“Burn the Bread Book” is a complete atrocity of an essay and I’m just gonna get straight to the point by starting with the most noteworthy factors that essentially tear it to shreds. For lack of confusion I suggest reading it first. With that out of the way, here we go:
CURRENT industry, one built on fossil fuels rather than green sources, results in massive avoidable waste because little to nothing is directly given away for free without charity of crumbs AKA a tax lowering scam, in fact enough is produced to feed 1.5 earth populations and yet so much is thrown out while, as a result, 20 or so million people die from poverty every single year, many of whom being literal child slaves in the global south. This is a distribution problem just as much if not more than a production one.
Yes, automation — provided it’s powered by genuinely clean (not elon musk’s methods) renewable energy, of course — will indeed be helpful, not sure why he mockingly glosses over it other than his not so subtle implication that he is a primitivist, in which case I’m not sure why he even uploaded this text to the big bad internet instead of scribble it down on a cave somewhere — oh wait, I know why! It’s because having mass reach thanks to technological innovations is quite helpful after all, isn’t it?
The lovely author shockingly enough makes a good point and correctly calls out “anarcho” capitalists for not understanding how money hoarding leads to hierarchically abusable positions of authority and power over others, but for some reason doesn’t take his conclusion far enough to understand how money as a concept should be abolished altogether instead of having separate communities trade with each other — meaning they would be competing, meaning they would be compelled to destroy one another, meaning we have the potential to go back to the process of tribes conquering and enslaving other tribes (or at least the most ruthless ones successfully doing so, which means the result being the most ruthless ones always comes out on top... sounds familiar?) which got us into this present day mess called class society in the first place — that said, I actually am for the ability of different groups to freely disassociate because the alternative is a bureaucracy forcing everyone to stick together, I just think that by default we should aim to voluntarily do so as much as possible by practicing bottom-up consensus decision-making and federalism.
I’m not quite sure where he has gotten the idea that a collective effort of chopping down trees = bad but individuals doing so (for purposes such as lighting fires preventing them from freezing to death during winter time and cooking their food, presumably) separately = acceptable? Same goes for the idea of bakers lobbying the anti bureaucratic, revocably delegated and consensus mandated council with... baguettes, I guess? Except hold on, wait a minute, even those are now free. Speaking of, the “freeloader” talking point the author brings up is debunked partially with the fact that laziness is capitalist propaganda to hide the real problem: the alienation of the proletariat from their labor. Lastly, I have no idea why the author seems to assume that the average person has (or even will have, if he is now poor but will be granted access to higher standards of living conditions) the appetite of Tarrare, where if given the opportunity would just do nothing but eat “gourmet bread” all day in a society where there is no reason to hoard because everything has been made accessible, in a post artificial scarcity system one will naturally not want to sabotage in order to keep enjoying said accessibility. If that can be communicated when raising the next generation alongside of course automation, the supposed issue claimed here will be no more: “when other people are tasked with growing your food, they will take shortcuts because the food isn’t going into their own mouths or the mouths of their loved ones.” except if you just make sure they are educated to not be stupid, then person A will quickly realize that by going to person B, it goes to the same person B who produces other food he eats or other items he uses and it’s all part of the same interconnected supply line/s.
You don’t need infinite resources in order to feed everyone, you just have to calculate the average consumption rate of every specific type of X and then produce mildly above that, while at the same time maintaining the option to rapidly increase it in case of emergencies causing demand to spike.
Some more specific examples of noteworthy idiocy and/or intellectual dishonesty:
no one is going to spend their life doing gruelling manual labor and then just give everything they produce away to some random stranger who shows up at the communal store with a dumpster truck and says “I need your community’s entire monthly output of goods today, so load it up”
Unless of course, they’re from a community that has made a mutual aid agreement with yours to share, because it goes both ways and is therefore mutually beneficial. Again I ask: why would anyone hoard in a decommodified society? You’d literally be shooting yourself in the foot for no good reason, by crippling the stocks of people who are already willing to just give you anything you would ever want on a regular basis with no ulterior motive. Sure people make short sighted stupid decisions NOW — but that’s just the cultural extension of capital’s logic, not “human nature” set in stone. A successful revolution must make social progress too.
Kropotkin might insist we’ll all be happy toiling away all day to make this consumerist shit just to give it away to random strangers, but he was a privileged scholar who never had to work a day in his life, so what do you expect?
