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"Conquest of Bread" had a huge impact on my politics. It cut through the capitalist realist narrative that we're all in economic competition and that capitalism

• DubiousPusher 4y ago
  Yes and we've been taught from a young age that capitalism and democracy are joined at the hip. But when we look back we can see how capitalism accommodated itself quite nicely to domination starting from the early modern period.
  • einpoklum 4y ago
    It depends on what you mean by democracy. For people who mean a government by a parliament of elected representatives making laws and a centralized state government running the state by those laws - then that tends to go with capitalist relations of production; and it is an accessible and useful structure for commercial corporations, which will have their property ownership enforced by the state, and will not have to have continuing agreement of local populations to their activities. The dictionary says Democracy means: "Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives." - so there's already the question of decision by representative yes-or-no. Plus, there's the question of what the 'government' part means. Some Anarchists would say they oppose democracy because of it. Does it mean that decisions get enforced by a special social structure? Are decisions majoritarian? etc.
    • incompatible 4y ago
      I think anarchists typically support direct democracy, but oppose representative democracy, which gives the representatives excessive power. Any society will have to make decisions at some point which can't be left to individual preferences. E.g., we have a large natural forest, should it be preserved for nature, or cut down for timber and farmland? If left to individuals, the people who want to cut it down will win by default.
      • public_defender 4y ago
        It's sort of a different thought pattern than most of us are used to using. Imagine the anarchists vote: 49 for logging, 51 against. The question is then whether 51 anarchists foresters will mobilize to stop 49 anarchist deforesters. Will there be a civil war? Will the 49 weigh the benefits of whole community over wood and yield? Will someone burn the chainsaws in the night? It's less about whether we vote directly or through an intermediary, and more about how we hold the community together (or don't) through tough decisions.
      • kqr 4y ago
        It's not just that representatives in a typical representative democracy wield disproportionate amounts of power, it's also that the people who are able to become popular enough to get a significant share of votes are people who have time and resources and connections for campaigning, PR, and so on. This is a very specific stratum of the population. It's an elective kind of aristocracy, basically.
      • einpoklum 4y ago
        > should it be preserved for nature, or cut down for timber and farmland? Perhaps the main question would be what happens when people disagree with the decision, regardless of how it was taken. Many Anarchists would be concerned more with that than with the question of how such a decision is taken.
• bbzealot 4y ago
  Same here. Growing up fully immersed in the capitalist world it’s easy to think that this is the natural state of things. This book, among others, helped me change perspective and challenge my assumptions about the world. Totally recommended.
  • _0ffh 4y ago
    Well, if we lived in a society which was based on voluntary social interactions - which are by definition mutually beneficial - and where bodily attacks and forcible expropriation by dint of the "right" of superior force was deplored and defended against by the majority, I'd call that a capitalist society.
    • public_defender 4y ago
      That would not be an accurate label. Nothing you wrote implies any economic system. Of course the society you describe would allow for capitalism, but it equally allows other models.
      • _0ffh 4y ago
        > That would not be an accurate label ...in your estimation. I and many others would call it such, and with good reason. In our estimation it is capitalism that allows for other models, as long as they are peaceful and respect property rights. Nothing about capitalism hinders you to follow your social instincts. You are free to share your possessions with whomever you choose. You can jointly own whatever you want with whomever you want. That is capitalism.
