HeavenlyPossumA thread of threads.
A survey of some examples of capitalist sabotage, through destruction of production, of various economic sectors:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
The other day, I mentioned the deliberate destruction of food by supermarkets as an example of capitalism’s sabotage of production to create artificial scarcity and enforce profits. Some people rightfully asked about liability and risk stemming from eating expired food. So, to explain why I don’t think that’s a salient factor in their decision-making, I thought I’d do a quick survey of other sectors to see if they, too, sabotage production in this manner. https://apnews.com/article/portland-storms-oregon-4eebd2cd2f1b9f798667994bc871a647 1/5
A survey of some evidence that, contrary to neoclassical models, capitalists collude with each other to raise prices all the time.
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
In neoclassical doctrine, economic competition will inevitably lower prices, like gravity acting inexorably on mass. If some firms are selling at a particular price, the story goes, a competitor will attempt to sell at a lower price—such as by accepting lower margins or, ideally, innovating new processes and technologies to lower production costs—to capture market share and thus profits from competitors. Those original firms will then have to lower *their* prices or lose all their sales to the new, lower-price competitor. Everyone wins, thanks to those lower prices and new innovations. Well, everyone except for those capitalists, who must constantly lower prices in order to avoid being competed out of the market. 1/10
A discussion about the nature of wealth and poverty, and why the poor of today are not “richer” than ancient kings and historical titans of industry.
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
This is an incredibly common and incredibly stupid take on wealth: that people today have so much more “stuff” than people in the past, so we—even the poorest among us—are richer than ancient kings and titans of industry. 1/9 https://twitter.com/cafreiman/status/1635430623958401024
A brief look at capitalism’s role in social crises:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
A lot of people buy alcohol, but a small number of people buy A LOT of alcohol. This is pretty common in a number of industries: sellers rely on a small number of hyper-consumers for the majority of their revenue. Alcoholism is good for alcohol industry profits. 1/7 https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/22/problem-drinkers-alcohol-industry-most-sales-figures-reveal
An investigation into money, credit, and the social role of landlords:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
It is a common capitalist trope that landlords “provide” housing to people. They are, the story goes, doing everyone a service! And we all know the appropriate response: it’s actually the tenant who provides the landlord with housing, by paying capital costs (like the landlord’s mortgage, which was borrowed to pay the people who actually built the home) in their rent payments. Landlords don’t provide, they *hoard,* collecting tolls by restricting access to housing. Some of the cleverer ideologues might argue: the landlords play an important role by paying the capital costs up front. Without landlords to rent out housing incrementally, everyone would have to save up enough capital to buy outright, and most of us would be too poor to buy a house outright. So it’s worth asking: why do landlords have access to all that capital up front, and can spend it all at once, while others don’t and have to pay for it a bit at a time? 1/11
On the enclosure of our roads and car dependency as capitalist rent:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
In 2010, Raquel Nelson attempted to cross a street in Marietta, Georgia, with her three children. Rather than walking a third of a mile away to the nearest crosswalk and then another third of a mile to her home, she attempted to directly cross. While she was doing so, Jerry Guy, who was driving a car while intoxicated, struck and killed Nelson’s four-years-old son A.J. Guy was convicted of hit-and-run and sentenced to six months in prison. Nelson—who was not driving a car—was convicted of vehicular homicide and sentenced to 36 months in prison. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2011/07/14/mother-convicted-of-vehicular-homicide-for-crossing-street-with-children/ 1/9
A thread on art as an enclosed commons.
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
If you spend time with kids, one thing you’ll quickly notice is how incredibly creative they are. They churn out art at prolific rates, and seek out opportunities to create it as a form of play. I have two kids and have often struggled with figuring out storage solutions for their art, all of which is precious to me. I was a kid once too, and I have memories of making lots of art as a kid. But, at some point, I just sort of stopped. This isn’t true for everyone, of course; some people go on to become professional artists, while others keep it up as a hobby. I suspect, though, that most people reading this will share my experience: like most imaginative play, we leave the daily production of art behind in our childhoods. Isn’t that strange? 1/8
A quick look at the Irish rundale system for managing common property:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
The dominant pattern of Irish community organization used to be something called the “rundale.” The rundale was a system for managing and dividing up village agricultural land according to need. The word derives from two Gaelic words—“roinn,” or division, and “daíl,” a meeting or assembly. The rundale, then, was “the meeting to divide up the land.” Each peasant village, or clachan, owned land in common. Some of it was used as common grazing land for cows and other livestock; some was used for gardens by individual households, and some was used as crop land to grow oats, rye, barley, and potatoes. Periodically—I presume each year—the clachan would meet in a daíl to redistribute crop land among households. 1/5
On the imposition of markets and the demolition of society:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
We live in what Karl Polanyi called a "market society," in which commercial market exchanges have almost completely supplanted non-market exchange. Gone are the great pillars of pre-capitalist economies: domestic household production, reciprocity, and redistribution. In their place are buying and selling. To access virtually any resource, including basic sustenance, we must first sell (usually ourselves). 1/15
On labor and leisure as false distinctions, and the joy of just being alive.
