where you have a gun, they don't, and they have anything to offer you.

In order to properly analyze this a game matrix needs to be created looking at the payoffs of different strategies for the soldiers and capitalists. Although the soldiers may get a short term benefit from betrayal they do not get a long term benefit from economic control and will be worse off in the event of such a betrayal. Just look at the mismanagement of the soviet economy by the communist party for an example of this in action. Likewise the capitalists do have the ability to harm the soldiers if they are aggressive to them in the form of lowering their productivity. Technological change can lead to differing outcomes but it is far more likely that the military will lose in the long run rather than the capitalists with the advent of AI drones that require capital as opposed to labor. With this in account it is possible that soldiers will attempt to create a command economy so that the corporations can't make them outdated with drone strikes a la outer heaven but that is highly unlikely since the corporations could just buy off the generals (colonels may be more difficult since there are far more of them so there is a risk of a colonel driven coup but they could be purged en masse through fake wars lead by the generals).

Now, for the sake of argument, let's say you did magically get these paramilitary groups to work without simply raiding their own clientele. Why would they ever compete in a free market

I don't understand what you mean right now. Free market as opposed to what?

I compete in the free market right now, and we openly try to undercut, outsell, and fuck our competitors out of work, because we want more money.

Again the market for private security will likely be one that is an oligopoly. There may be a large amount of vertical integration in it in order to secure supply (that is companies have their own paramilitary units under the command of the CEO in order to ensure that they have a constant supply of security) or it may involve low levels of vertical integration (the private defense companies are relatively independent from their clients) but the companies will lose if they engage in mass wars as there will be infrastructure damage and reduced quality of life. Likely in the scenario of low vertical integration we will see clients putting the defense companies under a large amount of surveilance and hiring multiple defense companies with whom they will share the data of the other companies if they see anything suspicious going on. We need to find the Nash equilibrium of such a game in order to figure out what the world would look like under anarcho capitalism but it likely would be one of a constant cold war utilizing quantum computers in order to search through massive amounts of surveillance data.

The only reason we aren't burning each other's houses down is that we live in a civilized society, but if you look at places like Somalia, that shit absolutely flies.

I would say that the better explanation is that in somalia they don't have the human capital to use game matrices for their everyday decisions nor do they have the tendency to reach similar decisions through intuitive altruism

When I oppose conventional standards of altruism and morality I do so not because I believe that it is always beneficial to engage in antisocial behaviour but rather because empathy is poorly evolved. Although antisocial behaviour can result in a good for oneself as a universal strategy it is a bad idea because it will lead to one being punished. I consider empathy to mostly fulfill the same purpose as the usage of game matrices but it will occasionally lead to being too forgiving and not creating enough of a disincentive from people taking advantage of you and it can sometimes lead to not engaging in competitive behaviour when it is rational. Natural selection would give empathy and no game theory but an intelligent designer wouldn't create empathy if they wanted to maximize fitness. The key adaptation that has enabled us humans to thrive is the advent of memes which can be horizontally transferred in a population in a manner similar to sexual selection, Taking a compatibilist position we can say that humans choose the memes that they express and thus have the ability to be their own intelligent designers and guide their own evolution. Because of this we can and should replace empathy with game theory if we value our own fitness and the trait of valuing one's own fitness will become more common in the population as it will have a significant selective advantage

I don't understand what is meant by a civilized society and I don't think that it has much explanatory power.

If there's no oversight, there's no reason to not try to establish a monopoly as quickly as possible, and do whatever is necessary to get rid of competitors.

The thing about monopolies is that they only easily form under certain conditions such as legal enforcement, network externalities, or large economies of scale. Diseconomies of scale will likely prevent a monopoly of private military companies from forming mostly due to the principal agent problem.

Anarchy doesn't promote a free market, it promotes a single company owning everything and everyone while the rest of society eats each other.

