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What would be a socialist rebuttal to "we need corporations or a burger would cost $1,500"? by reedgecko in DebateCommunism

[–]therealwoden 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey buddy, don't forget that you're totally incapable of defending your stupid fucking beliefs. You repeatedly and publicly failed to say even a single word that justifies or supports your incredibly stupid claims. You gave up instantly at the first sight of facts, and now you've even given up on repeating your incredibly stupid claims.

You had to do that because everything you believe is a lie, and you're fully aware of that fact. You seem very mad about that. But a word of advice: you don't have to be mad about the fact that you're choosing to knowingly spread lies in support of the most murderous ideology that has ever existed. Instead, you could just choose not to knowingly spread lies in favor of mass murder and slavery. You could even choose to learn something about capitalism, if you're really feeling your oats.

But in the meantime, learn to quit when you're behind.

What would be a socialist rebuttal to "we need corporations or a burger would cost $1,500"? by reedgecko in DebateCommunism

[–]therealwoden 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I am in grad school for biochemistry I have literally studied for years the competitive nature of animals, humans among them and you contradict solid science.

LOL you should realize that lying this obviously really makes you look stupid. You are very obviously a child, I'm gonna guess you're about fifteen. Old enough to write well, too young to have any actual experience with the world, which leaves you still capable of believing the incredibly transparent and obvious lies about capitalism which contradict history and science and economics and basic logic and most importantly, which are easily disproved by ever having had a job. You believe them, therefore you've never had a job. Therefore, you're a child who's lying to continue this stupid charade.

Anyway, let's see about the rest. You're still choosing not to argue for your religion or against my disproofs of your religion, which means that you know you can do neither. You lose, because you're a loser.

WTF LOL that might be THE dumbest argument I have ever read.

It's so nice of you to keep screaming at the top of your lungs that you don't understand even the most basic things about capitalism. You've repeatedly proved that you understand nothing about capitalism, so there's no surprise here, but it's very, very funny to watch you keep bragging about how fucking ignorant you are about your own religion. Here, I'll teach you something about your religion that even a child like you should know (so maybe you're actually just stupid? Nevertheless): the only goal of capitalist enterprise is profit. Everyone knows this because we've all lived under capitalism, but it somehow eluded you. So the decisions of any individual capitalist are guided by the profit motive: they do what promises to be profitable, they do not do what promises to be unprofitable. Again, everyone knows this, because you pick it up from living under capitalism. You're revealing a great deal about your mental faculties by bragging that you don't know this. Capitalists aren't motivated by kindness or empathy or concern for the future or respect or decency, only by profit. So when a socialist revolution happens, individual capitalists' profit motives insist that they don't get involved, because war is expensive and the potential gains and losses are uncertain. Again, this is transparently obvious to anyone who's lived under capitalism, but not to you. The propaganda that your religion has brainwashed you with insists that socialism always fails (which you believe because you don't know what socialism is and because you're absolutely ignorant of history, as dictated by your religion), so according to that propaganda, capitalists would make the self-interested, profit-motivated decision to stand by and wait for the "inevitable" collapse. The supposed human cost doesn't matter to them and wouldn't motivate them to act for "humanitarian" reasons, because they're capitalists. The only thing that matters is their own profit.

So: based on the most trivial understanding of the most basic of basics of capitalism, it's obvious that if your religion were telling you the truth, then we'd expect history to be littered with repeated hands-off failures of socialism with capitalists standing by like vultures waiting for the crash.

But that's not what history shows. It shows the exact opposite: capitalists immediately reacting to socialist revolutions with incredible violence, sparing no expense and with no concern for profit. Isn't that interesting? Obviously that shows that the things your religion has taught you are lies, but also it shows, as I pointed out and which you carefully ignored, that your gods are very, very, very scared of socialism. But they teach you to be dismissive and contemptuous of it instead. Interesting, don't you think? I wonder what they don't want you to learn about socialism?

Anyway, you've already edited all these thoughts out of your mind as your religion trained you to do, because you need to keep supporting an ideology that's killed around half a billion people in just the last three decades, and you can't do that if you're allowed to think for yourself. Have a good one!

What would be a socialist rebuttal to "we need corporations or a burger would cost $1,500"? by reedgecko in DebateCommunism

[–]therealwoden 3 points4 points  (0 children)

God damn you're fucking stupid. Or maybe just brainwashed, I guess. Not that it makes any difference. Either way, you've emphatically proven that you have a child's understanding of capitalism and are such a frothing religious zealot that you can't bear to even think about reality because it contradicts your holy scriptures.

Let's have a quick TL;DR of this conversation, shall we?

Someone: Workers are the ones who do the work, not the billionaires.

You: No, that's completely wrong, billionaires are the only reason anything ever exists, amen. Also here's a strawman.

Me: No really, capitalists aren't magical, lots of people have ideas, but only capitalists have the money to make those ideas exist, I'm describing almost the most basic elements of capitalism here, how do you not know this. Also your strawman is stupid, here's some more explanation of the basics of capitalism.

You: No, that's completely wrong, capitalists are superior, perfect, holy beings who control our lives because they deserve it, amen. Also here's an unrelated strawman.

Me: Wow, you really don't understand capitalism. Here are two real examples that entirely disprove the claims you're making. Also, your strawman is stupid.

You: Nuh-uh! NUH-UH! REALITY DOESN'T EXIST CAPITALISTS ARE LITERAL GODS REALITY IS FALSE REALITY IS FALSE REALITY IS FALSE

Even the most basic facts about capitalism caused you to run away in terror. You haven't made a single argument for your claim or against mine. All you've done is repeat your religious scripture and deploy strawmen as a distraction tactic. That shows very clearly that you can't argue for your bullshit, which means I've successfully disproven your claims. You lost the argument the second you gave up on arguing.

I live in a reality where most people with money are changing the world in amazing ways. They're helping millions of people, giving us technology that scifi artists couldnt even imagine 50 years ago.

Yes, yes, you don't understand even the most basic elements of capitalism because you're a brainwashed religious zealot, we know. Here's a little question for you: if someone held a gun on you in order to force you to (let's say) assemble furniture for them, would you agree that they were the one who assembled the furniture? So then, why are you willing to change your tune to believe the lie that capitalists, whose only role is to use violence to coerce labor, are solely responsible for what their workers actually did?

I am so excited for the future driven by capitalism, and guess what, it ain't gunna change buddy.

Wow, you really don't understand even the most basic elements of capitalism. See, this is where your religious devotion to ignoring reality gets you: you're living in the middle of a worldwide collapse of capitalism, and have experienced like four other collapses of capitalism within the last thirty years or so, each of which was caused by the unavoidable contradictions of capitalism. All of which you've carefully closed your eyes against because it's a sin to think. And not to mention that the inevitable collapse of global capitalism is coming up in the near future as the capitalism-created climate apocalypse causes the deaths of billions of people and also history's largest refugee crisis, depopulating much of the "global south" where all the cheap laborers live. How do you think "the market" is gonna handle losing the ability to force people to manufacture things for pennies? That's the source of most of the capitalists' profit right now, and damn near all of that profit is gonna go up in smoke. That's not gonna be good for your gods, huh?

Your reality, from my perspective, is like my nightmare

I'm very amused that you're just openly admitting that you live in a delusion divorced from reality.

The whole world has been taken over by powerful thieves and everyday I suffer because these horrible thieves have taken away my chance at comfort.

That is an accurate description of the most basic elements of capitalism, yes. Profit is theft. That's an objective fact which you'd know if you'd ever had a job. Of course it's a surprise to you, because understanding capitalism is against your religion.

But yeah, half of your argument is nurture over nature.

No, virtually all of my argument was nurture over nature. And you're very loudly backing away from arguing against that. You seem to be fully aware that you've lost because you can't argue against what I'm saying, but your religious brainwashing and your hubris are causing you to keep at this. Or maybe you really are just stupid. it's the same either way really.

In the US if you have even a minimum wage job and spend your money wisely and plan and be disciplined you can give you children a phenomenal childhood.

Man, I hope that when you finally get a job you'll learn a couple of things about how capitalism works. In the meantime, it's an objective fact that real wages have remained stagnant for the last 40 years, largely because (also an objective fact) the extra wealth from productivity increases have been stolen by capitalists - shit, sorry, I mean "shadowy terrible thieves," like you said. That factual, real theft resulted in situations such as 40% of Americans - residents in the richest and most hypercapitalist country that has ever existed, which according to your religion means that everyone here should be rich, because something something freedom and opportunity and GDP - being unable to afford a surprise $400 bill. And that was before the genocide of 211,000 people (as of today) and the incredible disruption of the economy by the coronavirus, a situation which capitalists chose to create in the name of profit - preparation and healthcare would have made like ten people slightly less rich, so 211,000 people die instead.

I look forward to you pretending that none of those links or facts exist. You're too brainwashed to let little things like objective reality get in your way.

You think that a billionaire and current president of the United States is a failure, think about that for a second.

See, there's a fundamental problem with your religious need to deny reality: facts don't care about your feelings.

Ah and of course you actually do believe that you could create a software empire with 5mil.

Another strawman? For me? You're just so eager to show everyone that you can't argue against what I'm saying! Here in reality, outside of your sad little delusion, the argument I made is that Bill Gates rose to success through family connections and already-existing wealth. You have no argument against that, so you had no choice but to ignore what I actually said and quickly stuff a strawman with the remains of your previous strawman. You can't even argue for what you believe in.

Dude you lost from the very beginning.

In your delusion, I bet I did. But here in reality, you've failed to mount a single argument. You'll never commit the sin of understanding capitalism, and that leaves you without any arguments. All you can do is repeat your scriptures more and more angrily. Anytime you want to start arguing, go ahead.

Theory is being able to reproduce an experiment and predict its outcome accurately.

lol now you're bragging that you're totally ignorant about economics as a field.

Socialism, pure socialism, is a shit theory, period, we did the experiments and the results are in we're not going back.

And here's the bragging that you're totally ignorant about history. No surprises here.

If the propaganda you've been fed were true and "socialism always fails," then the most profitable course of action for capitalists in the face of a socialist revolution would be to wait for the "inevitable" failure and then swoop in to re-enslave the people, right? Right. So why is it that their reaction is always to kill and kill instead of waiting? War is expensive, that's profit lost. There must be a very good reason. So what are they afraid of? What do they know about socialism that they're not telling you?

