sashin on Nostr: npub16ykq3…7gh74 I like anarchism, and I call myself an anarchist and an ...
npub16ykq3tavyhqd8gw407j3xce72vuwjkc4fa8ymf76tv8uzhwvvx5qk7gh74 (npub16yk…gh74) I like anarchism, and I call myself an anarchist and an anarcho-communist, but in my mind, anarchy isn't a form of human organisation. It's an opposition to hierarchies, it's defined in the negative as what it's not. I'm imagining there are many ways to organise that are non-hierarchical.
Somehow we have to prefigure them in the world we are living in now. As the saying goes, we have to build the new in the shell of the old.
I'm interested in the basics of how to house, clothe, provide food, water, electricity and medicine to people. I'm wondering if there is anything we can do that would simultaneously help prefigure the conditions for a better world (by reducing our dependency on the capitalist system) but also make everyone's lives easier in this system.
One problem is that if the various systems detect threats, they can in turn respond. Poverty and the threat of poverty is the leverage that the ruling class has, it's the engine that gets most of us spending most of our lives in jobs that we find at best unsatisfying.
It is their power, and addressing poverty or even alleviating the suffering that it causes I think necessarily weakens this power. If we had strong social security for example, we would be right not to tolerate an abusive workplace. In America things like tying healthcare to employment sounds to me like additional leverage, the ability to hold a person and their families health hostage.
Apparently once upon a time, in America the capitalists at the time noticed that there was high worker turnover that was preventing them from getting as much profits as they would have liked. This wasn't the case in the UK. The reason was because there was lots of land in the US and therefore it was cheap and workers were choosing to save up for a plot and then live self sufficiently. When the capitalists realised this, they conspired with government to fix land prices high enough so this wasn't an option and presumably gave a fraction of the profits from this to the politicians.
I think anything that we do, we will either have to do in a way that is discreet or doesn't ring alarm bells or be prepared to deal with blowback. Poverty is wealth, high in the hierarchy depends on low, people need to be kept in a state of perpetual desperation in order to be pushed around. If any changes threaten the various power structures they will act.
Somehow we have to prefigure them in the world we are living in now. As the saying goes, we have to build the new in the shell of the old.
I'm interested in the basics of how to house, clothe, provide food, water, electricity and medicine to people. I'm wondering if there is anything we can do that would simultaneously help prefigure the conditions for a better world (by reducing our dependency on the capitalist system) but also make everyone's lives easier in this system.
One problem is that if the various systems detect threats, they can in turn respond. Poverty and the threat of poverty is the leverage that the ruling class has, it's the engine that gets most of us spending most of our lives in jobs that we find at best unsatisfying.
It is their power, and addressing poverty or even alleviating the suffering that it causes I think necessarily weakens this power. If we had strong social security for example, we would be right not to tolerate an abusive workplace. In America things like tying healthcare to employment sounds to me like additional leverage, the ability to hold a person and their families health hostage.
Apparently once upon a time, in America the capitalists at the time noticed that there was high worker turnover that was preventing them from getting as much profits as they would have liked. This wasn't the case in the UK. The reason was because there was lots of land in the US and therefore it was cheap and workers were choosing to save up for a plot and then live self sufficiently. When the capitalists realised this, they conspired with government to fix land prices high enough so this wasn't an option and presumably gave a fraction of the profits from this to the politicians.
I think anything that we do, we will either have to do in a way that is discreet or doesn't ring alarm bells or be prepared to deal with blowback. Poverty is wealth, high in the hierarchy depends on low, people need to be kept in a state of perpetual desperation in order to be pushed around. If any changes threaten the various power structures they will act.