The defining literature of Evolution

Xunk: Evolution is obviously false!

Snikwad: What are you talking about? Evolution is an extremely well-supported scientific theory.

X: What is evolution?

S: Without going into the considerable complexity of the theory, it's natural selection working on heritable variation.

X: How is this "heritable variation" supposed to work?

S: By genes. You know, DNA, C-A-G-T.

X: Nonsense! There's nothing at all about "genes" or "DNA" in the defining literature of evolution. Search as you might, you'll find nothing about "genes" in Darwin, Wallace, or Huxley.

S: Well, we discovered genes after those pioneers died.

X: Whatever. If it's not in Darwin, it's not evolution.

S: Fine. Whatever. We'll call it something different. Would you prefer "genetic evolution"?

X: It's still got "evolution" in it.

S: How about the "New Synthesis"?

X: New Synthesis of what?

S: Well, of evolution.

X: There's that "evolution" nonsense again.

S: Good grief. OK, if it'll make you happy, we'll make up a new word: Call it "Qwghlm theory".

X: Does this "Qwghlm theory" talk about heritable variation and natural selection?

S: Well, yes, of course.

X: So it's evolution.

S: Well, yes, but...

X: What, do you think you can fool me by calling a failed theory by a different name?

S: Seriously? Are you even sane?*

*With apologies to Justin Jason

---

There's a point to this exercise: a commenter recently challenged me to find "in any of the defining literacy [sic*] of communism (Marx, Lenin's, Trotsky's books, your choice) any defense of democracy, individual liberties, free speech etc." Despite being completely false (there are lots of defenses of democracy, individual liberty, etc. in communist literature), the demand itself is completely absurd. It would be completely irrelevant even if there weren't any defense at all of these items in the past.

*English is not Knux's native language; his meaning is nonetheless clear.

If I talk about the social ownership of the means of production, no matter what else I say, I'm talking about communism. If I call it something else — "democratic communism", "socialism", "communitarianism", "Qwghlm theory", whatever — I would be accused — with some justice — of obfuscating what I was talking about... i.e. communism. So I call myself a communist, and I myself — not Marx, not Lenin, not Mao, and certainly not what some idiot on the internet — get to decide what I mean by "communist".

I hold the opinions I hold, and I say what I say. If you want to criticize what I actually say, then fine. Everything I have to say is freely available here on the blog. If you want to criticize what Marx said, or what Lenin, Trotsky or Mao said, or what anyone else said, find out what they actually said — most of it is freely available on the Internet — and criticize that. Accusing me of holding opinions I do not hold on the basis of what some guys said decades ago — or what you imagine they might have said — is not just ridiculous but dishonest.

It's really interesting: When they're not just lying outright, creationists focus a lot on errors and flaws (real and supposed) of scientists decades ago (Haekel's embryos, Darwin's eye, Piltdown man, etc.) If a scientist sneezed a hundred years ago, evolution is responsible for the common cold. They almost never talk about science that's happening today (except to mangle it almost beyond recognition). Similarly, every idiot critic of communism wants to talk about everything but the social ownership of capital.

There's no such thing as the defining literature of communism. The "defining literature" of communism, at least the kind of communism I'm talking about, is not found in Marx or Lenin or Mao or anyone else. The "defining literature" of communism is reality.

Voluntary cooperation

One of the biggest problems of both left- and right-anarchism is that the notion of "voluntary cooperation" is extremely philosophically problematic.

Now, I definitely want to act cooperatively, i.e. I don't want to steal from people. I don't want to hurt or kill other people. I don't want to endanger other people. I don't want to have non-consensual sex with other people. I don't want to exploit or take advantage of other people. I don't want to enslave or otherwise subordinate other people. That's just how I roll. But what does it mean to say I want to refrain from these activities, i.e. that I don't want to do these things?

Let's take a more scientific approach and consider an operational definition of "wanting". If I were given an externally unconstrained choice between two societies, one of which (for whatever reason) theft, assault, murder, rape, exploitation, and slavery were rare, and another where these activities were common, I would choose the former, the society where they were rare. But that definition doesn't tell you anything about my wants or desires, it just tells you that I'm rational: By any reasonable metric, I will be materially and physically better off in a society where theft, etc. were rare... even if subjectively I were to have no particular desire to act cooperatively. So framing "want" in this sense doesn't help much.

