In Defense of Anagorism

political economy in the non-market, non-state sector

Category: Uncategorized

  • In a market economy…

    boso-and-evoo…one puts one’s best foot forward.

  • Quotebag #98

    “It’s the mind- and body-numbing tasks, the tasks that make no use of my particular mental or physical capacities, that require incentive. (That incentive might be as simple as the understanding that somebody’s got to do it and as long as the crappy work is fairly distributed I’m willing to do my part.)”—Yalt

    “I have concluded that most ideas equated with ‘positivity’ by the mainstream are cheap abstractions, bankrupt of honesty and meaning.”—Prodigeek

    “Basically, crack babies are a myth and poverty is real.”—N. K. Jemisin

    “The business world pays a lot of lip service to Hayek’s 1940s ideas about free markets. But when it comes to freedom within the companies they run, they’re stuck a good 50 years earlier, mired in the ideology of Frederick Winslow Taylor and his ‘scientific management’.”—Cory Doctorow

    “Until you can build a working general purpose reprogrammable computer out of basic components from radio shack, you are not fit to call yourself a programmer in my presence. This is cwhizard, signing off.”—abachler

  • I’m an anti-anti-intellectual

    Hit on the head again by blogspot.com’s 4KB comment limit. In reply to J. R. Pitt’s Random Ramblings #5

    …

    Is it weird that I’m honestly disturbed by the way anarchists of all sorts tend to disregard the academics and intellectuals? Usually they do so on the basis that intellectuals are “elitist” or that they don’t “fit” within the framework of their version of anarchist theory.

    I only got as far as the BS degree. I’m not very academic, but I’m not very anti-academic, either. I know a lot of anarchists have glommed onto the idea of “unschooling,” or being an autodidact. I think that’s great if it works for them, but in my case there’s a big difference in level of performance between skills in which I’m self taught, and ones in which I’ve taken a course or two. Maybe that means I have an external locus of control. I prefer to think of it as a case of “the bootmaker is an authority concerning boots.”

    When it comes to anarchist theory, I’m just not very theory oriented. Most theory just sails over my head. My writing on the subject of anarchy is not very theoretical (although I try to make it logically sound); mainly it is just a personal statement that being pushed around by market and state is painful.

    Never mind that these are the same people who attack me and my feminist buddies for wanting to strongly reduce prostitution and porn as much as possible, because “sex workers are workers too” – so, aren’t college and university professors workers as well?

    They’re the best kind of workers. Too many of them are not class conscious, but that can be said for workers in every industry.

    Do academics not have a role in your revolution? It’s this disdain for intellectualism that I fear may kill anarchism (not that you shouldn’t be skeptical of academia – of course you should – but throwing academics under the bus just because they have no “use” to your revolution is fucking stupid). If anything, you should be using academics to help further your revolutionary goals. It’s certainly true that academia reproduces the ruling ideology – “education is imposed ignorance,” says the chomskybot – but then again, it could be argued that “sex work” reproduces misogyny and a commodified perversion of sexuality, yet you, dear radical, have no problem with considering the latter workers as allies (even going so far as to convince the IWW to unionize them!).

    In the actually-existing world, academia has the closest thing there is to a gift economy, at least among the shrinking number of academics fortunate enough to be able to do “non-classified, non-proprietary” research. Academia’s faculty governance is probably also the closest thing to worker self-management in the actually-existing world. Tenure is the closest thing to job security. Market anarchists (including left-styled libertarians) seem to be opposed in principle to job security, but I’m not. I wish the business workplace operated more like academia. A lot more.

    It seems like the anti-intellectualism might be another aspect of the pacification of radicals, the fact that they’re so quick to disregard theory that would be of use to them on the basis of appearing “organic”. I can’t really speak for the marxists, but I see this quasi-populist mentality with anarchists all the time. They reject Critical Theory and dialectical methods simply because they think it makes them look elitist (despite the fact that the Black Panthers taught dialectical materialism to people who could barely read!) and thus puts them on a higher level than the people they desire to help liberate. The idea shouldn’t be to force theory down the throats of the oppressed (and by doing so, completely negating the experiences of those who have dealt with oppression firsthand) but rather create a scenario where both sides learn from each other. Anyway, I plan to write more about this in a future post.

    I don’t reject critical theory (but I don’t capitalize it, either). I simply don’t understand it.

    …

    For example, I have over 100 followers on this blog, but I don’t really care who reads it (unless you’re NSA or FBI and plan on using my blog to find personal information to go after my comrades). I don’t do sub-for-sub (or follow-for-follow) and I only urge people to subscribe if they enjoy my content. I don’t need 40 fucking comments on each one of my posts telling me: “Oh Julia, you’re so insightful!”, “Oh Julia, you’re such a good writer!”, “You’re so creative and I agree with everything you say!”, but the thing is, a lot of other people do. You don’t see this so much on Blogger or WordPress but I see it all the time on Tumblr (which functions more like Twitter than an actual blogging website); people will fish for followers and comments only because it makes them feel important. I see it as a showing of how deprived we are of the feeling of importance in our real lives. Whatever it is, it sucks.

