It may be worthwhile to find common ground with libertarians?

We get into a lot of pissing fights with libertarians. But when I word things in a certain way with libertarian and ancap colleagues, it is interesting how much I can get away with without revealing my powerlevel as a socialist.

I was ballsy enough to even use words like "bourgeoisie" and "workers' ownership of the means of production." Libertarians basically acknowledge that the system is rigged against the common man. They acknowledge that the economy is going to collapse. I said something like "the workers should seize the means of production when the economy collapses. After all these companies want taxpayer money right?" and no one called me out on that.

The difference is that they seem to think that everything will be alright if they downsized government or got rid of government completely. They acknowledge that the wealthy elite are actively working to use the government as a vehicle of violence and oppression against the working-class.

But they think that the problem is that the government allows the bourgeois to push their agenda. They don't think the problem is the bourgeois themselves. They think that so as long as the bourgeois can't manipulate the government to do their bidding, that everything will be fine. Yet aren't many libertarians in favor of the Citizens United decision which gives the bourgeoisie unlimited ability to bribe politicians?

Admittedly I do feel like I am held down by the government. And feel like I would be more successful if the government got out of my way. But the bourgeois don't actually want the government to get out of my way. They are the ones who are responsible for the government imposing so many regulations on the self-employed (I don't have employees). The bourgeois want you to be their bitch. They want you to be a wage cuck. They don't want you to be free. They are mortal enemies.

I can't support an economic system that would allow the bourgeois to have free reign to do whatever the fuck they want. Libertarians seem to think that perfect capitalism will prevent mass unemployment, lead to higher wages, better benefits, more people starting their own businesses, etc. You don't think the bourgeois are going to do everything in their power to maintain status quo or actively make life even worse for the working-class?

Hell even now (I used to be a libertarian a long time ago. lol) if I listen to Peter Schiff, WeAreChange or whomever else, etc. (Stefan Molyneux too sometimes. Though his content has been getting a lot worse in recent years. lol) they make a lot of valid points about how the economy is going to collapse, we can't sustain ourselves with high unemployment and low wages and how the elite are actively rigging the system.

Peter Schiff is anti-public education. Yet he agrees that the cost of college tuition is so high that people are not going to want to pay for it anymore because college students are not getting enough value for their money. He says the beautiful thing about capitalism is that if you don't deliver value for people's money, you will be punished by the invisible hand of the market. People will stop going to college until colleges improve the value of education or lower the price.

They just feel that the solution is less government regulation and voluntaryism, not abolishing private property.

In fact WeAreChange did a video with a libertarian friend of theirs who builds mini-homes for homeless people in Orange County, CA. And he talked about how the government told him to knock it off because it was "unsafe". Stop building mini-homes for homeless people. Because apparently sleeping on the street in the rain or cold is safer than sleeping in a mini-home in a vacant lot. I have to admit that when you see a libertarian actually go out there and build mini-houses for the homeless, I feel bad about all the times that I have made fun of libertarians. lol. Some libertarians are actually not assholes. lol. Though are most libertarians like that? Probably not. lol.

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The meme in that post is hilarious. But it highlights the central problem with the left. We're not going to convert libertarians to our way of thinking by ridiculing them. Even if they are wrong, if you snarkily point out a contradiction in their logic, they're going to be even more defensive. I would point out the contradiction. But I would not portray them as fedora-wearing neckbeard caricatures. Whether you like it or not, these people are part of the working-class and we can't win without popular support.

I make it a case to talk frequently with them about how the system is rigged to screw people over. Meanwhile faux libertarians like the Tea Party are shifting the narrative towards Obamacare and welfare because they are being funded by bourgeois like the Koch Bros and the Koch Bros are perfectly fine with the government serving their agenda.

Libertarians become Libertarians, Donald Trump supporters become Donald Trump supporters, etc. because they feel resentment. They are not "winning." They feel the system is screwing them over. Liberals and leftists snarkily ridiculing them is making things even worse.

Seeing angry mobs of Donald Trump supporters and angry mobs of Bernie Sanders supporters gives me hope. People being pissed off is a good thing. I have more respect for Donald Trump supporters and libertarians than smug liberal baby boomers like Bill Maher who are content with the status quo. If Donald Trump fucks over the country, Bernie Sanders or a younger successor is going to win in 2020.

t. Poorly disguised propertarian

I actually think Libertarians are the easiest to convert. By far the hardest problem with talking to normies is they don't actually want to anything to change. They want the system to remain as it is, just with small changes.

