Capitalism created more poverty by putting a price tag on the basic necessities of life and making land private. We could have had no poverty if we had free shared access to the means of subsistence/production. We could have lived and worked cooperatively for the benefit of everybody instead of having to compete with each other to be exploited for the major profits of the few.

“…the long rise of capitalism, from 1500 right into the Industrial Revolution, caused dramatic social dislocation everywhere it went. The enclosure movement in Europe, the Indigenous genocides, the Atlantic slave trade, the spread of European colonisation, the Indian famines; all of this took a measurable toll on human welfare around the world. […] For the vast majority of the history of capitalism, growth didn’t deliver welfare improvements in the lives of ordinary people; in fact, it did exactly the opposite. […] capitalist expansion relied on the creation of artificial scarcity. Capitalists enclosed the commons – lands, forests, pastures and other resources that people depended on for survival – and ripped up subsistence economies in order to push people into the labour market. The threat of hunger was used as a weapon to enforce competitive productivity. Artificial scarcity quite often caused the livelihoods and welfare of ordinary people to collapse even as GDP grew. It wasn’t until nearly 400 years that life expectancies in Britain finally began to rise […]. Historians today point out that it began with a startlingly simple intervention[…]: sanitation. In the middle of the 1800s, public health researchers had discovered that health outcomes could be improved by introducing simple sanitation measures, such as separating sewage from drinking water. All it required was a bit of public plumbing. But public plumbing requires public works, and public money. You have to appropriate private land for things like public water pumps and public baths. And you have to be able to dig on private property in order to connect tenements and factories to the system. This is where the problems began. For decades, progress towards the goal of public sanitation was opposed, not enabled, by the capitalist class. Libertarian-minded landowners refused to allow officials to use their property, and refused to pay the taxes required to get it done. The resistance of these elites was broken only once commoners won the right to vote and workers organised into unions. Over the following decades these movements, which in Britain began with the Chartists and the Municipal Socialists, leveraged the state to intervene against the capitalist class. They fought for a new vision: that cities should be managed for the good of everyone, not just for the few. These movements delivered not only public sanitation systems but also, in the years that followed, public healthcare, vaccination coverage, public education, public housing, better wages and safer working conditions. According to research by the historian Simon Szreter, access to these public goods – which were, in a way, a new kind of commons – had a significant positive impact on human health, and spurred soaring life expectancy through the twentieth century. This explanation is now backed up by a strong consensus among public health researchers. Recent data shows that water sanitation measures alone explain 75% of the decline in infant mortality in the United States between 1900 and 1936, and half the total decline in mortality rates. A recent study led by an international team of medical scientists found that, after sanitation, the greatest predictor of improved life expectancy is access to universal healthcare, including child vaccination. And once you have these basic interventions in place, the biggest single driver of continued improvements in life expectancy happens to be education – and particularly women’s education.” (from the book “Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save The World” by Jason Hickel)

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“The long process of removing people from lifeways that allowed for them to survive as communities is the history of the violent imposition of capitalism and the state. There are countless stories of how this was done, from the enclosure of common land, to the gendering of different kinds of work, to the creation of dependence on wage labor to purchase the things necessary for life, to the creation of centralized food systems and monoculture that eliminated people’s ability to grow their own food.” (from the book “Practical Anarchism: A Guide For Daily Life” by Shuli Branson)

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

If we’re arming people I think a slightly better solution would have been to go further back and arm the peasants in Europe so they can overthrow the monarchs/feudal lords and dismantle the hierarchical system that sent people to “discover” the world for profit/plunder and did the enclosures at home

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.

Thing is, evil isn’t inevitable, it’s created by specific systems/conditions* that we can act to remove. It might require hard work and take a long time but it can be done.

*Hierarchy, coercion, individualization/lack of communality and support, competition (between countries, companies, co-workers, etc.), shame/isolation, the insecurity/stress of there being a price tag on the basic necessities of life which means most people have to find a way to consistently make money (e.g. find employment and keep it) in order to survive, etc.

