So, same old story, different century…

“During the 1950s and 1960s, the United States had become particularly concerned about Chile. As the home of the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America and figures like Raúl Prebisch, Chile had become the centre of developmentalist [=Western-style internal economic development, building an independent economy not subjected to exploitation by foreign institutions/corporations] thinking in Latin America. The US feared that these ideas would spread across the rest of the continent. To counter this tendency, the US government launched Project Chile in 1956. The goal was to resist developmentalism by training Chilean economics students – around 100 of them – in the principles of neoliberal theory at the University of Chicago. A decade later, the programme was expanded to include students from across the continent, and eventually led to the formation of the Center for Latin American Economic Studies at Chicago. It was ideological warfare. The idea was to train students to scorn social safety nets, trade barriers, infant industry protection, price controls, public services and many of the other policies being promoted by progressive Latin American economists at the time. […] Developmentalism received a promising boost when voters elected Salvador Allende – a thoughtful, unpretentious doctor with thick-rimmed spectacles who was popular for his progressive views. At the time, much of Chile’s population was still mired in extreme poverty, while a small elite controlled most of the country’s vast land and wealth. Allende […] established a minimum wage, reduced the price of bread, rolled out free school meals, expanded low-income housing and extended public transportation to working-class neighbourhoods. He nationalised the copper mines and capped land ownership at 80 hectares (fully compensating all private owners), ending the colonial latifundia [=vast land estates] and redistributing land to peasant farmers. And it worked. Wages rose, poverty rates declined, school enrolment reached record levels. But the United States was not happy. Allende’s nationalisation and land reform programmes appeared to threaten US economic interests; after all, US corporations had $964 million invested in Chile and were earning an average return of 17.4 per cent on it. Allende pledged full compensation for anyone who would lose their property or investments as a result, but this failed to pacify the US, which feared Allende’s popularity would trigger a broader turn to the left in Latin America. At the time, 20 per cent of total US foreign investments were tied up in Latin America, and US firms had 5,436 subsidiaries in the region, with significant profits at stake; they didn’t want to see the rise of more Allende-style governments among Chile’s neighbours. At first, the United States tried to force Allende to back off his nationalisation programme by applying non-military pressure, doing everything in their power to strangle the Chilean economy. President Richard Nixon famously ordered the CIA director, Richard Helms, to ‘make the economy scream’. The US blocked government loans to Chile and encouraged private banks to do the same. They placed a moratorium on Chilean copper imports for six months, thus depleting Chile’s foreign currency reserves. And the CIA used El Mercurio, a newspaper owned by US multinational ITT, to disseminate anti-Allende propaganda. …” (from "The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets’’ by Jason Hickel)

edit: there’s also the related Aphgan textbooks https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2014/12/06/368452888/q-a-j-is-for-jihad

It’s been a while since I’ve read it but Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare was an eye-opening read (it can be a bit dry but has great information)

