What sucks in reading the bread book is when you get to the bit where he talks about productivity. He has some great figures on the productive output of every industry in France, and what it would take for everyone in France to have enough down to the per capita consumption of meat, grain, etc. And he pointed to the industrial changes that had done so much already: surely the age of plenty for all and copious leisure is right around the corner, if we can just muster the political will! But it doesn't work out like that. We still work a lot. In fact there's a loosely negative correlation between difficulty of a job and standard of living in the U.S. So every time a futurist talks about how AI or automation or whatever is going to give everyone so much free time we won't know what to do with ourselves, I can't help but think back to the facts and figures of this dude writing before we'd even harnessed electricity at scale.
"copious leisure is right around the corner, if we can just muster the political will! But it doesn't work out like that. We still work a lot."
This is worth thinking about. What do people actually do?
Well, this is what.[1]
- Farming is tiny. Under 1% of the labor force. In 1900, it was around 40%. (That's typical of most developed countries. Since the US is a net food exporter, that's not due to imports. Food preparation is 10x the size of farming. (Farmers complain that they capture only a small fraction of the value of food as eaten, but they're not doing more than a small fraction of the labor involved.)
- US manufacturing is around 5% of the labor force. Some of that is due to imports.
In Kropotkin's day, those two categories covered most of the workforce.
- Health care, broadly defined, consumes a sizable fraction of the labor force.
An interesting question to ask is how much other employment is not really necessary. How much is zero-sum activity?
- If advertising was no longer a tax-deductible business expense, there would be a lot less of it.
- If insurance was standardized (as it is for Medicare), the insurance industry could be far smaller.
- If finance faced a tax on financial transactions and was restricted to the product set of 1980, finance would be far smaller.
This would look a lot like China's policies today, or US policies of the 1950s.
Production is cheap because it's massive and economies of scale apply, but distribution is not because it works with every customer inevitably. Every customer in a supermarket needs to interact with a cashier.
Also, transporting, washing, sorting, storing are all scalable but not free, and these are important parts of the easy availability for the end customer. Then, storage is not preserving 100% of produce, some of it inevitably withers or spoils, and handling this is also not free.
Potatoes are only dirt cheap if you buy them in bulk on the farm, then store in your basement, and sort and handle yourself. This is a lot of work and time spent, I've seen such an approach firsthand.
The operations you cite aren't free, but they aren't the reason that costs of food for consumers dwarf payments made to farmers. Distribution is not a free market. Farmers sell to monopsony, and consumers buy from monopoly. Firms like Tyson, JBS, Cargill, etc. are not the immense size they are in order to create efficiency but rather to extract rents from abusive market positions.
Many companies buy directly from farmers or actually own farms. This however isn’t a major cost savings. Those distributors are actually doing a lot of work relative to the effort needed to produce it at a farm. Consider even just someone driving a semi truck from Idaho to NYC takes over 30 hours of labor one way and roughly transports one acre worth of potatoes. That’s excluding loading, packaging, unloading, etc or any effort needed to actually sell to each customer.
Of course, none of this would be necessary without the idea that produce grown anywhere should be available everywhere. You don't need all that infrastructure if the potatoes you buy are from a farmer's market and were grown a few miles outside town.
In 90s in my country it was a norm to buy potatoes directly from farmers. Many would find it funny that in richer places people pay more buying it washed, and sorted. However, as economical circumstances enhanced majority of urban dwellers started to pay more for washed, and sorted (and often imported, because you can't guarantee high quality of yield in any given year, at any given place) potatoes. You still can buy directly if you like, but nowadays it's mostly for students, and unsupported seniors. I don't know, maybe there's some sort of cartel conspiracy in US food trade, but consumers paying more for intermediary services is universal phenomenon. Likely after reaching some economical threshold, it becomes easier to spend for a bit of free time, and comfort.
I have no issue with people paying for processing, only the part where you're buying potatoes from a supermarket that came from another country when there's a farmer growing the exact same thing a few miles away. Reducing logistic complexity is both an inherent good for the environment and places distributive power in the hands of farmers to form a market or a distribution union or whatever form is applicable locally.
There is no where near enough farms close to NYC to meet NYC’s food demands. Buy local can work depending on the local climate, population density, etc but it isn’t inherently more environmentally friendly. Large scale food distribution networks are extremely efficient where farmers markets high markups often mean inefficient practices behind the scenes. At the extreme end you get indoor farms for produce which takes vastly more energy and resources than using sunlight on a farm thousands of miles away.
> scale food distribution networks are extremely efficient
Financially efficient. Trucking a ton of food 100 miles is worse for the environment than trucking it 10 miles.
> There is no where near enough farms close to NYC to meet NYC’s food demands.
It doesn't have to be just within the nearest few miles. My general point is that shortening logistic chains is a good thing. Is this a controversial idea? Just because its cheaper to ship products from China or food from Latin America, doesn't mean its better for the environment. It means that capitalism's cost model is completely detached from the actual environmental costs.