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
I have a cat that freaking loves to chase the laser pointer dot. Just bonkers for it. Up and down the stairs, around corners, leaping many times his height to try to catch it. In doing so, he mimics the act of hunting, on which cats naturally depend for their food. So when he plays at hunting with the laser pointer, does this imply he experiences that as work? Or do cats experience hunting as play? 1/11
An exploration of self-harm as a crime of the rich against the rest of us:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 image · Content warning: Self-harm, capitalism
Freedom doesn’t mean much without the freedom to escape, to leave, to opt out entirely:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
Yesterday, I posted an excerpt from a speech by Abraham Lincoln from 1859 in which he critically compared wage labor—especially life-long wage labor with no hope of ever graduating to independent production—to chattel slavery. As hard as it is to imagine today, there was once a robust public debate in the US in which words like “capital” and “labor” and “wage slavery” were explicitly used. Today, the slightest whiff of these would have you accused of communism and brayed off the public stage. Our discourse has gotten *more* restricted over time. 1/10
The simplicity and simplification of presidential speech is a good proxy for how much coercive control the state has over us:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
Here’s a brief excerpt from one of Joe Biden’s state of the union addresses (bear with me I’m going somewhere with this): “Inflation has been a global problem because of the pandemic that disrupted supply chains and Putin’s war that disrupted energy and food supplies. But we’re better positioned than any country on Earth. We have more to do, but here at home, inflation is coming down. Here at home, gas prices are down $1.50 a gallon since their peak. Food inflation is coming down. Inflation has fallen every month for the last six months while take home pay has gone up. Additionally, over the last two years, a record 10 million Americans applied to start a new small business. Every time somebody starts a small business, it’s an act of hope. And the Vice President will continue her work to ensure more small businesses can access capital…” Just…really boring boilerplate, right? A handful of data, some platitudes, very simple language. Blech. 1/8
On Thorstein Veblen and property as sabotage:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
There was a stretch when Elon Musk took over twitter and started charging for blue checks (lmao) and some of his sycophants started talking about “Veblen goods.” A Veblen good is something for which demand *increases* as price increases, in contact to the neoclassical orthodoxy that demand decreases axiomatically with price. Veblen goods are things that rich people buy to signal their wealth and status. Jewelry, fancy watches, yachts, Ivy League degrees. Things that cost many thousands or millions of dollars. The idea that an $8 verification on twitter would ever be a status symbol for the rich was fucking ludicrous. 1/8
On violence and inequality:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
Regardless of Zach Snyder’s deeply fascist, deeply homoerotic, deeply ahistorical film 300, classical Spartan society was very shitty. Sparta was a highly militarized, nearly-totalitarian slave state. A tiny hereditary elite devoted itself almost entirely to the production and export of violence, living off the labor of a large servile population, the helots. Helots lived a bit like medieval serfs: they lived in their own villages, farmed their own fields, raised their own families. But each was owned by some member of the Spartan elite and owed a regular tribute of agricultural production to that owner, freeing the Spartan elites from manual labor and permitting them to focus on learning how to hurt people. 1/9
An exploration of some of the ways nonstate societies deter power-seeking and aggression:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
How, I’ve been asked, do people in nonstate societies prevent bad guys from taking over? It’s a bit of question begging: it presumes that the state (bad guys who have taken over) is required to prevent other bad guys from taking over. But let’s take a serious look at *some* of the scholarship on how and why nonstate societies aren’t quite as vulnerable to this as people seem to commonly assume. This is neither exhaustive nor comprehensive. 1/
Do people really like living under state rule?
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
Someone said to me “I think most people believe states in general make their lives better, or at least can given the right leadership, and so like them.” I’m not even sure how you could confirm this. Maybe a poll? And even then, I’m not sure how you could trust the results, considering that most people alive are subject to state power, have never known an alternative, and have been taught since birth by the press, schools, and popular entertainment that there is no alternative to the status quo. https://www.motherjones.com/media/2022/12/paw-patrol-police-copaganda-children-peppa-pig/ 1/6
Archeologists should probably stop being “surprised” every time they find evidence for women hunters and leaders in the past.