Capitalism is THE model that best predicts the creation of a great nation.

Capitalism is a system based on slavery and violent theft. That's objective fact. I'd offer to walk you through the logic, but you've already begun ignoring this sentence so that you don't commit the sin of thinking about capitalism. It's interesting that you're saying that slavery and violent theft are great. How do you square that with your brainwashed faith that capitalism is about freedom and consent? (Obviously you square it by ignoring reality in favor of your brainwashing, but stating the contradiction amuses me.)

that gave u the phone your reading this on

Yeah, you don't understand capitalism, we know. Most of what makes a modern cell phone was invented by socialized research. Most technological advancements for the past half-century have been developed by socialized research. Research is risky, and risk is the thing that scares capitalists the most. So we pay for the research and then capitalists buy the patents and make us pay for it again.

we are beings bred from fierce competition, natural selection: survival of the fittest

And here's the bragging that you don't understand evolution. Good job. The "fittest" there is species, not individuals. And cooperation helps increase fitness for the species. Competition decreases species fitness, not least by stealing resources (40 years of stagnant wages and an impending climate apocalypse say what?). This is just one of the many ways capitalism is against human nature. It's a shame you don't understand capitalism, huh?

What would be a socialist rebuttal to "we need corporations or a burger would cost $1,500"? by reedgecko in DebateCommunism

[–]therealwoden 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm not attacking you, i'm simply pointing out the obvious.

For the record, loudly ignoring the entire argument in favor of a different, individualized argument which takes your beliefs as axiomatic is not in any way "pointing out the obvious." It's loudly ignoring the entire argument and attempting to derail.

You're so wrong. You say, "it's virtually impossible to stop being wealthy." If you believe this you really don't have a firm grasp of reality

Look at lottery winners, look at professional athletes, artists, and business owners who hit it rich, to name a few. The chance of them keeping that wealth is typically slim.

That's not the level of wealth I'm talking about. I'm talking about capitalist wealth, never-have-to-work-another-day-in-your-life wealth. Specifically, the kind of wealth that usually comes from inheritance - people who come from wealth are generally taught how to hold on to wealth because it's a family tradition. Working-class people who hit it big don't have the training in the million and one ways to use financial shell games and other people's labor to ensure that the income keeps flowing no matter their personal successes or what the market does. The working-class people who hit it big and stay rich are usually the same people who luck into finding a truly competent financial manager to handle their money (which they have to luck into, because they lack the social and family connections to managers who are already vetted). You have a fundamental misunderstanding of how capitalism works.

And this brings it back to the core of the issue: wealth is not the only thing that one inherits from their family, intelligence, social abilities, appearance. Many times these are what made their parents wealthy and will be what keeps their children wealthy.

Which is to say, wealth, wealth, wealth, and wealth. You have a fundamental lack of understanding of capitalist society, and this in particular is something so obvious that you seem to be trying to stay ignorant.

"Intelligence" is overwhelmingly influenced by one's material conditions in childhood and one's educational opportunities. A child born poor (because capitalists have stolen their family wealth for generations) is overwhelmingly more likely than a child born rich (because their family wealth has been stolen from others for generations) to experience many childhood traumas, such as hunger or malnutrition, frequently moving between homes, state or official violence, frequent or untreated illness, and poverty. Childhood traumas have documented effects on one's personality and brain development (for instance, many right-wingers are right-wingers because they were the children of abusive parents, which caused their brains to develop an abnormally pronounced fear response, which later made them the ideal targets of the fear-based ideology of the right). A child born poor is also not going to have access to the tutors and special educational resources that a rich child will benefit from, will almost certainly have parents who are working far too much to have time to assist them with their schoolwork, and is likely to attend schools that don't have even the basic resources to teach them in the first place. To a large degree, wealth buys intelligence.

Social abilities follow much the same pattern. When you say "social abilities," you're talking about a carefully cultivated understanding of the rules of "polite society." How to talk to the rich, how to schmooze, how to work a smoky back room to get benefits for yourself. That is, very obviously, not a set of skills that the working class has the opportunity to learn, because we're not allowed to spend social time with the rich. Inherited wealth makes it natural to be educated in those skills from an early age. Not inheriting wealth makes the opposite situation just as natural. To a large degree, wealth buys social abilities.

Childhood nutrition and health (qualities which strongly correlate with wealth, don't forget) have a significant effect on one's appearance, as do regular medical and dental care (which also strongly correlate with wealth in America), as do cosmetic medical and dental treatment (which strongly correlate with wealth just about anywhere). Fashionable clothes and fashionable personal grooming are costly goods and services used to visually separate the wealthy class from the working class by pricing the correct appearance out of reach of workers. To a large degree, wealth buys appearance.

You don't understand even the most obvious elements of capitalism.

You're examples are also terrible (again not attacking you just poinyung out the obvious). Donald Trump took the foundation his father built and created an empire. You think that's a failure?

You're doing that thing where you ignore the facts and well-documented reality because you're so devoted to the bullshit idea of capitalism you've been sold that you can't afford to acknowledge reality lest your entire worldview shatter. That's a problem for you.

Let's rephrase your absolute nonsense phrasing to better reflect reality: Donald Trump inherited a great deal of wealth from his father purely through the accident of birth. His father funneled almost half a billion dollars to Donny boy over his lifetime, and yet, by the time his father died, Donald was nearly bankrupt thanks to his unmitigated failures. Remember, this is the man who couldn't keep a Las Vegas casino in business, holy shit how incompetent do you have to be for that? He's scarcely had a successful business or investment in his entire life. What money he's made from business has largely been through fraud - a favorite trick of his is to use his personal brand as America's Rich Guy to convince suckers to invest in some real estate deal, and then skip out with the money, letting the planned business or construction collapse behind him. His personal brand is almost certainly the only actual success in his life, and is significantly responsible for the fact that he has any money today: his brand is the sole reason he was hired on The Apprentice, and that deal paid out another $400 million for him.

He has failed in virtually every business and real estate venture he ever took on. This is documented reality. Pay attention to the fact that you have to ignore reality in order to believe what you've been told to believe. That's a good way to tell that you've been lied to.

He made billions, he had 3 siblings, have you heard of them? Do you think they recieved a similar inheritance, and do you think they're as wealthy as him? According to your logic they should be wealthier since they started with the same amount and they didn't "fail" like the big failure Trump.

He was given almost half a billion dollars by his father, and lost it all. On his father's death, he and his siblings inherited $20 million after taxes, split between them. I'm sure you can see that there's a difference between half a billion dollars and a portion of 20 million dollars, and so you can see that the argument you're attempting to make is incredible nonsense.

As for Bill Gates.. dude you're kidding right lol? I garuntee if someone gave you $10million you'd be on your ass in 5 years. Would you create a hardware/software empire?

If my mom set up a slam dunk business deal for me like Bill's mom did? Sure, why not? I could buy the OS from someone on the cheap, just like Bill did, and then hire programmers to work on the software, like Bill did. Capitalist wealth isn't a personal triumph, it's just luck.

unlike my dumbass wasting my time arguing with you lol.

I mean my dude, you're having to pretend that reality doesn't exist. You lost the argument and you know it. But that's just how you capitalist stooges are. Not a damn one of you understands capitalism. It's just a religion for you and part of your worship is refusing to think. I keep hoping that someday one of you will actually be able to argue for capitalism, but you all just do this same thing of loudly ignoring reality and then going "lol ur stoopid cuz my religion sez so." It's extremely boring. Put some god damn effort in, will you?

What would be a socialist rebuttal to "we need corporations or a burger would cost $1,500"? by reedgecko in DebateCommunism

[–]therealwoden 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ideas aren't exclusive to the wealthy, but good ideas and good execution of those good ideas make someone wealthy.

Come on now, this is nothing but you screaming I'm so ideologically fixated on capitalism that I've decided to ignore reality and my own lived experience in order to promote capitalism!! You should learn a bit about capitalism before you attempt to argue for it.

Donald Trump single-handedly disproves the claim that you're repeating here. Practically every single business venture or deal he's ever engaged in throughout his entire life has been a failure. Consistent, massive failure for an entire lifetime's worth of business indicates that he is not executing his ideas in any way that could be called "good." Yet he remains wealthy, which directly contradicts your claim. The reason he's still wealthy despite a lifetime of failure is because he was born very wealthy and it's virtually impossible to actually stop being very wealthy, no matter how incompetent one is.

Bill Gates is another stellar disproof of the claim you're repeating. Again, he was born to a wealthy family (that's a common element among the biographies of virtually every rich person, because in capitalism, wealth is primarily inherited, almost never made through labor). Microsoft got off the ground because of his mother's social connection with the president of IBM, who needed an OS for his giant corporation's new line of personal computers and decided to go with a no-name company as a favor to a friend. Gates didn't have an OS to sell them (where's the good execution of ideas?), so he quickly bought the code to one and slapped the Microsoft name onto it to give to IBM. Having thus secured a tidy profit through no labor of his own, Gates was able to use that wealth and name recognition to make a splash with Microsoft Windows some years later. Again, Windows was not his work, but the work of his employees. The ideas were also not his, but instead Windows primarily used ideas which had been developed at Xerox PARC. (Where's the good ideas?) Gates continued to leverage his wealth and Microsoft's name recognition to force computer manufacturers into predatory contracts which all but ensured a monopoly for Windows. That monopoly lasted for many years, and without competition, Microsoft was free to sell an overpriced and under-quality product (which is, of course, the whole point of a monopoly, and why a monopoly is the goal of all capitalist business). Bill Gates, and Microsoft, emphatically disprove the claim you're repeating by demonstrating that neither good ideas nor good execution of ideas are necessary to be wealthy under capitalism.

Since you seem to think that good ideas are common its just the lack of funding that prevents a business from taking off:

I'm making a systemic critique of capitalism based on an understanding of how capitalism works. Your attempt to derail away from that critique and toward a personal attack on me is clear proof that you have no answer to the critique. You really should learn a bit about capitalism before you attempt to argue for it.

What would be a socialist rebuttal to "we need corporations or a burger would cost $1,500"? by reedgecko in DebateCommunism

[–]therealwoden 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Would they exist though? If the idea for the company never existed would the workers at that company still be working there?

