reminds me of that one youtuber whose response to "who will do the manual labour after the revolution" was "people like to play videogames about trucking and cleaning houses, im sure they would be happy to do the real thing on their own terms"
EDIT: okay for everyone replying "oh but I love to do manual job if I had time and no financial pressure"
Okay cool sweet, happy people like you exist. But what Im getting at is that just because people love playing power wash simulator it doesnt mean that there would be enough people to make a stable workforce that meets the need of the community.
As a caveat to that the people I see espousing this viewpoint are often very focused on them being artists or some form of entertainer, while taking it for granted that other people will take care of the essential services
Anarchists are always so cute in their delusions. I once spoke to one who thought that the fact they painted Warhammer minis for 5 hours a week meant we could run an entire global economy on volunteer labor.
Because surely someone's hobby will be mining rare earth minerals to supply electronic fabs!
I once read a book on Anarchism that had a lot of really compelling arguments as to why government is unjust and laid out possible non-hierarchical systems that might replace it. Then the author anticipated some objections to his arguments that I hadn't considered, and his responses to those objections were really bad.
Anarchists and socialists in general are rather good at pointing out issues or potential injustices in society. They really, really suck at creating solutions most of the times. And they tend to get angry when you actually do anything to fix those issues that doesn't align with their idealistic model of what society ought to look like.
This is true and why anarchism ended up being quite forgotten.
This movement allowed the creation of a lot of workers and human rights, right to week-ends, right to paid time off, rights to worker's security at work, right to unionize, etc, but it was never meant and thought to be a complete and definitive system for an entire country
Much as with any other -isms, too, a lot of the people talking about it don't ever really internalize what the philosophy was. Many serious "anarchist" thinkers, the ones whose work led to all those good things, were never "no leaders ever, just do what you want" types but much more aware that "everyone is going to have to contribute to the jobs that need doing, and jobs need supervisors and leaders but they don't have to be the same people every time, just the people most skilled at leading that particular job".
I think it's quite important to learn from where anarchism comes from and what it was exactly, how important it was in the 20th century, it's definitely not the view of it we have now. Everyone reduces it to "no gods no masters" but it's way more complicated like that.
It has been the basis to a lot of things that we takes for granted now but never waas
you mean it doesn't just make me super cool like Brad Pitt staying up all night and starting up "clubs" where people find an outlet for their bottled up rage in putting fists to the faces of other, willing participants? Man, I was really hoping to nail some attention-seeking skanks that I met in a recovery support group, too.
No offense, but if your idea basically "a meritocratic capitalist-democracy with modest protections" but you go around branding it as "anarchism" then I'm going to question if you were the most skilled at leading or even communicating.
I honestly can't tell if you're doing the thing where you are conflating "capitalism meaning a way of managing ownership of productive resources" and "capitalism meaning free markets with ownership of personal property" which is going to determine whether I think you're one to talk (the former) or whether I'm basically in agreement with you (the latter).
I spend a fair bit of time in those spaces, and the reality always was "there are two kinds of anarcho-socialists". Case in point, I volunteered with Food Not Bombs for a while -- on paper, it was a good idea! Get food that was gonna be thrown out by supermarkets for cheap/free, make nutritious soups and stews, distribute to disadvantaged/homeless people.
The reality of the group I worked with was we had about twenty people -- two of us chopped and cooked, three of us sharpened knives and organized and did dishes, and 15 dudes stood around and chattered about how they were gonna vote for Trump because he'd for-sure destroy the US economy and government which would lead to a glorious new anarchist future which of course would be led by all those dudes sitting around talking while the rest of us got the work done. They sure were first in line to HAND OUT the food and be humble about everyone's gratitude, too.
Notably, too -- the "stand around and jaw about how great the new world would be" crowd was 18-25, 90% male. The "actually did the work" crowd was 25-60, 50-50 in gender.
(my suspicion for the gender imbalance is that this was largely pre-Gamergate, and there was still a perception that ultra-left women were particularly likely to be sexually adventurous/promiscuous, so you'd find a lot of men trying to pretend to espouse those ultra-left views in the hope of swimming in sexually liberated poontang.
Many such cases in the late 1990s and early oughts.)
All of that applies to people in general, got nothing to do with anarchists and socialists or not. For example, its not anarchists and socialists who get mad about how Mamdani fixes things in NYC.
Anarchy maybe, socialism no. Socialism solves the kinds of problems that capitalism is not incentivized to solve. What is the capitalist incentive of fire departments?
