In Defense of Anagorism

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

Tag: society

  • 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.”

  • 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 #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)

  • 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

  • La lucha continua

    What has now become the old model (the J.O.B. as the usual means of support) was a factory sweatshop partially humanized by several generations of intense activism and reform. Perhaps the precarious “freelancer” model that is rapidly replacing it can similarly be modified. The new rules seem to be that successful self-employment is a necessary but not sufficient condition for basic dignity. We can and should do better. I suspect the boycott will be more relevant than the strike this time around. I particularly like replacing the idea of “general strike” with “general boycott”–instead of “buy nothing day”, how about “live like a monk for a month”?

  • Exploring, as always, possible end-runs around market omniscience

    Maybe “letting go and letting the Invisible Hand” is more or less guaranteed to result in an allocation that lies at rather than within the production possibility frontier (PPF), but maybe no point on the present PPF represents the best of all possible worlds. Ideally, the road to there will involve some non-market activity on someone’s part. It’s hard to imagine the best of all currently possible worlds not being on the PPF, but that leaves open certain other questions: Does the pursuit of a better-than-currently-possible world necessarily involve pushing outward the envelope that is the PPF, or are there other avenues? I’ll admit that growth as a prerequisite for everything that is good (human rights, poverty alleviation, a smarter humanity, etc.) is a doctrine I find particularly depressing. It almost implies that to be poor is to be part of the problem, or at least precludes the poor from being part of the solution. Contrast this with sustainability principles, steady-state economics and the kind of thinking around “affluenza,” which actually honor the lean life rather than the mean life. This tonal contrast has played a big role in shaping my tribal and ideological allegiances, and is also why I am rooting for the affirmative in the global warming debate.

    Maybe the ability of the Invisible Hand to solve the calculation problem is definitively superlative when it comes to local optima, but discovery of non-local (but maybe preferable) attractors can be effected by shocks to the system from other-than-market forces.

  • Quotebag #86

    “Values plus Socialism tends to oppression. Socialism plus Liberty without Values tends towards an aimless mediocrity, Liberty plus Values without Socialism leads to injustice.”—John Madziarczyk

    “I have long felt that one cannot be sure that a person has offered him- or herself voluntarily for work or a service if that person does not have an acceptable alternative; i.e., the means to cover his or her basic needs.”—Edward S.

    “If you echo the belief in Christianity, saluting the flag, and pro-business beliefs of your superiors, you can get ahead fast in certain places.”—John Madziarczyk

    “Apart from a handful of artistic careers, the sad truth is that deeply satisfying work for pay is squeezed-out toothpaste that can’t be coaxed back into its tube.”—Solidarity Economy editors

    “It is a sad thing that anarchism is beeing [sic] distored from it’s original sense, but only by definition capitalism and anarchism is contradictions. It is very simple. The state and private property rests in the same principle of unpersonal property. If the master/ruler of the property is a king, dictator, CEO or elected president, it is still a form of government. Call it whatever you want- capitalism/statism.”—MrAnhape

    “Derived from the adage that ‘we cannot trust an honest man,’ we (aka ‘society in general) institute flawed, unworkable or Catch 22- like social standards in a deliberate fashion.”—locumranch

  • 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

  • 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