/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

i'm selectively anarchist when I participate in masturbating to monetary-compensated sex trafficking videos

>socialism without state tyranny
Potentially theoretically possible after capitalism is superseded by lower stages of socialism in all corners of the globe. For now socialist states live under constant threat from capitalists and need a strong state to defend itself.

I don't know how that would work though. Wouldn't that lead to a lawless society? You would still need central planning, who is going to enforce the plan?

I think individualism is just a platitude. You should strive for more social cohesion and not individualism. Individualism is the antithesis of socialism.

I notice you've chosen to use the word "consensus" when speaking of democracy, OP. I have a bone to pick with this that might seem like an incredible tangent but actually applies to broader questions of self-governance.

If we are to speak of the formalized "consensus" process used in a lot of left-ish circles in the US, it is a decision-making process invented by Quakers with a religious assumption behind it that everyone can always come to an agreement on something. While it's true that consensus is often possible in small groups, in large settings it is nothing more than an idealized fantasy.

Consensus-seeking is anti-democratic at its heart and usually results in one of two outcomes: a) wreckers abuse the process to stonewall decision-making resulting in enormously long meetings that favor people with the most free time or b) it favors the idea of irreconcilable differences and promotes the creation of splits. In terms of b, traditional dichotomous Roberts Rules facilitates a similar situation. Consensus was developed to address perceived problems with Roberts Rules but ultimately failed to tackle the real problem.

The deeper problem is placing the establishment of a majority or plurality as the prime goal of a decision-making process. This creates a fundamental dysfunction that promotes factionalism and polarization. Roberts Rules attempts to cope with the factionalism by distilling every single decision to a dichotomous yay or nay vote, but it doesn't stop the polarization (in fact it may make it worse by forcing artificial dichotomies to align with the process).

The alternative is to use rating-based systems to measure the overall support for a given set of decisions. The decision with the highest overall rating is the decision a group of people should use. By not forcing people into binary outcomes and thus binary thinking, you can reduce the level of destructive individualism in a cohesive social unit.

I think the typical weakness of anarchists on functional self-governance ultimately comes down to that forgotten and neglected third pillar of democracy: sortition. Elections are an institution of oligarchy, but it's not at all realistic to expect people to spend all their time making social decisions in a public venue. The alternative is to delegate day-to-day social decision through public officials selected at regular intervals not through the oligarchic institution of elections but through a democratic random sampling process. This seems to be the key missing component every time we witness an anarchistic commune collapse partly from its own failure to govern.

Anarchists misidentify the state as the root of oppression, when in reality the state arises to protect and enforce the relations of capital, oppression flows from the material organization of production, not the state in isolation.

>>489212
>Wouldn't that lead to a lawless society?
Yes but it won't be Mordor either. Since the workers will be able to enforce their interests by themselves they will not allow to be treaded on and use firearms if necessary.
>You should strive for more social cohesion and not individualism.
That sounds fascistic. To me the change of the economic system is for us to have less cohesion and regiment. Didn't Marx say that under communism there will no longer be division of labour?
>>489214
>While it's true that consensus is often possible in small groups, in large settings it is nothing more than an idealized fantasy.
The solution is to delegate as many decisions as possible to the lower levels obviously and use delegates for the upper levels. Also, is there really an alternative to consensus democracy that doesn't have a chance of upsetting someone?
>promotes the creation of splits
Splits are based. Ironically, a split is the reason this site was born. This site is very Trotskyist.
>>489216
>Anarchists misidentify the state as the root of oppression
>the state arises to protect and enforce the relations of capital
Pick one.

>>489216
>>489221
States existed long before the existence of capitalism and will likely exist after it. In fact the earliest states in Egypt and west Asia were frequently antagonistic to capital relations. Nobody in the 19th century knew this history and to continue parroting their incomplete theory of the state as if early socialists and anarchists knew everything that anyone could ever know about the history of political economy is deeply unscientific and anti-intellectual.

>>489223
>States existed long before the existence of capitalism and will likely exist after it.
That's not the point I was making. It doesn't matter if it's capitalism or feudalism, states exist to reinforce class society in general.