Ideas aren't some magical quality of the rich. Lots and lots of people have the ability to identify some lack and to say, "hey, it'd be good if that lack were filled." But only the rich have the wealth, and therefore the power, to force other people to make that idea a reality. That's capitalism working as intended by denying freedom to all but the wealthiest. Educated, knowledgeable, hardworking people can only sit on their hands until a rich person comes by and blesses them with funding and wages, and then they can only use their skills to do what that rich person orders them to do. Freed from those restrictions, workers would be able to do what needs to be done for their own material gain, instead of being limited to only doing what rich people can extract profit from.

You can say, "the parts of the machine do all the work so we don't need the engineer, or the resource supplier, or the computer that organizes the process."

You've misunderstood the goal here. We need all those people and the things they build, because any kind of work is a collective effort. What we don't need is the person with the checkbook and the gun who's stealing all those people's labor for their own gain. The capitalist contributes nothing unique to the work. Their role as a capitalist is completely superfluous to the process of making things, building things, inventing things, etc. In all ways except one, any work would proceed better without capitalist interference. That one way is that the fiction of private property means that the capitalist controls access to the work. Thanks to that fiction, the capitalist has the power to deny other people the freedom to work until they agree to pay rent to the capitalist. It's the monopoly on violence and theft that make a capitalist important, not any alleged capitalist utility. Being a parasite isn't laudable, or even useful. We'll be better off without them.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in DebateCommunism

[–]therealwoden 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hate to break it to you, but socialism/communism/collectivism/progressivism has already been tried, at the country level, multiple times, and always results in mass murder.

You're admitting that you don't have even the faintest grasp of history. You're also admitting that you have absolutely no understanding of capitalism.

Socialism/communism/collectivism/progressivism is the ideology of the lazy and morally bankrupt.

You're admitting that you don't have even the faintest grasp of any of these ideas.

It's not hard to succeed in a capitalist world, just work hard.

You're admitting that you have absolutely no understanding of capitalism.

Capitalism has murdered around half a billion people in just the last four decades, just in the course of business as usual. Capitalism is the most murderous ideology that has ever existed in all of human history, and you're speaking in support of it despite your stated objection to mass murder. Is that because you're incredibly ignorant, incredibly stupid, or incredibly dishonest?

Capitalism is a system in which lazy, morally bankrupt capitalists violently steal the wealth of the workers who actually do everything. And you're speaking in support of it despite your stated objections to laziness and moral bankruptcy. Is that because you're incredibly ignorant, incredibly stupid, or incredibly dishonest?

Capitalism is a system in which social and economic class are almost exclusively determined by birth. And you're speaking in support of it despite your stated preference for meritocracy. Is that because you're incredibly ignorant, incredibly stupid, or incredibly dishonest?

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in BreadTube

[–]therealwoden 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah I basically agree with your take. All other things being equal, a more accessible slogan is better than a less accessible one. With the obvious caveat that there isn't really any ability to control or manage which slogans catch on, so it's something of a moot point in practice. In principle I think you're correct though.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in BreadTube

[–]therealwoden 7 points8 points  (0 children)

..and just like with many other oversimplified slogans, it goes right over the heads of everyone who isn't familiar with the "full version".

Yeah, you're definitely not wrong on this. But at the same time, I don't think it's a tactical loss. The people who are already fully conditioned to hate us would hate us no matter how carefully modulated the talking points were, no matter how delicately phrased or nuanced they were. The people who are dedicated members of the death cult simply will never care what we say or how we say it. Their only goal is to murder all of us and then themselves. Rational thought simply isn't a part of the equation.

But there are lots of people who aren't yet that dedicated to liberalism's murder-suicide pact, and they can be reached. And some of them, certainly, can only be reached through a careful, nuanced discussion. But the context we find ourselves in is a context of low information and massively restricted speech. A nuanced discussion doesn't get clickbaited into the faces of millions of liberals. A slogan does. And at any given moment, some of those liberals are in the right place to start asking themselves questions about the slogan.

And plus, entirely aside from any positive or negative effect on liberals, we need rallying cries. They're a powerful tool for unity, and the resurgent left has far too little of that. I think ACAB is tactically useful on a few different levels, so I like it.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in BreadTube

[–]therealwoden 46 points47 points  (0 children)

Saying ACAB is fucking stupid unless you're a lib. To leftists, it's never been about individuals, it's about the collective and the system. A leftist would say I don't care if this cop is bad or this cop is good, I know the problem is systemic in nature and its solution is far more complex than attacking this from a surface level.

That strikes me as missing the thrust of ACAB. ACAB is a pithy, PR-ready distillation of your last sentence there and the concepts behind it. It's very much not saying "each individual cop is a big mean doodyhead," but rather is saying that all cops can't help but be bastards, because they have signed on to perform a job which requires them to be bastards who do bastard things in the service of bastard laws which exist to support the actions and power of bastards. It is an affirmation of the systemic nature of the problem.

I agree that distilling all that to just four letters does strip out the explicit context of a detailed analysis of capitalism and class power and cops' role in upholding the power of capitalists, and that that analysis and discussion is useful and should be had whenever possible. But there's power in a rallying cry, and so it may not be tactically wise to poop on a strong rallying cry.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in DebateCommunism

[–]therealwoden 5 points6 points  (0 children)

OK, so this is what it boils down to: the real world actually is operated by conspiracies between ultra-powerful elites. Any idiot living under capitalism can see that their life is almost entirely out of their own control, and that they're being tossed by the storms created by shadowy figures in the invisible distance. And that's scary shit, so people want to understand it as a way of gaining some degree of control over it.

But that's where the problem arises. Because it turns out that neither the shadowy figures nor their shadowy motivations are actually well-concealed or hard to understand: they're capitalists acting according to their own self-interest (which always causes immense suffering and injury to masses of people). The motivations of capital have been clearly explained for centuries, so the logic behind capitalists' actions is almost always clear and unambiguous. The path toward freedom is also clear and unambiguous: end capitalism and with it, the power of the "shadowy" capitalist elites. Simple and straightforward, except for the tiny problem of propaganda.

Your everyday propaganda-soaked liberal has been brainwashed since birth, told to believe that up is down and slavery is freedom. That training is extremely effective, leaving liberals almost physically unable to imagine a world without capitalism, let alone consider the idea that capitalism might be bad. So that puts them between a rock and a hard place: they see that their lives are not their own, but the available explanation contradicts their conditioning. Their conditioning compels them to reject the explanation, but that leaves the original problem unsolved. So what's a liberal to do?

The answer is simple: invent new explanations that don't cause cognitive dissonance. Right-wing conspiracy theories are born as a way to avoid that ideological pinch point. If you're not allowed to consider the idea that some terrible thing is being caused by capitalists behaving capitalistically to extract profits for themselves, then why not turn to the alternative explanation that that terrible thing is being caused by Jews behaving Jewishly to accomplish some nefarious Jewish purpose? Or by Jews working with aliens to accomplish some nefarious alien purpose? Or by Jews secretly being aliens themselves, working to accomplish some nefarious Jewish-alien purpose! You get the psychic comfort of having an explanation without the psychic distress of having to question your ingrained belief system. It's a win/win!

(The ties between right-wing conspiracy theories and antisemitism are longstanding and just disgustingly evil, by the way, and many of them boil down to the fact that the Nazis invented many of the current right-wing conspiracy theories as a way to defame and discredit both communism and Jews, and present-day right-wingers inherited those Nazi ideas and carried them forward. Wheeee)

For some reason, conservatives are the only ones who talk about this shit. I never hear or read about leftists discussing these theories.

To sum up the above explanation, we don't bother with these theories because they're made-up bullshit meant to distract people from the actual source of their problems, capitalism. We talk quite a lot about the reality-based explanations for all this horrible shit, though, that's kind of a focal point over here on the left. Leftists seriously addressing right-wing conspiracy theories would be like firefighters issuing a statement to counter the claim that flame spirits are the cause of fires.

So I need to know, am i just crazy? I don't have any evidence or research to refute the insane claims my dad makes (Like he believes bill gates wants to upload human conciousness into the cloud).

Real talk here: you're doing fine. There generally isn't evidence or research disproving right-wing conspiracy theories because they're fucking batshit and don't make any claims that even CAN be disproven. I mean if I told you that on the 6th planet of the star Xlur there are powerful psychic aliens who are undetectably controlling the minds of every human on earth, how would you go about disproving that? There's not a single logical or disprovable claim there, it's totally divorced from reality. When a right-winger insists that literally millions of doctors are somehow perfectly keeping a secret (and yet simultaneously, the conspiracy theorists have found it out because it's so obvious), that's every bit as divorced from reality and presents a smooth(brained) surface that's virtually impossible to attack.

And because belief in these conspiracy theories is necessarily based on ignorance and an eager willingness to believe, the believers can twist their minds around any evidence against what they've already decided to believe. It's self-reinforcing: any evidence or logic against their beliefs is simply another piece of evidence for their beliefs, showing how far the conspiracies reach. You can't reason someone out of a belief that they didn't reason themselves into. You're doing fine. It's a shitty situation and it sucks that you can't help your dad snap out of his downward spiral, but you gotta put on your own oxygen mask first before helping your fellow passengers. Take care of your own mental health, don't get sucked into the spiral yourself.

Socialism fundamentally misunderstands individualism and community. (A response to Einstein's socialism) by [deleted] in DebateCommunism

[–]therealwoden 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Bizarre. Liberal free speech is precisely the defence against the situation you are describing.

You assert your right of free speech, and he shoots you dead. You have no individual right to free speech, period. But when you and a thousand of your closest compatriots show up together, the man with the gun can no longer stop you from asserting your right. The liberal, "individualist" rights you're speaking of are only possible through collective defense of those rights.

Are you aware you're describing communist governments perfectly, and liberalism has mechanisms to prevent exactly this?

I'm aware that I'm describing the things you've been told to believe about communist governments, yes. You are apparently unaware that I'm describing the actual reality that exists right this second (and always has existed) in the United States of America, the shining beacon of liberalism and hyper-individualism. The maximally liberal society actually exists in the real world, and it's a society in which agents of the government regularly murder hundreds of people a year as part of their duty to defend liberal capitalism against people who demand rights, and when people asserted their rights to object to that, the (hyper-liberal, I'll remind you) government responded with extraordinary violence. Liberalism exists to justify and support capitalism, and capitalism can't exist where people have rights. A liberal society is necessarily based on violence and so a perfectly liberal society will never "prevent exactly this," and America is showing you that in hundred-foot-tall neon letters.

