In Defense of Anagorism

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

Category: Uncategorized

  • Quotebag #83

    “Just take anarcho-capitalism, perhaps tweak a few premises, change your semantics, and apparently you’re a ‘left-libertarian’!”—Shenlong

    “Death to the mainstream!”—Summerspeaker

    “Most people who blog on political or social issues, probably, fear what might turn up if the Human Resources Gestapo do a Google on them.”—Kevin Carson

    “♥ Embrace your desires, don’t discipline them.”—Summerspeaker

    “While some anarchists may contest the ideology’s association with criminals, losers, outcasts, queers, and rejects of all kinds, I passionately embrace this designation. I’ve no compunctions about declaring that my lack of status within the existing system goes light-years toward explaining my opposition to it.”—Summerspeaker

  • Quotebag #82

    “The difference between a university and a vocational school is precisely that a university offers you more than an insight into a single discipline. This is why I always say that there was good vocational training in the sciences in the USSR but there was no education.”—Clarissa

    “The central core of Communism is its one fundamental principle and defining goal, creating a society in which power, wealth, pleasure, and other aspects of life are shared equally, democratically, and freely. If that sounds like a utopia, I have no problem with that. If Christians can absolutely reject adultery, theft, murder, and so on, but humanity still regularly engages in these acts, why can Communists not in some sense embrace their ideals as in some sense absolutes that nevertheless make demands on us in the present?”—radicalprogress

    “We are in desperate need of squatters areas, much like the developing world. Unused public land where people can set up shop and mostly be left alone.”—Purple

    “Crowned heads, wealth and privilege may well tremble should ever again the black and red unite.”—Otto von Bismarck

    “Let me put it this way: Google and Facebook are more powerful than any government, Apple definitely more powerful than Microsoft and Twitter can bring the whole lot crashing down.”—Carolyn Ann

    “Black holes are beautiful, bizarre, fascinating, frightening; they follow from the laws of physics, and then break those same laws… they are the closest thing in the real world to a cosmic Cthulhu.”—the resident alien

    “Markets are not places where equals meet. Markets are places were millionaires meet homeless workers.”—Peter Rachleff

  • Open letter to When Mitt Had A Spell

    Here’s a probably-somehow-illegal deep link which probably won’t work anyway.

    Here’s the actual text (the inclusion of which here probably violates someone’s intellectual property rights, but I’m a literally worthless human being so what will they do, sue me? Ya can’t extract blood from a turnip, ya know. The names have been changed (albeit in an anagram sort of way) to protect the innocent.

    APPEALS ASSISTANT

    When Mitt Had A Spell has an immediate opening for an appeals and denial assistant.​ Individual would assist with the coordination of the member/​provider appeal process for all When Mitt Had A Spell Products.​ Candidate would gather data to identify discrepancies/​problems or issues and resolve them
    amicably.​ All replies confidential.​ Please e-mail to

    rakeless@​whenmitthadaspell.​com

    A prize of some sort is deserved by whoever comes up with the most apropos (while still “fair”) re-statement of the J.O.B. description to be found among the comments.

  • Prying apart life’s package deals…

    Things that would be nice if they were possible:

  • technology without technocracy
  • opportunity without opportunism

  • Core political beliefs

    Following in the footsteps of Vox Corvegis (2012-08-04), Nominatissima (2012-07-30) and Clarissa (2012-06-25):

    These should be taken to pertain to me personally, not to the anagorist movement as a whole (very likely a distinction without a difference, but…) Anyway:

     

