In response to Capitalism is Cruelty and this facebook discussion which indicates fundamental differences and problems of reconcilability between two general camps—anarcho-capitalists and anarcho-communists—I’ve decided to republish my responses to a fellow “ancom” where I don’t think it makes sense to try at this juncture to unwed the people from the political identity of “ancap” that they dress themselves in. I like to think that I’ve undressed down to a naked animal, and my skin and inner organs are all “ancom”, but whether this is ontologically accurate, and important to conceive of at this juncture, I throw in doubt. When an important alliance looms between our two groups, which is arguably always an important alliance to make so long as these two groups of people exist, I am quite fine with putting these differences aside, no matter how much the idea of private property “gets under my skin”, to mix metaphors! So, here is my responses to what he said on facebook and in his one article:
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I read Cap is cruelty, and I agree fully with all you are saying (though I am doing theoretical anthropology and am guessing that the seeds were sown more than 10,000 years ago, but no matter property is an ancient burden that has been unsuccessfully challenged heretofore). I guess I just feel a time pressure and if we hold the bar so high for full on mental revolution to a sense that mutual aid and sharing are the ideals that we are ready to unbag all the cultural baggage we’ve inherited, we will lose many people along the way that might have been a few years away from that leap, and might be turned off to the ideas if they are too much of a radical leap. I’ve visited some intentional communities where, to me, they seem at the forefront in western culture towards retribalizing in a sharing, horizontalist as possible fashion. some are only a couple of generations away, in my opinion, of realizing your and my dreams for people. obviously that collides and is not enough given the speed of the holocene extinction event/desertification, a real crisis indeed. but the teacher in me would rather “chunk” mental revolution and i see being a libertarian that doesn’t like global expansion, itself the most harmful general trend to the environment, to subaltern people, to dangerous new military arms weaponizations, i would rather these people be included than excluded in this movement and perhaps their culturally acquired ideas of rabid individualism will start to soften as they find the comraderie with others that the culture was unable to provide them with beforehand. Psychological barriers are so deep, I have found this true within myself, and they generally need to be crawled out of, so as to slowly stretch them. It’s taken me a long time to get to the latent content and fully be conscious of this nightmarish reality, and break down the self-inner-monologue bs narratives. I give a lot of credit to people even being libertarian and having a sense that imperialism is wrong. it to me is a huge leap in the right direction, one that should not be admonished by any who have had a lifetime to think deeply and move their mental states further along. But I think your article might argue against what you’re proposing here, which is “the first step is to get more people talking about it.” I completely agree with this sentiment. Peace!
and lastly wanted to say there still are indigenous and psuedo indigenous people who are farther ahead than intentional communities, and surely should be learned from. the difference is they possibly never lost the core of sharing going back tens of thousands of years, whereas westerners really have to go to some core instinct that private property is wrong and rebuild from that, aided of course by ideology of anarchists or revolutionary marxists.
and lastly lastly, ha I keep having add ons, or new ideas (which may work to support what I’ve been getting at) – private property is not just solely something that exists in human minds and therefore perpetuates because of their ideas. property is outside of humans in historical Alien archaeological visitors viewing our planet shortly after we all were extincted would be able to decipher that we were “thing obsessed” people by noting both how our skeletons were gathered and separated in our dwellings, but maybe even more by our infrastructure and mass strewn about separatized possessions. It is a battle of ideas in our minds for sure, but it is also a battle against hard and individualized matter that has suffered us and our recent ancestors who industrialized and thingified so much of the physical planet. Though I call myself an anarchocommunist, how often do my habits unawares stray back to the default of being possessive, spiteful, paranoid? Not infrequently enough! And how often does an an cap do something cooperative, or feeling something mutual? Probably more often than would be given credence. We are all works in progress/regress. Let us throw out the gray bathwater, but certainly not any comrades rinsing and refining, or polluting their halfway decent ideas. We need all the comrades that we can get in this lopsided, terrain destroyed battle for the ecosphere to survive this human-led extinction effort.
Related Post:
https://subversesjournal.wordpress.com/2016/10/21/to-my-libertarian-frienemies-tmlf-part-1/
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