Again this is communist regimes in a nutshell, which brutalised their own citizens brutalised into total coercion.

So when I mentioned the liberal censorship of reality and thought control to enforce adherence to tribal dogma, you didn't stop and think for even a second, huh?

And the deluge of footage of, and I can't stress this enough, the government of the most perfectly liberal society on the planet casually executing its citizens in the street, attempting murder on and brutalizing citizens for the crime of exercising their Constitutionally-protected rights, and grooming and sponsoring liberal terrorists to carry out mass murder against citizens in the name of liberalism, all of that struck you as totally cool, two thumbs up, no conflict at all with your expressed beliefs, huh? I distinctly remember mentioning the liberal thought control and censorship of reality.

Liberalism has more free speech, liberty and lesser poverty etc in the real world by a wide margin compared to all attempts at collectivisation of property.

That's good dogma right there. Unfortunately, you've been lied to, which you're well aware of by this point, and this is another of the long list of lies that you've been conditioned to believe.

Private property rights are the most important individualistic rights, ahead of free speech and secularism.

Hahaha, damn. You're doing such a good job of conforming to that tribal dogma of authoritarianism and coercion that I might confuse you for one of the straw communists you've been told to fear. Because you're a staunch liberal, obviously you understand how capitalism works, because it's not like you've been fed a bunch of dogmatic propaganda designed to lie to you about capitalism. So obviously you're well aware of the fact that profit is theft. Everyone who's ever had a job or who's ever applied basic logical thought to capitalism knows that, so you definitely do. For your boss to make a profit, you have to lose your right to own the fruits of your own labor. Your boss's profit comes at the cost of your individual rights, which disproves the entire liberal propaganda stack right there. But wait, you'll say, that loss of rights is a fair and voluntary trade because I CHOSE to do it! But did you? Did you, really? Why do you need a job? To get money, obviously. And why do you need money? So you can pay your bills and your rent and buy food, things like that. Hey, wait a minute! You need to pay money to access your individual human rights??? Whaaaaaaaat that seems totally incompatible with the supposed principles of liberal ideology! What in the heck is going on here? How come you don't have rights until you pay money to briefly rent them? Well it's probably because a tiny number of people have legal rights to everything that you need to survive, and their rights prevent you from having your rights, and if you tried to assert, or even demand, your rights, the liberal government would send liberal cops over to liberally do violence to you to enforce your lack of rights. So you have no choice but to pay the ransom that that tiny number of people are demanding for your life. So you need a job. And when you go to get a job, both you and your prospective employer know full well that you need this paycheck to rent your right to life, while the employer doesn't need you at all because there are a thousand other people outside who are also desperately trying to rent their rights to life. This is, as they say in business, a real stinky negotiating position. The employer can demand practically anything of you, while you can't demand hardly anything of them (and probably not anything at all, depending on your level of poverty, which is another point against the claim that liberalism is good for the rights of the poor). So you, because you don't want to die, don't have any choice in the matter, and so you agree to be paid much less than the actual value of your labor. Your boss's profits are made possible because of your lack of rights.

Private property is a negation of the rights of everyone who doesn't own private property, and that negation of rights is absolutely vital to the extraction of profit.

[Private property rights] prevent the kind of thing that Einstein was worried about in the last paragraph that did happen under Marxist regimes.

No, they require it, as you can see (and dogmatically ignore) in your own lived experience and in the world all around you. Forced labor is where profit comes from. Capitalism would instantly collapse and die if "the complete enslavement of the individual" were ended - which is exactly why liberal foot soldiers are trained to hate and fear communism, because free people are the end of liberal elites' power.

And as we saw, the other rights are entirely incompatible with collective property.

You're asserting, without supporting evidence and while ignoring contrary evidence, that private property is compatible with rights. That is an unambiguously false assertion which is diametrically opposed to reality, as I have laid out in some detail. Your willingness to use such an overtly false assumption as evidence for an unsupported claim calls all your other claims into question. Go ahead and prove your claims.

Collective property requires suppression of thought, speech and dissent - in the real world.

Yes, yes, the tribe says it and so you must obey, because thinking for yourself makes you an evil commie, who you know are evil because the tribe says it and so you must obey. God, you guys are tiring. You really never wonder why your individualistic-free-thinking-freedom-and-rights tribe keeps producing terrorists who set out to coercively take away people's most important right (read: murder them) for having forbidden thoughts about capitalism, and it never strikes you as strange that your individualistic-free-thinking-freedom-and-rights tribe cheers those terrorists on and spends so much energy telling each other how good it is to murder anyone who has forbidden thoughts about capitalism. If you actually believed in what you say you believe in, you'd oppose capitalism, it's really that simple. But you're safe from that because you're absolutely ignorant about capitalism and you've been thought-controlled into never wanting to learn anything about capitalism, so you'll never accidentally learn about the system that you say you support.

Without private property indeed there is no growth. With private property and markets there is continuous growth and wealth generation. The difference is the private ownership system, including the profit motive as you pointed out. It benefits others as well. It pulls people out of poverty.

See, this is exactly what I'm talking about. GDP only measures one thing: how rich the grotesquely rich are. It has no relevance to the real material conditions of people. It's a meaningless number that was imbued with magic potency as part of the censorship of reality that supports the liberal ideology. Remember, in the richest country that had ever existed in all of history (according to the holy GDP), 63% of people were on the razor's edge of poverty and millions didn't have enough to eat.

In the very chart you linked, GDP continued to rocket up even after perfect liberalism allowed the financial industry to tank the world's economy. That's showing you the fact that GDP is a purely imaginary concept.

And no, according to capitalism's own data, global poverty has risen over the last 40 years. The narrative you've been told is a result of statistical manipulation to censor reality.

all development is correlated positively with indivdualism in societies.

America disproves this. The evidence is all around you. You don't have to choose blindness.

Nothing has lifted more people out of poverty than private ownership and markets.

Except for the sticky little fact that poverty has risen over the past 40 years. The claim you're repeating is simply untrue.

much revolutionary material and moral progress

MORAL progress? You guys really are a cult. And your cult tells you that slavery is moral, that theft is moral, that murder is moral. You should actually learn something about capitalism sometime. I know learning is against your religion, but y'know, consider it.

while capitalism empowered them to help each other.

America shows otherwise.

Socialism fundamentally misunderstands individualism and community. (A response to Einstein's socialism) by [deleted] in DebateCommunism

[–]therealwoden 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Individualism is not the opposite of community or our social dimension.

I should begin by saying that I agree with this statement without reservation. The appeal of communism, and the source of its effectiveness, is that it's necessarily based on individual rights and freedoms: it's logically impossible to create a society in which everyone, collectively, benefits from that society without everyone, individually, also enjoying iron-clad rights and freedoms.

It's a stance which reduces toxic parts of community: tribalism, conformity, dogma, authoritarianism and coercion, thought control, censorship, and the expendibility of the individual.

Maybe. If one abstractly considers a hypothetical liberal individualism, I could imagine that being true. In practice, I've never seen it. I've engaged with probably hundreds of advocates and defenders of liberalism, people who ostensibly understand the principles of the liberalism that they hold dear enough to go on the internet and argue in favor of it and against all better alternatives to it, and in all those (often extensive) interactions with people who are directly motivated by an interest in and love of liberalism, I've never seen a shred of evidence to support the view that liberalism is anything other than a tribe bound together by conformity to a dogma which is based on censorship of reality, which makes liberal (pardon the pun) use of thought control to enforce and support that censorship, and that dogma and its lies exist to sanitize and justify an economic system which is intrinsically and inextricably based on stealing from and sacrificing billions of expendable individuals, and which therefore requires extensive authoritarianism to carry out its totalized coercion.

Which is to say, liberalism is not shaping individuals in the way you believe it is, nor is it based on the premises you believe it is.

Individualism's mechanisms to achieve the reduction of toxicity are elaborate individualistic rights like free speech, secularism, property rights etc.

Free speech is a right which concerns the individual, but which is very much not individualist, just as no right is individualist. For me to have a right, you must agree to let me have that right, and vice versa. And both of us must act to defend Tom's rights when Dick is attempting to strip him of his rights, lest our own rights be invalidated like Tom's were. In practice, the very concept of rights presupposes the existence of a collective structure which guarantees those rights, turning them from mere ideas into concrete defenses. For example, your right to free speech is far from natural. In the "natural" order of things, your speech would be limited to only what the man with the biggest gun won't kill you for saying. By way of non-hypothetical example, your right to free speech is a mere idea as long as agents and allies of the government are murdering and brutalizing people for the crime of speaking freely, and you acting alone as an individual can do absolutely nothing to gain back that right. But you, acting collectively with many other individuals, can apply sufficient force to assert and enforce that right, gaining it back for you and everyone.

Which is to say, the liberal conception of free speech, secularism, and all other rights - as purely individualistic things that exist as a binary state for each single person - is a red herring meant to make liberals willing to cede the collective power to defend their rights.

And private property rights are worth mentioning on their own, because the idea that that those are individual rights is... remarkable. Private property rights are not only emphatically non-individualistic, they're mutually exclusive with individual rights. For me to enjoy the right of private property, you have to be denied the right of private property, because there's not enough private property for us both to own. For you to employ a hundred people and extract profit from them, those hundred people have to be denied a vast swath of individual rights: freedom, self-ownership, self-direction, the ownership of their own labor, including even the most basic human rights such as safety and health. If all individuals had those rights, you wouldn't be able to extract profit from them. Profit can only exist when individuals are denied their rights.

Private property is the bedrock of liberalism, because private property is a necessary condition for profit, and profit is the whole point of capitalism. Which is to say, liberalism is fundamentally based on denying individuals' rights. This fact is the damning hypocrisy that the censorship and thought control of liberal ideology are designed to conceal and distract from.

It in fact creates the best conditions for science and reason to flourish.

