Reading Recommendations for a Fellow Anarchist

No, no, no, omen!

There's no such structure as a cake!

It's just flour, eggs, butter, sugar, etc., lying alongside each other on a table.

ComradeAppleton doesn't recognise the counter-revolutionary apparatus of an 'oven', or the counter-revolutionary act of 'baking'.

Not even cookery? Surely you like cakes!

Appleton, you make a dogmatic Marxist look like a fucking free-thinker. That's the reason I depict you in my cartoons with a bucket over your head.

I guess I should have read this bit before hitting reply, then...

Besides, I was officially declared the winner of this thread a couple of pages ago, so anything I've posted since has been nothing more than a victory lap.

ETA: I was really hoping you would say "I didn't come here to be insulted," so I could say "Well, where do you normally go?" But you're not even a very good foil.

They made you type an awful lot of angry and confused words in response. If I hadn't made them, you would have posted slightly fewer angry and confused words. Ergo, I have altered reality, and you are my puppet...

Thank ye koindly, Sur, for 'splainin you're oideas to the loiks of us simple country folks...

Yes, because that was an entirely serious comment, and I live to pwn random strangers who post shit on the internet.

Well, we can't all be onanists...

Don't let the door hit you on the way out...

But at least I can bake a cake!

The social theory of recipe, the social technology of an oven, and my practical activity, during which I learn and improve, creates a cake which did not exist before, only the isolated ingredients.

But this, I realise, is as nothing compared to your 'willing' of a cake into existence.

A 'triumph of the will' - a Nietzsche sponge.

Now that ComradeAppleton has left us*, who's up for a game of strip poker?

* Unless it was meant as one of those "Stop being mean to me or I'll leave the internet forever! ... Oh, I've come back for now, but just you wait!" type posts that people write when they lose arguments on the internet.

And freedom from cakes baked by cooks.

Oh, are you back already? That didn't take long...

I posted a fuck'n picture of it, mate! Until you can post a picture without a cake in it, my evidence trumps your imagination any day of the week.

Any internet discussion wouldn't be the same without the ubiquitous "Emperor's New Clothes" reference. Can we have an Orwell reference now, to complete the set?

???

so you're actually saying freedom comes from thinking your free? if you believe it hard enough it will be true?

An i've being meaning to ask, how come you say society doesn't exist, but you never say the same about property?

Oh, so that's what he meant when he said "Farewell omen!" He thinks I'm his imaginary friend, and if he really concentrates hard enough he can make me disappear. Hang on a minute...
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Nope, I'm still here! Phew!

Well, I'd take my hat off to you if I was wearing one! That's a powerful piece of philosophy you got going on right there, Comrade. We're mere insects by comparison to your genius. Right up there with the best of Nietzsche! Well done!

Aha! But you can't touch a cake! Remember, structures don't exist!

If you touch that 'structure' on the table, I'll say, using your method, that "no, you're touching sponge", then "no, you're touching cream", then "no, you're touching jam", then "no, your touching candy sprinkles".

To 'see' a cake requires a social concept of what a cake is. 'Cake' has a history.

Unless omen puts a 'cake' in their brilliant cartoon, along with the spitfire, castle, dinosaur...

Or perhaps T. Rex did eat cake?

No, but I did this instead:

And you made up your own language to express the concept of "cake", which coincidentally just happened to resemble the languages used by all of the other individuals around you, which also just happened to resemble each other, or did your concept of "cake" consist of a picture of a cake in your head?

On ComradeSimpleton's terms, communication would pretty much be a miracle.

Dang! And I already made this:

[ETA: Damnit! I just realized I confused Lassie with Skippy the Bush Kangaroo! My sincerest apologies, Australia!]

But on with the serious stuff...

Society is not fixed, and constantly evolves, roughly starting with early tribal societies, through feudalism, then capitalism, but that's pretty much right.

Not every detail, but much of it, particularly the fundamental stuff like language and class. But, yes, more or less.

