Radical politics -

[Protoman]

Tyce's being an "anarchist" sparked a pretty interesting discussion in the chat, so I figured I'd make a thread about the discussion, debate, and interpretation of political ideologies typically considered to be radical and outside the mainstream.

To start us off, I consider myself a social anarchist, and I've been leaning towards anarcho-syndicalism; that is to say, a system in which people form a self-regulating community in which its citizens take care of one another, established by revolutionary tactics based around unionism and worker's control of the economy. I feel that the success of worker's co-ops in the last few decades prove that this system is at least somewhat viable.

What about everyone else?

 

[exball]

I am American. Better dead than red commies.

 

[Uzumaki]

I've always liked Chompsky's line about not being an anarchist, but being a "fellow traveler along that train of thought."

Of course, just name dropping Chompsky is fucking amateur hour, so I'll elaborate:

I think that the reason the system is the way it is is because the people at the top realize that, in order to maintain their lifestyles, there needs to be a much larger number of people at the bottom. Someone has to pump their gas, drive their cars, and clean up after them. The full weight of human endeavor has never been put to the task of making our most onerous tasks less onerous, because it has always been assumed that there will be a massive underclass who will perform the unpleasant duties on pain of starvation (and that's something that actually benefits the people at the top). There's no practical reason why everyone couldn't have a job that was something worthwhile and fulfilling, with a little of their own dirty work mixed in (like how all the kids help clean the school in Japan, so they have no custodians). My dislike of hierarchies and inherent mistrust for authority means, more often than not, if someone is saying something I agree with they're an anarchist.

But I'm not.

 

[Marvin]

I've always liked Chompsky's line about not being an anarchist, but being a "fellow traveler along that train of thought."

Of course, just name dropping Chompsky is fucking amateur hour, so I'll elaborate:

I think that the reason the system is the way it is is because the people at the top realize that, in order to maintain their lifestyles, there needs to be a much larger number of people at the bottom. Someone has to pump their gas, drive their cars, and clean up after them. The full weight of human endeavor has never been put to the task of making our most onerous tasks less onerous, because it has always been assumed that there will be a massive underclass who will perform the unpleasant duties on pain of starvation (and that's something that actually benefits the people at the top). There's no practical reason why everyone couldn't have a job that was something worthwhile and fulfilling, with a little of their own dirty work mixed in (like how all the kids help clean the school in Japan, so they have no custodians). My dislike of hierarchies and inherent mistrust for authority means, more often than not, if someone is saying something I agree with they're an anarchist.

But I'm not.

Oh, the scale of human civilization is why we couldn't have a utopia.

 

[Uzumaki]

Oh, the scale of human civilization is why we couldn't have a utopia.

Well, at the very least, let's not even try.

 

[Marvin]

Well, at the very least, let's not even try.

My view on life is strongly colored by the impact of scale. I depend on public transit and government services. I live in a decently sized city, in one of the denser states in the US. Without a lot of interlocking systems, like government and business, I can't survive.

I'm very happy that I am living on my own and not completely miserable. So I really like the state of things. There are tons of things I want to improve, of course, and I do my part to improve them, but I really like the base we've got.

Heh, to put it another way, I really don't like the "radical" in "radical politics". My situation is precarious and I like being able to survive as I do.

I do concern myself with politics though. I'm almost like an old man in that. I wear moccasins and write letters to politicians. Actually, recently I'm kicking myself for not registering as democrat on my voting registration. I don't consider myself a democrat, but I'm in a blue state, and every even remotely feasible candidate will be picked in the primaries, not the general election.

 

[Ariel]

No time for it at all. So called radicals are almost always detached from reality. I cannot comprehend why anybody would advocate a change in government in Australia (or Canada, pretty much the same thing), but they do.

 

[Surtur]

Someday I shall rule over you all.

 

[Observers]

My view on life is strongly colored by the impact of scale. I depend on public transit and government services. I live in a decently sized city, in one of the denser states in the US. Without a lot of interlocking systems, like government and business, I can't survive.

I'm very happy that I am living on my own and not completely miserable. So I really like the state of things. There are tons of things I want to improve, of course, and I do my part to improve them, but I really like the base we've got.

Heh, to put it another way, I really don't like the "radical" in "radical politics". My situation is precarious and I like being able to survive as I do.

I do concern myself with politics though. I'm almost like an old man in that. I wear moccasins and write letters to politicians. Actually, recently I'm kicking myself for not registering as democrat on my voting registration. I don't consider myself a democrat, but I'm in a blue state, and every even remotely feasible candidate will be picked in the primaries, not the general election.

I can totally see were you are coming from.

