: : I dont have to appeal to it. why is the result of millions of individual choices so gard to comprehend? SDF: It's not -- and in fact such choices can be attributed to the controlling influences of those who have won the struggle for power. Marlboro, for instance, is the third-largest US export product (outside of weapons and Coca-Cola) because people outside the US have been so effectively "sold" on smoking Marlboro cigarettes. People "choose" to live, right? People "choose" to make a living (according to what counts as "making a living" in any particular society), right? People "choose" to get along with those who represent a potential immediate threat to their livelihoods, right? Is the use of the word "choice" supposed to glorify these things? Nobody is going to do any differently, so why call it a choice? We could just as well call "making a living" a "controlling influence" and it would make even more sense, since if we attributed choice to "controlling influence" we might be able to UNDERSTAND the behavioral manipulation that pushes the aggregate of choices one way or another, rather than attributing them to the "veils of ignorance" of choice theory.
: : I know its complex and riddled with 'veils of ignorance' but I would consider central planning even less capable of adaptation or efficient disposal of property.
SDF: It's only called "property" under propertarian social systems. Just a reminder.
(skipping)
: : My system? When have I favoured the statist-merchant marriage that is the cause of your 'capitalist' enemies (which on the whole are my 'statist' enemies!) in the IMF, in gross multi nationals, in the imperialist tribal mindets of national govts? What I have defended is private property (and , no, I havent closed my mind and said 'so there', but i havent been convinced of alternatives). What our disagreement appears to be is that you consider private property to be at the root of the above?
: Right you believe that "private property" could be annexed from the present capitalist order, I think that's shit.
SDF: Yes Lark but you have to explain why, otherwise you're only going to encourage the bickering response from Gee that you got. One can hypothesize the social order that would arise with private property and without government. Those without any private property, the "surplus" population that doesn't own real estate to live upon, would immediately begin to demand their own. (We are NOT talking fictionally here -- the Sandinistas and the FMLN call this movement "land reform.")
It could start with rent strikes -- the overwhelming majority of the legal battles waged in courts today in the US, as a lawyer once told me, revolve around the drug laws and around evictions, and if you got rid of the government (but kept traditions of "private property"), the drug law legal battles would disappear (because their plaintiffs would become unemployed) but the eviction battles would persist. Landlords still have an interest in collecting rent, tenants still have an interest in not paying it. These interests do not magically disappear even if we could wave our magic wand and make government vanish.
The tenant interest in not paying rent would become stronger, of course, if government were no longer around to enforce the value of money (and thus money would have to return to a metallic standard, wiping out the savings of those without the requisite metal, because there would be no army of police to combat counterfeiters of non-metal money)...
The landlords just can't live in the buildings they own, all by themselves -- there are too many people, and too many buildings around that have been built (architecturally speaking; apartment complexes for instance) for the sake of tenancy. The landlords would start to hire armies of their own to evict tenants that did not pay, and soon enough these armies would become accountable to nothing but the pay (presumably in gold, since money would be detached from its current government-guarantee) of the landlord. It's also possible that some of these armies, hired to enforce the private property rights of the rich against the claims-to-exist of the poor, some of these armies could organize in their own right, and live off of piracy, as was the case during the general withdrawal of government from Germany during the Thirty Years' War. Thusly you'd get a re-establishment of the State, since collecting the rent becomes more efficient when landlords don't have to each hire their own individual armies to exact rent from tenants.
You'd also see private armies from the owners of grocery stores. If they are to continue to hoard "private property," they're going to need armies to protect their stores from looters, or to protect their money from ordinary thieves. Such stores will find it cheaper to band together in cartels in order to financially-manage the training of their troops. Objections to the potential for piracy created with the withdrawal of "goverment" apply to the systems operated by grocery stores, too.
(lark says later)
: Now I dont find that ethically or morally correct but I know appeals like that have absolutely no interest to you, well, logically the greatest threat to private property comes from such a system the have nots are going to criminally exact revenge upon the haves.
SDF: I disagree, Lark, I think the "criminality" (remember under our hypothesis there's no government!) goes the other way, the privileged possessors of private property are not going to give up on profit system, as I've explained above. If government were to be magically made to disappear, such privileged possessors would devote their every efforts to make government come back, so as to maintain their regimes of privilege. Government validates the extraction of surplus labor as capitalist business-as-usual, so that it is not declaimed as extortion (as it would otherwise be if business-as-usual were to conduct itself without any government protection), so clearly the bourgeoisie have a class interest in the maintenance of government. This "restoration" effort they would conduct would leave the working class with two options:
1) organize some group action (peaceful sit-down labor strikes, peaceful rent strikes etc.) in hopes that the existing social order of "private property" can be re-ordered around the real material needs of the majority (most importantly, people WILL starve to death without some social order that will assure them of daily food)...of course, it isn't necessarily guaranteed that some group action as such will result in the maintenance of "private property" in its current form.
2) retreat to the old "statist-merchant marriage" (as Gee calls it) that at least assured SOME of us that if we respected our bosses, did our jobs well, paid the rent, bought what the TV told us was good, and believed in tradition and in the propaganda of the newspaper, that this would guarantee us of "a life" at least in the short run...see, the average guy today has a strong interest in the "statist-merchant marriage," it provides a dreary continuity to life, which is better than getting killed or losing one's job or family or finding one's savings wiped out by the disintegration of the traditions surrounding money...we've bought into it, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, 'til death do us part, amen...if one is parading one's theoretical prowess on this forum about some alternative way of doing things, one needs resolve one's theory with the struggle for power -- if we're going to re-order our lives and change the world against overwhelming odds, it had better work out for us on the other end.
All things told, aren't you glad you live in a democracy, even if it's a fuck-up?
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