Hello Paul St John. I recently had a similar reply to yours on the original site where this is taking place. The message I am importing is enormous. It covers what you're talking about plus a few other things.
The other guy's stuff along with the things he was replying to (written by me) are in italics. Here it is:
(rand) is attaching individual rights to property rights.
That is a totally and completly justified statement.Are you familiar with the difference between possessions and property in political ideology? Property means one thing: you can horde it or abandon it while a government guards it. Property requires government protection in order to exist. Possessions are in fact owned with or without a government's validation.
This is good that we're starting out with property vs. possessions because this is the difference between fake and real. Property is fake because it requires force (government) to be recognized. Anything which requires an artifical structure (government) to back "ideas" with force is not "real". Possessions are real...
Your goods and property are an extension of you. The labors of your mind and of your hands become, by extension your property.Those are possessions. You own anything you build, anything you buy, anything you barter for as long as it is in your possession. The house you live in is not truly property. It is a possession.
The problem with property (enforced by government) is that it is offensive. A builder can horde land and guard it with the state's force until he builds tons of houses on it to sell rather than leave it free to the community to decide what to do with it. An investor can buy empty apartment complexes and charge people rent rather than people owning them and having to sell them (one by one) before they leave.
I'm not really illustrating its entire offensiveness well at this time, but the idea is that "property" leads to far too much wealth centralization. Property causes people to spend too much of their lives finding a way to pay rent or a mortgage all because someone else had more money first. Property coupled with inheritence basically turns families into rulers over populations who are not wealthy -- the working class people who have to rent from the family of heirs. The whole point is: Property is artificial. It requires a state to enforce property ownership; therefore property is part myth, part scam.
Property is an enabler of enslavement -- what anarchists call wage slavery. That's what we mean by "Property is Theft". The only people who NEED property are the people who need you to serve them by giving them money for it through rent or a mortgage, as my usual example. Plus, if everyone had "property", no one would be working 40+ hour weeks for executive capitalists in order to survive.
The novelist's book that he has spent years slaving over, is a extension of his very mind which he has put into paper. Granting rights to that book, is akin to protecting his thoughts. By the same token, the ironworker who has welded a beautiful cast iron fence, has put his sweat and blood into the creation of that object. According to Rand it as much a part of him as his arm. In our world it is impossible to take a person's arm and make it work, or peer inside someone's head and read their thoughts. Objects and property are the result of that fact. To the outside world your property becomes you.Did Ayn Rand actually categorize this as "property"? Think about all of those examples you just gave. Think about how real they actually are. These are real possessions. Think about how even if a government said "these are not yours", that would be false. It is a valid possession when a government cannot change the reality of who it belongs to. It is "property" when a government can enforce, determine or change who it artificially belongs to. Property is not real, so I think Ayn Rand either has an agenda, is attempting more capitalist brainwashing upon her audience, or she's just confused. Did she really call this stuff property? She's making a severely erroneous connection if she did.
(this) in effect applies a barrier between you and your community
That does not apply the barrier, the barrier exists already. There is no barrier between you and your community unless you built a fence or stay indoors at all times. Even if you do that, you must interact with your community at some point, at least to buy groceries. The barrier is not there in reality. The realistic barrier is only there based on how much autonomy you want in relation to how much autonomy each of your neighbors want. Capitalists want this autonomy enforced for some crazy reason. Plus, as you know, capitalism + property actually SERIOUSLY intrudes on the working class and the poverty class's autonomy. Anarchists realize this desire for autonomy exists in each one of us, so we respect others' autonomy in exchange for them respecting ours. We also protect each others' autonomy because it is a common, united interest.
Government enforcement/protection of autonomy applies too much separation between the people of a community. Rather than the community having the freedom to pursue its goals collectively, at the majority's will, government again is a centralization in which the most wealthy run the show... a vertically structured community where the lower levels know they have little or no influence, so they may as well remain separated -- separated by the lack of interest in the community, separated by lack of confidence in their peers against the upper levels, separated by court recorded land surveys, eminent domain, rent, mortgages, etc.