But ironically the same system that you depend on is the same system that is keeping me from surviving comfortably.

My wife and I want to build a house on our land that we own. We plan to follow every safty code (as we have no intention of dieing in a crappy built house. However the Government that be has passed so many "size" requirements that we can not afford to build that house. See in the old days you could have a house that was 250 square feet. now you cant due to the 1997 international building code. Plus with all the permits and fees we just cant afford it so we are stuck living hand to mouth.

These are not exact numbers but our rent is roughly $950 a month for a one bedroom there is really no were cheaper unless you live in the middle of no were and the drive would be gas prohibitive. The house we want to build would cost around 30K in a thirty year loan that would be roughly 300 and some change a month which would save us 650 dollars a month. Plus we could grow our own food have chickens etc.

But because of the law we can not build, we can not save to get the money to build. So in a sense the system is screwing us over My friend is an engineer who designed the house made sure it was safe but still the city says no.

Some people may argue that our neighbors may not want a small house by there land. we even got a petition signed by All of the neighbors in the area still the city said no. So yup i hate the system. I have no problem paying taxes i have no problem pulling my own weight. But I would really appreciate if they would leave me alone and let me live in the house that I chose.

So though the system works for you, and i totally understand why you support it. It still screws others over.


edit* i forgot to mention lol its not a big city its a small country town in the middle of no where we have three neighbors who are about fifty acres away lol

 

[c-no]

Someday I shall rule over you all.

With the beard you have and a flaming sword, it is bound to happen.

 

[StallChaser]

Radical politics are generally unworkable because they make bad assumptions about people. With socialism/communism to the max, if there's no mechanism to reinforce carrying your own weight, people won't carry their own weight and the whole thing collapses. Libertarian taken to the max will always reduce to "might makes right". This may not be true for small scale things like a village where everyone knows each other, but it is for anything larger than a small town. The only way I know to make anything work on a large scale is to have a free market base with some government regulations on top to prevent abuses. That ends up not being very radical.

My most radical political position is that we should legalize all drugs. Most of it would be regulated similar to tobacco/alcohol. Everything would have its active ingredient, dosage, and effects labeled. People who couldn't handle their shit would lose their drug taking privilege.

 

[Some JERK]

My view on life is strongly colored by the impact of scale. I depend on public transit and government services. I live in a decently sized city, in one of the denser states in the US. Without a lot of interlocking systems, like government and business, I can't survive.

I'm very happy that I am living on my own and not completely miserable. So I really like the state of things. There are tons of things I want to improve, of course, and I do my part to improve them, but I really like the base we've got.

Heh, to put it another way, I really don't like the "radical" in "radical politics". My situation is precarious and I like being able to survive as I do.

I do concern myself with politics though. I'm almost like an old man in that. I wear moccasins and write letters to politicians. Actually, recently I'm kicking myself for not registering as democrat on my voting registration. I don't consider myself a democrat, but I'm in a blue state, and every even remotely feasible candidate will be picked in the primaries, not the general election.

scale is exactly why all those folksy "common sense" solutions to complicated problems never work out, and leave extremely conservative people baffled. Yeah, it would be nice if we could balance the budget in Washington as simply as the head of a household could balance their checkbook, but it doesn't work that way once you're dealing with 300 million people who have different ideologies and values.

I can totally see were you are coming from.

But ironically the same system that you depend on is the same system that is keeping me from surviving comfortably.

My wife and I want to build a house on our land that we own. We plan to follow every safty code (as we have no intention of dieing in a crappy built house. However the Government that be has passed so many "size" requirements that we can not afford to build that house. See in the old days you could have a house that was 250 square feet. now you cant due to the 1997 international building code. Plus with all the permits and fees we just cant afford it so we are stuck living hand to mouth.

These are not exact numbers but our rent is roughly $950 a month for a one bedroom there is really no were cheaper unless you live in the middle of no were and the drive would be gas prohibitive. The house we want to build would cost around 30K in a thirty year loan that would be roughly 300 and some change a month which would save us 650 dollars a month. Plus we could grow our own food have chickens etc.

But because of the law we can not build, we can not save to get the money to build. So in a sense the system is screwing us over My friend is an engineer who designed the house made sure it was safe but still the city says no.

Some people may argue that our neighbors may not want a small house by there land. we even got a petition signed by All of the neighbors in the area still the city said no. So yup i hate the system. I have no problem paying taxes i have no problem pulling my own weight. But I would really appreciate if they would leave me alone and let me live in the house that I chose.

So though the system works for you, and i totally understand why you support it. It still screws others over.


edit* i forgot to mention lol its not a big city its a small country town in the middle of no where we have three neighbors who are about fifty acres away lol

We should talk...