“In 2014, a team of scientists based at Harvard and Yale published a remarkable study on how people make decisions about the natural world. They were interested in whether people will choose to share finite resources with future generations. Future generations pose a problem because they cannot reciprocate with you. If you choose to forgo immediate monetary gain in order to preserve ecology for your grandchildren, they can’t offer the favour back – so you gain little from sharing. In light of this, economists expect that people will make a ‘rational’ choice to exhaust resources in the present and leave future generations with nothing. But it turns out that people don’t actually behave this way. The Harvard-Yale team put people in groups and gave them each a share of common resources to be managed across generations. They found that, on average, a full 68% of individuals chose to use their share sustainably, taking only as much as the pool could regenerate, sacrificing possible profits so that future generations could thrive. In other words, the majority of people behave exactly the opposite to how economic theory predicts. The problem is that the other 32% chose to liquidate their share of the resources for the sake of quick profits. Over time, this selfish minority ended up depleting the collective pool, leaving each successive generation with a smaller and smaller supply of resources to work with. The losses compounded quickly over time: by the fourth generation the resources were completely exhausted, leaving future generations with nothing – a striking pattern of decline that looks very similar to what’s happening to our planet today. Yet when the groups were asked to make decisions collectively, with direct democracy, something remarkable happened. The 68% were able to overrule the selfish minority and keep their destructive impulses in check. In fact, democratic decision-making encouraged the selfish types to vote for more sustainable decisions, because they realised they were all in it together. Over and over again, the scientists found that under democratic conditions, resources were sustained for future generations, at 100% capacity, indefinitely. The scientists ran the experiments for up to twelve generations, and they kept getting the same results: no net depletion. None. What’s so fascinating about this is that it shows widespread and intuitive support for what ecological economists call a ‘steady-state’ economy. A steady-state economy follows two key principles in order to stay in balance with the living world: 1) Never extract more than ecosystems can regenerate. 2) Never waste or pollute more than ecosystems can safely absorb. To get to a steady-state economy, we need to have clear caps on resource use and waste. For decades, economists have told us that such caps are impossible, because people will see them as irrational. It turns out they’re wrong. If given the chance, this is exactly the kind of policy that people want. This helps us see our ecological crisis in a new light. It’s not ‘human nature’ that’s the problem here. It’s that we have a political system that allows a few people to sabotage our collective future for their own private gain.” (from the book “Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save The World” by Jason Hickel)

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“Ownership of things in common was so universal throughout the American continent when the Europeans arrived that even the cooking pot, Columbus noted, was available to anyone who wanted to take from it, and this even in times of starvation. Two centuries later, Thomas Morton could also say of the Five Nations inhabiting New England that “although every proprietor knows his own . . . yet all things, so long as they will last, are used in common amongst them.” The idea of ownership of land was so alien among Native Americans that individuals made no effort to secure for themselves the lands they occupied, frequently moving grounds, and readily sharing them with newcomers. As Kirkpatrick Sale writes, “Owning the land, selling the land, seemed ideas as foreign as owning and selling the clouds or the wind.” William Cronon too comments, “This relaxed attitude towards personal possession was typical throughout New England.” […] No effort was made to set permanent boundaries around a field that a family used, and fields were abandoned after some years and allowed to return to bushes. What people possessed was the use of the land and the crops; this is what was traded, and this usufruct right could not prevent trespassing. In fact, different groups of people could have claims on the same land, depending on the use they made of it, which might not be the same. Several villages could fish in the same rivers recognizing their mutual rights. And when one left the clan they left everything they had possessed. Yet, these unattached, nomadic tribes had a far deeper communion with the land and agriculture than the privatizing Europeans and so much respect for it that though “they had taken their livelihood from the land for eons, hunting, foraging, planting, fishing, building, trekking,” at the time of the Europeans’ arrival “the land of North America was still by every account without exception a lush and fertile wilderness teeming with abundant wildlife in water, woods, and air.” The result of this lack of attachment to private property among the Native peoples of America was a communal outlook that valued cooperation, group identity, and culture. […] The dislike for individual accumulation was so strong that they invented the ritual of the potlatch, that is, a periodic redistribution of wealth, to free themselves from it.” (from the book “Re-enchanting The World: Feminism And The Politics Of The Commons” by Silvia Federici & Peter Linebaugh)

We aren’t programmed by nature, we were programmed by economic interests.

Adding a relevant quote (also see an additional quote in a separate reply to this one in regards to how people can protect/conserve nature if given the chance/freedom to do so)

