In Defense of Anagorism

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

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  • Successful society of atheists or mostly areligious people?

    Cliff Arroyo informs us:

    I usually describe myself as incapable of religious faith (that part of my brain/mind/soul/whatever is just plain missing). But I do have an attraction to a lot of religious imagery and/or practice.

    I also respect religion and religious belief and it’s clear that human societies function best when some religion is present for the majority. It’s easy for the religious authorities or dogma to become too powerful which is awful but in the other direction there’s no record of any successful society of athiests or mostly areligious people.

    I see no record of any set of cultural templates succeeding indefinitely. As far as any successful society of atheists or mostly areligious people, such a society (if it even exists) is something fairly new under the sun. Atheist literature, for all practical purposes, only goes back a couple of centuries or so. I’ve always wondered what explains this. I don’t think it’s a matter of atheism being a recent invention. I used to think it was simply a reflection of how persecuted, and therefore deeply closeted, atheists were prior to the Enlightenment, combined with the destruction of whatever writings might have existed in spite of that. This doesn’t quite fit, as we know a fair amount about other heresies such as albigensians, etc. I suspect that it may be that people living in a pre-scientific time and place are as incapable of contemplating non-divine explanations of phenomena as Cliff Arroyo is of religious faith. If that is the case (or if the recent arrival of atheism in the marketplace of ideas is due more to persecution) then atheism as a cultural norm is very young compared to rival systems, and it would be premature to dismiss it as patently non-viable. At any rate, secularity’s place in the present-day marketplace of ideas, including ideas about how to “run a society,” is one in which the other side has had a millenia-long head start.

    I have done a little informal public opinion research on the whole question of whether civic religiosity is a prerequisite for civilization. One of the items in my questionnaire was:

    Without widespread belief in the truth of some religion, life would be very unsafe.

    Of course the pattern of responses to this survey item demonstrates a heavy bias indicating the sorts of people with whom I tend to be in contact. The correlation between answers to this item and answers to others raises some questions. If some kind of Fear of God is one of the major strategies for dissuading some types of conduct that are not conducive to civilization, what sorts of baggage might that bring with it? Is there truly no way out of this trap, which has deeply authoritarian implications?

  • Some notes on thick individualism.

     

    • Thick individualism considers the distinction between individuals and firms to be of more consequence than the distinction between small firms and large firms.
    • Thick individualism considers the distinction between individuals and the state to be non-analogous with the distinction between firms and the state.

     

     

    It really sickens me that the word individualism has come to denote what should logically be called privatism.

  • Quotebag #91

    “Governments are just window-dressing for the major multinational corporations that actually run the world. They, in turn, are already run by computers.”—whlanteigne

    “The sooner we restore a society where work is something we do, and not something we’re ‘given,’ a society where we’re in control of our working lives, the sooner we can do away with fake machismo, commodified rebellion, and going postal.”—Kevin Carson

    “The upper class uses its mass media instruments to paint a picture of an aloof, overly idealistic, left.”—The Working Class

    “Libertarian pretense that the workplace is voluntary would only make sense if people had an equal alternative to the workplace.”—Critiques of Libertarianism

    “So, we do make common cause with liberals on formal equality, but radicals must push further and demand substantive equality against a world system of horrendous inequalities.”—radicalprogress

  • When others know you better than you know yourself, I call that power.

    CBC asks:

    How much data privacy can you expect to have?

    I’d like to see a shift to a debate which treats as the relevant question: How much information asymmetry can you expect not to have?

    Or alternatively: How much machine-readable/queryable/”mineable” data can a consumer or end-user expect to be on the receiving end of? In the case of a $ell phone, this might mean access to raw dumps of one’s own GPS logs, call logs, raw network traffic feeds up & down, etc. Analogously, raw feeds for “smart” meters from Big Utility, etc.

  • Quotebag #90

    “Perhaps this should also serve as proof that the market doesn’t always work in the favor of what’s desirable. Que: “That’s not the TW00 free market capitalism!”,”—Julia Riber Pitt

    “Consumerism is not a byproduct of human nature; it is a disgusting system which turns human actions into malicious transactions.”—Anti Consumerism

    “And while you would not have ‘profits over people,’ I don’t see how a market anarchist society could prevent ‘efficiency over people’ which could act in a very similar way.”—NoMoreSunsets

    “I’ve got news for you: the market matrix is NOT moral. It’s quite possible to screw people over and succeed in business. It’s equally possible, and very common, to try your hardest to be ’employable’ and still get screwed-over. Your Robinson Crusoe acrobatics can’t conceal these simple facts.”—AndyN00bpwnr (h/t Jack Saturday)

  • The trouble with Android

    Or as I’ve started calling it, Spamdroid. Too little sense of open source culture among Android devs. The overall tone one senses at Google Play is reminiscent of the DOS shareware community circa 1990. There is every imaginable combination of beggarware, crippleware [sic], adware, demowarez, etc., but added to all this, data mining, behavioral profiling, black hat SEO and all the newer black arts. One gets the impression that people are grasping at every imaginable straw in pursuit of “monetization.” Part of it is the Google cut on sales of paid app revenues, part is the opening of the dev market to emerging markets where people are unlikely to have the luxury of not “being in it for the money,” but mostly it is network operators absolutely insistent on assigning their retail customers a passive role in the network.

