Capitalism: What do you think?

I didn't say that, that's for sure.

 

if we didn't have capitalism or periods how would we know when a sentence started and endedjustthinkifwedidnthavespacesorpuntuationthenifwecouldntspellweedbefukkedjroiwjafdg

 

I think some people here's definition of Anarchy is a bit fucked up. For one, Anarchy is not about having no authority whatsoever, it's about challenging and overthrowing illegitimate authority.
You're right, it's human nature for one person to want to control another. But in my view anarchism is the only philosophy that actually takes into account human nature. For example (this example's not my own) say a parent is walking down the street with his child, and all of a sudden that child darts into the street. The parent uses his authority to restrain the child. The child has every right to challenge that authority but I think in 99% of cases that challenge can readily be met by the parent because he used his authority for a rational purpose.
Another example, say a man rapes a woman, something which he thinks is perfectly normal. He uses authority over her, but it is completely illegitimate authority and thus the woman and the community have every right to persecute him because it is for a rational reason.

Second of all, Anarchy is not about having no government. Government is a very vague word. No government could be considered a form of government. Anarchists aim to abolish among other things, hierarchy and the State, 2 things which corporate capitalism thrives on. By the State, I mean the large centralised institution that regulates almost every aspect of our lives. Anarchists see the State as a major form of illegitimate authority, as a look in history will prove, and thus needs to be overthrown. For a replacement, anarchists aim to build a society of smaller communities (and by this I don't mean actual physical communities but rather in the sense of collectives, associations, federations...) which all federate together and make decisions.

It is completely illogical to claim that all human beings are immoral and corrupt and that the only way to solve this problem is to place a minority of those human beings in a position of power in order to keep everyone else from becoming even more corrupt. Power is the worst corrupter of all. Yes, there will always be natural hierarchies forming and people trying to dominate others, even in an anarchist society, but in my opinion why people can't challenge those hierarchies and power figures.

I think a lot of people here should maybe research anarchy before they continue arguing over something they seem to have little understanding of (that's you BraveSirRubin ). Indeed, anyone who bothers to do even a tiny bit of research will see that there indeed is a history behind Anarchism and that all of these arguments have been brought up before and have behind countered by anarchist thinkers of the past.

A good place to start if you're interested in learning about the real meaning of anarchism would be here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism

as well as here:
http://www.anarchistfaq.org

 

mom and pop retailing and unionized infrastructure may have been a mostly harmless form of it when that existed, but fanatical corpratocracy has become a doomsday device, destroying everything in its path with no one in control and no off switch. whatever the shortcommings of anything else, and everything but everything but everything in this universe has some, do not chainge the sailient reality that the circular illogic of little green pieces of paper is motivating what has become a serious threat to the web of life on which all existence including our own utterly depends.

capitolism has been useful by enabling tecnology to overcome other forms of fanatacism which had previously inhibitied its evolution. but there is a point of diminishing returns in the sense of bennifits that has long since been reached and exceeded.

whatever may be better, worse, good, bad, or indifferent about anything else, in no way alters the real harm and suffering it has come to facilitate, and to a signifigant degree, percipitate.

i'm not "anti" anything. not gratuitously nor arbitrarily at any rate. but i am seriously not "pro" ANY form of fanatacism, which very much includes economic and idiological fanatacisms, again, of any flavour what so ever.

neither is the union bashing and anti-environmentalism of pseudo-conservatism ever going to bring back that era of mom and pop retailing and unionized infrastructure, kept honest with a modicum of socialized support.

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Yes you did.

Not in so many words.

It was implied with this statement:

When what I proposed was that in the absense of government people might take "the law" into their own hands if criminals threatend their life, property and community.

They may be preforming a function of government, but this does not make them a government any more then me cutting down a tree makes me a lumberjack. Am I saying that this is the best way to deal with crime? No. Am I saying it is the only way to deal with crime in the absense of the government? No. The only thing I am trying to demonstrate is that the government is not the only institution capable of providing social order.

 

Yet again, you are describing a government, sure we can just call it "a group of people who got together to provide social order", yet that's just semantics.

 

How am I the one arguing semantics when it is you who keeps trying to define government as anyone who uses retalitory violence. You can call it a government if you like but the fact that they do not have a monopoly on the ability to enforce contracts in a given area would make them funtion is a way fundamentally different from anything we now call a government.

 

I didn't say that, no sir... now you are stuffing words into my mouth. I would rather have you stuff sushi into my mouth.

 

Here's a thought:

If an anarchist state occured, what would be stopping a group of people to rise up and force a government on the rest of the people? Wouldn't it be in their right of anarchy to do whatever they want, and to enforce their principal on others? And who would be eligible to say that what they're doing is wrong without "lawful" ethics?

