Reading about Anarchism....

I don't hate capitalism. I prefer to criticize it rationally. I certainly don't hate the state either, and it has in fact, been the only human institution able to curb capital to a certain degree. That is why most wealthy people are for "free-trade" and wish the state did nothing but police their property without taxing their wealth.

However, I do understand that states cause another set of diplomatic and domestic problems. My whole thing is this:

1) I'm not going to waste my time on utopias. Social experiments like the Paris Commune or the October Revolution are welcome as far as I'm concerned. Because they are ideas that were put to test, and as we can now see, they also had problems, much like any other political system or non-system I've been exposed to;

2) I also greatly resent certain limitations that living in this society imposes on me... they greatly impoverish my life and I'm open for realistic changes on the ground. However, I don't deny that I benefit from it somehow. I'm here, in a heated home, on my computer, ready to eat a meal, and I'm going to walk to Wendy's on a freshly paved sidewalk built on our tax money...

I guess my only problem is the romanticization/demonization dichotomy. I'm hearing a lot of this cozy romanticization of primitivism lately, that is accompanied by the idea that this society yields NO benefit. And both are false, and at any rate, like I said, Bushmen are out there... If I really thought one system is utopian and the other a living hell, I would seriously consider migrating like, say Che Guevara did. But ideological primitivists never will... they are too comfortable benefiting from the same things they profess have absolutely no merit.

 

There's nothing wrong with technology, just the uses it's put to. If factories were owned by the staff, then investment in mechanisation could mean a shorter week. However because it's there to make a profit for the owners, greater mechanisation means greater unemployment.

 

Good job, Manchester man!

 

Yes that would be a good job! We could take fridays off at the collectivised biscuit factory. It'd be great.
Right now I've got Mon to Friday off, I need a job but it's not that easy to walk into a job just now.
"we shouldn't be forced to rent ourselves" damn it!
mustn't grumble! X