I agree with conservatives that strict boarders are necessary for nation states.
They call it a necessity evil, I use it as an argument to abolish all states.
Wouldn’t removing or abolishing borders result in more invasions and wars, not fewer? Weak or unprepared nations would no longer have allied agreements for protection and would surely be under attack.
I think the point is there just wouldn't be Nation-states anymore, just a single united world. Partially because communism is definitionally stateless and classless (by Marx at least).
How would removing borders unite people? There’d still be religious, cultural, and racial differences to fight over, as well as interest in your neighbor’s desirable resources.
Like united as in sharing the same governmental structure (or lack thereof sometimes), freedom to move and travel anywhere, and probably more or less similar ideals for such a thing for actually work.
There still obviously would be things to fight over and probably some amount of small-scale civil conflict. There would also still probably be areas with with similar cultures, but with softer and more grey edges and mixing.
This is also more or less just the Marxist ideal of things, I have slightly different ideals personally. Mostly that there does need to be a fairly defined state and governmental system to maintain socialism/communism, help organize large-scale resource allocation and transport on a global scale, and provide structure for civilization-scale projects like progressing human knowledge and science, space travel and exploration, etc.
What if the region you wanted to visit did not culturally accept your race/religion/sexuality? Without laws tailored to specific regions, wouldn’t we just be trading arrests for lynch mobs and hate crimes based on regional social mores?
I think you might over-estimate how common that would be if such hate and opinions were not supported by the state or at least not ignored by the state, but it is an understandable concern, but I see a few possible arguments against it.
the lack of such freedom of mobility and movement of culture would let cultures mix and have more interaction, which has been shown to increase acceptance of different cultures, and reduce hate.
there will almost always be cultural differences, and dislike between groups, but especially without class struggles it will be less common for them to elevate to the levels of lynchings, and outright conflict. Hell, even just looking at the US, it has a decent amount of separate cultural regions but not much conflict based on that. It is mostly interpersonal conflict, class-based, or from reactionaries to minorities.
Yes, the states must be prepared and it can't be done all at once. See how not every country is automaticly added to the EU and Schengen, often it takes time.
potentially, it's really dependent on any given geographical region and the military capability in that area i guess.
I don't actually know what would stop this, on a global level, aside from a global military force, so arguably you could refer to it as a "single nation earth" i guess.
Yes, this is the entire reason behind the contemporary idea of the geographic border defining the political state. If we just hit "reset" after the war and all agree that states should embrace political sovereignty which isn't tied to ethnic divisions, then slowly it will kind of all blur into one big quasi-federal good time.
This has actually worked decently well in most places, with some notable exceptions.
It would absolutely guy capitalism's strangle hold
I don't think it would have that effect at all... abolishing all nations and states would mean the massively wealthy corporations that are wealthier than most nations and states would become the de facto super powers of the world. Governments are the only thing keeping the likes of Meta, Google, Apple, nVidia, etc. From having private militaries and literally taking over the world. If you want to abolish all nations and states, you need to gut capitalism first and make sure these corporations can't just become the new and far worse government.
You're probably right... Really I was just trying to point out that these borders and that separate us are a lot more for governments than they are for any of the people.
Really I don't think capitalism is the worst system in the world inherently nor is a completely communist system the problem is that when allowed to run unchecked and you get incompetent grifters who take advantage on both sides of the equation that's unfortunate.
How does removing borders ridicule capitalism? Maybe I’m misunderstanding your use of guy as a verb.
I meant gut, and without the artificial rules we abide by enabling capitalism it would falter...then like 8 guys would figure out how to ruin it all again.
Border have to exist to some degree, simply from a management perspective. Even if we threw all state and country borders away, it'd be literally impossible for a single government to effectively govern the world. You'd need to divide it all up into smaller regions to be managed. Otherwise, we'd might as well just fall back into the pre-industrial age as infrastructure erodes due to poor governmental oversight and management.
I agree, but those aren't the kinds of borders OP is talking about, I think. And it's a naïve simplification, in any case.
I interpret OPs point is about free travel and employment, without restriction or passports. The kind of "no borders" that exists in the EU: any citizen of a country in the EU can travel to, live in, and work in any other EU member country, without restriction, without limitations, and without passport.
It doesn't require, but is greatly facilitated by, a common currency; and as the EU has demonstrated, there's a lot of moving parts for this to function well. Having a common set of standards for human rights, having some basic economic model alignment, having mutual non-aggression agreements for a members... they're all essential components. Heck, I'd suggest that it'd be super-helpful if there was adopted a neutral, universal second language that all member countries require children to take a couple of years of in the public education system - a conlang like Esperanto (by virtue of sheer numbers of speakers), but certainly one where no single country has a advantage by having it be the natural native language, which excludes English.
Anyway, that's the kind of "no borders" I think OP is talking about, not the governance kind.
That's called an open border. No border is a stupid thing unserious morons on the internet make up.
Why do you assume we need an entire government to do work?
Because we had to live with shit in the streets for thousands of years before the invention of a strong government.
Look at what corporations (made up of people) do with the slightest deregulation.
People are, in general, awful.
There's shit in the streets right now in many large cities due to the failures of the state. The gilded age and industrial revolution spawned numerous public health crises under the watch of governments. The planet is being burned alive due to failures of the state. The solution is more state? Are you sure about that?
How do you propose you regulate corporations or any sort of industry? You want to make sure you food is handled sanitarily, no? You want to ensure your drinking water is being cleaned correctly, right? You want to know if new medications have downsides or are at least effective at what they're purported to do. You want to make sure bridges and tunnels are engineered correctly. Etc. etc.
Yes, government is not perfect. Yes, there are things that get past regulation all the time, but just imagine how much worse it would be with zero regulations. That's the kind of society you're arguing for. You literally cannot have more than a dozen people living together without some sort of social governance. Even tribal communities have some type of government in its most basic form.
Encourage and support the current unionization efforts. Stoke radicalism in the working masses, collectivize the means of production in a horizontal and egalitarian fashion. Abolish corporations so that there's no corporations to manage. Allow the people who are already ensuring you have clean water to continue ensuring you have clean water. Allow the people who already study and test medications to continue to study and test medications. Allow the people who already engineer and maintain infrastructure to continue to maintain infrastructure. Standard anarcho-syndicalist stuff.
For civic management form neighborhood councils that are federated with adjacent communities, repeating this process to cover as much area as possible. Make collective decisions via direct democracy, utilizing revocable delegates to manage specific tasks and coordinate efforts on a large scale. Operate on a hybrid library/gift economy internally and engage in trade with outsiders (if money is still a thing). Distribute housing, food, and medicine freely, based on need and not the ability to pay. Facilitate relationships of freedom and mutual trust in your community. Do your part and trust memebers in your community to do the same. Standard communalist stuff.
That sounds good in theory, but incentivization is a real problem for numerous communities, particularly less urban ones. Attracting doctors, engineers, etc is much more difficult when you have a smaller pool of people even capable enough to perform those tasks to pull from. Currently this is done through money/profit, but even that isn't enough in some areas (see how the agricultural industry is currently struggling to attract veterinarians to rural communities).
I'm not fully disagreeing with you, by the way. In a perfect world, that sounds great. It just feels like a huge world of, "if X people do Y thing, it'll all work out just fine." Taking that step requires a huge leap of faith by hundreds of millions of people, and hoping no sizable group rises up to eventually usurp the whole delicate transition process.
It sounds good in practice too. The Zapatistas and Rojava have been putting systems like these in practice for quite some time now. Compared to their neighbors, they're doing pretty well for themselves. These systems work, have worked, and are likely to continue to work. These systems aren't for a perfect world, theyre systems to make the world better. My comment isn't a comprehensive or even prescriptive list of things we need to do to establish anarchy. They're examples of methods that have been used to great effectiveness and may carry insights and knowledge for people/communities to apply to their contexts in ways that make sense to them.
It shouldn't be a leap of faith, it should be a careful and calculated effort put forth by those who want to work for it. You may not totally disagree with me, but I wholeheartedly disagree with the characterization that anarchy is unrealistic. It's been done before and it's being done now
I guess the biggest issue I see is how do you handle global trade? Right now, tons of materials we need for even manufacturing highly advanced products and other materials requires a complex web of international trade. How do smaller communities hope to be part of that without sliding back to the pre-digital age? I know there are folks who probably don't see that as a bad thing, but I definitely do, as I enjoy having access to modern technology and services (not to mention, I work in IT, so my job kind of depends on it).