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
This study is making the rounds: “Through the analysis of sexually dimorphic amelogenin peptides in tooth enamel, we establish that the most socially prominent person of the Iberian Copper Age (c. 3200–2200 BC) was not male, as previously thought, but female. The analysis of this woman, discovered in 2008 at Valencina, Spain, reveals that she was a leading social figure at a time where no male attained a remotely comparable social position.” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-36368-x 1/6
Some quick thoughts on private property, common property, and the state:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
Let’s say you and your family live in a home together. None of you can exclude the others from that home. It is your *common property.* You can, however, exclude other people. Let’s say that someone tries to burgle your home one night but your family works together to chase them off. You’ve engaged in *self-defense* of your common property. Imagine that, one day, your neighbor sets up a toll booth outside your home and demands you pay him a toll to get inside. If you don’t pay, he’ll hurt you if you try to get inside. Your neighbor is establishing *private property* over your home. He uses violence to exclude you—not in self-defense, but in order to extract rents from you. He doesn’t actually *want* to exclude you, because then he wouldn’t get paid. He just wants to use the *threat* of exclusion to extort you. This is a critical distinction between common and private property. Common property owners might exclude aggressors from their property in order to maintain the status quo of equal access. One cannot use exclusion from common property to extract rents, though—if you’re a member of the community of owners, no other owner can exclude you from the property, and thus no one can extract rents via exclusion. 1/4
On landlording and sabotage:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
A journalist recently noticed something strange about the New York City housing market. During the peak of the COVID crisis in NYC, the city lost close to seven percent of its population as people either died or moved away. The real estate vacancy rate was close to twenty-five percent. Since then, according to an array of parties with considerable interest in rents, the population of NYC has rebounded. As a result, housing is once again scarce and rents have soared. Except…there’s no actual indication that the city’s population has actually rebounded, and certainly not by enough to explain soaring rental prices. After all, the city’s population had already started to decline before 2020. 1/7 https://www.curbed.com/2023/01/nyc-real-estate-covid-more-apartments-higher-rent.html
What people mean when they ask about healthcare under anarchism:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
When people find out I’m an anarchist, a question I frequently get is “how would people with chronic illnesses like diabetes access treatment under anarchism?” There are a lot of unspoken assumptions packed into that question that I thought I’d explore a bit. The first is, of course, that people with chronic illnesses *can* access treatment in the context of capitalist modernity. Not everyone can! Many people in the world of states and capital suffer and die from lack of access to treatment. Not because the treatment is unavailable, but because access is mediated through capitalist gatekeeping. People, today, right now, in allegedly rich countries, die because they cannot afford insulin. For them, the question of “but how would we access insulin under anarchism” is moot. Many others access it only at the cost of medical debt and other forms of indenture. https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/rise-patients-dying-rationing-insulin-u-n-tries-new-solution-n1083816 #capitalism #anarchism #diabetes #diabetic #disability #disabled #ableism #chronicillness 1/7
Was the past as bad as you’ve been taught to believe it was?
Probably not!
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
We’re doing the medieval peasant discourse again. We’re doing it! Ok. Whenever we talk about “feudalism” or “the Middle Ages” or “medieval” we’re generalizing about millions of people in diverse communities and circumstances that spanned centuries. I’m necessarily going to be making huge generalizations about past societies that paper over important distinctions. That said, we can still interrogate ways in which a medieval European peasant might have experienced life in ways that weren’t as bad as we popularly imagine them to have been, or might even have been better than comparable experiences people today have. 1/many
A little roundup of some of the ways police play a “necessary role” in society.
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
@chairman_meh @[email protected] “Cops are a necessary function of society.” The necessary function: torturing random people. https://chicagopolicetorturearchive.com
Our personal decisions about buying things aren’t going to save us from climate catastrophe, and often aren’t even ours to make freely:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
Someone popped into my mentions yesterday and tried to argue that we can and should respond to the climate catastrophe by changing our consumption patterns—reducing, reusing, and recycling; carpooling; buying from artisans rather than big firms; etc. Undoubtedly, many of us could improve the way we buy and use stuff and thereby nibble away at the margins of the climate problem. But no, we are not going to solve problems like “sequential heat waves that kill at least tens of thousands of people every summer” by recycling our glass bottles. What I really want to talk about, though, is the idea that our pattern of purchases and use is somehow a neutral and organic expression of our preferences that we can just adjust on a whim. It’s not. 1/ #ClimateChange #ClimateEmergency #ClimateCrisis #ClimateCatastrophe
Theft doesn’t exist in every society:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
In “The Giving Environment: Another Perspective on the Economic System of Gatherer-Hunters,” the #anthropologist Nurit Bird-David described an interesting social institution among the Nayaka, a forager society in southern India. Bird-David calls this “demand sharing.” “Nayaka give to each other, request from each other, expect to get what they ask for, and feel obliged to give what they are asked for. They do not give resources to each other in a calculated, foresighted fashion, with a view to receiving something in return, nor do they make claims for debts.” 1/ #Anthropology #DemandSharing #HunterGatherers
A few quick thoughts on intellectual property as capitalist rentierism:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
Abolishing capitalist property means getting rid of #copyright too.
