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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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No free trade without free movement!
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.
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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.
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Hey! You comment in support of Israel bombing hospitals. Thanks for commenting in bad faith and alerting me to your post history.
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"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
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