In Defense of Anagorism

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

Category: Uncategorized

  • Quotebag #75

    “If you remain neutral in a battle between a lion and a gazelle, you’ve effectively sided with the lion, and the gazelle isn’t going to appreciate it.”—Natalie Reed

    “If there’s a chance for the wealthy to capture a social instrument, they will. If there’s an opportunity to use it to dump on the despised, it will be taken.”—Jack Crow

    “The human resources folk who do this judging should somehow have to answer to the people they are nosing into.”—David Brin

    “Getting a lousy public education, then being played against your fellow workers in Darwinian fashion by the free market economy does not make for optimism or open mindedness. It makes for a kind of bleak meanness nobody is openly talking about in the American political dialogue today.”—Joe Bageant (1946–2011), h/t Jack Saturday

    “The legal and cultural norms of the U.S. are based around the notion that it is a middle class nation. It isn’t.”—Purple

  • The Tyranny of the Necessity of Selling

    “If, in the present chaotic and shameful struggle for existence, when organized society offers a premium on greed, cruelty, and deceit, men can be found who stand aloof and almost alone in their determination to work for good rather than gold, who suffer want and persecution rather than desert principle, who can bravely walk to the scaffold for the good they can do humanity, what may we expect from men when freed from the grinding necessity of selling the better part of themselves for bread?”—Lucy Parsons

    “Instead of studying how to make it worth men’s while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.”—Henry David Thoreau

    “Man truly achieves his full human condition when he produces without being compelled by the physical necessity of selling himself as a commodity.”—Ernesto “Che” Guevara

    “‘Market value’ means the amount that would be paid in cash by a willing buyer who desires to buy, but is not required to buy, to a willing seller who desires to sell, but is under no necessity of selling.”—Jeff Hamilton

  • Quotebag #73

    “One of the reasons it’s so easy to condemn the public sector is that it is so, well, public. Government makes decisions in front of everyone. Even a cub reporter can easily uncover problems. The private sector, on the other hand, acts in secret.”—David Morris

    “I figure governments and corporations alike will seek to bottle of the genie of superintelligence. Expect very bad things if they succeed.”—Summerspeaker

    “Homework: Think about ways that land based drones (air/ground) can maintain operation in a built up area for a year or more while remaining mobile and independent.”—John Robb

    “Forget any notion that the ‘sharp elbows’ of the middle classes will be employed to make room for less privileged families; they bond, network and move within their class, there is scarcely any cross-class ‘bridging’.”—Stuart Weir (h/t Michel Bauwens)

    “Does one have to have a PhD or be in the process of getting a PhD to be a considered an expert? This is the framework of the bourgeoisie, not a way to empower or give voice to a working class.”—Purple

    “I am almost totally adult, but the child that used to be me has not committed suicide. He is still here inside me.”—Giulio Prisco

  • Quotebag #72

    “Gayhoods and girlhoods are significant…

    … even the erased ones.”—Valerie Keefe

    “It is always magical thinking to declare an outcome need only be profitable for it to be possible.”—Dale Carrico

    “As a physicist, I will tell you one thing: no matter how afraid you are of nuclear war, you are not afraid enough.”—voxcorvegis

    “The minority* of white, comfortable motherfuckers with vacation homes and private land lecturing the victims, the poor, the damaged, the abused, the raped, the herded, the harassed, the imprisoned, the exploited, the evicted, the institutionalized, the penalized and the discarded on what are and are not appropriate responses to victimization — that shit is rich. Literally. It takes a comparatively rich motherfucker to confuse the play-acting, submission rituals and lying of ‘civilized’ society with any end to institutional depravity, inequity and the hierarchies which profit from the same.”—Jack Crow

  • Polycentric pursuit of equality

    As you may know, my conception of equality is not so much equality of opportunity or the (IMHO straw-man) equality of results, but equality of footing. I fear there may be reality-based reasons to believe that equality in this sense and personal freedom may be conflicting goals. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that there are inequalities in individuals’ level of ability that cannot readily be overcome. Let’s also assume that each individual carries a portfolio of skills, characterized by the familiar expressions “strong suits” and “weak suits.”