“Tribal” societies were often more civilized than capitalist modernity is:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
At least 50,000 years ago, people in Eastern Africa started making ostrich eggshell beads, the oldest known fully manufacture bead. People in the region still make these beads from ostrich eggshells, an unfathomable continuity with the distant past. Sometime between 33,000 years and 50,000 years ago, people in Southern Africa started making nearly identical beads from ostrich eggshells, suggesting some kind of social exchange—of beads, of raw materials, or, most likely, of ideas and techniques, across a distance of more than 3,000 kilometers. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04227-2 1/
Some thoughts on collapse:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
When I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, I watched Star Trek: The Next Generation. I soaked up the vibes of a high-tech, utopian future. I internalized the trajectory we were on was good, that we had reached the End of History. There might be a few bumps on the road, but the direction was inevitable and the destination was inexorable. It turns out that the fastest a human being has ever traveled was 39,897 kilometers per hour. That was the crew of the Apollo 10 mission returning to earth. That happened on 26 May, 1969. Fifty-four years ago. We peaked more than half a century ago. 1/of several
Capitalism and feudalism aren’t as different as capitalists would like us to believe:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
@[email protected] wrote a great essay title “Autoenshittification” that made the rounds recently, and I highly recommend it. I disagree with Corey on one point, though. In it, he writes “Rather, capitalism has given way to feudalism.” Corey’s argument goes something like this: Before capitalism, feudal lords extracted parasitic rents from their tenants. Early capitalists hated this and wanted to produce stuff dynamically. They wanted “active income” instead of “passive income.” So they got rid of feudal rents and relied instead on capital ownership to “organize the economy and take the lion's share of its returns.” But now we’ve gone back to the old ways. “People don't aspire to create value – they aspire to capture it.” And I can’t help but think Corey really missed the mark on capital ownership, which is every bit as rentier as any feudal estate. https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/
Neither violent conflict nor peaceful cooperation are inevitable products of human nature, but rather deliberate social choices we can make:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
In his book “Debt,” David Graeber relayed an anecdote about the Gunwinggu people of Western Amhem Land in Australia, observed by anthropologist Ronald Berndt in the 1940s. Two groups of strangers encountered each other and negotiated with each other to barter over trade goods—in this case, spears made by one group and cloth owned by the other. Conflict between these strangers was of course possible, and the situation was undoubtedly tense. The ritual they engaged in began with a dance, followed by singing, followed by a kind of formalized bullying—women from each side insult and hit the men from the other. 1/ #thread
Some introductory thoughts on the state, hierarchy, and statelessness:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
Thousands of years ago, people were experimenting with all sorts of complex, dense social forms. Over 11,000 years ago, at Göbekli Tepe in what is now Turkey, people were erecting some of the world’s first monumental stone architecture. 11,000 years ago at Jericho, in Palestine, people were settling in one of the world’s first cities. At Çatalhöyük, also in Turkey, people 9,000 years ago built a complicated, honeycomb-like city. 5 to 6,000 years ago, people in what is now Ukraine built sprawling settlements. People were experimenting with urban life, with agriculture, with writing and all sorts of new phenomena. Then, a little more than 5,000 years ago, in what is now southern Iraq, something entirely new began to emerge in some of the Sumerian cities of Mesopotamia: the state. 1/#thread https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruk_period
The City Without the State—complex urban infrastructure at the Pingliantai Neolithic site:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 image About 4,000 years ago, at a site called Pingliangtai in eastern China, Neolithic people had to deal with frequent and unpredictable flooding, driven by summer monsoon rains. These stone age people responded very resourcefully: they built a wall around their community, surrounded by a moat to capture rain water; they dug ditches around their homes; and, most impressive, they built an elaborate system of ceramic drainage pipes, made of interconnected clay segments. And they did it all without any indication of state authority. 1/ #thread
The City Without the State—political revolution and social leveling at the Taosi Neolithic site:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
In my last thread, I talked about Pingliangtai, an archeological site in China where people living in the Neolithic built and maintained a complex drainage system, including China’s oldest ceramic pipes, without any evidence of state hierarchy. Today, I wanted to discuss another site from the same archeological culture, Taosi. 1/ #thread https://kolektiva.social/@HeavenlyPossum/111079324770420934