 

[StallChaser]

scale is exactly why all those folksy "common sense" solutions to complicated problems never work out, and leave extremely conservative people baffled. Yeah, it would be nice if we could balance the budget in Washington as simply as the head of a household could balance their checkbook.

Well, that and micro vs. macroeconomics. I always cringe when I hear things like "balance the budget" or "run government like a business".

 

[Yaoi Huntress Earth]

Radical politics are generally unworkable because they make bad assumptions about people. With socialism/communism to the max, if there's no mechanism to reinforce carrying your own weight, people won't carry their own weight and the whole thing collapses. Libertarian taken to the max will always reduce to "might makes right". This may not be true for small scale things like a village where everyone knows each other, but it is for anything larger than a small town. The only way I know to make anything work on a large scale is to have a free market base with some government regulations on top to prevent abuses. That ends up not being very radical.

My mostradical political position is that we should legalize all drugs. Most of it would be regulated similar to tobacco/alcohol. Everything would have its active ingredient, dosage, and effects labeled. People who couldn't handle their shit would lose their drug taking privilege.

I definitely share your feelings. I find free-market anarchism to one of the scarier ones. If you've ever read Maury Rothbard's views on parenting and children (it's ok be a neglectful parents, the kid can be sold or runaway), the Miseses (sp) Institute's defense of Scrooge and how awful Cratchet is for putting family over money, Lew Rockwell wanting to legalize drunk driving (since cops are meanies "how hate you for your freedom") and how it's wrong to get mad at BP, it would create a society of sociopaths. There's the other side that are extremely naive and think nothing can go wrong if we just handed over everything to the market (they at least mean well.)

 

[Massif]

Anarchism and libertarianism are non positions, you can't just say "worker's collective" or "INVISIBLE HAND" and have the entire issue of legislation and regulation go away.
Things simply don't self regulate, if for example the FDA or the EU or whatever didn't put regulations in place limiting the use of toxic chemicals in foods corporations would abuse that as much as they possibly could to maximize profit. We know this because this is what it was like in the past before these regulations and laws existed(and still is in relation to regulations that are not in place yet), changing the name of the corporations to worker's communes wouldn't change this.
There are just no plans for the little things in these ideologies it's all simply supposed to spring from nothing, no opinions on work safety regulations, no opinions on the organization of education, no opinion on building regulations and so on since that's just going to spring out of thin air and be perfect because of the good will of people towards each other.
If you want your ideology to be taken seriously you have to at least have some kind of idea about how these things will be managed, you have to offer an actually conceivably viable alternative to how these things are handled in representative democracies other than "It will self-regulate".
Anyway since apparently things automatically just converge to the best state imaginable why haven't states all over the world converged to your ideology since it's the best one? Why is the revolutionary leap necessary if the power of self regulation is so strong, shouldn't the world have self regulated into changing to the obviously best system?

 

[PantsOfDesire]

Radical politics are generally unworkable because they make bad assumptions about people. With socialism/communism to the max, if there's no mechanism to reinforce carrying your own weight, people won't carry their own weight and the whole thing collapses. Libertarian taken to the max will always reduce to "might makes right". This may not be true for small scale things like a village where everyone knows each other, but it is for anything larger than a small town. The only way I know to make anything work on a large scale is to have a free market base with some government regulations on top to prevent abuses. That ends up not being very radical.

My most radical political position is that we should legalize all drugs. Most of it would be regulated similar to tobacco/alcohol. Everything would have its active ingredient, dosage, and effects labeled. People who couldn't handle their shit would lose their drug taking privilege.

The main problem with socialism/communism at to the max is that centralisation of production kills innovation. Memes are a silly but good example of market driven innovation. Could anyone have designed Star Wars kid and intended it to spread as it did? I find it difficult to imagine a committee could have passed a regulation requiring that Picard's face-palm be used to express frustration. It's not so much that people won't carry their own weight - it's more the incentives are entirely wrong. I think someone in another thread mentioned the example of a Soviet factory, tasked with producing nails by weight, who met the quota by making giant and entirely useless nails. Even if apocryphal, it still illustrates a point. Production should be based on demand and individual freedom to try something new. On trying new things, this is also where public funding can help. Universities can research areas that are not immediately profitable but may later be useful. Even with that, it's difficult to sit a bunch of people in a room and direct them to build the next technological breakthrough in transistors. Sometimes research for the sake of research is how things have to be.

I'd be up for legalising drugs to a certain extent. It depends on the social cost. People have to have freedom to make bad decisions so long as this isn't going to end-up with addled lunatics trying to scoop out the brains of bystanders.