Distance is just a really bad proxy for environmental impact, though. Larger trucks are more efficient than smaller ones, rail is much more efficient than trucking, and shipping is much more efficient than rail.
(This is part of why I'm so strongly in favor of carbon taxes:. It means businesses can continue to be optimizing for lowest cost, and the tax reconciles places where cost and environmental impact currently diverge)
Logistic chains are being optimized and thus shortened behind the scenes as a cost saving measure.
Even then distance is a terrible measure on it’s own. Suppose a local farmer drives 100 lb of food 25 miles to a farmers market in a 25 MPG truck. They just spent 1 gallon per 100lb of food. A semi driving 2000 miles at 6.5 MPG is moving 34,000 pounds is at 1 gallon per 110 lb of food. And that’s just the surface a farmer needs to drive his truck home, where semi’s try to have useful cargo on the return trip. Granted the farmer might haul more food etc, but the semi could haul more and probably isn’t traveling that far etc.
Further distribution chains aren’t about a single good, grocery stores for example get bulk delivery of multiple goods from distributors. When you include people driving to a farmers market who also drive to a grocery store, farmer’s markets often become much worse for the environment than the giant logistics chain their trying to improve upon.
The real solution is to add taxes for the externalities you care about not simply wing it via feel good assumptions.
Taxes for externalities do not solve power imbalances caused by centralisation.
As for economies of long distance transportation, this is as a result of investment into those forms of transport as a result of centralised bargaining power and economies of scale. It's not like long distance transport has an inherent efficiency benefit over short distance, it's just more amendable to centralization.
Power imbalance is a function of capitalism, they can setup a setup a cooperative but the prices wouldn’t change much. The issue is if they sell a commodity in bulk they get a bulk commodity pricing.
Efficiency in long distance transportation is inherently a function of scale. Very quickly you find it’s often more environmentally friendly to do longer distances with full loads than short distances with nearly empty or much smaller trucks/trains/boats/ etc. A farmer > collection point > train to regional distribution points > truck to local distributor works. A farmer isn’t going to say fill up a train on his own, and a train stop per farm isn’t going to work.
At the outer end N to M transactions between distributors with one product sending to different distributors with multiple products works. A grocery store getting deliveries from hundreds of farmers runs into issues especially when people want out of season fruits and vegetables.
The downsides of this model is it’s difficult to supply goods that decay quickly. A farmers market physically next to the farm can sell fresh food that would never work in a grocery stores supply chain. But people driving to every farm is a different inefficiency thus seasonal farmers markets.
True - I think we're better-served in some areas by consciously avoiding pure market competition in service to ideals like fair compensation or environmentalism.
> Efficiency in long distance transportation is inherently a function of scale. Very quickly you find it’s often more environmentally friendly to do longer distances with full loads than short distances with nearly empty or much smaller trucks/trains/boats/ etc. A farmer > collection point > train to regional distribution points > truck to local distributor works. A farmer isn’t going to say fill up a train on his own, and a train stop per farm isn’t going to work.
True. What I'm talking about is shortening logistic chains though, not increasing distribution of logistics. Maybe a farmer's market is a bad example because typically the farmers drive their own crops to market - I was thinking an alternative to supermarkets where rather than the accumulate-transport-distribute pipeline that you described, sale happens directly after accumulation of goods into a locally-central store or market. That accumulation can happen the same way it does now, but you remove or reduce the international shipping and distribution from ISO containers that's inherent to a global market with subsidised transport.
> The difference between what they get paid for a potato and what I pay for a bag is quite extreme.
Not only extreme, but also obscene.
I recall in the late 90's someone described the poor profitability of potato growing in large tracts of the USA, and it sounded impossibly low - in the order of hundreds of dollars per acre.
Sad but true -- while revenue per acre may be ~$2500, costs are ~$2000 [0]
There's probably an on-topic observation to be made here about the past century or so spent driving subsistence farmers off arable land, monoculture, soil destruction, leading to an objectively unsustainable potato farming industry (in the sense of throwing more Joules into the working of the land, than you are getting out of it).
Other anarchists have been talking about this issue specifically. A interesting example would be David Graeber[0]. His books Debt and especially Bullshit Jobs were discussed on HN quite a bit.
Many of us in software and tech in general understand what he was saying on some level, some even make a huge buck out of it by cutting away the cleric and managerial work. We haven't figured this out completely but the general drive I observe from people who think deeply about process and information is that we tend to be allergic against bureaucracy and the thing we call accidental complexity.
If you look at this things through the lens of a radical, then you might come to the conclusion that the underlying problem is systemic. We have a economic system that is optimized for growth and competition, while most of our big challenges today require maintenance and collaboration. And we have a political system that is rigid, bureaucratic and often violent, when people long for self-determination and peace.
>copious leisure is right around the corner, if we can just muster the political will! But it doesn't work out like that. We still work a lot.