I can only speak for myself and my beliefs, but trade would be done in a manner where one community is capable of producing more than half of their needs within the community first. The workplaces in a community has unions represents them to meet with unions from other communities so they can coordinate production and trade for the mutual benefit of both communities.
imbisbibal hamd
No.
No we didn't.
We did not live with shit in the streets without government. Even the earliest known sites for long term near human habitatation had sanitation at least to the point of handling waste away from living areas. It's really exclusively the British and British controlled India that had problems with this. Nearly every other known society in history has sensible sanitation. Indoor plumbing is older than monotheism for ducks sake.
It wasn't British. All of Europe was known for dumping their waste in the public street. Britain did not bring that to India. It was already traditional.
Sanitation in Rome was stones placed in the middle of the road so you could cross the street without stepping in human waste.
Sanitation in Rome was open sewer lines yes, that had constantly flowing water that removed waste in the gutter. Also closed sewer lines nes that removed waste from people's houses. Depending on the era you want to try to claim this in. At no point were people just throwing waste into the street and leaving it there. That was just an English thing.
A corporation might be made up out of people, but it is also a vertical power structure that gives the people at the top the ability to benefit from being awful, at everyone else’s expense.
People are awful when they have the ability to be awful while benefiting themself and are able to get away with it.
And to say people are generally awful completely ignores the societal strictures imposed on us that reward horrible people.
Is built by people, designed by people, contributed to by people, and most importantly exists in stateless societies. When a community has a common need and enough spare time to address that need, infrastructure happens. A government not only is not needed for this, but objectively halts or stalls progress for a variety of selfish goals of the individual politicians, as humans cannot be politicians, just parasites.
What stateless societies have infrastructure on the scale of NYC, Paris, or Tokyo?
What government has given out free ponies to all citizens?
Is this not where we ask nonsequiturs?
To address your point that is irrelevant to any discussion at hand. We can get into why there are exceedingly few stateless societies allowed to exist, the history of aristocracy and how every single world leader is a descendant of a feudal lord proving feudalism never died out and psychopaths have ruled the world since the dawn of government, but you're frankly not ready for that discussion. Until you are I suggest JAQing off in your right wing echo chamber from now on like you types are used to.
Wtf are you even talking about? You literally said that stateless societies have formed infrastructure. I asked you to provide examples of where that has occurred on the massive scale that modern cities exist at. Basic roads and sanitation that stateless societies create is a whole lot different than getting clean water to tens of millions of people in a relatively small, dense footprint. You could argue that Kowloon did it, but honestly it is only due to the extreme humidity in that area of the world that the whole place didn't go up in flames due to how shoddy the ran electric lines throughout the whole city. But there were tons of other problems that existed in that place, e.g. extreme levels of mold, sanitation issues, etc.
But sure, just write me off as a right wing zealot because I challenged your worldview. I'm not even conservative, but whatever, lol.
Nooo don't break up the giant monolithic top down states into smaller federated communities, noooo!
But there'll still need to have common policies across all of those communities, otherwise you just end up right back at square one with nation states. The US and EU are literally just this, a bunch of states (US) or countries (EU) that agree to allow free travel/living/learning/business/etc between each other with a larger governing body that oversees all of it.
That's all good as long as this body doesn't have final control over the other territories.
The US/EU states/countries are also... states and countries, so that could change.
Originally, the federal government in the US was very, very limited in power and states had much higher degrees of autonomy than they do now. It resulted in tons of problems, even agreeing on a basic common currency was problematic.
Now, I think that it's swung too far in the other direction and that the federal government nowadays in the US has too much power. I think it's possible to meet in the middle, where you have a semi-central body where federated communities have a common ground to address and resolve grievances with an outside, neutral party mediating things.
Anyway, just my two cents.
The problem with the "middle ground" approach is that eventually it's bound to start acquiring more power.
This is just the nature of top down government structures and is pretty much inevitable.
True, that is a valid point. Maybe with direct democracy, hard safeguards, and very limited terms and funding, it could potentially be limited from expanding power. But, I'm not an expert, so I'll leave hypothetical future social governance planning to those who are more competent.
Understandable, I just enjoy thinking about these sort of things way too much, haha.
You think it's ok for a local federated state to allow slavery?
Because it took a centralized government to have final control over those states rights.
And the big bad wolf went to the straw man and huffed and puffed and blew the poor straw man away.
It would also effectively mean that every region in the world would have to have the same laws.
Take Canada and the US. Very similar culturally, very similar economically, but some pretty important differences in human welfare. Like, every Canadian resident pays taxes to support a healthcare system, and if you need healthcare it's free.
If you eliminated the US/Canadian border, people could live in the US where taxes are cheaper until they had a serious illness, then they could move to Canada to get free treatment whenever necessary, moving back as soon as the treatment was done. That obviously wouldn't work well.
The only ways to make that work are either to eliminate the border, and have both regions have exactly the same healthcare system, or keep the border and allow both to have different systems.
This has so completely disappeared from discourse over the past four years. I remember when it used to be that "building the wall" was stupid at best and bigoted at worst. But now, it's all, "Of course we agree that we need a strong border, but we're the ones who will actually do it, Trump's all talk."
It's always the Republicans that get to set which values and goals the country persues, while the Democrats just run on pragmatism and efficiency. It's like they're allergic to making moral claims.
It's because it's a one-party system masquerading as a two-party system.
Oh, oh no, no no no no no, No. this isn’t a one party system, this is something far worse, this is what comes exactly right before a one party system. That is a two radicalized polarized adversarial party system. One must go but neither will leave willingly, there is more concentration of money and power in these two parties than possibly any other group on earth and maybe through out all history, make no mistake the only thing that will hold the country back from civil war is the Bomb, and that is only a maybe.
We might not quite be that bad yet but all the peaces are in place and adversarial moves are already being made.
it's really not one party.
To be clear we have one party, that is effectively fascist, and another party that is, center left/right and very moderate.
Two parties, one donor class.
well yes, people are the one species with money, so that does apply. (yes it's a rich people meme i know, that is a big problem)
If we're breaking it down this significantly there is no politics, merely the human hierarchical structure of control.
no politics, merely the human hierarchical structure of control.
I'd love to hear the perspective where this makes sense.
An important party of governing is listening to constituents. They border is the second highest concern of voters (behind the economy) and an overwhelming majority want stricter border controls. Being a good public servant involves listening to the public.
It's bc the Republicans are fear mongering about the border 24/7
So, the Democrats don't listen to the majority of voters when they want free education, Medicare for All, or an arms embargo on Israel, but when it comes to stricter border controls, they're all ears for some reason.
but when it comes to stricter border controls, they’re all ears for some reason.
well there's a really obvious reason for this one.
Currently the border asylum processing chain is incredibly swamped, up the point of multiple years of backlog, which is why temporary status citizens are a thing. Though not to the same degree as the UK. The whole point behind border control and immigration policy is to fix this problem, actually push the asylum cases for these people through, and get them real citizenship (or not, and get rid of them, that's how it works.)
This is arguably a human rights issue.
So, the Democrats don’t listen to the majority of voters when they want free education,
we have free state education, primary education only though. Republicans want to get rid of this, i don't think you'll see kamala harris saying she doesn't want it. Though free secondary education is obviously the implication here, i figure it's worth pointing out.
Medicare for All
biden has done numerous things for healthcare in his term. Same for obama, though again, not universal socialized healthcare, so not really the implication but it's worth noting.
or an arms embargo on Israel
i'm not going to talk much about this because i keep getting banned over these topics for some reason. But idk how much popular support there is for this one, i haven't looked at polling, i wouldn't be surprised if it was a popular position though. That very well might be the case, however if you're asking why the US is supporting Israel, the answer is that it's militarily strategic. That's the unfortunate but real answer there.
Great example of manufactured consent
Which polls show an "overwhelming majority" want stricter borders? Source please.
Tbh I expect that some people are more hawkish on the border now than before because the Democrats switched tacts, and not the other way around, but regardless I haven't seen any evidence that shows what you're claiming.
Polls do show a majority is in favour of some currently proposed border measures. "Overwhelming" is a bit much, but that might refer to people in favour of a stricter border policy but not necessarily in favour of the currently proposed measures.
Source please to show they don't.
Source please what burden of proof is
The burden of proof is on the person making the claim. I have made no particular claims about how popular or unpopular immigration is.
