then i guess there's no problem with state communism either because a literal monopoly isn't possible anyways

because it creates class division, greed, self-interest at all costs, etc.

...or they can just pay off the judges and other people involved and have their case dismissed, no questions asked, no reputation lost, because, let's face it, who will be talking bad about them, the rich people? no. the poor people? yes, but what do they matter? they don't have the money.

idk how many times we need to go over human psychology, sociology, philosophy, etc., for you to finally realize that it isn't as simple as that.

because, in many ways, they are rich at the expense of everyone else. they exploit our labor, discipline us as subordinates and as if we were children, have complete decision making power over whether or not to hire or fire us (which could be built on prejudice motives if they so choose), etc.

the aforementioned text is in post #8

basically, what i'm trying to say is that the society i propose will be as productive if not more so than a capitalist society, and will have as much or more incentive for innovation, as proven by accounts of history, and since you claim that poverty is directly correlated to lack of innovation and productivity, and innovation and productivity rid us of poverty, then my ideas would be more effective than yours at eliminating poverty.

no, that is completely false. greed, while occuring naturally in animals, can be discouraged and mutualism, cooperation, sharing, etc., can be enculturated into people as shown in different groups throughout history including some of the most well known Native American tribes.

that is because of a set of values you have been enculturated with. in an libertarian socialist community, community is family.

no, but you can seriously limit it to the point of virtual irrelevance.

unless the judge sees dollar signs in his eyes. and like i said above, they can bypass the poor class, because the people with all the money are the only people that matter. the rich know the poor won't do shit.

i said that people who believe that competition can go unregulated and avoid corruption are naive. that is hardly name calling. i said you were being naive. competition is, by nature, cutthroat and compassion free. while it is a natural phenomenon, it is an impersonal instinct that is cause of many social, psychological, and even, on occasion, physical maladies. there are unavoidable forms of competition, but due to it's corrupting nature it should be limited in as many ways as it can. competition often results in stress (which has been directly linked to, and named one of the biggest factors of a large portion of the diseases that are the top killers around the world including number 1 -- Coronary Heart Disease. competition is one of the biggest factors leading to stress), over exertion (which can also lead to stress), rivalries, anger, spite, excess greed (as in it encourages more greed than would otherwise occur naturally), the likelihood of cheating or trying to cheat, etc. in most societies, there are occasions when males and females feel the need to compete for a sexual partner. this has been known to cause a great deal of emotional stress, especially amongst teenagers and young adults with whom this occurs most rampantly. luckily they are at an age where they can handle stress. as we grow older, stressors begin to accrue from other sources. one of the biggest stressors amongst working adults is work related stress, much of which has either a direct or indirect correlation to competition.

how did he turn out to be naive? i think he would contest that as well as would many others who have viewed this thread.

what do you disagree with? do you feel my analogy is false? would you care to dissect my analogy and show where my error occurs?

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erikboyd60@hotmail.com

"True poetry can communicate before it is understood"

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if my society can be less poverty stricken than those, then this statement is irrelevant. it so happens that history shows this to be a great possibility.

my new theme song



erikboyd60@hotmail.com

"True poetry can communicate before it is understood"

-T.S. Eliot

battle record:

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"Although CNT-FAI publications cited numerous cases of peasant proprietors and tenant farmers who had adhered voluntarily to the collective system, there can be no doubt that an incomparably larger number doggedly opposed it or accepted it only under extreme duress...The fact is...that many small owners and tenant farmers were forced to join the collective farms before they had an opportunity to make up their minds freely."

"Even if the peasant proprietor and tenant farmer were not compelled to adhere to the collective system, there were several factors that made life difficult for recalcitrants; for not only were they prevented from employing hired labor and disposing freely as their crops, as has already been seen, but they were often denied all benefits enjoyed by members...Moreover, the tenant farmer, who had believed himself freed from the payment of rent by the execution or flight of the landowner or of his steward, was often compelled to continue such payment to the village committee. All these factors combined to exert a pressure almost as powerful as the butt of the rifle, and eventually forced the small owners and tenant farmers in many villages to relinquish their land and other possessions to the collective farms."