“…the last 30 years or so have seen the science of psychology and studies of the human brain begin to put compassion, caring, and pro-social behaviour centre stage in the development of well-being, mental health and our capacity to foster harmonious relationships with each other and the world we live in. Shortly after the Second World War, researchers such as Harry Harlow (1905–81), who worked with monkeys, and the child psychiatrist John Bowlby (1907–90) began to study the impact of the caring relationship that infants had with their mothers. It was found that a mother’s love and affection had a huge impact on the emotional development of the infant, child and subsequent adult. In the 1950s and 1960s, John Bowlby outlined the approach to human development that he called ‘attachment theory’. This focused on the quality of the attachment relationship in terms of the accessibility and affection of the parent in soothing and regulating the infant’s emotions. Indeed, we have probably all seen how young children become distressed if they lose contact with their mothers and how, in the normal course of events, the return of the mother calms the infant down. Bowlby helped us to recognize that, from the day we’re born, our brains are biologically designed to respond to the care and kindness of others.” / “I was lucky in having as PhD students the talented Steve Allen and Chris Irons, who studied the interaction between attachment experiences and those of power and subordination. […] I was also fortunate that, during the 1980s, a group of us were able to meet every few months to share ideas about the interaction between the innate aspects of our minds and the way our early and social environments can bring out the best or worse in us.” / “[in the context of therapy:] it turned out that helping people develop compassion for others and, especially, themselves is not always easy. Indeed, some people are positively frightened of it and resistant to the idea. They see self-compassion and self-kindness as a weakness or an indulgence; to them, it means that you’re going soft or letting your guard down. If they started to feel self-kindness or compassion, it could ignite feelings of grief because they would recognize how alone they’d been feeling for so long. John Bowlby suggested that, if you show kindness in therapy, you can activate your patient’s attachment memories. If those memories are of neglect or unkindness, the feelings that result from neglect or unkindness can reemerge. Far from experiencing the therapist or the procedure as kind, patients experience it through their emotional memories – they feel awkward, anxious and resistant to compassion.” / “Children have a natural desire to want to play. However, suppose that, every time children start to play, their parents punish them and withdraw affection. Over time, the children will learn that their own desires for play result in punishment, and so they’ll inhibit these desires or become anxious if they feel such desires within themselves. We can learn to become anxious about our feelings because of how others have responded to them in the past. Let’s look at the desire for care and affection. What happens if children’s desire for care and affection results in neglect, rejection or even abuse? You can see the problem. So when the therapist behaves in a kind way, this can reactivate their patients’ (innate) desire for care and affection, but of course, these feelings are associated with great fear, and that’s what can flood through the patients – so they turn away from kindness.” (from the book “The Compassionate Mind” by Paul Gilbert)

"Many people who end up in top positions of power are the product of private boarding school education, which separates children from their parents at an early age. […] The psychologist Joy Schaverien, author of Boarding School Syndrome, argues that ‘early boarding can cause profound developmental damage.’ She notes in particular that because the institutions themselves provide ‘little time for reverie … the life of the imagination may therefore suffer.’ I spoke to the journalist George Monbiot, himself a boarder from the age of eight, about how a system that produces ‘a repressed, traumatised elite unable to connect emotionally with others is a danger to society’. ‘The effort […] was very much to throw a tight loop around our imaginations, and confine them to a particular social and cultural arena.’ The result was that many of his fellow students appeared ‘to have had their imaginations surgically excised.… You come out of that system really not understanding how the other ninety-three percent of people live and work and struggle. This is why you have people who have been through that system arguing there’s no such thing as poverty in this country.’ " (from the book “From What Is to What If” by Rob Hopkins)