I've never met a liberal irl who gives a fuck about borders or immigration. It's always conservatives that rage about that shit to me.
liberals have a lot of "very serious people" who talk about the sanctity of the nation state.
So you agree that nations should be abolished, including any and all borders?
Yes
Based, but also not a common belief under liberalism. I suppose you could argue there's nothing inherently anti-globalist about it though.
Cool now convince like many many other people that this is a good idea and can be implemented without disaster .
I think we should strive toward a world without borders. but until all governments can agree that borders serve no good aside from trade boundaries and taxation (which is arguably theft anyway) and should be abolished, then I think they do serve a protective purpose as well. Other nations are territorial so you have to be in defense of the place you live else you risk losing it to more territorial peoples.
Meaning that will never, ever happen.
No free trade without free movement!
"Yeah, but proceeds to present an argument that completely ignores the underlying premise that everyone should be cool with all being one planet helping each other instead of returning to squabbling tribal mentality of 'us vs them' and 'if I give themsomethen I'll haveless' and people need to stop letting conflicts of our parents and great-great-great-x147-grandparents started decide how we view our neighbors"
Haha checkmate, logical thinkers.
I'm pretty sure neoliberals also actually advocate for open borders and reduced immigration in general, and often accuse the left of being anti-immigration because of concerns regarding wages by unions.
neoliberals advocate for open borders only for capital. Capitalism itself would collapse overnight if there was free movement of labour
Schengen zone, and to a lesser extent USA, show that capitalism can continue to function with a free movement of labor within relatively large and varied economic zones. This would continue to be the case worldwide, I believe. There remains significant barriers to movement even without borders: time, money, separation from family and cultural support systems, and more. There are people in the US and EU who want to "escape" their current state/country due to local laws but cannot do so despite it being perfectly legal to do so.
It is true. I'm talking about all borders mate.
Why is capitalism perfectly functional within regions of open borders but would not function within a larger region of open/no borders?
Do you have a response to the concept of practical borders applying whether or not there are legal borders?
Why is capitalism perfectly functional within regions of open borders but would not function within a larger region of open/no borders?
Because Europe is externalizing the capitalist exploitation outside of Europe. We saw the instant upheavals that happened when they dared to take a small amount of refugees from the places they and their US allies have been destabilizing for decades. And that was with just a fraction of a fraction of the population movement that would happen from the exploited nations to the exploiting ones through open borders.
I think I get what you're saying wrt exploitation of the global south, but this is a very out of date view in my opinion.
The physical location of a person does not determine the value that can be exploited out of them by capital, it is why some leftists take an anti-immigration stance as it can drive down wages by increasing supply of labour domestically, which is proof enough that one can be exploited no matter where you are located.
In the neoliberal world the argument is then that with wages being driven down living should also get significantly cheaper as the cost of products comes down and companies lower prices to out-compete each other. Of course in reality due to concentration of power in so few hands companies often behave more like a cartel so it doesn't happen.
In theory with strong minimum wage laws exploitation should be much harder to achieve locally than via outsourcing (you can't run a sweatshop in the UK), but those minimums are often so out of touch with actual living expenses that a decrease in wages even far above the minimum is sorely felt on the middle income working class.
There's still some exploitation that can only be done with overseas labour, sure, but it's really less and less as globalization equalises the global labour market. Once scammers used to be far more common in poorer countries, now grifters are everywhere.
And I think when it comes to the EU and the refugee crisis, that isn't necessarily related to this, it just coincided that severe contradictions in neoliberal race to the bottom trickle down austerity economics coincided with an influx of immigration, and Europe was always quite racist tbh and especially islamophobic, so grifters seized on stoking the fears of cultural shifts and jobs being taken.
Of course capitalism is inherently unstable, and it naturally radicalizes those exploited by it. Which is why capital is unrestricted by borders and flees to other nations to exploit once the local market becomes too unruly and then requires state violence to keep the radicalism in check. This works much better when the exploiter and exploited are in different nations and a whole nation becomes effectively the bourgeoisie while another becomes the proletariat. All the people living in "bourgeoisie nation" then get pacified by the spoils of the prole nation, and the latter is suppressed militarily and kept out of sight and out of mind.
Remove the borders and the exploited in the poor nations will immediately immigrate and destroy the standards of living for the rich nations and therefore destroy the pacifier keeping their local labour in check.
There is no situation where completely opened borders for labour wouldn't collapse the system. It's why liberal nations become more xenophobic as time progresses regardless of how many noble ideas they are espousing. If it was in the benefit of capital to have no borders, they would have done it ages ago, but they perfectly well understand what would happen, which is why all the rich people naturally promote stronger borders for labour, not less.
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have to pay taxes to the US on my income that I earn while living elsewhere
You do an FEIE deduction on your 1040. If you're earning less than $120,000 in a year and live more than 330 days outside of the US during a tax year, you thus don't need to pay a single dollar to the IRS.
(I agree it's messed up that US citizens have to file taxes, but you don't need to resign your citizenship to avoid paying US taxes - as long as you're a bona fide resident of a foreign country and earn less than $120k.)
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You're earning significantly over $120k/year? Then you file a form 1116 to have a credit against foreign-paid taxes. And even then, whatever income was left over after deductions doesn't put you automatically in the highest tax classes.
Where are you living where you're earning so much? I know many US expats, basically no one is earning that much, much less native-born citizens. It's the US that usually pays much more for engineering, not as much in RoW.
Is your cost of living so high that you're unable to save any of your super high income? You don't necessarily need to "extract wealth from other people".
It sucks to need to file taxes to a regime you're not residing in, but you surely understand the purpose of it? Don't you think it's probably a good thing that billionaires can't just make big profits in the US and pretend they're living in Malta?
Sorry, but as someone who has helped several high-earning expats with their US taxes, it really seems like you're either setting hinders for yourself (intentionality or otherwise), or doing some creative writing.
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Not significantly more.
Good, and you understand how the level calculations work, right? If you earn $121k, you're only going to calculate taxes for $1k of income for example.
It sucks to pay even a cent to the US, but probably still cheaper and less risk compared to giving up citizenship -- especially if you have family there that'd you'd like to be able to visit in the future.
for a consultancy in the US
That makes it a bit more complicated, but if you're abroad over 330 days, you'd fill form 673 to prevent withholding for example. Have you not retained an accountant to help guide you through this? Based on the information you've shared, it seems like you're paying a lot more into the system than you need to.
That sucks, but it's not responsive to my argument.
I have never once heard and have not been able to imagine an explanation of how not having borders could possibly work.
Notice how there is no border between your town and the next one? Same, but on a larger scale.
But there is...
There's the border, then there's The Border. One is a line drawn on a map for administrative purposes, sometimes comes with its own road sign. The other is a checkpoint where your documents are handed over and you're at the mercy of the border authority. Usually doesn't happen between towns, but those are pretty popular in places like Soviet Germany, apartheid South Africa and the West Bank for example.
Internal border control is common in East Asia. India, China, North Korea, Bhutan, Malaysia and Vietnam have it with varying degrees of strictness.
Yes, but the next town over is protected by the same military, is under almost exactly the same laws, is covered by essentially the same tax system, and so-on.
If you're suggesting eliminating borders once there's one world government covering every country and a planetwide tax system, then sure. Until then, it seems like it would be a disaster.
You can just keep going where the border would be.
Simple. In the past there is no "border". You are someone from Frankfurt who came to Paris to set up business and there was no question asked.
In the past that was true of certain classes, other classes were tied to the land and forbidden from leaving their manor lord's land.
A example that’s not borderlessness, but still interesting, was the Behind the Bastards episode on Harlan Crow which talked about how there was seasonal migration of people from Mexico into the US during peak agricultural seasons. They would return to Mexico in the winter, but the introduction of a hard border incentivized people to remain in the US.
It seems the hardening the border lead to the exact thing Harlan Crow and the other racist trash were trying to fight, increased immigration.
All immigration is a net positive to the economy in a number of different ways, and most of "problems" are caused by material conditions created by having classes of citizens versus non citizens. The US basically had open borders for much of its history and that's a big reason why it became such an industrial powerhouse.
The original idea behind physical border control has more to do with espionage and sabotage than restricting immigration.
What do you mean "how it works"? What function would 'having no borders' serve?
Ask the EU.
They have a lot of borders.
They're similar to the US under the Articles of Confederation. Separate states with free passage among them. Going from France to Germany is effectively the same as going from Georgia to Tennessee.