Let's try a slightly different frame, again a choice between two different societies, both of which are about equally cooperative. In the first, people act cooperatively (i.e. they don't steal, etc.), but there are no physical or violent constraints: that's just how the individuals in that society happen to roll. On the rare occasion where someone does steal stuff, or assault someone, etc., they just shake their heads and say, "How regrettable." In the second, people act cooperatively, but there are physical and/or violent constraints on uncooperative behavior. (I'm of course excluding the middle of a society with nonviolent constrained to cooperate; more on this in a minute.) Superficially, I would prefer to join the former society and act cooperatively; they sound like genuinely nice people. Because of the violent constraints on cooperation, I really don't know anything about the character of individuals in the second society. The problem, though, is that there are a lot of assholes who would see the first society as ripe for exploitation: They would join the first society just so they could steal, assault, murder, rape, and enslave its members... including me. (What if there were no assholes? Again, more on this.)

But there's a substantial problems with the second society too: I really can't be sure the physical, violent constraints on cooperative behavior won't be employed "uncooperatively"; I don't know that the government (the institutions that physically enforce cooperation) won't turn into a "state" (according to Lenin's definition) to implement the oppression of one class by another.

What we have here is the Prisoner's Dilemma. It's "obvious" that everyone is better off if everyone cooperates than if no one cooperates. But it's equally "obvious" that if everyone else cooperates, an individual (with no external constraints on his behavior) is even better of if he himself does not cooperate: He gains the benefits of everyone else cooperating, but avoids the costs of his own cooperation. It's a perplexing conundrum; the problem itself is obvious but the answers are most definitely not obvious.

Let's look at some of the possibilities I glossed over earlier.

What if there were only "nonviolent" constraints on cooperation? Suppose, for example, that a person who stole, assaulted people, etc. were somehow shunned, ostracized, or something like that. The society would have to be absolutely nonviolent; if you can allow someone to starve or freeze to death for any reason, you might as well just shoot them. And even "minimally" violent constraints do not escape the philosophical problem: Omelas and The Country of the Kind both employ violence to preserve social cooperation. I'm all for efficiency, but using as little violence as possible is a horse of a very different color from refusing on principle to use any violence at all.

But if there are really only nonviolent constraints on cooperation (assuming there are those who must be constrained, see the next paragraph on "no assholes"), then what's to prevent the people "nonviolently" constrained from banding together to act as an exploiting class, to gain from each other the benefits denied by the rest of society? That's been the behavior of every ruling class in history: They really don't care that the hoi polloi hold them in contempt or refuse to socialize with them, so long as they obey. And they have always found soldiers and police willing to do the dirty work of maintaining obedience.

What if there were no assholes (or few enough that they could not band together to form an alternative society)? That's the most promising possibility; assholes are definitely not logically necessary, and I can imagine circumstances where assholes were as physically impossible as a human being born with working tentacles instead of arms and legs. Indeed, if such a society were to exist, I would join it... if they would let me in. The problem is that I have absolutely no idea how to arrange circumstances such that assholes really were physically impossible, except by the painfully slow evolutionary process of violently selecting out the most egregious assholes. We might get there in a thousand years, or ten thousand, or maybe even a million. (Why not? We have at least a few billion years to play with.) And when we do, good for us.

But as desirable as conditions might be that made assholes physically impossible, I don't see any practical way of arranging such conditions today or tomorrow. However technically correct one might be, I don't see much point complaining that we have a violent society, a lot of assholes, and (correctly) denouncing any attempt to contain them as perpetuating the violence of modern society. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and a project of a thousand generations begins with the work of a single lifetime. I may not be able to achieve anything within shouting distance of perfection within my lifetime, but I would like to at least get a step closer.

Side Effects

Side Effects
by J. Brad Hicks, The Infamous Brad
Jan. 10th, 2011

I read a fascinating book, a while back, called When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store by Elaine Abelson. Here's the story it tells, and what (I think) it may have to do with the Tea Partiers' refusal to back down on their rhetoric even after the assassination attempt on Gabrielle Giffords.

At the dawn of the industrial age, factories started churning out products for the home that had been previously hand-made by wives and their servants, in the home, and the problem arose of how to persuade wives to come in and see that the factory-made products were better than the ones they were making at home, more uniform in quality than the ones they were making at home, and actually cheaper than the materials cost, alone, of the products they were making at home. And what they developed was the Department Store: a brilliantly lit, fantastically delightful gigantic building, made as pleasant to visit and to hang out in as it could be made to be, where women could come and see the newest factory goods, try them out, and be persuaded to buy them. Then they had to staff them with enough people to handle the customers, including both salespeople and what we now euphemistically call "loss-prevention specialists."

