@HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social avatar

HeavenlyPossum

@HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social

Anarchist, communist, opossum. But then, I repeat myself.

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rechelon, to random
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When you start downloading the pirated copy of the paper and it's 200 MB.

haha, this is not a trustworthy file

HeavenlyPossum,
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@rechelon

“Oh my god, it’s so big” dot porn meme

larsfrommars, to random
@larsfrommars@toot.garden avatar

what if you showed me the music you hyperfixate on and i tolerated it and i showed you the music i hyperfixate on and you tolerated it

HeavenlyPossum,
@HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social avatar

@larsfrommars

That actually sounds really nice

HeavenlyPossum, to random
@HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social avatar

The hierarchies of state and capital are two of the most intrusive and omnipresent in our lives, and they are very much institutionalized.

By that I mean that the state and capital are both institutions. They have codified and legible rules; they present themselves in society with visible and regularly recognizable symbols; they behave in predictable ways and produce predictable outcomes.

When you see a cop, you know exactly what that cop represents and who that cop works for, and you also have a pretty good sense of how that cop will behave in any given circumstance.

1/

HeavenlyPossum,
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Not every hierarchy is institutionalized, though, but that doesn’t mean we should oppose them any less. Sexism and misogyny, gerontocracy and child abuse, racism and anti-Semitism—there’s a whole host of hierarchies in our lives in addition to the state and capital.

They’re all entangled with each other in capitalist modernity, but that doesn’t mean we can simply overthrow one and not the rest and call ourselves free. Many of these informal hierarchies are still present in non-state and non-capitalist societies as well.

Societies without any institutions at all can still have hierarchies of coercion and command.

2/

HeavenlyPossum,
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Talking about hierarchy makes the most sense when we look beyond a simple interpersonal relationship between two people and consider the social context of that relationship. Anyone can bark orders at another person and threaten violence to compel obedience, but hierarchies really only emerge when other people believe those relationships are legitimate and act to affirm and reinforce those relationships.

This is how an act of assault between two people, a horrible violation that typically moves bystanders to intervene and help, into just the natural order of things. A husband beating his wife, a parent beating their child, a teacher beating their student, a master beating a slave, a landlord evicting their tenant—these are all hierarchies of violence and command that exist only in their social context.

We do not have to have an institution of, say, parents, in the same way we have an institution of cops, in order for parents to exist in a coercive hierarchy with their children. All we need is a social consensus that of course it’s right and just for parents to assault their minor children.

4/

HeavenlyPossum,
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To explain what I mean by that, I’d ask you to imagine that you are in a relationship with an unlike person.

Maybe that means you are a child and they are an adult; maybe it means you are a wife and they are your husband; maybe it means you are a student and they are your teacher.

Now imagine that this other person physically attacks you in order to compel some behavior from you. You cry out for help to nearby onlookers. Do they assist you, help protect and defend you from your attacker? If so, you probably live in a society without that particular hierarchy.

Or do they ignore your assault, or even assist your attacker? Do they interfere with or punish you for defending yourself? If so, you probably live in a society with that hierarchy, even if it is not formally institutionalized in the same way that, say, capital ownership and wealth are in ours.

3/

HeavenlyPossum,
@HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social avatar

There are a handful of extant societies that exist effectively without any hierarchies at all. These are all immediate-return forager societies; that is, these are “hunter-gatherers” who consume food as soon as they acquire it, without storing any for the future.

In these societies, it would be as shocking for a parent to assault their minor child or a person to assault their spouse as it would be for one US Senator to gun down another Senator in front of a news camera—it just isn’t done. Someone would intervene in that situation in a way they wouldn’t if, say, Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein sexually assaulted minor children.

It’s almost certainly the case that the choice of people in immediate-return societies to eschew any accumulation of food is related to their radical egalitarianism. Just because it’s a tool that can be used to create egalitarianism, though, doesn’t mean that it necessarily creates egalitarianism or that to live free from hierarchy requires immediate-return foraging.

5/

HeavenlyPossum,
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I say this because no relationship between any two unlike kinds of people intrinsically produces any particular kind of relationship, hierarchical or egalitarian.

We’re very used to the idea that teachers have authority over their students, but at the birth of the university, in late medieval and early modern Europe, students pooled their resources to hire teachers who worked for at at the pleasure of their students. Command can work in either direction.

