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Comment by aalleavitch | Hacker News Reader

Unlike authoritarian communism, anarcho-socialism never got the chance to succeed or fail on its own merits. It was strangled in the crib.

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I’m interested to hear what part of my statement people seem to disagree with: this was largely the thesis of Homage to Catalonia. It was the point behind most of Orwell’s writing, he was an anarcho-syndicalist.

Even tough the internet is an invention of the anarchist movement, like any cool stuff it’s now filled with people who are just trying to make some quick and big money. And these people don’t want to argue with you because time = money.

> the internet is an invention of the anarchist movement

Could you elaborate on that statement? I've heard this same notion twice now in the past couple months, and I have no idea what it's based upon.

It seems far easier to argue that the Internet is an invention of the military-industrial complex. I would enjoy hearing your rationale!

It stems from John Perry Barlow and the Cyberspace Declaration of Independence.

There was a lot of discussion of what the emerging net was, and what it was going to be. A society, a state, governable or ungovernable, above or separate from such things, etc. Which led to the Declaration.

https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

That was in 1996. The internet was around a long time before that, heck, public use of the WWW was starting to take off then.

That piece may have been an important contribution to thought that shaped the future development of how people approached the internet, but it wasn't responsible for the invention of the internet, which was not, in fact, a product of the anarchist movement, but rather something the anarchist movement attempted to grab onto and use to reshape the world to fit the movement's ideals.

It's late, I read as web. 0/10.

I probably should have added more detail anyway, but the net prior to 1990 was a gently regulated, and self-regulating sort of place almost entirely consisting of scientists, geeks and techies. Adopt netiquette before posting to newsgroup, read the FAQ - and people actually did, etc. Even arguments could often stay mainly civilised. Bix, Compuserve, AOL were (partially) walled non-free and moderated venues of speech.

The early nineties changed everything. TBL gave us the web, the NSF ended the ban on any commercial activity, AOL let its hordes out onto the wider net in Eternal September, ISPs started including web space with every connection. VR was having its last hype phase, people were talking about virtual communities, and writing books about it. Suddenly this net thing was an uncontrolled space where anyone could have a free space to say anything...

Which led to the discussions of the net's anarchy, what it is, and the declaration I mentioned above.

Ahhh, thank you. So not "Internet" as technical superproject, but "Internet" as emergent supersociety. (I don't believe that anarchists actually invented either of those things, but at least I get the reference now!)

"We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace." Gosh, I had forgotten what heady times the Nineties were!

The anarchists didn't need to invent it, it described what people were already participating in. Anarchy is simply the natural state of man without an imposed hierarchy. The scientific community is an anarchy.

I wouldn't have been confused to hear that anarchists were participating in online community. What confused me was because1's statement that anarchists invented the Internet.

> The scientific community is an anarchy.

The scientific community is an organism that eats government grants and excretes pay-walled research papers. I wouldn't call that an anarchy!

That's simply how it pays for itself, and I think all scientists agree that is the worst part of science. But fundamentally science is not a profit-seeking enterprise, it is driven by the desire of people to benefit all of society and there is no central authority and yet through the individual actions and judgments of different scientists a community and scientific consensus is born.

> The scientific community is an anarchy.

No? It's a meritocracy, with elite gatekeepers. How is it an anarchy?

Without a doubt, there is cruft in the sense of gatekeepers and institutionalized power as short-hands for who to trust, but in the grand scheme of things the most power is in reaching a closer approximation of the truth. There is no strict structured system for obtaining scientific consensus, it's simply the individual actions of different researchers, labs, and institutions that choose to build on the work of others or challenge it that cooperatively reach outcomes that benefit all of mankind. There are plenty of parasites growing on the scientific community, like the publication system, but these things don't define it, they're simply hangers on and the scientific community has existed in plenty of times and places without something like it.

> Anarchy is simply the natural state of man without an imposed hierarchy.

Ah, majoritarianism with violent wars against outsiders.

https://www.archaeology.co.uk/articles/features/bloody-stone...

People on HN downvote comments that are pro anarcho socialism without saying why they disagree. HN is a very capitalist place apparently. It would be nice if we could really engage in these discussions, but people seem to want to just downvote without comment.

There's also a good degree of US interpretation of terms, where apparently communism, fascism, socialism, democratic socialism and sometimes social democrat are all indistinguishable from the USSR.

It can make some discussions seem rather futile. :)

That could indicate they don't find the discussions of political systems very interesting, or particularly relevant to HN. I'm one of those people -- I find a plot to kill Orwell interesting and I couldn't care less about the discussion of anarcho-* interesting, except very narrowly if it contributed to the context of the article.