Each man is an end to himself. He is alone. No person has any ingrained attachment to others, aside from what the bleeding-heart doctrine has established within people. If I cut my arm, will you feel it? If I am saddened will you cry with me? No. I am as alone, hypothetically speaking, in a crowd, as I am in a prison cell. Now the possibility arises that you will try to pervert this into saying that I am an embittered and lonely person, much as people pointed fingers at Existentialists for being depressed and heartless. That is not the case.Sounds like you're still talking about autonomy, real autonomy which exists in each person's set of desires, not government enforced artificial barriers.
Regarding autonomy, one interesting thing to note without going into much detail is the difference between egoism and utilitarianism among anarchists. Egoism and utilitarianism are basically opposing principles. Anarchists who are egoists are called "individualist anarchists", while utilitarianism is a solid set of principles to illustrate the anarcho-communists. Both of these groups respect individuals' autonomy. Both groups can coexist in the same community or apart from each other. I just thought I'd import that to sorta show why we don't need artificially enforced autonomy barriers.
Objectivists see man as standing strong over the earth. Proud and tall and alive. The theories are not hollow, lonely ones. At their root they are about the empowerment of the individual.Empowerment of a few individuals over the masses is what it really is. Capitalists are always trying to come up with new schemes to make you feel like working for them is identical to working for yourself.
Consider that a capitalist's claim that your freedom does not extend beyond your freedom to think.
It is nothing of the sort. There is a jump in logic there that your freedom of thought and of choice is your only freedom. No. That is your basic freedom. From this all other freedoms derive.No, she claims outright, "That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call ?free will? is your mind?s freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom."
That's not me rewording it. That's Ayn Rand, the Antichrist herself who says that heheheh Look under the Human Nature section on this page:
http://www.aynrand.org/objectivism/essentials.html Anarchists believe human freedom is unlimited in all aspects, materially, spiritually or otherwise with the one limit being: we are not free to impose or covertly coerce others, which capitalism DOES allow.
According to an Objectivist, that is true as well. In a pure Objectivist society no one would impose themselves on others. You seem to assume that the event of capitalism imposes on others. Not true. In a free market, one trading to another their goods and services, for another's, there needs to be no coersion at all. Any person is free to fall out of the deal at any time.Anarchists are not against trade, bartering & all that. We're against hording, rent, wage slavery to survive and so on.
With the means of life being land, water, food, & shelter, to categorize those things as "property" as capitalism does, you are enabling the wealthy to artificially own any or all of that. When the wealthy are the only ones who own it, everyone else has to buy or rent it. In order to buy or rent the means of life, they must serve as a wage slave or die. That definitely qualifies as "imposing themselves on others". That's coercion by its worst definition: to bring about by force or threat
You work for your own self interests, but how are your self interests going to be satisfied if you reject altruism?
Easily. The idiology that altruism is an ideal to achieve has been perpetrated far more than anyother on this planet. But it is a hollow and artifical one.It's neither hollow nor artificial when you consider the reality of just how little altruism would be needed (from each individual) in order to have a well-sustained horizontal society. It would be altruism still within the realm of the people's pleasure to cooperate. It would not be drudgery "for the benefit of others". Drudgery is extreme overkill in an anarchist society. Drudgery is having to work on-site 8 to 12 hours a day while some boss keeps 90% of what you produce (capitalism).
Beasts in the wild do not act out of the goodness of their hearts for others. They establish themselves first, before others. It may be a brutal system, but it is a clean one.People are not beasts, so we don't need to compare ourselves to or pattern ourselves after wildlife.
Objectivism requires trade as the only method. Why limit yourself to trade/coercion? Just for the sake of greed? Just so you can needlessly separate your "property" from your community when your community would respect your "possessions" to begin with?
