Fact Check

Based on currently available numbers, there are about 31 vacant housing units for every homeless person in the U.S.

  • @jorp
    2•4 months ago

    This is a common misunderstanding of anarchism. Anarchism doesn’t mean individualism, often it means the opposite. Anarchists can cooperate and freely associate into large organisations of people and can participate in planned economies or even market economies (less commonly).

    Edit: I don’t expect you to read all of this, but I’d have similar expectations about anything I can say on the subject, and this saves me time.

    https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-anarchy-works

    • @LaLuzDelSol
      2•4 months ago

      All right, I made it through about 20% of that document before I decided to call it quits. I appreciated the examples of different anarchic/stateless societies but I got frustrated with the use of obviously untrue statements to support the thesis.

      In the introduction the doc states that statist societies are incapable of dealing with problems like climate change. This seems completely backwards to me. Climate change is a tragedy of the commons type challenge and that requires some sort of authority to deal with. Do you really think a world of anarchist societies could pull off the Montreal Protocol?

      Here’s another claim that’s clearly untrue:

      “Today’s entrenched systems of repression cannot be reformed away. Those who hold power in a hierarchical system are the ones who institute reforms, and they generally do so in ways that preserve or even amplify their power. Systems like capitalism and white supremacy are forms of warfare waged by elites; anarchist revolution means fighting to overthrow these elites in order to create a free society.”

      • institutional racism has been “reformed away” in pretty much every developed nation on the planet. That is not to say that racism is gone but enormous progress has already been made. Not a decade goes by without enormous progress towards equality. A century ago women couldn’t vote; 2 decades ago gay people couldn’t marry. It seems strange to look at this societal progress and throw up your hands and say this system is incapable of achieving equality.

      Another claim is “everyone also has a sense of the needs of those around them, and we are all capable of generous and selfless actions.” I’m a big believer that humans are fundamentally good, but there are absolutely exceptions. Quite apart from societal influences, some people are neurodivergent a threat to people around them. Its the few that ruin it for the many.

      When talking about indigenous societies run by cheif, the document claims “Ultimately they [cheifs] worked harder and had less personal wealth than others” with no citation. I have never myself read any examples of this. Every portrayal of cheifs I have ever seen shows them as having the nicest clothes, the nicest lodging, and usually the first pick of one or more wives. And before you dismiss that as western propaganda- western propaganda generally kinda like the strength and dignity cheifs. I don’t see why they would make up facts about chieftains that make them look better- surely they would instead push the opposite narrative that indigenous cheifs were poor and overworked?

      Then I got to the discussion of KPAM which was the last straw for me. The doc describes it as a place where “large populations had freed themselves from the authority of landlords and governors and reasserted their power to come to collective decisions, to organize their day-to-day life, pursue their dreams, and defend those dreams from invading armies.”

      I was curious about such a large example of anarchy so I did some more research. Wikipedia says “Before long, the association found itself under attack by both Korean communists and Japanese imperialists, who assassinated their leadership” hmmmm that doesn’t sound like it anarchy…

      https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/l3czli/did_an_anarchist_commune_really_exist_in_the/

      Seems KPAM was basically just the domain of a general/warlord Kim Chwa-chin.

      I was interested to learn more about different examples but the document burned through its credibility with me and I couldn’t take any of its claims at face value.

      • @jorp
        1•4 months ago

        I must say I’m impressed at your level of engagement and I admire how much thought you’ve put into this, I truly did not expect it, and although I don’t agree with all of your criticisms completely I do agree that it’s a biased presentation and I don’t take all of its information at face value either.

        I’ve dug into some of its claims as I read it, and some things were truer than I expected and others were interpretations of the truth, but I never found anything that made me feel the author was being dishonest with the reader on purpose. Though some things lack adequate justification or are matters of opinion stated more assertively than they should be, I don’t think the author is trying to lie to me anymore than you could say they are lying to themselves.

        I consider it a very interesting and eye opening resource with many reality-rooted ideas of how things could work and how they have worked, but to your point it’s not convincing enough that this is the right way or the only way. However, my goal in sharing it wasn’t to convince you of all of that but instead to try to give you a better idea of how anarchism might work at scale and dispel the notion that an anarchist society would not be capable of providing basic needs for its people, I hope you can see how that could be possible even if you reject some of the more modern and larger scale examples as “not really anarchism.” There are other contemporary “not really anarchism” areas like the region of the Zapatistas and Rojava in Syrian Kurdistan that are of interest to me as well.

        I disagree with some of your criticisms, for instance although I can recognize that civil rights have been progressing over the decades under Liberalism I can point to very many examples of backsliding and ongoing systemic issues that are just as harmful to marginalized people of today as they were when the mask was off. Through a certain lens you might think that we have more black slaves today under the legalized slavery of the prison labor system in the United States than we did under the slave trade, but granted that’s “more equal” in that it’s not limited to black people and it’s also a function of population growth.

        Any concessions towards equality from the ruling class have these kinds of asterisks and those rights vanish as quickly as they appear under a system of rule. I agree with the author that the only truly equal society that’s possible would be one that actively resists any form of oppression (including economic oppression) and violence-backed authority and by definition that begins to take the shape of socialism, communism, and anarchism. Just as you point to KPAM and say its characteristics were a result of benevolent (debatable perhaps) rule by a warlord, I feel the same about any egalitarian progress today under Liberal capitalism, and that power apparatus is a short distance away from becoming fascist and undoing all of that progress. That used to feel like hyperbole, but feels all too real now.

        Thank you for the engaging conversation. I don’t think we disagree as much as I thought we might, nor do we completely agree, but I’m glad we had an open minded conversation. I’m not a devout and completely convinced anarchist but I’m definitely an anti-capitalist and anarchism feels like a good target to push towards from our current state, maybe along the way we’ll find a better stopping point or a point of diminishing returns, but that’s the direction I would like to see us taking from here.