Libertarians recognize the whole system is fucked. They've effectively already been radicalized. This makes them receptive to the Left's message. Libertarians generally want to feel informed, so I've had a lot of success introducing them to certain Leftist literature that is critical of the US government and so on but also makes critiques of Capitalism. In this way you can slowly make cracks in their ideology.

It's easier for a Libertarian to become a Fascist than anything else, honestly.

Pretty much. I would probably rather side with libertarians, even before I went further left, both because there are basic social freedom that can actually exist without capitalism. But more importantly there is the growing threat of fascism and idpol, and I'm pretty sure truer libertarians at the very least value freedom the most, they just may not know the proper procedures to achieve it thanks to all the disinformation out there.

Left libertarians?
sure
Right libertarians?
Fuck'em.

To answer your picture: the worker has freely entered into an employee relationship with the boss. The "employee" is free to start their own goddamn business and enjoy their own surplus. The boss provides the means of production, allowing the employee to do that work (but not holding a monopoly on their ability to do so) and assumes the risk of the business failing. The employee is an employee because they have actively refused to assume the risk of failing. It is this assumption of risk that the boss is being paid by the employee for, or stated another way, it is this unwillingness to assume risk that the employee suffers "exploitation" for.

People voluntarily and freely choose to live in a country. The citizen is free to move to another country and see if they can make it in Somalia. The state provides protection from other nations and criminals. The citizens voluntarily refuse to denfend themselves, and so therefore the state has full right to command the population and levy taxes since it is all voluntary.

This is a slightly biased stance imo, because this assumes that both employer and employee both started in a position where they could afford the capital to run a business in the first place.

Obviously that is a fallacy that is disproven by how tenaciously "sticky" one's economic background is even from birth in our modern societies.

Secondly your employee really doesn't have a choice. Sure they get to pick their owner to some degree, but ultimately it is a decision between starvation or or exploitation.

Actually, most people don't. They live in the country of their birth. The difference between living in the US and Somalia is substantially different from the difference between working for BigCorp and running a Mom-and-Pop shop.

You make that assumption. One of those people just needs the audacity to ask others to fund their business, and that individual gets the capital.


It's not. Any employee can start a business that competes with BigCorp, and make a decent living from it. Your position derives from your own cowardice towards failure. And failure is necessary, because some ideas really do suck.


Honestly, the both of you are just trying to justify to yourselves why others should live under your tyranny.

Sure, but they didn't move away. Therefore they chose to stay voluntarily and agreed to pay taxes. If they don't like that, they can go elsewhere. If they don't like the rules of the country or the taxes that are levied, then they can go make their own country, maybe in Somalia.

Point is that you're breaking that NAP if you're agressing against the property and authority of the US when you have the option to freely move away.

No. Not when "bigcorp" has the ability to hire workers overseas and make products for way cheaper than the mom and pop shop, putting them out of business. Since there's no protectionism in your society there's nothing stopping the corporation from doing that unless you think the whole world is magically going to become ancap, and that when that happens companies overseas will magically stop paying their workers pennies an hour.

They could've moved to a country with lower taxes, or tried to start their own country to. They are voluntarily using the states protection by staying there. Saying "but somalia is bade :(" isn't an argument.

No.
BigCorp can just overproduce on purpose for a while and kill any competion that has less capital than themselves.

Which is pretty much all of them.

You are insisting that everyone who lives in the land of your birth, land that both of us have equal claim over, have to live by YOUR RULES on that land. You sit there and say "MY LAND! MY RULES! MINE! MINE! MINE!" You have a selfish philosophy of childishness.

…
Yes. That's the point.

Now apply that logic to companies.
If I had to choose between a long list of fascist states, would that be democracy?

So what's stopping a corporation from buying loads of land and performing the same action as a state? Building essential roads and charging for them, having private armies to defend their land, extracting rent from those who live on the land? And someone voluntarily sold them the land to. Sounds like capitalism to me!

It can't keep that up. Given enough competition, BigCorp will eventually not be able to sustain such a program. Most small businesses fail on their own, or never grow into competition. BigCorp generally ignores small startups until they are big enough to be competitors.

It can sustain it when it can produce goods for much cheaper overseas than the smaller ones can.

The amount of competition is irrelevant. What matter is how much capital each one of those have. If it's less than BigCorp, then BigCorp can keep up the overproduction until each and everyone of the competition is eliminated. This has happened before.

Imagine it's like a siege.
Bigcorp can bleed money for 40 months, it's closest competitor can bleed money for 30 months and the collective rest of all the competion can bleed money for 10 months individually, even though they collectively perhaps own the majority of the market share.

Thus BigCorp, as the plurality, can eliminate all competition naturally from just being the market plurailty, even major-scale competitors.