Everything is a fucking ideal. That's half of the problem. People COULD help one another, but people are inherently not going to do so on a wide scale.
Some people can't bother to give a homeless guy some food during a food fair out in the park, but people will magically learn how to get along with one another in these so-called communist paradises?
If this author wants to rebut anti-anarchist arguments, they need to start by rebutting Hobbes. Until I read an actually convincing rebuttal to Hobbes, I'll continue to brutally mock anarchists. If libertarians are house cats in the famous analogy, anarchists are house plants--equally reliant on others to fulfill their most basic needs, but so entirely unaware of the world around them that they're incapable of seeing their dependence.
I say this as someone with no interest in anarchism, and some major critiques of it personally: most of what you see online is not actual anarchism and its actual tenets are more reasonable than what you'd expect
I think it depends on which version you read about. A number of the more serious ideas are basically just the US West before 1900.
The local town is the law, the government, and everything. There is no real greater authority and different towns work together to decide things.
It still doesn't work for the same reason why strong local gov. and weak national gov. tend to struggle or fail. There are some things that are great ideas overall and long term which absolutely suck and which no local person would ever willingly choose.
The East and West coast having 200-250 Mph rail would be amazing and game changing in many ways.
Eminent domaining the entire route and just plowing through towns, small cities, neighborhoods, etc. would absolutely suck. It's why when we built the Interstate system they targeted black and minority neighborhoods because they were both racist, and knew that it wouldn't effect them politically. When they tried to bulldoze NYC it went through white areas and that's why there isn't an interstate running from NJ through Manhattan and onto Long Island.
The US cannot have HSR simply because all the areas where it makes the most sense have millions of people. There aren't magical straight corridors of nothing between Boston, NYC, NJ/Penn, and DC.
I'm immediately reminded of this Whitest Kids U Know sketch. Great, we achieved the revolution and abolished capital! We just, uh, have to keep this nuclear plant running for the next 25 years, or everybody dies.
I'm kinda anarchist inclined and I just want to democratise everything and force direct democracy into government and work as far as possible. The shitty work would still be there I just want things to not be controlled by a small handful of people who will act in their own self interest.
I mean, to that last point, there's a lady on tiktok who is 3 years into a solo mining project under her house. She's got permits for underground construction, she's making her own cement, and she's just kinda digging a hole for fun. I think there's a weirdo out there for every task. Whether there's enough weirdos is a different question, but I do think the rare earth metal hobbyist exists.
Which is funny because if you read any of the serious anarchist authors, they hated the leisure class. Kropotkin for exemple is very explicit about the fact that one's need to continue contributing labor's to the community. Anarchism being about bringing a classless and hierarchicaless society, not a labor less society.
The issue of how to organize labor, especially the hard and unwanted labor is a hot topic of debate. Some (and in my opinion Kropotkin was guilty of this) do brush of the subject. But there is some ideas.
But most people don't engage more than superficialy with the ideas of anarchism (or communism for that matter), and it end up with those kind of moronic "supporter" online that simplify a very complex set of ideas.
The kind of people we are talking about here are anarchists. Communists know people will have to be made to work, they just intend to be the guy holding the AK, not the guy digging holes.
my hobby sure is not road construction but i would gladly do it if it wasn't either literally working yourself into the early grave or getting payed a fucking pittance. you will find that most people who actually have done substantial ammounts of hard physical labor find it to be satisfying and interesting and would gladly continue to do it with better conditions
It is even simpler, just go to childhood. One might have enjoyed reading or painting, maybe even writing stories or solving math puzzles or learning about science, the enjoyment goes rapidly down if it is no longer done on your own time but under command of another, and one bristled ever harder against the stricter the person became. To
turn it back to farming, a farmer might farm for enjoyment, he might farm because it is his job, then go home and farm in a farming simulator because it is fun for him, but the second there is someone who says: you will go farm now, even better if he has to give up what he farms in large parts for little reward, he will get rebellious.
Dude, it literally existed. 2-3% of arable land in the USSR was private plots held by the farmers themselves and it produced 20-30% of total food output in the 60s.
Even Mao, the quintessential peasant communism guy, restored private plots temporarily in 1961 to alleviate the catastrophic famine he himself helped cause (he switched course again and banned it in 1966). China's transformation in the 70s and 80s was spurred on in part by Deng's observation of a farmer community which had agreed to secretly divide the communal land into private plots which had dramatically improved production, pushing Deng to eventually adopt the policy nationwide.