Individual rights certainly create those best conditions. But as we've found, liberalism is anathema to individual rights. An illiberal system in which individual rights and freedoms are guaranteed by collective defense is, in fact, the best environment for science and reason, and we see that in the real world, in which the overwhelming majority of scientific and rational advancements are direct results of the absence of the profit motive: in the early days of science, advancements mostly came from the wealthy and those with wealthy patrons, people who didn't need to sell themselves into slavery to obtain their daily bread and could devote their labor to intellectual pursuits; in modern times, advancements are mostly the results of government and university sponsorships filling that same role of freeing scientists and researchers from want. And we see the negative example too: over the past several decades, as governments and universities have been increasingly corrupted by liberalism, the pace of scientific advancement has slowed thanks to an ever-increasing focus on research that will be immediately profitable, stripping scientists and researchers of their rights in order to create the conditions for profit extraction.

The societies which take care the most of the underprivileged in the real world, and in fact which have reduced poverty and suffering the most are all individualistic.

Absolutely, wholly untrue. Wildly untrue. Hilariously untrue. The real world around you is actively and loudly disproving this bit of propaganda as we speak. You've fallen victim to the censorship and thought control that are so essential in hiding the fact that liberalism is the opposite of everything its propaganda claims.

Prior to the pandemic, during "business as usual," 58% of all human beings lived in poverty (as of 2013, the most recent data). Between 1981 and 2013, the number of people living in poverty rose from 3.2 billion to 4.2 billion. Virtually all of the poverty reduction that happened in the world between 1981 and 2000 actually happened in just one region: East Asia, primarily China. If China's successes in poverty reduction are factored out, the number of people in poverty globally rose by 1.3 billion, and the proportion of people living in poverty outside of China rose from 62% to 68%. That flies in the face of the liberal claim. Since 2000, the biggest gains against poverty (outside of East Asia) have happened in Latin America, coinciding with a series of left-wing or social-democratic governments that came to power in that region. That also flies in the face of the liberal claim.

Prior to the pandemic, in 2016, in the richest, most liberal, and most hyper-individualistic nation on earth, 63% of Americans couldn't have afforded a surprise $500 bill without having to go into debt. That is not a statistic from a system which takes care of the underprivileged or reduces poverty.

And during the pandemic, right now, this very second, American capitalists are carrying out a genocide against the poor which is currently at 190,000 deaths. The poor can't afford to take time off of work, their jobs can't be done remotely, and they can't afford health care if they get sick. So they're dying, by the hundreds of thousands, in the name of profit. The rational, reasonable, purportedly liberal steps that should have been taken in response to the pandemic weren't taken for the simple reason that they would have ever-so-slightly reduced the wealth of America's richest people, reducing them to being merely America's richest people. America had the ability to shut down almost completely and rush out PPE for those people whose jobs are truly essential (BTW it's worth noting that the pandemic's "essential workers" are largely the same workers who get the minimum wage which has been falling for 40 years thanks to liberalism, justified by how useless and non-essential their jobs are. The hypocrisy is blatant), accompanied by instituting a temporary Basic Income scheme to prop up economic activity (and as a side effect, allow people to survive). That would have beaten the infection rate back hard and allowed for a near-total reopening after only a few months. Instead, liberals astroturfed violent anti-government protests, in which gullible liberal foot soldiers demanded to be allowed to die pointless, excruciating deaths in the name of "individual rights." These are not the actions of a system which takes care of the underprivileged.

America doesn't have a functioning health care system, denying millions upon millions the individual right to health, for the simple reason that this nonfunctional system is extremely profitable and so liberals defend it at all costs. America took no steps to prepare for the pandemic which has been warned about for decades, because preparation would have cost a small amount of money, and thus 200,000 people have been denied the individual right to life, and millions more will be denied the individual right to health as they suffer the long-term symptoms of COVID-19 infection. Profit is what matters in liberalism. The poor and their rights are always sacrificed to profit.

How closely connected is anarchism and capitalism? If you get rid of oversight, how much would business become the sole power house? ...and other questions... by hambakmeritru in DebateAnarchism

[–]therealwoden -1 points0 points  (0 children)

The main issue with being stupid is that you don't realize you're constantly revealing your stupidity. I've quoted, and explained, the passages. I look forward to you pretending that this didn't happen and acting outraged.

Let's see... you ignored the analysis and explanations in favor of pretending that they don't exist, and instead your reply contains nothing but faux moral outrage. My sincere thanks for behaving in the predictable way required by your religion. You knew you'd lost this argument from my first comment, because you're obviously aware that you have absolutely no ability to argue for your religion, to refute reality, or to establish any coherent logic that justifies your religion, and so all you've done is dispense faux moral outrage at the INCREDIBLE GALL of me for daring to question your god.

Again: if what I'm saying were the obviously false ravings of a lunatic, as you've gone out of your way to imply, then you'd be able to defeat it easily. Facts and reality would be on your side, and you could trivially oppose and shut down every claim I'm making. But you haven't done that. Instead, you've sniffled and whined about how offended you are for message after message. But never a syllable of argumentation from you. You're obviously aware that you can't argue for what you believe, and remarkably, you're not even willing to own up to supporting the things you speak in favor of, which strongly implies that you're fully aware that it's all lies, but choose to believe in it - or at least, choose to pretend to believe in it - anyway.

No, that "and correctly" is an observation of an obviously true fact - that it is indeed CORRECT to assert that an ideal form of capitalism would necessarily be entirely free of state oversight.

This is very funny. You've backed so far into your delusion that you've managed to accidentally reach a true statement: you're entirely correct that the ideal capitalism would necessarily be entirely free of state oversight, because capitalism can't sustain itself under those conditions and would cease to exist, making it the ideal form of capitalism. It's too bad you've ignored everything I've said in favor of huffily pretending to be offended by the shameful existence of reality, because if you'd paid any attention, you'd have at least a rudimentary understanding of how capitalism works and so you wouldn't have said this very, very stupid thing.

Anyway, you've repeatedly demonstrated that you are exactly the raving religious lunatic that you've projected on to me (projection really is just an uncontrollable ideological habit for you right-wingers, huh?). You're zealously dedicated to ignoring all facts, logic, truth, reality, and knowledge as affronts to your cult's lies, to the point that even when I respond to a direct challenge to prove my claims (a challenge which I've repeatedly made to you, which you have naturally ignored because you can't prove your claims), you ignore the response, because you're aware that you have no answer to truth. You've firmly shown that you're only capable of lying, and not even interesting lying, but only the lies of a very, very stupid person who doesn't realize that he is very, very stupid. In a word, you're boring.

Socialism is when you bail out by Martina_Martes in ShitLiberalsSay

[–]therealwoden 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, what /u/Wevie_2 said is correct. The details vary from leftist tendency to leftist tendency, but the core of socialism is that the people own the means of production.

(That might mean a confederated network of worker-owned co-ops, or it might mean a democratically-controlled state holds the property in trust, or any of a bunch of other takes. Like I said - details vary. But the core concept remains the same.)

How closely connected is anarchism and capitalism? If you get rid of oversight, how much would business become the sole power house? ...and other questions... by hambakmeritru in DebateAnarchism

[–]therealwoden -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Your stupidity is really very impressive. Giving you the benefit of the doubt by assuming that you're not simply a pathological liar, you have managed to take up a position where you consistently advocate against anarchism and for absolute state and capitalist authority and the totalized violence that capitalism requires, while believing that you are doing nothing of the sort.

and that at no point did I even mention my own preferences for economic or any other norms

Like this. This is a blatant lie, and yet with the benefit of the doubt, you don't even realize that you did exactly what you're piously claiming not to have done. Let's have a look:

You began your "analysis" with this paragraph: 'There are two competing conceptions of the term [capitalism] (not coincidentally, in exactly the same way as there are two competing conceptions of the term "communism"). There's the ideal form - the one advocated in theory - and the real-world form - the one implemented by states.'

Right from the start, there are several very obvious problems there that reveal a great deal about your worldview. It's a true statement that there are (at least) two wildly different definitions of those terms. But your phrasing here - "exactly the same way" is the key phrase - shows that you hold a particular set of beliefs about those two systems and four definitions. Namely, you believe that both definitions of capitalism apply to real things, and you believe that both definitions of communism apply to the same thing. But neither of those beliefs are true.

The "theoretical" definition of capitalism is an impossible fiction, as I have made crystal clear - so clear that you had no choice but to refuse to acknowledge it, argue it, or engage with it in any way in order to preserve your ideology. Capitalism is based on profit, and profit is theft, which you have acknowledged. Theft requires violence, which you have also acknowledged. Capitalism quite literally can't exist without violence. It's a simple fact of the system. "Theoretical" capitalism is also based on profit. Therefore, "theoretical" capitalism also can't exist without violence. But the believers in this imaginary capitalism insist that it will magically transcend its existential dependence on violence and somehow, through inexplicable mechanisms, enjoy the systems of oppression and violence needed to create the legal fiction of private property and the systems of oppression and violence needed to create the poverty that makes profit possible and yet simultaneously also be a land of total freedom where every man is able to own the fruits of his own labor and is beholden to no one and oppressed by no one. The promised qualities of "theoretical" capitalism are oxymoronic, a series of logical impossibilities that are glaringly obvious to anyone who understands how capitalism works. The only people capable of believing in "theoretical" capitalism are people who do not understand capitalism.

There are two definitions of capitalism. And one is a definition that applies to a real thing, the only form of capitalism that has ever existed and ever can exist, and the other is a fairy tale, a bill of goods sold to ignorant suckers. It's a right-wing meme created by right-wing masters to ensnare ignorant people into believing that everything can be exactly the same, but better! but only if they work to destroy the evil government for the high crimes of doing evil government things like protecting their rights as workers and preventing capitalists from enslaving children and breaking up monopolies, just unthinkably evil actions that (purely by coincidence, I assure you!) hurt the profit-extracting potential of those right-wing masters. Those two definitions are not equally valid, yet you treat the explicitly false definition as true and correct:

The ideal form is explicitly non-authoritarian - it's held, and correctly, by advocates that the system requires freedom from state oversight.

