Excrubulent

Okay, I appreciate you saying you're interested, I've found that's a useful filter to find good conversations, and I've always found this particular topic very frustrating to talk about. Hierarchical realism - the idea that there is no alternative to hierarchy - is incredibly pernicious. People seem to have a hard time questioning it.

So as to the assumptions:

That's when you have an organised force opposing them, which doesn't need to deal with internal disputes the way an anarchistic force would need to.

You have drawn the dichotomy between "organised" and "anarchistic". This is such an entrenched misunderstanding that you can explain it plain as day to people and it's like they don't even hear it.

Anarchy requires far more organisation than hierarchy. In fact the classic anarchy symbol of a circle A means "anarchy is order". Anarchy isn't chaos, it is the absence of hierarchies of domination.

And internal conflicts happen within established hierarchies, all the time. You see this in strikes and labour activism. They're a much bigger problem in hierarchies because the bosses can't acknowledge or deal with them. They don't know what to do when the "do as I say" lever stops working.

In fact, something that tends to get left out of typical histories is the military revolt that played a significant role in ending the US's invasion of Vietnam.

So the idea that organisation is a feature of a dominance hierarchy is wrong. Domination is used when organisation can't be. Anarchies have to be supremely organised to exist in the first place, and it doesn't magically stop working because conflict occurs. The thing about organisation and consensus building is that it is actually far more robust than dominance hierarchies.

Hierarachy is strong but fragile, because it is necessarily arrayed in tension against itself like the molecules of a Prince Rupert's drop. It seems impossibly hard and unassailable, but disrupt the right part and it explodes. It has no flexibility.

There would be no reason to believe hierarchy were better in any respect except that it is currently the dominant world order. That wasn't always the case and it seems to have a hard expiration date. The question is whether we can destroy it before it destroys the ecology.

So that's the spiel about assumptions. Sorry I went so long, I didn't have time to edit it down. I could go on about how hierarchy has embedded itself so deep in all our psyches, but I'll spare you that.

So as to the question about internal criminal activity, which seems like the best way to put it. You're asking about any "involuntary or enforced way of preventing them from exploiting society". Well, there really isn't one.

Like I said, voluntary prison is a method for dealing with individuals whose behaviour necessitates such treatment. Organised groups are a different situation, so the idea just doesn't apply.

When I said the answer was violence, I was trying to make that point.

As for how to stop such organisations from metastasising, I don't have any examples of such a thing actually happening, so I don't know, except to point you to societies where it just... doesn't come up. Rojava uses a reconciliation process to prevent things like murder from turning into full-on blood fueds, which used to be a problem in the previous society, but that's a little different.

Apart from telling you that the problem just doesn't appear to arise in the first place - and I could talk about "leveling mechanisms" here, but that's getting pretty deep in the weeds - I can point you to an example where an indigenous horizontalist society excised criminal and state elements that were deeply embedded. It's not the same, but I hope it'll be illustrative.

It was Cheran, Mexico, where politicians, cops, illegal loggers and drug cartels were merged into a fucking rat king of corruption that was smothering the town. Murders were a daily occurrence, plus all the other problems you would imagine in that scenario.

An underground network of women organised and rose up against them. On the day it happened, there was so much popular support that they were able to evict the entire oppressive structure at once without undue violence. Once they'd clearly won, some young men wanted to start lynching the captives, but the women who'd run the day stopped them and told them to simply let them go.

The town still runs on horizontal organisation principles, it keeps out the state completely. No cops, no politicians, no corporations, no drug cartels. The murder rate dropped off a cliff.

Now, that's not the end of the story. Let's imagine you're in a town with that history, and you want to start a crime syndicate. How do you do it? Who do you talk to? How long do you think it takes before you're dragged in front of a town meeting to be dealt with? Would it even occur to you to try?

I suspect this is why the problem you brought up doesn't have any examples.

I have both owned and rented, and there is no comparison. Owning is a million times better. Not having a landlord that can just raise the rent or kick you out whenever they feel like it, plus the freedom to do whatever you want with the place, plus the almost certainty that your house is appreciating and you're not constantly throwing massive amounts of money in the fucking toilet.

