Edit: Sorry, I do more or less agree with you that what you are describing is pretty much the right way to handle drug problems, but I think it's important to point out that poverty and homelessness are symptoms of capitalism, which is the real problem.
Capitalism is an economic system. It says nothing about social services or policy. There are plenty of countries with free market economies which provide extensive social services and have very progressive social policies (see northern europe and scandinavia).
Wow, I'm really surprised to find someone on HN who is against capitalism. Here are a few points for you to consider, they might help you clarify your position on capitalism:
1. What you are probably really against is collusion between big government and big business. This is a real problem and is antithetical to true capitalism.
2. In a free market economy, there is plenty of room for charity and there is no one stopping people from organizing and participating in communes.
3. Taking my money through force to redistribute through inefficient state run welfare programs is not going to benefit anyone but the government. The poor will continue to be poor, and the elite will continue to extort those who actually add value.
Wow, I'm really surprised to find someone on HN who is against capitalism.
Perhaps after you've been here longer you'll realize it's not all that homogeneous an audience.
Your point 1 is well taken (meaning: I personally agree).
Point 2 is somewhat simplistic; large-scale organization is superior to voluntary charity, which is why third-world countries have poverty problems and billionaires at the same time, while Sweden doesn't have much of a poverty problem.
Point 3 is so full of loaded terms it's nearly useless except as an indication of your own biases.
> Wow, I'm really surprised to find someone on HN who is against capitalism.
Heh, yeah :) It's possible to like computers and enjoy programming without being a capitalist though! Look at the free software movement!
What you are describing is "anarcho"-capitalism, I think. I'm an anarchist. We seem to agree agree on some things. I think most of the same things that stop people from organising and participating in communes in our current society would still exist in an "anarcho"-capitalist society. The rich still control the means of production, and the poor need to work for the rich in order to survive. I can't see that ending well. That's the essence of it.
Capitalism and F/OSS advocacy are not contradictory. I'm of the opinion that for certain kinds of software, F/OSS is the most efficient approach in the context of a free market.
In particular, for software that (1) has a wide audience and (2) does not provide a significant competitive advantage, it makes sense to share the development burden amongst others that need the same software. A successful open source project is cheaper to maintain because of market forces: more organizations (including your own) are able to develop expertise in the software, driving down the price of such support.
Yours points are true but also somewhat simplistic. I'm not addressing you point by point, but laying out a couple of points for you to consider.
1. There is a tendency to corruption in any concentration of power, government or corporate. There still remains the problem in capitalism that concentration of capital leads to entrenchment, stagnation, and corruption, and our regulations, faulty as they certainly are, have historically at least attempted to address problems in concentration (Sherman Antitrust Act and the original Glass-Steagall Act). There is no fire-and-forget legislation that can guarantee this, of course, since it is also in the nature of power to route around such fault lines.
2. Many theories based on the free market assume rational actors. The bulk of psychological research shows that this is a faulty assumption for individual humans. I argue that we also have sufficient evidence that this is a faulty assumption for behaviors in aggregate (corporations and governments). We need to take this into account when we talk about the power, the benefits, and the faults of the free market.
With regards to your point 2, I'm interested in data you have regarding the relative effectiveness of charity and the welfare state. My understanding is that the European-style welfare state consistently gets more balanced outcomes and a higher quality of life for more people than reliance on charitable institutions.
Your point 3 is too laden with loaded words to be used effectively in an argument and reads more like right-wing talking points than an attempt at discussion. When discussing this in the future, I recommend sticking to redistribution and outcomes, and leave out the rhetorically charged "taking my money through force" and "extort".
Also, you will be hard-pressed to find anyone who will argue that "inefficient state run welfare programs" are a good thing; really the argument is about relative efficiency between state welfare systems and private charity.
I'll concede that my second and third points skew the conversation away from the issue of addressing homelessness.
If the topic were 'personal liberty' than they might have more relevance. I guess the attack on capitalism as being 'evil' brought out my personal bias.
He's right though, in the communist countries that I've visited there was nobody homeless.
I am surprised that on HN someone that states something that contributes to the discussion gets modded to -4, I thought we reserved that for trolls.
You can find plenty of things wrong with communism, and I think that for the most part capitalism is to be preferred but that doesn't make him factually wrong.
Communism isn't the opposite of capitalism. China's both communist and capitalist. It also, incidentally, has extreme levels of poverty.