Free passage, but limited rights. In the US, you could move to a state with "easier" welfare programs, and collect them... whereas in the EU (Schengen), you're not allowed to stay longer than 90 days at a time without having a job/being able to support yourself.
Exactly, the US also used to have serious borders, now you can travel and work anywhere you want. EU is more interesting in this case because it's more recent and it consists of national states.
EU has borders though, it just functions like the United States does (in a republican wet dream) in that it's a conglomerate of a bunch of "states". ask the UK fucks that get kicked out of Spain now. No borders inside the territory but there's absolutely borders on the outside.
Yes. It used to be a bunch of more or less national states mosty at war with each other though. The fact Schengen was created is pretty mind blowing to me.
Which drowns refugees seeking asylum in the Mediterranean? That EU?
Well, they used to kill each other not so long ago. Look at the 20th century (or any previous one) - they hated each other. They've opened lots of borders since then and it was a gradual process with lots of negotiations and conditions. I'm sure you don't think it's possible to open a border without proper preparation.
Do you think the Russian army should just be allowed to march to France?
Usually the idea that borders shouldn't exist is connected to the idea that armies shouldn't exist.
How do you propose to stop armed groups from forming?
Typically community defense, which means there are already armed groups, they just autonomous groups of people ready to defend their own communities. Similar to the concept of minute men if you want to think broad strokes.
So you want a local conscript or volunteer militia? How about those local groups making alliances, sharing training, building up shared resources and infrastructure, a unified command, standardized equipment for better and more efficient defense?
So long as the local group autonomy is still respected that can work fine in theory. Once you start stripping groups of autonomy to make a beauracratic monster, you've lost the anarchism plot. A lot harder in practice to have a massive armed org that values that autonomy. Most of the time local groups will be linked to other groups. Just by group consensus, not by necessity because of course that too would not be anarchism.
Well, yeah. Anarchism loses wars to bureaucracy. That was settled in 50 BC with the Gallic Wars.
Im no historian but I think we've made some headway in technology that allows for quicker longer distance organization in the past 2000 years.
That gives even greater advantage to centralized bureaucracy. 2000 years ago armies could be independent weeks before anyone back in Rome knew what happened.
Sounds like a theoretical Libertarian trying to raise an army. Do you hand a copy of the NAP to just the volunteers or also to those you fight?
If you cant tell anarchism from libertarianism, theres no intelectual basis to continue this conversation on. Which would explain why you set up a strawman with your second sentence.
You got me, it seems I have not educated myself thoroughly enough.
Really though, if only the enlightened can see the light then it seems like it's just an academic exercise or trolling people to advocate for ineffectual fringe theory.
You may be right, but also powerless.
Tell them to fucking stop it or we'll shun them.
Ideally by eliminating any reason they might form.
More realistically... I'm not sure. Small local militias?
Anarcho-NATO.
I'm pretty sure Vaush was memeing when he said that but it honestly makes a lot of sense
Until one guy with an army realizes no one else has an army, then they march their army into whatever they now claim as theirs. Humans are too greedy, selfish, and divided to completely abolish borders and armies any time soon.
Militias are a thing. We mean standing armies. No one is saying we just let the imperialists walk in and conquer us. It means people should be able to live and work wherever they want, unhindered by borders. An invasion is something else, and would be defended against by community defense and militias
So without a standing army, how does a militia made of local community fight a force gathered from across an entire country? 500 semi trained militants won't last long against a trained army of 2000 with military equipment and logistics
Through coordination with the communities of others. Militias have and are very effective at fighting conventional standing armies. Look at the viet kongs, the anarchist militias in the Spanish Civil War, and the Ukrainian Black Army. Or the slave rebellion of Haiti. Even modern day, the Zapatistas hold their own against both the Cartels and the Mexican government.
I think the Russian and French armies should be disbanded and the workers of the world should unite to violently eliminate
until we can all be free to equitably trade our services in furtherance of the common good in society, enabling a time of total enrichment and pursuit of happiness.
Anyway this tos is crazy right.
workers of the world should unite to violently eliminate
Workers uniting to violently accomplish something looks like an army to me.
History has taught us that formal armies are not effective in doing much besides killing civilians and ruing the environment.
However independent groups of self reliant people all working towards the same goal can resist the strongest most depraved military in the history of humanity.
Workers of the world, if we unite around the common goal of a new tomorrow without owners, would not ever be controlled, all without the need for a formal military.
A $100 drone and home made explosive can elimate the most advanced 50 million dollar tank, and a single 5.56 round in the right place at the right time can take out the most advanced stealth fighter. Resistance is not only possible, it's fiscally responsible and has never been more realistic of an idea.
However independent groups of self reliant people all working towards the same goal can resist the strongest most depraved military in the history of humanity.
Like drug cartels!
And "terror" cells, and resistance fighters across the world. The US managed to kill at least a million Afghan civilians, drop tens of millions of tonnes of ordinance, spend more than ten thousand years of Afghanistans GDP on military operations, violate more children and commit more generalized war crimes than nearly any other empire while causing tens of thousands of vets who participated to kill themselves... All to take the taliban out of power and put them right back in power with even more public support than they had before the invasion.
Independent groups all working in commicationless tandem towards a single ideological goal is far more effective than even the best example of a formal military with unlimited funding and absolutely no morals.
That is more about an insurgency being difficult, since the oppression radicalizes more and more people the longer it drags on.
It isn't like city states or other small groups were less violent than more recent wars, the scale is different. Hell, the KKK and other hate groups are independent groups that work towards a single idealogical goal. The structure isn't what has a better or worse outcomes, there are different challenges and benefits to centralized and decentralized systems but the root issue with all of them is human behavior.
Human behavior is objectively to work together for a common goal. It is exceedingly few people in society that cannot do this. Basing your view of humanity's behavior on the outliers is asinine.
I highly recommend you and other misanthropes take a human evolutionary psychology course or two. Standford has one for free on their YouTube page.
If human behavior is objectively to work together, then why would scaling that up be a bad thing?
It's not, but that's not what government is. Government is the removal of responsibility away from the people; the positive reason proffered being that this frees up time for people to focus on other things, but in reality the only actual reason is misanthropy. You don't trust people, so you want a source you can trust to do things. The problem with that is humans have an evolutionary adaptation wherein some, exceedingly few, humans are born without the key ability of empathy that all normal (meant in the most offensive way possible) people are born with. These few individuals colloquially known as psychopaths exclusively take advantage of this distrust and place themselves in positions of power despite the fact they are solely the reason the distrust exists.
The line about how power corrupts is false, power attracts the corrupted and allows them to be free. Therefore we can never have any person ever have more power than any other.
Without a state, what would constitute an army and what would it fight over?
If Russians are freely allowed to roam into France, and French into Russia, what would be the matter of the war, and ultimately, what would define French or Russian as a nationality?
If you go back in history a bit, then wars were fought to steal, plunder, enslave, and to spread religions or ideologies.
Which is something that we'll have to deal with using internal forces.
If it's a global state, then there should be peacekeepers - the benefit here is that we can literally use armed forces of an entire world, though accountability is a must here. If it's an anarchy - militias can help solve it - it would be a harder balance, but it's doable and comes with less corruption.
Also, people freely moving across the world would lead to a gradual unification of culture, which should take at least religious/racial/ethnical extremism out of the question.
Should an anarchist community be able to exclude people?
Probably yes. And accept, too.
Then you will get segregation by ideology, culture, ethnicity, religion etc.
Inevitably, to some extent. But such enclaves will likely be small in size, which wouldn't let the global scale conflict develop.
States have power of all on behalf of certain group, which isn't much true for the anarchist community.
(With that said, I think anarchism is full of assumptions and I'm not sure it's the ideal way forward; but it's worth mentioning nonetheless)
I just think that anarchist societies are fragile.
Self segregation isn’t necessarily a bad thing either.
Communism is a global goal, and works best with every human on board so the parasites have nowhere to hide and no secure place from which to attack out of.
I was actually quite disappointed that the Fallout show mentioned using separate Vaults as a control mechanism to contain any rebellion and didn't do anything with it.
Anarchism is leftism, where is the contradiction? And I hope that most people in this community believe that nation states and their governments are not efficient to make the world a better place and on the contrary are one of the reasons billions of people suffer and die.
One could argue that completely open borders, like in Schengen area, are practically nonexistent. You can cross them anytime, no one stops you.
Though various countries in this scenario can still impose some restrictions and kick you out if you get caught somewhere on their territory.