    It is hoped that every individual, at least some of the time, will be in a situation which plays to their strengths. To mitigate the setbacks due to time one is not fortunate enough to spend in such environments, I propose centers of domain-specific equality in which earnest attempt is made to neutralize one or a few gradients of inequality; leaving others in play.

    To conjure up an example, consider my stance that civil-service bureaucracy as an organizational form is not entirely without merit. This partial admiration of a type of institution that should be anathema to my anarchist sympathies is an expression of the fact (or at least self-perception) that negotiating skill is one of my very weakest skills. All other things being equal, I tend to accomplish more in an environment in which the rules, and more importantly the criteria (of merit, for advancement, of acceptability, etc.), are stated explicitly. I flounder when there are unwritten rules about which everyone is assumed to be aware. Maybe it makes me a bad person, but I’d like to think that in a condition of anarchy (or at least of polyarchy), there can be affinity groups that emulate some features of a civil service bureaucracy, without implementing the key feature, of course, that being government. If one or two cooperative undertakings have a policy that stated prices are firm (i.e. not haggled over), or that the criteria for the privilege of producer-side participation (assuming here, of course, that the Hypostasis of the Agora cannot be overcome) are “as advertised.”

    Enough about my weaknesses. This isn’t intended to be about me. While not a problem for me, some people’s weak suit is mathematics. Some refer to this as innumeracy. Whatever you call it, it get ruthlessly exploited in the existing economy. It isn’t hard to demonstrate that exploitation of naïveté about, say, exponential functions and their implications (e.g. compound interest), is central design feature of many down-market financial products. It should be possible to create spaces within polycentric or polyarchic society for, if not a math-free zone, at least a math-trickery-free zone, in which the more quantitative aspects of the terms of the deal are stated in terms of simple arithmetic or plain English.

    Everyone deserves a chance to fly, or at least, to spend part of their life in an environment that downplays their weaknesses.

  • Quotebag #71

    “Well, I am not convinced that Agorism is revolutionary at all. Except the fact that most agorists I’ve seen are simply some strain of ‘Anarcho’-Capitalist (or at the very least, support private property and the allow for wage labou[r]), Agorism itself [is] based on the idea that Black Markets can destabilize a society enough to topple the state.”—db0

    “If the G8 want to hide themselves as far away from protesters as possible, I propose we shoot them off into space and leave them there.”—Broadsnark

    “The big problem is that the elites pull their ‘divide and conquer’ shit. So they have the conservatives attack academia, and then the proggies feel that it’s ‘liberal’ to support academia in turn. Why that unbelievably obvious trick continues to work, I have no idea. Then again, maybe none of this stuff works.”—Roseanne

    “A key flaw of capitalism is that in its search for profit, it preferentially creates products for those with disposable incomes to the detriment of adequate levels of necessary goods. Freedom to make a profit means the freedom to not produce necessities.”—Radical Progress

  • Quotebag #70

    “A movement to Occupy, from my perspective, has to avoid the temptation to be about expanding the ranks of the winners, or changing the composition of the winners. It has to subvert the contest altogether.”—Freddie

    “Many threats to freedom come from capitalists. The story is no longer capitalism and freedom, but capitalism against freedom. Two of the world’s largest economies — China and Russia — show that capitalism can exist quite happily without political freedom.”—Norman Geras

    “For those with some political and historical knowledge, those who carefully file their definitions, an anarchist is someone that doesn’t believe state power is the object of struggle with the dominant social order but, a socially responsible and autonomous humanity — is — the object of struggle.”—Larry Giddings

    “We will never get anything but the proverbial table scraps by begging from the rich or appealing to their better nature.”—Purple