I don't believe that it promotes a single company owning everything as I explained above but a consistent anarchist (or at least anarcho egoist influenced by max stirner) would only care about their own freedom regardless of whether they claim otherwise (and it would be completely acceptable for them to lie in order to trick people into letting them gain power

I think that the reason the system is the way it is is because the people at the top realize that, in order to maintain their lifestyles, there needs to be a much larger number of people at the bottom. Someone has to pump their gas, drive their cars, and clean up after them. The full weight of human endeavor has never been put to the task of making our most onerous tasks less onerous, because it has always been assumed that there will be a massive underclass who will perform the unpleasant duties on pain of starvation (and that's something that actually benefits the people at the top). There's no practical reason why everyone couldn't have a job that was something worthwhile and fulfilling, with a little of their own dirty work mixed in (like how all the kids help clean the school in Japan, so they have no custodians). My dislike of hierarchies and inherent mistrust for authority means, more often than not, if someone is saying something I agree with they're an anarchist.

I don't think that the problem is that there is too much meaningless labour needed and as we can clearly see with automation we have put effort into making onerous tasks less onerous. Rather I would say that there is a likely shortage of meaningful jobs available (or a surplus of meaningful labour if you want to use labour economics terms)

I definitely share your feelings. I find free-market anarchism to one of the scarier ones. If you've ever read Maury Rothbard's views on parenting and children (it's ok be a neglectful parents, the kid can be sold or runaway), the Miseses (sp) Institute's defense of Scrooge and how awful Cratchet is for putting family over money, Lew Rockwell wanting to legalize drunk driving (since cops are meanies "how hate you for your freedom") and how it's wrong to get mad at BP, it would create a society of sociopaths. There's the other side that are extremely naive and think nothing can go wrong if we just handed over everything to the market (they at least mean well.)

I think that the big thing about anarcho capitalism is that the natural conclusion of it would be simply a decentralized government that collects revenue via poll tax and doesn't care about non taxpayers but are nominally "free market private defense agencies".

Anarchism and libertarianism are non positions, you can't just say "worker's collective" or "INVISIBLE HAND" and have the entire issue of legislation and regulation go away.
Things simply don't self regulate, if for example the FDA or the EU or whatever didn't put regulations in place limiting the use of toxic chemicals in foods corporations would abuse that as much as they possibly could to maximize profit. We know this because this is what it was like in the past before these regulations and laws existed(and still is in relation to regulations that are not in place yet), changing the name of the corporations to worker's communes wouldn't change this.
There are just no plans for the little things in these ideologies it's all simply supposed to spring from nothing, no opinions on work safety regulations, no opinions on the organization of education, no opinion on building regulations and so on since that's just going to spring out of thin air and be perfect because of the good will of people towards each other.
If you want your ideology to be taken seriously you have to at least have some kind of idea about how these things will be managed, you have to offer an actually conceivably viable alternative to how these things are handled in representative democracies other than "It will self-regulate".
Anyway since apparently things automatically just converge to the best state imaginable why haven't states all over the world converged to your ideology since it's the best one? Why is the revolutionary leap necessary if the power of self regulation is so strong, shouldn't the world have self regulated into changing to the obviously best system?

I don't know whether this is the same issue but self regulation could happen if one clearly found what the Nash Equilibrium was for the system.

I'm very curious as to how society will adapt when we no longer need manpower to do most tasks. Pretty soon robots will be able to replace almost all physical work done by humans so a new type of society will have to be developed along with a new type of economy.

Also with the advent of such an increase in ability to partake directly in government via social media type programs will we move more into a direct democracy style of government where each citizen has a direct say in policy or can we foist off the day to day affairs onto so sort of super AI.

To me the biggest question will be "what will we do with our time?" If AI and robots are taking care of all the details, what will we do? Descend into a life of pleasure seeking? Pursue intellectual limits of thought? Or do we take the easy route and let our species drift into extinction while our AI children move forward into the future.

Fuck...I wish I could freeze myself for 500 years just so I could know.

I hate not knowing...

I think that likely what will happen is that society will become very unequal and social media will be used to organize revolutions but they will inevitably fail because we will be a hydraulic empire only with technology instead of water
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_empire
Likely humans will not become obsolete specifically because the small elite of humans will have enough power to do all the research they need to stay in power.