I agree with conservatives that strict boarders are necessary for nation states.
They call it a necessity evil, I use it as an argument to abolish all states.
Wouldn’t removing or abolishing borders result in more invasions and wars, not fewer? Weak or unprepared nations would no longer have allied agreements for protection and would surely be under attack.
I think the point is there just wouldn't be Nation-states anymore, just a single united world. Partially because communism is definitionally stateless and classless (by Marx at least).
How would removing borders unite people? There’d still be religious, cultural, and racial differences to fight over, as well as interest in your neighbor’s desirable resources.
Like united as in sharing the same governmental structure (or lack thereof sometimes), freedom to move and travel anywhere, and probably more or less similar ideals for such a thing for actually work.
There still obviously would be things to fight over and probably some amount of small-scale civil conflict. There would also still probably be areas with with similar cultures, but with softer and more grey edges and mixing.
This is also more or less just the Marxist ideal of things, I have slightly different ideals personally. Mostly that there does need to be a fairly defined state and governmental system to maintain socialism/communism, help organize large-scale resource allocation and transport on a global scale, and provide structure for civilization-scale projects like progressing human knowledge and science, space travel and exploration, etc.
What if the region you wanted to visit did not culturally accept your race/religion/sexuality? Without laws tailored to specific regions, wouldn’t we just be trading arrests for lynch mobs and hate crimes based on regional social mores?
I think you might over-estimate how common that would be if such hate and opinions were not supported by the state or at least not ignored by the state, but it is an understandable concern, but I see a few possible arguments against it.
the lack of such freedom of mobility and movement of culture would let cultures mix and have more interaction, which has been shown to increase acceptance of different cultures, and reduce hate.
there will almost always be cultural differences, and dislike between groups, but especially without class struggles it will be less common for them to elevate to the levels of lynchings, and outright conflict. Hell, even just looking at the US, it has a decent amount of separate cultural regions but not much conflict based on that. It is mostly interpersonal conflict, class-based, or from reactionaries to minorities.
Yes, the states must be prepared and it can't be done all at once. See how not every country is automaticly added to the EU and Schengen, often it takes time.
potentially, it's really dependent on any given geographical region and the military capability in that area i guess.
I don't actually know what would stop this, on a global level, aside from a global military force, so arguably you could refer to it as a "single nation earth" i guess.
Yes, this is the entire reason behind the contemporary idea of the geographic border defining the political state. If we just hit "reset" after the war and all agree that states should embrace political sovereignty which isn't tied to ethnic divisions, then slowly it will kind of all blur into one big quasi-federal good time.
This has actually worked decently well in most places, with some notable exceptions.
It would absolutely guy capitalism's strangle hold
I don't think it would have that effect at all... abolishing all nations and states would mean the massively wealthy corporations that are wealthier than most nations and states would become the de facto super powers of the world. Governments are the only thing keeping the likes of Meta, Google, Apple, nVidia, etc. From having private militaries and literally taking over the world. If you want to abolish all nations and states, you need to gut capitalism first and make sure these corporations can't just become the new and far worse government.
You're probably right... Really I was just trying to point out that these borders and that separate us are a lot more for governments than they are for any of the people.
Really I don't think capitalism is the worst system in the world inherently nor is a completely communist system the problem is that when allowed to run unchecked and you get incompetent grifters who take advantage on both sides of the equation that's unfortunate.
How does removing borders ridicule capitalism? Maybe I’m misunderstanding your use of guy as a verb.
I meant gut, and without the artificial rules we abide by enabling capitalism it would falter...then like 8 guys would figure out how to ruin it all again.
Gotcha
I like my boarders to be easygoing rather than strict, makes the conversation easier.
Border have to exist to some degree, simply from a management perspective. Even if we threw all state and country borders away, it'd be literally impossible for a single government to effectively govern the world. You'd need to divide it all up into smaller regions to be managed. Otherwise, we'd might as well just fall back into the pre-industrial age as infrastructure erodes due to poor governmental oversight and management.
I agree, but those aren't the kinds of borders OP is talking about, I think. And it's a naïve simplification, in any case.
I interpret OPs point is about free travel and employment, without restriction or passports. The kind of "no borders" that exists in the EU: any citizen of a country in the EU can travel to, live in, and work in any other EU member country, without restriction, without limitations, and without passport.
It doesn't require, but is greatly facilitated by, a common currency; and as the EU has demonstrated, there's a lot of moving parts for this to function well. Having a common set of standards for human rights, having some basic economic model alignment, having mutual non-aggression agreements for a members... they're all essential components. Heck, I'd suggest that it'd be super-helpful if there was adopted a neutral, universal second language that all member countries require children to take a couple of years of in the public education system - a conlang like Esperanto (by virtue of sheer numbers of speakers), but certainly one where no single country has a advantage by having it be the natural native language, which excludes English.
Anyway, that's the kind of "no borders" I think OP is talking about, not the governance kind.
That's called an open border. No border is a stupid thing unserious morons on the internet make up.
Why do you assume we need an entire government to do work?
Because we had to live with shit in the streets for thousands of years before the invention of a strong government.
Look at what corporations (made up of people) do with the slightest deregulation.
People are, in general, awful.
There's shit in the streets right now in many large cities due to the failures of the state. The gilded age and industrial revolution spawned numerous public health crises under the watch of governments. The planet is being burned alive due to failures of the state. The solution is more state? Are you sure about that?
How do you propose you regulate corporations or any sort of industry? You want to make sure you food is handled sanitarily, no? You want to ensure your drinking water is being cleaned correctly, right? You want to know if new medications have downsides or are at least effective at what they're purported to do. You want to make sure bridges and tunnels are engineered correctly. Etc. etc.
Yes, government is not perfect. Yes, there are things that get past regulation all the time, but just imagine how much worse it would be with zero regulations. That's the kind of society you're arguing for. You literally cannot have more than a dozen people living together without some sort of social governance. Even tribal communities have some type of government in its most basic form.
Encourage and support the current unionization efforts. Stoke radicalism in the working masses, collectivize the means of production in a horizontal and egalitarian fashion. Abolish corporations so that there's no corporations to manage. Allow the people who are already ensuring you have clean water to continue ensuring you have clean water. Allow the people who already study and test medications to continue to study and test medications. Allow the people who already engineer and maintain infrastructure to continue to maintain infrastructure. Standard anarcho-syndicalist stuff.
For civic management form neighborhood councils that are federated with adjacent communities, repeating this process to cover as much area as possible. Make collective decisions via direct democracy, utilizing revocable delegates to manage specific tasks and coordinate efforts on a large scale. Operate on a hybrid library/gift economy internally and engage in trade with outsiders (if money is still a thing). Distribute housing, food, and medicine freely, based on need and not the ability to pay. Facilitate relationships of freedom and mutual trust in your community. Do your part and trust memebers in your community to do the same. Standard communalist stuff.
That sounds good in theory, but incentivization is a real problem for numerous communities, particularly less urban ones. Attracting doctors, engineers, etc is much more difficult when you have a smaller pool of people even capable enough to perform those tasks to pull from. Currently this is done through money/profit, but even that isn't enough in some areas (see how the agricultural industry is currently struggling to attract veterinarians to rural communities).
I'm not fully disagreeing with you, by the way. In a perfect world, that sounds great. It just feels like a huge world of, "if X people do Y thing, it'll all work out just fine." Taking that step requires a huge leap of faith by hundreds of millions of people, and hoping no sizable group rises up to eventually usurp the whole delicate transition process.
It sounds good in practice too. The Zapatistas and Rojava have been putting systems like these in practice for quite some time now. Compared to their neighbors, they're doing pretty well for themselves. These systems work, have worked, and are likely to continue to work. These systems aren't for a perfect world, theyre systems to make the world better. My comment isn't a comprehensive or even prescriptive list of things we need to do to establish anarchy. They're examples of methods that have been used to great effectiveness and may carry insights and knowledge for people/communities to apply to their contexts in ways that make sense to them.
It shouldn't be a leap of faith, it should be a careful and calculated effort put forth by those who want to work for it. You may not totally disagree with me, but I wholeheartedly disagree with the characterization that anarchy is unrealistic. It's been done before and it's being done now
I guess the biggest issue I see is how do you handle global trade? Right now, tons of materials we need for even manufacturing highly advanced products and other materials requires a complex web of international trade. How do smaller communities hope to be part of that without sliding back to the pre-digital age? I know there are folks who probably don't see that as a bad thing, but I definitely do, as I enjoy having access to modern technology and services (not to mention, I work in IT, so my job kind of depends on it).