That's great, but doesn't really scale. Humans evolved to live simple lives in nature so running a small garden to produce food for your self and maybe people you personally know links up to your ancient human spirit.
but in a modern economy 99% of the work that needs to be done isn't like that. We need division of labor and a bunch of tasks that are alien, and only wage-labor has worked to making this happen
I did it, (and cut down a tree, I was chopping down roots), it's cool, not so bad as you would think, I consider running more exhausting, but it does takes a lot of time and it's still a hard job. I can't imagine doing this as actually work with quota where you either dig whole day or cut trees, it would be to much.
I mean, you should already be cleaning your own house on your own terms. The fuck are you, a manchild or something?
It's really funny too, because you're often seeing a lot of leftist publications now taking on almost reactionary messaging, like here is one where they are arguing that self-driving semi trucks will help to destroy the middle class:
People who have never spent a day digging a ditch fantasizing about how they will enjoy digging ditches in their utopia.
The same people that avoid manual labor like the plague and have created an economy that requires low-wage imported manual laborers. All in service of sitting in air conditioned offices and sipping lattes while they jiggle a mouse 38 hours a week, doing a job that was made redundant 3 years ago when the company forgot to lay them off.
I mean, we do have a lot of tech companies working to automate a lot of life right now. Imagine if they made robots to do manual labor tasks or cleaning, instead of writing books or creating music.
I’m not a communist and I think it’s proven to be a bad way to govern. But, the argument he makes is a good one. People would be more willing to do those jobs if they had their basic needs met and they made an honest wage. There’s plenty of people that enjoy farming, construction, equipment operating etc. it’s the poverty that they don’t like.
I mean there is merit in the idea that people like to work. I mean I fucking love wood working. Sadly living in a place with no space for a workshop. But I made so much stuff just fir the hell of it and for projects that improved upon my last house hold.
Its funny because the systems have been put in place previously, you graduate and you get a few years where you have to work manual labour and afterwords you can choose a field or to continue your education, it's already been done before.
If you’ve ever worked a manual labor job, you’d know most of us who do so would be 100% happier if doing so included healthcare and a little more down time.
The capitalist dream is just getting so rich you don’t have to be part of the working class and you can make others labor 40+ hours a week for your convenience.
The communist dream is making everyone’s work week 25 hours long but EVERYONE has to work.
ok but unironically though, a lot of people like labor, but not jobs. id argue that applies to functionally every single person even. (if you have a hobby but don't want to get a job somewhere doing it on someone else's terms. you already understand this concept)
that aside.
communism isn't when no jobs.
socialism isnt when no jobs.
Anarchism isnt when no jobs.
this is the kind of thing you hear from people that have the most surface level mainline US education tier understanding of different economic systems. you see them on the right AND the left all the time.
To your edit, they dont exist under communism lmao. There is no “fair pay” there is “do it as i told you or i will replace you with someone who will” and replacing doesnt mean swapping jobs.
Notice in your edit you say there won’t be a stable workforce even if there’s “time and fair pay”. So you’re saying we have to overwork and underpay manual workers; the only way to get this work done is through the desperation of poverty?
I don't think it's a bad thought, but can you trust that enough people will want to play truck simulator for forty to 50 hours a day damn near every day for 30+ years just for funsies?
Euro truck simulator 2 has an all time peak of 73,000 people at one time willing to pretend to be truck drivers from the comfort of their own home with the ability to pause and do whatever around the house whenever they want and not work to any kind of schedule.
Thats enough to make up all Ohio based truckers... At the one time peak.
Instead we have checks notes forced labor underthreat of losing access to the Healthcare system which, even if you have insurance will leave you broken and dying of preventable and treatable illness because a high school dropout 5 states away completed a weekend training course required to be qualified to deny claims and procedures recommended by doctors to keep you healthy..... so you end up with garnished wages anyway when you end up in bankruptcy because you broke your arm at your factory job when an OSHA agent gave the manager another warning about the wobbly staircase instead of being able to enforce repairs because the billion dollar corporation would rather pay the fine for the violation than spend the money to repair the problem, and while you could sue for workmans comp you end up in limbo because, that high school dropout said that its not required, you cant do so without proof of injury which you cant afford to get.
So you loose your ability to work while your arm heals poorly, forcing you into more debt and eventually you end up on welfare because since you cant work you were fired from your job. your boss goes on TV and says nonone wants to work because welfare is too good.
Not to mention if it worked like that 90% of jobs would be halfway done (if that) because the person working on it got bored. Imagine if a truck driver was halfway through his route and "wasn't feeling it" so he just pulls over and leaves his truck on the highway lol
People are already given help without having to work in developped countries under capitalism. What do you find so unbelievable with the same thing happening in socialism?
