In Defense of Anagorism

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

Tag: politics

  • 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.”

  • 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 #94

    “I’m willing to grant that right-wingers can libertarian (they are really radical liberals), even if I think that their focus on negative liberty promotes an incomplete picture of freedom.”—Dave Hummels

    “What I wonder: what the fuck is it about the exchange of money that makes people feel entitled to *disrespect*? When I buy services from someone, as a customer, I don’t treat that person like shit. Why would I? I get nothing but bad karma by being bad to other people.”—Michael O. Church

    “You may also notice that, as well as a devout atheist, I’m kind of a crazy libertarian. (And even more of a crazy socialist. But we’ll get to that later.)”—writerJames

    “I think the first rule, ‘People have a right to trade services and resources with the market, so long as they aren’t hurting others by doing so.’ is self-contradicting since any competition assumes ‘hurting others’.”—Aleh

    “Is that the con’s blueprint for the New World Order? Art Linkletter heartily endorsed the game, and he certainly was fast friends with Ronald Reagan. You’re forced to get married, have kids, drive your car everywhere, and at the end of the game, there is no middle class. There is only Millionaire Acres and The Poor House.”—Pestone

  • Degree, not kind

    The difference between the totalitarian nightmare of the nation state and the totalitarian nightmare of the business establishment is one of degree, not kind. OK, the latter is more voluntary than the former, making it a lesser of two evils. Always some careerist or other sucker-upper to the business establishment will describe the employment relationship as “nobody’s holding a gun to your head.” Fine, but in very few countries is anyone holding a gun to your head saying you can’t emigrate (the few that still lock their citizens in, I’m sure, are counterbalanced globally by coercive private sector phenomena like human trafficking). Oh, the cost of emigrating is many times higher than that of getting a job elsewhere? Of course it is, but still a matter of degree not kind. More telling, there isn’t a square inch on the planet that isn’t part of some nation state’s sovereign territory. Which demonstrates what? That there’s at best small comfort in having more than one choice of ways to be pushed around by force, or by its evil brother called persuasion, who I’ll concede for now is an evil little brother rather than an evil twin brother.

    No, take that back. In a world in which politicians fear lobbyists far more than they do voters, persuasion is the evil big brother of force. Anyone, in today’s world, certainly in today’s America, who believes that there’s more de-facto political power in government than there is in business, or even who believes axiomatically that everything conceivably negative that a business might do is enabled by government (this means you, left-styled libertarians), is someone who has taken sides with the most powerful tier of society, is someone who is speaking power to truth, is someone who is striking at the symbol, rather than the source, of authority.

    I hate the state, and I hate commerce even more.

  • Quotebag #93

    “The bottom line is this: project management is a game you can’t win. If you come in way under budget and time, it’s as if everybody is going to think you’re a sandbagger and won’t believe your estimates again.”—David Shirey

    “[Referring] to humans as an ensuing mob [isn’t] very nice.”—Mikey Hetherington

    “The various binary distinctions libertarians make (voluntary/coercive, government/market, positive/negative liberty) fall apart upon critical inspection, and we then have to take things on a case by case basis in the fuzzy world of morality, trade offs and so forth.”—Unlearningecon

    “For you and I and a lot of other college-educated people, the subordinate employee-customer relationships are a temporary thing to be suffered through. Some people will work under that situation though, for their entire lives. That is really not a trait of society that I want to perpetuate.”—Barnacle Strumpet

    “If I performed an action that made me $100 and cost the world $90, that would technically be ‘positive sum’ (net gain of $10) but it wouldn’t be right.”—Michael O. Church

    “I think people need to start approaching their own employment the way they’d approach a political cause: get a bunch of people together and help each other do it. Kind of like union membership, but without the part where you negotiate with capitalists for wages. I think this is how anarcho-syndicalism works.”—Zacqary Adam Green

    “If you hear that ‘everyone’ supports a policy, whether it’s a war of choice or fiscal austerity, you should ask whether ‘everyone’ has been defined to exclude anyone expressing a different opinion.”—Paul Krugman