The communist countries you visited likely did a good job of hiding the homelessness. It's one of the advantages of having that sort of control over your subjects.
> The communist countries you visited likely did a good job of hiding the homelessness.
The communist countries I visited I lived in for quite a while, and no, they didn't do a good job of it, it simply didn't exist. I would have definitely noticed. And yes, I did visit the poorer regions. Now they have homeless people though. But they're no longer communist.
Everybody had a job, everybody had a house. Maybe the job was changing the traffic lights or something similarly inefficient but you'd have a job, guaranteed.
Second this, although the only communist country I knew was Hungary and I got to know it just before the regime change. The Communists built huge housing projects around Budapest specifically to ensure that everybody, no exceptions, had a place to live and a job to work. It might be a stupid, demeaning job - there were no vending machines - but it was work, and a place to call home.
Now, there are tent cities along the Danube and in the corners of the railway easements. Say what you like about the wonders of capitalism and the "fact" that communism just swept the problems under the rug, but anybody who actually witnessed both knows that for the people on the very bottom, communism is far, far better. And for the people in the middle, it was about the same, albeit with fewer electronics. Of course, for people at the top, it's the same; they're just allowed to be honest about their Swiss accounts now.
Chomsky refers to the 'real' communism, which has to date not been implemented by any society (and which possibly can not be implemented with people the way they happen to be).
It always has been a version of an oligarchy.
The same goes for those 'communist' countries out there today.
I think the 'fat cats' simply used the term communism to make the have-nots believe that they were living in a fair society without exploitation. A propaganda device rather than anything else.
When some oppressive hellhole styles itself the People's Democratic Republic Of Wherever, everyone sees through the ruse rather than blaming its failings on actual democracy. I don't see why communism is held to a different standard. There weren't any secret police disappearances or corrupt apparatchiki in Marx's advocacy, were there?
Communism's aim was always the abolition of the state. Technically, communist countries were what Marx called dictatorships of the proletariat, which he thought was a transition stage between capitalism and communism. This transition never occurred, so Chomsky is correct.
Marx was held back by his historical era (as are we all); he believed that evolution consisted of a progression. We now know pretty well that evolution goes any damn way it wants, and imposing a direction as "forward" is wishful thinking at best. The spontaneous dissolution of the state is probable - eventually. Very eventually. Forcing progress, as Lenin hoped to do, was naive, although (imho) well-intentioned.
The breakup of the USSR is not a victory for anybody, really. The very presence of the USSR in the first place was a detriment to the mindshare of communism, and its breakup ensured nothing beyond the fact that Americans could say they "won" the Cold War, whatever the hell that means.
Something like the original communist ideal can be seen - as it's always been - in the spontaneous organization of maker communities and other types of community. But if real communism is ever going to appear among us hominids, it's not going to come out of a State that grants it to the masses. The masses are just going to have to make the State superfluous. And that is not going to happen any time soon, libertarian science fiction notwithstanding (I like my Vinge as well as anybody).
I still have family in mainland China, and we know there is a homelessness problem in China. The government effectively insures that they are out of sight, so they beg where they can out of sight. You can find them in loading docks or behind restaurants. This is not a new problem that has started since economic reforms, it has always been around.
I have talked with my coworker, someone who lived in Soviet Russia until his 20s, and he will confirm that they also had homelessness problem. At that time it was dealt with similarly.
(1)Simple searches give clear depictions and discussions of the homelessness problems in these current and historical examples.
(1)Post edited here to remove an inappropriately rude and confrontation postscript (I accused the parent of lying or being willfully ignorant; which does not cover the gamut of possibilities)
You begin the post with "He's right though," and then provide anecdotal evidence. I am not arguing against your experience. Your experience is not wrong; I am arguing against that the grandfather post is "right" that homelessness is a symptom of capitalism, to which you agreed and supported.
Those countries that did not have homelessness under Communism have plenty of it under capitalism, for those countries that I have experience with.
That's not a scientific study, but it definitely should give you pause. Oh and I forgot to add Romania to the list.
I said "in the communist countries that I've visited", to qualify my experience, and to make sure that you understood that I was not speaking for all communist countries at all times.
I imagine the reason he got modded to oblivion was that he made an extraordinary claim "...I think it's important to point out that poverty and homelessness are symptoms of capitalism, which is the real problem" with no attempt at justification.
