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Am important aspect of anarchism is community. Capitalism tends to atomise people, replacing community and cooperative relationships with work relationships and transactions. This erodes mutual trust and support, so without rebuilding communities I agree, you couldn't reasonably hope for cooperation and sharing. But people's attitudes are shaped by their environment, and with a greater sense of community and engagement, we are more willing to help each other out. I'm a lot more willing to lend or gift things to a friend or a neighbour than to somebody I don't know. Now, as you've rightly pointed out, that doesn't scale past Dunbar's number (the maximum number of people we can reasonably know personally), so the alternative to scaling this up is a democratic union-of-unions system where my community and your community both elect councils and delegates for coordinating with each other. That way the delegates can represent our communities' interests in a bottom-up fashion. Since there's no meaningful benefit to profit without a money system, we can support each other in a mutual/reciprocal fashion. > Guess people like me gotta be put in the gulag. Again, you're thinking of MLs. My primary value is decreasing human suffering and increasing preference fulfilment. Neither of those are fulfilled by senseless ideological violence. > My personal view of what ends up happening to leftist communities is their either become dystopian to ensure your property is now the public's property, slide into democracies, or go into limited-government libertarian type scenarios. I'd rather live under a social democratic capitalist society like I currently do than the USSR. Freedom is important - I want to increase it, not decrease it. There's plenty of room for democracy within anarchism, and anarchism is the original source of the term "libertarian" so yes I agree on the latter point - the main point of disagreement is whether capitalism can really be libertarian. I think that replacing a competitive, isolating economy with a cooperative sharing economy would be a positive thing for everybody. I think the kurds are a good example of an incremental step in the right direction - their economy is more oriented towards sharing and cooperation, which is inherently a step away from capitalism because capitalism relies on individualistic trade negotiations rather than sharing. Edit: I just thought, if you've watched the later seasons of The Walking Dead, the communities are a pretty good example of anarchist community, including the union-of-unions part. |