Effective individual behaviors rely on empathy and denying short term gratification for long term prudence. Empathy breaks down on large scales for most people, and denying short term exploitation to build a better world is not something even the best of us can reliably do. Good vibes aren’t useless, but they are not enough to make necessary changes.

As far as relinquishing power goes, my eyes are wide open. It’s necessary in theory, but I don’t respect laws that prevent people from living well. I respect the enforcement, but only because I must work to avoid it. I recognize that the only way to stop some bad things is violence, and that all rights must be protected by someone. It’s undeniable that violence, although often avoidable, is necessary to exist. Human made laws and concepts without enforcement will be trampled on and basically don’t matter.

Anarchists are the antithesis to authoritarians, not liberals, which doesn’t even mean they’re right. Besides, liberal democracy can support and enforce non government entities that take rights away from others. Even if you ignore slavery, where the liberal government arrests human beings if they try to gain freedom illegally, companies and owners can legally take away things necessary for life. Are the homeless, starving, and dirt poor really free in any meaningful way?

I personally think we can build on liberal democracy and the concept of private property, but serious adjustments need to be made to actually have a free society. We need, at the bare minimum, a welfare state that ensures everyone has the necessities, and access to the tools for self improvement. A society that doesn’t give people fair chances is not a free society.

I’m in favor of limiting the private accumulation of wealth and power, as people shouldn’t have the unilateral power wielded by the current ultra rich. This wouldn’t be communism, but it would maximize freedom and minimize class conflict. It would democratize economic power as much as possible. Another key change would be making it as easy as possible to check the power of those who wield violence. Police must have democratic accountability.

The most controversial thing I think we need is a federation for peace, who’s sole purpose is limiting and resolving interstate conflict. It would work to destroy or neutralize weapons of mass destruction, while also binding member states to enforce agreements made by the federation. It would be fundamentally decentralized, relying on the shared self interest of humanity to squash the selfish interests of humanity. The goal would be to prevent a single player from holding too many cards, even the federation itself. I don’t expect it to happen until people recognize that we need it, but it is a part of the puzzle that cannot be overlooked: the quest to ensure liberty must be global, as the mechanisms that take away the most liberty, mostly global capitalism and imperialism, have no borders.

Having a mentality of sovereignty won’t change much, if only because it doesn’t fix many of the inherent problems with a global human society. A big downside to capitalism and free markets are mortal limitations. We can’t predict the future or understand the full effects of our actions. We estimate based what information we have, but we can often be wrong even if we have good intentions. The externalities of our actions are basically impossible to calculate, and even when we discover them, we possess the ability to suspend our empathy and ignore potential harms.

I’m also not a fan of the assumption that we can’t tell others what to do until we put our own lives in order. Sometimes getting others to do things is essential to changing your own life and improving your own situation. On a personal level, you can set boundaries with toxic people in your life or convince others to leave you alone. On a large scale, you can overthrow an oppressive system or change laws that prevent you from living well. Telling others what they should do is not mutually exclusive to making changes in your own life.

Sovereignty is great and all, but even if widely respected by most, some will not, and those that do must step in to protect it. The way I view it, laws don’t exist for ethically behaving people, they exist because there will always be unethical people, and there’s no way to ensure that any ethical person will always be ethical.

The fundamental reality is that someone who wants to do good can participate in an evil system. Unregulated global capitalism uses child slaves and keeps people in poverty, all while pumping substances into the environment that harm everyone. You might respect the sovereignty of everyone you meet, but anything you buy can be made by manufacturers who don’t respect the sovereignty of people you’ll never meet.

Capitalism is too big for its problems to be solved by individual behaviors without changing our current system. We must change it to actually make a system that respect everyone’s anything, be it sovereignty, human rights, or the ability to live.

The problems start before Stalin. I also don’t know what you mean by capitulation or how the USSR worked less by it than capitalism.

As far as a system that everyone buys into out of their own free will, it’s probably not possible. Even in a system that perfectly ensures equality for all people, a couple of assholes will not like the system because they want to dominate others. Even anarchy would require a mechanism to uphold anarchy through violence. The best we can do is to create a system where everyone is equal and it is most prudent to uphold it from a rational point of view.

In order to own anything at all, you need a mechanism to protect that property with violence. When you have to protect your own property with violence through hired guards, it’s feudalism. A necessary quality of capitalism is that the government protects your property with violence. Capitalism cannot exist without governments that defend property with violence or the threat of it.

All modern states are the final arbiters of decisions, just like the USSR and similar governments. If business contracts are signed in America, it’s the governments that force people to follow them. If you have a property dispute, the government decides who wins through laws. The government ensures that individual rights are protected through violence, from basic rights like the right to life, to the right to have private property. Laws are backed up by violence, as laws only matter when enforced.

The issue with attempts to establish communism in the past is that their democratic mechanism either failed, or never existed to begin with. When democratic workers councils disagreed with what Stalin wanted, he just ignored them. What could they do about it? When member states of the Soviet Union got upset with federal decisions, tanks were sent in to silence any dissent. These states enforced systems that centralized power and allowed small groups, or even a single person to make unilateral decisions and never have their power challenged.

Sorry, but the protection of rights requires that governments limit freedom. All societies and nations on earth do this. If given absolute freedom, some would kill and brutalize to gain power, forcing everyone who wants to avoid this to band together and enforce rules that prevent that behavior. This is the biggest reason to rationally want a government. Even if you believe rights aren’t social constructs themselves, everyone knows they must be fought for.

Some tankies use the fact that governments inherently limit freedom to claim all governments are authoritarian, and therefore states like the PRC and the USSR are no better than liberal democracies. Your definition of authoritarianism supports the bullshit arguments tankies make.

Authoritarianism is a sliding scale, and not every limit on freedom is equivalent in contributing to a country being more authoritarian. Not having the freedom to kill others without consequence doesn’t make a country very authoritarian. Not having the freedom to publicly disagree with the government is a large factor in a state being authoritarian.

Communism and socialism do not necessitate having no freedom of speech or bodily autonomy. Communism, as defined by Marx, was the final stage socialism and anarchistic in nature.

The idea that communism is always authoritarian uses the idea of communism popularized by Marxist-Leninist movements, where dissent is highly controlled and limited. In reality, these regimes were socialist at best, calling themselves communists to claim that only their version of socialism would deliver Marx’s communism. Even to the authoritarian communists themselves, their states never achieved communism at any point.

When it comes to indie stuff or blockbusters that were huge risks for the studios like Dune, you should pay for it if you have the ability. Pirating doesn’t directly hurt most of the people who worked on the film, as they usually get payment upfront. It does hurt them in the future, as studios won’t finance similar future projects or projects with those creators. This is why you should pay for risky movies that are of higher quality.

If Dune didn’t make the money it did, the franchise would have ended there. I was surprised it did as well as it did, as while I never doubted that it would be a good movie considering the people that made it, I was convinced it wasn’t something most people would appreciate. The director’s last film, Blade Runner 2049, was better than the first movie, but not enough people saw it in theaters. I was blindsided by Dune even getting made, let alone being a financial success.

Bottom line, pay for movies you want people to make more of if possible. Pirate shit you don’t care about. If you can’t pay for media because of financial hardship, pirate away. Investors have made streaming services suck for consumers while squeezing workers into having little disposable income or time. They deserve piracy, as it’s the harvest they have sown. Property is a social contract, and by not letting workers see the benefits of ownership, they have every right to not respect it.