I don't think we've ever mustered the political will to even give it a shot, so the fact that we work more than ever is not really a point against Kropotkin, IMO.
I think the issue is we are all mortals. No matter how much wealth we have we will all die. Sorry to crash the party. But wealth can prolong life and make it more enjoyable. People will never have enough so they will work more even when they don't have shortage of food.
Even if you are rich and think you have more than enough, you SHOULD think you want to earn more just to be able to give it away to the less fortunate.
> number of people who'd accept a relatively comfortable life
Congratulations to those who have achieved that level of spiritual enlightenment.
Of course we "accept" what we have since it is what we have. What you're gonna do file a complaint?
People in need think they would be more than happy to "accept" a "relatively comfortable life". Who wouldn't? The point is the word "relatively". Once they achieve that level then relatively happy will mean the next thing.
Many would be content with maintaining a sustainable, comfortable life.
Today the general worker in developed countries is more productive than 40/50 years ago but gets less for it. Less and less middle class workers can afford to by their own house or apartment and those with lower paying jobs are barely getting by often under harsh conditions.
Life should be getting better for all due to overall increase in productivity, but it's getting worse for many or is stagnating, while there are few who have been amassing obscene amounts of wealth and power.
I am one of them. But I don’t consider myself spiritually enlightened. I just realised that I already have more than I need to be happy and content. I used to own an expensive sports car but sold it because it wasn’t practical and didn’t bring me any additional happiness. Quite the opposite. I learned a lot from that.
Why is it necessarily a disease and not a natural part of the human condition? It seems to me like if we were the sort of beings to say “this is enough”, we would have never made it out of hunter-gatherer.
Ambition and curiosity are separate instincts from greed. If you think all innovation comes from greed, that itself is a cultural belief and cannot explain the greatest innovators in history like Einstein, Newton, Da Vinci or Tesla.
The icon of innovative greed would be someone like Edison who was a profoundly cruel and greedy man who stole the ideas of others more tab he created himself. There's your icon of capitalistic innovation.
I feel like the word wealth has been bastardized pretty badly, but using its original meaning I'd argue that wealth has to be created; it isn't straightforward to "give it away".
Have you read Clay Shirky's "Gin, Television, and Cognitive Surplus" [1]?
He argues that technology does free us from more and more work, and we find ways to spend this time, by wasting it, or by fitting other things into it.
E.g. the lazy Saturday when people can just do sweet nothing, watch TV, play games, or maybe feel bad about nothing good to do is a very recent development.
People like Marshall Sahlins (Graeber's mentor) woudl strongly disagree that leisure like this is recent, in the sense that he believe(d) that pre-agricultural human societies had lots of free time available to (almost) everyone.
The problem is the same as with gorillas: habitats supporting such leisurely life are rare, and cannot support density required for any kind of technological and most forms of social advancement. This makes life leisurely but full of peril.
The memoir "Indian Boyhood" by Dr. Charles Eastman gives excellent examples of this. He describes life in his native American tribe as alternating between the best life can offer and desperation / extreme discomfort. They did little to no work in spring and summer but faced constant warfare and often bitter winters, not to mention the risks involved in hunting large game. He notes how they lived at all times just moments from calamity but didn't live in fear per se.
I think one of the best expositions of a possible world based on similar philosophies is The Disposessed by Ursula K LeGuin.
It's now presented as a material utopia, and the first time I read it, I found it to be in many ways as oppressive a way of life as the other forms presented in the novel. But, it has the benefit of feeling plausible and realistic, and as I have aged I find it more compelling than I did in my youth.
In any case. A great novel that should be more widely read.
Another classic work from Kropotkin is Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. It's more anthropology than economics, but it is an absolutely fundamental work for anarchism.
Not really, it shows that nature is not just a bunch of individual animals competing for resources, as Darwin has sometimes been interpreted. Eg by the Nazis or Capitalists. Rather mutual aid is a fundemental property of nature.
Meanwhile, today's poor have a surplus of accessible carbohydrates, and this ends up being harmful to them! Such a thing would have been utterly beyond the imagination of the 19th century intellectuals whose radical views are directly taken up by many young people today (and many more, young and old, powerful and not, in some implicit or indirect form).
Oh, the irony! Right? Not really. Carbohydrates in particular have been sold as the top staple of a good diet (bread/pasta/etc. was at the top of the old food pyramid after all) by commercial interests for almost a century. Fats were of course villified for a good while. Why? Probably because it is easier to gorge yourself on carbo-heavy foods and drinks than on other types of food (also less processed foods). Thus you can sell more of it.
(You can also salten soft drinks a bit in order to induce more thirst… since all you have to do to hide that salty flavor is to add more sugar.)
We live in a consumer society now, where apparent “abundance” gets turned into new ailments and problems in order to sell more stuff (not necessarily more food—could be exercise equipment or whatever else).
And it’s of course no coincidence that wealthier people have more and better access to whole foods and other supposed “lifestyle choices”.