    “I don’t believe there is a class of lazy people who deserve to starve, rather such a class of people who cannot find work is the creation of capitalism itself, through its profit system.”—radicalprogress

  • Why I’m not ready to jump on the P2P bandwagon

    Because Governance of Peer Production is Meritocratic, not Egalitarian. My watchwords are Equality, Liberty, Sorority and Fraternity (the latter two more in the French sense of “brotherhood” than the “Greek” sense of secret societies). I put Equality before Liberty not because I consider equality a strictly higher priority than Liberty, but because I don’t see the promotion of Liberty as an “under-served market.” On the other hand, I just provided another example of how hard it is to escape the logic of the market. 🙂 In my defense, I do drop frequent disclaimers that at least half of what appears at the present blog might be in the spirit of devil’s advocacy.

    Back to the Governance of Peer Production; maybe my anarchist-sympathizing soul is opposed in principle to Governance, which sounds suspiciously like Government. Or maybe I’m opposed in principle to Meritocracy, which ends in the -ocracy suffix, which is usually more or less synonymous with the -archy suffix. In my defense, I’ve promoted Meritocracy over Promotion (e.g. here and here). This is largely because I’m a frank aspie and I am a lot less (a LOT less) intimidated by civil service exams than by J.O.B. interviews, let alone “networking,” “elevator pitches” and other increasingly-mandatory practices that from my perspective look like extreme feats of extroversion. While posting those essays, the -ocracy at the end of meritocracy was of course sticking in my craw, as of course is the obvious problem that civil service jobs are government jobs and therefore not suitable for a practicing anarchist. My nebulous policy statement is “let’s extend civil-servicey humyn resources praxis to the private sector,” with “policy statement” walked back to “best practices norm” for the sake of anarchy, but in the name of all that is sacred, can’t we advocate these practices ASSERTIVELY?

    Back to the Governance of Peer Production; reading about its Governance reminded me that, while there’s no I in team, there demonstrably is an -ocracy in Meritocracy. In short, the essay served as a wake-up call that it’s high time that I explicate that while I prefer Meritocracy over Promotion, I prefer Egalitarianism over Meritocracy. Egalitarianism-bashing has become fashionable even in progressive circles, where its not unheard of that outing myself as an Egalitarian gets me reflexively called insulting names such as Diana Moon Glampers. Maybe all I’m really asking for is a little Inclusivity. The social and economic forces that galvanized me into an Anagorist consist of nothing more than

    • The experiences of a foolish youth with a resume too short on experience and therefore too long on education.
    • The experience of living in a culture in which one’s J.O.B. is literally one’s Justification Of Being.
    • The experience of discovering the Internet during its relatively innocent period in 1991, but nevertheless being assaulted by ALL CAPS verbiage in misc.jobs.misc along the lines of THREE PLUS YEARS OF FULL TIME PAID NON-ACADEMIC EXPERIENCE ENTRY LEVEL NEED NOT APPLY AND WILL NOT BE CONSIDERED.
    • The experience of listening to sanctimonious assholes whose current fad is calling themselves “the 53%,” who say “I wish everyone was willing to work” when what they mean is “I wish everyone was able to sell themselves.”

    The experience of being ineligible to claim any experience at all.

