Traditionally, the business class T-series thinkpads were always easy to take apart and replace parts. All of the used lenovo thinkpads I’ve ever owned had marked screw holes on the bottom for the keyboard, which would let me slide it out without having to remove the case or anything.

The consumer Lenovos that weren’t based on the older IBM thinkpad designs were more standard designs like you describe.

If a community refuses to stop polluting, your only options are some form of enforcement, or letting it happen. Your only response here is “It wouldn’t happen often enough to consider”, which is utopian to the point of absurdity.

I’ve responded that it could absolutely happen, I think you’re bringing up a real issue that would need to be faced, but my point of view is that it probably wouldn’t happen super frequently, which is to say, I don’t think Anarchism should be dismissed as a viable way to structure society due to not having specifically a centralized way to wield a big stick against non-cooperative or harmful communities.

I am not a Utopian. Anarchism won’t solve all our problems, and conflict will still arise. I just think it’s the best option we currently have, and will at least reduce many of the problems we face, hopefully making it easier to tackle the problems that are left and cannot be solved with Anarchism.

you have no means of conflict resolution which can stop any intransigent community from acting selfishly at the expense of other communities without going back to the question of “Enforcement”.

As @Dippy@beehaw.org elsewhere in the comments here, a regulatory body could be created, which the different communities could then join. This doesn’t entirely solve the issue if the troublesome community refuses to join or adhere to those regulations, but that body could at least collectively give the troublesome community some consequences for continued pollution.

Oh, social shaming has a good record on that, does it?

It’s something they could try, I didn’t say it would be super effective. Against the type of populace of Johnsville, it likely wouldn’t work.

And sabotage? What happens when someone gets fucking shot for sneaking around in the middle of the night … Is the sabotage lawful by the downriver community’s decision? What’s the next step then?

If we’re assuming that no other community wants to help Tableville, that Johnsville refuses to listen to the regulatory body, that the pollution is severe enough to make Tableville’s way of life downstream nonviable, and they refuse to move elsewhere, then yes; Tableville’s community may decide to opt for sabotage, which could escalate to armed conflict, such as guerrilla warfare if Tablesville is much smaller.

My point is in response to the idea of Tableville being so against additional work that doesn’t benefit them directly, they’ll avoid it even if it’s obviously hurting people. If it really just comes down to not wanting to take on more work, then it follows they’d want to avoid the extra work of fighting Tableville, especially if Tableville is telling them that they are being left no other choice than violence (to be clear, I don’t think Johnsville would actually weigh the potential hours needed to clean the water vs fighting in a meeting, that would be kind’ve absurd. I mean if they did get to that point, holy shit that place is fucked).

Considering how people tend to band closer together when they feel under attack by ‘outsiders’, even to their own material detriment? And especially within an ideology, or rather a very specific interpretation of anarchism, that rejects the notion that outsiders have the right to tell them what to do?

Would the same not also happen under a centralized government trying to force them to abide by waste water regulations? What if they saw that as an outsider force trying to impose upon them, and thus decided to militarily fight against it? This would put them in a similar situation to Slave owning states before the confederacy formed. If there were other communities who also didn’t want to clean their waste water, they could join together and rebel against that centralized authority trying to clean up all the poop water.

If instead the regulating power is an overwhelming force that would result in sure destruction, only then might they simply relent without conflict. Which, I mean yeah that solves Tableville’s problem, but under a centralized government we now have to hope that it does not corrupt at some point, which is what Anarchism is trying to avoid, as it assumes all centralized power structures will at some point become corrupt.

Even to-day we see men and women denying themselves necessaries to acquire mere trifles, to obtain some particular gratification, or some intellectual or material enjoyment.

I mentioned before that even struggling people acquire luxuries to make the grind bearable. I didn’t say they wouldn’t still want luxuries on top of having their basic need met. I agree with Kropotkin’s POV.

Sounds good ^^

To reiterate, your argument was that people in an anarchist society will, as a whole, not take on an ounce of extra work even if it means helping not poisoning their neighboring towns.

My argument was that there are social and material benefits to taking on that extra work of cleaning their waste water, and I believe most people would not feel good poisoning their neighbors unless they were extremely uneducated or sociopathic.

You believe that the only solution to that scenario is to have a hierarchical government with a big stick to force that group to clean their waste water.

I believe that most places under an Anarchist society would, on the whole, not need the stick. There may be some infrequent specific scenarios where even under Anarchism, that a settlement acts as you suggest. In those cases, especially if the harm was severe or could not be mitigated, the community(s) effected down river may opt to resort to other means to resolve that conflict, such as social shaming, or potentially even sabotage. Then that population would have to decide between the extra time and work that defense against them would require, or just clean the damn water.