There’s nothing ironic here at all. Just new problems being invented in order to sell more stuff.
> wealthier people have more and better access to whole foods and other supposed “lifestyle choices”.
This is one of the secret priviliged pleasures in my life - having zero income yet eating whole foods like some rich person. The sheer social altruism of nordic countries is nothing short of amazing.
But it's really cold here in winter. If we didn't take care of each other, those left starving and homeless would revolt violently, refusing to freeze and die (or die then freeze).
Social security simply affords me an amount of money that's plenty to buy whatever organic and whole foods I desire. It's probably budgeted for neurotypicals to go drinking at bars, buy new clothes, stuff like that. I'm happy spending it all on good food.
Meat like all things has its scale. Some meats are of course better for you than others. Steak is probably way better for you to eat than ground beef or hot dogs. Chicken probably better than most beef products.
An unfortunate reality I had to break to my sister in law, Beyond Burgers are not all that "healthy" and they never marketed it as such. People, such as bloggers, media, and friends on facbeook/twitter, jumped to the conclusion it was.
I won't say that it applies to all meat, but mostly to beef.
Also, beef need not vanish, it could just go expensive, like, say, foie gras.
I personally am totally fine with chicken, fish, and shrimp providing the bulk of animal protein in my diet, and relegating a steak to rare festive occasions, as it was historically.
Is it structurally lacking or just culturally? You can get a bunch of kale for $2 in most grocery stores. Garlic, beans, turmeric, none of these are particularly expensive or hard to find.
Both. In few countries the industry managed to convince people that healthy food, especially vegetables, should be more expensive.
Secondly, in some countries there are food deserts or a small selection of healthy food among a lot of unhealthy one (e.g. stuffed with oil, sugar, fats etc)
Finally, the ratio of carbohydrate-to-vitamins is increasing in many foods due to artificial selection and increased CO2 in the atmosphere.
>There appears to have been something in the air in 19th century Russia that lent itself to the formation of socialist and anarchic activity. I’m not sure what it was, but it appears to have subsided.
That something in the air would probably have to do with a decrepit monarchy and deeply corrupt church working together to utterly screw over the people and deplete the country's wealth. Pre-USSR Russia is almost a poster child for the harms of the state.
The revolutionaries that followed[0] didn't actually care about abolishing the state, though. They[1] were just better at keeping people angry at things other than themselves. After all, they had a benchmark to compare against - as long as they weren't any worse than before, they could still claim to be continuing "the revolution", whatever that meant.
This even extended past the fall of Communism. There was a brief period of genuine interest in a free market, which was almost immediately followed by the country getting fleeced by fraudulent Ponzi schemes, and then a network of kleptocrats taking power.
[0] Once the revolutionaries genuinely interested in progress had been unpersoned and replaced with authoritarians willing to parrot Stalinist slogans. Auth-left loves to do this to the rest of the left wing.
[1] Or the de-Stalinized bureaucratic mess that followed.
> That something in the air would probably have to do with a decrepit monarchy and deeply corrupt church working together to utterly screw over the people and deplete the country's wealth.
Yes but ...
That's a description of most European states since, say, Charlemagne defined the subsequent millennium of European control structures -- but pragmatically that broad description likely also applies to most parts of the world for most of the past several millennia.
I suspect it's more a combination of Gutenberg tech adoption, and (in retrospect quite torpid) increases in education and state-tolerance towards humanism.
Love the amount of Anarchist thought being posted on HN lately. First people discussing Graeber recently due to the release of his new book, and now the Bread Book.
I do understand why "people" do not recommend Lenin to you, and they recommend Kropotkin. Since they belong to a layers of classes that benefit from the interests resulting from imperialist force of your homeland. Lenin will analyze it with scientific rigor and will show how the reality works, and he will not talk about abstract ideas! Ideas are the reflections of movements in the material reality. There are classes! There are layers in each class! Read Lenin for science's sake! We are in a phase that we are preparing for a horrible world war over repartition of the world market. Don't end up in one the trenches!
Lenin turned out to be an autocrat who fought to have managerial control reinstated in the factories after they had been taken over by Soviets and various other ways he crushed the revolution. The Bolsheviks were a group of middle class people who wanted everything subservient to them. If you read anarchist history books like anarchosyndicalism by Rudolf rocker or books by Emma Goldman on the subject you might be intrigued.
Right. I used to love reading Lenin. Until I realized that the first thing Lenin did upon assuming power was destroying the power of the Soviets and assuming full control of the entire state, thus removing almost all of the democratic elements from the revolution.
There’s nothing scientific about Lenin, nor about Marxism. We’ve learnt a lot more about how capitalism works, and how our economy works, in the last 100 years. Plenty of better analyses of capitalism in the mean while, such as the “Capital as Power” framework
Marx was a social scientist, much of his structural analysis of capitalism still plays out accurately today. Given that science is about building predictive models, that makes him a pretty successful scientist.