(Edit - not a downvoter however)

It may be true, but my hunch is that discussions of capitalist market politics are fine and only socialism gets downvoted.

This could be a mix of relevance (US-centric, startup centric message board) and confirmation bias.

Anarcho socialism hasn’t succeeded yet, but I still believe it must succeed in the future if we are ever to see real freedom for the masses and to avoid near total destruction of the Earth’s biosphere.

If anyone wants to downvote me, I ask that you choose one of two alternatives. First, tell me why you want to downvote. Or, read this article by Albert Einstein talking about the necessity of socialism: https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/

Capitalism will reach its end one day, long after we are gone, but that will be because of its own technologic achievements and not because of 19th-century socialist philosophy. Capitalism will become so efficient at some point that in its quest for more and more efficiency, it will end resource scarcity. Once scarcity is eliminated, capitalism "withers" away.

That's my hope anyway. In the short-term, I'd like to see free markets begin erasing more borders and reducing the number of nations. Hopefully, the recent nationalist fad is just that and we can get to more EU style setups, more globalism, and more cooperation. A disgusting amount of resources is spent on the military. Capitalism has the ability to solve our problems. Borders are in the way.

Edit: Is it the socialists, anarchists, or capitalists downvoting me? Hard to say. My ideas definitely don't have many friends.

Your main idea is Marxist. Marx said the same thing, that Capital would end itself, through the elimination of scaricity. Though I think he was wrong about that, things like UBI proves that it always finds a way to survive.

But anyway, you are both saying Marxist and pro-capitalist things, so I would guess you're just being downvoted by everyone.

Surely it was going to be the rise of class consciousness that overthrew Moloch? Though if we're all involved in the process ourselves, and only gain this consciousness through work, the end of Capitalism isn't so much a violent overthrowing from outside as much as a growing, positive realization of what was inside it anyway.

Maybe that's exactly what things like UBI point to: life as an adventure rather than a slave camp. The paranoid part of me then wants to find a bigger and more evil capital to criticise in the Marxian manner.

Capitalism doesn't wither away, it imposes artificial scarcity to allow its uneven power dynamic to continue. At some point the cruelty itself becomes the point. I would argue we're already past the point where we have to deny resources to anyone, we could feed and shelter everyone if we had the will to do it.

Actually I think that right now, when we are facing the potential reality of AGI not many decades away, is when we have to collectively make the choice to become the society we truly want to become.

Humans aren't very good at managing things. Just take a look around your co-workers some time and you'll see mismanagement. We're really bad at managing! You could say, scarcity is a management issue. If systems are managed by inefficient beings, well then the system doesn't really matter be it socialism or capitalism. I'll take my chances with capitalism and hope the best managers naturally rise to the top.

Maybe AI can remove the mismanagers from the problem one day. Or maybe, even with our woeful mismanagement, if two hundred governments weren't pitted against one another and we had a single world government, there would be plenty to go around even with humans mismanaging everything.

We’re bad at managing because none of us want to be doing what we’re doing and all of us are thinking about how we can maximize our own benefit. But the truth is we don’t even have to do an amazing job of managing, we have to just want to route enough resources to everyone that they can survive. Technology will continue to increase with or without capitalism. In fact, the claim that capitalism is responsible for scientific or technological advancement is mostly false. It’s responsible for wide-scale mass industry, but scientists would exist and push forward the boundaries of knowledge with or without it.

> Capitalism will become so efficient at some point that in its quest for more and more efficiency, it will end resource scarcity.

This is honestly one of the most absurd things I've ever heard. I gotta admit, I do envy your optimism.

It's already pretty true for many types of resources. Electronics, software, music, plastic parts. All sorts of things cost practically zero today compared to, say, 100 years ago when they required much more labor to produce or didn't even exist.

I recently bought a flat-screen TV for half the price of a McDonald's meal. That's as good as free.

I've never heard the term resource scarcity used to refer to something like software, music, or televisions.

Hilariously, software and music are inherently non-scarce. In fact, we do a massive amount of detriment to everyone by not allowing a piece of infinitely replicable media to be instantly available to everyone. And yet despite the fact we could benefit everyone at once we can’t seem to figure out a way to allow creators to live comfortably without inventing arcane and artificial IP laws?

