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/
Thread: the myth of labor unions as cartels.
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
Let’s talk a little about labor unions and wages. It is a shibboleth on the right that labor unions are very bad. But it’s hard for them to come right out and admit that they hate workers, so they’ve concocted an elaborate explanation for why unions are bad. Unions, you see, are like cartels or even monopolies. By setting aside competition and agreeing to Bartali collectively, workers in unions are interfering with the efficient functioning of the market, stealing from employers, and hurting non-union workers. https://mises.org/wire/how-unions-reduce-real-wages 1/5
Thread: the centralizing nature of private property.
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
Let’s imagine that you’re a farmer. You work a little plot of land. You own this land as what we would call “private property.” That means it has a single owner (you) and it’s unencumbered (no one else has a claim on it). You can exclude whomever you want from it. It’s yours to do with as you please, including giving it away or selling it. Your claim is permanent and you own it outright (you don’t owe anyone anything for it). Luckily for you, you grow enough food on this little plot to take care of yourself, just like all your neighbors do on their plots. So far, so good, right? 1/8
Thread: wage labor, slavery, and private property.
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
Frederick Douglass was born an enslaved person in 1817 and freed himself in 1838, after 21 years of slavery. For a time after escaping, Douglas worked for wages as a laborer. In a speech in 1883, Douglas—someone who had personally experienced both antebellum chattel slavery and wage labor—had this to say about the relationship between the two phenomena: “Experience demonstrates that there may be a wages of slavery only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other.” It’s hard to argue with an authority like that. In his speech, Douglas explained why wage labor is so similar to chattel slavery: “The man who has it in his power to say to a man you must work the land for me, for such wages as I choose to give, has a power of slavery over him as real, if not as complete, as he who compels toil under the lash. All that a man hath will he give for his life.” https://omeka.coloredconventions.org/items/show/554 1/6
Thread: on living the good life on the cheap, and the theft of happiness by the rich.
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
If you’re like me and suffer from depression and its close cousin anxiety, you’re probably familiar with many of the commonly recommended home remedies: - spending time with friends - spending time outside in nature - getting enough sleep - physical exercise - meditation - dancing - talking to people about your feelings And so on. You get the idea. Something interesting about this list is that none of these remedies are intrinsically expensive. They might be luxuries now in our capitalist society, but there’s nothing *intrinsically* out of reach for most people. 1/9
Thread: on the immense price we pay for capitalist modernity:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
The Price of Utopia - a thread It has been 54 years since 1970. Life is certainly different today than it was in 1970. Personal computers and smart phones, for one, are ubiquitous now. But would daily life for many people around the world, but especially in the capitalist core of North America and Europe, be all that unrecognizable? If we looked back a similar span of time from 1970, we’d find ourselves in 1916. I’d venture to guess that someone in 1916 would be more overwhelmed by the changes apparent by 1970, than a person from 1970 would be by 2024. The mass adoption of the personal automobile and recreational air travel; space travel and atomic physics; televisions and telephones; birth control and antibiotics—it feels, on some level, that things changed much more and faster and then…slowed down. 1/8
Thread: The Spread of Agriculture and the Rise of the State
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
Thread: the spread of agriculture and the rise of the state. You have probably heard some variation of this argument: “Humans are bad in some way—violent, rapacious, hierarchical, etc—because bad social structures outcompete good social structures.” Violent societies outfight and conquer peaceful societies. Agricultural societies outbreed and swamp non-agricultural societies. Hierarchical societies mobilize more labor and resources and bludgeon egalitarian societies. It’s a sort of folk-Game Theory argument that’s quite popular in certain misanthropic circles, especially among people who enjoy feeling holier-than-thou without explicitly resorting to racist myths or social Darwinism. 1/12
Thread: The Bronze Age Collapse and Lessons for Today
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
The Bronze Age Collapse: A Thread About 4,000 years ago, something new began to emerge on the world stage: a complex system of interconnected states in the Eastern Mediterranean, Southwest Asia, and neighboring regions. This was the Bronze Age World of the Mycenaeans, the Hittites, the Minoans, the Babylonians and Egyptians and Assyrians. When you read about King Tut in Egypt, or Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War, or the Labyrinth of the Minotaur at Knossos, this is the era you’re reading about. Sophisticated, literate states dominated a large part of the world. They traded extensively with each other. They exchanged ambassadors and engaged in international diplomacy. Like French in the early modern period, they used Akkadian as a diplomatic and cultural lingua franca. They built monumental architecture and recorded extensive bureaucratic records and literature. They administered economies from centralized palace institutions. They imported tin from as far away as what is now Afghanistan and were in contact with the distant Indus Valley Civilization. About 3,200 years ago, this world collapsed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse 1/9
Thread: What Is The State?