-Burnett Bolloten

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnett_Bolloten

"It is also fair to conclude, on the basis of friendly as well as hostile accounts, that the Aragonese collectivization took place under the direct auspices of anarchist militia columns, and it would be utterly naive to claim that the executions of landlords and priests, and the procedure of voting by acclamation, did not constitute a considerable element of coercion."

"Another conclusion which can reasonably be drawn from all accounts of the village collectives is that the committees, potentially at least, could exercise a very large measure of control over the personal lives of the villagers. Some of them closed cafes, censored movies and books, or prevented the distribution of tobacco and alcohol. Where money was used only in relations with the outside world, the committee exercised virtually absolute control over who would travel and how he might spend a stipulated amount of cash. For poor peasants with austere deals, the censorship might be morally approved and the financial system might enable them to travel for the first time in their lives. But for those who liked to decide about drinking, smoking, and traveling for themselves, this feature must surely have been onerous."

http://uweb.cas.usf.edu/ssphs/vol1no2.html

who says it actually has to get to court? and who says the observers weren't hand selected and/or paid off? how are we to prevent either of these from happening?

.....what??? who said the people being taken to court are getiing paid off? i was specifically speaking of the judges/courts/people involved in the stipulation of the case getting paid off.

no, we are speaking on different frequencies here. i'm speaking of things like the fact that the layout of society can determine someone's attitude towards work, themselves, and life in general. for example, in a classist society, people have it ingrained from a young age that they are a low class citizen or a high class citizen. low class people often have it embedded in their brain that they can never do better than what they are currently doing and so they don't try. this is not something they can just overcome as an individual person. some can, some can't. most need people to de-program them from this belief that they are destined to be bottom feeders. this is what i mean by looking at things by a sociological and psychological standpoint. also, realizing that the underlying ideal behind that is that we don't have free will in the classical sense we think of it, but rather that everything is determined, putting our free will in a box at the very least is a philosophical way of looking at things that, by all regards, seems to be the accurate view as of current. also, the information i presented on the negative and harmful effects of competition, which you completely disregarded, add another sociological evaluation into the mix as well as a physiological one that could provide for another monkey wrench in your ideology. and i am once again not only speaking of competition on the worker to worker level, because competition at the B2B level also effects the worker to worker level, therefore effecting people physiologically. these are the aspects of society that you fail to see and that prevent you from seeing the flaws in hierarchy, unevenly distributed power and capitalism.

not at all what i'm talking about.

no, at the expense of the workers who are your subordinates.

you don't understand the concept of exploitation then:

"ex⋅ploi⋅ta⋅tion
  /ˌɛksplɔɪˈteɪʃən/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [ek-sploi-tey-shuhn] Show IPA
Use exploitation in a Sentence
See images of exploitation
Search exploitation on the Web
–noun
1. use or utilization, esp. for profit: the exploitation of newly discovered oil fields.
2. selfish utilization: He got ahead through the exploitation of his friends.
3. the combined, often varied, use of public-relations and advertising techniques to promote a person, movie, product, etc."

the very purpose of hierarchy in the workplace, marketing, and capitalistic economics and the labor within it is exploitation. when a boss puts me to work, he is exploiting my labor. he is commodifying my work and even turning me into a commodity. when something is a commodity, whether that commodity is rented or owned, it becomes a slave. of course the rented commodity, thanks to slavery during the period of European colonialism in the United States, would instead be called, in a very euphemistic manner, indentured servants. this is what libertarian socialists mean by "wage slavery". exploitation is what drives capitalism and exploitation of humans and their labor creates slavery. simple as that. when you work for someone you are the owner of your product which is labor and you are literally renting this labor out to someone for a wage. that is what employment is. if this is true, then denying that wage slavery exists or calling it an absurd term is simply ignorance. i think i've made this quite clear.