    • Power corrupts
      Because power corrupts, I have no difficulty rooting for, and siding with, the underdog, or anyone who I have reason to believe to be in a relatively disempowered condition. I am unabashedly biased in that I will side with employees against employers, tenants against landlords, debtors against creditors, and in general, individuals against institutions, before even ascertaining the facts of the case. After doing so, I might change my mind.
    • Information is power
      therefore reverse engineering is not a crime.
    • Nonzero tolerance policy
      If you’re trying to eradicate a phenomenon (however atrocious) entirely from existence, at some point the cost of eliminating that last remaining bit of whatever it is will be ginormous. That said, when it comes to War On Poverty, I’m a non-pacifist. Few goals animate me as much as proving Jesus wrong on that “poor you will always have with you” prophecy.
    • Degree, not kind
      It would be unconscionable to disagree with the non-aggression principle, but it is also the case that the implications of the non-aggression principle are shockingly anti-egalitarian. I suspect that this is because catapulters of the non-aggression principle tend to operate with the assumption that the difference between aggression and non-aggression is testable and dichotomous. I suspect a lot of facts about life are less than entirely clear-cut.
    • Social equality
      I strive to treat others as equals, barking neither up nor down the food chain.

     

     

  • Quotebag #81

    “Frankly, best theory? We exist in a cheap holodeck in 2043 on quarters that had been dropped in by a ninety year old George W Bush who wanted to live his chain of fantasy dream jobs. Fighter pilot! Oilman! Baseball team owner! Guv uf Texas! Pres-e-dent!… and he got fatigue[d?] before he could appoint himself astronaut. How likely that we’d ACTUALLY be stupid enough for Culture War? ”—David Brin

    “When you say I need to find a job. You are essentially saying: Who wants to control me with money?”—Greg Sidelnikov

    “I’ll give you an example I like to use. Say I’m walking down the street and I see this store and I am thinking, ‘They have Kettle Korn? Wow, I love this stuff. Let me get some.’ The problem: the owner of the store wants no black people inside. That’s his policy. This isn’t a government policy since discrimination based on race or ethnicity is illegal in the United States. But, this business owner doesn’t want blacks in his store. So when I enter, he tells me to leave because I am violating his store’s ‘liberty.’ I would argue that my individual liberty trumps his business liberty. A corporatist would say that the business owner can do as he pleases.”—Yves Smith

    “Many libertarians speak as if it were possible to come up with a clean way to separate voluntary transactions from involuntary transactions. Once you have defined a transactions between parties A and B as voluntary, then you have a presumption that party C should stay out of it. What I am suggesting is that defining voluntary exchange may not be quite so simple.”—Arnold Kling

    “A ‘strike’ that the boss gives you permission to take part in isn’t really a strike.”—Nestor Makhno, of the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project

    “Maybe the determining aspects that really exists in our lives are: Physical usage, direct or mutual cooperative manifestations, and self-will. Yet somehow we insert money, government, and laws which actually work against the flow of the former REAL functions.”—afunctionalworld

    “Capitalism has always been an exploitative system, which had emerged from a feudal system.. It doesn’t matter the definition you give to it! Trying to mix it with anarchy is suicide.. almost the same for communism which is a more broader [sic] concept.. you always fail trying to recover anarchism for a specific economic system, because you cannot predict what each person will choice [sic] in different moments.. unless you believe in a kind of misantrope [sic] scientific libertarianism..”—happyzero

  • Random thinks

    I’m not ready to jump on the democracy-denouncing bandwagon. In theory I’m against government, which implies being against democratic government. Off the record I’d say (to a co-religionist co-ideologist) that I’m against democracy in the sense of majority rule but for democracy in the sense of control from the bottom up. Assuming I’m against majority rule (which I’m not, publicly) I’m against it not because it’s majority (which is why the public choice theorists and other hired guns are against it) but because it’s rule.

    I’m at peace with loss of privacy (confidentiality enjoyed by individuals) iff it’s accompanied by loss of secrecy (confidentiality enjoyed by business/government, between whom I refuse to pick lesser evils).

    Self-employment is being both master and slave. Freedom/equality (two words for the same thing, not a “trade-off”) is being neither.

    Enlightenment liberalism, under which nobody is entitled to anything, is of course a lesser evil than explicit, inherited social rank. Freedom/equality requires that either everyone is a member of the entitled class, or no one is, and we all know the former is unrealistic. I’m not above impossibilism, so I have adopted universal entitlement as a goal. By entitled class, I don’t mean Downton Abbey, or people being waited on hand and foot. I mean the part that puts the nobility in the nobility, the sheer luxury of not being in it for the money, or as RAW’s character Hassan i Sabbah X put it, being “unwillingly forced to grub and hustle in the jungle of commerce.”  At the risk of being called a Maoist, I’d suggest that if we can’t achieve post-scarcity, maybe we should take turns being the non-entitled class.