“Having spent over thirty years at the UK criminal bar, and ‘rather a lot of time in prisons’, Baroness Helena Kennedy QC speaks from experience when she writes: For most people, prison is the end of a road paved with deprivation, disadvantage, abuse, discrimination and multiple social problems. Empty lives produce crime…The same issues arise repeatedly: appalling family circumstances, histories of neglect, abuse and sexual exploitation, poor health, mental disorders, lack of support, inadequate housing or homelessness, poverty and debt, and little expectation of change…It is my idea of hell. In our society, children subjected to the harshest, most impoverished environments are increasingly being criminalised. Kennedy remarks that ‘Ninety per cent of young people in prison have mental health or substance abuse problems. Nearly a quarter have literacy and numeracy skills below those of an average seven-year-old and a significant number have suffered physical and sexual abuse.’ Economic, political and cultural arrangements shape identities, opportunities and, ultimately, behaviour.” (from the book “Creating Freedom: The Lottery Of Birth, The Illusion Of Consent, And The Fight For Our Future” by Raoul Martinez)

It’s important to note that people are mirrors of the system/conditions that they live under. They are steeped and conditioned by frustration, stress, shame, scarcity, competition, individualism, lack of empathy/solidarity/communality, entitlement that comes from either high class that “deserves/earned” it or from trying to grasp at any amount of control they can get over what happens to them amidst a feeling of utter helplessness of having no meaningful effect on how society around them operates, etc.

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’s so heartbreaking. And it’s so tragic that “seeking attention” has become a bad thing, a dismissal, a put-down, only seen as narcissism.

Yes, human beings seek (positive) attention. We live in an atomized, individualized society where everyone is expected to be out for themselves, responsible for their own survival. We want an empathic and supportive human connection, we want a society of people that care about each other.

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)

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“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)

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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)

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.

I think that deciding on political/social issues should be preceded by a lengthy public discussion where experts and non-experts alike get to share all relevant information/viewpoints and ask questions to try and figure out the best way (or ways) to tackle the issue(s)

Adding a quote from the book “From What Is to What If” by Rob Hopkins:

While I was writing this book, my country has been enmeshed in the appalling contortions of Brexit, its withdrawal from the European Union. Brexit has been a disaster. Not because of the decision or its implications – I am not setting out in this book to express an opinion on that. The disaster was the process. The Brexit referendum took a highly complex issue, which most people didn’t really understand, and reduced it to a binary Yes or No. It was prey to massive amounts of misinformation and political interference, ‘dark money’ which influenced the vote, leaving a legacy of families and neighbours who don’t speak to one another, and a younger generation feeling betrayed by the older one. Did it have to be like that?
Neither campaign, Remain nor Leave, engaged the imagination in making their case. All we got were dry arguments about how much money we’d lose or save, and big red buses with fictitious numbers on how much the United Kingdom would be able to reinvest in its National Health Service if it left the EU painted on the side. No one argued for the brilliant creative flourishing that leaving the EU could bring about, a cultural renaissance, the chance to create vibrant local economies and opportunity for reconnection. Conversely, very few people argued that we should stay in the EU because being connected to Europe brings untold cultural delights, means we are working together for a common goal of unity, solidarity and peace and a flourishing of the arts. No, it was all about how many millions of pounds we might save, or are unnecessarily spending, and provoking a fear of immigrants.
The resultant decision was neither a carefully considered nor a wise collective response, and the divisions it created will endure for generations. And it meant that no one could think about anything else for years – squashing imaginative what-if questions about what kind of future we might actually want to embrace. But how might we have done it differently? How might we have had a national exploration of such a big and important question in such a way that our imaginations were invited, enhanced and treasured?
The answers can be found in a suite of techniques known as ‘deliberative democracy’. In essence, deliberative democracy refers to decision-making approaches that give people the opportunity to deliberate, to digest and to contemplate, in a safe context, particular issues. Ed Cox of the RSA (the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce), whose aim is ‘to enrich society through ideas and action’, suggests three principles that underpin it:
* Debate should be informed and informative, enabling people to explore issues from a range of perspectives based on sound argument rather than personality.
* Participants should be willing to talk and listen with civility and respect.
* Participants should represent a range of backgrounds and perspectives across the general population.
It covers a spectrum of approaches and tools, but central to them all is the making of considered judgements, spaces where people of different perspectives come together to deliberate in an informed and well-facilitated way.