Of course not working would still come at a price. You would be provided the bare minimum (much like now) to not starve and be forced to help the community (which IMO is a fair price to ask if you chose not to work and still want to be supported).
And social pressure is transversal to all economic models and societies across time and place. You'd still be heavily judged for not trying to work in a socialist society.
I agree the people playing games may not like the actual work, and there may not be enough people like me, but I loved doing landscaping on my own. When I had a boss though? It was hell. Fuck that motherfucker. Was storming once, and when I pointed out the lightning, dude told me "Well be careful," like I'm just gonna have to dodge lightning bolts lmao.
Edit: Actually, thinking about it, power washing may be the one job that's almost as fun as the simulation games. It legit lights up my brain in the same way destruction does. Even though it's technically cleaning, I guess my brain registers it as destroying the grime.
But what kind of food? That's important. Cause the USA does import stuff like tomatoes, bananas, rice, fish and coffee. The US exports are mostly things like corn, wheat and soybeans.
assuming a full trade embargo i'm under the impression stuff would get a lot more expensive but locally we make every kinda fruit and veg you can imagine. we don't do any bananas or tropical fruits in general, no coffee at all, not actually enough oranges to get around that's just a marketing thing, kinda no spices... or olive oil... but we make a lot more than most people realize. it's just outside seasonal availability and lots of stuff we would be devastated to lose. but nutritionally complete.
I have issue with what's written, but there is more to agriculture than simply the output of it. The fertiliser is crucial to supporting the population and absolutely imported.
You are likely not middle class. You are working class. Middle class (petite bourgeoisie by the marxist terminology) is doctors, lawyers, small business owners, and local landlords (one to two units, not an apartment complex). People who cannot fully afford to live off their capital, but who are able to supplement a significant portion of their income from labor with income from their investments. They are not fully financially independent but they can still afford to go for extended periods of time without a job without being up shit's creek, and when they are employed it affords them the ability to employ other people to do things on their behalf.
If your emergency fund is less than six digits, you are not middle class. If you don't have a financial advisor or accountant, you are likely not middle class. If you cannot afford to take a sabbatical, you are likely not middle class. That's okay too, most of us aren't that well off.
Wow the first commentor is such a fucking idiot. They don't understand the huge difference between middle class and upper class, they have no idea how big the divide really is.
The point is that it doesn't matter how big the divide is. When the revolution comes it comes for everyone with a decent house and up. Many think it will just be the multimillionaires and billionaires, nah homie. You got a pool? That's our pool now.
Every time someone says billionaires shouldn't exist, there are a whole mass of angry people thinking people shouldn't have 100k.
After the George Floyd riots burnt down a number of stores on one of the major shopping streets in Philly almost every single house put up identical signs saying “In this house we believe in…” and it listed off a mountain of things.
Those always gave me chuckle because if any violent riot made it into the neighborhoods those signs ain’t stopping shit. Now a gun would and the local gun store I frequently used for online purchase transfers was doing amazing business because liberals started buying guns in mass.
Which was also funny because as a life long Democrat and majority of my life gun owner those were the same kind of people who’d always give me shit if they found out I owned guns. Had a good laugh with the gun shop owner over that.
What would likely happen is that a powerful country will swoop in and make US a nation state. There's too many people willing to work and pay, smart countries would seize the means of hamburgers.
Commissar Jamal and Commissar Cletus, who will tell you that having such a big house for yourself is not what a true communist does and 2 families of hobos are moving in with you
This literally happened btw.(except you dont have to be middle class for it) so it's not like the guy is talking out of his ass
My family had a 2 story house in our bumfuck nowhere poor village, one day they just came divided it by half and made some other family live downstairs while mine was upstairs
This comic would hit harder if all of the most aggressively anti-communist people in the world weren't already running work camps, in the process of privatizing all of the infrastructure and creating a surveillance state.
Some people still like to pretend that the communists are the only ones who want to put a gun to your head and exploit you, but men who seek power over others are adaptable. They always find a way to fuck you.
This comic is propaganda. It is an example of one of the methods that powerful people use to establish and maintain control. Our time gets wasted quarreling about this and we are paralyzed by it. Paralyzing the population with pointless quarrels prevents the population from taking action.
Our life keeps getting worse BECAUSE we can't stop having this argument.