 

[DNJACK]

Anarchism and libertarianism are non positions, you can't just say "worker's collective" or "INVISIBLE HAND" and have the entire issue of legislation and regulation go away.
Things simply don't self regulate, if for example the FDA or the EU or whatever didn't put regulations in place limiting the use of toxic chemicals in foods corporations would abuse that as much as they possibly could to maximize profit. We know this because this is what it was like in the past before these regulations and laws existed(and still is in relation to regulations that are not in place yet), changing the name of the corporations to worker's communes wouldn't change this.
There are just no plans for the little things in these ideologies it's all simply supposed to spring from nothing, no opinions on work safety regulations, no opinions on the organization of education, no opinion on building regulations and so on since that's just going to spring out of thin air and be perfect because of the good will of people towards each other.
If you want your ideology to be taken seriously you have to at least have some kind of idea about how these things will be managed, you have to offer an actually conceivably viable alternative to how these things are handled in representative democracies other than "It will self-regulate".
Anyway since apparently things automatically just converge to the best state imaginable why haven't states all over the world converged to your ideology since it's the best one? Why is the revolutionary leap necessary if the power of self regulation is so strong, shouldn't the world have self regulated into changing to the obviously best system?

First off, excuse my speeling, I'm drunk.

Regulating entities will always exist, weither they are formalized are not. ANd corporations do not form a uniform group. SOme will behave like criminals, some do behave decently. It is also the case in a heavily regulated set of laws like we have currently, but to a lesser extent. What behaviour is decent and what is horrible is still subjective to some extent, so setting a set of rules is difficult. That's why you have many branches of anarchism and many unrealistic utopia and possible realitities brandished as a goal.

My approach to narachy is slightly different and is more in the tradition of political nihilism: identify what institution actively works against you or limits you and seek their destruction. Everything else does not matter.

 

[AnOminous]

The main problem with socialism/communism at to the max is that centralisation of production kills innovation.

That's one of its bad and good points. Think of how the interstate highway system would be if every state "innovated" and had different widths, were made of entirely different materials, could decide to have driving on the left or right side, different regulations for what cars were allowed on it, so that when you crossed state lines, your perfectly legal car was now suddenly illegal on the other side, etc.

It would be chaos.

But apply socialism to building cars. You end up with a piece of shit like the Trabant. Cars produced in Soviet countries were absolutely lousy.

So a "socialist" system is good for building infrastructure and public goods where you really don't want innovation. You want standardization.

And capitalism is what you use to build what you actually drive on that highway.

The difference is you can't shop around for public goods. Your country either has sufficient military defenses to stop foreign invasions or it doesn't. You can't exclude anyone from the benefit of that whether or not they're paying for it.

Cars, by contrast, are a private good. You buy a car, you own it. People will only buy cars that do what they want. Companies that build cars that nobody wants will go out of business.

People arguing about whether capitalism or socialism are "better" remind me of two guys, one with a hammer and one with a screwdriver, arguing that either a hammer or a screwdriver is the only good tool and the other tool is horrible.

 

[DNJACK]

lol at standard needs socialism. governments didnt invent time zones after all.

 

[Yaoi Huntress Earth]

Anarchism and libertarianism are non positions, you can't just say "worker's collective" or "INVISIBLE HAND" and have the entire issue of legislation and regulation go away.
Things simply don't self regulate, if for example the FDA or the EU or whatever didn't put regulations in place limiting the use of toxic chemicals in foods corporations would abuse that as much as they possibly could to maximize profit. We know this because this is what it was like in the past before these regulations and laws existed(and still is in relation to regulations that are not in place yet), changing the name of the corporations to worker's communes wouldn't change this.
There are just no plans for the little things in these ideologies it's all simply supposed to spring from nothing, no opinions on work safety regulations, no opinions on the organization of education, no opinion on building regulations and so on since that's just going to spring out of thin air and be perfect because of the good will of people towards each other.
If you want your ideology to be taken seriously you have to at least have some kind of idea about how these things will be managed, you have to offer an actually conceivably viable alternative to how these things are handled in representative democracies other than "It will self-regulate".
Anyway since apparently things automatically just converge to the best state imaginable why haven't states all over the world converged to your ideology since it's the best one? Why is the revolutionary leap necessary if the power of self regulation is so strong, shouldn't the world have self regulated into changing to the obviously best system?

They also have to realize that the people they exalt are not going to act like perfect little saints, either. People will try to find a way around the no-aggression principle (if that's your ideal system), try to cover their tracks and no amount of wagging is going to make them more moral.