In some countries, governments provide housing on a temporary basis for people who need or want it; thus replacing the need for private landlords. One could also institute a rationing or sharing system by removing housing as a commodity from the economy. There's historically an unlimited number of options to this issue and in no way are we limited to feudal landlordism nor is capitalism predetermined.

I feel like the article responds to this, but who are these people that are adapt at governing others and what system actually puts them in places of power? Looking at the world around me today, I see incompetence at the top just as much or more than at the bottom.

Also, not everyone has to be good at self-governing, but if you put one person in charge of everyone else, they certainly have to be good at it due to the complexity and the consequences. The argument that a single person should be in charge of an organization seems like the belief that the best brain cell should run the entire human body. Chomsky describes the consequences of this ideology as "institutional stupidity".

I think you're presenting a false dichotomy here. Be unequal and wealthy or equal and poor.

In our extremely stratified and wasteful society, I think it is entirely reasonable to be equal without being poor. The poverty inflicted on the masses to keep them in waged labor is artificial, and many of the "luxuries" are just distractions that are bad for us (like Reddit itself).

Also, this assumes that the current structure can survive indefinitely. I do not see any reason to see that it can. I would argue that it's pretty clear at this point that continuing the capitalist mode of production is an existential threat to life on Earth, and so the choice ends up being between preserving whatever life we have now at the cost of an early death or looking for an alternative which allows us to continue to survive long term.

Private property is a specific kind of property.

So, let's use a house as an easy example. If I buy a house (outright, it's totally paid for), then it becomes my personal property. I can do with it what I want and my ownership is legally protected based on where I am.

If I rent my home, then it is not my personal property, it is someone else's private property. There might be some tenet rights that I have, depending on where I live, but overall the private property owner (who does not use the property for anything other than making money) has the property rights.

Similarly, if I take a mortgage on the house, then it is the bank's private property. The bank will for the most part not interfere too much, but at the end of the day, the home is not my property, it is the property of the bank for the purpose of making money. That is, the bank's private property.

And from this you should be able to understand what private property is. It's property you own, but do not use, for the sake of collecting some kind of passive income. It's the central feature of a capitalist economy. I own land and charge rent for someone else to use it. I own a building and charge someone else to use it. I have an idea and charge anyone else who uses it. In essence, I am allowed to hold something hostage from society unless they pay me. Maybe it's a national or international business, where I do not myself work, but from which I become independently wealthy. Like Elon Musk buying Tesla and then getting complete control over the company and personally collecting its profits. That's capitalism, and it's intrinsically totalitarian, as the article points out.

Markets, where stuff is traded or bought and sold, predate capitalism and will continue long after capitalism is gone. What the market is allowed to do is determined by the economic system that it's in. For instance, a slave economy is a kind of "free market" where humans can be bought and sold as property in a slave market. Feudal societies had markets. Tribal societies can setup markets. No capitalism is required for markets or property to exist. Private property, however, is a unique feature of capitalism.

From a creature comfort standpoint, yes I think there would be some envy. From a standpoint of individual autonomy and leisure time, though, they would overwhelmingly consider working people to be slaves and not want to be us.

Plato would consider our souls too corrupted for geometry or philosophy. Roman law wouldn't consider us freemen. Even medieval serfs had more leisure time and access to more public spaces and common land.

It's not as simple as "things are better now". Some things, like comforts and the forms of escapism have improved, but other things are much worse. We don't really have privacy anymore. Our personal property has been replaced with the private property of those we are made dependent on. We have little to no public space or natural environment. It's more polluted. Our existential threats are worse than ever before.

I think it would be very hard to make the case that a historical tyrant would look at the average retail or office worker with any degree of envy.

Voluntary market exchanges existed for thousands of years before the creation of private property and capital. It actually took an extreme amount of violence to create private property. It was absolutely not the result of some natural tendency.

Yeah, I agree actually. The article seems to conflate socialism with "when the government does stuff". Socialism is, instead, just the democratic organization of an economy. Thus it's incompatible with liberalism.

Take the Zapatistas in Mexico. They control an anarchist autonomous zone, and their economic system is socialist in structure. Socialism and anarchism are perfectly compatible, though socialism is not necessary. One could have a communist economy that functions as a sharing or gifting economy instead, for instance.

Or, look at the autonomous zone in Syria, Rojava. It is also founded on anarchist principles, and once again, its economic structure is socialist.

Basically, if you're going to take an anarchist stance, it's also going to be anti-capitalist. That's why anarchists universally don't consider anarcho-capitalism to be a form of anarchism, because that ideology (which is mostly a byproduct of online tests like the political compass which nobody should take seriously) doesn't actually apply the anarchist critique to capitalism (which is often its primary target).

> Wealth and power were far more concentrated when the world was ruled by absolute monarchs, emperors, and warlords.

They would look on today's billionaires with an envy the rest of us couldn't imagine. Today's wealthy and powerful are like gods compared to history's tyrants.

> You can't "eliminate unjustified forms of dominance" and also have no hierarchical system to enforce it.