How disgusting. This is either unbelievably ignorant or purposefully misleading AKA willfully ignorant. Kropotkin may have been born into a privileged family but he quickly gave all of that up in favor of being a biologist, author and geographer. He and his family often lived in poverty. Contemporary accounts (including his daughter Alexandra’s memoirs) describe their household in Bromley, near London, as modest and frequently short on money. He often gave away speaking fees, royalties, or portions of income to comrades, prisoners, or movement funds. In exile circles, Kropotkin was known for living simply and supporting struggling anarchists whenever possible, but these were small sums rather than major donations. Imagine undergoing all of that and then still having tankie level lies spread about you, by a fellow ‘anarchist’ no less.
The only red anarchist tendency that made a modicum of practical sense in my mind was anarcho-collectivism, because at least the workers would receive the direct value of their labor hours instead of having external bodies decide how much value / worth to assign to them as a person.
...and if you actually read Kropotkin who directly addressed its flaws, you would have quickly found out precisely why that tendency died off and was replaced by anarchist communism.
There are lots of factors to take into consideration when deciding someone’s “needs”, like how far they live from work, how far they live from the store, how many calories they burn doing the labor they do, the size of their family, their dietary restrictions, disabilities they might have, their particular metabolism, how many parties they throw, how many friends they have and thus might invite to the parties, their religious and cultural practices, the size of their house, the size of their garden, the type of insulation their house has and how quickly it loses heat, the fuel efficiency of their car... I could list hundreds more things but I’ll stop myself.
deep breath ...polls.
If a computer does it, the programmer will have biases.
Yeah, and if those are communist biases then the goal of equity might very well be fulfilled. If I managed to make even ChatGPT agree with me about communism, an AI by a corporation, then I doubt this is as impossible as you make it sound.
If you’re going to spend your life toiling in a factory or farm to produce goods for other people, would you really want a bureaucrat or a committee or even a direct voter body deciding how much you deserve for that labor, while giving someone who does the same job (or a much easier job) more than you because of potentially biased reasons?
Except for the fact that everyone being biased is precisely why the consensus of all aims and will continue aiming to satisfy everybody’s desires.
Creating a police force, even if it’s formed of volunteers, even if they were elected, even if they make decisions collectively, even if their uniforms are red and black, even if the officers placed on duty are regularly rotated, is authoritarian by any definition. There are no anarchist cops. An “anarchist cop” couldn’t be a bigger oxymoron.
While I certainly am no a fan of a labeling them as anything resembling a “people’s” cops, I can’t help but be confused at the suggestion that delegated and revocable peacekeepers (as this person later mockingly puts them while defining authority in as overly encompassing and therefore meaningless way Engels did) there to de-escalate forms of victimization like domestic abuse, are ‘authoritarian’. Just imagine how such an interaction would play out in the purity testing author’s ideal society: “Excuse me, sadist torturing a child? Can you please stop? I certainly wouldn’t wanna force you to, as that would be authoritarian after all. If you disagree, feel free to continue, at least I shall not exert authority on you, meaning I’m allowing your actual authoritarianism to keep overpowering your innocent victim.” or does he actually believe that this task should only be left up to vigilants, who just so happen to luckily be in the right place at the right time?
Hilariously enough, yes:
here’s an example of direct action: me punching a logger who is cutting down my favorite tree. This action is completely removed from structural systems of authority because I have no authority or structural power behind me. There’s nothing legitimizing my use of force or giving me a monopoly on violence. My use of force doesn’t extend beyond my own two fists. Since assault is illegal, and his logging is legal, the logger has the full authority of the law behind him, so any action I take to oppose that authority is punching up. It’s fighting to curve a gross power imbalance. It’s anarchy.
And there you have it folks: anarchy can only be practiced through a lack of efficiency, apparently. Keep in mind that this very author made fun of calls to individual action and personal responsibility like “go vegan” to solve mass scale problems, earlier in this very essay no less.
Some ancoms will no doubt unironically reply to this piece with reasoning that just amounts to “no, actually, anarcho-communist industry will be a utopia because Kropotkin said so”. They’ll quote a bunch of literature to me that is nothing but empty promises by long-dead European philosophers for industrial egalitarianism.
