Chapter 3 of the book is titled “Anarcho-Communism,” so I was expecting to finally get Kropotkin’s great argument for how to establish communes without a state apparatus forming.
What I got was a series of weird historical cherry-picking and declarations pretending to be arguments.
Detailed notes available here.
Responding to an interesting but occasionally misguided video by Tim Cain, called “Do Devs Know What Gamers Want?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bA-P3p7PdEc
Tim makes some good points about how some of the feedback game developers get can be vague, open to multiple interpretations, and/or contradictory.
Get a copy of my outline for this video here.
Check out Fuller’s talk here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZYAFaHSsZY
Normally the Mises Institute’s Austrian Economics Research Conference has interesting and novel talks. Usually they’re a bit dry and directed toward an audience that knows Austrian economics quite well.
However, this year, Edward Fuller brought the house down with a lecture on Keynes that is not only fascinating, it is a fantastic example of detailed historical work, hunting down and confirming original and nearly-lost sources, showing evidence to people and getting entirely unexpected responses, and several other staples of a really good mystery or thriller.
It starts off a little slow, mildly threatening to be the same kind of “Keynes was a socialist” talk you’ve probably heard before, but after a few minutes, Fuller dives into some unexpected sources and makes some new points on that front, before going into a detailed investigation of an extremely prominent economic model and its true origins.
It unfolds like a detective story–to the point where I was afraid of putting spoilers into my recommendation for it. If you like economics or mysteries, go give it your time–you won’t regret it.
My video is available on Odysee, YouTube, and BitChute.
Thumbnail image is a caricature of Keynes by David Low
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Keynes_caricature_Low_1934-1.jpg
Pre-order my new novel, releasing April 7th:
Pursuit of the Heliotrope
https://a.co/d/7eWrZeh
Kropotkin’s second chapter is a doozy. He makes a variety of really bad extrapolations, a bunch of incredibly ignorant anti-economic points, and then goes on to demand total expropriation of all goods, both capital and consumption, “private” and personal.
He bases this mostly on floppy definitions of “need” and “live,” as well as the usual incorrigible envy that motivates most actual socialists and communists.
Even worse, the next chapter is supposedly his argument for “anarchic” communism, but considering how he simply papered over the confiscation of all goods with some utopian nonsense, I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for a good argument, because it doesn’t look like one is coming.
Full show notes here.
Welcome to the first episode of my examination of Peter Kropotkin’s book “The Conquest of Bread.”
Episode notes can be found here.
This video can be found on Odysee, YouTube, and BitChute.
Kropotkin is a prominent example of the so-called anarchist strain of communists, which believed that social revolution would lead to the abolishment of private property in the means of production, further leading to a stateless method of organization through communes and labor associations.
The preface and first chapter, however, do not begin by explaining how to enforce the abolishment of private property without a coercive state. Kropotkin instead decides to open his book with a combination of bad economics, misread history, blindness to incentives, rhetorical flourish, and misunderstanding stemming from over-aggregation of the capital structure.
It isn’t a good start, but we’ll see where he goes from here!
Cited articles:
Ludwig von Mises, “The Rise of Capitalism”
https://mises.org/mises-daily/rise-capitalism
Lipton Matthews, “The Problem with Guilds: They’re Monopolistic and Wasteful”
https://mises.org/mises-wire/problem-guilds-theyre-monopolistic-and-wasteful
Robert P. Murphy, “Why Austrians Stress Ordinal Utility”
https://mises.org/mises-wire/why-austrians-stress-ordinal-utility
Murray N. Rothbard, “Ten Great Economic Myths”
https://mises.org/mises-wire/ten-great-economic-myths
Ludwig von Mises, “Planned Chaos”
https://mises.org/library/book/planned-chaos
Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society”
https://mises.org/mises-daily/use-knowledge-society
Intro music edited from a piece by Paul Yudin, courtesy Unsplash:
https://pixabay.com/users/paulyudin-27739282/
While I spend a little time reading making notes on Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread for my next series of videos, I figured I’d make a random fun video about an idea that’s been bouncing around in my head for a while.
You can just watch the video if you want, but I’ll put a text summary below if you prefer that.
Wrapping up my examination and critique of Locke’s Second Treatise, I focus here on where Locke’s framework fails to achieve his stated goals, and why.
This is it! The final chapter of Locke’s Second Treatise, “Of the Dissolution of Government.” Here, Locke covers a variety of ways that a government or a society can fail, and tries to explain under what circumstances a people forming a society may toss out their existing government and create a new one.
These two chapters cover two ways in which governments can make themselves illegitimate: through usurpation and tyranny.
Locke is careful to separate the two terms, so that usurpation is specifically the transfer of power to one entitled to it (even if that one restricts himself to similar powers and functions as the legitimate government).
Chapter 16, “Of Conquest” finally gets to the details of the hypothetical “just conqueror,” and covers Locke’s ideas of the restrictions and requirements for a conqueror to maintain the legal/moral high ground.
Some of the argumentation in this chapter is a bit confusing, so I start out with Locke’s summary at the end of the chapter, and then return to the more nuanced discussions after that.