And it’s not even the case that command is a necessary outcome of the student-teacher relationship in either direction. You knowing something that I do not know does not automatically create a relationship of command between us. You might freely share your knowledge, or we might reciprocally exchange with each other, or we might part ways without me learning anything at all.

6/

HeavenlyPossum,
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People sometimes get tripped up over the anarchist objections to hierarchy and authority, because we colloquially use those words to describe some unlike phenomena.

We might colloquially say that an expert is an “authority” in their field of expertise, but that does not automatically mean that person exercises authority in the sense of command, the word’s original meaning.

We might colloquially say that there’s a hierarchy from youngest to oldest in a community, but that does not automatically mean the elderly exercise rule over the young, in the word’s original meaning.

(Both authority and hierarchy contain roots that convey rulership.)

I frequently encounter people who hear that anarchism opposes hierarchy and authority and mistakenly conclude that anarchism thus opposes, effectively, all differences between people.

It does not.

7/

foolishowl, to random
@foolishowl@social.coop avatar

An aspect of Nazi eugenics is a notion of a physically perfect person.

This used to come up quite often as a trope in science fiction, but I think that people gradually lost track of the idea that we were supposed to reject the concept, and feel visceral horror at it. The implication is that all human variation would be wiped out, that none of us would measure up to the standard, that the concept of an ideal person is irredeemably flawed.

HeavenlyPossum,
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@foolishowl

This makes a lot of things make a lot of sense

HeavenlyPossum, to random
@HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social avatar

I remember being pretty young and asking my parents—is this it? We go to school every day and then we get a job and go to work every day and this is our lives, forever? Just living each day according to someone else’s schedule, at someone else’s command? This is life?

And they were pretty flummoxed. Yeah, they said, this is life. What did you expect? This is what you do and then you die.

These are the same people who showed my Koyaanisqatsi when I was like six and encouraged me to internalize its message that capitalist modernity is catastrophically, irrevocably broken and unsustainable.

And I just think…a lot of people hold pretty good beliefs in the abstract but it doesn’t occur to them to live as if they were actually true.

HeavenlyPossum,
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@mark

I’m saying that your description of historical processes is inaccurate.

HeavenlyPossum,
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@jargoggles @mark

Mercantalism was an incredibly violent process and states can indeed coerce people into commercial exchange.

HeavenlyPossum,
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@mark

Yeah, I’d suggest the two things are connected

HeavenlyPossum,
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@mark

Yes; human freedom.

HeavenlyPossum,
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@mark

If you say so.

Capitalism is not a system of generating resources; it is a system of extracting rents, more like feudalism than unlike.

HeavenlyPossum,
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@ErictheCerise

It sounds like you’re thinking of Marshal Sahlin’s “The Original Affluent Society” and subsequent works.

HeavenlyPossum,
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@mark

Capitalism is a way of organizing value and organizing people to do work faster/better/larger in the same sense as a slave plantation—coercively, for the benefit of rentier elites.

HeavenlyPossum,
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@mark

The choice of masters does not somehow mitigate unfreedom. Roman slaves assigned peculia could also choose which job to do and which boss to work for at any given time, but were still slaves. The diagnostic feature of unfree work is the coercive compulsion to work for someone else, which is the case under capitalism.

HeavenlyPossum,
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@mark

Renting yourself out to lots of part-time bosses is of the same species as renting yourself out to one full-time boss. You don’t suddenly become free because you’re coerced into the gig economy and lose whatever paltry legal protections were won by past worker militancy.

HeavenlyPossum,
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@mark

It’s not a question of “room.”

HeavenlyPossum,
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@mark @RD4Anarchy

One of these days I’ll get around to scripting out one of these exchanges. Hitting all the beats.

HeavenlyPossum,
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@mark @RD4Anarchy

https://kolektiva.social/@HeavenlyPossum/110016655952719317

HeavenlyPossum,
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@mark @RD4Anarchy

You’re welcome, and thank you for your thoughtful comment here.

HeavenlyPossum,
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@jargoggles @mark

Since the vast majority of polities that have ever existed no longer exist, it’s fair to say that no conceivable system offers the guarantee of permanency. This is not some unique objection that could be levied against, say, the stateless alone.

HeavenlyPossum,
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@LanguageMan1

People lived just fine with socialism for millennia; greed is not an obstacle.

The US does not feature socialism in any way.

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