 

Because all authority must give a rational justification for its existence and if if can't then that authority should be dismantled. Anarchy isn't about everyone is accountable to themselves. Anarchy is about everyone being accountable to their communities.

 

You seem to be attacking a strawman. Anarchism isn't just 'do what ever you feel like' and it isn't a society that lacks laws. Anarchism is simply a social order where 'the law' is the product of voluntary non-invasive interaction. The government, being an inherently involuntary institution, is thus rejected by the anarchist. Rejection of the state however is merely one facet of anarchist thought, it is by no means the only part nor the essential part.

 

What rejection got to do, got to do with it?

 

sounds like a new hit song...lol


Anyways, I hate capitalism, communism, and anarchy...
I'd love if we went back to small city-states and I'd go join a hippie one.

Anarchy is just not ideal and wouldn't last long anyhow.
chaos brings order..and blah blah blah.

 

I think people should spend time thinking of what can be improved, or what new forms of something could be created to replace...

Thats obscure >.> Lol.

 

America money hungry! America needs to eat green green little papers!

 

Broccoli?

 

No!

Little little little devils dancing on your fingertips as you stand infront of the atm, as you slowly turn around and walk towards the gas station on your right, the one with the big yellow signs and cig prices in the window.

 

Thats my grandmas house!

 

Oh my gosh I love this topic..I have to write an english paper on it! The question for the paper is-do you think capitalism is moral or immoral?

wtf!

 

well you see the thing is, without being accountable for one's own affect upon/contribution to, the kind of world we all have to live in, one isn't being very well accountable to one's self either. for the simple reason that this is how we create the kinds of conditions we experience and how we experience them.

marxism is supposedly accountable to some mythical 'social class' while capitolism is only accountable to the circulation of those little green pieces of paper. in anarchism everyone is accountable to themselves for everything which we're all accountable in reality for. and that includes our effect of all of us on the web of life the air we breathe comes from. something capitolism never took into account. it was born of a time when the world was so big and we were so few that we could get away with not having to. but that is an age long past. marxism, for all its moral merits otherwise, also somehow forgot to. probably because marx was a henpecked unfortunate living in a damd city, to whome it probably never occured.

so in a sense we may need a real science of economics, but the point is we don't really have one. because 'everyone' (please forgive my dipping into the hyperoble jar, but i've yet to see exceptions among economic theorists) is so attatched emotionaly to whatever their pet theory might happen to be about it. that everyone studying one theory or another is too bussy trying to defend their assumptions to even think about looking for anything beyond what they are familiar with about it. and thus the whole realm of nature's web of life, without which we would not and could not exist at all, gets entirely left out of the picture.

but not out of the consiquences. nor out of those consiquences for ourselves, both as a species, and ultimately as individuals as well.

so we need to stop believing in any known existing economic idiologies as any kind of magic wand they all try to pretend to be.

and i aggree completely about authority requiring justification. i mean it's existence creates real burdens (well beyond and in addition to those of nature itself) and without some compensation for them it resaults in less bennifit then harm.

thus the only true civilization is for society to so organize itself, based upon the SELF dicipline of the individual as to create and sustaine such environmentaly harmonious infrastructure as may be the collective mandate, without having to romatacize and reward aggressiveness, or even tolerate it.

the origen of the village, city state, and ultimately modern nation, is the bonding togather of individauls for their common shaired intrests of survival and ultimately of even comfort.

so marxism at least has a touchstone there capitolism lacks. but still we are at a point where we can no longer ignore our collective effects upon that web of life. we can only hope we haven't passed some point of no return in that reguard. if life ends on our planet anytime within the next century or so, it will almost certainly be as a direct resault of our own hands and the error of this short sightedness.

we need to not inhibit ourselves from barrowing concepts from every existing idiology, but at the same time, not limit ourselves to blind fanatical adhierance to any one of them. not only as some sort of moral and ethical aesthetic, but as a very matter of survival itself.

and above all to completely stop ignoring, at an intrinsic institutional level, as well as universaly individualy, our interaction with nature's cycles of renewal and our own interaction with them, as well also, as the ways in which how we each ourselves live, affect the opportunities for calm and secure gratification, and even survival, of each other, and thus also our own selves.

and it IS, perfectly possible, to accept that the carrying capacity of nature's cycles of renewal have limits, without having to throw every familiar comfort out with the bath water. for most, all that is required is more environmentaly harmonious ways of sustaining them. for the remainder, well there are SOME things we COULD live without, especialy if it were a matter of living at all to do so.

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