  • Chaotic good, high fructose corn syrup and large organizations

    Jason Lewis writes of the plight of the Chaotic Good, especially when trapped in a large organization. Apparently these are D&D alignments. The most concise explanations of these that I have found are in the form of memes, of which there are many to choose. In case that doesn’t clarify the matter, the good neutral folkx at Max Planck Institute offer an alignment quiz. From the post:

    I’ve seen myself as “chaotic good” long before this series of posts, or before I ever thought of applying the D&D alignment categories to roles at work. It fits with my politics (anarchist-communist), with my gneral M.O. of getting things done (open source is always bettter, and it’s always easier to ask for forgiveness than to get permission). It also fits with my general attitude toward work: if you want something brilliant, tell me what you want and get the fuck out of my way. If you want a mess, keep letting middle managers stick their fingers in the pie of my creative process.

    Church makes an excellent point, though, that the “technocrat” disposition, and the alignments it tends to entail (chaotic good to chaotic neutral) tend to be notoriously difficlut to manage. The only thing I think is missing from the series he’s been doing on this issue is that if you’re a programmer, you weren’t meant to have a boss.

    The article by Paul Graham on why programmers aren’t meant to have a boss is also a good read, and Paul Graham has been mentioned in the present blog before. Graham has reached the conclusion that (for a programmer, at least) nothing good can result from working for a large organization. Nothing at all. Paul Graham says that instead people (even entry level people) should be founding startups.

    It’s interesting how we get from anarcho-communism (which I’m all for) to going into business for oneself (which terrifies me a lot and repulses me at least a little). Addressing the employment problem with self employment is the textbook example of “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” For better or for Worse, I’m not emotionally ready to let go of the desire to beat them. If a programmer isn’t meant to have a boss, that would logically imply that a programmer isn’t meant to be their own boss. As Paul Graham says:

    The people who come to us from big companies often seem kind of conservative.

    No arguing with that. But from my unique and twisted perspective, the people who start businesses also seem kind of conservative. More often that not, VERY conservative. I know part of this is my belief that libertarianism is a subset of conservatism, but even if we assume (for the sake of argument) that not all libertarians are conservatives, can founders of startups be communists?

  • Antilibertarian antistatism

    The tag line of the present blog has been changed. It was: “Lack of marketing skills leads to agoraphobia, which leads to anagorism.” Now it says “antilibertarian antistatism.” The previous slogan was introspective and a little self-deprecating. It served a purpose, and now another purpose is to be served. “Antilibertarian antistatism” is an attempt to propagate a meme in the “mindfuck” category, in the spirit of the “free-market anticapitalist” slogan of the left-styled libertarians. In their case, the gimmick behind the apparent paradox is their understanding of what anticapitalist (and by extension, capitalist) means. As Charles Johnson informs us:

    The reasons I do have, have to do with the specific communicative purpose that I explained in the article. It’s not because people think of bad things when they hear the word “capitalism,” it’s because making a sharp terminological distinction between (1) market forms, on the one hand, and (2) capitalist patterns of ownership and control, on the other, helps me to achieve a specific communicative goal when I am talking with people about economics. The goal, as I describe in the article, is to highlight a particular causal claim about economic outcomes (the claim that freed markets would naturally produce the kinds of outcomes I described under the headings of “the wage-labor system” and “profit-dominated society”), and to raise some questions about what the basis for that causal claim is, and about whether or not that causal claim is actually true. If using the word “capitalism” synonymously with “free markets” or “private enterprise” tends to block that conversation or obscure that underlying Capitalist Causal Hypothesis, then that is a good reason not to use the word “capitalism” that way. If distinguishing the word “capitalism” from “free markets” or “private enterprise,” and using it instead to refer to something else that I want to question or to condemn (such as the wage-labor system, or profit-dominated society), helps to get that conversation started, and helps to bring out the underlying Capitalist Causal Hypothesis, then that is as good a reason as any to use the word “capitalism” in that way instead.