Perhaps reread Chapter 9 of The Conquest Of Bread.

I don’t see how it conflicts with what I’ve been suggesting?

In short, the five or seven hours a day which each will have at his disposal, after having consecrated several hours to the production of necessities, will amply suffice to satisfy all longings for luxury however varied. Thousands of associations would undertake to supply them. What is now the privilege of an insignificant minority would be accessible to all. Luxury, ceasing to be a foolish and ostentatious display of the bourgeois class, would become an artistic pleasure.

Every one would be the happier for it. In collective work, performed with a light heart to attain a desired end, a book, a work of art, or an object of luxury, each will find an incentive, and the necessary relaxation that makes life pleasant.

In working to put an end to the division between master and slave we work for the happiness of both, for the happiness of humanity.

The entire point originally raised was that people would still desire to do less work even if they had their needs fulfilled.

Peter Kropotkin provides a good counter-argument to the idea that everyone would skimp out on doing needed work if all their basic needs were met in The Conquest of Bread, under Chapter 12: Objections.

It’s available either through a browser or as an installable PWA (progressive web app), which can be done by clicking ‘add to homescreen’ from the firefox mobile menu, or install as app under a chromium based mobile browser.

There are native mobile XMPP apps that can interact with Movim, like Monocles for Android or Monal for iPhone, but both are lagging behind in features compared to Movim, as neither can currently do group calls, screenshare, or have discord-like spaces.

Do you not see how controlling a large amount of wealth in the form of jewelry can give a person influence even in a society without formal units of account for monetary expressions of value?

It may be able to be used as a bargaining chip, but overall it would be much less valued under a society where gaining tokens of exchange isn’t tied to access to a decent life. Right now, jewelry is valued because it can then be converted to monetary units. Those units are valuable because so many are still clamoring for them to get access to those basics.

If monetary tokens could only be used for things beyond the basics, they may still have value, but you could no longer be able to exploit people nearly as hard with them.

But then you admit that personal property is not defined by its lack of deprivation of society of needed commodities, which drives us right back to square one.

No. Personal property is defined as something that an individual or family uses. Private property is any excess resource or tool that an individual or family cannot use themselves.

If John Jacobs is living in a little shack on the side of the river, and Malcolm Red is living in a palace a stone’s throw away, how is it moral for Malcolm to continue in that state of affairs?

A literal palace probably couldn’t be reasonably justified as personal property, but for simplicity’s sake, most people who already own their home would be able to keep it, even if it’s large. However, it’s likely that the palace or mansion owners would then need to maintain those themselves if they wished for it to be just their own personal property, and they would likely find it very difficult to get others to maintain it for them without sharing it in some way.

John Jacobs and the Palace owner (if they eventually found it unmaintainable on their own) would both be able to join a building collective to contribute to the construction of a more reasonable a home they could then own. They would also have access to the guaranteed basic housing available to anyone (assuming enough had been constructed by that point).

… have you ever actually lived in the USA?

You think most people wouldn’t become homeless if they spent less time working?

The issue being disputed is the idea that provision for one’s basic needs is enough to stop one from desiring more

That is not the argument I was making. People can still desire more even under an Anarchist society, the difference is that anything more they want they either have to make themselves, make it collectively under a worker cooperative, or trade with another person with something they acquired by their own means or as the fruit of a cooperative effort.

You can still create computers, build fancy chairs, make a cooperative factory to produce a desired good, etc, but you just wouldn’t be able to hang food, housing, and healthcare over somebody else to effectively force them to do that stuff for you. Under an anarchist society, you could only convince someone to work with you on something if they felt it was a democratic endeavor where they had an equal say and an equal reward as you or anyone else who helps you gets.

That ensures that no one can effectively exploit anyone else, or create a power imbalance with a hierarchy. Everyone gets access to the same baseline for a happy life, and 9 months our of the year to do with as they please, whether that be to improve their house, make jewelry, paint, write, or spend time with their friends or family, they can personally decide what they want to spend that time doing, instead of laboring all year for just those basics.

Accumulation of material wealth is extremely easy without hierarchy.

To accumulate wealth as an individual, you need other people who can help you gather or take that wealth/resources, or do so on your behalf.

So any jewelry, since it is not, realistically, used, will get you ejected from the anarchist society?

