I like the full quote from Mark Twain, referring to the French Revolution and the ‘Reign of Terror’, from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court:
There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
Collective action to revolutionize political structures by force doesn’t necessarily entail going on a ‘rampage’ or just murdering your enemies summarily. The state uses force against it’s people and enemies every day. There are many forms force can take.
This reminds me of a nice Mark Twain quote I just posted a little while ago, talking about the French Revolution and the ‘Reign of Terror’:
There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
I chose those words because someone else quoted them earlier today and I thought it was relevant, it may be from ‘another time’ but the prevailing political and economic structures of today are essentially the same. Is self-defense cruel? If someone is beating someone to death, and you use force to stop that person from murdering them, is that as cruel as murder?
What system do you think they are referring to as an anarchist? Anarchism is simply opposition to hierarchies that allow control over others, such as the control capitalists have over workers by owning the means of production and political forces. The system that anarchists advance in place of that can take an unlimited number of forms.
Just one example, Democratic Confederalism. There are endless possibilities, even within the scope of ‘communism’. To think free-market capitalism is the best that can be come up with is a severe underestimation of the powers of human ingenuity.
The politicians and bureaucrats don’t know better, which is why people tell them what paths we should take as a society. Then when organizations are funded by public dollars they hire experts in the relevant fields. If the public were to take over healthcare for example, experts in healthcare policy would be hired to consult on how to overhaul the medical industry.
A socialist system doesn’t have to be state-based. Socialism can encompass anarchism, anarcho-communism and many other left ideologies besides state-communism.
We have a state now though, has thievery and violence been stopped? How many thousands are in poverty, how many are killed in global wars waged in the name of profits? There are states where theft and murder are extremely rare, and states where it is common. What is the difference between the conditions where it is common and uncommon? Is a top-down control and manipulation the only way to reduce violence?
Anarchism works all the time. It’s more than a political structure, it’s an idea about how to organize relations between people, and there already are many groups that are active that function on anarchist principles.
Any group that collects itself in the modern world as anarchist, like anarchist groups in the Spanish Civil War, are heavily repressed by state forces. Capitalist states work together to discourage anarchist ideals even more so than communism because of the possibility it has for threatening traditional power structures.
You said a state must have control to stop thievery and murder, but I’ve never heard of a state that successfully stopped those things, is what I was getting at. The point about conditions where violence is common or less common is that there are more primary factors to violence than whether or not someone will be punished by state forces for that violence. There are more effective ways to combat violence and theft than a police state.
Exactly, any massive corporation doing anything charitable is nearly always for the PR. If a company like Coca-Cola suddenly switched to all glass, even if it cost them profits, that would be incredible. If anyone running these corporations really cared about helping they would do more drastic things like that.
The structures of society are created by human will, but the structures in place and the interactions they require also shape our values as cultures. Capitalism is a system in which by owning capital, wealth and the means of production, a capitalist derives profit from the workers who are the producers using the tools and facilities owned by the capitalist. To be successful in this, or to raise yourself above the working class, you must own capital and use it to derive profit to increase your capital further, or else other capitalists will take your place in the market.
Capitalism and market based economies have only been a part of the global structure for a small minority of the total time that humans have created societies. There are thousands of years we have very little information of, making it difficult to derive what sort of social structures were in place in different societies.
In the absence of pressures like poverty and economic competition, people help each other. When someone trips in front of you, the vast majority of people will be concerned and help them up. I truly believe altruism is a core aspect of ‘human nature’ as much or more than greed.
I wonder how much this varies depending on the amount of data it would require to store the emails of a company. I know nothing about this subject, but does it occur where companies with very large email lists would forgo storing those types of emails to save data costs?
I no longer work there but in the last year I worked for a “leading global source for education materials” according to Forbes, worth 2.8 billion and I was paid minimum wage as a retail employee.
Shout out to the show Person of Interest, pretty clichéd crime/action show but gets good with AI, surveillance/police state and related themes. SLIGHT SPOILERS But basically a super intelligent AI was created in the pursuit of perfecting the surveillance state.
Unremoval of Piracy Communities
Hello World!...
"A history that prioritizes spectacular but brief violence against elites while downplaying millennia of elite violence against everyone else isn’t really history; it’s propaganda." (kolektiva.social)
LFG (lemmy.world)
Your big brain conservtive/capitalist takes will be laughed at (lemmy.world)
[OC] Save Our Home Planet. (lemmy.world)
Something has to change.
It seems like the Internet always converges on these things... (lemmy.ml)
Larion Studios forum stores your passwords in unhashed plaintext. (lemmy.world)
Larion Studios forum stores your passwords in unhashed plaintext. Don’t use a password there that you’ve used anywhere else.
TIL Minimum wage has only increased by $7.00 in 85 years in the USA.
Upon inception it was set at $0.25. It is now $7.25.
AI is fundamentally 'a surveillance technology' (techcrunch.com)