I can only speak for myself and my beliefs, but trade would be done in a manner where one community is capable of producing more than half of their needs within the community first. The workplaces in a community has unions represents them to meet with unions from other communities so they can coordinate production and trade for the mutual benefit of both communities.
imbisbibal hamd
No.
No we didn't.
We did not live with shit in the streets without government. Even the earliest known sites for long term near human habitatation had sanitation at least to the point of handling waste away from living areas. It's really exclusively the British and British controlled India that had problems with this. Nearly every other known society in history has sensible sanitation. Indoor plumbing is older than monotheism for ducks sake.
It wasn't British. All of Europe was known for dumping their waste in the public street. Britain did not bring that to India. It was already traditional.
Sanitation in Rome was stones placed in the middle of the road so you could cross the street without stepping in human waste.
Sanitation in Rome was open sewer lines yes, that had constantly flowing water that removed waste in the gutter. Also closed sewer lines nes that removed waste from people's houses. Depending on the era you want to try to claim this in. At no point were people just throwing waste into the street and leaving it there. That was just an English thing.
And a French thing too
Who do you think works in governments?
A corporation might be made up out of people, but it is also a vertical power structure that gives the people at the top the ability to benefit from being awful, at everyone else’s expense.
People are awful when they have the ability to be awful while benefiting themself and are able to get away with it.
And to say people are generally awful completely ignores the societal strictures imposed on us that reward horrible people.
Infrastructure.
Is built by people, designed by people, contributed to by people, and most importantly exists in stateless societies. When a community has a common need and enough spare time to address that need, infrastructure happens. A government not only is not needed for this, but objectively halts or stalls progress for a variety of selfish goals of the individual politicians, as humans cannot be politicians, just parasites.
What stateless societies have infrastructure on the scale of NYC, Paris, or Tokyo?
What government has given out free ponies to all citizens?
Is this not where we ask nonsequiturs?
To address your point that is irrelevant to any discussion at hand. We can get into why there are exceedingly few stateless societies allowed to exist, the history of aristocracy and how every single world leader is a descendant of a feudal lord proving feudalism never died out and psychopaths have ruled the world since the dawn of government, but you're frankly not ready for that discussion. Until you are I suggest JAQing off in your right wing echo chamber from now on like you types are used to.
Wtf are you even talking about? You literally said that stateless societies have formed infrastructure. I asked you to provide examples of where that has occurred on the massive scale that modern cities exist at. Basic roads and sanitation that stateless societies create is a whole lot different than getting clean water to tens of millions of people in a relatively small, dense footprint. You could argue that Kowloon did it, but honestly it is only due to the extreme humidity in that area of the world that the whole place didn't go up in flames due to how shoddy the ran electric lines throughout the whole city. But there were tons of other problems that existed in that place, e.g. extreme levels of mold, sanitation issues, etc.
But sure, just write me off as a right wing zealot because I challenged your worldview. I'm not even conservative, but whatever, lol.
Nooo don't break up the giant monolithic top down states into smaller federated communities, noooo!
But there'll still need to have common policies across all of those communities, otherwise you just end up right back at square one with nation states. The US and EU are literally just this, a bunch of states (US) or countries (EU) that agree to allow free travel/living/learning/business/etc between each other with a larger governing body that oversees all of it.
That's all good as long as this body doesn't have final control over the other territories.
The US/EU states/countries are also... states and countries, so that could change.
Originally, the federal government in the US was very, very limited in power and states had much higher degrees of autonomy than they do now. It resulted in tons of problems, even agreeing on a basic common currency was problematic.
Now, I think that it's swung too far in the other direction and that the federal government nowadays in the US has too much power. I think it's possible to meet in the middle, where you have a semi-central body where federated communities have a common ground to address and resolve grievances with an outside, neutral party mediating things.
Anyway, just my two cents.
The problem with the "middle ground" approach is that eventually it's bound to start acquiring more power.
This is just the nature of top down government structures and is pretty much inevitable.
True, that is a valid point. Maybe with direct democracy, hard safeguards, and very limited terms and funding, it could potentially be limited from expanding power. But, I'm not an expert, so I'll leave hypothetical future social governance planning to those who are more competent.
Understandable, I just enjoy thinking about these sort of things way too much, haha.
You think it's ok for a local federated state to allow slavery?
Because it took a centralized government to have final control over those states rights.
And the big bad wolf went to the straw man and huffed and puffed and blew the poor straw man away.
It would also effectively mean that every region in the world would have to have the same laws.
Take Canada and the US. Very similar culturally, very similar economically, but some pretty important differences in human welfare. Like, every Canadian resident pays taxes to support a healthcare system, and if you need healthcare it's free.
If you eliminated the US/Canadian border, people could live in the US where taxes are cheaper until they had a serious illness, then they could move to Canada to get free treatment whenever necessary, moving back as soon as the treatment was done. That obviously wouldn't work well.
The only ways to make that work are either to eliminate the border, and have both regions have exactly the same healthcare system, or keep the border and allow both to have different systems.
This has so completely disappeared from discourse over the past four years. I remember when it used to be that "building the wall" was stupid at best and bigoted at worst. But now, it's all, "Of course we agree that we need a strong border, but we're the ones who will actually do it, Trump's all talk."
It's always the Republicans that get to set which values and goals the country persues, while the Democrats just run on pragmatism and efficiency. It's like they're allergic to making moral claims.
It's because it's a one-party system masquerading as a two-party system.
Oh, oh no, no no no no no, No. this isn’t a one party system, this is something far worse, this is what comes exactly right before a one party system. That is a two radicalized polarized adversarial party system. One must go but neither will leave willingly, there is more concentration of money and power in these two parties than possibly any other group on earth and maybe through out all history, make no mistake the only thing that will hold the country back from civil war is the Bomb, and that is only a maybe.
We might not quite be that bad yet but all the peaces are in place and adversarial moves are already being made.
it's really not one party.
To be clear we have one party, that is effectively fascist, and another party that is, center left/right and very moderate.
Two parties, one donor class.
well yes, people are the one species with money, so that does apply. (yes it's a rich people meme i know, that is a big problem)
If we're breaking it down this significantly there is no politics, merely the human hierarchical structure of control.
I'd love to hear the perspective where this makes sense.
An important party of governing is listening to constituents. They border is the second highest concern of voters (behind the economy) and an overwhelming majority want stricter border controls. Being a good public servant involves listening to the public.
It's bc the Republicans are fear mongering about the border 24/7
So, the Democrats don't listen to the majority of voters when they want free education, Medicare for All, or an arms embargo on Israel, but when it comes to stricter border controls, they're all ears for some reason.
well there's a really obvious reason for this one.
Currently the border asylum processing chain is incredibly swamped, up the point of multiple years of backlog, which is why temporary status citizens are a thing. Though not to the same degree as the UK. The whole point behind border control and immigration policy is to fix this problem, actually push the asylum cases for these people through, and get them real citizenship (or not, and get rid of them, that's how it works.)
This is arguably a human rights issue.
we have free state education, primary education only though. Republicans want to get rid of this, i don't think you'll see kamala harris saying she doesn't want it. Though free secondary education is obviously the implication here, i figure it's worth pointing out.
biden has done numerous things for healthcare in his term. Same for obama, though again, not universal socialized healthcare, so not really the implication but it's worth noting.
i'm not going to talk much about this because i keep getting banned over these topics for some reason. But idk how much popular support there is for this one, i haven't looked at polling, i wouldn't be surprised if it was a popular position though. That very well might be the case, however if you're asking why the US is supporting Israel, the answer is that it's militarily strategic. That's the unfortunate but real answer there.
Great example of manufactured consent
Which polls show an "overwhelming majority" want stricter borders? Source please.
Tbh I expect that some people are more hawkish on the border now than before because the Democrats switched tacts, and not the other way around, but regardless I haven't seen any evidence that shows what you're claiming.
https://www.realclearpolling.com/stories/analysis/poll-shows-support-for-stricter-immigration-measures
Polls do show a majority is in favour of some currently proposed border measures. "Overwhelming" is a bit much, but that might refer to people in favour of a stricter border policy but not necessarily in favour of the currently proposed measures.
Source please to show they don't.
Source please what burden of proof is
The burden of proof is on the person making the claim. I have made no particular claims about how popular or unpopular immigration is.