Jewelry is not an essential good to society, it’s just a bauble. Someone having a personal jewelry collection doesn’t deprive anyone else of any essential need. It would be an issue if they forcibly took someone else’s jewelry, but if they traded for it, or made it themselves, it’s just personal property, and they could reasonably collect as much of it as they want, as it is unlikely they would be able to realistically gather enough to cause a problem in society from a shortage of precious metals for some societal need.

And if there’s a shortage of hammers, does personal property no longer remain personal?

You as an individual don’t realistically need 100 or 1000 hammers. That would be hoarding. And you most certainly couldn’t individual own a large factory that made hammers (but you could collectively own it in a worker cooperative).

But a few personal hammers that you use for your own projects are your personal property, even in a hammer shortage. If you allow personal property to be confiscated for societal need, it’s little different from Marxist-Leninism.

Even if you own it and use it yourself, your usage deprives others of its use.

You are as deserving of a place to live as anyone else. You are not deserving of multiple places to potentially live if someone else is without a home. You can’t take someone else’s home that they personally use, and they can’t take a home that you personally use.

How big is a house permitted to be? How fine?

If we assume that everyone who currently lives in their existing home gets to keep it, then the style or size of a house would be determined by the people willing to build them. You could build your own house as you wish, as long as large as you can realistically construct on your own, or if you can convince a group of friends to help you build a bigger one (they may want collective ownership if they help, or they may do it as a favor to you). Otherwise you might participate in a building group that makes housing for people, like how this group in Spain operates.

I think a big issue here is that you’re operating under the assumption that humanity as a whole is incredibly selfish, uncaring, and unable to operate cooperatively without a centralized force that is able to adequately threaten people to cooperate against their natural instincts. If that is your base assumption, then you will have to conclude that Anarchism isn’t viable because it doesn’t have enough threats or sticks to keep people from reverting to some base-level of antagonism, laziness, or self interest.

Where on the other end, due to the evidence I’ve seen of how humans organized in egalitarian societies as the norm until around 8000 years ago (from compelling evidence put forward in David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything), as well as the success of the Anarchist Society in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil war, I believe that humans would demonstrate their true nature is cooperation and egalitarianism if finally provided a society that does not actively incentivize our worst traits like our current one does.

We work ourselves like dogs and normalize it because previous standards aren’t good enough. What was idyllic in 90 AD is torture in 1990 AD. And this is good! It encourages society to ever move onward, to not be satisfied with what it has.

Most people in the US are barely able to afford basic food, housing, and transportation. They are working harder now than they did in the 1970’s without any meaningful wage growth since that period, despite their actual productive capacity increasing tremendously since that time.

You really think most would choose to continue struggling with bills, or to be two paychecks away from homelessness vs. a society where all of your basic material concerns are guaranteed as a human right?

And you realize those people can choose to do whatever they want with the those 9 months of free time? They can still choose to become doctors, or engineers, or scientists, or to create the things that give meaning to their lives? They just won’t have the threat of homelessness weighing above their heads if they don’t instead choose to work for someone else to make them richer.

We are creatures with very limited lifespans, and every hour becomes precious when considered.

All the more reason to question the utility of capitalism, if only a minority are able to achieve the fruits of all the time spent doing things we’d rather not be doing, if every hour is so to be considered.

… but the reason why people are overworked is not because society ‘gives’ us too little to not work ourselves to death; it’s because people value things other than free time.

If you truly believe that, then our entire worldviews are completely incompatible. I don’t mean this as an insult, but from my perspective your judgements on why people work so hard are quite detached from reality.

But, no system is immune to bad actors and idiots.

Agreed. Though I think it would be particularly difficult for a strongman or strong personality to take hold in an Anarchist society.

If it was successfully implemented, and everyone is now receiving free housing, food, healthcare, public transport, and education all in exchange for 2 to 3 months of voluntary work (the rest being free time), I think it would be exceptionally difficult to convince that populace that actually they should actually go back to the old way where they work for him all year in exchange for some paper that would then give you access to those things which you already have for free.

I just think it would be almost impossible to put that genie back in the bottle, just as it would’ve been almost impossible for medieval kings and lords to bring back serfdom after mercantilism/capitalism was established.

The way tax laws are structured, big businesses generally pay much less taxes compared to smaller businesses. Non-compete laws are very much in favor of big business, as it prevents ex-workers from forming competitive smaller businesses in the same field.

Citizens United massively favors the interests of big businesses who can out-bribe smaller businesses, which allows bigger businesses to become monopolies to crush smaller businesses from out-competing them.

