Replying to TheOneWithAReallyLongName

Corporations would simply form their own states. They'd buy small armies and if libre labor poses an actual threat to their profits, they'd be removed. Even if you ignore that inevitability, economies of scale suggest at least the biggest businesses would be able to compete quite well.

Unless you're prepared to be a farmer, you're going to need to buy food, so you're going to *need* to sell your labor to survive, so individual laborers have to deal with the power imbalance of needing food immediately, compared to a business owner capable of hiring you clearly having extra money on hand to weather a shortfall until you cave out of hunger. There's an inherent power imbalance in the worker-employer relationship, and the absence of a state won't fix that.
Avatar
Low Information Voter 1y ago

You're thinking good thoughts.

The societies we speak of lasted thousands of years, and attempts at doing all of those Statist things were done. And nearly all failed. You really need a critical mass of monopolies to become self-sustaining, if your victims are able to flee OR resist.

And now we know more about the "failure states" and how to spot them. And we can engineer technology to distribute power further than ever before.

Books I recommend:

"Seeing, Like a State"

"Against The Grain: a prehistory of the earliest States"

"Debt: the first 5000 years"

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

4a
TheOneWithAReallyLongName 1y ago

What? We've had a practically unbroken chain of authoritarian state societies going back like 6,000 years or more. Some of them failed, sure, but always to be consumed by another state, never again to form an anarchic community for any meaningful length of time on a historical scale. If there's a critical mass of scale, we've already blown well past it. It's practically demanded by the sheer scale of work required to maintain society. It's the only way we know how to organize ourselves at scale.

We can develop tech to change our power structures, but for better or for worse, I would not brand the ones we have as failures. They've survived without any real threat to their fundamental structure for thousands of years, only ever seeing one state fall to another. It's incredibly difficult to scale without centralizing, which is why it took thousands of years and the advent of networked computers to just decentralize the money.