I've never met a liberal irl who gives a fuck about borders or immigration. It's always conservatives that rage about that shit to me.
liberals have a lot of "very serious people" who talk about the sanctity of the nation state.
So you agree that nations should be abolished, including any and all borders?
Yes
Based, but also not a common belief under liberalism. I suppose you could argue there's nothing inherently anti-globalist about it though.
Cool now convince like many many other people that this is a good idea and can be implemented without disaster .
I think we should strive toward a world without borders. but until all governments can agree that borders serve no good aside from trade boundaries and taxation (which is arguably theft anyway) and should be abolished, then I think they do serve a protective purpose as well. Other nations are territorial so you have to be in defense of the place you live else you risk losing it to more territorial peoples.
Meaning that will never, ever happen.
No free trade without free movement!
"Yeah, but proceeds to present an argument that completely ignores the underlying premise that everyone should be cool with all being one planet helping each other instead of returning to squabbling tribal mentality of 'us vs them' and 'if I give them some then I'll have less' and people need to stop letting conflicts of our parents and great-great-great-x147-grandparents started decide how we view our neighbors"
Haha checkmate, logical thinkers.
I'm pretty sure neoliberals also actually advocate for open borders and reduced immigration in general, and often accuse the left of being anti-immigration because of concerns regarding wages by unions.
neoliberals advocate for open borders only for capital. Capitalism itself would collapse overnight if there was free movement of labour
Just not true
Schengen zone, and to a lesser extent USA, show that capitalism can continue to function with a free movement of labor within relatively large and varied economic zones. This would continue to be the case worldwide, I believe. There remains significant barriers to movement even without borders: time, money, separation from family and cultural support systems, and more. There are people in the US and EU who want to "escape" their current state/country due to local laws but cannot do so despite it being perfectly legal to do so.
It is true. I'm talking about all borders mate.
Why is capitalism perfectly functional within regions of open borders but would not function within a larger region of open/no borders?
Do you have a response to the concept of practical borders applying whether or not there are legal borders?
Because Europe is externalizing the capitalist exploitation outside of Europe. We saw the instant upheavals that happened when they dared to take a small amount of refugees from the places they and their US allies have been destabilizing for decades. And that was with just a fraction of a fraction of the population movement that would happen from the exploited nations to the exploiting ones through open borders.
I think I get what you're saying wrt exploitation of the global south, but this is a very out of date view in my opinion.
The physical location of a person does not determine the value that can be exploited out of them by capital, it is why some leftists take an anti-immigration stance as it can drive down wages by increasing supply of labour domestically, which is proof enough that one can be exploited no matter where you are located.
In the neoliberal world the argument is then that with wages being driven down living should also get significantly cheaper as the cost of products comes down and companies lower prices to out-compete each other. Of course in reality due to concentration of power in so few hands companies often behave more like a cartel so it doesn't happen.
In theory with strong minimum wage laws exploitation should be much harder to achieve locally than via outsourcing (you can't run a sweatshop in the UK), but those minimums are often so out of touch with actual living expenses that a decrease in wages even far above the minimum is sorely felt on the middle income working class.
There's still some exploitation that can only be done with overseas labour, sure, but it's really less and less as globalization equalises the global labour market. Once scammers used to be far more common in poorer countries, now grifters are everywhere.
And I think when it comes to the EU and the refugee crisis, that isn't necessarily related to this, it just coincided that severe contradictions in neoliberal race to the bottom trickle down austerity economics coincided with an influx of immigration, and Europe was always quite racist tbh and especially islamophobic, so grifters seized on stoking the fears of cultural shifts and jobs being taken.
Of course capitalism is inherently unstable, and it naturally radicalizes those exploited by it. Which is why capital is unrestricted by borders and flees to other nations to exploit once the local market becomes too unruly and then requires state violence to keep the radicalism in check. This works much better when the exploiter and exploited are in different nations and a whole nation becomes effectively the bourgeoisie while another becomes the proletariat. All the people living in "bourgeoisie nation" then get pacified by the spoils of the prole nation, and the latter is suppressed militarily and kept out of sight and out of mind.
Remove the borders and the exploited in the poor nations will immediately immigrate and destroy the standards of living for the rich nations and therefore destroy the pacifier keeping their local labour in check.
There is no situation where completely opened borders for labour wouldn't collapse the system. It's why liberal nations become more xenophobic as time progresses regardless of how many noble ideas they are espousing. If it was in the benefit of capital to have no borders, they would have done it ages ago, but they perfectly well understand what would happen, which is why all the rich people naturally promote stronger borders for labour, not less.
redacted for pii
You do an FEIE deduction on your 1040. If you're earning less than $120,000 in a year and live more than 330 days outside of the US during a tax year, you thus don't need to pay a single dollar to the IRS.
(I agree it's messed up that US citizens have to file taxes, but you don't need to resign your citizenship to avoid paying US taxes - as long as you're a bona fide resident of a foreign country and earn less than $120k.)
redacted for pii
You're earning significantly over $120k/year? Then you file a form 1116 to have a credit against foreign-paid taxes. And even then, whatever income was left over after deductions doesn't put you automatically in the highest tax classes.
Where are you living where you're earning so much? I know many US expats, basically no one is earning that much, much less native-born citizens. It's the US that usually pays much more for engineering, not as much in RoW.
Is your cost of living so high that you're unable to save any of your super high income? You don't necessarily need to "extract wealth from other people".
It sucks to need to file taxes to a regime you're not residing in, but you surely understand the purpose of it? Don't you think it's probably a good thing that billionaires can't just make big profits in the US and pretend they're living in Malta?
Sorry, but as someone who has helped several high-earning expats with their US taxes, it really seems like you're either setting hinders for yourself (intentionality or otherwise), or doing some creative writing.
redacted for pii
Good, and you understand how the level calculations work, right? If you earn $121k, you're only going to calculate taxes for $1k of income for example.
It sucks to pay even a cent to the US, but probably still cheaper and less risk compared to giving up citizenship -- especially if you have family there that'd you'd like to be able to visit in the future.
That makes it a bit more complicated, but if you're abroad over 330 days, you'd fill form 673 to prevent withholding for example. Have you not retained an accountant to help guide you through this? Based on the information you've shared, it seems like you're paying a lot more into the system than you need to.
That sucks, but it's not responsive to my argument.
I have never once heard and have not been able to imagine an explanation of how not having borders could possibly work.
Notice how there is no border between your town and the next one? Same, but on a larger scale.
But there is...
There's the border, then there's The Border. One is a line drawn on a map for administrative purposes, sometimes comes with its own road sign. The other is a checkpoint where your documents are handed over and you're at the mercy of the border authority. Usually doesn't happen between towns, but those are pretty popular in places like Soviet Germany, apartheid South Africa and the West Bank for example.
Internal border control is common in East Asia. India, China, North Korea, Bhutan, Malaysia and Vietnam have it with varying degrees of strictness.
Yes, but the next town over is protected by the same military, is under almost exactly the same laws, is covered by essentially the same tax system, and so-on.
If you're suggesting eliminating borders once there's one world government covering every country and a planetwide tax system, then sure. Until then, it seems like it would be a disaster.
You can just keep going where the border would be.
Simple. In the past there is no "border". You are someone from Frankfurt who came to Paris to set up business and there was no question asked.
In the past that was true of certain classes, other classes were tied to the land and forbidden from leaving their manor lord's land.
A example that’s not borderlessness, but still interesting, was the Behind the Bastards episode on Harlan Crow which talked about how there was seasonal migration of people from Mexico into the US during peak agricultural seasons. They would return to Mexico in the winter, but the introduction of a hard border incentivized people to remain in the US.
It seems the hardening the border lead to the exact thing Harlan Crow and the other racist trash were trying to fight, increased immigration.
All immigration is a net positive to the economy in a number of different ways, and most of "problems" are caused by material conditions created by having classes of citizens versus non citizens. The US basically had open borders for much of its history and that's a big reason why it became such an industrial powerhouse.
The original idea behind physical border control has more to do with espionage and sabotage than restricting immigration.
What do you mean "how it works"? What function would 'having no borders' serve?
Ask the EU.
They have a lot of borders.
They're similar to the US under the Articles of Confederation. Separate states with free passage among them. Going from France to Germany is effectively the same as going from Georgia to Tennessee.
Free passage, but limited rights. In the US, you could move to a state with "easier" welfare programs, and collect them... whereas in the EU (Schengen), you're not allowed to stay longer than 90 days at a time without having a job/being able to support yourself.