If no, then your democratic council/process has a monopoly on violence,

That would depend on how that local community collectively decides to operate. Most would likely opt for community consensus for something so serious, where an individual cannot forcibly eject someone from the community if there is not community consensus.

and the question arises what differentiates it from a state.

A state is a centralized hierarchy of power that operates in a top-down structure, where the people at the top of the hierarchy have the ultimate say on what happens to those at the bottom of the hierarchy.

Anarchism’s goal is to decentralize power and make any societal structures as horizontal as possible. A local community would have final say on things that effect that local community, and if there are any people elected by a community to participate in a larger federated structure, that elected person is able to be immediately re-callable by the community that elected them if they fail at performing the duties they were tasked with. They would also be elected as a Delegate, not a Representative.

Delegation, in contrast to representation, stresses that the purpose of the delegate is instrumental. The delegate acts like a rubber belt connecting two gears; they are simply a tool for the exchange of force and influence between two greater bodies. They are not the component that creates or directs force, but only act only to guide it. The relationship of the delegate to the organization is like one of a secretary. Naturally, delegates are often just called secretaries, or the more popular, “secretariat.” They are in a relationship where they take their direction from the whole – not where they direct the whole.

Representation is the opposite. It is a system where the representative who presents the interests of their people is in full power. The delegate is seen simply as a means for directing the ideas of one group to another. It is something that can be fulfilled by anyone The representative is someone who makes the decision of what ideas the group should have altogether. It is something that requires political parties, party elections, general elections, campaigning, and an exquisite ability to measure the honesty and integrity of the candidates.

When a society prospers or suffers, blame or praise always go to the organizing force that directed it. Within Delegation, that blame or praise goes to the common people, who must live with their mistakes, or be elevated by their willingness to change. Within Representation, that blame or praise goes to the politician, who is so far removed from the people, that whether they’re guilty or not won’t change the situation the people are in. One system focuses on the people as the guardians of their own welfare; the other focuses on a single person to be the guardians of all.

There is more to it than simply stating that the Delegate can make no decisions and stating that the Representative can make decisions. Both of these systems have developed their own institutions for encouraging either the Authoritarian or Libertarian trends as they see fit. Within Delegation, for example, a delegate can be removed at any time, for any reason and for no reason. Since they are simply the carrier of the group’s demands, it is for the group to decide who is best at any moment for this purpose. Removing a delegate, then, is like reworking the positions of the laborers in the factory – a purely technical matter.

The Representative does not have this fear, however, of “Recall.” The Representatives of nations, from Germany to Russia to the United States to France to Britain, have always plunged their people into wars, concentration camps, and forced labor – and yet, one could be assured almost, that such miserable conquests never would have started, if these were simple delegates, and not representatives, of the people.

The Representative was elected, whereas many delegates some delegates are elected and others are chosen by random ballot. At the start of one of these imperial wars, like the Boer War or any number of the Moroccan Wars, the representative had survived party elections, regional elections, and finally, a national election. Imagine if one of their voters said, “Actually, we don’t like your ideas now, and we want someone else to carry our interests to other nations, because war is not our interest.” The representative could point to a thousand courts that would stand up for them and a million soldiers with bayonets for anyone who would still disagree.

The entire point of Socialist Anarchism is to prevent the centralization of power or the hoarding of private property. Eliminating money, and thus profit incentive, is simply another tool to prevent centralization of power or the incentive to accumulate resources.

Accumulation of material wealth is only really possible with a hierarchy (as there is only so much an individual can realistically accumulate without underlings), and that hierarchy usually requires a power imbalance to form. A society with decentralized power as cornerstone makes it much harder (though not impossible) for those types of imbalances to happen.

In order to eliminate profit, you must eliminate wealth; to eliminate wealth, you must eliminate personal property, not just private property.

Personal property is classified as what an individual person or family can actively use themselves. If you begin hoarding more than you or your family can realistically use, the excess is no longer considered personal property, but private property, which may get you ejected from that community if you actively hoard under an Anarchist society.

Private property is how imbalances of power can explode from a small local problem to a bigger one.

Quoting someone who explained the difference between private and personal property:

I like to link the word “private” with “privation” or “deprivation”. Private property is easily identifiable by its effects on others, specifically, it’s deprivation. There are hundreds of thousands of hammers. Having one doesn’t deprive anyone of anything. At most only one person can use the hammer.