There is nothing about owning a house that even approaches the cost of renting unless you don't know how to do even basic DIY shit and you don't have any friends who can.

There are so many assumptions in what you said that I don't know where to start dealing with them. You've packed so many common misconceptions in such a short comment it's kind of overwhelming. Let me know if you want to hear what I have to say, it's a lot of work if you're just trying to tell me I'm wrong.

But just quickly:

It's well documented that decentralised autonomous cells are extremely effective. Special forces take a large portion of their tactics from guerilla fighters that operate the same way.

There are examples of decentralised societies today that are incredibly effective fighters. Rojava and the Zapatistas are two excellent examples, plus numerous small regions that have held off vastly superior state forces without centralised leadership. Community self defense is a powerful method that works even within overarching state oppression.

Yeah, she's the very epitome of born sexy yesterday. She literally strips in front of them because she's too naive to understand modesty like a toddler.

Right, so the quantum field model is designed to solve the assymetry paradox, but it's just unconfirmed speculation. It's a hypothesis, barely a theory, not a law. It's discussed honestly for the most part, unlike the way orthodox economics discusses supply & demand. Just because you can find something roughly analogous in a hard science doesn't make the problem substantively the same.

And do you really think supply & demand isn't taught as a law? We hear the phrase "the law of supply & demand" bandied about whenever anyone does any pop-economics. Do you seriously not encounter that?

And you actually think housing speculation doesn't happen on a wide scale? Like... what? Again, have you heard people talk about economics before? You said you understood a good amount of it, but you're denying that housing speculation is real?

https://www.urban.com.au/expert-insights/property-speculation-to-continue-boom-but-will-a-bust-follow
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26457/w26457.pdf

The 2008 recession was literally a housing speculation bubble. I really don't understand where you get off saying speculation isn't a thing.

Also, in Canada, your tradespeople are swamped but there are about 1.3 million empty houses.

Here's a quote that confirms what I just told you:

Even more disturbing are the figures comparing vacant homes to the homeless population of a given country. While Canada ranks lower on this list at 13, it is still not a ranking that we should be proud of at all. It would take just 9% of the over 1.3 million vacant homes in Canada to give every homeless person in the country a place to live.

Like sure, there might be a housing shortage in the market but not in reality. In reality it's a hoarding problem. We know from the pandemic that governments could house everyone if they simply made it a policy priority, but they don't.

And as for the "lab politics" of economics, I'm glad you've been able to see that issue, and I think that's a good term for it. The lab politics doesn't come from nowhere. Sciences advance in a way that is exploitable by capital. When someone discovers a new kind of technology usually it can be turned into a profit. Often the details are obscured by charlatans looking to make a quick buck - see any tech hype cycle for an example of this - but interfering with the scientific process is usually going to be detrimental to the aims of capitalists.

Social sciences are a little different, usually capital can kind of just ignore the policies proposed by social scientists, even if they can cause minor problems for them.

For economics though, when someone like Marx comes along and points out that capitalists are stealing value from the working class and that working class can unite to overthrow their oppressors because in reality those oppressors create nothing and they depend on us, then that has real teeth. That causes problems, of the revolutionary variety. The ruling class has to respond to that, so they will use their influence to fund think tanks, sponsor economics departments that are friendly to them and torpedo institutions that say things they don't like.

Richard Wolff talks about this:

Sure. I’m a product of the elite top of the American university system. I went to Harvard as an undergraduate. Then I went to Stanford in California to get my master’s degree. And then I went to Yale to get my Ph.D. So, by the normal standards of this profession, I’m the elite product of these institutions.

I was always struck that as I went through these schools, studying history, politics, economics, sociology—the things that intrigued me—I was never required to read one word of Karl Marx. And I remember telling that to my father, who looked in stunned disbelief at the very possibility that an educated person going to such august universities would not be required to at least read people who are critical of the society, simply as a notion of proper education.

https://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/25/watch_extended_interview_with_economist_richard_wolff_on_how_marxism_influences_his_work

Just like kings used to, they have raised up their own class of priests to proclaim to the commoners that their power and wealth is justified and good, and we should all bow to their blessed interpretation of the mystical movements of the market. That's why they don't do science, and they quibble on the minutiae of the interpretations of long-dead texts, just like the priesthood did, because they can't work in the realm of science, because it would destroy their entire project.

