Anarchy could never work.

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not necessarily. anarchism is essentially stateless socialism.



socialism is such a wooly term though, and so many different people and groups use it to define such hugely differing philosophies. like techstepgeneration mentions above. the same thing happened with libertarianism. the americans who describe themselves as libertarians are hugely removed from those who referred to themselves as such when anarchism was banned following the demise of the paris commune.

i don't think things today are so different as you imagine, though.



aye, i don't think anyone would deny that there is a tiny percentage of anomalous spontaneous upward mobility, particularly in the area of celebrity culture. i mean there are people who buy glossy magazines and pore over photoshopped images of half wits who are only famous due to appearing on some reality tv show or other. however, these are anomalies. beneath this facade, things are not so different now from what they were in luxemburg's day.


i'd counter this by saying that a temporary situation in which excessive wealth was seized and redistributed is far more humane than a system that promotes inequality, subordination and oppression in perpetuity.

it certainly is anarchy. anarchism as a political philosophy has existed as long or longer than socialism. but i'd agree that if the socialism you describe is stateless and bottom up, they are essentially the same thing. the main difference is anarchists rejection as futile of the notion of reformism, which is advocated by pretty much all people these days who talk of socialism as a preferred means of societal change than direct revolution.

Direct revolution would be the only way to achieve socialism. I don't understand why many socialists are so opposed to the idea.

You might have missed my point on one thing in particular:


The two people I've highlighted; not media-made commoners. These two are a good example of your 'born into billions', your aristocracy as you put it. The first one was the only example of someone who was essentially self or self-and-media made.

The good news about having Marx and things like that luming in the background, it hasn't provided a working system *but* its made people much more socially conscious. What I was driving at; the more the legacy money starts going this way, ie. people my age and younger who are born into upper millions or billions, and the more who'd rather do philanthropy or put as much of their money as possible behind causes they believe in, you're really looking at a culture where everything is starting to meld anyway. When you think about it the rich eat, sleep, breath, shower, put their pants on one leg at a time in the morning, and they also have a need to justify their own existance at a personal level as much as the next person. To do something abrupt and hostile to any group is to do violence to a lot of very stable and organic progress toward what'd been desired anyway.

Indeed. As I see things, and tech step would likely disagree, reformism as a strategy in itself originates with fabianism and is nothing more than an attempt by the ruling classes to stave off impending violent uprising.

I think this the point where we're on different sides of a wall of dogma. Fund debating and illucidating viewpoints and all here but I know better than to see the rich as sociopathic parasites, even if they may essentially be partial parasites in some senses, but I think the respective countries we live in and what kind of 'rich' we get to see within our own respective countries that makes a difference - apparently (I got this from DC directly as well), yours are considerably more vulgar, elitist, and 'old blood' than ours.

This also tells me exactly why the founding fathers of the US made a hard and fast rule that there would be no knights, no dukes, no lords, no anything. If Sam Jones is in an old wealth line here he's not Sir Sam Jones, not Lord Sam Jones, he's simply Sam Jones - there's no title to place on your headstone unless perhaps its Rev., Dr., Fr., Sgt, Col., Cptn., Gen., etc.. Things like that, albeit perhaps seemingly inconsequential to a lot of people, really do seem to have an impact in that we kept our country from having any clear and confined elite. Its not that we have no elite, just that we may have done something very wise in keeping them from having a 'badge of class' or having there be any official on-the-books aristocracy.

Regardless - I can't comment on how things work in the British Isles but I can comment on the US; we'll be a capitalist nation until innovation takes its course; its set to happen like that within the next couple generations anyway and we're far too conservative AND empathetic, as well as perhaps not having quite as cartoony an upper-class, to warrant wild political adventurisms on our side of the Atlantic. I get the impression that even with your problems you won't see an uprising either as I get the impression there are lots of people in the British Isles who don't think all that differently than we do.

you should edit the title of your thread to anarchy could work!!

i wasn't trying to sound conspiratorial with that comment, however reading it back perhaps it did read that way. if you look at the historical background though, radical militancy was fairly prevalent at the time, a proletarian revolution was an imminent possibility, the class divide was a lot less fuzzy than it is now (although i'd still posit that this apparent fuzziness doesn't imply class society doesn't exist equally strongly as it did then) and a group of apparently benevolent bourgeoisie appear preaching reformism. perhaps they were indeed benevolent, but i think that's by the wayside.



but perhaps this was a bad move, in that the enemy are not so clearly delineated (i'm being facetious here, just to be clear!).

but as i said somewhere else in this thread, to me, the rich are the rich, the fact of the formal aristocracy being somewhat virulently disgusting aside.



i wouldn't completely rule it out, but broadly speaking you are probably right, a violent overthrow of the ruling class is not on the cards any time soon. although i wonder how the steady increase in oppression of the unemployed and precariously employed might influence the situation...

I tried that but it appears that it is too late to edit my own post after 9,999 minutes after posting.

of course. although an efficient system of social organisation also needs to be fluid rather than fixed.

[qipte]

I perhaps didn't mean a different meritocricy but perhaps I'm used to hearing from people left of center that egalitarianism is the core but then again it seemed like the egalitarian part was taken to obsessive/compulsive extents to where even merit-based inequality was seen as a wrongful act. If you're simply talking about equality in the eyes of the law and then extending equality in a few more economic aspects but careful not to crush meritocricy under the weight of that then its a better proposition.[/quote]

i don't see the two as linked by necessity. of course as things stand, they are inextricably linked, however having people gravitate towards roles in society to which they are well suited, and earning respect among your peers doesn't necessitate a subsequent increase in wealth.



this is essentially why such a model of social organisation needs to be built from the ground up with a violent uprising being prerequisite. it could never come from reformism or, as you have suggested, an evolution of the current system for the very reason you've outlined here.



there is some truth in this, and the inevitability is that once this cycle is in motion people are tarred with the brush and it becomes impossible to escape. another facet of the self-perpetuating nature of things as they are now.

on the first point you mention here, again many look at this as inherent in capitalism as a result of the atomising and alienating effect that it has upon the oppressed classes.



the poor don't build better communities because essentially they can't. life for them consists of struggling to survive. anything else is a luxury. perversely, they have now become entertainment for the slightly better off in our jerry springer/jeremy kyle culture of voyeurism.



community is really the key to humanity living in a civilised and respectful manner, indeed.



i'm not sure i get what you mean here. can you give examples?



i agree with you here, but again i would suggest the idea that the current system actually encourages and perpetuates it.





i'm not sure on this. i'm not sure how much leverage the legal system has on capping power accumulation as a byproduct of wealth accumulation. i'm personally thinking not much, and i think objective observation of our current predicament would suggest as much.


post truncated again due to cognitive fatigue. i'll get back to the rest later.