> Marx was a social scientist, much of his structural analysis of capitalism still plays out accurately today.
None of his structuralist analysis has played out accurately. Indeed it was discredited long before the Soviet Union collapsed. Marx's ideas of historicism have been largely abandoned decades ago.
You no longer hear people talk of "historical necessity" of socialism, nor do people believe that man goes through stages of capitalism to socialism to communism. And with the collapse of the Iron curtain and China abandoning communism, all that is left of modern marxist-lennist thought is the actual Lenninist part -- e.g. party dictatorship, which has proven resilient in some cases as a form of authoritarian control. Even the modern has left has abandoned class conflict as the source of ressentiment and is now pushing racial conflict - in fact one can argue that the modern left is firmly rooted in the professional classes, viewing the working class with great suspicion as a source of reactionary beliefs. That was always the problem with Marx, whose focus was on the politics of the city - real poverty lies in the rural countryside, which tended to be religious and conservative, wanting to honor God and King. This bothered Marx to no end, accusing the poor of having a false consciousness and not knowing what was in their best interests, whereas the urban leftists knew what was good for them. It was the failure, for example, of the republicans in Spain to win over the farmers that was the death knell of the left in the Spanish Civil war. And it was the farmers that were slaughtered first whenever lefist revolutions succeeded, from the Vendee in 18th C France to Ukraine in the 1920s to China in the 1950s. Marxism itself was always a bit phoney with the class conflict -- it is, at the end, a cultural conflict, and the economic stuff was tossed overboard like a used glove the moment a better one was found.
It's true that the world is discovering how fragile democracies are, especially racially diverse democracies[1], but that insight is available even in Plato, and really has nothing to do with Marx. That is, while Marx's notions of some economic end-state turned out to be false, the larger framework of the cycles of history as outlined by the Greeks still hold some sway.
But that does not mean that all of Marx is worthless. He did a good job describing the economic history of the English industrial revolution and was a keen observer of the urban reality of his day. It's just that his recipes didn't work and his predictions didn't pan out.
[1] My favorite trilemma is that you can have liberty, diversity, or centralization. Pick two.
You're narrowing down his ideas to only those relating to socialism, which I didn't even mention. I said much of his analysis of capitalism still holds. You know, the content of Kapital, where he analyses the capitalist mode of production, how it arose from feudalism, the form it takes in terms of a working and capitalist class and how their interactions drive the economy. The vast majority of that is still predictive today.
No, I really don't think it's predictive. It's interesting social commentary on a world that no longer exists.
It's interesting historical commentary on some specific events in England, but not "mankind". Capitalism arose out of feudalism in England yes, but Capitalism also predated Feudalism in Rome and other societies. In fact, Feudalism arose out of capitalism!
If you look at the history of Feudalism, it came to be from the efforts by Rome to fight inflation, which required moving away from taxation via currency and starting to tax goods in kind. They then created lists of people with certain occupatons, and they froze the economy -- you needed to do what your father did. People didn't like that, so they started preventing people from moving. That was the origin of capitalism devolving to feudalism.
In other words, the ideas that there are these "historical laws" is the most discredited part of Marxism (other than the pure economic stuff). That idea is called "historicism", and is no longer advocated even by those who really like marxist economics. The reason is that we know a lot more about economic history than Marx did, and especially about non-european economic history, where some societies never experienced feudalism and jumped straight into capitalism with the domestication of cattle in the neolithic era. Fun Fact: The word "capital" comes from cattle. I recommend reading A History of Interest Rates by Sydney Homer.
So as long as Marx sticks to commentary on 18th Century England then he's golden. Alienation of factory workers, economic surplus, rapacious financiers -- it's all good stuff to describe that society. But the moment he starts declaiming universal laws for all societies and economic history in the middle ages or even tribal societies, that's when he doesn't have a lot of evidence for his thesis and ignores lots of counter-examples and most economic historians no longer take it seriously.
So how do other capitalist countries solve the bootstrapping problem? Because in order to have capitalism you need to have a class that owns means of production (coming out of feudalism, that meant private land and farming equipment that were previously worked by serfs) - what was the economic model that led to the centralised ownership of these things in Rome? Perhaps a system of slavery or similar?
In different parts of the world, there are different evolutionary paths, but I think it's wrong to start with the assumption of class and think the class of owners appears before the thing they own. It is rather the opposite -- some means of production is discovered/invented and then people compete over owning that means of production and the results of that competition gives rise to classes of those who are rich in the resource and those who are not. Nature is unequal.
In some societies, that capital was cattle (and also other livestock, like sheep). Cattle create other cattle and are a store of value, so that's all you need. Labor without capital isn't worth very much -- you can walk around picking berries. But combine labor with capital and you can feed yourself well and have some surplus left over. So those who owned the capital would attract people who want to work for them and improve their life over picking berries, and they become servants of the cattle owners, and you develop nomadic tribes of cattle owners.