Besides which, capitalism is not a form of government. So he started from a position of error and then went out on his limb from there.
It was an extraordinary claim (given the demographic here) and I made no attempt to justify it, so I can see why it was modded so harshly. I think the modding was a bit extreme, but I knew when I was making the post that it was going to be a -4 type of thing.
However, I don't think question of whether or not capitalism is a form of government has anything to do with the point I was making.
Right, but this can be trivially shown to be false in the case of capitalistic systems with minimal levels of homelessness and poverty and socialist economies with rampant poverty.
I did point it out and I didn't down-vote him (because I was hoping he would expound on it). But you know that voting means different things to different people (and HN has gone on vast navel-gazing tangents trying to define it).
If people see a controversial position half-heartedly argued, the bad marks should not come as a shock nor am I sure they are unreasonable. In the end though, the points are utterly irrelevant as long as it doesn't dissuade others from taking controversial positions and, crucially, defending them.
I tend to refer to myself as a "centrist libertarian", because I used to be hardcore right libertarian, but lately have developed relatively strong anarchist sympathies. (Oh, and capitalists can't be anarchists.)
I don't 100% buy it yet. I feel the same way about capitalism that I do about religion; losing my religion was a long journey over a period of years, that took a lot of unlearning. I'm in the middle of that process with capitalism now.
That's cool :) Good luck! I'd really recommend getting involved in your local anarchist collective (which from Google seems to be this one: http://anarchistnews.org/?q=node/8085). Actually, shit, after a bit more Googling, that place seems to be dead. That's very sad. If a new place pops up though, try to get involved if you can. I've really, really benefited from getting involved with Seomra Spraoi, which is a similar type of place in Dublin. Being able to be around people who understand your basic assumptions in life, in a fun and sociable environment, has done so much to keep me sane.
We have a local FNB that I've been meaning to go help with, but haven't found the time. I was also involved in the G20 stuff here. In the meantime, I've +frontpaged /r/anarchism, been doing a lot of reading, and taking it slow.
That's cool. I was just having a discussion with somebody earlier about how much better discussions are in real-life places like Seomra Spraoi than they are on /r/Anarchism though. You get so many people on /r/Anarchism who take a moral high ground against people who they (usually correctly, but this isn't the point) perceive as not being "real" anarchists. Even when we disagree, discussions in Seomra Spraoi are always very pleasant and respectful, and there is a real sense of togetherness, despite our minor differences. Basically, don't lose faith in anarchism and anarchists because of /r/Anarchism, because I could see that happening to somebody. :)
I'd beg to differ. The hierarchy is what enables the coercion to take place, they're two sides of the same coin.
Anyway, I'm sorry, but this comment is 3 pages back in my history, so I probably will forget to come back and check. If you'd like to discuss this further, my email is in my profile.
To be fair, the need for slave labor on collective farms did reduce the problem somewhat. But that practice was stopped precisely because it was inefficient to force mentally and physically handicapped people into a physically demanding profession.
Okay, I should probably just come clean and say that I'm an anarchist (an anarcho-socialist for those that believe that "anarcho"-capitalism is actually a form of anarchism). Anarchists have a bunch of ideas about what are the causes of the problems in our civilisation are and what can be done to change it and our lives for the better which are more or less internally consistent. So do capitalists, "anarcho"-capitalists and even the Catholic Church. All of these respective philosophies are internally consistent, or at least can be made so. So, I guess it was kind of pointless for me to say "capitalism causes poverty", which although I believe in the truth of that statement, most of the people on this site are capitalists and have a set of basic assumptions which justify capitalism. The statement I was making doesn't attempt to question or identify those basic assumptions, which I guess was my intention, but was just a lazy post that really just seems a bit absurd by capitalist set of assumptions. It makes sense perfect sense from the anarchist set of assumptions. So really, the post should have said "hey guys, while that drug policy sounds good, there is a school of thought that says that the real problem is capitalism itself, and I would subscribe to that school of thought and vouch for its applicability to the real world, and maybe you might find it interesting to think about that and read up on it a bit", but in order to do that I would have had to explain everything in a much deeper way than I was prepared to do at the time.