It worked at getting the merchandise into the womens' hands, but it had a glaring drawback: operating the stores themselves was insanely expensive. And as long as women could comparison shop, they could force the department stores to bid against each other in a destructive race to the bottom, until the goods were selling for less than was necessary to pay the upkeep and the payroll for the store. So the stores eventually invented "impulsing selling:" make the store as hypnotic as possible, make it a total sensory overload environment, advertise "loss leaders" to bring women in, sell the loss leaders at the back of the store, and on the way back to the door, hard-sell products at a high enough mark-up to cover the store's expenses.

This worked at making the stores profitable, but it also had a glaring drawback: store detectives found that fewer and fewer of their shoplifters were the semi-professional criminals who had made up the shoplifting class before. Now, the vast majority of their shoplifters were respectable middle-class women, upper-middle-class women, even wealthy women. These women had regular accounts at the stores they were stealing from. They bought things from those stores all the time. They had frequently just bought three items, on the same visit, for every item that they stole. They almost all had more than enough money on them to buy the items they'd just stolen. So they put the best detectives and the best psychologists they could hire on the job of finding out what the heck the women were thinking when they risked their position in society and risked their husbands' reputations over trifles, and finally had to conclude that the women weren't lying when they said: they hadn't consciously stolen those goods. They weren't thinking of anything when they did it; they weren't thinking, period, not at all. They were in a trance when they did it.

The stores tried toning down the level of trance-inducing sensory overload ... and found that the impulse purchases dried up. Finally they cranked the sensory overload back up, and adopted a "harm reduction" type strategy: when particular upper-class and middle-class women could be confirmed to have stolen certain items, simply mail a bill for the items to the womens' houses; the vast majority of them could be easily embarrassed into paying. (Although even then, it occasionally fell to the people in charge of those departments to persuade the women to search their own pockets -- no, you really did take this, yes, it really is in your pocket. They were in that much of a trance when they did it.) What the Victorian department stores had learned, to their chagrin, was that any sales technique that left customers with enough intact free will to prevent rampant theft left them with enough intact free will to resist high pressure sales.

Fascinating, no? Now, here's what I think this has to do with the Tea Party.

When Holy Saint Ronald Wilson Reagan the Infallible and Great, Savior of the Free World and Conqueror of the Communists, Blessed Patron Saint of the God's Own Almighty American Dollar, was sworn into office in January of 1981, it was his holy and sacred promise that cutting taxes on the wealthy and deregulating business would eliminate all of the problems in America: newly freed businesses and investors would hire us all to make products for each other, and we would all be happy, healthy, safe, and free. But in the wake of a whole series of back-to-back gigantic nation-wide Ponzi schemes, suddenly Saint Ronald doesn't look so infallible. People were starting to wake up to the fact that when freed from all taxation and regulation, the nation's wealthy have exactly zero inclination to hire us all to make goods for each other. What they do with that freedom is to trick us, over and over again, into piling all of the nation's wealth into a dozen or so piles, and then play a rigged game of musical chairs: at the end of each game, a dozen or so people, at least half of them the previously wealthy, own everything and the rest of us lose our entire life's savings.

Saint Ronald's ideas were so popular in the 1980s and 1990s that they became the ruling ideology of not just the Republican Party, but of the post-Clinton Democratic Party as well ... and now they have been discredited. Which leaves the people who were enjoying those global Ponzi schemes, who enjoyed that hypomanic game of musical chairs, with a problem: how do they get people to keep voting for an ideology that has been entirely and thoroughly discredited? And their first attempts were pretty pathetic, and failed utterly in 2006 and in 2008. But now they've got one technique that works: fear. Deploy a multi-billion dollar campaign, funded by the dozen or so wealthy guys who won the last couple of rounds of musical chairs over all the world's wealth, in the world's greatest propaganda campaign, to persuade as many people as possible that the Death Panels are coming.

Sure, Republican ideals have failed; they poll horribly and only a tiny handful of the most clueless and elderly Republican and right-wing Democratic elected officials are still talking about them, still trying to make the case for that failed ideology. What all of the prominent spokespeople are saying, instead, is, never mind our failures, never mind our laughable ideology, just remember this: if you don't put us back in power, the Death Panels will kill your babies, the Death Panels will kill your parents and grandparents, and the first time you get old or get sick, the Death Panels will kill you, too.