Wanna know what is actually utopian? Pretending like this one anprim is capable of either convincing or punching his way to every one of the millions of lumberjacks out there. Yeah, good luck with that pal. But also, instead of all that, can you just answer me this: why hate large scale coordination? Do you really seriously believe that the very concept in and of itself necessarily destroys the environment? The author just sort of keeps promising that we should trust him on it but never provides a single valid, legitimate reason for how that is supposedly the case. If according to this person, human nature tends to be so flawed, why not systemically implement problem solving mechanisms that unlike the status quo will emphasize the importance of accountability to rather than separation from, the masses?
Even if minority groups are involved in the police force, the majority group will still oppress their groups.
Weird how we are seeing the exact polar opposite happen in Rojava’s militias and committees, aren’t we? If they’re the same as a state then how come the SDF are the ones welcoming them and protecting them from the actually bigoted new Syrian regime? Funny how that works huh, very odd...
Authoritarian behavior will only ever be repeated if society is structured around authoritarian institutions like industrialism and democracy. Both Marx and Kropotkin’s communism are centred around these institutions because their ideologies require that people be controlled by bureaucracy. Whether it be decentralized democratic bureaucracy or centralized party bureaucracy is irrelevant. The result is the same: Authority and control.
OK so, real quick, the person reading this — look up what the word bureaucracy actually means to understand why this individual(ist) is misusing it in a way that is completely devoid of meaning. I don’t know about you, but most definitions I found seem to emphasize the lack of accountability, rather than the simple act of choosing anyone to fill a specific role in an organization or voluntarily listening to experts on any topic in particular.
It’s why every time industrial communism has been attempted, it has simply been manifested as a perverse collective-capitalism with even more centralized power than regular-flavor capitalism.
Actually, it was because the bolsheviks lied to and betrayed everyone including their allies, the peasants and even the proletariat until it was too late, whereas the RIAU did not. Then the bols proceeded to co-opt every other revolution by having it so that only the puppet governments funded by their newly established superpower could stand a chance and everyone else got the CNT-FAI backstabbing treatment. Or if I was a primitivist I guess I would ignore all of that historical context for the sake of just spouting out “durr hurr, industry bad”.
Allow me to quote the ‘industrial fetishist’ Kropotkin from his accursed bread book that this fine person has definitely read:
Take for example a peasant commune, no matter where, even in France, where the Jacobins have, done their best to destroy all communal usage. If the commune possesses woods and copses, then, so long as there is plenty of wood for all, every one can take as much as he wants, without other let or hindrance than the public opinion of his neighbours. As to the timber-trees, which are always scarce, they have to be carefully apportioned. The same with the communal pasture land; while there is enough and to spare, no limit is put to what the cattle of each homestead may consume, nor to the number of beasts grazing upon the pastures. Grazing grounds are not divided, nor is fodder doled out, unless there is scarcity. All the Swiss communes, and many of those in France and Germany too, wherever there is communal pasture land, practice this system. And in the countries of Eastern Europe, where there are great forests and no scarcity of land, you find the peasants felling the trees as they need them, and cultivating as much of the soil as they require, without any thought of limiting each man’s share of timber or of land. But the timber will be divided, and the land parcelled out, to each household according to its needs, as soon as either becomes scarce, as is already the case in Russia. In a word, the system is this: no stint or limit to what the community possesses in abundance, but equal sharing and dividing of those commodities which are scarce or apt to run short. Of the three hundred and fifty millions who inhabit Europe, two hundred millions still follow this system of natural Communism.