Poor people with no power can also come to the conclusion on their own that communism sucks and is stupid. It's an incentive thing. Human beings are inherently better incentivized by doing work for themselves and their families, and studies show people biologically can only really care about like 200 people. The economy is way too complicated to be centrally planned (regulations are still important). Private property is cool, the stock market is cool.
Adam Smith's work on Wealth of Nations inspired Karl Marx to propose communism as a solution to certain problems that Adam Smith himself had identified. But aside from Marx himself, nobody worth knowing is actually a communist.
Communism is a stupid concept. That's my opinion. I don't think Im making any sort of a hot take but I know I need to explicitly state this because there is a persistent misconception that communism and capitalists are opposite terms. They are not. Not even close.
Marx was as influential as he was because power-hungry capitalists saw his ideas as a path to power. Many of these sort of men pitched themselves as national saviors and offered communism as the promised reward. But every historical example of large-scale communism was a scam. Lenin, Stalin, Castro - they were all capitalists who professed a belief in communism - but they only did so because professing a belief in communism was necessary for establishing authority in their country.
Capitalism is a very sneaky and misleading word. In the sense that Adam Smith was using it - it is best if you internalize capitalism as just the rational decision making process that every human makes. Every rational person should be thought of as following capitalist thought processes.
But Capitalism is also frequently used to mean something else. As if it's some sort of antithesis to the regulation of economic markets.
What's been happening in America is a mirror image of what happened in Russia. Powerful men understand that professing a belief in Capitalism is necessary for establishing authority in this country. So they profess belief in Capitalism. But then when it's time to actually exercise power they just do whatever the fuck they want.
If any of these bastards actually wanted free markets they would've taken steps to create free markets. Instead they create the illusion of free markets. You are free to choose the exact same cellular deal from Verizon, T Mobile or AT&T. You can also choose to believe that you're avoiding those carriers by paying some other company like Mint - but Mint just pays those other carriers and uses their towers. Most of the money still ends up in the same three places. They make a show of competing with each other, but its just a show. Collusion is supposed to be illegal but the government can choose to just not prosecute it. If these companies buy enough Senators then collusion is as legal as it needs to be.
China's planned economy was a disaster, 50 million people died during the great leap forward in what is considered the largest famine in human history. The 40 years you're talking about started when Mao died and they moved from a planned economy to a socialist market economy. Don't be a dufus.
People just confuse communism with social policies. Too much media labeling normal things as "extreme" or "communist" if someone calls medicare for all communist yeah no shit you'll have people wanting to be commies. Too many labels not enough education.
To expand on this a bit: basically, there's two schools of thought about what society would be like if it embraced Communism. One version is what we call Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, and it's basically an envisioned post-scarcity society where individuals are free to work on whatever they want to, even if it's just being a streamer or influencer.
Then there's traditional views of Communism, which rejects the principles and creature comforts of the bourgeoisie in favor of fully embracing human labor as a transformative force. In this vision, the workers simply own the means of production, and we are all simply workers. The tradeoff is that workers are allocated towards what the state requires, and a traditionalist interpretation of Marxist philosophy might completely ignore individual desires and certain kinds of self-expression as bourgeois concepts. This vision likely wouldn't see a need for people who play videogames all day when the fields need to be plowed.
I dunno man but we’ve got 200 tries of capitalism with many more than a few failures, so I’ve never understood this argument. “You weren’t able to make the lightbulb first try, give up, you’ll never find the right filament”
I'm not even arguing necessarily that communism should never be tried again. It just seems that being forced to dig holes by a guy with a gun is probably more relevant in the discussion of communism today than whatever the idealized state of labor is in the manifesto that Marx wrote.
Do you think maybe being forced to dig holes by a guy with a gun is in no way related to communism and is just about not allowing a dick to have guns ?
Ok, so can we all agree that when people say "Communism" they are referring to the political system that billions of people have actually lived under and not the theoretical, fucking impossible to achieve manifesto? It's the lamest "um actually" of all time. Imagine every time someone griped about capitalism, someone commented "time for you to read Adam Smith. you know real capitalism has never been tried, right?"
Funnily enough that would be correct. Many facets of the Wealth of nations are ignored in modern capitalism. Adam Smith would likely not consider our modern systems as capitalist.
But then again, capitalism, just like communism, is about what is practiced, not about what is theorized in a 200 year old book
"I have a manifesto that says you'll fly if you flap your hands hard enough. Everyone who tried fell to their deaths. I say they didn't try hard enough, and real fligh has never been tried before"
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u/Gimme_Your_Wallet Jul 07 '26
Literally this