In Defense of Anagorism

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

Tag: stateless society

  • 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.

  • 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.