You can start out with just a pair of cattle sold to you in exchange for doing some valuable service to someone else and with a little luck and wise husbandry, your great-grandson owns thousands of head of cattle and is also attracting lots of people work for your clan. This, for example, is the story of Jacob in the Bible, except he got sheep and two brides from Laban in exchange for working for him for 14 years. Or Abraham, who in old age became extremely wealthy in cattle. It's similar to people like Warren Buffet today who are both lucky and well-tempered and they end up with ridiculous amounts of capital. Some get really rich, others get really poor -- their cattle die, or they can't find good pastureland, or their children end up wasting their inheritance.
Similarly, things do not start out as slavery, slavery is what happens as a result of historical processes. Maybe you agree to work for someone for 10 years, but then after you are done you don't have many good options so you sell yourself to them and they feed you and promise to protect your offspring. Then, a few generations later, you have one class and another.
Here, I am talking about nomadic societies. In other societies, things like land and slavery could be the result of conquest by rival tribes. Most nobility in the world originally were some conquering tribe that subdued the local population, and maintained traditions that discouraged intermarriage and encouraged family wealth preservation. You could enter this system by performing some act of valor or conquest, and be rewarded with a title and entrance into the nobility for your children.
Other examples are possible.
But there are many different paths. It is important to remember that all early societies had the notion of private property. Maybe not the exact same notion we have today, but even chimpanzees believe in private property, and will fight to defend a rival taking something away from them. So ownership + the existence of capital goods => capitalism.
The communist-anarchist concept is interesting, to somebody like me, who tends to be frugal (not wasting resources) and willing to work without some kind of carrot-stick mechanism. I can easily imagine living in a community of like-minded people. However, I'm not sure that it's for everybody, and it would be contradictory to try to force such a system on people against their will. What I'd like to see is more experimentation with different social and economic models, perhaps in special economic zones, instead of the prevailing notion that everybody must be forced into a particular model, just because a dominant group has decided that this is best.
The question I have about communist-anarchism in practise is about how well it would manage supply-demand issues. I can imagine that you'd get massive overproduction in some areas, e.g., perhaps a lot of people would fancy themselves as artists. In other areas, needs would probably not be met, e.g., a lot of people might like to have all their meals in a nice restaurant, but there may not be enough people willing to operate the number of restaurants required. Or perhaps there's not enough land for everybody to get all they want, but some guy is farming 100 hectares with some crop that nobody wants, or getting very low productivity, but perhaps he has every right to carry on doing it. I remember in the classic anarchist novel "The Dispossessed" that some of these issues are considered, such as communal eating places which perhaps aren't especially fancy.
> What I'd like to see is more experimentation with different social and economic models
You should check out the late David Graeber and David Wengrow's latest book The Dawn of Everything. It came out this year. It does a really amazing job of showing how a defining characteristic of many nonindustrial societies was radical experimentation with self-organization models. Something that many feel is lost today in the way we organize ourselves politically
> What I'd like to see is more experimentation with different social and economic models, perhaps in special economic zones, instead of the prevailing notion that everybody must be forced into a particular model, just because a dominant group has decided that this is best.
This happened a lot in the 20th century, and often resulted in a visit from the CIA at the behest of international corporations. The US does not let experiments in political structures play out, it just kills the leaders and replaces them with puppets. See: Chile, attempted in Cuba, and all over Latin America.
> The question I have about communist-anarchism in practise [...]
If you haven't already, look into Catalonia in the Spanish civil war. It's perhaps the closest thing we've seen to libertarian socialism at scale. It's said to have worked pretty well until it was smothered between fascists states on one side and the USSR on the other.
There's also present-day Rojava, which AFAIK isn't as far along the path as Catalonia was, but still is really inspiring.
The few modern Anarchist systems have tended to fail due to interference by outside forces. It's also easy to imagine the system failing from within if human nature causes too many people to act in non-anarchist ways (by trying to force dominance, or by use of market mechanisms such as bartering to jump queues for scare resources). However, I'm interested to know if the system would work if these tendencies could be avoided. Perhaps fewer goods and services would be produced, but perhaps this may be a good thing if compensated with equality and less time spent working. Perhaps the system would actually encourage some people to work more, although in a way that they find enjoyable, not necessarily the most efficient way.
> This resonates with me, and it certainly seems that something like this is true. But it is unclear to me to what extent this actually is true, or even if it is true, to what extent this is truly due to intentional, planned behaviour on the part of ‘capitalists’, versus the afore-mentioned emergent effects of Smith’s invisible hand.
It's the emergent one. That's why this is a systemic critique of capitalism and not an individual critique of an individual capitalist.
Number 6 in the analysis hints towards Walter Benjamin argument that capitalism is a religion. This is extremely important that characterizes capitalism as cult.
Also the "wage slavery" is indirectly referenced in Apocalypse.