A house is usable by an entire family, and if I own it but don’t use it myself, my ownership deprives an entire family of its use. That scales to apartment buildings pretty easily. Then there’s farms where basically it’s impossible for one person to do all of the work on a farm or eat all of the products of a farm, but my ownership has the effect of depriving anyone the right to work there or the right to consume its products. A factory is truly impossible for one person to use, but my ownership of it allows me to deprive everyone of its products unless they meet my price demands and also allows me to deprive everyone of use of the factory to make anything at all.

Private property entails a deprivation of society of socially necessary commodities.

Personal property absolutely does not have to be eliminated, and does not contribute to profit incentive, hierarchies, or power imbalances. Only Private Property does that.

Easy. They don’t believe it. They think Tablesville is exaggerating. They think Tablesville is confusing what is causing the polluted water. They think that pollution isn’t that bad.They don’t care about Tablesville. Take your pick.

So that’s assuming that Johnsville is naturally deeply uneducated, unwilling to listen to any evidence presented, won’t test their own waste treatment output, or are majority sociopathic (lacking empathy for others), or a combination of all the above.

I could see perhaps a very insular and small religious fundamentalist town perhaps being capable of totally ignoring the problem, but any larger settlement tends to attract more education amongst the population. Our current system usually puts the sociopaths in leadership positions which can then override a community’s wishes, but under an Anarchist system it would be highly unusual that the majority care so little about others to the point of not wanting to help whatsoever.

They think that their need to spend more time with their kids in their very short and mortal lives is worth more than Tablesville’s need to reside on a very specific piece of land that Johnsonville can’t even see the point in inhabiting.

In an Anarchist society, people would only really need to contribute about 2 to 3 months of work per year to have a functioning society that is able to provide everyone’s basic needs for free. That would leave 10 to 9 months out of the year as completely free time for everyone to do with as they please, which would make it even more difficult to justify not spending a little extra time to treat your waste water properly for the sake not actively poisoning others.

If Johnsonville is in a good position and largely helps, rather than is helped, while Tablesville is a barren little scrap of swamp, what need does Johnsonville have of Tablesville’s good will?

If they become so uncooperative and hostile to their neighbors, than they could receive negative perception or treatment from other federating communities near them, which would probably go a long way to encouraging them to just treat their waste water better.

Bruh, people will put other lives at risk to end a job - not a capitalist job, but everything from volunteer work to self-improvement - a fucking hour early.

People are desperate to stop working an hour early because our current society gives them virtually no free time to enjoy life, to rest properly, or to not worry about needing to make ends meat just to survive and not become homeless. Most of their waking hours they are exploited with the majority of their effort going to the benefit of a few undeserving folk.

Would they be so desperate not to help if they were now afforded most of the year to themselves? I think many would find meaning in helping out in some of their spare time, since it is not longer exploitative or coerced.

You don’t need capitalism to provide a motive for overcoming goodwill and empathy.

It’s doing the heavily lifting for most of society.

A democratic socialist state has the obligation to enforce the laws made by common agreement upon all members of the polity, even those that disagree.

A society of self governing communes could still federate with each other, and with that federation agree to some standards to become a part of that federation, such as adequate waste water treatment.

Yes. The difference between our current system and Anarchism is that it is much, much harder to create a system that does not benefit the everyone, since the people who are usually negatively effected by the whims of corporations or centralized power would now have the ability to directly have a say in how their local community decides on rules and how to enforce them.

There would also be no wealthy elites who can influence things, as there would be no mechanism or ability for an individual to accumulate vast resources or wealth.

Like who, comes up with those? Who will explain those rules to others? And most importantly, who will make sure others follow them properly?

Rules are decided on at community-level. That could mean a village comes together to collectively decide on rules for their community, which the entire village can participate in. Once everyone is happy with the rules, and with the methods of enforcement chosen, the entire village will be familiar with them, and can then explain those rules to others. They may also federate with other villages and agree to follow a larger set of rules or standards.

You can see a form of this style of society in practice in Rojava (there’s also this video for an even more in-depth look at how different aspects of Rojava function).

A community can collectively decide on rules, and collectively decide how to enforce those rules. If someone is harming the community and will not stop when asked, the community can decide to forcibly eject that person from the community.

Profit chasing would absolutrly exist in a system without restriction and would be 1000x worse

Yes, but what you’re describing is Anarcho-capitalism, or Right-wing Libertarianism, not Anarchism. Anarchists do have restrictions, and there would be no profit incentive, as money could be entirely eliminated if they wished, and instead operate on a Gift economy. This concept is wonderfully explored in Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, if you’d like to see how such a system could operate in practice.