  • Quotebag #80

    “The ‘genius’ of capitalism is that premature death is regarded not as systemic failure but as a matter of personal choice. ”—Purple

    “If all the employers who’ll hire you will make you pee on camera, if all the municipalities have obnoxious zoning laws, then you don’t have much choice, other than who you’ll pee in front of and exactly which obnoxious regulations you’ll live under.”—Damien S.

    “Given the ease of data collection, question is no longer how to block data flows, but how to assure ‘Equal Surveillance Under Law’ (the title of a ‘Ewen Lecture on Civil Liberties’ I recently gave at Brooklyn College).”—Frank Pasquale

    “Bringing it back to the debate over libertarianism and the workplace, it’s worth noting that ‘voluntary’ versus ‘coerced’ is not a binary distinction but a spectrum, with one end representing virtually no costs for choosing something different, whilst the other represents death/torture.”—Unlearningecon

    “Hayek loved Pinochet more than Paul Robeson ever loved Joseph Stalin.”—Mitchell J. Freedman

  • Quotebag #79

    “If the human condition was immutable, we’d still be living in caves.”—Charlie Stross

    “A good piece of evidence that capitalism is in crisis are the increasingly loud exclamations to return to a ‘real’ capitalism. Reminds one of the cries that the USSR was not a ‘real’ communism.”—Purple

    “Capitalism, being based on a system of exchange, is inherently hierarchical. Because an exchange system privileges whomever is most able to say no, this advantage is cumulative and ultimately coercive to those on the losing end of exchanges.”—David Benfell

    “I wonder if Western individuality is such a burden, that it tends to lead to low self-esteem. The individual against the world is a disproportionate affair.”—musteryou

  • Follow the path of greatest resistance

    In a recent exploration of what it means to “strike the root” I pointed out that my battle lines are between individuals and institutions rather than the more “libertarian” framing of its struggle as the battle between the private and public sectors. My beef is not with narrowly-defined “aggression,” but with something more broadly-defined, and I’m not sure just what to call it. “Assertiveness” might be a little too broad (but only a little). My best single-word answer so far is “ascendancy.” I think much of the hobgoblinry over internal consistency, and also over narrow definitions, while useful as a tool for ferreting out illogic, can also be a tool for constructing rhetorical traps, or constructing a framework which substantially defends the status quo. I freely admit that I believe the difference between persuasion and force is more one of degree than one of kind. Maybe my sliding-scale understanding of freedom is a slippery slope, but it seems plainly obvious to me that under assumption of formal rather than substantive equality, some people are not only more equal than others, but more free than others. My own hedge against bullshit relies less on rigid definitions and more on the assumption that de facto matters matter, while de jure ones (mere formalities) do not. Equality to me is not some formalism such as equality of opportunity or equality under the law. It’s, among other things, ethological equality. It is treating others as your equal, which means behaving like a parrot and not like a primate, even when you are a primate. It means putting the most into holding your head high precisely when it is most discouraged. And perhaps hanging your head low when holding it high is least discouraged. At its best, of course, it means refusing such contests altogether, but one must confront the world as it is. Being a primate, behaving like a parrot takes real effort. This is also why I regard anarchism not as narrowly-defined anti-statism (a highly anti-egalitarian and reactionary view, in my view) or even diffuse anti-authoritarianism (although that impulse at least is authentic), but at its core, the rejection of human-nature essentialism. Between the classic conservative position that human nature is essentially vicious and the classic liberal position that we’re essentially selfish, of course liberalism is the lesser of two evils, but Evil itself is problematic. The quest for value-free science, while it was laudable in an earlier time when the main enemy to freedom was the Church, has become a source of pat excuses for social darwinism. Time to throw it out with the bathwater. That’s all for now.