which, as i explained above, is based on the labor your as a business oriented person in a capitalistic society choose to commodify and rent to a person/company/etc. who then in turn exploits your product of labor and pays you a salary for that labor, which constitutes wage slavery.

for example, a worker has a conversation with a customer. the employee isn't the extremely social type and gives off very stand-offish (though not intentionally) attitude. the boss calls the employee into his/her office after the conversation/transaction/whatever and tells the employee what he/she did wrong and how he/she needs to improve. whether the boss has a very strong attitude and disciplines the employee by getting angry and putting them in their place or acts in a nurturing and explanatory manner, they are treating them as a subordinate and/or child and flexing their power over that individual.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
http://www.prisonexp.org/

yes, in most cases you do, but not complete control over whether or not you will be able to work again and if you will, when you will.

ummm.... anyone who is opposed to bigotry.... ?

i knew you would bring this up and because of that i should have been more specific. see, what you often do to my arguments is you find these little spots in my arguments that somehow appear to your mind as loopholes or holes when they are really not at all what i'm talking about, but rather something that i would expect you to know is not what i am talking about, and you run with those aspects of my argument and effectively prolong the discussion. i would appreciate an attempt to limit this. i am not attacking you for this or accusing you of anything, i am just making you aware of a miscommunication we seem to be having so that we can try to expedite our understandings of each others argument and move on to another topic more quickly.

i was not speaking of discrimination within a group or business whose sole purpose is discrimination. i am speaking of discrimination within your average work environment, ie the Christian boss of a sandwich shop who finds out one of his workers (and not one that is particularly bad at his/her job) is an atheist and decides to fire him/her on the spot. the boss could easily lie about this in court, whereas in an environment where there are no bosses and work is voluntary rather than exploited, this would be impossible because 1. there is no boss to be discriminatory and 2. there is no employment to be terminated.

that is an extreme case. like i said, greed, competition, selfishness, etc. are all things that occur in nature. however, these concepts have such a negative connotation because, in most cases, they have terrible side effects. for this reason, while eliminating these things will be impossible, limiting them and replacing them with other human instincts like sharing, nurturing, loving, cooperating, etc. is the ideal way for a society to run. embracing and encouraging greed, fierce competition, selfishness, etc. is harmful to society and should never be condoned.

which consumers? surely in a classist system the same market segregation will occur as in the current society and surely this will lead to the bourgeoisie having more purchasing power than the lower and middle classes, no? if the consumers with the purchasing power are the defendants or have a good turnout for the defendants in their best interests, what does it matter what the plaintiff wants? the matter doesn't even have to make it to court. payoffs can prevent that.

calling him a Marxist is laughable. maybe you should read up on the difference between Marxist (state socialism) and anarchism (libertarian socialism). he never condoned the route of USSR, Cuba, SK, etc. and if you knew the difference and truly understood it you wouldn't have erroneously labeled him.

???? i was asking you if my analogy was not accurate. i felt the analogy made a good point. why wouldn't you have to use my analogy when addressing whether or not it is a good point.... ?

anyways, what unlawful things??? the dogs are simply competing. in society, businesses compete. in competition, there is a victor and numerous losers. as a victor faces more opponents and continues to have victories, victory becomes easier to come by and more power is gained. in the case of a fighter dog, the other dogs become wounded while the best dog comes out with considerably less wounds and is able to continue to fight and begins realizing that he has power over the other dogs. in the case of businesses, a business competes with another causing wounds in the form of convincing people in the loser business to lose faith in the business they work in and leave. the victor business slowly, as it defeats more and more smaller businesses, begins realizing and utilizing it's power.

no, it hasn't. name one circumstance where this has happened and don't use any state socialist society because anarchist theorists predicted that state socialism would lead to the same injustices or worse than capitalistic societies while Marx was still theorizing them:

"freedom without Socialism is privilege and injustice [...] Socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality"

-Mikhail Bakunin

1. if the society's main principle in non hierarchical labor and the abolition of wage slavery, of course they will not allow someone to hire labor. would it make any sense if a society based on such a principle allowed hired labor?abolishing hired labor (aka wage slavery) is equivalent to abolishing common slavery which i am sure you are a proponent of (i hope).