> Similarly, there is nothing to prevent a tyrant from arising who will create a system that is horrible in completely novel ways; or some clique gaining power and doing the same. I almost can’t believe Kropotkin doesn’t address this; but I have had the benefit of the history of the 20th Century to draw on, which produced e.g. Animal Farm. The Bolshevik revolution was still more than two decades away when the Conquest of Bread was written, and while Kropotkin did not live to see the formal declaration of the creation of the USSR in 1922, he himself was apparently not impressed by the dictatorial tendencies of the Bolsheviks.
Animal Farm is a critique of authoritarianism generally and Stalinism more specifically. Orwell was in revolutionary Spain, which inspired him to write Homage to Catalonia:
> I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it. There is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism. Many of the normal motives of civilized life – snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc. — had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money – tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master.
> I expect that in almost all circumstances the type of anarcho-communism he espouses will eventually lead either to a form of authoritarianism, or to a chaotic state of semi-barbarism in the medium to long term, and to incredible suffering and violence in the short term. That doesn’t mean I disagree with him on principle - I disagree with his analysis of how the type of revolution he outlines, e.g. one based on expropriation, would progress.
But people seem to like anarchist ideas and especially direct democracy, so we have things like AANES aka Rojava (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_Administration_of_N...). I gather it's not considered real anarcho-communist or anarcho-syndicalist or anarcho-whatever, but it's definitely influenced by those ideas.
Unfortunately that part about Animal Farm a lot gets lost in translation. Snowball and Napoleon specifically mimic ideas of Trotsky and Stalin. Many people take it as a criticism of leftism, I heard it a lot, but Orwell died still a party member of a socialist party.
You may have an overly narrow idea of what HN is for. As you'll see if you check https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, the site is for anything that gratifies intellectual curiosity. Kropotkin was a fascinating figure and certainly counts.
The word "new" in that phrase "interesting new phenomenon" doesn't mean recent, it means different—i.e. different from the sorts of stories that usually show up. For that, a book from 1892 can easily qualify, modulo how well known the book is.
Historical material has always been welcome here, just because it often is a meaningful diff from what people are used to. If we start to see a lot of Kropotkin threads, the diff value will disappear and then it won't be on topic anymore. Same goes for any unusual topic.
Hacking society has a long and rich tradition, albeit primarily composed of a long series of failures. A lot of us are looking for that one weird trick which allows one to end-run the various socioeconomic impediments to a forward leap in the realization of human potential inherent in contemporary regimes.
Obesity and malnutrition are two ends of the same coin. In industrial societies we subsidized calorie-dense products (in the US these are corn based), and mostly lead sedentary lifestyles even as children.
Kropotkin would have a lot to say about how children of the lower and even middling American classes are both overweight & malnourished at the same time. That's without even getting to the fact that 20% of children are "food insecure" in the wealthiest capitalist liberal democracy on the planet.
I hack because some rules were made to be broken. The rule that some children get to eat while others don't is barbarism. I never knew about "school lunch debt" until I immigrated to the US. How could I not hack in a society where many dogs lead better lives than the children (domestic & abroad)?
What good is being opposed to both of those things if there is no way to implement a situation without at least one of them? The single public sector monopoly on violence is the least bad alternative, because if it were to vanish the vacuum it leaves would quickly and inevitably be filled by the first strongmen who can raise an army via whatever means at their disposal. And that would be far worse than the single public sector overlord.
FWIW, the quote appears to be a Polish joke, popularised by John Kenneth Galbraith in the late 1950s. The canonical form seems to be "Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite."
I've traced it to a couple of late-1950s books, though their content isn't available online or searchable. (The Polish Review is at the Internet Archive, but text search doesn't find the phrase in 1959: https://archive.org/search.php?query=%22the%20polish%20revie...)
At least the public sector is nominally democratic. Obviously the Easter Bloc never was, but that doesn't mean that some flavour of socialism couldn't be. Meanwhile, capitalism rejects even the principle that democracy could be the primary decision-making tool of society.
A mob isn't a democracy; democracy is structured. If a democracy votes not to permit vandalism and then I vandalize something, I'm going to get sanctioned. A mob has no structure and no restrictions.
Democracy in and of itself is not inherently considerate of man's inalienable rights. If a group of people decide to strip you of your right to live merely on the basis of majority vote, that's democracy in action. Majority rule is prescriptivism by way of the ballot. A mob with extra steps, if you will. It's not bound by legal precedent or logic. It can so far as to invent fictions to justify its existence.
Democracy must be tempered with the recognition of individual rights. That, regardless of what the majority hold or believe, the individual has the sole prerogative to go far as his own ability allows him and on his own terms.
Reductionist, there’s simultaneously many public and private sector “overlords” in capitalist liberal democracy. Sometimes a private company can also resemble a public utility through government granted monopolies as well (Bell System)
For one, investment in the US is directed by wealthy private investors. Which means that the entire bearing of its economy is undemocratic. It doesn't matter if a majority of the public favour heavy investment in (eg) green energy; if it's not profitable, it won't get done, and the government is paddling upstream any time it tries to resist the motivating flow of private investment.