OK fine. People would have to work for dirt to be profitable in the long run, or self-employed. Getting a job is not optinal to survive. UNless you think there would be government welfare for all humanity (can't last)

I think that the government (private security firms) will provide a high level of basic income simply in order to prevent rebellion. It probably will be more stable than one may think because there will likely be sub replacement fertility for the unemployed class since they are spending all day on social media. This massive structural poverty will likely be a population bottleneck and revolution will be impossible specifically because large proletarian casualties will not be a problem for the elites anymore due to the low bargaining power of labour

The only way a small number of people would be able to defend themselves against a large number of people is with superior technology. That's money that might as well just be spent on more productive machinery anyway, and it has the added advantage of not alienating or killing all your potential customers.

That is implying that there is not economies of scope on predator drones. The algorithms necessary to run one and the mechanisms necessary to fly one would all have other applications such that there would likely only be the small cost of defense contractors putting together existing technologies (they will be able to avoid patent problems because the owners of the patents will be hiring them)

When just a couple guys pay for all of of the more important organisation of a territory, it doesn't take long for them to realize who has the real power.
And btw taxation is extortion, not theft.

I would say that it is only extortion in a democracy. The usage of poll taxes when one needs to pay a set amount to vote and that is how the government obtains revenue would be pareto efficient and would not be a form of extortion (although based off of legal definitions it wouldn't be extortion, it is only an act of coercion and pareto inefficient)

Whoever controls the robots would have their position as "owner" dissolved.

When a market fails to be productive, it'll break down. People have interfered with markets for a lot less than "most of humanity being unemployable".

The issue is not that the (non privatized) government would be willing but that it would be able. With private military contractors the bourgeoise could easily crush the political class.

Further hatred of government as an institution is just as unworkable as hatred of the free market. Both individualism and collectivism have advantages and disadvantages however as you move further toward the extremes the corresponding disadvantages get larger and larger.

Radical politics doesn't work. Every successful nation has had both a government capable of useing extensive powers when it felt the need to do so and a reasonably free market.

This isn't radical politics but rather the rejection of politics. @DNJACK seems to be apolitical and thus isn't political anymore than bald is a hair colour. This is the abandonment of the false consciousness that the bourgeoise has just as much as the proletariat and acting purely in class interests.

Majority rule is rule of the strongest. So is government rule. Why is the majority will more important than my own? Because there are more of them? How is that morally superior to the man with the biggest crowbar? Why is Roman law the basis of our system and not Persian or Gaullic law? Because the Romans were strongest.

Edit: Also the whole "if you're an anarchist why not move to Somalia" is unfair. People can think whatever they like without preconditions. I don't need to be a soldier to be pro or anti war.

The thing about strength is that the strongest is constantly changing. It may be that the majority were at some point the strongest but that is not the case anymore with the decreasing bargaining power of unskilled labour.

The romans were not the strongest: they were overrrun by the goths and franks, who ditched their own codes in favour of the roman laws because they were better thought out and actively designed to be just.

I would say that the abandonment of germanic law came not from them being just but rather that the Roman law in its contemporary form (although not the republican form which had patria potestas) was adopted by the Germanic peoples with the slave morality. Roman law is the vengeance of a conquered people using deception to take from the Germanic race the vitality that they lost when they became the empire.

I have been watching you- not caring about the majority and only caring about oneself is exactly why anarchist arguments fail. an anarchy is not a fair place, it is not an honourable place rather it is an exceedingly selfish place inhabited by the deluded, the tyrannous and, on the internet, by edgelords. And what better descriptor for someone from ED than an edgelord?

TPTB regularly fail and have had changed forced upon them and if they are truly beyond changing then as i said- i fully support revolution in those circumstances.

At least Anarcho-Egoism makes no attempt to claim to be fair and is explicitly motivated only by a rejection of justice. There can still be trust in a union of egoists but there is no obligation, just game matrices

Yes sorry radical politics as in politics at the extreme ends of the collectivist-individualist spectrum don't work.

So does that mean that you would not consider my radical nepotism to be radical politics because it is based around the extended family and contract enforcement. I think that what you really mean is that anything that you have already accepted works and anything that you haven't accepted doesn't work

They do, they also tend to have personal grudges against people in government and are often looking for someone to blame for their own lack of success. Most if not all of the anarchists i've met in the real world were clinging to it as the last thing that made them special or powerful as without it they would have to admit to themselves they had failed in one of the easiest contries in the world to live a successful life. No doubt there are some genuine ones but i imagine living off the grid without any support from society also removes them from being easily or often encountered.

