In Defense of Anagorism

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

Tag: politics

  • Quotebag #85

    “If freedom means non-frustration of the exercise of one’s legitimate property rights, you can be made perfectly free by being relieved of all property, including the right to your own body and life.”—John Holbo

    “The truth is, frankly, that there is only one war left to fight; the war against our own baser nature, the war against those primitive impulses which compel us to wage war.”—voxcorvegis

    “Libertarians like to suggest great disanalogies between the coercive law-imposing competition of rising and falling states and the seemingly more peaceful and mutually beneficial competition of rising and falling business enterprises.”—Dan Kervick

    “So lorraine you pathetic freaks actually have the occasional “crisis of faith” wow now I really know that leftism is a pseudo religion. So pretty much you guys don’t even believe in your own bullshit? The problem I have with leftism is that it really is a blank canvis there is no structured dialogue all it is is a bunch of retarded miscreants attributing their own personal desires unto this blank canvis. ”—the truth

    “The fungibility of work, the reduction of demand for long-developed special skills, the impossibility of virtuosity in one’s limited job, has made work less and less a source of reliable, positive information about the increasing value of the self — because it has ceased to truly improve people. But people still desire to work at what they love, and to improve themselves. The market will sell them the feeling of this, but will not commonly supply them with food in exchange for pursuing virtuosity.”—Sister Y

  • It’s not always the fake free-marketeers

    The portions of the apparent free market package that disturb me the most are not the obvious distortions.  It’s the frank anti-egalitarian attitudes of certain individuals who clearly do understand that not all pro-business politics is pro-market.

  • “Freedom from arbitrary authority is a consumer good”

    So says Gary Chartier. I’m inclined to agree that it’s a consumer good, at least in the actually existing economy. If freedom is doomed always to be an economic good, then there will always be constraints on freedom. Either freedom is impossible, or freed markets are an incremental step toward actual freedom, or freed markets can actually bring the cost of freedom all the way to zero.

  • Quotebag #84

    “If the concept of the Unconditional Basic Income encourages laziness, why would any right minded parent pass on an inheritance to their children?”—bstard4bristolmayor, h/t Jack Saturday

    “Not asking out Ayn Rand girl. I will not date her in a boat, I will not date her with a goat, I do not like Objectivism and won’t permit my brain to schizm, she’s awfully cute, but understand, I will not tolerate Ayn Rand.”—Garrett Cook

    “If you think about it, the concept of a free-market economy itself is a kind of gamification of human production. Yes, we’re all happy when we make more money, but we’re happiest when we make more money than others. Just ask any CEO.”—Don Peppers

    “Talk to me about how to have the freedom to pursue my dreams without leaving a mountain of young, old, sick, and dying to fend for themselves and I’ll listen.”—Melanie Pinkert

    “Anarchists might break a window, but capitalists will take your whole house, medicine from the hands of the sick, and rights from the poor.”—Hope

    “The solution to the need for competition isn’t to eliminate the idea of a middle class that doesn’t have to compete so hard, but to socialize that situation so that everyone benefits from it. ”—John Madziarczyk

  • Should we refuse grants from institutions in service to empire?

    The Center for a Stateless Society advises us not to worry about DARPA’s involvement in what are otherwise projects with wholesome bottom-up implications.

    The Internet itself was spawned in the dark corridors of DARPA. I’m still undecided as to whether I consider the Internet itself to be a Trojan horse upon society. I’m not especially worried, but there’s a remnant of worry in the back of my head. In any case, I always take the most interest in those activities that can be pursued on a micro-budget (if not yocto-budget) as where I come from, even if DARPA (or some other spook) is on the ropes and not positioned to claim a controlling interest in whatever it bankrolls, there’s the (perhaps not purely) emotional matter of “not having so-and-so to thank” for such-and-such.

    Academia, for example, is utterly economically dependent on outside parties. In this place and times, this is a mixture of business, government, fees for services rendered (tuition, etc.) and individual donors. Assuming business and government are the lion’s share, it would appear that academia has historically been adept enough to “play mommy against daddy” well enough to retain a semblance of independence, which can in turn be invested in institutions such as tenure, academic freedom and the Pursuit of Knowledge for its Own Sake. These traditions (in the western world, anyway) date back to the Middle Ages, when mommy and daddy were church and state, and may still be a factor for some sectarian institutions. It’s looking more and more like the jig is almost up for academia. Most of those in the anarchist movements deride academia as a source of social control and favor autodidactics and unschooling. I’m not affiliated with academia, but am openly supportive of it, because it’s become a de facto sanctuary where non-conservatives can be both out and employed. We civilian supporters are finding ourselves more and more in the uncomfortable position of defending the indefensible, as the ways of academia begin looking more and more to us outsiders like either frank credentialism or frank surrender to the business model.

    Then there’s my pet project, pubwan, which has noncommercial in its definition. Perhaps this (and this alone) is why pubwan-as-defined has not been implemented.

  • 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

  • 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 #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