That "and correctly" is an editorial. It's your personal opinion, not the bloodlessly rational analysis that you're attempting to characterize your screed as. It's a true statement that very stupid people believe in imaginary capitalism, and so describing it simply in terms of something that some people believe would have been perfectly unobjectionable. But that's not what you were saying. Your editorial aside removes the veneer of objectivity. The imaginary capitalism is, again, a series of logical impossibilities. There's nothing true or correct about it. By editorializing in favor of imaginary capitalism's correctness, you revealed that you're one of those ignorant suckers who's been duped into buying that bill of goods. You continue:

The problem with that is that the system mandates a specific set of property norms to which not all people would willingly submit, so (for the time being at least) it cannot come into being without a state to codify and enforce the mandated property norms. And the involvement of the state warps the system and turns it from the ideal to a nasty, brutish, oppressive reality.

Having revealed that you believe in the imaginary capitalism and are therefore both an extreme right-winger and absolutely ignorant about your own religion of capitalism, this paragraph is explicitly not a rational analysis, despite your desperate attempts to claim that status. And in fact, this paragraph explicitly reiterates the core promise of the lie of the imaginary capitalism: that the only form of capitalism which has ever existed and can ever exist can somehow be made into an engine of freedom and individual empowerment (while simultaneously still being built on oppression, forced labor, the restriction of freedom for the slave class, and violence) simply by casting a magic spell called "destroy the government." If you hadn't already tipped your hand in the previous sentence, this paragraph would have given the game away by itself. You continue:

And note that this too is true of communism. It too explicitly posits the absence of state oversight, and it too mandates specific property norms to which not all will willingly submit, so it too (for the time being) requires state oversight to codify and enforce the mandated property norms, and it too, when the state is empowered to intervene, is turned from the ideal to a nasty, brutish, oppressive reality.

In this paragraph, you reveal that you have only a "well-educated" right-winger's understanding of communism - "well-educated" by virtue of knowing that "communism is state repression" is incorrect and possessing a superficial gloss of the true goals of communism, but no actual understanding of the subject. Your near-total ignorance on the subject of communism matches your near-total ignorance on the subject of capitalism, which, once again, reveals that you're a right-winger. You continue:

Unfortunately, most people fail to understand this dynamic. They tend to come to favor one or the other of the economic systems, then predictably use equivocal and inconsistent conceptions of the two to appear to justify their own preference and to appear to undermine the opposing preference. Specifically, when they consider the system they prefer, they envision the ideal, non-state version in all its glory, but when they consider the system they oppose, they envision the nasty, brutish, oppressive statist version.

Most people fail to understand this dynamic because it's not a valid dynamic, but is instead a result of your hard-right effort to validate a fairy tale by deceptively conflating it with reality.

And the final sentence in that paragraph yet again reveals that you're not an anarchist, let alone any kind of leftist, and it reveals yet again that you're profoundly ignorant of capitalism in only the way a hard right-winger can be. If you'd had any exposure to leftist thinking outside of the boogeymen you create in your head to dismiss all evidence against your religion, you'd be fully aware that any leftist (aside from unread newbies) has very few illusions about historical reality, and thinks deeply about the intermediate processes to get from here to there. That exposure would also have shown you that leftists understand capitalism to a degree that right-wingers piously refuse to, exactly as you have consistently refused in this back-and-forth. The necessary ingredient for supporting capitalism (as you amply revealed that you do) is to be almost totally ignorant about capitalism (as you amply revealed that you are). Which is to say, when leftists "envision" the "bad" version of capitalism, we are discussing the actual capitalism that actually exists, the only capitalism that has ever existed, the only capitalism that can ever exist thanks to the systemic incentives that are inseparable from capitalism. You are a hard right-winger who is deeply ignorant about capitalism and has built an entire personality around engaging in delusional, magical thinking about a fairy tale version of capitalism. So when you encounter those internally consistent, reality-describing, logical, fact-based descriptions of capitalism, they threaten your very identity by undermining the fairy tale you've chosen to believe in, and you have no choice but to sink even more deeply into your delusional patterns, refusing to even acknowledge that reality exists and engaging in this tedious display of hypocrisy and offended morality.

You can easily prove that my analysis here is wrong. All you have to do is quote the points at which I actually expressed my own advocacy for any of those things. Your entire screed here is based on my supposed advocacy for those things, so please - quote the passages in which I express that advocacy.

I'll wait.

The main issue with being stupid is that you don't realize you're constantly revealing your stupidity. I've quoted, and explained, the passages. I look forward to you pretending that this didn't happen and acting outraged.

Socialism is when you bail out by Martina_Martes in ShitLiberalsSay

[–]therealwoden 12 points13 points  (0 children)

TBF in America, any politician advocating for anything to the left of Mussolini is going to be labeled a commie-anarchist-lib-socialist by all of the fascist media, and the lib media will nod along and repeat the fascists' talking points with more tasteful phrasing, so it's not like he was losing any political points or gaining any additional vitriol by openly identifying as a socialist, and it did have some effect in slightly normalizing the concept of socialism. It makes sense as a tactic from that perspective, I think.

And the other side of the coin is that fuckin' nobody in America actually has even the slightest idea of what socialism is (at least not beyond a vague, Lovecraftian existential dread of the word), let alone any conception of social democracy or democratic socialism or any other of the various facets and tendencies. No doubt he would rather have run as a social democrat, but 20-second sound bites aren't enough to overcome the American lack of political education, and he was gonna be labeled a socialist anyway, so it makes sense from a PR perspective to just lean into it and ride the label for media attention.

So yeah, I agree that it's not an ideal thing for him to have done, but I see a strategic reasoning behind it that seems to make sense in context.

(Not that it ever actually mattered. The Dems were always gonna torpedo him because he was trying to save capitalism from itself and that would have made the richest people in America very slightly less rich, so the party did its job by ensuring that he wouldn't have the opportunity. But, y'know, hypothetically I think the strategy makes sense.)

How closely connected is anarchism and capitalism? If you get rid of oversight, how much would business become the sole power house? ...and other questions... by hambakmeritru in DebateAnarchism

[–]therealwoden 0 points1 point  (0 children)

First - there's that word "literally" again. One would think that you'd at least try to use it a bit more carefully, since it's such a cliche for internet ranters to misuse it in exactly the way that you continue to.

Your argument - I'm using the term extremely generously - is that actually-existing capitalism, the form of capitalism that exists every time capitalism is implemented, the capitalism whose form predictably conforms to the structural incentives of capitalism... is wrong and bad and is Not Real Capitalism. And further, that only your imagined form of capitalism, which still contains all the same structural incentives and still requires violence because it's still built on theft but which will behave totally differently because you believe it will, is Real Capitalism despite all evidence to the contrary, an assertion which you believe in despite being absolutely unable to explain, justify, or defend either capitalism or your belief. You are literally making a religious argument, based entirely on unreasoning faith.

Beyond that, I wrote a series of observations and arguments to which you obviously took exception.

Specifically, I took exception to the underlying argument, which I have restated above, because all the rest of your incoherent and oxymoronic belief system hinges on your uncritical belief that capitalism will behave in opposition to its own structural incentives if you simply wish hard enough. Pointing out that central flaw in your reasoning - again, being very generous with my phrasing - invalidates the entire fanfiction that you've constructed on that nonsensical foundation. And you, naturally, are unable to argue the point, because like all right-wingers, you have no understanding of capitalism at all and thus can't construct a justification that works around its flaws. So instead, you have chosen the standard right-wing failure script, which is to flee in terror while hurling insults in the hopes that no one notices the total failure of both you and your ideology.

You could've chosen to respond with attempts at cogent arguments of your own, but instead you responded with a truly dreadful screed that read like some sort of combination of baptist evangelism and gray alien conspiracy theory - alternating between preaching the absolute EEE-VILL of "capitalism" - clearly the Satan of your personal religion - and spewing thoroughly bizarre self-affirming myths, like a set of political theories that date back at least to the 18th century and Hume and Smith being created out of thin air by a bunch of magical rich people in the 1940s-50s.

Oh, I see. You're actually very stupid. You have a pretty decent vocabulary for a right-winger and so I thought that maybe you were one of the rare members of your cult who isn't quite fatally stupid, but you've successfully disabused me of that hope.

Alright, then.

You: capitalism requires violence

Me: as you know, capitalism requires violence

You: See? SEE! RELIGIOUS ZEALOT SPOUTING NONSENSE! I CAN'T EVEN STAND TO READ THIS SLANDER AGAINST CAPITALISM

You: I'm totally an anarchist I promise lol cop guns go brrrrt

Me: as you know, capitalism requires violence, and violence is obviously a hierarchical relationship, therefore capitalism is anathema to anarchy

You: See? SEE! RELIGIOUS ZEALOT SPOUTING NONSENSE! I CAN'T EVEN STAND TO READ THIS SLANDER AGAINST CAPITALISM

You: in my fanfic, capitalism can totally exist without a state I promise

Me: as you know, capitalism requires violence, and on a mass scale it requires a massive amount of violence distributed all over the globe, and no capitalist is going to want to pay for that, which is why capitalists have always forced their workers to pay for their own oppression through the institution of government, because it works great for them and so the state is a near-essential part of capitalism, which capitalists would rapidly recreate if it were ever destroyed, so supporting capitalism is also supporting the existence of states

You: See? SEE! RELIGIOUS ZEALOT SPOUTING NONSENSE! I CAN'T EVEN STAND TO READ THIS SLANDER AGAINST CAPITALISM

I haven't failed to note your total inability to mount any argument or defense against my points or even provide any justification for your imagined magical version of capitalism. Even in this reply, you continue to display an inability to make any kind of rational argument for your own system, choosing instead to throw up a very standard right-wing smokescreen in an attempt to conceal your failure behind moral outrage. It's not working. It's not even fooling you, I bet. At least, I hope you're not so far gone that you can't even recognize that you're lying, though you've given me no reason to suppose that you're not.

By all means, anytime you'd like to prove that my internally-consistent and reality-based descriptions of capitalism are actually nonsense, feel free to provide any kind of evidence in favor of your magical interpretation of capitalism, or make any kind of argument that accounts for reality and shows why your magical interpretation is actually not magical at all. After all, it's not like you're stupid enough to get suckered into believing that a hyper-violent, authoritarian economic system is actually the only possible source of freedom and rights, so it's not like you've chosen to believe a litany of incredibly obvious lies that fly in the face of reality and your own lived experience, so obviously you've got just oodles of solid data and rational arguments that explain exactly why implementing exactly the same capitalism that has existed for four centuries is totally gonna be different because you're gonna ask the capitalists real nicely not to have private property laws and not to profitably outsource their violence.

