• 4 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Nah, you’re right, it definitely isn’t as simple as all due to the material conditions, although I do tend to think the majority of crime is due to them. At the same time, I’m not sure I’m using material conditions in the correct technical sense, and was thinking about including a , “someone feel free to correct my usage” note in my comment. I also wasnt really itching for a super in-depth conversation about it, even though your question

    do you think Trump is lacking in material conditions?

    is a really interesting one that I’d need to think and talk about a lot. I think if we had appropriate non coercive controls against accumulation of property, while also living in a society that met the physical, psychological, and social needs of its people, Trump perhaps would not be a criminal.

    This comes from my tendency to think people are more inherently good than evil, and that much of the evil comes from the patriarchal culture of accumulation



  • I’m conflicted over whether I’m glad or disappointed at his respect for the feds.

    On the one hand, I’m disappointed, because like many many others, I identify with his frustration with fat cat CEOs imposing systems of structural violence against us. I wish that had extended to lack of respect for the state, which also imposes and upholds the same systems, and others.

    On the other hand, I’m glad because I still think what he allegedly did is wrong and don’t necessarily want further ideological alignment with that, even if billionaire CEOs have it coming, and even if I think he should go free.









  • jwiggler@sh.itjust.workstoPolitical Memes@lemmy.worldLandlords are parasites
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    3 months ago

    It’s pretty apparent your questions aren’t in good faith, or you wouldn’t be so combative. It’s clear you’re not actually interested in answers, just in getting a “gotcha,” which is pretty lame. Also, I wouldn’t call any of the questions you’ve asked actually tough, because they’re almost all the first, second, or third questions he typically answers in the book. They’re fair questions, for sure, but they’re the ones Kropotkin anticipates while you’re reading, which is part of the fun of reading Kropotkin.

    Then you go on to completely mischaracterize his view of the Paris Commune based on a single chapter of his book, while also insulting people who call you out. It’s totally cool if you disagree and don’t like Kropotkin’s ideas – I mean the dude wasn’t right about everything. But you’re just being a dick about it, sorry to say.


  • jwiggler@sh.itjust.workstoPolitical Memes@lemmy.worldLandlords are parasites
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    3 months ago

    If you actually read the book, you’d know how silly most of the things you just said are, especially about the Paris Commune. But I appreciate you sharing your opinion :)

    edit: btw, its called conquest of bread. good stuff, check it out. you dont need to agree with it, but its a great intro to learning about some of the moral philosophies behind anarchy and communism and why they surged in the late 19th and early 20th century



  • jwiggler@sh.itjust.workstoPolitical Memes@lemmy.worldLandlords are parasites
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    3 months ago

    The house was not built by its owner. It was erected, decorated, and furnished by innumerable workers–in the timber yard, the brick field, and the workshop, toiling for dear life at a minimum wage.

    The money spent by the owner was not the product of his own toil. It was amassed, like all other riches, by paying the workers two-thirds or only a half of what was their due.

    Moreover–and it is here that the enormity of the whole proceeding becomes most glaring–the house owes its actual value to the profit which the owner can make out of it. Now, this profit results from the fact that his house is built in a town possessing bridges, quays, and fine public buildings, and affording to its inhabitants a thousand comforts and conveniences unknown in villages; a town well paved, lighted with gas, in regular communication with other towns, and itself a centre of industry, commerce, science, and art; a town which the work of twenty or thirty generations has gone to render habitable, healthy, and beautiful.

    A house in certain parts of Paris may be valued at thousands of pounds sterling, not because thousands of pounds’ worth of labour have been expended on that particular house, but because it is in Paris; because for centuries workmen, artists, thinkers, and men of learning and letters have contributed to make Paris what it is to-day–a centre of industry, commerce, politics, art, and science; because Paris has a past; because, thanks to literature, the names of its streets are household words in foreign countries as well as at home; because it is the fruit of eighteen centuries of toil, the work of fifty generations of the whole French nation.

    Who, then, can appropriate to himself the tiniest plot of ground, or the meanest building, without committing a flagrant injustice? Who, then, has the right to sell to any bidder the smallest portion of the common heritage?

    http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/kropotkin/conquest/ch6.html



  • For the curious, this “Pro American Rally” Nazi rally occurred in 1939

    At Madison Square Garden, the rally opened with the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag. The mood was jubilant. Attendees wore Nazi armbands, waved American flags and held aloft posters with slogans like “Stop Jewish Domination of Christian America.” There were storm troopers in the aisles, their uniforms almost identical to those of Nazi Germany. “It looked like any political rally — only with a Nazi twist,” said Arnie Bernstein, author of Swastika Nation.

    The speeches were explicitly anti-Semitic, and tirades against “job-taking Jewish refugees” were met with thunderous applause. “They demanded a white gentile America. They denounced Roosevelt as ‘Rosenfeld,’ to say that Roosevelt was in the pocket of rich Jews,” said Sarah Churchwell, author of Behold, America. In equal measure to the xenophobia, the speeches were loaded with American boosterism.

    Sound familiar?

    Source



  • Hmm…I have to think about your first statement. I agree to the extent in that our modern political systems are more derived from Roman republic rather than Athenian democracy. Still, I guess my point was that there was a classical idea of anarchism before the thinkers of the 18th and 19th centuries, and I don’t blame people for retaining the negative connotation. Especially because, like you said, that idea is apt to be perpetuated by the ruling class.

    When I was reading Chomsky and Graeber, I kinda dismissed them at first because I was a liberal and “anarchism bad.” Nobody is really being called an idiot here, which is great, but I’m happy I had a chance to learn more about it before I went online and made a fool of myself.

    Edit: Honestly I’m reading my comment over and I think I’m splitting hairs/being pedantic about “misunderstanding” anarchism. But I’m happy that in your response to them you’ve been completely kind and understanding to them