“There was a day when the prevailing American culture was the mass marketer’s worst nightmare. Frugality and thrift were central to the famed “Puritan ethic” that the early settlers brought with them to America. The Puritans believed in hard work, participation in community, temperate living, and devotion to a spiritual life. Their basic rule of living was that one should not desire more material things than could be used effectively. They taught their children, “Use it up, wear it out, make do, or do without.” The Quakers also had a strong influence on early America and, although more tolerant and egalitarian, shared with the Puritans the values of hard work and frugality as important to one’s spiritual development. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, both important early American writers, viewed simplicity as a path to experiencing the divine. The consumer culture emerged largely as a consequence of concerted efforts by the retailing giants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to create an ever-growing demand for the goods they offered for sale. The American historian William Leach has documented in Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture how they successfully turned a spiritually oriented culture of frugality and thrift into a material culture of self-indulgence. Leach finds the claim that the market simply responds to consumer desires to be nothing more than a self-serving fabrication of those who make their living manipulating reality to persuade consumers to buy what corporations find it profitable to sell: Indeed, the culture of consumer capitalism may have been among the most nonconsensual public cultures ever created, and it was nonconsensual for two reasons. First, it was not produced by “the people” but by commercial groups in cooperation with other elites comfortable with and committed to making profits and to accumulating capital on an ever-ascending scale. Second, it was nonconsensual because, in its mere day-to-day conduct (but not in any conspiratorial way), it raised to the fore only one vision of the good life and pushed out all others. In this way, it diminished American public life, denying the American people access to insight into other ways of organizing and conceiving life, insight that might have endowed their consent to the dominant culture (if such consent were to be given at all) with real democracy. The populist cultures that grew out of the hearts and aspirations of ordinary people in America stressed the democratization of property and the virtues of a republic based on independent families owning their own land and tools, producing for themselves much of what they consumed, and participating in communities of sharing. Theirs was the model of a strong social economy, supplemented by involvement in the money economy at the margin of their lives.” / “Gradually, the individual was surrounded by messages reinforcing the culture of desire. Advertisements, department store show windows, electric signs, fashion shows, the sumptuous environments of the leading hotels, and billboards all conveyed artfully crafted images of the good life.” (from the book “When Corporations Rule The World [20th anniversary edition]” by David C. Korten)

The answer is that without a country capable of standing up to the US, they do not. These countries that still have socialist goverments have to hold on to power in a world where US hegemony is a fact.

Maybe a naive question but is there no way to have a country that stands strong against the US and its interference without being repressive/authoritarian against your own people? What’s the point of being a socialist dictator for many years/decades if you’re not allowing the people to gain collective control of the land/resources/means of production/etc. for their own benefit?

That’s some biblical shit

Destroy all their carved images and their cast idols, and demolish all their high places.
https://biblehub.com/numbers/33-52.htm

Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols in the fire.
https://biblehub.com/deuteronomy/7-5.htm

Everything that’s made of atoms is 99.9999999% empty (if it is indeed correct, I don’t have much scientific knowledge)

https://medium.com/illumination/why-solid-matter-is-mostly-empty-space-03f42e95c03f

Another reason to why we should be depaving and creating sustainable organic agriculture everywhere

“The efficiency and productivity of industrial agriculture hides the costs of depletion of soils, exploitation of groundwater, erosion, and extinction of biodiversity. Industrial agriculture uses 10 times more energy than it produces. It uses 10 times more water than biodiverse farming with water-prudent crops and organic practices use. In fact, when assessed from nature’s economy, biodiverse, ecological farms have much higher productivity than large-scale, industrial, monoculture farms. The illusion of efficiency is produced by externalizing the ecological costs.” / “…a polyculture [crop diversity] system can produce 100 units of food from 5 units of inputs, whereas an industrial system requires 300 units of input to produce the same 100 units. The 295 units of wasted inputs could have provided 5,900 units of food. This is a recipe for starving people, not for feeding them. A common argument used to promote industrial agriculture is that only it and industrial breeding can maintain the increased food productivity needed for a growing population. However, since resources, not labor, are the limiting actor in food production, it is resource productivity, not labor productivity, which is the relevant measure. What is needed is more efficient resource use so that the same resources can feed more people. A 66-fold decrease of food producing capacity in the context of resources use is not an efficient strategy for using limited land, water, and biodiversity to feed the world.” (from the book “Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, And Peace” by Vandana Shiva)

Do you mean 1844? I couldn’t find 1848

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_and_Philosophic_Manuscripts_of_1844

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/preface.htm

I had that several times some years ago and eventually it went away. It’s very anxiety inducing. Just above that thing when you get a cramp in your toes and they get stuck together for what feels like eternity.