    To add injury to insult, it turns out that in the New Economy, even unpaid volunteer work is a privilege, not a right. The market value of the data entry and other back-office gigs even I was able to drum up back in the Halcyon Nineties has fallen literally to pennies or fractions of a penny as evidenced by the existence of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. As Felix Stadler tells us, anyone can be a user of free open-source software, but not everyone can be a contributor. This mirrors the 53% mentality perfectly. According to those reactionaries with their creative accounting methods, 53% of the American population are taxpayers, which is to say, contributing members of society. Part of the emerging message discipline of the right is to rebrand clients/beneficiaries/etc. of the safety net as consumers/users/etc. The “everyone can be (and in fact is) a consumer but not everyone can be a producer” mindset is the essence of the market, and I see no solid reason to believe that the so-called freed-market somehow negates this fact. Assuming you have money (and money is money—a “welfare consumer” has money, at least for a few moments now and then) the market economy offers no resistance to the privilege of consuming at least some amount of economic goods. The privilege of being an economic producer, a contributor, on the other hand, is a well-guarded fortress. Competition itself is an entry barrier and therefore a barrier to the unattainable ideal called perfect competition. And yet, production is a pre-requisite for consumption. Solvency requires producing at least as much as you consume. And of course dignity requires solvency. People who have lived under Big-C Communism talk of (i.e. lecture Egalitarians about) a world in which even buying grocieries requires connections, references, the Gift of Gab, scary-smart shrewdness and other stuff a lucky Citizen of Capitalism like me thinks of as weapons for penetrating Fortress Employment. Each individual has their economic inputs as a consumer and hopefully economic outputs as a worker. In a market economy they deal with the Business Community, whose dealings with individuals has its inputs as an employer and outputs as a retailer. For each, solvency happens when outputs meet or exceed inputs. An individual is an individual, while a business is an institution (I *Hate* using the word “collective” as “the opposite of an individual,” BTW) so of course individuals are encouraged, yea pressured to consume, but at best invited to run the gauntlet to see if they’re “good enough” to produce. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor the solvency to the institutionalized. The previous sentence is ironic. This is why, in spite of my sympathy to the anarchist cause (or at least the anarcho-communist cause), I see no way around some kind of basic income guarantee, except Frank Social Darwinism. Back to the Governance of Peer Production; Mr. Stadler wants me to believe that Benevolent Dictatorship and Voluntary Hierarchy are somehow not oxymorons, while the less starkly contrasting and less antisocial Egalitarian Meritocracy is. No thank you, Mr. Stadler, I don’t want to buy any of what you’re selling.

    Perhaps the days are over in which a brainchild released into the public domain can serve as an individual’s “calling card” or even a one-time waiver of the ENTRY LEVEL NEED NOT APPLY clause, simply because of all the coding projects of one-person scale are a sort of low-hanging fruit that has already been harvested. In the spirit of the New Economy in which even the supposedly nerdy jobs like engineering and accounting require SOLID COMMUNICATION SKILLS BOTH ORAL AND WRITTEN, even contributing to the open source movement requires People Skills. If the tone of what you just read (If you’re still with me a big THANK YOU btw) seems abrasive, it’s because right now the future looks to me like a Very Scary Place. I’m literally trembling in my boots.

  • Jon Huntsman on Charlie Rose

    Presently watching Jon Huntsman on <i>The Charlie Rose Show</i>, talking about China, past and present.  Actually putting a “tone” on his pronunciation of Chinese names.  Plus, even more importantly, offering intelligent insight on the subject.  And he was among the first dominoes to fall in the Republican nominating process?  Facepalm.

  • Coercion vs. control

    I think left libertarians risk watering down their message by adopting a coercion-centered understanding of the meaning of freedom. The types of (non-LITAS) libertarian and progressive rhetoric that have played a large role in influencing the development of my worldview tend to make heavy use of the term “social controls.” In the progressive case, social controls are sometimes referred to as a necessary evil, or last resort. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) I don’t know of a formal definition of “social controls,” but I suspect that overly-formal or overly-analytical development of ideas may also be leading to the adoption of premises (rightly or wrongly) associated with the American right by the American libertarian movement, whose non-LITAS elements (let alone “private sectorist” elements) contain a heaping helping of American-style individualism. Everything I’ve read about social controls (which is mostly stuff about other subjects, that refers in passing to social controls) leads me to think that all coercion is social control but not all social control is coercion. Most other things referred to as social controls seem to fit into the category of behavioral psychology, specifically asymmetric applications of it, in which one party’s role is to condition and another’s is to be conditioned.