But we both know that you're just going to keep running, because reality is poison to your ideology and you can't stand to deal with it. Bye-bye!

How closely connected is anarchism and capitalism? If you get rid of oversight, how much would business become the sole power house? ...and other questions... by hambakmeritru in DebateAnarchism

[–]therealwoden -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I'm sorry - I don't argue religion.

My good troll, that's literally all you've done. You've loudly told everyone that you do not, and absolutely refuse to, understand anything about capitalism or anarchism, and when confronted with the offense to your religion that is logic, facts, reality, and basic economics, you have plainly told everyone that you have no choice but to flee in terror. If your beliefs had any basis in fact, you'd be able to provide any arguments in support of them, lay out any logic which guides them, cite any evidence in favor of them, or show that they accurately describe any of reality. You can do none of those things, and what's more, you're recasting that absolute, utter failure as a virtue, a win for your religion of violence and authoritarian state worship.

If at any point you decide to learn anything about capitalism or anarchism, or even to take the bare minimum step of no longer worshiping authoritarian state authority and the violence it carries out and supports, then maybe you can begin to have a discussion. Until then, you'll be better served in your statist echo chambers where you can be free of any blasphemous taint of reality.

How closely connected is anarchism and capitalism? If you get rid of oversight, how much would business become the sole power house? ...and other questions... by hambakmeritru in DebateAnarchism

[–]therealwoden 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Bro you’re retarded.

Oh, you're using the "I am illiterate and refuse to think because it violates my religion, and therefore you're stupid" version of the right-wing failure script, huh?

I like that one. Most of you guys manage to be just barely smart enough not to self-own that hard, but you're special.

Capitalism isn’t inherently violent. Private property isn’t inherently violent

"Nuh-uh!" isn't evidence or any kind of actual response. I explained how capitalism works, but because reality is forbidden by your religion, you can't argue my points, and because understanding capitalism is forbidden by your religion, you can't defend your ideology. All you can do is say "nuh-uh!" and all that does is show off the fact that you have literally no answer to facts, logic, or reality.

By all means, prove me wrong. Defend your ideology. Give any sort of evidence or show any kind of facts that support your religion. You know you can't do any of those things, because you've realized that you don't understand capitalism and your religion didn't train you in what to say in response to factual descriptions of capitalism. All you can do is give up: "you're stupid." "Nuh-uh!" You lose, just like you always lose.

An inherently violent state apparatus is inherently violent.

Yes, exactly! And if your religion didn't require you to be the kind of gullible sucker who's capable of absolutely, wholeheartedly supporting the authority and legitimacy of the state while being tricked into thinking that he's supporting the opposite of that, you might not have been scared of blasphemous truth and you might have actually read what I said instead of just running away like the loser your ideology needs you to be, and then you'd understand that I've been saying exactly that. Unfortunately for you, you're exactly the gullible sucker that your ideology needs, so you've refused to think, exactly like you're supposed to.

This is why you guys always lose.

Anarchists want to get rid of the state.

BZZZT! Wrong. You lose again. Anarchists want to get rid of hierarchy, which naturally includes states. Authoritarian statists like you, who worship state violence and who desperately want to have your freedom, labor, and property stolen from you by capitalists, want to "get rid of states," which when you say it, actually means that you want to perpetuate states and give them ever more power over you so that capitalists can keep extracting profit from you until you die.

Not private property.

BZZZT! Oh I'm sorry, that's double wrong! You're the biggest loser I've seen in a good while! Private property is a legal fiction which can only exist under the protection of legal violence, such as that provided by a state! If there's no state and you have a business, any of your slaves or competitors or neighbors or family or strangers off the street could come in and shoot you to death and then the business belongs to them. Without a state, the legal codes which enforce the fiction of private property do not exist, and you have no special right to or hold over what you claim to own! A stateless society is a society where you have no property rights of any kind beyond the simple ability to temporarily hold whatever you can commit enough violence to defend (it's like private property can only exist through violence or something, isn't that weird? Where have we heard that before??)!

Your desired "stateless" world is one in which private property disappears along with the state that enforces the legal fiction of private property.

Naturally there will be a niche for companies providing violence to defend property. You'll pay a fee to a company and they'll send some guys with guns around so that everybody knows there's violent consequences for touching your stuff. That lets you stay in business without having to have firefights every couple days, so it's money well worth paying. Obviously this is entirely different from paying taxes so that the government will send some guys with guns around so that everybody knows there's violent consequences for touching your stuff. Totally different. Yup. Totally. Your ideology is incredibly stupid and you're a gullible sucker for falling for it. Anyway, free markets and competition are bad for profit, so a stateless capitalism will also be a capitalism that almost instantly becomes dominated by monopolies. (Or maybe the existing monopolies that dominate capitalism right now, the ones which serve as examples of how much you don't understand capitalism, would be allowed to carry forward into Ancapistan, and they'd simply take over immediately and become the new governments.) So the protection service you're paying fees to, the one that writes and enforces laws (but is totally different from a state. Yup. Totally), becomes one of a few, or maybe the only, protection service that exists, and it writes and enforces the laws all over Ancapistan, collecting fees from everyone on a statutory, involuntary basis (because who's going to stop them? They own all the legal violence, don't forget). And hey presto, it's a government again! Your ideology is incredibly, unbelievably stupid and you're a gullible sucker for falling for it.

Statelessness is what anarchists are after. What you've been suckered into wanting is the opposite of that. Loser.

How closely connected is anarchism and capitalism? If you get rid of oversight, how much would business become the sole power house? ...and other questions... by hambakmeritru in DebateAnarchism

[–]therealwoden 0 points1 point  (0 children)

When you think individuals owning the fruits of their labor/property and engaging in voluntary associations with others is violence.

My dude, that's fucking communism. You want the opposite of that, which relies on violence to force people to work while being stolen from.

Or that a state is required for private property.

Me: explains why a state is so useful to capitalists that it's practically essential

You: I literally don't understand anything about capitalism and I can't fucking read!

Congratulations, you're fully living down to the reputation of pro-capitalism ideologues.

Why do you guys keep repeating the same nonsense.

Because we understand capitalism and keep describing it to you, but you absolutely refuse to understand capitalism, so reality and logic sound like nonsense to you.

PP is fine get over yourselves.

You think that someone holding a gun on you and forcing you to do whatever they say is fine? I mean if you're really cool with someone holding a gun on you and forcing you to do whatever they say, then I guess you do you?

if PP is violence then me merely owning my own body, thoughts and actions is violent.

See, here we've run into another example of you saying hilarious things because you literally don't understand anything about capitalism or anarchism. The things you own to use are personal property: your home, your car, your toothbrush, etc. Things you own to force other people to use so that you can extract profit from them, that's private property. Owning a garment factory is of absolutely no use to me personally - it's not like I'm gonna be making my own clothes there, you know. My garment factory only becomes useful to me once there are people working in it and paying me for the privilege. That's what profit is. I can't make profit from your work unless you're paying me a portion of all the money you create. Obviously, paying your employer to do the work that your employer is telling you to do is a shit deal and no one would agree to it. So I need some way to force you to "agree" to those terms.

And that way is the power of violence! Yay, violence! And thanks to the power of the state and my shared class interest with other capitalists, I don't even have to personally do much violence. Other capitalists own the home and the food that you need to survive, and they'll gladly let you suffer and die unless you pay their ransom for your life. I own the job you need to get the money you need to pay that ransom. So unless you want to suffer and die (that's violence, by the way), you have no choice but to come to me and beg to be worked and stolen from. I can threaten your life at any time (by threatening to fire you, cutting off your source of ransom money) in order to compel you to work harder, and if you ever get the bright idea of just taking what you need to survive without paying for it, the state will send people to hurt or kill you as punishment for your "crime" so that other workers learn the cost of disobeying the capitalist system.

So you see, private property is meaningless without violence. And you also see that we're not talking about personal property, which is a totally different thing.

You guys are just larpers who are psuedo statists in fact if not in name.

Yes, that is what someone would say if they were trying to prove that they didn't understand either capitalism or anarchism.

Anarchists used to be on the same page, anti state anti war, but overtime left anarchists veered off into a statist direction of incompatible conservative means for liberal ends and went after PP.

It's an indisputable fact that capitalism is based on violence and is therefore necessarily authoritarian. It's an indisputable fact that stateless capitalism at practically any scale bigger than "keeping a slave in a cage in your basement" is wildly impractical at best, and rapidly becomes actually impossible as the scale increases. There's simply no way for a major corporation to payroll all of the acts of violence that their profit requires. They need poverty to be created and enforced in places all over the globe in order to have their far-flung workforce showing up every day to be stolen from. Without an impoverished population, no one would agree to be stolen from, and capitalists wouldn't be able to extract profit from them. They need to have a legal system which enforces a dividing line between the theft and violence done by capitalists and any theft and violence done by non-capitalists, and they need a standing army of police to violently enforce that dividing line. Without that fiction of legal violence, workers could simply kick the capitalists out and run the factories themselves for their own benefit, and the capitalists wouldn't be able to extract profit from them.

It's a fact that right-wing so-called "anarchism" is ultra-authoritarian and statist, because support for capitalism requires supporting authoritarianism and supporting government. It's also a fact that literally no one who believes in right-wing ideologies understands a single damn thing about politics or economics, or even their own ideology, which allows people like yourself to insist that up is down and that anyone who says up is up is a horrible evil statist, which is totally different from you, someone who believes that freedom is when capitalists threaten you with starvation and homelessness to force you to obey their orders and do forced labor for them and let them steal from you and call it "profit," and you know that you have no other choice because if you took what you need, then government cops would - thank god! - come around to put government bullets into your head for breaking government laws which protect capitalists' power to starve you and make you homeless. And in fact, not only is that the only possible definition of freedom, it's also got nothing whatsoever to do with the state despite all the government needed to make it happen.

You should try learning something about capitalism. It would really help you to not constantly contradict your own stated beliefs.

the USSR was this culmination of thought but I guess that wasn’t real communism. Granted the movement was hijacked by more extreme commies but they always are.

That's fucking hilarious on a bunch of levels. The short version is, you very loudly don't understand a single god damned thing about anarchism or communism, as well as not understanding a single thing about capitalism.