Ultimately, the argument is about what is and is not a justified hierarchy. In this way, anarchism isn't unique from other forms of critique of power. What anarchism is, instead, is a focus on dominance in its political form. Environmentalism, feminism, race theory, Marxism, and other forms of critiques on the justification of hierarchy exist. It's a simplistic interpretation to take these as arguments for absolutely no power dynamics. That's impossible. What they are, instead, are the shadows cast by those power dynamics. They raise questions worth answering, and in answering them, we can create a more ethical world.

Anarchy in its most extreme theoretical form isn't possible. Neither is good, truth, objectivity, etc. Ultimately, ideals are directions we move toward more than they are destinations. To abandon projects just because their most Platonic form isn't achievable in material reality is really just to abandon any meaning or purpose and fall into nihilism and despair.

Liberalism is very specifically the combination of democracy with capitalism. What we are living through is the natural consequence of trying to merge democracy with its opposite. Either you end up with a society that abolishes capitalism for some form of socialism (democracy in the economy), or you end up with a society that abolishes democracy in favor of some form of capitalism (some kind of corporate feudalism or fascism). We are living through the latter today.

I agree that over time there is an expansion of the moral sphere, but the path to moral expansion is treacherous, and we are currently in a period of backsliding. Victories won in the past are being rolled back. Some are new victories, like abortion rights in the US. Some are ancient victories, like acceptance of gay or trans people. I do agree that in general there is an expansion of this sphere, but only over very long periods of time, and in the short term it expands and contracts, sometimes violently.

We have this narrative of progress, which is an Enlightenment thought, which paints history as backwards and primitive while painting the present as progressive and advanced. Sadly, the real world is much more complicated than that. Some progress is made and some progress is lost as time marches on. It's convenient for those in power to paint the past as being worse because this is a much easier (and more profitable) strategy than actually making the present better. Be wary of progress narratives because, more often than not, they're misleading.

The world today has many wonders, but it also has more inequality than any historical period, the rising threat of nuclear war, and global ecological collapse. These are all the result of not only failure to progress, but serious regress. The point of critiquing liberal democracy is to ask how we got to such a dire situation and work towards something better than this. Anarchism is one, of several, such responses.

And yet wealth and power remain extremely concentrated - more so than in any point in history. The institutions that rule also concentrate power at the very top - whether it's the totalitarian power of the business owners, the plutocratic power of a board of directors, the dictatorial power of some "elected" leaders like the US president, or the kleptocratic power of our democratic "representatives" who overwhelmingly belong to the owning class.

Systems of governance create the conditions which consolidate wealth and power in some hands, and strip wealth and power from others. An anarchist society is not one without structures of governance, but one which radically distributes wealth and power to the individual by critiquing and eliminating unjustified forms of dominance.

> Seeing how people reacted to a completely manageable crisis like COVID selfishly and counterproductively proved to me without a reasonable doubt that people as a group cannot be trusted to act rationally without guardrails or hierarchical structure.

Odd to think that because people are incapable of self-governing that they must be capable of governing others. It seems like one should have the opposite reaction.

Liberalism as a political ideology grew from thinkers like John Locke (the supposed "Father of Liberalism") and Adam Smith during the Enlightenment.

This is the very early days of capitalism, before socialists would coin the term, and theorists were just attempting to objectively describe economics. They didn't yet fully understand that they were describing a particular mode of economics. You can see this confusion to this day, where many just assume that "capitalism" means "markets" and that "free market" means "freedom". This is a leftover from those early thinkers.

Liberalism, as a political ideology, takes these economic assumptions and integrates them into a political and moral theory. For instance, Locke's idea of personal rights and property rights being essentially the same can be found in liberal democracies (and was a justification for voting rights being connected with land ownership). This is where we also see the argument for laissez-faire economics, or the idea that a government should let the market regulate the economy of a nation (every prior system restrained markets with a heavier hand since markets regularly commit atrocities for profit). It's also where you see the idea of the "tyranny of the majority", which references the fear of the "agrarian" population (the working class at the time), and how if they had democratic power, they'd vote away the private property of the ruling class (the founding fathers of the US specifically write about this).

The result is a preservation of the autocratic caste system of capitalism which divides everyone into employer (owner) and employee (worker) where the former has all the wealth and makes all the decisions, and the latter does all the work and makes none of the decisions. Liberalism specifically preserves this arrangement through democratic suppression of workers (look up the history of worker's rights; they weren't won democratically), often through state violence. The police are one such institution, which exist primarily to protect private property rights, because it is impossible for private property owners to protect their own property, and it is unprofitable to pay for that expense yourself, so it becomes subsidized by tax payers under liberal democracy to maintain the caste system of capitalism.

That's a very brief overview of the subject, but you can find a little more information on the Wikipedia page. It's not going to be as direct a response, but you should be able to verify what I've said here.

Liberalism is built on capitalism, which is an economic totalitarian (using the article's wording) hierarchy. Anarchism is fundamentally incompatible with capitalism (as is any egalitarian society).

Protests are a good sign that a democracy either isn't working or is just an outright lie.

I couldn't help but find this article amusing because in the last protest I was part of (fighting for better pay and working conditions for grad students who had recently unionized at a local university) we were all chanting "this is what democracy looks like". Maybe the author of this article should head on over to the US and get some perspective on this. What they wrote feels extremely out of touch.