Influence. I want to be able to convince everybody with power around the world to actively support a transition away from a system that’s based on hierarchy and coercion to a decentralized and cooperative one.

The real demons are the friends Epstein made along the way…

Nah, other users won’t know who you are.

Well, at least until the database inevitably leaks

https://www.pcmag.com/news/reddit-could-soon-require-face-id-to-prove-youre-not-a-bot

Huffman indicated the platform may use decentralized third-party information providers to verify users’ personal details.

“Part of the promise to users is we don’t want to know your name," he told the hosts. "But we want to know that you’re a person.”

Sure, “we don’t want to know your name, we just have to know it or have to have another party that we have access to/a deal with know it”

It does work in communities around the world, though each community can do it differently. You can look into the practice of consensus for a general way of doing that.

“Consensus decision making is a creative and dynamic way of reaching agreement between all members of a group. Instead of simply voting for an item and having the majority of the group get their way, a consensus group is committed to finding solutions that everyone actively supports, or at least can live with. All decisions are made with the consent of everyone involved, and this ensures that all opinions, ideas and concerns are taken into account. Through listening closely to each other, the group aims to come up with proposals that work for everyone. Consensus is neither compromise nor unanimity - it aims to go further by weaving together everyone’s best ideas and key concerns - a process that often results in surprising and creative solutions, inspiring both the individual and the group as a whole. At the heart of consensus is a respectful dialogue between equals. It’s about how to work with each other rather than for or against each other - it rejects side taking, point scoring and strategic manoeuvring. Consensus is looking for ‘win win’ solutions that are acceptable to all, with the direct benefit that everyone agrees with the final decision, resulting in a greater commitment to actually turning it into reality.” (from the book “A Consensus Handbook” by Seeds For Change)

And adding:

“The 2001 popular rebellion in Argentina saw people take an unprecedented level of control over their lives. They formed neighborhood assemblies, took over factories and abandoned land, created barter networks, blockaded highways to compel the government to grant relief to the unemployed, held the streets against lethal police repression, and forced four presidents and multiple vice presidents and economic ministers to resign in quick succession. Through it all, they did not appoint leadership, and most of the neighborhood assemblies rejected political parties and trade unions trying to co-opt these spontaneous institutions. Within the assemblies, factory occupations, and other organizations, they practiced consensus and encouraged horizontal organizing. In the words of one activist involved in establishing alternative social structures in his neighborhood, where unemployment reached 80%: “We are building power, not taking it.” People formed over 200 neighborhood assemblies in Buenos Aires alone, involving thousands of people; according to one poll, one in three residents of the capital had attended an assembly. People began by meeting in their neighborhoods, often over a common meal, or olla popular. Next they would occupy a space to serve as a social center—in many cases, an abandoned bank.” / “The city of Gwangju (or Kwangju), in South Korea, liberated itself for six days in May, 1980, after student and worker protests against the military dictatorship escalated in response to declarations of martial law. Protestors burned down the government television station and seized weapons, quickly organizing a “Citizen Army” that forced out the police and military. As in other urban rebellions, including those in Paris in 1848 and 1968, in Budapest in 1919, and in Beijing in 1989, students and workers in Gwangju quickly formed open assemblies to organize life in the city and communicate with the outside world. Participants in the uprising tell of a complex organizational system developed spontaneously in a short period of time—and without the leaders of the main student groups and protest organizations, who had already been arrested. Their system included a Citizen’s Army, a Situation Center, a Citizen-Student Committee, a Planning Board, and departments for local defense, investigation, information, public services, burial of the dead, and other services. It took a full-scale invasion by special units of the Korean military with US support to crush the rebellion and prevent it from spreading. Several hundred people were killed in the process. Even its enemies described the armed resistance as “fierce and wellorganized.” The combination of spontaneous organization, open assemblies, and committees with a specific organizational focus left a deep impression, showing how quickly a society can change itself once it breaks with the habit of obedience to the government. In the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, state power collapsed after masses of student protestors armed themselves; much of the country fell into the hands of the people, who had to reorganize the economy and quickly form militias to repel Soviet invasion. Initially, each city organized itself spontaneously, but the forms of organization that arose were very similar, perhaps because they developed in the same cultural and political context. Hungarian anarchists were influential in the new Revolutionary Councils, which federated to coordinate defense, and they took part in the workers’ councils that took over the factories and mines. In Budapest old politicians formed a new government and tried to harness these autonomous councils into a multiparty democracy, but the influence of the government did not extend beyond the capital city in the days before the second Soviet invasion succeeded in crushing the uprising. Hungary did not have a large anarchist movement at the time, but the popularity of the various councils shows how contagious anarchistic ideas are once people decide to organize themselves. And their ability to keep the country running and defeat the first invasion of the Red Army shows the effectiveness of these organizational forms. There was no need for a complex institutional blueprint to be in place before people left their authoritarian government behind. All they needed was the determination to come together in open meetings to decide their futures, and the trust in themselves that they could make it work, even if at first it was unclear how.” / “Peasants in Spain had been oppressed throughout centuries of feudalism. The partial revolution in 1936 enabled them to reclaim the privilege and wealth their oppressors had derived from their labors. Peasant assemblies in liberated villages met to decide how to redistribute territory seized from large landowners, so those who had labored as virtual serfs could finally have access to land. Unlike the farcical Reconciliation Commissions arranged in South Africa, Guatemala, and elsewhere, which protect oppressors from any real consequences and above all preserve the unequal distribution of power and privilege that is the direct result of past oppressions, these assemblies empowered the Spanish peasants to decide for themselves how to recover their dignity and equality. Aside from redistributing land, they also took over pro-fascist churches and luxury villas to be used as community centers, storehouses, schools, and clinics. In five years of state-instituted agrarian reform, Spain’s Republican government redistributed only 876,327 hectares of land; in just a few weeks of revolution, the peasants seized 5,692,202 hectares of land for themselves. This figure is even more significant considering that this redistribution was opposed by Republicans and Socialists, and could only take place in the part of the country not controlled by the fascists.” / “In the state of Chiapas, in southern Mexico, the Zapatistas rose up in 1994 and won autonomy for dozens of indigenous communities. Named after Mexican peasant revolutionary Zapata and espousing a mix of indigenous, Marxist, and anarchist ideas, the Zapatistas formed an army guided by popular “encuentros,” or gatherings, to fight back against neoliberal capitalism and the continuing forms of exploitation and genocide inflicted by the Mexican state. To lift these communities up out of poverty following generations of colonialism, and to help counter the effects of military blockades and harassment, the Zapatistas called for support. Thousands of volunteers and people with technical experience came from around the world to help Zapatista communities build up their infrastructure” / “Throughout the 2006 rebellion in Oaxaca [within Mexico], as well as before and after, indigenous culture was a wellspring of resistance. However much they exemplified cooperative, anti-authoritarian, and ecologically sustainable behaviors before colonialism, indigenous peoples in the Oaxacan resistance came to cherish and emphasize the parts of their culture that contrasted with the system that values property over life, encourages competition and domination, and exploits the environment into extinction. Their ability to practice an anti-authoritarian and ecological culture—working together in a spirit of solidarity and nourishing themselves on the small amount of land they had—increased the potency of their resistance, and thus their very chances for survival. Thus, resistance to capitalism and the state is both a means of protecting indigenous cultures and a crucible that forges a stronger anti-authoritarian ethos.” / “Throughout Europe, dozens of autonomous villages have built a life outside capitalism. Especially in Italy, France, and Spain, these villages exist outside regular state control and with little influence from the logic of the market. Sometimes buying cheap land, often squatting abandoned villages, these new autonomous communities create the infrastructure for a libertarian, communal life and the culture that goes with it. These new cultures replace the nuclear family with a much broader, more inclusive and flexible family united by affinity and consensual love rather than bloodlines and proprietary love; they destroy the division of labor by gender, weaken age segregation and hierarchy, and create communal and ecological values and relationships.” (from the book “Anarchy Works” by Peter Gelderloos)

They don’t have to be, they can be cooperative/communal endeavors where people arrive at decisions together, where nobody is coerced

We need to move away from a system that requires “funding” to operate. If we have all of the needed knowledge, resources, technology, human power, etc. - we should just do what needs to be done.