"It's better to give than to recieve" is told constantly and is the basic tenant of an altruist. What makes the person recieving, worthy of that gift? And if it is better to give than to recieve, why is it ok for that other person to recieve in that instance from you? The system has that basic hypocrital flaw at it's root. One must give, and one must recieve. One must be right, and one must be wrong, unless there is a person leeching on the recieving end. Which is exactly what will happen. Nature abhors a vacuum. There can not be people giving without someone taking what is given. There will always be a person picking up the recieving slack. And he will be fed by the countless people who have been told that they are just and noble for giving away their life's work. And he will laugh all the way to the hypothetical bank.Naw that's not altruism. Altruism is carried out collectively. It's not "my stuff is your stuff". It is "our stuff is our stuff, but my stuff is separate and is still my stuff". If we built it together as a community, we are altruist. It is ours because we built it; it's not one person's. If one person built it, it is his even by altruist definitions. Think of the alternative in capitalism... if "we" built it, some conglomerate or executive staff owns it and/or politicians get to control it.
If you don't like altruism, stop being so altruistic for the benefit of the ruling class. Altruism is as real as it gets. You're either gonna be altruistic horizontally or vertically. In anarchism or capitalism, either way, without altruism you're just miserable or even dead... the difference is that you die faster in capitalism. Altruism IS drudgery under capitalism, but it is pleasure in anarchism.
Once you see it in an anarchists' light, it's really hard to be "altruistic" in capitalism. It's more like "forced altruism" which is an oxymoron.
It (altruism) is simply another form or coersion which you seem so adamite about eliminating.No, what you are illustrating is slavery, not collective, real altruism.
Why is he worthy of the product of your labor more than you are?Good question. Why is the CEO worthy of 400 to 1000 times more than each worker makes? Why is the rent regime or mortgage company entitled to well over half your income? See how capitalism contradicts itself constantly?
The alternative is an economy where both partners are on an equal field. One gives in fair measure for anothers product. Tit-for-tat, the system polices itself. No one is made a martyr, no one is a leech. The system is pure, and the lives of people are justified.There's plenty of evidence in the world today to show that this cannot be done in capitalism.
Ah so Objectivism wants a government for the sole purpose of enabling you to trade your way into artificial appropriation of Earth's resources
No an Objectivist wants a government that will stop a person from raiding their house, or stopping an invading force. No more, no less."No more, no less" is also impossible in any centralized, vertical structure which has enforcement capabilities of any kind. Mixing centralization with funding and enforcement is big time lobbyist bait. You'll never have "a dictatorship of the Objectivists" as long as money exists. Keeping these vertical governments in place eternally damns you to political parties who are controlled by wealthy lobbyists. If it weren't that way, it wouldn't be vertical. The only other way is horizontal... anarchism.
Speaking of house raids, do you know much about the drug war? It's useless. It violates innocent people all the time. The drug war is the product of capitalism, enabled by centralized, vertical, unstoppable, ever-expanding government.
We can stop criminal house raids and foreign invasions on our own. I already wrote a giant message in this thread about that. I'd much rather have horizontal public militias (as sophisticated as need be) than capitalist police and military forces.
The resulting economy is in effect a free enviroment. People are free to do as they see fit with the capabilites of their mind and hands.That's only possible in anarchy.
They do not want government to redistribute wealth, but they also do not want to permit a natural form of wealth distribution.
The natural form of wealth distribution is Objectivism.Objectivism is nothing but capitalist reform. Reform is the foundation for repetition.
Nature demands that one creature is responsible for itself and itself only. Without notions of altruism, that can occur. A rabbit will not lay down and die so that a bear may eat, and by the same token a bear will not let a rabbit go so that the rabbit may live. Animals, of which humans cerainly are, respect that the other has a right to life, so long as that right does not intrude upon anothers. When it comes down to it, everything in nature will act upon it's own self interest. Humans are creatures that do not do this. They are filled with artificial notions of right and wrong. And as a result do not act in harmony with each other.Aside from repeating that "people are not beasts", I'll just say, I wonder where they get these "artificial notions of right and wrong" from? Capitalist indoctrination is sure to be a huge part of it.
Show Posts