Its perhaps significant that often only those with little to lose become anarchists but that is a discussion for another thread and another day.

I would say that the 1% who rule the world are anarchists even if they are unwilling to refer to themselves as such because they are gaining class consciousness. It is more that there is nothing to gain from admitting one is an anarchist at least at the moment

I used to be an anarchist until I met other anarchists and saw how fckin horrible they were so now I'm a nihilist

I think I would still say you are an anarchist, you just aren't a lifestyler

All of your reasons as to why I'm wrong have been appeals to law and practicality. Laws only have force because of the hired muscle of the state enforcing them. It doesn't matter how old the laws are or how clever the writers of the laws are. Individuals have the natural right to act according to their conscience and this right is violated if the state uses its might to force somebody to obey a law or command they consider unjust.

The success of society is totally irrelevant. Radical thought is about pointing out the inherint contradictions of government and society while freeing your thought from the bounds of law and custom. People try to intimidate radicals by pointing out that anarchy is dangerous and implying that we deserve to live in war-torn countries. Refusing to let your thoughts be limited by fear is exactly what anarchism and individualism is about. I'm sorry, but I think that you're wrong because your thought is totally dominated by law, history, and tradition. None of these things are real, but they create an intellectual straightjacket which forces people to theorize within a pre-defined spectrum. I apologize again, but I just figured that this thread could use somebody who takes radical thought seriously.

I would agree with this that to a large extent anarchism is more an intellectual position than a system. Although I am an anarcho-egoist in practice I support a dictatorship that will allow me to do as I please and will only appear outside the norm when I use academic/autistic language to describe my positions

Any anarchy will eventually turn into a government. People tend to be naturally inclined towards finding more efficient ways to do things, and organization tends to be more efficient. Or at least until corruption sets in.

I'd still rather live in an anarchy over a tyranny.

This could be easily simply seen as economies of scale and sticky behaviour leading to increasing in scale beyond the minimum efficient scale

The problem is that many radicals consider the value of their ideas and their own sense of purpose to be more important than actually convincing people.

They keep their ideas to themselves or conceal their contents because people may misunderstand them. Not all radicals are people persons. This can often lead to groups where resentment grows because no one else "accepts them" when in reality it is the fact that they have never expressed their ideas or were disuaded away from expressing them.

I would say that an anarchist really has no reason to convince others of anarchism because they have no obligations and thus can allow others to be wrong

Woah! I don't think so. This is so mistaken it's making my head spin.

Laws exist to protect interests. Interests can be moral, material, or personal, but they are real. Interests shape institutions, and institutions in turn shape interests. It's like Rousseau said: political actors make their schemes rotate. They pursue power to become wealthy, and wealth to exercise power, justice to become strong, and strength to protect just institutions. "Ideology" does not enter the picture directly. Countries have different laws and institutions because different individuals have cultivated different interests in different ways.

If "ideology" exists, it is a reflection of these things, not the cause. I'm thinking of what Erik Erikson said, that ideology reflects “an unconscious tendency underlying religious and scientific as well as political thought … to make facts amendable to ideas, and ideas to facts, in order to create a world image convincing enough to support the collective and individual sense of identity.”

And there is the version of ideology that Leon Baradat described, which I don't have handy but which basically says that ideology is 1) briefly stated so that it can be communicated, 2) assumes a manner in which politics operates, 3) suggests an achievable goal with a moral reason, and 4) describes a project in which the listener's participation would help achieve that goal.

So basically, "ideology" is how one describes a reason to vote a certain way, or to engage in revolt. It effects things episodically, during elections and revolutions, and that's it.

I would actually quite strongly disagree with you and argue that ideology is actually a memetic viral infection that by its very nature will lead to acting in a way that depending on one's opinion is either contrary to one's own interests or above one's interests (for those who advocate ideology). It fundamentally exists as a very seperate phenomenon from one's interests and can lead to things that under interests alone wouldn't happen such as unwillingness to engage in ceasefires in Syria by ISIS.