And then after that 40 months, new companies pop up that can bleed money for ten months. Big corp is now out of business.

The difference is that it is far easier to establish a business than a state. Your cowardice towards failure is not a reason that the rest of us should live under your tyranny.

The US isn't a person, it is a contract between citizens. I have a right, as someone who has "agreed" to that contract (by birth) to try to alter it.

If challengers keep appearing, then the siege lasts longer and longer, and five years later BigCorp is bankrupt. Businesses aren't static. They come into existence on a daily basis. They die on a daily basis.

No. You have the ability to leave the country if you want to. You are agreeing to live in the country and abide by the contract by staying. If the U.S. had a policy where no one could ever leave no matter what, then you might have a point. But there's nothing stopping you from leaving. You are voluntarily agreeing to the contract by staying.

Who would start up businesses in an unprofitable business?
Is that why you see cheap plastic toy and widget factories popping up in the US all the time?
Why would you invest in a market that is unprofitable? You think that people just randomly decide which kind of business they're going to start?

Just go to Somalia. There's practically no state prventing you from setting your own up there.
What, are you a coward? Why should your cowardice exepmt you from taxes?


A company isn't a person, it's a contract between people.


So I can take over the workplace and democratize it? Great!


Again, who ge's into an oversaturated market that's unprofitable and doesn't make a profit on its products?

The fact is that that contract, in its original form, is far closer to my ideology than yours. YOU are the people who have insisted on altering it, YOU are the people who are selfishly claiming that others need to leave so that that contract can be what you aspire it to be. You're being a hypocrite: why don't you leave to glorious Soviet Union. Oh yeah, because every state that has ever existed under your ideology has failed.

Okay, if you have a problem with altering things and don't like taxes, why don't you just leave then?
You're free to. If you don't, you voluntarily choose to live in the US and abide by all it's rules.

Also riffing on this point, if by the end of that 40 months, Bigcorp has put 30 businesses out of business, where are those who don't have the capital to start up a business supposed to find investors to invest in a business that's not profitable? So now the only people who have the capital to invest in this are other bigcorp like fellows. Not your everyday joe.

And John Locke's definition of property is closer to mine than yours. No one is forcing you to stay again. Think of states as big companies. You can choose which one you want. Another non-argument from you? By your logic, theres nothing wrong with me wanting to start a community that uses a socialist system. Also Rojava is doing pretty good right now.

I am happy to live under America's rules. But, you seem to think that your dictates are America's rules. I am happy to live under America's rules, not your tyranny.

Direct democracy in the local community and in the workplace is tyrranical now?
Seems to me that democracy is the opposite of tyranny, and you advocate for less democracy than I do.

No one would be forcing you to stay in the commune. You can leave with likeminded people and start your own capitalist city with America like rules.

""""""""tyranny""""""" of the masses. Aka. taking my ability to oppress people away is true oppression.

Well, unless our federation decides that's fundementally a threat to our democracy.
In which case we will crack down on it.

I'm not the lolbert, but how is that not tyranny? If people want to voluntarily start a capitalist system( actual voluntarily) then why can't they do that?

I mean the same argument can be made for when the lolbert says that us forming a socialist society is a threat to him and we should be stomped out. But I don't agree with you on this dude.

Capitalists, like Kings, Mullahs, Popes and all other just hierarchs often seek to expand their terriotory, to be able to expand how many they can control and the profits they can garner.
Such a system might be a danger to the democracy, depending on its size.

And it absolutely should. We are mortal enemies. Our interests and our values fundementally oppose each other. Peace can never exist between us. Of course they will crack down on us. They do all the time. We must be prepared to do the same.

That could be an argument for pretty everything.
Fascists states would see other systems as a threat, so theocracy, so democracy and so on…
Can radically differents system simply coexist? Or does it always end up in some kind of deathmatch?

Alright. So lolbert, will you let us socialist have our city in your America? Or do we need to stomped out?

Let's see who has the moral highground here.

It will always end up in bloody struggle. Of course it will. It must.
Our values simply radically oppose each other. We cannot coexist. We will find purpose in struggling against each other.

Of course the lolbert will say he's fine with a socialist city.

Will the next Rockefeller, though? Will the guy who matters in a capitalist system?

Yes lolbert. Your kind have shown over and over that you will stomp us out. Many of the potential successful socialist societies were stomped out by your kind. You are a threat to us, and always have been.

What about the tragedy of the commons? Will you accept our environmental law? Will you accept our worker's rights law? And will you agree not to poach our educated workers by offering them more money by paying the lower class less? And will you keep your capitalism inside your own borders?

If you agree, you might as well join be socialists, if you don't agree, how can socialism allow such a threat to exist?