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RE: The Precarity of Anarchy: A Reason to Doubt

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The Precarity of Anarchy: A Reason to Doubt

frdem3dot0 (58) in anarchism • 7 years ago

I think what you two are mostly pointing towards is how to go from the current system to a better one. I agree that most wealth currently is distributed extremely unfair and that the people benefitting from the corrupt system will not hand it over without a fight. That is a problem i honestly have no answer to. I hope that we can disrupt their power using new decentralised technologies. Also resource distribution is a leading cause for wars around the world and improvements are direly needed.

Where I disagree is that once you are in a hypothetical anarchist society, that people that accumulate wealth could exploit it. The solution to voluntary slavery is self-employement. Currently this is made difficult due to unnecessary entry barriers. But we see the rise of a peer-to-peer economy and I think there is nothing rich people could do short of trying to establish a police state.
Also we are not as free to leave our states. Yes, we can travel but getting another citizenship is a matter of 5+ years and requires me to move and leave my home. That is a quite high barrier that makes competion between states an almost non-issue. States may compete for the top 1%, but not for the rest and that is part of the reason why they suffer. Unless the sate is so bad that there is a large scale migration, they are fine in doing whatever they want.

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7 years ago by frdem3dot0 (58)

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ekklesiagora (62) · 7 years ago (edited)

A few years ago I used to hold to more traditional market-anarchist views, but I realized that the current distribution of wealth was unjust; the current distribution of wealth is the product of government subsidizing certain persons and groups at the expense of others. I realized that others were kept from freely competing and thriving because of restrictive government policies. This meant, in my estimation, that we would need something like distributism in order to get us to a point where the means of production is no longer unjustly concentrated into the hands of the few. I proposed distributism as a way to transition towards voluntaryism, and voluntaryism as a transition to market-anarchism. I think you might, perhaps, find my idea of anarcho-distributism more interesting. (Cf. An Intro to Anarcho-Distribuism)

Taiwan is an important example that kind of demonstrates the basic principle that underlies the idea of anarcho-distributism. In Taiwan, they adopted distributist policies, such as "land to the tiller," and then allowed a free market to follow. When General Douglas MacArthur, a distributist, got control of Taiwan, he implemented distributist policies that laid the foundation for a truly free market to function. Later on, free-market economists like Milton Friedman would praise Taiwan as an example of the success of free markets, without even realizing the distributist foundation that built those markets. It was the "land to the tiller" program that made free trade so successful in Taiwan.

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sylph (39) · 7 years ago

Taiwan's situation mentioned by @ekklesiagora was interesting:

Taiwan’s land reform was a bloodless revolution ending the unfair distribution of land and significantly reducing the gap between the rich and the poor.
After Taiwan’s retrocession to the Republic of China from Japan in 1945, over 50 percent of the island’s population was farmers, of whom 70 percent were tenants. After a half century of colonial rule, the Japanese land-rental system still applied. The average share of the harvest that tenants had to turn over to the landowner exceeded 50 percent, sometimes going as high as 70 percent.
Furthermore, some were “iron leases” requiring a fixed crop quantity, regardless of land conditions or natural disasters. Tenants toiled all year round just to give most of their harvest to the landlord. To make things worse, leases were usually oral. When conflicts arose, there were no written documents to refer to, and landlords, given their higher social status, usually won out. The system represented blatant socioeconomic inequality.
The final goal of Taiwan’s land reform was to make all farmers the owners of their own fields. The reform proceeded in four stages: (1) leasing government-owned land to tenants; (2) 37.5 percent shares on privately-owned farmland; (3) the sale of public land to farmers; and (4) the land-to-the-tiller program.
Beginning in 1946, to begin balancing land supply and demand, state-owned farmland was leased to farmers for 25 percent of the crop. Furthermore, in 1949, shares were reduced to 37.5 percent on privately-owned farmland, based on average harvest quantities for the previous two years.
The figure of 37.5 percent was arrived at by assuming that the working capital provided by a farmer was equivalent to 25 percent of total production. The remaining 75 percent of the crop was divided into two equal parts, one for the landlord and the other for the farmer.
In 1949, Chen Cheng, then chairman of the Taiwan Provincial Government, pointed out to a reporter that farmers, who made up a large percentage of the total population, work harder than anyone else, but they sometimes could not even fill their stomachs. “The motivation behind the 37.5-percent rent is to eliminate such unfair conditions,” he emphasized.
Under the new arrangements, crop yields increased as tenants were willing to invest more money in agricultural equipment and improved farming methods. According to Ministry of the Interior statistics, in 1948, before the rent reduction, total rice production was 1.037 million metric tons. Following the change in 1949, the rice output rose to 1.172 million metric tons, and jumped to 1.517 million metric tons in 1952, a 46 percent rise in four years.

https://taiwantoday.tw/news.php?unit=10,23,45,10&post=15716

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frdem3dot0 (58) · 7 years ago

Clearly we have to solve the issue of land and resource distribution. I think that our concepts of ownership have to be questioned in this regard.
Any distribution of resources that is not uniform will be questioned by those that dont get their share. As a consequence every human born should receive a part and that is not compatible with private ownership. In the past the solution of this problem would have required authority and a state. But I think that we can finally solve the problem without a middle man using distributed organisations and the blockchain.

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sylph (39) · 7 years ago

The blockchain is quite a transformative technology. It's the dawn of a new world with new possibilities. :)

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sylph (39) · 7 years ago

Yeah. I do think that we might ideally have a more and more anarchistic society in the future. The various anarchistic solutions just need to someday be tested until they're proven, as we change our culture to something that's not as exploitative. I mean, at some point, if genuinely good rules become accepted as the norms maybe laws could become voluntary cultural practices observed by everyone, while the bad rules/laws are not needed by anyone. :)

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