It's not actually possible to persuade sane Americans that this is literally true. But it turns out to be possible to persuade a working majority of Americans to be uncomfortable with the idea that it might be true, to doubt their own confidence that it isn't true, to vote Republican just in case the Republicans are right that the Death Panels are coming. However, this solution comes with a drawback: there are people out there who are so crazy, so suggestible, or so already inclined to fear Government Death Panels for their own reasons, that it is possible to persuade them that the Government Death Panels really are coming, no really, no doubt about it. And those people, as soon as the Death Panels nonsense started, behaved the way you, frankly, would behave if you really believed that the Death Panels were coming for your mother, for your baby: you would form a resistance movement and start assassinating the pro-Death-Panel government officials.

The Tea Party spokespeople and candidates have painted themselves into this corner: they have discovered that no line of rhetoric they can devise is powerful enough to persuade enough people to keep voting for Reaganomics, unless it's also powerful enough to persuade dozens of lone crazies to run around assassinating Democrats. This leaves the rest of us in the awkward position of having to persuade them to voluntarily give up their only chance of winning, for conscience's sake. You may quite accurately guess, I suspect, how likely I think it is that they will volunteer to lose in order to save however many dozens (or more) of the lives of people they disagree with.

[This article is the work of J. Brad Hicks, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution, NonCommercial, ShareAlike 2.5 License.]

Does communism work?

Allen Small demands that I "show [him] an example where [communism] has worked or even partially worked now or in the past." It's pretty much a stupid demand; at the very least it condemns any sort of novelty or progress. But it got me thinking.

Of course, we have to be a little more explicit about what we mean by "communism", "working" and "partially".

There are three good definitions of communism. First, the "minimal" definition that I use: the social ownership of the means of production. The second is the "Marxian" definition: socialization of capital, participatory democratic government of enfranchised workers (a la the Paris Commune), and central planning of the consumer economy. The third is the "Soviet/Chinese" definition, oligarchical rule of the Communist Party to own and administer the means of production and implement central planning. I personally endorse only minimal communism, but both Marxian and Soviet/Chinese communism include minimal communism.

It's a little more difficult to define "working". Allen has, of course, set me a task that I suspect he considers impossible. He condemns all of Western civilization as "statist" and appears to consider them the moral equivalent of communism and fascism; presumably does not believe that any civilization, society or government actually works or has worked. But of course Allen is that curious rarity, a complete idiot; most sensible people I think will have somewhat less dogmatic and more pragmatic standards of what works and what doesn't work.

I think we can take Fascism — defined as the political-economic and social systems actually in place in Italy, Japan and Germany from the early 20th century until the end of the Second Imperialist War — as near-ideal exemplars of "not working": they ended in the economic ruin, military defeat and unconditional surrender of their respective countries and criminal prosecution and near-complete discredit of Fascist politics and politicians. (Political parties and movements in the West may include elements of Fascism, a worrying phenomenon, but they also fail to include some essential features. And the more features of Fascism present-day political movements include, the more marginal they appear to be.)

I think we can take "Western capitalism" — loosely defined as the international system pioneered in England in the 17th and 18th centuries and finding common expression in most European, North American, (to some extent) Central and South American countries as well as Southeast Asia and (to some extent) the Indian subcontinent — as an exemplar of "working". Which is not to say that I endorse Western capitalism, but it has certainly done the opposite of the catastrophic failures of Fascism.

Taking these as our examples, it is important to note that the presence or absence of horrific atrocity doesn't really distinguish between "working" and "not working". The litany of horrific atrocity in Western capitalism is depressingly long: chattel slavery, genocide, wars of aggression, millions killed in the First and Second Imperialist wars, epidemics and famines caused or exacerbated by societal incompetence and indifference, etc. ad nauseam. Again, to say that horrific atrocity is not a component of "working" or "not working" is not to say that I endorse or even excuse atrocity; I'm saying only that it is not a particularly useful criteria for historical comparison. (Indeed I share to no small extent Allen's disdain for all human civilization. And, like Allen, I think our near-universal history of really stupendous atrocity calls for truly radical societal change. Allen and I disagree only on what kind of radical change to implement.)