And this is where it all goes terribly wrong. I don't think any of us have said anything like as extreme as that above quote. But you can never be genuinely independent. Think of it like gravity (I'm sick of cakes now!): It constrains your actions to some extent, you can't just leap into the air and fly away, but you are free to jump a bit and move about the Earth's surface. That's half of what we are saying, the other half is that society is necessary for freedom in any pleasant kind of sense, that is, it doesn't just constrain you, but also enables you, by giving you, for example, language with which to think and communicate. Without society -- genuinely without it -- you would be a naked, mute wolf-man scavenging for scraps and berries in the wild!

You actually seem sincere for once! And I mean that in a good way! Really!

You get an "up" for that, and not a pity one this time!

OK, this is a biggy, so I suggest you only reply to the points that bother you the most to save it getting even bigger.

OK, but you did say "This society has always existed" (my emphasis), so you'll have to forgive me if I misunderstood.

Well, evolution (in the biological sense) doesn't necessarily imply improvement, and that wasn't what I meant to imply. For example, I guess Mayan society evolved something like: tribal -> some sort of urban feudalism -> tribal (collapse of urban feudalism) -> feudal (under Spanish occupation) -> capitalism, maybe with some localised and short lived attempts at socialism of one kind or another.

Much as I would choose between anything else in life (e.g. buying a new computer). In this case I'd look at the conditions people lived under, look at evidence from the different periods (where it exists), for example written accounts, being careful to distinguish those written by the "rulers" and those by the "slaves" (if they existed in those societies), and compare them. As for socialist/communist societies, I don't believe a genuine one has existed other than localized and short lived attempts, and then under exceptionally harsh circumstances (e.g. Spanish Civil War). I don't count the Soviet Union, say, as communist, because I would take "worker control of the means of production" as a rough definition of communism, and in the case of the USSR the state owned the means of production, and workers had no control of the state at all (as they might in a democratic state, say). Plus, life in the USSR was shitty, as many people who live there would tell you.

As for genuine communism, I'd have to make an educated guess, same as you would in your individualist utopia.

I'd probably just call myself an anarchist actually (but not in the exclusive sense you use the term), but I'd accept libertarian communist. Short answer [ETA: turns out it wasn't so short!]: under libertarian communism you wouldn't have to work for most of your day and most of your life in an (often) pointless job you hate, for a boss you hate, just about scraping by, or living an even shittier life on the dole (if you're lucky). IMO, most labour is squandered under capitalism (look at how much unnecessary disposable shit it produces, and how people are convinced to regularly throw away perfectly usable items for slightly better versions). Under libertarian communism people would only make what is needed, would work much fewer hours, mostly doing the jobs they liked, and without a boss to annoy them, share around the shitty jobs that have got to be done anyway (so they wouldn't take up so much of any one persons day), and you wouldn't have to worry about unemployment because the products of society would be made available to everyone due to the over abundance of labour. Also, you'd have more freedom in your personal life (in part because you have more free time), and an actual say in how your workplace was run.

As it happens I listened to this radio programme yesterday (a repeat of a 1994 broadcast), on pretty much this subject (although he doesn't make reference to socialism, what with it being the BBC and all). It's quite funny and to the point.

To know that working a shit job, for shit pay, under horrible conditions, etc. is not a good thing? It's a value judgement and hence subjective, but I'm pretty sure large numbers of ordinary workers agree with it (even if they don't agree with or understand socialism) and that's what matters.

Because you aren't entirely "free", even in a libcom society, to do whatever you want, but you would be freer than in a capitalist society, say, and freer still than in a fascist society. There is no such mode of existence as total freedom. The example I gave of a dumb, naked, wildman, scavenging and gathering berries, though unconstrained by any society, is not free either, and is heavily constrained by nature. It would be a poor, brutal and short existence.