Capitalism is about profit extraction from private property. Can't do this without exploitation of at the very least natural resources, but this ends up extending to technology and workers because wealth is extracted out of them. That's the entire point of capitalism. Exploitation is defined as making less than you produce, which is another way of talking about wealth extraction. We might be able to limit exploitation, but it can never be eliminated under capitalism. And so as long as it continues, exploitation is a given, and this will always empower justifying ideologies for that exploitation.

The author doesn't get into this, but is complaining about the intolerance from liberals. This intolerance is real, but the reason for it's existence isn't just bad people. It's the way our society is materially structured.

Well, liberalism is built on capitalism to serve and maintain the capitalist system. Neoliberalism is a more extreme form of that. Many of the critiques of liberalism, from both the right and left, concern the capitalist aspect of those political ideologies. Not every critique realizes this, though, especially from the right.

For instance, intolerance is intertwined with exploitation. Capitalism needs exploitation, so it finds a source. Maybe that's black slaves, maybe it's women, maybe it's immigrants, etc. Once the source is found, racist, sexist, and other bigoted beliefs get reinforced and structurally integrated into law, thus perpetuating it. The thing spirals downward, and in the end, until the economic structure of society is addressed (or even acknowledged), the issue of tolerance remains unresolvable.

Ultimately, liberalism (and conservatism, an aesthetic variation of liberalism) cannot resolve this problem because it exists to serve capitalism. So here we are in a world where a lot of "tolerance" from both groups doesn't amount to much, whether its tolerance for oppressed groups or even each other. Tolerance isn't materially possible under capitalism, which depends on the exploitation of someone for its existence.

I've seen it referred to as essentially zombified, actually. This is essentially what David Harvey argues in his A Brief History of Neoliberalism.

The source of the rot is indeed capitalism, and that also happens to be the most dominant aspect of neoliberalism (and its current alternative, neofascism).

> When the values of self-expression and dignity are hegemonic, liberal tolerance seems to erode, implying that liberalism is becoming something else.

It seems to me that liberalism died 40 years ago and lives on as "neoliberalism", a market logic form of thinking about politics and ethics and everything else, and that analysis of liberalism today amounts to an analysis of a decomposed corpse. That is, what we're seeing today isn't liberalism at all, but its successor.

I mean there's a ton of nonsense ideologies out there, and the fact that the Nazis were calling themselves "national socialists" in opposition to the "international socialists" (who were the actual socialists the Nazis purged after coming into power) is certainly going to aid in that confusion.

Western capitalists very specifically funded the Nazis to fight against the communists / socialists to the East. It wasn't until the Nazis invaded to the West that this changed. Fascism is the attack dog of capitalism, not a capitalist led transition into socialism (which makes no sense at all).

The communists didn't want Nazis to be capitalists, either. In fact, after the Soviet Revolution, it was hoped that Germany would have a socialist revolution. It went the opposite way, and this spelled disaster for socialism in Russia. It was one of the reasons for the disorder in the USSR; they had to rely on their own feudal lords to run a presumably socialist economy.

As for the article, it's very long and I'll have to check it out later. Keep in mind, though, that capitalism and socialism both can appear in many various forms, not just one. Nazi Germany was certainly one example of a capitalist society. We haven't had any real examples of a socialist society as of yet because it's a rather new ideology and attempts at it have either been sabotaged from the outside or collapsed from internal forces. Not all that different from any historical period of transition where old forms are struggling to maintain control as new forms begin to emerge. So we can speak rather authoritatively on capitalism as it has a few centuries (~350 years or so) of data we can look back on. For socialism we only really have some experimentation at best, and false promises at worst. I'm sure the end of the feudal period looked similarly as new mercantile systems were appearing and being put down by feudal lords who felt threatened by a shift in power structures. We're not really to the point where we have a "third position" because we haven't properly seen the alternative to capitalism, but given enough time it too will come along and replace whatever comes after capitalism whether it's socialism or something else.

Nobody but Stalin claimed achieving socialism, and you can believe him if you'd like I guess.

Smith was describing, not prescribing, economics. Maybe you should read him?

Yeah none of them achieved a socialist economy.

Edit: Also, Smith wrote before the word capitalism even appeared.

The "marketplace" isn't a person who decides things. It's just whoever controls the market. Whether it's a cabal of wealthy billionaires or the state, it doesn't really matter.

In the end, all capitalism is, is a system that separates people into employers and employees. You got that and you got some form of capitalism.

Exactly, and the same misunderstanding is happening again now with regards to Russia and the anticommunism of Putin.

Haha, yeah I figured as much. It's really hard to claim that fascism is critical of capitalism in any imaginable way.

Sure, but that's not a critique of capitalism, that's just anti-semitism. They purged the Jews and ran a hypercapitalist society that was backed by capitalists around the world. Meanwhile they also purged the socialists and communists (to them a Jew, a "cultural Bolshevik", and a communist were all the same thing).

Meanwhile, Heidegger's philosophy contains elements that are inherently critical of capitalism, though it's never explicit.