If we adopt the minimal criteria necessary to call Western capitalism as working, it straightforwardly follows that communism has at least partially worked in a couple of ways.

First, the Soviet Union and Communist China lasted a lot longer than the Fascist countries. Although communism fell — definitely in the Soviet Union and arguably in China — these countries did not fail in the spectacularly catastrophic fashion as did the Fascist countries. Furthermore, both the Soviet Union and China transformed backwards, illiterate, agrarian countries that were manifestly subservient to Western imperialism into industrialized, nuclear-armed world powers. And they did so in considerably less time than did the Western nations. This is not a stunning success — neither the Soviet Union nor China achieved their greater goal of exporting communism to the world, and they achieved what they did at a staggering cost in human suffering — but I think we are justified in considering them at least partially working, by the minimal standards we must adopt to label Western capitalism as "working".

Second, and perhaps more importantly, all Western democracies have partially implemented components of minimal communism. Almost all features of "welfare capitalism" are direct consequences of communist and communist-inspired political activism in the early and middle 20th century. These features include a dramatic de facto and de jure increase in the political franchise, substantial regulation of the capitalist ruling class, workers' political and economic empowerment through unions, heavily progressive taxation, and one or two orders of magnitude increase in direct government economic participation. And the historical record is crystal clear: The more Western capitalism has adopted communist elements, the better it has performed by every metric — economic, social and political — except the privilege and absolute power of the capitalist ruling; the more Western capitalism has abandoned communist elements, the worse it has done.

If we are going to condemn all human civilization — an exercise I have a lot of sympathy for — historical comparison is irrelevant: We must rely on purely theoretical comparison. If, however, we are going to employ historical comparison, communism seems to come out at least as well as — and on some accounts considerably better than &mdash its antinomy of laissez faire capitalism.

The death of Facebook?

Facebook hype will fade:

Mark Zuckerberg is Time's Man of the Year, the movie about him seems likely to be an Oscar winner, and now Goldman Sachs is raising $1.5 billion from its favorite investors on behalf of the social networking company. ... As I read the situation, we are witnessing the beginning of the end of Facebook. These aren't the symptoms of a company that is winning, but one that is cashing out.

Presuppositional apologetics

Presupposational Apologetics, Morality, and The Intellectual Legacy Of Greg Bahnsen:

Peter: Hi, Justin.

Jason: Hi, Peter. Just so that we are clear my name is Jason.

Peter: Are you trying to commit a logical fallacy by correcting me?

Jason: WTF are you talking about?

Peter: No bother, I apologize for the misunderstanding. Let’s talk about that dog over there. Would you say that that dog is gray?

Jason: That is an elephant, Peter. It’s ten feet tall and has a big fucking trunk. It is a fucking Elephant.

Peter: I didn’t ask you if it was an elephant, Jason. I asked you if that dog is gray. Just answer the question. But be careful, you will have to accept the consequences of your answer.

Jason: Seriously. It’s a goddamn fucking elephant. If your question is “Is that quadruped gray?”, then yes, yes it is.

Peter: I told you to be careful how you answer the question. You should have listened to me. Can I passive-aggressively offer you a coffee to drink while you mull it over? You see Jason, if you answer yes, you are saying that that animal is a dog, and you are committing the fallacy of mutual contradiction. An elephant can’t be a dog, you see. If you answer no, then you are saying that it is not gray, and by their nature all elephants are gray. So again, you are wrong.

Jason: First off, that is the most retarded thing anyone has ever said to me. Second, what about albino elephants? Are they not white, or at least cream colored?

Peter: See, you lost the argument when you answered the question. I am not obliged now to answer any of your arguments because you are wrong no matter how you answer. I claim victory. You admitted that you are incapable of simple color recognition or of species identification, so in your world any animal can be any color, or any species. That makes no logical sense.

Jason: Seriously? Are you even sane?

Peter: I cannot argue with someone who cannot grasp simple logic. Good day to you, sir.

(aside) Wow, I sure showed him. I got him to admit that an elephant was a dog. What an ass.

Funniest (and truest) fucking thing I've read in a month.

[Egregious Intelligence tag for Jason and George; Egregious Stupidity tag for Peter]

The Stupid! It Burns! (reading comprehension edition)

I don't often cite commenters for burning stupidity, but this comment from chucky-texas deserves special mention:

Your example of Boeing is humorously ironic; it's a private entity which started and grew without government planning. Central planning of "economic concentration" isn't a requirement for developing complex products or entire industries. These things evolve on their own and are fully manageable within private enterprises.