“Pfizer and its shareholders make more money from drugs that treat baldness and impotence than they would from drugs to treat diseases, such as malaria and tuberculosis, that are leading causes of death in the developing world. Pfizer and other pharmaceutical companies likely have the know-how and the physical capacity to place more emphasis on developing and making drugs to fight these killer diseases. Though such drugs would do immense good for the world and could save millions of lives every year, the costs to any company that developed them would almost certainly outweigh the benefits.” (from the book “The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit Of Profit And Power” by Joel Bakan")

Chiming in to say that you can check out the book Getting Free: Creating An Association Of Democratic Autonomous Neighborhoods (James Herod) (though it might not be 100% framework), and the book “Anarchy Works” by Peter Gelderloos (the latter might supply less of a framework but still worth reading I think)

2 quotes from “Anarchy Works” for general reference:

“Korean anarchists won an opportunity to demonstrate people’s ability to make their own decisions in 1929. The Korean Anarchist Communist Federation (KACF) was a huge organization at that time, with enough support that it could declare an autonomous zone in the Shinmin province. Shinmin was outside of Korea, in Manchuria, but two million Korean immigrants lived there. Using assemblies and a decentralized federative structure that grew out of the KACF, they created village councils, district councils, and area councils to deal with matters of cooperative agriculture, education, and finance. They also formed an army spearheaded by the anarchist Kim Jwa-Jin, which used guerrilla tactics against Soviet and Japanese forces. KACF sections in China, Korea, and Japan organized international support efforts. Caught between the Stalinists and the Japanese imperial army, the autonomous province was ultimately crushed in 1931. But for two years, large populations had freed themselves from the authority of landlords and governors and reasserted their power to come to collective decisions, to organize their day-to-day life, pursue their dreams, and defend those dreams from invading armies. One of the most well known anarchist histories is that of the Spanish Civil War. In July 1936, General Franco launched a fascist coup in Spain. […] While in many areas Spain’s Republican government rolled over easily and resigned itself to fascism, the anarchist labor union (CNT) and other anarchists working autonomously formed militias, seized arsenals, stormed barracks, and defeated trained troops. […] In these stateless areas of the Spanish countryside in 1936, peasants organized themselves according to principles of communism, collectivism, or mutualism according to their preferences and local conditions. They formed thousands of collectives, especially in Aragon, Catalunya, and Valencia. Some abolished all money and private property; some organized quota systems to ensure that everyone’s needs were met. The diversity of forms they developed is a testament to the freedom they created themselves. Where once all these villages were mired in the same stifling context of feudalism and developing capitalism, within months of overthrowing government authority and coming together in village assemblies, they gave birth to hundreds of different systems, united by common values like solidarity and self-organization. And they developed these different forms by holding open assemblies and making decisions in common.”

“One economy developed over and over by humans on every continent has been the gift economy. In this system, if people have more than they need of anything, they give it away. They don’t assign value, they don’t count debts. Everything you don’t use personally can be given as a gift to someone else, and by giving more gifts you inspire more generosity and strengthen the friendships that keep you swimming in gifts too. Many gift economies lasted for thousands of years, and proved much more effective at enabling all of the participants to meet their needs. […] gift economies, in which people intentionally kept no tally of who owed what to whom so as to foster a society of generosity and sharing.”

The “tribal savage” attitude/behavior is created/reinforced by capitalistic societies/interests. We need to actively create an alternative system and it will reshape society as we go.