Anarchism isn't non-violent. To assume anti-oppression and pacifism are one and the same is to make the same mistake Engels makes in On Authority.

Authority is violent, but violence is not authority.

Edit: on this topic I'd recommend Anark's video on Power, where he explains that anarchism seeks to create a horizontal power structure. It is not the absence of power structures, it displaces oppressive power structures with egalitarian ones.

A lot of people in this thread knee-jerk hating on the nails don't realise that it's just culturally-entrenched misogyny. More people need a "Don't be an asshat because not everybody is like you" guard rail.

Okay, so you're talking about an antisocial group that is attempting to prefigure a society of domination within the existing anarchist society.

Well, assuming they've established themselves as a continuing threat, the short answer is: violence. We use defensive violence against their encroachment until their group crumbles, which shouldn't be hard since by definition most of their members are living a way worse life than they would without their oppressors, and they're surrounded by examples of people living free.

Hierarchies are fragile. Also, in order to exist, an anarchist society must already solve the problem of how to keep hierarchies from forming.

The voluntary prison idea is a way of dealing with individuals, not organised groups. That's an entirely different situation.

I'm not really sure what question you're asking. What situation specifically are you talking about? Are we dealing with capitalism from the inside or from the outside? Are you asking about a theory of change, or about how an anarchist region deals with its state neighbours?

These all have answers, similar but different, but I don't really want to spend the effort answering every permutation of the question I could imagine without knowing what you mean.

My point about convexity being a handily-written escape clause was not to say that economists invented it out of whole-cloth, it's to point out that it's tautological. It's basically saying, "Prices follow our law in all of the cases where they follow our law." So it's not a law then, is it? It's an observation of extremely limited utility that just so happens to provide a justifying narrative: "our law says the market will be stable," when we see the absolute opposite in many places.

And if you feel like you've seen it in person, then again the data should exist. Again I'd say if you're saying this is an example of the effect, without seeing the data, then you're admitting out loud that you are just confirming your own preconcieved ideas rather than seeing any real evidence. These are statements of faith, not science. Orthodox economists would be proud.

I'm not sure what you mean about the sombrero potential only being partially observed. It is a principle only, and you could observe it fully by simply making a sombrero shape and putting a ball in the middle and observing how it falls multiple times. That's literally what the concept entails. It's analogous to supply & demand in that the graphs are merely illustrative and it is only applicable in very specific situations. The difference is that supply & demand is presented as a foundational and ubiquitous law to high-school students, whereas the sombrero potential is presented honestly.

As for the "don't try to time the market" advice, if you're right about that then someone should tell all the real estate speculators that are leaving extremely expensive real estate empty because they can't rent it out and don't want to sell at a low price. It would help our housing shortage immensely. Either they don't exist, or your story about that isn't complete.

I don't need you to look into Australia - price cycles and boom-bust cycles are well-documented economic phenomena. I linked an Australian case because I'm familiar with it.

And to the extent that other sciences engage in politics over actual science, they are also being unscientific. However I've never heard of a scientific discipline where there is an "orthodox" school, except in economics. It's the orthodox school that I have a problem with. Supply & demand is just emblematic of that issue.

And further to that we have voluntary prison. Essentially, if you're guilty of something and want to have the benefits of this society, you need to agree to a loss of some privileges - in whatever form is necessary. If you won't, well good luck surviving when nobody will trade with you or let you live near them.

If you won't agree to that, you can leave, but the full details of your trial and conviction are public and your decision to leave will be broadcast, so our neighbours know to look out for you.

That means trials will need to be fair, and seen to be fair, or else it will be easy to ask for asylum. Prisoners need to be fairly treated, or they will try their luck in a nearby place.

But if someone chooses to leave and is just trying to run from the consequences of their actions, well they'll have a hard time being accepted anywhere else.

Authority is usually understood by anarchists as a component of hierarchy. I'd be interested to hear your definition that doesn't make it hierarchical.

And there are ways of enforcing rules that don't require authority, like diffuse sanctions, essentially community-based enforcement.

There's a whole school of anti-carceral justice thought that deals with this.