    That’s why the big commercial websites (which are largely self-contained populations of netizens) are out to destroy the blogosphere, and why there is so much marketing buzz around “the PC is dead” (translation: the QWERTY keyboard, and literate communication in general, is dead) or “blogging is so 2006” (translation: support for RSS feeds will be discontinued). It’s part of a larger effort called by some “the war against general purpose computing.”

  • Definition of market

    unperson asks:

    What is your definition of the market?

    There’s more than one definition, because the word can be used as different parts of speech.

      1. Used as a verb (most important usage IMHO): Shameless self-promotion. “In the market economy you have to market yourself.”
      2. Used as a noun: A setting in which marketing takes place, i.e. supermarket, meat market, flea market, stock market, etc.
      3. Used as a modifier: A market basket, a market economy, etc. Market economy advocates tend to offer two antonyms for the adjective “market”, namely “command” and “planned.” Naturally, they use these terms interchangeably, so as to give the idea of a planned economy a bad name. Anagorism rejects the idea that “market” is the opposite of “command,” (and by extension, the idea that “planned” is synonymous with “command”) as “demand” (including market demand) is a concept that belongs somewhere between “request” and “command,” and probably a little closer to the latter. Another rhetorical trick of the right is to use the terms “planned economy” and “centrally planned economy” interchangeably; as a way of summarily dismissing the possibility of a decentrally planned economy.

    Now to answer the question in more of what I think is the spirit in which it was asked. I apologize if it seems more like a description than a definition: The market is a complex system based loosely on equilibrium, somewhat like the weather. Like the weather, it is a source of precarity and danger in the lives of people, although the forces it controls can sometimes be used in the satisfaction of wants. It is an amoral agent, most likely an unconscious agent. Since humanity still lacks a systematic understanding of its processes, it is assumed by some to be omnipotent (its outcomes are treated as non-negotiable, like physics), omniscient (“prices incorporate all information”) and/or omnibenevolent (the best of all possible worlds), and a quasi-mystical claim (certainly a claim of transcendence) that allocation can be perfectly calculated by the market, while the market is ineffable and cannot be computed or modeled. Anagorism questions these claims.

  • Quotebag #97

    “Heritage has an ‘economic freedom index.’ ‘Freedom’ has a specialized meaning to Heritage — financial regulation and regulation to protect workers’ health and safety tends to be treated as a decline in freedom.”—Bill Black (h/t Yves Smith)

    “The Firm’s succinct relationship motto: Capitalism is a sufficient (though not necessary) condition to destroy liberal political freedom.”—dL

    “Quite a few Libertarians work for the government or for government contractors. Money and security trump Libertarian principle.”—Carl Milsted

    “If everyone was ‘working’ either producing or selling something, the resulting consumption that would be required to maintain that level of employment would leave us scratching at a scotched earth, wondering where out next morsel of food was going to come from.”—Challenged Species

    “[T]he welfare reformers and unemployment haters will not have an answer for you OP, they wont even bother with a response other that to reiterate their belated message to ‘just get a job’…they have no paradigm outside their own little ‘I got mine’ eggshell of a world…”—Anonymous Coward

    “If you tell someone (or say about someone) that they should just get a job, as though it’s that simple, you’re required to hire them.”—impudent strumpet

  • That which is for sale is that which is not free

    In Why buy the cow if the milk is free? at , UnboundID asks and answers:

    What would make data sharing acceptable to consumers?

    1. Being asked what you’d be willing to share
    2. Being given meaningful value for the use of the data
    3. A guarantee that the data will be kept secure
    4. The ability to update data, or revoke access to it
    5. Knowledge of who the data will be shared with

    I speak for only one consumer. What would make data sharing acceptable to this consumer?

    1. Having a client-side record of every outbound data transfer in queryable form
    2. Having packet-level access to network traffic in/out of my devices
    3. The ability to mark individual table/view columns as
      1. private, meaning not in circulation,
      2. shareable with the general public as nonproprietary data, or
      3. shareable as proprietary (monetizable) data with a list of named data partners.

    The milk metaphor is apropos. The key to monetizing your projects is being willing to milk them.milch

  • Is there an emerging geopolitical alignment?

    L’affaire Snowden has become a sort of Rorschach test for nation states, as have several recent international incidents. The Russia vs. Georgia spat back in the Bush years comes to mind. It’s almost as if you could take a map of the world and color the countries based on reactions to events. Maybe I’m overfitting the data, but sometimes it seems like the patterns of “alignment” are predictable and recurring. If (God forbid) there’s such a thing as World War III, I get the feeling we already more or less know the map in terms of “allied” vs. “axis.” I suppose the relevant question is “allied to what?”

    The most nationalistic and trigger-happy element of American public opinion, of course, is increasingly assertive about framing everything in almost Merovingian terms, as a clash of civilizations between ChristenDOM (which I assume is why we call some of these reactionaries DOMinionists), and that Bush-era neologism, “Islamofascism.” This is probably a fair characterization of that part of the allied-axis front that is the Ethiopia-Somalia border, or Armenia-Azerbaijan. But what about Colombia-Ecuador or Colombia-Venezuela? With Venezuela (at least before the passing of the late Hugo Chavez) making overtures to Iran, perhaps the Colombia-Venezuela border is a Merovingian battle line in some sense.