    A rather spammy website called “MedConnections.net” offers a “medical” definition of social control that basically equates to “constituted authority.” This I find troublesome as it largely lets the private sector off the hook, although I like their use of the word institution. The more respectable-looking sociologyguide.com offers a less narrow definition:

    Social control is the means by which members of a society attempt to induce each other to comply with the society’s norms. Social controls influence behavior constantly because they are internalized and come into play every time a person has a deviant impulse.

    I like this definition because I find it very reminiscent of vocational (i.e. decidedly non-liberal-arts-oriented) education program offerings. In the course of turoring community college students, it became obvious to me that differences between liberal arts departments (say, the math department) and career-oriented departments (say, “medical assistant”) go far, far deeper than the “pure vs. applied” dichotomy I was taught to believe in once upon a time. It is a cultural divide as entrenched and gaping as Mods vs. Rockers, or Vickies vs. Thetes, or Red States vs. Blue States. A large portion (I’m tempted to say the lion’s share, but that’s an outsider’s view) of the mission of the vocational departments is less about teaching (or even hands-on training) than about enculturation. Pre-requisites and co-requisites are interlocked in a way that makes part-time study impossible, electives almost impossible, sabbaticals unheard of, and thereby enforces a chronological cohort system in which each graduating class is a subset (sometimes a small subset) of an entering class. Note that a few sentences back I said “medical assistant,” not “medical assisting.” The adoption of labeling programs as occupations rather than “disciplines,” I suspect, is no accident, but I’m a little bit paranoid, so don’t take my word for it. The trashy TV commercials of for-profit trade schools have long hawked curricula which are basically job titles, and in recent years that mentality has (unfortunately IMHO) infected the public community colleges. My closest ties to this world of trade-school mentality was when my LL was majoring in “physical therapy assistant” [sic] at the local community college. Like me, she’s a free spirit, and of course was drummed out of the program within weeks. A vocational program is very much a voluntary association (although I’m sure “workfare” schemes are eroding that aspect of it) but is also very much a nexus of social control, as defined by Sociology Guide, or by Webster’s Online Dictionary (are there as many Webster’s Dictionaries as there are Poor Richard’s Almanacks?):

    The training or molding of an individual through various relationships, educational agencies, and social controls, which enables him [sic] to become a member of a particular society.

    I’m more inclined to identify with the label “antiauthoritarian” than “antistatist” (although I am of course both). One problem with this is that people and groups who self-identify primarily as anti-authoritarian seem to offer no web content other than protest footage, and similarly boring conversation. Antistatism is much more developed as a theory, but is laced with decidedly narrow definitions that look to my largely untrained mind as if they’re designed to trip people up, especially people who can be thought of as either idealists or egalitarians. One of my favorite anarchist slogans, which was popular during the period of my life when my affinity to anarchism was at its peak (sadly to say, not the present) is “kill the controls.” I just did a Yahoo!/Bing search on that phrase and, depressingly, the entire first page of results is about gaming.

    Just what are these “controls” that some of us would like to “kill?” To the extent that there really is a genetic component to human conduct, one of my first targets would be whatever genetic mechanisms are responsible for dominance-submission behavior, which of course is readily observed in most if not all animal species. This is the main reason why I’m not a primitivist. It’s a tricky area, because technology to genetically engineer ones progeny will probably precede technology to genetically re-engineer oneself. It seems to me, anyway, that the former is a “lower hanging fruit.” From the “kill the controls” perspective, it seems desined that things will get much worse before they get much better. Some targets that are already within reach might include psychological (self-directed, of course) “re-imprinting,” by which hopefully one can erase some of the cultural programming they’ve received, even in the “formative” years. Another project (which seems to be well underway, but has a long way to go) is the creation of networks of teachers and learners in which learning applied (useful) knowledge and learning for its own sake need not be a “pick one” proposition.