At a narrower scale, who decides how many hours you work? Did you elect that person, or were they forced upon you? Sure, you could quit & move to another company, but I could say the same of a citizen living in a tyrannical country. It doesn't make that country any less tyrannical. And at whichever company you switched to, you still wouldn't have any democratic input in the workplace. If you don't like your overlord, you can take a mulligan, but it's not easy to switch jobs, and all you end up with is a new overlord.
Contrast this with a society in which investment was public and the workplace was democratic. Obviously it wouldn't be perfect, but it would be a substantial improvement on the current state of affairs in terms of overlords or the absence thereof.
> At a narrower scale, who decides how many hours you work?
I during work contract negotiation?
> Sure, you could quit & move to another company, but I could say the same of a citizen living in a tyrannical country.
That is not really true, for two reasons:
First, many tyrannical countries forbade that, with border guards shooting people trying to flee the country. That was common e.g. in eastern bloc communist countries.
Second, work is just one of many dimensions of life, so having multiple separate and independent 'domains' is better than all-encompasing state/community. Therefore, switching work is just switching one of several dimensions, not a complete change as leaving a country.
> but it's not easy to switch jobs, and all you end up with is a new overlord.
If you do not want overlords, you can just be independent contractor offering services to public. I do not know about US, but where i live there is permanent shortage of these (so no worry about getting customers) and i knew people who do that exactly because they would not fit to typical corporate structure.
> Contrast this with a society in which investment was public and the workplace was democratic.
Current society says a little about how corporations are internally organized. You could have democratic workers' cooperatives competing in the market. The fact that they make just a small part of economy suggest they are not really effective or interesting.
> The fact that [worker cooperatives] make just a small part of economy suggest they are not really effective or interesting.
Actually there are a few reasons why we don't have many worker co-ops. First reason is, private investors want equity. VCs don't give out loans — they buy ownership shares, because that has the potential for a much bigger payout. That's incompatible with the co-op model. Similarly, banks are often tentative to give loans to co-ops, because they're so rare, despite co-ops tending to be slightly more stable than corporations when they do crop up. Thirdly, as a company grows, there's no incentive for the founders to give equal shares of ownership to new employees when it's acceptable for them to keep them for themselves. The less you can pay your employees, the better, obviously.
It's clear that in the absence of regulation, corporations are a more enticing business organization model than cooperatives. This doesn't mean that they're better — the free market sacrifices public well-being for private profit all the time. It just means that government intervention is required to promote them.
> many tyrannical countries forbade [emigration]
Do you think preventing your citizens from leaving is a prerequisite for tyranny? Because if not, then my point still stands, and the fact that an employee can quit doesn't make a corporation's governance just, in and of itself.
> you can just be independent contractor
The economy depends primarily on conventional employees. Some people can be independent contractors, but everyone can't, so even if being a contractor is more desirable, my critique of corporations is still very relevant. Besides, independent contractors often get treated even more poorly because of their unprotected status. Uber drivers are classified as "independent contractors," and this has led to Uber being able to treat them pretty poorly. So I'm not even convinced that contract work is necessarily better than regular employment.
If you're a member of the largest workforce (service sector) in America, when you go to work every day what say do you actually have in the way things are done? Is there any real democracy happening there? The ideal of democracy has been abstracted away from the personal and lived realities of many people to getting to vote for one of two options for president every 4 years (obviously you can vote in more elections, but whose got time to look into that you got work the next day?)
For many people capitalism is just a reincarnation of feudalism for the industrial age
There hqve been gains in democracy in the capitalism context. From the 19th century to the 1970's power was slowly whittled away from the rentier class, but ever since then they have made a huge comeback and now the financilisation kf the economy is becoming a drain due to the debt servicing costs. Michael Hudson writes a great deal about it.
Dictatorships, monarchies, oligarchies, and corrupt politicians worsen situations. Putting power back into the hands of the community and it’s workers shouldn’t do that.
Some people have a hole in their brain that makes anarchism invisible to them. The only way they can respond to a critique of authority is to ask "have you considered the benefits of this other authority?"
I don't think that's what critics of anarchism are thinking. They just believe that anarchism is a metastable state (with a very short half-life) that inevitably reverts back to either a strong central authority or multiple vying strongmen making & enforcing claims on various regions.
Attacking another user like that will get you banned here, no matter how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. Please review the rules and don't do anything like this on HN again: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
In addition, would you please stop posting flamewar comments generally (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28749013)? That's not what HN is for, and we've already had to ask you about this more than once.
The problem with capitalism is that is so good to produce what you really desire that it causes addictions. These addictions change your character from a good kid to a bad boss, bad banker or a corrupt government official, just to keep your addictions to continue.
The only solution to the problem is a state cryptocurrency that tax all transactions the same and let the people vote where the taxes will go. This way, we destroy bad bankers and corrupt officials and we will be left dealing with bad bosses when they will come to us to request investments
