Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

Majrelende wrote

  1. In theory this is fine, but in some cases, religions and religious texts can be contrary to anarchy. For example:

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. (Genesis 1:28)

  1. Yes, at least in my interpretation— but morals that are forced upon people, as in the case of the socialisation and oppression of children, are unnatural and coercive, which anarchists tend to dislike. There are some “anarchists” who would call socialisation a “justified hierarchy”, but you will probably not find too many of these people here. So many morals and values are also based in the perpetuation of authoritarian society, too— like the idea that it is wrong to pass a no trespassing sign or that authority is sacred.

  2. No.

The terrifying and omnipresent violence of authoritarian society is far too often ignored, and with much reason. But the only violence inherent in anarchy, at least in following with capitalist conceptions of violence, is in resistance to authoritarian violence; there is not much good reason for free people to fight among themselves.

  1. This code is part of a tradition which is in place in order to prevent disagreements on who should be where first, but it is used here as an example of consideration of others rather than greed and selfishness.

  2. Anarchy is in fact less violent than authoritarian society, as I explained earlier and as has been shown elsewhere. Any genuine anarchist is a communist (sensu lato), which entails a desire to see the violent, coercive, anthropocentric, workist institution of land “ownership” dismantled.

Nature can be said to be the state of a person (human or otherwise) or a community when no institutions of control are present and all are free. In nature, plants grow without any help from humans, and humans will eat many of these plants; however, when humans try to reduce these plants to sunlight and water and dirt, they will bring out the plough and and the fertiliser and the aqueducts and tear at the soil to loosen it for planting and mix in the fertiliser and build the irrigation systems, and they fail to understand even their own ignorance; when their crops grow, they find that they do grow vigorously, but the health of the soil declines, and many years later, they realise their terrible mistake. So they invent some new technique or replace one with another, and the labour compounds. Farmer and philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka (who I must give credit for these ideas) has estimated that conventional farming takes two calories to manufacture one calorie of food, and I imagine that this will rise even further with new methods such as vertical farming.

And in suffering to sustain crops in an unnatural setting, a farmer might want compensation; they may claim that anyone outside of a defined group should pay with some food of their own harvest if they want to use plants from “their” land, and eventually, this becomes the horrid system we see today.

Communism (sensu lato), therefore, will probably be best realised in a setting where the least amount of work is done in farming or gardening, which, incidentally, is probably more pleasant and is certainly closer to nature. If you want to read more on this subject, Masanobu Fukuoka had written about natural farming and practiced it for many years.

Now that I think about it, then, a work ethic is detrimental to communism, and laziness is benificial, toppling traditional arguments against it, though those where made in the context of industrial communism.

4