NEUROSPORT

true ...

and yet i would rather think of an iPhone as necessity than of shelter as a luxury

Wessexman

And when you find a system that makes shelters a luxury please inform me, I will attack it with you. Otherwise you don't really have an argument nor did you really respond to my points.

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The Wessex society.

“I am an aristocrat. I love liberty; I despise equality.”
John Randolph of Roanoke.

NEUROSPORT

some systems make food a luxury.

Dirt poor Haitians eat cookies made of mud | Worldfocus

Wessexman

Well I don't see many people championing that one here but if they were I'd attack it.

My system is distributism or Catholic social teaching, which is both anti-socialist and anti-capitalist, so only it and perhaps things similar to it have much relevance to my position.

__________________
The Wessex society.

“I am an aristocrat. I love liberty; I despise equality.”
John Randolph of Roanoke.

Ethereal

Agna,

I'm mostly on your side. Perhaps, if you swallowed your pride, you would realize it.

Wessexman

Personally I've always found Agna quite reasonable and polite.

__________________
The Wessex society.

“I am an aristocrat. I love liberty; I despise equality.”
John Randolph of Roanoke.

Agnapostate

I should also reiterate the point I made in the economic calculation thread about the socialist calculation debate; one of the earliest objections to the inevitable failures of central planning that the self-described socialist USSR had embarked upon on the basis of its failure to incorporate dispersed knowledge and a condemnation of the party dictatorship that state "socialism" involved is found in Peter Kropotkin's 1919 postscript to Words of a Rebel, which was published the year before the publication of Mises's 1920 Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth. As Kropotkin wrote:

The entire libertarian approach went virtually ignored by the Austrian school (Mises did devote an irrelevant cutting remark to Proudhon in his essay without actual argument), which placed focus on central planning mechanisms and procedures on account of the emergence of them in the economic structure of a country which was to later become a superpower of the world. While Hayek commented on the market socialist models that were proposed during his lifetime in his and Lionel Robbins's debates with Oskar Lange, Henry Dickinson, and Abba Lerner, he dismissed decentrally planned socialism without argument, stating that "[t]he earlier systems of more decentralized socialism like guild-socialism or syndicalism need not concern us here since it seems now to be fairly generally admitted that they provide no mechanism whatever for a rational direction of economic activity." There was no elaboration on who "generally admitted" this, though the existence of widespread central planning and nonexistence of widespread decentral planning at the time was probably the chief basis for the Austrians' primary focus on the former.

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The workmen desire to get as much, the master to give as little as possible...It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. -Adam Smith

rathi

The Spanish Civil is an illustration of why socialist anarchism is not an optimal choice of social organization. How can your communal anarchists defend themselves from the fascists or other totalitarian groups? Centralized state organization is extremely powerful, and in matters of military is the key to victory. Even liberal democracies switched to corporatist economies with national conscription in order to fight wars. Fighting wars is one of the main reasons that the nation-state was developed, and remains a crucial part today.

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He'd be right at home on some ancient battlefield, swinging an axe into somebody's face.

Panache

And socialism isn't?

The only true anarchism is consistent opposition to any system of government. If rules are created, the anarchist opposes those rules and whatever body created them, regardless of whether the rules protect workers' access to the means of production or protect the ruling class's control over the means of production.

Ironically, only reason a government can impose its rules on anyone is because there isn't any rule saying they can't. From anarchy, hierarchy is established, and to anarchy it shall return.

Libertarians are generally willing to suffer a government to the extent that it protects its constituents against force and fraud.

Agnapostate

No, it isn't. Anarchist organizational principles weren't responsible for the inability to maintain a defensive military; indeed, some of the anarchist militias were forces to be reckoned with throughout much of the military campaign. As put by Spanish Civil War author Hugh Thomas:

He added that, "Durruti's column was the most formiddable of these forces, having advanced within striking distance of Saragossa." It was then that they were deterred by superior military technology in the way of air strikes, not superior coordination based on better organizational principles. And even aside from the fact that the anarchist collectives were violently sabotaged and the militias were undersupplied, there was also the matter of the eventual involuntary incorporation of those militias into the regular army that was mentioned by Cattell and is more explicitly described by Spanish Civil War historian Burnett Bolloten, certainly no friend of the anarchists:

So a superior means of determining whether libertarian military organization constitutes an internal deficiency would be to judge a libertarian military body in direct combat with a proportionally sized and equipped orthodox military body, not a deliberately undersupplied libertarian military body subject to sabotage by their "allies" while facing disproportionate military force to begin with. Superior insights can be derived from the legacy of Nestor Makhno. His anarchist military body, the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine (or the Black Army, as opposed to the Bolshevik Red Army and the czarist White Army), defended the Free Territory of Ukraine, a society characterized by libertarian collectivization relatively free from Leninist methods. They enjoyed victories against the czarist military commander Anton Denikin and his White Army, as well as substantial defections from the Red Army in Ukraine to their own forces, though they were still undersupplied.

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The workmen desire to get as much, the master to give as little as possible...It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. -Adam Smith