Comment on "Yeah, but what if we used AI?"
TotallynotJessica@lemmy.world 8 months agoI am very much in favor of using violence to take resources from people that don’t give back to the community they rely on. It’s a good thing to take money from the rich and greedy using violence. There is no imaginable society where people should be permitted to not contribute when they are capable of contributing.
If people are permitted to not contribute excess power, it places more of the burden on everyone else to make up for it. On top of that, as the tax dodger accumulates too much control over resources(wealth), they can use those resources to hire people that then impose violence on the community when they try to take the resources back.
If anything, an anarchist society should be more vigilant of resource accumulation, forcing each other to contribute through violence and ensuring that large power imbalances don’t emerge. There would be no state to handle redistribution, so it’d be the responsibility of every individual to make sure everyone has enough. There’d be no justification for anyone to have too much exclusive control over important resources, nor would there be a justification to not give excess resources to ensure everyone has the essentials.
In a society that prohibits excessive wealth imbalance or centralization of control, there’d be power inequality, but there’d also be a well established ceiling and floor to the inequality. That will always require some form of progressive “taxation” or system of redistribution. There’d also need to be taxation on almost all worker productivity to help develop public goods that everyone will benefit from. Everyone would need to chip in what they can if they need a new communal well, or if they need to maintain the roads, or need to put someone’s home out if it caught fire. People would need to contribute even if they don’t benefit from the particular public service, as they might benefit from another one more than others.
A well functioning society must require people to contribute what they can to maintain & improve the community, must take from those that don’t contribute by force, must tax people even if they don’t consent. This isn’t optional for any system, state or no state. If it fails, exploitation, abuse, and suffering will destabilize the system until it falls apart from under its own weight. A society that taxes properly can minimize violence, maximize efficiency, and be far safer for everyone without exception. Even those on top are constantly in danger of being deposed by someone who wants their position, as well as the people they exploit.
Tldr: Yes, we must use violence to force contribution. Not doing so only causes more violence. Violence is unavoidable, and can only be minimized by ensuring no one gets too powerful to oppress.
aidan@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Yeahhh I definitely disagree this is a fundamental truth. Not because you’re necessarily wrong from your perspective, but because we have fundamentally different values.