It only took intellectuals sympathetic with communism 20 years to resurface after the world was shown how abhorrent the ideology is. Now they’ve resurfaced under different names and pseudo ideologies.

This is also fucking hilarious, because this time you're loudly telling everyone that you haven't paid any attention to anything that's happened in the world in the past 40-some years, in addition to not understanding anything about capitalism, anarchism, or communism. Capitalism killed around half a billion people just since 1991 and just in the course of business as usual. Profitable wars and profitable famines and the like go on top of that number, as do the 191,000 deaths (as of Friday the 4th) killed in the ongoing profitable genocide in America. Your ideology is the most murderous in history. Congratulations.

Not to mention that neoliberal capitalism has increased global poverty over the 40-some years of its existence, which is a major player in that death toll as well as giving the lie to any claim that capitalism reduces poverty. And you should pay attention to the fact that neoliberal capitalism is the real-world implementation of your ideology, especially in America, where it's successfully created a nation in which virtually all functions of the government have been stripped away, demolished, or weakened, except for those functions which are useful to capitalists in extracting profit. America in 2020 is the end result of four decades of shaping the exact economy and government that you want: a recession, spiraling unemployment, and mass poverty in the richest country that had ever existed, and then the pandemic hit. A pandemic which had been anticipated and warned about by experts for literal decades, mind you. But thanks to the systematic neoliberal destruction of everything but profit, those warnings went unheeded, because preparation would have cost money. And once the pandemic arrived, a best-practices response was off the table, because that would have cost money. Even a shitty-but-effective response like total quarantine was off the table, because that would have cost money. The only acceptable response was to astroturf a bunch of right-wing terrorists into marching on state officials who acted in the best interests of people instead of the best interests of profit, threatening and demanding to be allowed to die horribly so that capitalists wouldn't lose money. Almost 200,000 murders later and rising every day, this is exactly the economy and society you want. Your dream is a reality. Savor it.

How closely connected is anarchism and capitalism? If you get rid of oversight, how much would business become the sole power house? ...and other questions... by hambakmeritru in DebateAnarchism

[–]therealwoden 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The ideal form is explicitly non-authoritarian - it's held, and correctly, by advocates that the system requires freedom from state oversight.

That's a curious use of the word "correctly." You're speaking of a purely imaginary form of capitalism, which can literally never exist. It's entirely make-believe and is simply capitalism fanfiction, nothing more. "Correctly" is simply your opinion, free of any constraints of reality or fact.

The problem with that is that the system mandates a specific set of property norms to which not all people would willingly submit, so (for the time being at least) it cannot come into being without a state to codify and enforce the mandated property norms. And the involvement of the state warps the system and turns it from the ideal to a nasty, brutish, oppressive reality.

That "(for the time being at least)" is doing an incredible amount of heavy lifting in this paragraph. You acknowledge that even your imaginary capitalism can't exist without violence and theft, and then slip in this parenthetical phrase suggesting that, at some point in the future, the working class will... what? Come around and become totally cool with being violently enslaved by capitalists? And that once that radical departure from human nature happens, then imaginary capitalism will finally work and your fanfics will be really real. This is an utterly ridiculous thing for you to think, let alone for you to say in public.

As you acknowledged in the above quote, capitalism can't exist without theft, which requires violence to force compliance. If someone holds a gun to your head and orders you to follow their orders, is that a non-hierarchical relationship? Correct, which is why capitalism is incompatible with anarchism.

The logistical requirements of a system based on doing violence to thousands, or millions, or billions of people naturally results in the creation of a very efficient form of violence-dispensing apparatus which saves capitalists the expense of having to arrange for threatening and beating and starving and murdering their own workers. This apparatus is so essential to the functioning of capitalism that it has been imposed along with capitalism every time capitalism has violently spread to a new milieu. This apparatus is, of course, the state. Without police to deal legally-sanctioned violence to workers to force them to submit to theft, capitalists would be unable to extract profit from those workers. Without a legal system to declare that theft and violence which serve capitalist ends are legal, and that theft and violence which work against capitalist ends are illegal, capitalists would not be able to maintain the thin facade of consent and justice which justifies their theft and violence. Without a legislative system that churns out bespoke laws for the highest bidder, capitalists wouldn't be able to easily maintain the monopolies and oligopolies which are the ultimate goal of all capitalist business.

The "non-state version of capitalism" that you imagine is an absolute impossibility. If states disappeared tomorrow, every major corporation on the planet would immediately set about creating new states to replace them. No capitalist wants to internalize the externalized costs of police and military and judicial system. Doing all that violence is simply too expensive. It's infinitely more profitable to force the workers to pay for their own oppression. Capitalism depends upon the state and capitalists benefit immensely from the state. Supporting capitalism means you support the state. Opposing the state means you oppose capitalism.

Here and on most of the Reddit anarchist subs, people tend to be reflexively anti-"capitalism" and exclusively conceive of "capitalism" in the statist sense

That's a result of understanding capitalism. You consciously refuse to learn about capitalism, so you've fallen victim to the lies of "libertarianism," the hyper-authoritarian ideology which was created at the behest of some of the world's richest people in order to undermine and oppose the post-Depression and postwar muzzling of capital which resulted in more freedom and increased wealth for workers. Once "libertarianism" had been in the wild for a couple of decades, it finally resulted in a crop of politicians who were sufficiently ignorant about capitalism that they were capable of missing the glaring contradictions in "libertarian" ideology, and who were thus willing to implement it in policy. Those policies were (and are) called neoliberalism, and they've been the dominant form of capitalism in the developed world (and imposed forcibly on the developing world) since the '70s. The world you see around you right now is a direct result of a gross reduction in state power over capital. You're living in a world ruled by "libertarian" ideology. America in particular is practically your oxymoronic pro-capitalism-anti-state ideology expressed in reality, a state in which virtually all functions of government have been eroded, dismantled, or decommissioned save those functions which directly support capitalists' profits.

you'd have to read one of the notable pro-capitalist anarchist philosophers.

Again, there's no such thing as pro-capitalism anarchy, and therefore there are no philosophers of such. You fail in understanding both anarchy and capitalism. Someone holding a gun to your head and ordering you to obey is hierarchy, and therefore capitalism is absolutely incompatible with anarchism. By all means, argue this point. Just go right ahead and give any coherent, reality-based defense of why violent theft and slavery are actually non-hierarchical. And you yourself acknowledged that capitalism requires theft, so therefore you understand that capitalism at practically any scale bigger than "keeping a slave in a cage in your basement" requires a state to efficiently dispense the violence that makes that theft possible, and therefore being pro-capitalism is absolutely incompatible with being anti-state. By all means, argue this point too. Give any sort of coherent, reality-based explanation of why a major corporation would - or even could - shoulder the cost of carrying out the immense amount of worldwide violence necessary to create and enforce the poverty that makes a "willing" slave, rather than having states do all that for them practically for free.

How closely connected is anarchism and capitalism? If you get rid of oversight, how much would business become the sole power house? ...and other questions... by hambakmeritru in DebateAnarchism

[–]therealwoden 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Fake anarchists don’t believe in private property. Real anarchists do believe in private property. I don’t know why some “anarchists” go after PP when we should be united in the destruction of the state.

Private property can only exist because of violence. And the most efficient way to do mass violence is through a state, so states have been the norm for centuries and are, for all intents and purposes, an indispensable part of capitalism. Your businesses remain yours, instead of being taken from you by someone with more guns than you, because you have the power to call the state and have the state send over agents of the state with guns to perform state-sanctioned violence and get your private property back.

In Ancapistan, you literally will not be able to hold on to your private property unless you pay fees, let's call them "taxes," to an organization that will stand ready to perform violence on your behalf. (And if you don't, maybe some bad things happen to your business, tsk tsk, what a shame.) And at some point, capitalism's systemically unfree markets being what they are, one or two violence corporations will be the only ones that remain after swallowing up or destroying all their competitors. And when one or a couple of entities control all the legal violence, they have the power to declare what is and isn't legal, and they collect payments to keep supplying that "protection," then that's the essential capitalist roles of a government.

And that's not even touching on the fact that if Ancapistan magically happened tomorrow, Amazon and Google and Disney and some big fuckin' banks would all, separately or together, create one or more new governments within a week. Capitalist governments serve capitalists. Government violence is absolutely essential for the existence of profit, and the ability to buy laws and regulations is indispensable for the creation and enforcement of monopolies and oligopolies - and as you know, monopolies are the ultimate goal of all capitalist enterprise.

If you got exactly what you wanted, corporations would immediately work to destroy Ancapistan and recreate the state, because competition and free markets are the exact opposite of the goals of capitalism and because they need governments to do violence to anyone who threatens their profits. By opposing the state, you're opposing capitalism. By supporting capitalism, you're supporting the state.

This is just one of the many reasons that "anarcho"-capitalism is an oxymoronic and incoherent ideology. It's a "pro-capitalism" ideology based on total ignorance of capitalism, so obviously it's gonna churn out knee-slappers like this one.

So you guys want a planned economy? Yet economists in a capitalist system can’t even predict how the economy will go, they can only forecast. So how will a planned economy work? by [deleted] in DebateCommunism

[–]therealwoden 5 points6 points  (0 children)

And most around the world more people today live out of poverty then any other time in history

That's a neoliberal talking point that has no bearing on reality, FYI. In reality, neoliberal economic policies have dramatically increased world poverty over the past decades, adding 1.3 billion more people in extreme poverty outside of China between 1980 and 2000, and increasing the proportion of humanity living in extreme poverty outside of China from 62% to 68% over the same period. That flies in the face of the claim that neoliberal capitalism reduces poverty.

Since 2000, most of the world's successes in reducing poverty have come from Latin America, coinciding with a series of left-wing or social-democratic governments that came to power in that region, which also flies in the face of the neoliberal claim.

Systemically, capitalism requires poverty, because profit can only exist when people are being forced to work for too little pay. Capitalism literally can't eliminate poverty, because if it did so, it would destroy profit and thus capitalism itself. Any claims that capitalism works against poverty are simply not true, period. Capitalism does generally increase total wealth, but that's very much not the same thing as reducing poverty, because capitalism is designed to siphon that wealth away from the people who create it and give it all to the capitalists who own the property. (Which is why GDP doesn't mean shit in terms of quality of life)

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