Violence is not inherent to freeing ourselves from oppression:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
My correspondent below makes the argument that any effort by an exploited class to end its exploitation will necessarily be violent. People will want revenge. It will be bloody. The poor will rise up against the rich and murder them; all we have to do is look at an historical example like, say, the Romanovs of Russia to see that this is true. But is it? https://phpc.social/@chrastecky/111136122961496278 1/ #thread
The state is not necessary for preventing violent aggression, such as murder, and indeed may be worse for that purpose than its absence:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 image In their book “The Dawn of Everything,” David Graeber and David Wengrow provide multiple accounts by early European settler colonists of the indigenous societies they encountered in the woodlands of northeastern North America. Over and over, these Europeans noted that these societies were well and truly stateless, lacking rulers, laws, courts, police, prisons, or anything like what they were used to in Europe. They quote one Jesuit, writing in 1644 about the Wendat: “I do not believe that there is any people on earth freer than they, and less able to allow the subjection of their wills to any power whatever – so much so that Fathers here have no control over their children, or Captains over their subjects, or the Laws of the country over any of them, except in so far as each is pleased to submit to them. There is no punishment which is inflicted on the guilty, and no criminal who is not sure that his life and property are in no danger…” 1/ #thread
A survey of some of the ways in which people sustain egalitarian societies against would-be tyrants:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
A very, very common question I’ve seen when discussing anarchism goes something like this: “Once people are free of state violence and hierarchy, how can they just stop some bad actor from taking over?” The assumption is that people who are free from coercive hierarchies are powerless to act in their own self defense, alone or in cooperation with each other. (The question is usually accompanied by some invocation of the dreaded “war lord” whom the questioner assumes will inevitably overrun a nonstate or non-hierarchical community.) So, I thought I would take a crack at answering this as comprehensively as I can! 1/ #thread
Thread: the social construction of altruism and egoism.
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
In my town, there is a medieval hospital—not for treating the sick, but for housing the indigent. It was built in the 15th century and it still serves to house the poor. A wealthy merchant endowed it. I don’t know why he did it, though. Maybe he was motivated by genuine concern for the poor. Maybe he was hoping to save his immortal soul through charitable works. Maybe he wanted to impress a romantic interest or embarrass a rival merchant. Maybe it was a combination of these things or something else entirely. Human motivation is, despite what you’ve undoubtedly heard, enormously complex, multifaceted, and often very opaque (even for ourselves and our own motivation). The fact remains that this merchant did something I’ve been told is impossible, could never happen: he did something for nothing. 1/
Andrew"And I can’t help but think Corey really missed the mark on capital ownership, which is every bit as rentier as any feudal estate."
I agree
teledyn 𓂀teledyn 𓂀 (@[email protected])
@[email protected] "How dare you steal what I've rightfully stolen from the guy who cowardly stole it previously!" — human history in a nutshell 😔 https://youtu.be/iVqQosyOpg4?si=mRAeRbsgEhaStHZE
Sorry wut
Folks been stealin' from folks as long as there's been folks to steal from. Capitalists, feudalists, monarchies, ain't nothin' new.
That clip is not the vehicle to use to make an argument like that
Actually I snarfed that comment from the comments on that video, but whatever. Ymmv
It’s just that the video is all about justifying genocidal settler colonialism on the grounds that people in the past might have used violence.
That wasn't my reading at all. It read like the Trojan wars all over again. As he says, possibly ironically, "for no less nobler a cause".
Try as we might, and we've been trying for several millennia, we haven't yet found a way to obsolese the habit.
Except that in this clip, one side represents the arguments of a settler colonial state actively engaged in genocidal expropriation on a continental scale and the other doesn’t.
It’s something of a false equivalence to suggest that this represents a case of one side being indignant that the other side is stealing what the first side already stole.
Air Quotes ComedianAs a person who works as a nurse under capitalism I just assume that in an anarchist society I'd probably spend about 20-30 hours a week providing nursing for whoever wants it.
Considering how little we pay nurses now, under capitalism, for this critical service…
@HeavenlyPossum I'm reasonably comfortable on what I get paid but I'm never going to be able to retire.
What pisses me off is that my colleagues ( 'unskilled' my fucking arse) aren't properly compensated for the hard work they do - not even close.
(moved)Galbinus Caeli 🌯@HeavenlyPossum real archeologists aren't. Biblical Archeologists and people who think Indiana Jones is a documentary might be.
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