“The world as we enter the 21st century is one of greed, of gross inequalities between rich and poor, of racist and national chauvinist prejudice, of barbarous practices and horrific wars. It is very easy to believe that this is what things have always been like and that, therefore, they can be no different. […] The anthropologist Richard Lee [said]: “Before the rise of the state and the entrenchment of social inequality, people lived for millennia in small-scale kin-based social groups, in which the core institutions of economic life included collective or common ownership of land and resources, generalised reciprocity in the distribution of food, and relatively egalitarian political relations.” In other words, people shared with and helped each other, with no rulers and no ruled, no rich and no poor. […] Our species […] is over 100,000 years old. For 95 percent of this time it has not been characterised at all by many of the forms of behaviour ascribed to ‘human nature’ today. There is nothing built into our biology that makes present day societies the way they are. Our predicament as we face a new millennium cannot be blamed on it.” (from the book “A People’s History Of The World: From The Stone Age To The New Millennium” by Chris Harman)

-

“Is it true that our human nature is “survival of the fittest”, greed, competition; that we can’t really think about the benefit of the whole and that it’s all about the individual - “if I can survive, if my family can survive, that’s fine, I don’t care about anyone else”? Or maybe it’s human conditioning, a second nature, which means a condition that’s been practiced for so long that now it seems like it’s innate. Because when you think about it, from a very early age we go to school, and the main purpose of this is to basically propel us into the “real world”, where we need to find a job, get a career, and try to survive as isolated people in separate houses, with the family, the car, and all that. But it’s a very isolated experience, where you try to build wealth only for yourself. And that’s what we’re pushed to do, that’s what we’re encouraged to do, that’s our definition of success. But who says? We don’t come up with these ideas when we’re born, we learn these ideas.” (from the book “How To Change The World” by Elina St-Onge)

-

“Ownership of things in common was so universal throughout the American continent when the Europeans arrived that even the cooking pot, Columbus noted, was available to anyone who wanted to take from it, and this even in times of starvation. Two centuries later, Thomas Morton could also say of the Five Nations inhabiting New England that “although every proprietor knows his own . . . yet all things, so long as they will last, are used in common amongst them.” The idea of ownership of land was so alien among Native Americans that individuals made no effort to secure for themselves the lands they occupied, frequently moving grounds, and readily sharing them with newcomers. As Kirkpatrick Sale writes, “Owning the land, selling the land, seemed ideas as foreign as owning and selling the clouds or the wind.” William Cronon too comments, “This relaxed attitude towards personal possession was typical throughout New England.” […] No effort was made to set permanent boundaries around a field that a family used, and fields were abandoned after some years and allowed to return to bushes. What people possessed was the use of the land and the crops; this is what was traded, and this usufruct right could not prevent trespassing. In fact, different groups of people could have claims on the same land, depending on the use they made of it, which might not be the same. Several villages could fish in the same rivers recognizing their mutual rights. And when one left the clan they left everything they had possessed. Yet, these unattached, nomadic tribes had a far deeper communion with the land and agriculture than the privatizing Europeans and so much respect for it that though “they had taken their livelihood from the land for eons, hunting, foraging, planting, fishing, building, trekking,” at the time of the Europeans’ arrival “the land of North America was still by every account without exception a lush and fertile wilderness teeming with abundant wildlife in water, woods, and air.” The result of this lack of attachment to private property among the Native peoples of America was a communal outlook that valued cooperation, group identity, and culture. […] The dislike for individual accumulation was so strong that they invented the ritual of the potlatch, that is, a periodic redistribution of wealth, to free themselves from it.” (from the book “Re-enchanting The World: Feminism And The Politics Of The Commons” by Silvia Federici & Peter Linebaugh)

Adding quotes for reference:

“The Russian revolutionaries believed that the international struggle for socialism could be started in Russia—but that it could only be finished after an international socialist revolution. A wave of upheavals did sweep across Europe following the Russian Revolution and the end of the First World War, toppling monarchies in Germany and the Austro-Hungarian empire and shaking many other societies. But workers didn’t succeed in taking power anywhere else for any length of time. So the Russian Revolution was left isolated. In these desperate circumstances, Russia’s shattered working class couldn’t exercise power through workers’ councils. More and more, decisions were made by a group of state bureaucrats. At first, the aim was to keep the workers’ state alive until help came in the form of international revolution. But eventually, as the hope of revolution abroad faded, the leading figure in the bureaucracy, Joseph Stalin, and his allies began to eliminate any and all opposition to their rule—and started making decisions on the basis of how best to protect and increase their own power. Though continuing to use the rhetoric of socialism, they began to take back every gain won in the revolution—without exception.” / “To finally consolidate power, Stalin had to murder or hound into exile every single surviving leader of the 1917 revolution. Russia under Stalin became the opposite of the workers’ state of 1917. Though they mouthed socialist phrases, Stalin and the thugs who followed him ran a dictatorship in which workers were every bit as exploited as in Western-style capitalist countries.” / “…The popular character of the Russian Revolution is also clear from looking at its initial accomplishments. The revolution put an end to Russia’s participation in the First World War—a slaughter that left millions of workers dead in a conflict over which major powers would dominate the globe. Russia’s entry into the war had been accompanied by a wave of patriotic frenzy, but masses of Russians came to reject the slaughter through bitter experience. The soldiers that the tsar depended on to defend his rule changed sides and joined the revolution—a decisive step in Russia, as it has been in all revolutions. The Russian Revolution also dismantled the tsar’s empire—what Lenin called a “prison-house” of nations that suffered for years under tsarist tyranny. These nations were given the unconditional right to self-determination. The tsar had used the most vicious anti-Semitism to prop up his rule—after the revolution, Jews led the workers’ councils in Russia’s two biggest cities. Laws outlawing homosexuality were repealed. Abortion was legalized and made available on demand. And the revolution started to remove the age-old burden of “women’s work” in the family by organizing socialized child care and communal kitchens and laundries. But just listing the proclamations doesn’t do justice to the reality of workers’ power. Russia was a society in the process of being remade from the bottom up. In the factories, workers began to take charge of production. The country’s vast peasantry took over the land of the big landowners. In city neighborhoods, people organized all sorts of communal services. In general, decisions about the whole of society became decisions that the whole of society played a part in making. Russia became a cauldron of discussion—where the ideas of all were part of a debate about what to do. The memories of socialists who lived through the revolution are dominated by this sense of people’s horizons opening up.” / “The tragedy is that workers’ power survived for only a short time in Russia. In the years that followed 1917, the world’s major powers, including the United States, organized an invasion force that fought alongside the dregs of tsarist society—ex-generals, aristocrats, and assorted hangers-on— in a civil war against the new workers’ state. The revolution survived this assault, but at a terrible price. By 1922, as a result of the civil war, famine stalked Russia, and the working class—the class that made the Russian Revolution—was decimated.” (from the book “The Case For Socialism” by Alan Maass)

“Partisans of the free market point to the failure of Soviet planning as a reason to reject, out of hand, any idea of an organized economy. Without entering the discussion on the achievements and miseries of the Soviet experience, it was obviously a form of dictatorship over needs, to use the expression of György Márkus and his friends in the Budapest School: a nondemocratic and authoritarian system that gave a monopoly over all decisions to a small oligarchy of techno-bureaucrats. It was not planning itself that led to dictatorship, but the growing limitations on democracy in the Soviet state and, after Lenin’s death, the establishment of a totalitarian bureaucratic power, which led to an increasingly undemocratic and authoritarian system of planning. If socialism is defined as control by the workers and the population in general over the process of production, the Soviet Union under Stalin and his successors was a far cry from it. The failure of the USSR illustrates the limits and contradictions of bureaucratic planning, which is inevitably inefficient and arbitrary: it cannot be used as an argument against democratic planning. The socialist conception of planning is nothing other than the radical democratization of economy: If political decisions are not to be left to a small elite of rulers, why should not the same principle apply to economic decisions?” / “Socialist planning must be grounded on a democratic and pluralist debate at all the levels where decisions are to be made.” (from “Ecosocialism: A Radical Alternative To Capitalist Catastrophe” by Michael Löwy)

They will either give special permissions to relevant businesses (maybe an expensive Super Premium Golden Access), or use selective enforcement to only go after people/businesses that don’t comply to their overall authoritarianism and pose too much of a risk to the status quo.