I want to get back to the point about internal consistency though. It's pointless to exchange our theorems (things like "if we change X about drug policy, Y about homelessness will change") when the axioms on which we build such theorems are different. The only truth we can get from a discussion like that is "well, given the capitalist set of assumptions, we can prove that this is true, but it is not true given the anarchist set of assumptions". That's a lemma you can use in the proof of the truth of such a statement, but to prove that it's true you have to show that capitalism's (or whatever) assumptions accurately model the real world. I admit I'm very much guilty of ignoring this in my post above, and I'm sorry for lazily making such a meaningless post. (By the way, the reason "anarcho"-capitalism isn't anarchism is because anarchism and capitalism have assumptions which contradict each other, so to be able to make it internally consistent, they must lose some of the assumptions that anarchists have which contradict capitalism's assumptions.)
So, economically then, what do I propose? A sort of decentralised socialism, I guess. I would broadly subscribe to the ideas outlined here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_communism#Economic_th...), which probably explains it better than I can. The reason I think these ideas and the ideas and the assumptions that justify them are more applicable to the real world than those of capitalism is basically just because they line up with better with what my intuitions have been. I've always been unhappy with authority and being coerced, and the justifcations offered to me for such coercion have always seemed kind of circular. In is-piracy-bad debates, I've always been on the side of the pirates, but also always felt that there's more to it than this, that there's some sort of logical conclusion that we (pirates) are not taking this to, and now I think anarchism is that logical conclusion. Anarcha-feminism agrees with and expands on ideas and feelings I've had about gender before I knew about it. Anarchism gives legitimacy to my intuitions and offers a framework in which they can be made logically consistent, and also offers an explanation for some social problems that I hadn't ever even thought about that are consistent with my intuitions. Basically, and I know this is pretty much a false dichotomy, but it does kind of get the point across - I've always felt that it's much more satisfying and generally better to be co-operative than competitive, and I think capitalists basically think the opposite and say that it's human nature to be greedy, etc. My experience has shown that I get a great pleasure out of sharing my things and with people and helping them out, but capitalism makes it difficult to share with people because you need money and everything in order to survive in a capitalist system, so by giving stuff away, you're risking your chances of survival, or at least decreasing your freedom. I think capitalist ideas might appeal to people because it gives them justification for being many times richer and therefore freer than other people. I don't think that is justifiable, certainly not when it's something that affects a person from birth (how wealthy a background they come from), and it's incredibly naive to think that everybody who's poor can just go out and start a business and get as rich as anyone, as if it's their fault that they're poor (for not doing this) and that everybody is completely in control of how wealthy they are.
Those are pretty much the ideas that I have. Anarchism is the school of thought that makes them logically consistent, but capitalist ideas are also logically consistent in their own framework, and if we disagree on the axioms then there aren't really any words or logic that can be done to resolve that disagreement. I'm really just trying to make people aware of anarchism, and maybe make them feel that their ideas are legitimate if they have anarchist ideas (because I think a lot of people have anarchist ideas but don't take them to their logical conclusion or realise that it's possible to do so), and maybe make people realise that there's more to anarchism than punk rawk, if there are people who haven't taken it seriously until now because of that kind of perception. That's it. Sorry about the initial post.
So, I read a little bit about Anarchist-Communism from the Wikipedia page, but it seems like it would never work in the real world.
For one thing, there are no property rights, people are free to live wherever they want, which usually tends to turn society into Mad Max type "you live wherever you can take and hold by excessive force" scenarios.
For another thing, all goods and services are communal and you are expected to just walk into any community store and take as much as you want or need. Let's take beer for example: Everyone loves to drink beer but nobody wants to go to the trouble to make it. How do you suppose those community store shelves are going to stock themselves? Basic food and supplies would be the same deal. What does a farm gain from putting the food created by his hard work on the shelves? Freeloaders will just take it all and he'll get nothing in return.
I guess I'm trying to see how society wouldn't devolve back into tribal villages under any form of anarchism. I just don't think people will work hard for each other out of altruism. They need a reason to work, and that reason seems to be wages and compensation.
And that is the problem with communism: in a society with any scarcity, human nature will take over. Even in a small society with very strong moral leadership and social and philosophical unity, it is a challenge[1]. I do wonder what would have happened to Orderville if Congress would have left the early Utah pioneers alone.
That is a big problem with communism, but there's one even greater: the calculation problem.
Without property, there is no trade. Without trade, there are no prices. Without prices, it is impossible to know how to efficiently allocate resources.