I used to believe free labor markets between countries was a good idea until I realized that it also comes with a free social welfare "market". Nobody wants to let people in their country starve to death in the streets, so they're going to financially support whatever immigrants come in, and if it's really free entry, that's going to be cripplingly expensive eventually because the world's unemployable will go to wherever the most generous welfare is. Another problem is cultural replacement which could replace the open country with a closed one that's perhaps worse than it started off as once enough similarly-minded immigrants live there to determine the outcome of elections. They're not the idealists who started the open boarders thing, they're just normal self-interested people so eventually they'll want to keep what they've got for themselves and stop letting people they don't like in. Bye-bye to all the progressive ideas of tolerating gays and multiculturalism too.

Cultural replacement is a bullshit concept. Not everyone is as selfish as you, some people just want to eat. The lie that people are inherently self-interested in a system that doesn’t directly incentivize self-interest is exactly the sort of thing you would want to spread if you were one of the people on top in such a system.

OP writes of anarcho syndicalism. Reply conflates it with anarcho socialism. Not sure these are the same things

Anarcho-syndicalism is a way to achieve/a form of anarcho-socialism.

Anarcho-socialism is a broad term that describes a lot of different possible configurations of society, anarcho-syndicalism is an approach towards it.

I’m aware of the differences and as another reply pointed out, one is a broader term than the other. I used the broader term.

> Anarcho socialism hasn’t succeeded yet, but I still believe it must succeed in the future ... to avoid near total destruction of the Earth’s biosphere.

Why do so many people seem to act like some form of socialism is required (or even useful) to avoid environmental issues? It really doesn't help fight the right's narrative of "all this global warming stuff is just the economic left seeking more control over the economy" - in fact it plays directly to it. Are people just trying to attach their particular goals to a crisis they think might propel them forward?

You’re presuming I’m not arguing in good faith. I actually do deeply believe that capitalism, being a system where a minority can accrue great wealth and therefore have significant motivation to do so regardless of the costs, is a system that directly promotes environmental destruction. Anarcho socialism or Anarcho communism are instead systems that have no privileged class willing to destroy for their own benefit. In these systems all the masses of people are deeply democratically organized in the society and would only destroy the environment if they all agreed it was worth it. I believe the masses of people are less willing to destroy the environment (for less benefit to themselves) than a wealthy class which could benefit greatly from that destruction.

Perhaps it is easier to assume I am arguing in bad faith, but I think you ought to consider that I know what I’m talking about.

And why would the members of such a society not choose to damage the global environment if the local benefits outweighed the losses? That's the carbon emissions problem, after all.

Regarding 'good faith' - I think you might be arguing in good faith, but I don't see how you'd think that argument is the best path to take to convince people to either support the environment or to abandon our current economic systems for yours.

Personally I think we need major geoengineering to preserve the current temperature range, and that our current economic system tends towards a failure mode with extremely concentrated wealth. I don't think those are connected, though. In fact, an argument can be made that concentrating much of the world's wealth in one person would also be good for the environment, since the required changes would have a smaller impact on their wealth than on their personal wellbeing. Basically, the theory goes that $10T + nice environment to live in > $100T + dead environment, so the hypothetical multitrillionaire would spend $90T to improve things based purely on self interest. This isn't to suggest that giving Jeff Bezos absolutely everything would be a good idea, or that doing such is necessary - just that there might be other routes than 'some flavor of socialism'.

The people ruining the planet will be dead before they have to live through the consequences of what they’ve done. Good ‘ol self-interest.

So we should invest more in life extension research - turn that self interest to work for us ;)

Ah, yes, then our immortal god-king can enjoy the perpetual beauty of his vast private estates while the rest of us waste away on the land he destroyed in pursuit of economic aims? The concentration of wealth is the concentration of power, the concentration of power in a single individual has never once been good in the history of the world.

Could getting strangled in it's crib be seen as anarcho-socialism failing on it's own merits? If it wasn't strong enough to protect itself, does it not then lack merit from a pragmatic perspective?

Not if better starting conditions could've led to a strong, long-term success. The principle behind Leninism is that you have to protect it in its infancy, but the thing they built to protect it ended up strangling it to death. I'm not sure what conditions in the real world would allow it to thrive, capitalism is extremely aggressive about attacking and exploiting everything it can find because it is competition itself grown malignant. I'm of the mind of Proudhon, though: the only thing that is necessary for anarchism to thrive is for enough people to develop a strong enough understanding and sense of morality to realize that it's what we all really want. In my mind the road to a successful anarcho-socialist society is simply planting the seeds in people's minds and letting them germinate in their own dissatisfaction with the state of the world.

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