You know how the scientific definition of theory has a fundamentally different meaning as the colloquial meaning of theory? The anarchist definition of property is synonymous with capital while the colloquial idea of property is more synonymous with the anarchist definition of possessions.

I am physically able enough and have the ability do almost all the necessary maintenance on my house, car, and other possessions myself. Of course everyone needs expert help from time to time, for example I can solder copper pipe but I don’t want to risk a gas leak so I call a HVAC tech if I need a new furnace valve. However other than external inputs like water, power, gas, and internet service which intrinsically require collective effort, a single person (who is physically able enough) can efficiently maintain a modern house by themselves.

A single person has no way of doing anything but very basic maintenance on something as technologically complex as a modern factory. Even if they were a master mechanic, electrician, calibration engineer, and every other diverse skill set involved in just maintaining a factory it would be impossible for them to run it as anything but an inefficient workshop without some sort of external labor. Things that intrinsically require collective effort to function should be collectively operated for the benefit of the community.

The same is true for a large property like a mansion (which should not really exist beyond serving a purpose as a historical artifact), an industrial farm, a power generation facility, or a water treatment plant. If it requires collective effort to run and maintain to function it is capital, thus falls under “property” and should be collectivized.

The fact that someone can own and profit off something while unable to maintain it or use it without collective effort solely for their own benefit and enrichment is theft. Without their workers they would have a decrepit building full of the rusting hulks of machinery yet there are factory workers in the US who have to sleep in their cars or work multiple jobs while the C-Suit takes home millions.

I don’t get it either. The west is an imperialist death machine and capitalism is taking down the whole biosphere in its death throes. Instead of looking at China and seeing signs of the same authoritarian and imperialist cancer metastasizing in its government tankies stop at “they oppose the west” and give them a pass rather than realizing that their system is fundamentally compromised as well. If they believe a state is necessary to achieve what they consider true socialism then have some standards beyond “opposes the west” and stop hand waving the suicide nets at the Foxconn iPhone factory and the totally not concentration camps in Xinjiang. If anarchist theory involved caging people behind barbed wire, conducting mass censorship and surveillance, and allowing the existence of something so beyond the pale such as billionaires I would never have even considered it as an ideology much less a hill to die on.

From what I’ve seen Dogbert is really obsessed with the Chinese state to the point of ignoring the fundamental structural issues it has. Is the Chinese state better for the average citizen than the US, probably in a lot of metrics, but as everywhere it is heavily dependent on who you are and where you live.

I’ve done some reflashing of cellular modems and the best place for open source modem firmware I found was some Chinese language hacker communities and they didn’t seem jazzed about the hoops they had to jump through to get to the clear net just to collaborate with the rest of the world. When information is restricted to that extent it is symptomatic of an extremely adversarial relationship between the government and its citizens.

What authoritarians of any stripe don’t realize that by abdicating their autonomy to any state, no matter the color of the flag or what ideology it espouses, ends in one way repression and death. If there is an out group there is a high likely hood that even a true believer will find themselves in it at some point. There is a tendency for authoritarian structures like states and corps to justify their existence through a progress at any cost mentality. This is true for western capitalism as well as Soviet and Chinese implementations of socialism. Any cost may be Lake Karachay’s ecosystem or the cultural extinction and enslavement of native people who live on land rich in rare earth minerals, it also means any citizen who becomes inconvenient to the state.

There is some disagreement between people who, for example, favor Proudhon versus those who favor Kropotkin over the ownership of personal tools that are involved in individual trade-craft. As with any ideology there are varying schools of thought but the common ideological baseline is that anything that requires capital investment should be collectively controlled and operated for the common good. A person’s personal possessions including their home and tools required for self sufficiency are not considered “property” or a “means of production” by almost anyone.

A good real world example is the FOSS community, most of us would be quite vexed to say the least if someone started changing stuff on our personal computers but we also actively share our code, experience, and knowledge with the world for free. Same goes for the open hardware folks, permacomputing community, and the open research community.

The one of the largest problems with any state system or really any system that includes involuntary hierarchies is the decoupling of economics and morality. Power not only is a corrupting force but the people who want power over others tend to have the basest morality. Both western capitalism and the Chinese implementation of socialism are both perfectly happy destroying the environment, utilizing slave labor, and implementing surveillance states all in the name of “progress” and the continuation of a world order that primarily benefits an elite few while grinding billions under their boot heels.

I would caution against attributing altruistic motivations to the actions of nation states. The Spratly Islands are having their ecosystem trashed so the various powers can have a fucking dick measuring contest over imaginary lines on a map. So far a bunch of fishermen have been killed and irreplaceable coral reefs have been destroyed, all in service of building artificial islands for reasons that vary depending on the state actor.

Debt trap diplomacy is a problem with every large power including BRICS, the west is currently the biggest offender because the World Bank and the IMF has the implicit backing of US military power projection. It is easier to strong arm “client states” into onerous loan terms and “free trade zones” when there is the threat of their nation being labeled as “supporting terrorism” and have a carrier battle group off shore within days.

I have no reason to doubt that once that BRICS has the ability to project power, basically whenever China has several modern carrier battle groups, they won’t operate any differently than the west does now. The flag and justification will be different but the global south will continue to be exploited.

It’s pure exploitation by the state of the ignorance and naivety of the average recruit as well as the capitalist system weaponizing its own failings. Most people in my boot camp platoon were under 20 and the vast majority of us came from disadvantaged backgrounds. I didn’t know the term at the time but most people joined for the hope of class mobility along with getting the fuck out of wherever they came from. It also showed the strength of the US propaganda machine, especially in the immediate wake of 9/11, where the media was complicit in a massive coverup of US/ISAF atrocities and a whitewashing of the savage inhuman brutality that is implicit in war.

That does not excuse our ignorance since millions of people our age marched against the wars, especially Iraq. In retrospect we unconsciously chose cowardice and selfishness and cloaked it in a delusion of honorable sacrifice.

Former Marine here. This illustrates the prevailing excuse endemic to the whole imperialist war machine. Every bloody cog has some way of passing blame up the chain. I fixed electronics so I never had to personally pull a trigger but the electronics I fixed helped fix aircraft whose pilots and aircrew were responsible for atrocities I can only imagine. I used to rationalize that this separation erased my culpability but now I understand it actually enhanced it. At the level of maintenance I was at a broken twidgit tip unaccounted for could ground an entire air wing for several days.

If you have made the massive mistake of joining the military please use your power of being a rusty cog. Report every chip on every tool to maintenance control, send every piece of gear missing a screw or emp braiding in for parts/DRMO don’t run to the hardware store for a quick replacement, CDI time is valuable and limited so make sure to never skip a CDI verification step and ask for their opinion on every anomalous reading, if you drop a torque wrench or break a cal seal ground that gear and send it back to the shop, take your time and verify every measurement, don’t gundeck MAFs, and follow all procedures to the letter. Don’t be afraid to involve maintenance control to make sure your shop is fully compliant and not taking shortcuts. If you had just sat on your rack and refused to work you would just get replaced, now you have weaponized the regulations and bureaucracy in a way that covers your ass for the rest of your enlistment while crippling the whole air wing. You can now get out and try to make amends for the catastrophic damage you have done to the world. However if you reenlist fucking die in a fire.

I regret every day that I joined and wish I was aware of the evil the system I was a part of was perpetrating. The few times I talk about my time in the Marines in the last few years is to warn people about how fucked up it is, how they brainwash and strip the individuality from recruits, and most importantly the reality of what the US Military does to innocent people all over the world and the environment.