You couldn't, for example, just declare yourself the King of England (even if you wanted to, no one would recognize you as legitimate), print your own money (and expect other people to accept it), speak your own personal language (and expect people to understand you), you couldn't pollute a reservoir without the locals getting uppity, etc. As my example was meant to highlight, you are "free" but within limits, but those limits also provide structure to enable you to be as free as you can. In the case of gravity, it stops you being able to leap into the air and fly away at will, but it also stops you and all the oxygen floating off in space and asphyxiating, leaving you free to wander around the Earth's surface and breathe.

By "pleasant" I was referring to the wolf-man/wildman example. Such a creature would be without society, and if you want to regard that as freedom, it would be a very poor form of freedom.

As I said, purely and totally outside society (an extreme example for sure) you would have no language, hence be unable to form any concepts, have no upbringing (family counts as a part of society), no one to pass on knowledge to you (hence you couldn't build anything more than rudimentary tools, and possibly not even them), no one to make things you couldn't make yourself, and so on. Lest you think I'm just making this up, this very occasionally does happen: one case I know of, a girl was kept locked in a darkened room by her parents, continually tied to a home-made "potty-chair" until the age of fourteen (or thereabouts), only provided with basic food and water, and they never spoke a word to her, apparently. No one but her parents knew she existed. Eventually she was discovered and rescued and cared for. She never learnt to speak anything more than a rudimentary sign language, as she'd effectively skipped the developmental stage of language acquisition, and so it was virtually impossible for her to learn anything. She had to have people do everything for her, and she eventually disappeared, as an adult, into the US mental health care system, and (from what I heard at the time) no one knew where she was at that time.

Now I don't for a moment think, that is what you mean by society not existing. Your neighbourhood of friendly individualists, producing for themselves and trading amongst each other, which you seem to think is somehow not a society, is a just particular form of society. (There are people, and social relations between those people, such as a common language, general friendships, trading, etc.) And the people here don't think it is a particularly good form of society, at least not for long, because in such a society, in our considered opinion, there is nothing to stop people accumulating wealth, and then using that to exploit others.

Example: much of the US started out from small Mom & Pop businesses, but ended up with huge corporations controlling everything. Another: After the fall of the USSR, citizens where all given shares in privatized companies that used to be the state companies, but due to their virtual worthlessness, massive unemployment and food shortages, most people sold their shares for peanuts, and they were acquired by a relatively small number of what are now known as Russian oligarchs (billionaires who were often mobsters, who used their capital from their blackmarket activities to buy up all the shares and became super-rich).

All these small businesses won't be able to make a living some will go out of business, others will be bought up, often cheaply, because people need to eat, these people will then need to work for someone else because they don't have a business or enough money to start one up (because they had to sell cheap) and even if they could start another one up, they couldn't compete with all the large businesses that were being created from the bought up smaller ones, and eventually you end up back where we are. It's already happened before. And there's no reason it won't happen again.

I didn't say this, and no one here has. Generally you would be left alone in a libcom society, even if you refused to participate. However, you couldn't just do anything you liked, if it affected other people. Say you wanted to dump raw sewage in the reservoir, for some reason: I think it would be legitimate for people to stop you from contaminating everyone's drinking water, as long as they didn't use unreasonable force (e.g. shot you in the head rather than talk it over with you). If you refused to stop doing it, it would be within reason to remove you from the reservoir, using reasonable force if necessary, and to prevent you from returning to continue polluting. This is not unreasonable, and in examples such as this: you causing harm, intentionally or unintentionally, to other people, it is not unreasonable to society to prevent you behaving in a specific way (polluting drinking water).

I hope you see what I am getting at here.

They shouldn't, unless you adversely affect them. And no one here has said otherwise, except your good self when putting words in our mouths.

Lifestyle choices to make yourself feel superior. And sound pompous. Wont end capitalism.
In any case, when you link 'effort' and 'reward' thus...

You make it clear that you arent against 'capitalism' anyway, just want your little version of it.

That's what capitalists say.

Damn, how much did I miss?

After reading all the way to post #329, I still don't think ComradeAppleton has a clue what we're talking about.