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
Thread: What Is The State? I thought it would be a good idea to explain what I mean by “the state,” because quite a few people seem confused by this. Thought it is lengthy, I don’t mean for this to be a definitive statement, and I’m sure plenty of anarchists will disagree with some or many of my points. I also don’t mean for this to be a comprehensive discourse on state-ness, but rather a general statement about my personal perspective. 1/13
Thread: The History and Archeology of Care
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
Perhaps you have heard (or even believe) some or all of the elements of the following story about the past: "Life in the past was crude and hard. People could not afford mercy or charity. People in primitive societies would leave the sick and weak behind to die, and even the ancient Greeks killed disabled infants through exposure." I have frequently encountered this set of ideas, in various permutations. It shows up all over the internet in popular historical accounts: "Infanticide was a disturbingly common act in the ancient world, but in Sparta this practice was organized and managed by the state. All Spartan infants were brought before a council of inspectors and examined for physical defects, and those who weren't up to standards were left to die...If a Spartan baby was judged to be unfit for its future duty as a soldier, it was most likely abandoned on a nearby hillside. Left alone, the child would either die of exposure or be rescued and adopted by strangers." It is also quite wrong. https://www.history.com/news/8-reasons-it-wasnt-easy-being-spartan 1/9
Thread: Prices, Inflation, and Power
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
Here’s how we know inflation is not “an increase in the money supply” or even a *function* of an increase in the money supply: Inflation is differential. That’s it. That’s all we need to know. The “inflation rate” is a statistical artifact. It averages the changing prices of *some* goods and services to produce a single number, when in reality some prices go up, some go down, and some stay the same. If inflation were an effect of “more dollars chasing the same number of goods and services,* it would not be differential. That’s it. #Inflation #MoneySupply
Thread: Joseph Tainter and the Collapse of Complex Societies
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
Thread: Joseph Tainter, Complexity, and Collapse I have mentioned Joseph Tainter and his theory of societal collapse a few times, so I thought it would be worth providing a bit more of an explanation of his thought. Tainter, an anthropologist, published “The Collapse of Complex Societies” in 1988. I don’t agree with every argument he makes, but he does provide an immensely useful conceptual framework that helps make sense of everything from Jevon’s Paradox to the bloat in the US legal code to plateauing global agricultural yields. I’ll be referring to his book throughout this thread, but I’m not going to bother with lots of quotes this time. It is an immensely clunky text; Tainter’s strength is not in breezy writing. I’ll also be summarizing like mad, so keep that in mind as you read. 1/12
Thread: Anarchism and Leadership
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
Thread: Anarchism and Leadership Perhaps you have encountered one or both of these related ideas: - That every society inevitably has leaders of some kind, or - That every leader exercises command, so that - No truly egalitarian society without hierarchy of command is likely or even impossible. I have frequently seen these arguments deployed in an effort to invalidate anarchism. A summary would go something like this: “anarchism is impossible, or at least we have no evidence that anarchism could be possible, because even the most primitive tribe has chiefs or elders, and these leaders issue commands that must be obeyed.” I thought it would be worth unpacking this a bit. 1/12
Thread: a quick and dirty treatment on wealth as the power to command, and poverty as the condition of being subject to command
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
Bill Gates is very wealthy. Bill Gates owns nearly 250,000 acres of farmland in the US—the largest private owner of farmland in the country. But what does it mean to say that Gates “has” that land? He doesn’t occupy that land himself. He doesn’t farm it or even guard it himself. It is not “in his possession” in any meaningful sense. What Gates has is a claim to the land—he can use it or sell it as he pleases—and, more importantly, a claim to the labor or people who do use that land productively. They have to give him, the owner, a share of the value of whatever they produce on “his” land.
Thread: inequality is the product of deliberate choice, not a natural outgrowth of differences between people.
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
An argument that has been made to me, more than once, is that inequality—in the sense of unequal power and access to resources—is a mechanical product of inequality between people—in the sense of capabilities and skills. And this one really sticks in my craw, both because of its misanthropic defeatism and because it is empirically false. We know that this is not how human societies function!
Thread: the US and the threat of civil war.
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
Many people in the US grew up seeing maps of the US civil war that depicted a sharp and clear boundary between the Confederacy and the Union. These maps, of course, paper over lots of historical nuance, everything from the federal occupation of Maryland to Kentucky’s internal civil war to the existence of southern Unionist insurgents to the participation of Indian Territory, but they do convey a real historical truth: The US civil war was fought between two polities that were internally cohesive, claimed specific and defined territories, and whic fielded coherent conventional militaries against each other. 1/ https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/union-confederacy/
Thread: Late Stage Capitalism and the Global Decline in Electoral Politics
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
In July 2024, the UK Labour Party won a sweeping electoral victory, claiming 411 of 650 seats in parliament and ending 14 years of Conservative Party governance. A year later, Prime Minister Keir Starmer was polled as the least popular prime minister on record and Labour was on track to lose the next general election. While some of this, surely, can be attributed to the uniquely anti-charisma of Starmer, an empty suit’s empty suit, I suspect there’s something else going on. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/09/27/starmer-least-popular-uk-prime-minister-poll/ 1/10
Thread: Late Stage Capitalism and the Global Rise in Scamming
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 image Do you remember NFTs? I remember NFTs. They exploded onto the scene in 2020 and were *everywhere* in the public discourse. At their peak in 2021, there were something like $25 billion in NFT sales globally. There were NFT Super Bowl ads. Jimmy Fallon had Paris Hilton on his show to awkwardly shill for NFTs. And then, by 2022, 2023 at the latest, the bubble had burst and NFT market had lost up to 99% of its value. Blessedly, I never have to think about those fucking Bored Apes ever again. I remember thinking, when NFTs first appeared, that they were so obviously a scam, but also a vague sense of surprise that such an obvious scam was proliferating while we were still living through the previous blockchain-related scam, cryptocurrency. And since the NFT bubble burst, we moved on absurdly quickly to the next tech scam-bubble, AI. 1/