        • imtringued 4y ago
          I can't run my own bank and abolish the capitalist system. I first need ten million dollars worth of capitalist money just to get started. Every clever path to eliminate capitalism from within is blocked through absurd licensing requirements by the government. The amount of loopholes I have to go through just to end capitalism from within are ridiculous and can hardly be described as voluntary. To abolish capitalism you need to provide cost effective liquidity, this means you will have to start an alternative money or payment system with a demurrage fee. The challenge is using existing constructs in the law to create something that cannot be banned by the government or the central bank. How voluntary... After you have done that you must now gather members and build the actual payment network because liquidity isn't provided by money, it is provided by the people trading with money. This is in fact the easiest problem because demurrage currencies are superior competitors to the capitalist system which is why they had to the banned before world war two or else people wouldn't become polarized enough to want Nazis in power. Third you will have to bypass banking regulations and somehow offer most of the services banks offer without a banking license. I haven't found any, de facto illegal. There is nothing voluntary about this. Finally, you have to somehow convince the government to adopt the non capitalist system for tax payments. If you cannot do so, you must wreck your brain trying to find an incentive structure that is competitive enough to make people who have freshly received money from the government put it into your money system faster than they pull it out by paying their taxes. Again, the fact that the government forces all economic activity to go through the capitalist system is not very voluntary. If anything, it is lipstick on a pig. I believe the banking loophole and the tax incentive structure can be solved but that only shows how fragile and ridiculous capitalism is, if an obviously superior system has so much trouble establishing itself even though it is superior in almost every respect and it is highly competitive.
• incompatible 4y ago
  I heard (of course) of anarchism a long time ago, but I always wrote it off as impractical: since without government, there's nobody to stop somebody from starting one. However, this may be incorrect, but it does require a population that is always willing to fight against the formation of a government. I think now that anarchism is practical, at least for a population of committed anarchists, and in the absence of hostile external forces. There's no way that anarchism could be imposed on people who don't want it (a contradiction), and it's going to be a stretch to expect people who grew up with capitalism or authoritarianism (or both) to accept it. It was in Le Guin's novel "The Dispossessed" that I first read a convincing account of such a society, and I only later read some of Kropotkin and Bakunin's work. Edit: Other forms of society are based on a carrot and stick system; people believe that without threats or rewards, people won't bother to work; they don't believe in mutual aid as sufficient in itself.
  • keybored 4y ago
    > I heard (of course) of anarchism a long time ago, but I always wrote it off as impractical: since without government, there's nobody to stop somebody from starting one. Without knightly orders there is nobody stopping people from forming knightly orders.
  • bxjx 4y ago
    Can totally relate! The Dispossessed was another seminal book for me.
  • samatman 4y ago
    I call this the "you and what army" problem: if you look around the room and you don't see the State, l'Etat, c'est vous. Council mutualism is not only practical, it's practiced, but it's practiced by Hutterites. Can it be done without Anabaptist convictions? I don't see any reason why not. Has it? Not with that level of success, no. The you and what army problem being obvious, inescapable, and inherent, political anarchism will, insofar as it plays a role at all, continue to be a way that people more inherently l'Etat c'est moi about it seize power, often jailing and killing the anarchist leaders (the anarcharchs, if you will) in the process.
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• chiefalchemist 4y ago
  What else can you recommend reading on the topic?
  • hprotagonist 4y ago
    warning, religion ahoy! “the duty of delight”, which is the collected diaries of dorothy day. “rerum novarum” and “laborem execrens”, papal encyclicals on labor and capital.
  • jostylr 4y ago
    A book that made the idea of a lack of government believable and appealing to me is David Friedman's Machinery of Freedom. He presents a flushed out vision of a withered state and it is the anarcho-capitalist version of anarchy, the only version which I feel is realizable without force-based coercion. The idea is to envision a society which is stable, but has no government and yet not perfect people. There can still be theft, violence, laziness, polarizing differences of opinion, etc. but the society thrives despite the absence of a government and nimbly handles these problems. He presents a vision of how it could work. It is not a prescription since it is impossible to prescribe an anarchic society as there is nothing to prescribe to. The criminal justice system becomes a bunch of competing rights organizations, similar to competing insurance companies. It allows for economic evolution of laws as everyone can choose what kind of system they want to be governed by and conflicts of competing legal systems get negotiated and arbitrated. One can choose not to be governed by any laws, but if that individual comes into conflict with others, then there is no one to defend them. They are not automatically cast out for not being part of anything. Most other anarchic systems seem to assume unity of purpose, a good work ethic, a lack of criminality, and an inability to fundamentally dissent from what the larger group wants. They often get presented as more of a direct democratic government that everyone belongs to while Friedman's approach is literally a lack of any coercive government. There is no governing body that all must yield to, including the collective. The fundamental transactions between people are voluntary and coercion to produce societal needs is both unnecessary and rejected. I find it to be a believable society with the people we have.
