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.
this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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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.
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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.
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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.
There’d still be religious, cultural, and racial differences to fight over
People can fight over other differences, even if all those factors were equal.
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.
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
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.
Who do you think works in governments?
"Government is terrible, I trust people!"
or
"People are terrible, I trust government!"
Both hamstrung by the fact that people are what make up a government.
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?
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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.
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.
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
"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.
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