  • Only the good (blogs!) die young

    I am pleased to add to my blogroll the apparently defunct blog No More Sunsets. The most recent post there was titled Back soon and dated July 16, 2012, with the text

    I’m in the process of moving so I’ll be out for the next couple of weeks.

    I hope the author is doing OK.

    I strive to keep my blogroll as on-topic as possible. By this I mean that no matter how small this list turns out to be, I want it to be a catalog of the online offerings of the “non-market, anti-state sector.” By this I mean those who, when push comes to shove, are anti-statist, and who, at least on occasion, suggest that the market mechanism—the price signals, the absolute centrality of voluntarism—might be a contributor to the problem of de facto or de jure statism.

    Putting the left back in left libertarianism is definitely a recurring theme at No More Sunsets. There is an article pointing out differences between Proudhonian mutualists and “neo-mutualists.” Those ridiculously non-credible “primitive” economies in which three persons exist or two classes of economic goods exist are referred to not as Edgeworth boxes but as Imagination Island or Crusoe’s island. Also subject to questioning are such supposedly unalloyed goods as voluntarism, individualism, agorism, efficiency, etc.

    I can’t read anything on this excellent blog without having a lot to say, but it is closed to comments. Apparently this has not always been the case. Perhaps I will start a series of blog posts here that are essentially comments on posts at No More Sunsets.

    At any rate, my purpose in posting this is to offer gentle encouragement to a writer whose work I admire and who I’d like to think of as a fellow anagorist. This is in the spirit of NMS’ own post in that vein:

    Mutualism and Solutions to the Social Problem is a new blog with extremely powerful posts. Hopefully, they continue blogging. All too often, I see people who start on a project and give up shortly after. Please show your support by checking them out.

  • Dollars are not votes

    There seems to be an uptick in businesses being used as soapboxes (Papa John’s, Whole Foods, Chick-Fil-A, ad nauseam); most often conservative soapboxes, since conservatism is the ideology of the business establishment. Time for us non-conservatives to circle the wagons…but one side’s boycott is always the other side’s buycott. At best it’s a wash. Frustration.

    How far do you think I’ll get in life spouting liberal opinions in job interviews, or even doing lunch with management types? Conservative opinions are of course risky in such settings, but you know and I know liberal opinions are career suicide. But of course conservatives make oh so much hay about alleged blockage of the academic careers of conservatives; academia being, what, 1% of the workforce? For most of us, there’s a tacit understanding that it’s wise to check one’s opinions at the door when entering the workplace. I’ve always accepted that as part of the implied social contract. But now business owners are absolutely flaunting the fact that ownership has its privileges, and that one of these is the privilege of mixing commerce and politics.

    Dollars are not votes, and the marketplace is not a form of democracy.  In fact, it is profoundly antidemocratic.

  • Quotebag #89

    “As for the libertarians themselves, we must not be shocked that they re-iterate the Sumerian division between the elect and the debt-bound with the devotion appropriate to a middle born climber.”—Crow Falls Down

    “A hierarchy is a machine — basically a steam engine straight out of the factory age — for compelling people to do what they have no direct rational interest in doing, for the benefit of those with whom they have a fundamental conflict of interest.”—Kevin Carson

    “It is not simply a ‘reward for services rendered’ that I’m supposed to believe. It is life held ransom to illegitimate structures of control called companies, corporations, private industry. Both subjugator and subjugated sing the same song. If ‘Work or die’ is the chorus, then ‘No excuses’ would be the crescendo. ‘If I can do it, you can too’ we mindlessly drone.”—Prodigeek

    “The government/market dichotomy is pervasive in contemporary political and economic debate.”—Unlearningecon

    “The capitalist state is run by capitalists. Tear it down without simultaneously tearing them down, and another one will pop up, and we’ll be playing whack-a-mole for eternity.”—anon.

  • Quotebag #88

    “Just be careful to keep your Hipster Gland in check. You don’t want to do the interview ironically.”—Matthew Benson

    “Revolution is illegal by definition and its adherents are routinely criminalized.”—blackorchidcollective

    “Some cultures used similar terms for ‘ripping someone off’ and ‘profit.’”—Unlearningecon

    “Honestly, the area of economics is still a soft science. Part of what we need to do right now is develope more accurate computer models of how all economies work. It’s still pretty much a black box. We can’t figure out how to control it, if we don’t understand how it works fundamentally.”—Bri

    “Once I started to dig deeper in that subject matter, I came to realize that markets don’t exist in the absence of states (regulations) and that the struggle isn’t people versus state; or business versus state; or people versus business and state, but people versus institutions.”—Todd S

    “Charter advocates talk a good game about freedom and school choice, but private institutions which control public goods have plenty of incentives to be authoritarian—even tyrannical.”—Ed Schultz

    “I think one of the differences between anarchism and panarchism is that anarchism draws on shared principles encompassing liberal values and moving beyond liberal values into socialist values, while panarchism rejects shared principles and all too often means cooperating with nasties and neo-Nazis who want the right to create a white cis hetero male supremacist dystopia in their county.”—Marja Erwin