Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You!
Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You!
David Graeber Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You! 2000
If there’s a line to get on a crowded bus, do you wait your turn and refrain from elbowing your way past others even in the absence of police?
If you answered “yes”, then you are used to acting like an anarchist!
Are you a member of a club or sports team or any other voluntary organization where decisions are not imposed by one leader but made on the basis of general consent?
If you answered “yes”, then you belong to an organization which works on anarchist principles!
Do you believe that most politicians are selfish, egotistical swine who don’t really care about the public interest? Do you think we live in an economic system which is stupid and unfair?
If you answered “yes”, then you subscribe to the anarchist critique of today’s society — at least, in its broadest outlines.
Do you really believe those things you tell your children (or that your parents told you)?
“It doesn’t matter who started it.” “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” “Clean up your own mess.” “Do unto others...” “Don’t be mean to people just because they’re different.” Perhaps we should decide whether we’re lying to our children when we tell them about right and wrong, or whether we’re willing to take our own injunctions seriously. Because if you take these moral principles to their logical conclusions, you arrive at anarchism.
Do you believe that human beings are fundamentally corrupt and evil, or that certain sorts of people (women, people of color, ordinary folk who are not rich or highly educated) are inferior specimens, destined to be ruled by their betters?
If you answered “yes”, then, well, it looks like you aren’t an anarchist after all. But if you answered “no”, then chances are you already subscribe to 90% of anarchist principles, and, likely as not, are living your life largely in accord with them.
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"neither of which would be acceptable..."
And how does one reject that? Do you think profit maximization goes away under anarchy? You're missing very basic parts of your utopia to deal with things when people don't act perfectly, intentionally or not.
If there is no money (as a store of value, as opposed to an freely inflatable means of exchange) and no private property (as opposed to personal property), both of which is a given in an Anarchistic society*, why would anyone try to maximize profit? The entire concept of profit maximisation would be absurd in such a scenario.
And with no external force to maximize profit, why would a worker-owned cooperative that handles transport of hydrocarbons exploit their workers (i.e. themselves) or not do necessary repairs?
I think you don't understand the basic idea behind Anarchism... it is precisely the idea that people can be flawed but society doesn't incentive such behaviour and has many defences in place to prevent people from trying to amass power over others.
*as they can only exist when a state enforces these with violence
Nifty, didn't know much about the economic specifics of anarchy (ancaps give you guys a bad name and are much louder). I'll have to dig a little deeper there as I'll admit I'm ignorant.
I still don't see how anarchy provides sufficient mechanisms to deal with economic bads. Like even if the worker-owned cooperative handles hydrocarbon transport perfectly, there's still environmental impacts from the use of that product. The incentive to do damaging things to others (pollution, climate change) is still present even in the absence of non-personal economic incentives (e.g. portable fuel for personal vehicles). Do you have anything to point me at for learning a bit more about how anarchy deals with that?
Well, as I said... I think extraction of hydrocarbons in not really feasible under the proposed framework of an Anarchistic society, but there will probably have to be some sort of transitional period during which existing infrastructure is still used.
In general it is perfectly feasible to run industrial machines with biogas and bio-diesel (ideally produced from waste streams), which are easy to produce in a decentralized way when the overall demand is minimized to what is really needed. Personal transport can be easily electrified with trains and so on.
But as a general principle Anarchism doesn't claim to have all the answers. It's more of an method to ensure that a fair society can reached and that people have the means & will be smart enough to figure out the details along the way.
I'll look into it a bit more, but claiming decentralized hydrocarbon extraction wouldn't be feasible but biogas etc would be is a stretch to me, especially with the caveats of needing minimized demand or having new technology available.
And while I understand not claiming to have all the answers (and this not being the best medium for long explanations), dealing with economic bads is a fundamental issue. Not having a sufficient solution is a big part of why we've got climate change, micro plastics in everything, etc., in the current system. I'm not a pollyanna; I don't think figuring it out along the way is sufficient.
Anyway, thanks for the conversation. You introduced me to some new ideas. I think it's getting a little too hand-wavy to continue, though. You've got me curious enough to look up some things, so I think this counts as a success for both of us. Have a good one.
The big difference there is that you can make biodiesel from an extremely common waste product (grease) in your back yard. Grease cars are very DIY, whereas oil mining operations really aren't.
As far as the amount of oil we use currently, a lot of that is going to be related to the unnecessary infrastructure of social hierarchy. Consider, for a moment, remote work. Employers who run offices tend to want their employees to come into the office every day, which leads to millions of people commuting on a daily basis. Not only do they have to burn the fuel required to move their cars from point A to point B, but they're stuck in traffic so they're constantly wasting momentum (and thus fuel) by braking and idling.
Pivoting to the office itself, now you've got a bunch of people hanging out in a big open space that needs to be climate controlled. Often this space has massive, bare windows, which isn't fantastic for heating efficiency. Offices aren't really built for efficient human habitation.
When people refuse to come back to the office, switching jobs or retiring early, they're helping to make things more efficienct by taking power away from the points where it's concentrated. Flattening out the hierarchy is better for all of us and better for the planet.
Centralized hierarchies really just take the work that's being done by much smaller groups of workers and claim credit for it while imposing an unnecessary organizational infrastructure over the top of them and taking the value of their labor. If you work at a corporate restaurant the food you're selling isn't prepared by some huge corporate infrastructure, it's prepared by the people who work in the restaurant. If they weren't getting their supplies from the company that owns the place, they'd be getting it elsewhere.
These sources of collected power want us to think we need them. They want us to think that because their name or their logo is on the side of a building they're the reason anything gets done. But the reality is that it's the people actually doing the work, and they often don't really need someone telling them how to do it from up on high.
"they often don't really need someone telling them how to do it..."
I don't share that level of optimism. So many current laws are written in blood, so to speak, because people are lazy or just ignorant even ignoring the crappy incentives in capitalism and hierarchies. I absolutely want standards for bridge construction, for example. Or food handling. Gotta get all that grease from somewhere, right? Doesn't take a jack in the box to give people e. coli. Got any ideas for a pessimist on that kind of point?