Exactly, the US also used to have serious borders, now you can travel and work anywhere you want. EU is more interesting in this case because it's more recent and it consists of national states.
EU has borders though, it just functions like the United States does (in a republican wet dream) in that it's a conglomerate of a bunch of "states". ask the UK fucks that get kicked out of Spain now. No borders inside the territory but there's absolutely borders on the outside.
Yes. It used to be a bunch of more or less national states mosty at war with each other though. The fact Schengen was created is pretty mind blowing to me.
Which drowns refugees seeking asylum in the Mediterranean? That EU?
Well, they used to kill each other not so long ago. Look at the 20th century (or any previous one) - they hated each other. They've opened lots of borders since then and it was a gradual process with lots of negotiations and conditions. I'm sure you don't think it's possible to open a border without proper preparation.
Do you think the Russian army should just be allowed to march to France?
Usually the idea that borders shouldn't exist is connected to the idea that armies shouldn't exist.
How do you propose to stop armed groups from forming?
Typically community defense, which means there are already armed groups, they just autonomous groups of people ready to defend their own communities. Similar to the concept of minute men if you want to think broad strokes.
So you want a local conscript or volunteer militia? How about those local groups making alliances, sharing training, building up shared resources and infrastructure, a unified command, standardized equipment for better and more efficient defense?
So long as the local group autonomy is still respected that can work fine in theory. Once you start stripping groups of autonomy to make a beauracratic monster, you've lost the anarchism plot. A lot harder in practice to have a massive armed org that values that autonomy. Most of the time local groups will be linked to other groups. Just by group consensus, not by necessity because of course that too would not be anarchism.
Well, yeah. Anarchism loses wars to bureaucracy. That was settled in 50 BC with the Gallic Wars.
Im no historian but I think we've made some headway in technology that allows for quicker longer distance organization in the past 2000 years.
That gives even greater advantage to centralized bureaucracy. 2000 years ago armies could be independent weeks before anyone back in Rome knew what happened.
Sounds like a theoretical Libertarian trying to raise an army. Do you hand a copy of the NAP to just the volunteers or also to those you fight?
If you cant tell anarchism from libertarianism, theres no intelectual basis to continue this conversation on. Which would explain why you set up a strawman with your second sentence.
You got me, it seems I have not educated myself thoroughly enough.
Really though, if only the enlightened can see the light then it seems like it's just an academic exercise or trolling people to advocate for ineffectual fringe theory.
You may be right, but also powerless.
Tell them to fucking stop it or we'll shun them.
Ideally by eliminating any reason they might form.
More realistically... I'm not sure. Small local militias?
Anarcho-NATO.
I'm pretty sure Vaush was memeing when he said that but it honestly makes a lot of sense
Until one guy with an army realizes no one else has an army, then they march their army into whatever they now claim as theirs. Humans are too greedy, selfish, and divided to completely abolish borders and armies any time soon.
Militias are a thing. We mean standing armies. No one is saying we just let the imperialists walk in and conquer us. It means people should be able to live and work wherever they want, unhindered by borders. An invasion is something else, and would be defended against by community defense and militias
So without a standing army, how does a militia made of local community fight a force gathered from across an entire country? 500 semi trained militants won't last long against a trained army of 2000 with military equipment and logistics
Through coordination with the communities of others. Militias have and are very effective at fighting conventional standing armies. Look at the viet kongs, the anarchist militias in the Spanish Civil War, and the Ukrainian Black Army. Or the slave rebellion of Haiti. Even modern day, the Zapatistas hold their own against both the Cartels and the Mexican government.
I think the Russian and French armies should be disbanded and the workers of the world should unite to violently eliminate
until we can all be free to equitably trade our services in furtherance of the common good in society, enabling a time of total enrichment and pursuit of happiness.
Anyway this tos is crazy right.
Workers uniting to violently accomplish something looks like an army to me.
History has taught us that formal armies are not effective in doing much besides killing civilians and ruing the environment.
However independent groups of self reliant people all working towards the same goal can resist the strongest most depraved military in the history of humanity.
Workers of the world, if we unite around the common goal of a new tomorrow without owners, would not ever be controlled, all without the need for a formal military.
A $100 drone and home made explosive can elimate the most advanced 50 million dollar tank, and a single 5.56 round in the right place at the right time can take out the most advanced stealth fighter. Resistance is not only possible, it's fiscally responsible and has never been more realistic of an idea.
Like drug cartels!
And "terror" cells, and resistance fighters across the world. The US managed to kill at least a million Afghan civilians, drop tens of millions of tonnes of ordinance, spend more than ten thousand years of Afghanistans GDP on military operations, violate more children and commit more generalized war crimes than nearly any other empire while causing tens of thousands of vets who participated to kill themselves... All to take the taliban out of power and put them right back in power with even more public support than they had before the invasion.
Independent groups all working in commicationless tandem towards a single ideological goal is far more effective than even the best example of a formal military with unlimited funding and absolutely no morals.
That is more about an insurgency being difficult, since the oppression radicalizes more and more people the longer it drags on.
It isn't like city states or other small groups were less violent than more recent wars, the scale is different. Hell, the KKK and other hate groups are independent groups that work towards a single idealogical goal. The structure isn't what has a better or worse outcomes, there are different challenges and benefits to centralized and decentralized systems but the root issue with all of them is human behavior.
Human behavior is objectively to work together for a common goal. It is exceedingly few people in society that cannot do this. Basing your view of humanity's behavior on the outliers is asinine.
I highly recommend you and other misanthropes take a human evolutionary psychology course or two. Standford has one for free on their YouTube page.
If human behavior is objectively to work together, then why would scaling that up be a bad thing?
It's not, but that's not what government is. Government is the removal of responsibility away from the people; the positive reason proffered being that this frees up time for people to focus on other things, but in reality the only actual reason is misanthropy. You don't trust people, so you want a source you can trust to do things. The problem with that is humans have an evolutionary adaptation wherein some, exceedingly few, humans are born without the key ability of empathy that all normal (meant in the most offensive way possible) people are born with. These few individuals colloquially known as psychopaths exclusively take advantage of this distrust and place themselves in positions of power despite the fact they are solely the reason the distrust exists.
The line about how power corrupts is false, power attracts the corrupted and allows them to be free. Therefore we can never have any person ever have more power than any other.
Without a state, what would constitute an army and what would it fight over?
If Russians are freely allowed to roam into France, and French into Russia, what would be the matter of the war, and ultimately, what would define French or Russian as a nationality?
If you go back in history a bit, then wars were fought to steal, plunder, enslave, and to spread religions or ideologies.
Which is something that we'll have to deal with using internal forces.
If it's a global state, then there should be peacekeepers - the benefit here is that we can literally use armed forces of an entire world, though accountability is a must here. If it's an anarchy - militias can help solve it - it would be a harder balance, but it's doable and comes with less corruption.
Also, people freely moving across the world would lead to a gradual unification of culture, which should take at least religious/racial/ethnical extremism out of the question.
Should an anarchist community be able to exclude people?
Probably yes. And accept, too.
Then you will get segregation by ideology, culture, ethnicity, religion etc.
Inevitably, to some extent. But such enclaves will likely be small in size, which wouldn't let the global scale conflict develop.
States have power of all on behalf of certain group, which isn't much true for the anarchist community.
(With that said, I think anarchism is full of assumptions and I'm not sure it's the ideal way forward; but it's worth mentioning nonetheless)
I just think that anarchist societies are fragile.
Self segregation isn’t necessarily a bad thing either.
Horseshoe Theory in action
borderless kings and ethnostates
Replace "Liberals" with "Literally everyone except middle school history flunk-outs" and you got yourself a real meme going there.
thats more Anarchism than Leftism isn't it
at least if you believe governments aren't efficient to make the world a better place
Anarchism is the leftist ideology.
Communism is a global goal, and works best with every human on board so the parasites have nowhere to hide and no secure place from which to attack out of.
I was actually quite disappointed that the Fallout show mentioned using separate Vaults as a control mechanism to contain any rebellion and didn't do anything with it.
Anarchism is leftism, where is the contradiction? And I hope that most people in this community believe that nation states and their governments are not efficient to make the world a better place and on the contrary are one of the reasons billions of people suffer and die.
One could argue that completely open borders, like in Schengen area, are practically nonexistent. You can cross them anytime, no one stops you.
Though various countries in this scenario can still impose some restrictions and kick you out if you get caught somewhere on their territory.