2. Bolloten was specifically observing the revolution from the communist side. the biggest downfall of the anarchists during the revolution was their allowing of peaceful coexistence between them and the communists. while it would go against their principles and what i would consider to be right, the anarchists not taking absolute control proved to be their undoing and so communist principles steadily overtook the more passive anarchist principles (due, not to the lack of strength of the anarchist principles, but because the communists were actively fighting a war against the fascists and because the main focus of the revolution was not anarchism, it was counter-fascism) and communism shortly prevailed before Franco's government crushed it. Bolloten was vehemently against the communism he had once supported that he found himself immersed in during the Spanish Revolution, not against the anarchism that he knew very little about.

"The problem in republican Spain was that whilst the social revolution which saw mass voluntary collectivisation, and a fantastic increase in both productivity and quality of life, was largely anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist at its root, the government was a coaltion of Communists and Liberals who saw the will of the people as a far greater threat than Franco and the fascists.

Thus, we saw anarchists drawn into the government by the false promises of the Communist-Liberal government and convinced to sign legislature that appeared to be in the interests of the collectives but in fact was part of the steady campaign to erode their standing. What is interesting, however, was that in more than one area the government was forced to reverse anti-collective legislation when it realised that the collectives were far more productive to the war effort. And, significantly, when the anarchist revolution was finally crushed, the will of the masses to fight Franco deflated, because their passion had been taken with their freedom."

http://pa-in.facebook.com/topic.p....pic_top

^^^ post #38

of course not. there's no indicators in either direction, unfortunately, because it was crushed so quickly. that is why we look to other sources such as the kibbutzen if we want to discuss libertarian socialism in terms of longevity rather than a large scale model.

my new theme song



erikboyd60@hotmail.com

"True poetry can communicate before it is understood"

-T.S. Eliot

battle record:

7-0-0

http://libcom.org/library/collectives-spanish-revolution-gaston-leval

Gaston Leval visited all Republican Spain I already posted this for you in another thread . You have here the achievements of every town and city and factory and village etc. here . Plus Syndicalisations in Alcoy , Madrid etc. So please shut the FUCK UP . The man gives you the names of the cities he visited the names of the factories he visited etc. . The man traveled all over Republican Spain so please SHUT THE FUCK UP. There is enough proof to show otherwise .

"The Austrian school of economics expresses that what is exchanged between individuals is irrelevant for the result. In the context of Austrian economics, the concept of compensation would extend to cover everything received by workers from employers for their labor. For consistency then compensation in forms other than wages should also be condemned by those who consider capitalist production wage slavery. That is to say, anything other than a revolutionary restructuring of the labor-employer relation leaves the original condition, the one advocated by the school in question, largely untouched. Further, utilizing the Misesian analytics of individual action, human beings must always engage in production in order to consume and survive. Thus, man would be enslaved to nature itself. If man is always enslaved in some form or another, according to this view, the concept of slavery is of little use in order to draw distinctions between what is a coercive interpersonal relationship and what is not, thereby defeating the analytical purpose of "wage slavery theory"."

http://jim.com/anarchy/

it's like a game of cards. the most successful of businesses are often more than willing to go "all-in" if they know a good result will occur and, though they lose money in the short run, they will continue to thrive in the long run. and they don't really have to pay of that many people. the entire court room doesn't need to be paid off. just the people with decision making power.