"The company's first government contract was not for airplanes at all -- but for 161 sets of pontoons for observation planes in service with the U.S. Navy."
http://www.boeing.com/history/narrative/n021naa.html

The relevant quotation from the original post:

It's ambiguous whether an anti-statist using this definition objects to concentrating political power in general, or concentrating political power in some specific way. ... The first sense [i.e. objecting to the concentration of political-economic power in general] [poses the] problem ... that our modern technological civilization requires a considerable degree of economic concentration.

It's helpful if you actually read the post before you comment.

The Stupid! It Burns! (what is god? edition)

Stream of thoughts: Atheism and God

Atheism is also a religion. Nothing of what you say can change atheists’ faith. Because atheism isn’t really a proof of one’s high intelligence but a form of close-mindedness. Atheists can only understand their language – a language that doesn’t use the words “God”, “Miracle”, “Prayer”. They cannot translate the language of theists into their language and vice versa even though what the both are saying is just the same. In this sense, atheists and people with blind faith to their religions are very alike.

So what precisely are we atheists close-minded about?

What is God?

Someone who directly grants your wish? I don’t believe in that God either.

Someone who is up there on the clouds, monitoring each of us? I don’t believe in that God either.

Someone who looks like a human but powerful? I don’t believe in that God either.

Someone who can literally multiply the number of breads? I don’t believe in that God either.

Someone who will punish or reward you after your life here on Earth is done? I don’t believe in that God either.

The word God is so cliché we almost don’t think about its meaning anymore but automatically believe in the meaning given by what majority of the society think it means.

Ask yourself. What is God?

So... as an atheist, I'm close-minded about a concept the author cannot explain!?

<facepalm>

Statism

Allen Small defines Statism as

the theory or practice of concentrating economic and political power in the state, usually resulting in a weak position for the individual or community with respect to government

It is too much to expect Allen himself to have more than a superficial, dogmatic attachment to this definition, but this definition is susceptible to substantive analysis.

One problem is that it's ambiguous whether an anti-statist using this definition objects to concentrating political power in general, or concentrating political power in some specific way, i.e. in the state. I don't know which horn of the dilemma Allen wants to get stuck on, so I'll address them both.

The second sense is trivially stupid. A state is a concentration of political and economic power (and the distinction between political and economic is itself only the most superficial distinction; they are two sides of the same coin); when you concentrate power, what you get by definition is a state: a collection of individuals who act to maintain and perpetuate — by force and propaganda — the power that they have concentrated. The only coherent reading of the second sense of anti-statism is that power should not be concentrated democratically; it should be concentrated, rather, in that class of people (i.e. the owners of capital property) who somehow deserve concentrated political-economic power.

(It is instructive to note that Libertarians typically disclaim loyalty to the Republican party, but they denounce Republicans only when they appear to act democratically instead of protecting de facto capitalist privilege. I know many Libertarians who "hold their nose" and vote Republican; I don't know a single one who would vote Democratic even if a Republican government were to start two wars of aggression, bail out the finance monopolists, increase the size of the government and deficit, nakedly interfere with the private individual rights of women over their own bodies, and generally act in the most egregiously "statist" manner possible. But I don't know that many Libertarians, I don't really like any of the ones I know, and I have a smidgen of grudging respect for exactly one.)

The first sense of statism is at least not trivially stupid; indeed I myself tend to prefer more distributed rather than more concentrated political-economic power. But there are two problems with this sense.

The first problem is that our modern technological civilization requires a considerable degree of economic concentration. A Boeing 747 costs about $318 million (about 13 million person-hours at the average wage, or about 127 person-lifetimes). And that's just for one aircraft: the production facilities are a couple of orders of magnitude larger: Boeing's present market capitalization is about $51 billion dollars, or about 20,000 person-lifetimes (and that doesn't count direct external, public costs, such as Boeing's share of academic and scientific research that has been conducted at public expense). That's not a trivial amount of concentration. If one is against concentration per se, must we therefore sacrifice air travel?