TL;DR. Sorry, I'm not going to read a 500 page dissertation on the philosophical points of Anarcho-communism, and all the various forms of Anarchism. If you want to bring me around to thinking Anarchy would be anything other than Mad Max you'll probably need to give me a bulleted list of reasons why.
I guess what I'm asking for is some evidence, not philosophical links from a huge, wordy FAQ.
The problem is that not everything can be fit into one page. We're talking near-total changes to the very most fundamental ways that we've built society, and so a bullet list should not be able to convince you.
Having lived in a communist/post-communist society, I can tell you this is bullshit. Communism, no matter what form, does not work. I agree that maybe (maybe), capitalism is a crappy system, but it is still 5 times (I counted) better than any other system we as a civilization currently came up with.
I know there is no way that I'll change your mind on this. All I can say is that there is nothing "free" in the world. Attempting to pretend like there is simply allows someone to take advantage of someone else.
EDIT: First off, thank you for the detailed response. Also, you did not answer my direct question as to whether you have lived in societies that have different systems than democracy/capitalism or the ones with a more socialist incline. The (other) trouble with communism is that it seems that many advocates of it think that it just hasn't been done right yet. Well, I propose that it cannot be done right and any place that had a pinch of communism in it will show it, and in an ugly way.
Sorry. I'm quite young and I've never lived in a non-capitalist country, or anywhere outside of Ireland or even Dublin.
But I'm not a communist, I'm an anarchist. I guess that doesn't significantly change your point, you probably still think it can never be done right or whatever. Basically, I disagree, but like I said above, I think we're disagreeing about the axioms.
You did admit though that capitalism is flawed. Ever since I realised that, all I want to do with my life is to help those (anarchists) who want to destroy it and create a better world. I just can't justify casually living my life in the capitalist system when I could be out there trying to replace it and helping those who suffer because of it. It feels like my life is meaningless otherwise.
I can recommend the book "Moving On", which discusses a participatory economy, which was quite interesting to me personally. although it does (as you would expect) bog down with committees!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but your main point is that capitalism takes as an axiom that people are naturally selfish, while anarcho-socialism takes as an axiom that people naturally are altruistic.
So I have a question: What motivates you to help other people?
Sex and eating immediately come to mind as counterexamples. When you said "life" did you actually mean something more specific along the lines of "modern life in the west"?
Exactly. I do the same. So I don't think that the concept is out of the realm of possibility.
Generally, anarchists acknowledge that there'd have to be a lot of social change before a state of anarchy could actually come about. If the government disappeared today, it'd be total chaos. Kind of like how I'd advocate for a total abolition of the prohibition of drugs; such a transition couldn't happen right away, it'd have to happen over a period of time.
An anarchistic society would have to be significantly different than our own. I think it'd end up being much like the Internet; there'd be a large number of very small communities. A decentralized network.
I'm not sure if this would ever come about or not.
Anarchism only works if everyone is honest and peaceful.
Not everyone is honest and peaceful.
Therefore anarchism is a naive governmental/philosophical system.
Also, on the internet, people steal shit from each other, hack in and destroy people's systems, commit fraud (phishing), and threaten to kill/harm one another all the time.
Thank you, but I'd rather live in a world where there exists an entity that protects property rights.
That's quite a simplification, but yeah, I'll accept that for the purposes of this post :)
If something I do visibly helps somebody, I feel good then because it feels like I have a purpose in life. It feels like I'm contributing to something greater than myself.
I think one of the most fundamental human urges is to feel like you belong to something. Helping people is so far the best way I've found of satisfying that urge. Capitalism seems to be based on the idea that that what people really want is more stuff. I think the reason that seems to be true is because having stuff and acquiring more of it is necessary to survive in a capitalist society. You need to have money to buy food and shelter. That's also why people don't share more of their stuff - sharing their stuff reduces their chances of survival. Even if somebody is rich "enough" to survive, they still need money to participate in nearly every other aspect of society. They can't listen to music, or go out with their friends, or really do anything unless they have money (or stuff that can be converted into money). This is always in the back of people's minds and is the reason people don't share more, I think.
Edit: Sorry, I do more or less agree with you that what you are describing is pretty much the right way to handle drug problems, but I think it's important to point out that poverty and homelessness are symptoms of capitalism, which is the real problem.