I don’t even know where ziq has gotten the idea that anarcho-communism, a movement that unlike most currents of marxism is focused less on fetishizing industry and more on the elimination of currency/markets/commodity production/monetary value... which leads me to wonder if he has ever heard of the Zapatistas, an indigenous libertarian socialist society that have arguably lived up to anarcho-communism’s standards more than revolutionary Spain under the CNT-FAI and even Makhnovtchina / the free territories of Ukraine (not sure if either name was ever official?) despite not being outright anarchists themselves — and who have managed to consistently coordinate quite a lot, avoid using money internally as much as possible (internally meaning it still has to be utilized for external trade, in order to account for shortages) and aren’t quite fond of pollution either. Not to mention that the EZLN have been inspired by magonism, known as Mexican anarcho-communism and named after the ancom Magon brothers it was advocated by. Their leader Marcos has been openly welcome to anarchists while not so welcome to vanguard parties, according to his articles posted on this website. One really has to imagine how stupid anyone must be to compare THIS to stalin or China ethnically cleansing native minorities... not to mention that the rhetoric of the public good being the same as the “public” sector, which isn’t actually controlled by said public — plays right into the hands of the capitalist (and state capitalist) ruling class. The reason why some of us believe the needs of the many come before the needs of the few (while still aiming to avoid the tyranny of the majority) is precisely because we value the freedom of the individual. But since the collective is at the end of the day an assortment of individuals and if we believe in a certain sense of equality — then logically the freedom of 5 individuals is greater in importance than that of 1. That being said, unless you are a certain factory owner writing a strawman, this of course does not apply if the relevant context is that the 5 are bigots and want to lynch the other 1, because they are putting their ‘freedom’ to make one dominating decision that strips the freedom of the other 1 to do anything in general, over said general freedom. Then again, judging by the article “Marcos Loves Modernization” by none other than Ted Kaczynski, I have a feeling like I already know the answer regarding his thoughts on them...
Communism is even more adamant in this “the will of the majority is paramount” shtick, going as far as to declare the industrial-worker class as the only voice that matters, with everyone needing to become part of the worker class in order to abolish class differences. This logic is why the USSR, China and other communist experiments forced collectivization on self-sufficient indigenous peoples and then slaughtered them when they inevitably resisted. If people won’t consent to being displaced from their ancestral lands to work on the industrial farms and factories that fuel the destruction of their homes, they’re branded “kulaks” and “counter-revolutionaries” and “reactionaries” and are systemically genocided, usually by destroying their food sources.
Now this is partially true but applies only to marxist communists, even then in spite of often ignored quotes by Marx himself strangely enough. Again, is this person apparently not aware of how the Ukrainian anarcho-communist black army was primarily a peasant movement? They were among the ones falsely accused of such things! This person pretends like Kropotkin’s promises were empty and yet with the actions of people like Makhno and now Marcos, we can see that they were anything but that, we can see who the REAL liar here is.
Why would thoroughly domesticated people used to all the comforts of destructive industrial civilization suddenly decide to forgo those comforts because of democracy?
Because, genius, to even get to that capitalism has to deteriorate enough to radicalize them towards organizing into a revolutionary society.
Even if we wake up one morning and marketing, consumer culture and wealth are all done away with, we still have generations of indoctrination in authoritarian behavior to contend with.
If only even Marx wrote about getting rid of the specter of bourgeois society, huh?
Communism expects everyone to be altruistic.
Speaking of Marx, his response to Max Stirner comes to mind here:
Communists do not oppose egoism to selflessness or selflessness to egoism, nor do they express this contradiction theoretically either in its sentimental or in its highflown ideological form; they rather demonstrate its material source, with which it disappears of itself. The Communists do not preach morality at all. They do not put to people the moral demand: love one another, do not be egoists, etc.; on the contrary, they are very well aware that egoism, just as much selflessness, is in definite circumstances a necessary form of the self-assertion of individuals. Hence, the Communists by no means want to do away with the “private individual” for the sake of the “general”, selfless man. That is a statement of the imagination. Communist theoreticians, the only Communists who have time to devote to the study of history, are distinguished precisely by the fact that they alone have discovered that throughout history the “general interest” is created by individuals who are defined as “private persons”. They know that this contradiction is only a seeming one because one side of it, what is called the “general interest”, is constantly being produced by the other side, private interest, ...
Final quote from ziq:
Mutual aid is a great thing, but it needs to be earned.
Do you think people practicing it right now in Sudan just patiently waited to make friends with everyone in the network before they could eat and, you know... not starve?
In a technologically developed society that aims to give everyone in the world equal access to consumer goods, industry does not increase; it decreases. This is not a marvel movie and you are not Thanos, as much as you may want to be. Right now, only a few tens of the total percentage of the world’s workforce (let alone population as a whole) provides essential goods and aren’t just focused on managing money and private business while serving those who own the most of it.
Hyperindividualism is not the solution to fighting authority, it’s simply a skin-deep re-brand of authority. A sparkly new paint job. There’s a reason so many lifestylists strive to “justify” not organizing against authority. They don’t actually care about reaching for anarchy.