they aren't assumptions. these are coming from my extensive studies and from taking classes in cultural anthropology, philosophy, physiology, etc. and doing independent studies in psychology and other subjects. this is knowledge i have accrued over the years from actual studies that have been done. studies that are being taught because they have been tested and proven by some of the greatest scientists in their respective fields. that's what you don't understand. you are the one making assumptions based on what has either been intuitive to you or what you have learned from various sources (other than those of a scholarly nature) within a capitalistic society that you have been conditioned to think are true. and if you try to claim that science can be wrong and often is in that aspect, then ok, but you don't seem to understand the scientific method or the direction the progression of scientific research seems to be going. you don't seem to understand that the fallacies are more often than not being discovered to be in my favor, not yours. scientists are discovering more and more everyday that their fallacious idea of free will truly is being disproven. scientists are realizing more and more that it is enculturation, not human nature, that causes humans to be greedy, anti-social, ruthlessly competitive, etc. it is not being turned in the other direction and science has a system of checks and balances called the scientific method that assures us that corrupt information doesn't leak through the cracks. science actually works very similarly to the decision making process found within my concept of libertarian socialism and is quite successful because of it.

many slaves and indentured servants also agreed to work.

and.... ? of course it does. that's why a revolutionary restructuring is EXACTLY what we are advocating.

agreed. and as i've shown, collectives (within an environment conducive to their style of operation such as an anarcho-syndicalist society) are quite productive, more so even than capitalist businesses within capitalist societies.

????? ........................this jump baffles me it is so silly.

this could also be an argument for straight-forward slavery. do you support slavery?

the point is that every time the boss has to discipline the worker in any form, whether it be by calling the worker into his office or critiquing his/her productivity while he/she is working, this becomes a form of discipline which translates to uneven power between the boss and the worker and as i've shown with the Stanford Prison Study, the Lord Acton quote holds true and uneven power has serious psychological and physiological repercussions for the subordinate:

"power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely"

-Lord Acton (it's funny because, being a Lord, he was actually including himself in his critique of power. he had first hand experience of being corrupted)

i do apologize for what i am about to say, but that is truly the dumbest fucking response you could have given me.

they will still occur in any society you place them in. a libertarian socialist society, while not conducive to EXCESSIVE AMOUNTS of such things, is plenty equipped to handle certain forms of them on a small scale and effectively oppose non-conducive forms.

like you have done so many times before, this article doesn't take into account monetary power. there will, in fact, be more expensive PDAs to which the best defense attorneys, police officers, etc. will gravitate because it is more lucrative; higher paying customers will hire the more expensive PDAs with good reputations knowing that they have better attorneys and officers while people with less money will hire cheaper PDAs with less experienced law enforcement and attorneys. in most cases the more expensive PDAs will have more pull over a court due to their reputation and the amount of money they have. it creates a much better situation for the wealthy than it does for the poor. PDAs may be a superior idea to the current system, but they will still have their problems with corruption.

and btw, the violence involved in this society of yours, by this guys article, suggests that this would be a war driven society, based heavily on physical battles between PDAs, much like, as the writer suggests at the end, the wild west. how can you even support that?

like in a game of Texas Hold 'em, while technically anyone has a chance to come out on top and many of the factors of victory are up to chance, a very skilled card player can put himself in a position where he is in control over more than 50% of the chips at which point he can use his control to keep all opponents at bay. also, unlike in a card game, Apple and Microsoft have the ability to make under-the-counter deals with each other in order to screw everyone else and give off a facade of fierce competition. i'm not saying that they do this, but they easily could if they wanted to and it would truly hurt the industry.

i'm saying that anarchist ideals weren't the reason behind this. compromise of anarchist for state communist ideals were the reason behind the coercion. this was already at the point where the communist government, which had been in place the whole time, actually gained a foothold in anarchist Spain and began eroding it from the insides.

we've been over this. the kibbutzen were forced to function in a capitalist country under government rule. their way of life as a collective society was, in a similar way to Spanish anarchism, taken by force because they felt they had no choice but to conform to their government or fold.

my new theme song



erikboyd60@hotmail.com

"True poetry can communicate before it is understood"

-T.S. Eliot

battle record:

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....or they could just set up a system that isn't conducive to bigotry in the first place, thus avoiding conflict..... ?

my new theme song



erikboyd60@hotmail.com

"True poetry can communicate before it is understood"

-T.S. Eliot

battle record:

7-0-0