>>489223
Nobody claims Marx, Engels, or early socialists “knew everything.” The point is: their method — historical materialism, remains the most scientific basis for understanding the emergence, function, and evolution of the state in relation to class and modes of production.If ancient states in Egypt and West Asia predate capitalist relations, that doesn’t make them “antagonistic” to capital, it means they paved the way for later exploitation and accumulation by enforcing class divisions, tribute extraction, and centralized surplus appropriation. This is primitive accumulation, and Marx wrote about this process explicitly in Capital.Marxist theory doesn’t ignore the long history of pre-capitalist states. It explains them by analyzing the dominant property relations of their time. The capitalist state is a specific historical form: born out of and organized to protect the rule of capital. That’s why Marxists say it must be replaced not simply because it’s a state, but because it serves a class.

>>489221
>Pick one.
Not mutually exclusive, the state is the TOOL, NOT the ROOT of the issue(class struggle).

>>489228
>the state is the TOOL, NOT the ROOT of the issue(class struggle)
That's not mutually exclusive either. The state is both the tool and the root. Capitalism is the cause, state is the root and the tool of that cause. Capitalists cannot enforce private property without the state.

>>489229
This is not correct.Saying the state is both the root and the tool of capitalism collapses historical sequence and function.It arises from CLASS ANTAGONISMS to defend the dominant property relations. The cause is capital. The state is its instrument, not its origin.

>>489231
>It arises from CLASS ANTAGONISMS to defend the dominant property relations.
Well I did say that class antagonisms are the cause.

If we're gonna play this semantic game then you're just strawmanning the anarchist position, the anarchists do not deny that class antagonisms are the cause of the state's creation.

>>489231
(me)
The existence of the state itself isn't the issue. The issue is which class rules and what social relations it upholds.

>>489232
>anarchist position
You're a reactionary, got it.

>>489227
>If ancient states in Egypt and West Asia predate capitalist relations, that doesn’t make them “antagonistic” to capital
No, it's the fact that rulers in Egypt and middle eastern states regularly went after the finance capital class with debt amnesty proclamations. That's what made them antagonistic to capital. Protecting their population from losing everything including their freedom to the accumulation of creditors. This tradition lasted over a thousand years until the Bronze Age collapse, far longer than capitalism has even been around today.

>>489234
>You're a reactionary, got it.
Please, spare me these hissy fits. This word is used by radlibs just as often in a way that's just as meaningless.

>>489235
There was no “finance capitalist class” in Bronze Age Egypt or Mesopotamia. Only temple/palace creditors and local merchants. Jubilee laws managed primitive accumulation under tributary/slave regimes, preserving free peasants for taxes, labor, and military service.

Debt amnesties were state tools to stabilize class relations, not evidence of states “against capital.” Capitalist finance relies on interest‑bearing money and abstract capital features absent until the late medieval and early modern periods.

Ancient debt relief regulated class exploitation; it didn’t oppose or negate capital in the modern sense.

>>489239
>Capitalist finance relies on interest‑bearing money and abstract capital features absent until the late medieval and early modern periods.
You seem to be engaging in some very fine pedantry here. If by "capitalist finance" you mean "finance for industrial capital", then fine, OK, that particular thing is obviously exclusive to the economic system that displaced feudalism and which we are currently living through. "Finance capital" on the other hand is simply any time a loan is given with interest. It predates industrial capital (the form of capital that actually established capitalism) by several thousand years and in fact it even predates the invention of currency. Throughout the history of civilization there has existed both a class of people whose primary occupation is living off rent and a class of people who needed to take out loans from them to get by. The word class is appropriate here because their interests often worked together and in opposition to other classes in society. They didn't need to wait until capitalism to invent themselves or their respective class conflicts.

You should read Michael Hudson's work on this subject, while there are some rulers who simply wanted to stabilize their society by freeing people from debt bondage, there are also some pretty clear-cut instances of both ancient and classical/medieval rulers going to war against the creditor class because they saw them as a threat to their own rule.

>>489241
There is a distinct qualitative difference between pre-capitalist usury and modern finance capital, it's not pedantry.

His work seems interesting but he's a reformist.