    The problem I have with this, of course, is that it doesn’t put enough distance between left-styled libertarians and those principled libertarians who, as a matter of principle, define capitalism (and libertarianism) as “nobody’s holding a gun to your head.” My own use of the term “antilibertarian” is to say that I’m anti “framing of liberty in terms of coercion.” I’m anti this because I think this is a gross oversimplification of how the world actually works, because I think it has become a game which only capitalists (in both senses) can win. In that sense I stand opposite the left libertarians on the Capitalist Causal Hypothesis. If anything I agree with the “anarcho”-capitalists on one thing (if only one thing), and that is the idea that the non-aggression principle, and specifically the decidedly (and aggressively!) narrow definition of aggression to be synonymous with coercion, is a reliable recipe for social darwinism.

    To paraphrase:

    If using the word “libertarian” synonymously with “antiauthoritarian” or “civil libertarian” tends to block the conversation about causality, then that is a good reason not to use the word “libertarian” that way. If distinguishing the word “libertarianism” from “antiauthoritarian” or “civil libertarian,” and using instead to refer to something else that I want to question or to condemn (such as the non-agression system, or subsidy-free society), helps to get that conversation started, and helps to bring out the underlying Capitalist Causal Hypothesis, then that is a good enough reason for me to use the word “libertarian” in that way instead.

    It is clear to me that non-aggression directly implies non-entitlement, which directly implies a society with economic casualties. I see no way out of this mess without achieving post-scarcity in some meaningful sense. The idea of social ends by libertarian means is suspect to me, as the call for libertarian (or market) means implies the existence of an allocation problem which must be solved, as well as a faith, which I do not share, that markets are uniquely qualified to perform that “calculation”. If allocation (and by extension, scarcity) is a major problem, then social ends are not to be achieved in my lifetime. If my life is to be used (by me) as part of the solution, then the means I wish to pursue is efficiency in individual (personal) production and consumption, not in interpersonal allocation. Production relevant to need rather than demand (in whose equations wants backed up by cash are weighted more heavily than needs in general), and the study of cheap living.

    As for the inclusion of the word “antistatism” in the slogan “antilibertarian antistatism:” A more succinct description of my worldview would be “antilibertarian antiauthoritarianism,” as I’m in more enthusiastic solidarity with those who self-identify as antiauthoritarians than those who self-identify as antistatists, and also because I don’t believe for a minute that the state has an effective (i.e., de facto) monopoly on authority, or political power for that matter. Also, there is the intent to mindfuck the mentality that non-libertarianism (in the NAP sense) implies statism. I refuse to be dismissed as just another suck-up statist just because I see the NAP as a rhetorical trap designed to rule out every expression of idealism.

  • Quotebag #92

    “If you accept that market economies have no tendency to full employment equilibrium, then it follows logically that large-scale automation is most likely to cause serious structural unemployment and a chronic aggregate demand shortfall.”—Lord Keynes

    “From my point of view, there is simply no way to posit any sort of god (a creature by definition more powerful than mere mortals, if only in the way comic book superheroes are more powerful, by possessing a hypertrophied attribute which allows this god a greater chance of winning feats of strength, or contests of wit) who interacts with humans and doesn’t come out of the relationship having harmed the human person.”—Jack Crow

    “One could make the case that the right to not have a boss is actually the hardest won of modern freedoms: should it really trouble us if more people in a rich society end up exercising it?”—Ross Douthat, h/t Jack Saturday

    “This corporatism talking point is yet another attempt to rebrand capitalism so that it doesn’t seem so evil, antidemocratic and corrupt. It’s capitalism.”—Matt Meister (on Facebook)

    “A proper forecasting mechanism would weigh each individual’s opinion by the precision of his or her knowledge. A market tends on the contrary to weigh each individual’s opinion by his or her wealth.”—Brad DeLong

    “Competition is an ideology.”—Jack Crow

  • 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.