    • mattbuilds 4y ago
• sershe 4y ago
  Of course it's possible, it existed before capitalism and had tons of mutual aid and resilience. It's called "subsistence farming". Without surplus extraction + capital accumulation, it was always stuck at low equilibrium where everyone is poor. See e.g. [1] Also as a side note I don't discuss here, anyone quick enough to band together and abuse the mutual-aiding community was easily able to do so, hence feudalism, or e.g. cartels in our times. In fact they observe it even in existing cultures where strong kin institutions prevent saving, both via "mutual aid" itself, but also cultural expectation of mutual aid creating an incentive to spend ASAP - cause if you don't, your family/friends/... are going to ask you for money. Meaning again everyone ends up poorer. Breaking kin institutions and "mutual aid" is one of the keys to actually improving QoL for most people [2] [1] https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-farmers/ https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they... - Banqueting the Yields, and other parts [2] The WEIRDest People in the World book
  • mellavora 4y ago
    I agree with your point that strong "mutual aide"/kin institutions often (but not necessarily) lead to low economic growth. And clearly surplus extraction + capital accumulation (leading to productive investment) strongly enhance economic growth. However, capitalism in its current form of all-consuming consumerism, a system that must eat everything including itself, I'm not so sold on. Just finished reading the Laundry Files (Atrocity Archives/Charles Stross) thanks to a recommendation on HN. One of the terrible beasts mentioned in the book is a creature that eats all the information in its universe, rushing the universe to entropy death. The analogy to bottomless consumerism is too obvious in my mind for me not to draw it.
    • sershe 4y ago
      I don't think consumerism and capitalism are related in this way. Consumerism just happens to be what people want to do. Capitalism as a better substrate allows people to do more of what they want to do... people in different systems (like Soviet Union) for the most part were just as "consumerist", they simply couldn't do as much consumption because the system sucked. That "consumerism" is bad is your personal value judgement (and mine, but I recognize it as such). It's kinda like, most major cultures wanted to, let's say, (among other things) study the stars and enslave other people. Primitive technology and economy produced a lot of cultures with calendars and simple systems of slavery. Stable empire like e.g. Caliphate was able to leverage their economy and better technology to do better at astronomy, and to do some real large-scale enslaving. Western countries eventually used even better technology and economic system to do things like send people to other planets and do some truly industrial-scale slavery. Everything just works better with technology - what you choose to do and how to change values to want astronomy and not want slavery is a separate question. Ditto capitalism vs consumerism.
• greenie_beans 4y ago
  haha, i submitted a pdf for "capitalist realism" yesterday: https://files.libcom.org/files/[Mark_Fisher]_Capitalist_Realism_Is_There_no_Alte(BookZZ.org).pdf https://files.libcom.org/files/[Mark_Fisher]_Capitalist_Real...
  • bxjx 4y ago
    haha great! You are correct - this is where i pulled the term from! Such a great book.
• imtringued 4y ago
  Capitalism is irrational. What sense does a fixed positive profitability constraint make? It makes no sense. It discourages people from economic activity. People talk about the profit motive but when you really think about it, profit is a demotivator. The more borrowed capital you use the more profit you have to make. But in principle any economic activity that breaks even is worth doing even at no profit. So in theory the return on capital should represent that competitors know how to use the capital better than you, but at the same time this would imply that unemployment and recessions are impossible. It's entirely possible for the interest rate to be so high and money to be so tight to cause mass unemployment throughout the entire economy as we have seen in the great depression. Marx treated money as a simple "medium of exchange" and therefore sought for an answer in the sphere of production. In reality it is money that has the power to cripple capital and land.