    By Jascha Goltermann [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

    Colombia has been spiraling deeper and deeper into the vortex of client statehood due in large part to the War On (some) Drugs. For a while I thought WOsD was a major factor in the emerging pattern of global alignment. Certainly it’s a major factor in US aggressionveness in Afghanistan. But Portugal is easily the least hawkish state when it comes to WOsD, and has recently (at least according to speculation and rumor) made its “sovereign” airspace an issue concerning a certain stateless person in transit. Maybe it’s the exception that proves the rule. Maybe I really have been overfitting the data. Maybe it’s just an example of small countries not really being entitled to an opinion in our Westphalian World in which, in theory, all nations are equally sovereign.

    We are living in interesting times.

  • Quotebag #96

    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
    Elimination by ~autogestion

    “Are digital commons and urban commons doomed to feed the hand that bites them?”—Tom Slee

    “There is nothing occurring anywhere on the planet which reasonably justifies the existence of the CIA, the FBI or the NSA. The degree to which someone disagrees with this assertion is the degree to which that person can be relied upon to sacrifice you and your interests should the occasion ever arise.”—Jack Crow

    “David Cameron is beginning to realise that the problem with tax havens (and their attraction for those who use them) isn’t their low tax rates, it’s their secrecy laws.”—ejoftheweb

    “I don’t recognize the gay rights movement anymore. It’s about as vital and energetic as a trade show. Somewhere along the line, the message that arose from that movement changed from being ‘be who you are, without apology’ to ‘we can’t help it, so please let us, thanks.’”—Freddie

    “Crony capitalism IS capitalism.”—Patrick Dyer

    “I think all these ‘free trade’ agreements the US is up to are largely a tactic to head off and preempt the development of good magna-carta-style international law with corrupt-cronyism-style (a la East India Company) international law.”—Poor Richard

  • In pursuit of a nonbusiness model

    Any nonbusiness model. A single example of a noncommercial (but also nongovernmental) operating model in the context of any plausibly economic activity in any social setting. Perhaps there is not and never will be and even maybe never can be such an example; demonstrating yet again why nature abhors an anagora. Tom Slee, in Open Wide — The New Inquiry, gives us multiple examples of commons-based online communities that lost their innocence in one way or another, and in the process lost

    Image courtesy Sir josef (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported)
    Image courtesy Sir josef (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported)

    whatever authenticity, outsider appeal, alternativity, and the like that originally made these cool spaces in which to be a participant. Not wanting to pirate the article, I will give a list of the entities used as case studies:

    1. Bebo.com, now part of AOL
    2. Goodreads, now part of Amazon
    3. Mendeley, now part of Elsevier
    4. Tumblr, now part of Yahoo!
    5. Zipcar, now part of Avis
    6. IMDB, now part of Amazon
    7. Couchsurfing.com, formerly couchsurfing.org

    In about three quarters of these examples, the fact that the enrichment of the commons had become the sharecropping of the long tail became evident in the form of mergers and acquisitions. I have long wondered whether there’s something in the Iron Laws of Economics that dictates that the role of small businesses and startups is to serve as feeder fish in the world of commerce. I have also questioned whether the trend from employment employment to self employment is at all liberating, empowering, or even conducive to independence in some sense. In terms of my own options for combating nichelessness, I’ve thought of the trend from J.O.B. security to precarity as something I’m being backed into by a combination of a less labor-intensive economy, a less labor-driven polity, a disentitled generation of young adults, and other factors making “cushy” jobs harder to come by. So far, I’ve given the prevailing trend the benefit of the doubt and assumed that there are some people for whom a less risk-averse and less competition-averse culture is a better fit and a more opportune ecosystem, and that these people are in some way changing the world, but I’m beginning to question that. Startup founders describe themselves and their ventures as “disruptive,” but it’s getting hard to identify possible outcomes for such ventures other than (1) a failed business or (2) a business that is for sale. At best, it seems that cooptation is a stronger force than disruption. Is this too an Iron Law of Economics?

  • Quotebag #95

    “However, I am looking forward to the launch of Youwho. I have no idea what it will be like, since it all seems to be a big secret, but at least Ancestry won’t own it. At first anyway…. :/”—MartheLawton

    “But politicians should reflect on the well-documented fact that fearful, insecure people lose their sense of tolerance and altruism. Anxieties also weaken immune systems. Do not demand social responsibility from chronically insecure people.”—JJ

    “My favorite is when companies call their workers ‘independent contractors’. They make them set up little businesses and then pay the little businesses. That way they don’t have to pay minimum wage.”—ishrinkmajeans

    “If a document or a database doesn’t seem to have a point of view, that’s like meeting a person who doesn’t seem to have an accent. The person, or the document, has the same accent or or point of view that you do, so it’s invisible.”—Ted Nelson

    “I’ve just come to realize that multinational means they have no country. Do they pay taxes in any country at all?”—Beachcomber Donna