The second problem is how to distribute or prevent the concentration of political-economic power. We've been concentrating political-economic power since the dawn of civilization, and we have seen a succession of states that have achieved preeminence by more effectively concentrating political-economic power. This concentration hasn't been imposed by space-aliens landing in their flying saucers and enslaving humanity; this concentration has been always the work of human beings. If, as left anarchists and (some) Libertarians assert, it is somehow "natural" for human beings to cooperate on a large scale without the concentration of political-economic power, then why has it not happened, ever, anywhere on the globe, over at least five millennia? This kind of large-scale voluntary cooperation might be desirable (I myself find the idea appealing) but I really cannot see how it can be called natural in any reasonable sense of the word. Allen demands that I "show [him] an example where [communism] has worked or even partially worked now or in the past." I can ask the same of him: Show me an example where Libertarianism has worked, or even partially worked, now or in the past. Presumably he cannot hold as examples

communists, fascists, NAZI's, socialists (called New Democrats in Canada), Liberals (in Canada), Conservatives (everywhere), Democrats, Republicans, Greens and on and on. They are ALL statists according to that definition and my usage, and they differ only in degree of application.

(Of course the demand itself is nonsensical; on these grounds one would have to denounce human civilization itself.)

When we study economics, political science, sociology, psychology, game theory, anthropology, literature, humanities or any other intellectual field having to do with the behavior of human beings on any scale from the individual to the world, we see that "individualism" and "collectivism" (enforced cooperation) are in an extremely complicated dialectical relationship. Our progress as a world civilization (such as it is) has been not a movement from one to the other, but rather an elaboration of the dialectical relationship between the two. We have been working out precisely what should be in the domain of individualism and what should be in the domain of collectivism. And we cannot work out this trade-off analytically; we have to work it out dialectically, evolutionarily, by trying things and seeing what works and what doesn't work.

I am certainly willing to admit that Lenin, Stalin and Mao's attempts at communism didn't work in the long run. I want to know precisely why they didn't work, and what we can do differently. I have some theories — I think explicitly democratic political institutions are absolutely necessary; neither dictatorial, oligarchal nor republican solutions will work — but simply dismissing anything that has anything in common with these experiments — or, more precisely, anything in common that threatens one's own political, economic and social privilege — as "statism" is uncritically and unskeptically ridiculous.

Communism and Stalin

You cannot determine either the truth or falsity of communism from the behavior of Stalin or the U.S.S.R. In the same sense you cannot decide the truth or falsity of the divinity of Christ from the behavior of Pope Ratzo or the Catholic Church, as evil, predatory, oppressive and blatantly evil the Catholic Church might be. Give me a list of the Church's crimes ten thousand pages long (and I'm not at all certain I'm being hyperbolic), and this list by itself would be not constitute a shred of evidence against the divinity of Christ. The atheist argument against the Catholic Church goes the other way. We know separately from the Church's behavior that Jesus Christ is not divine (and might not even be an historical person), therefore the Church's self-described belief in that divinity is no defense against its evils.

In much the same sense, that Stalin called himself a communist is no defense against his own crimes. (I suspect Stalin's crimes have been greatly exaggerated by a hostile and openly biased Western press and intelligentsia, but the general assholiness of world leaders of every ideology throughout history is pretty well-established, so I'm willing to accept on general principles that Stalin was one asshole among many.) And, similarly, give me a list of Stalin's crimes ten thousand pages long and that list by itself would not constitute a shred of evidence against communism.

You have to make an independent definitional argument, or you have to make a causal argument. "Stalin was a communist; Stalin was evil; therefore communism is evil" is trivially fallacious (hint: the structure of the fallacy is identical if you substitute "was an atheist" or "wore a bushy mustache" for "was a communist"). Communism is most definitely not defined as "whatever Stalin did". In all my years of studying politics and economics, even before I was a communist, I've never seen a good historical argument making either the definitional or causal argument. Before I became a communist, my belief that communism was evil was simply received wisdom, unskeptically and uncritically accepted. (I dismissed the more obvious anti-communist bullshit propaganda, but I believed that this was just actual critical thought repackaged for the credulous masses; imagine my surprise when I found out that the "scholarly" critique against communism was equally bullshit.)

So, show me how either definitionally or causally the socialization of capital entails rounding up tens of millions of people (on some accounts literally a third of the population of the Soviet Union) and killing them. Until then, I'm just going to treat your magic invocation of "Stalin" as just that: credulous, unskeptical thinking.

See also:

Communism 101
What is communism?
What is socialization?
What is ownership?
What is capital?

(Or, if you're curious, type "socialize capital" in the search box at the top of the sidebar.)