Ok, so Skynet sells a hospital a CAT scanner that doesn’t do what it is supposed to do, say, it randomly turns on and irradiates technologists walking by, or it won’t produce a diagnostic image. What is the hospital’s recourse under our new Anarchist non-overlords.
Or, say the doctor misinterprets the image and the patient undergoes an operation for a lung cancer they don’t have. What do they do, complain to the Anarchist medical board?
Skynet, and likely the people in charge of it, will never sell another imager again. Likewise, the incompetent doctor will get fewer and poorer patients.
What makes you think your shiny new vacuum cleaner will work, say? The American Board of Vacuum Cleaners? The fact is that “anarchistic” systems already apply in much of the market, although I don’t know what political/social principles anarchists espouse and I doubt that those are in place. If you want to attack anarchistic philosophy, you don’t want to start with the market - that we almost already have and seems to work OK.
This board has had a self-proclaimed anarchist around for a long long time. Me.
First, assume the absence of specific reciprocity. In other words, money doesn’t exist and nothing has come along to replace it: there is no central authority and therefore no central currency of any sort. The verb “to sell” is extinct.
Second, assume that no activity, such as “what specific work you do on Monday morning”, is organized by a hierarchy of people over other people. It may still be organized and if any highly complex product such as a CAT scan (and therefore the creation of CAT scanning equipment, and distribution thereof to places where they are needed) exist, assume that there is indeed some organizational structure. It just doesn’t depend in any shape way fashion or form on “bosses” or unequal positions of authority.
Third, assume that all labor performed by anyone, at any time, ever, is voluntary, so what GETS organized is communication: what do people need, where and when do they need it, who is available, which requested slots have been filled by volunteers, where in the system is there a current shortfall, how does that modify predictions of when things will be completed, etc etc etc…
If the Skynet syndicate knowingly provided (there is no “sold” in Anarchia) a defective scanner, there would be social penalties. Shunning is a personal favourite, but whatever works -public humiliation, ridicule in cartoons, ribald songs. If they knowingly provided a dangerous one, there would be criminal penalties, possibly jail time. Do not make the mistake of confusing Anarchia with Pacifica.
If it was all accidental, then the members of the Skynet syndicate would be encouraged to make right with the hospital, and in extreme circumstances, arbitration might be required in this regard.
Are we talking about an accidental misinterpretation here? In which case, the only penalty is (and should be) a loss in the doctor’s reputation as a good healer. Anything else (monetary compensation? Punitive damages?) doesn’t really feature in Anarchia.
Don’t have access to Wikipedia? My conception of the term is pretty much in line with Wiki’s - “a hypothetical form of economy or society, often explored in science fiction, in which things such as goods, services and information are free, or practically free”. I believe it could be achieved by advanced fabrication technology.
Me, too.
Well, yes, that is the very definition of what is required to create what you want. You cannot have a post-scarcity society until every possible human need is capable of being met infinitely simultaneously. This physically cannot happen in our universe.
Well, yes, a post-scarcity society does in fact require unlimited free energy. It’s the onyl way it can be “post-scarcity”!
So, in other words, you posit a theoretical goal, which you have no idea how to create, which absoutely cannot come about with any known mechanism, which requires the creation of an entire new form of life.
I’m sorry, but no. I believe all good little boys and girls go to heaven, and what you want is too absurd for me, for you demand to enter the Kingdom of Heaven without having said Kingdom or entering it.
And your FOR this. Are you sure you’ve thought this through?
And I ask the same question to Mr. Dibble. Just as a start, who does the enforcing—of anything? Who chooses who does the enforcing?
A vacuum will come with express and implied warranties (unless they’ve been disclaimed, in which case it’s buyer beware) that provide a remedy if it doesn’t work the way it is supposed to. Of course, in an anarchy, there’s no guarantee that the company will even honor their warranties, in which case buyers wasted their money just to gain the information “Vacuum Manufacturer X is only in business to rip off its customers.” Not a very productive use of assets, is it? Even if everyone decides not to give any more business to vacuum manufacturer X, what stops them from returning to the market as Vacuum Manufacturer Y or Mop & Bucket Consortium Z and ripping people off again?
The free market may be the best mechanism for determining the price of various goods and services, but it hasn’t shown itself to be free from distortion in the absence of regulation.
If there is enforcement, it ain’t anarchy. By definition. Period.
Who would decide this, and how would they do so?
Some points to consider:
a) There are no laws AGAINST anarchy, therefore there is no need to overturn any existing system, violently or otherwise. WITHIN an anarchic system, it itself needs to be pure or it’s not anarchy, but anarchic systems can exist and thrive (mostly in small pockets) within a non-anarchic system as long as the surrounding system does NOT prohibit it.
b) While the notion of a successful anarchy DOES entail the complete lack of law enforcement, the complete lack of any other form of organized authority ranging from armies to a trio of thugs with large clubs, the lack of structures of decision-making authority, the absense of rulers, bosses, governors, chiefs, kings, poohbahs, etc… that is the description of a world which has “gone anarchy”, it is not a necessary precondition for starting an anarchy, so arguments about “your anarchy would last just long enough for three big trolls on Harley-Davidsons to come into town with big clubs” completely miss the point.
c) The answer to all the questions about “why would people…?” (participate in this way, that way, this other way) and “why wouldn’t people…?” (participate instead in contrary ‘archist’ ways) is that they get their way and have good lives with less hassle and stress by participating in the anarchy. Same reason people participate in whatever system surrounds them: people mostly DO unless there’s a compelling reason to do otherwise. AND see b) above again, the vision of everyone participating in an anarchy volitionally in a world entirely devoid of law enforcement and whatnot is not a necessary precondition to the existence of anarchic systems, it’s the description of a world in which those anarchic systems have PROVEN to be more efficient and pleasant etc to the point that law enforcement and other archic structures fall by the wayside. So arguments about “people wouldn’t pitch in” or “people would just steal all the rice for themselves” are irrelevant: the systems preventing theft won’t go away until lack of need causes them to, and the anarchy won’t thrive until / unless people are pitching in during an era when law enforcement et. al. still exist.
Well, if we want to constrain “post-scarcity” to mean “every felt human need or want fulfilled instantly and universally”, then post-scarcity is impossible.
But if we take “post-scarcity” to mean “goods and services will fall in price to a point unimaginable in today’s society”, then of course it’s possible. Your average welfare mother of today has more suits of clothes than the aristocracy of a few hundred years ago. Clothing isn’t “free”, but still the price of cloth has dropped several orders of magnitude, to the point where nobody really talks about providing clothing for the poor anymore, because the poor can walk into a thrift store and walk out with a full wardrobe for a few dollars.
So “post scarcity” really means a future world where a comfortable middle-class lifestyle of today can be provided so cheaply that we might as well give it away, plus future classes of free goods and services the like of which are hard to imagine.
To me this sort of future is very plausible. I don’t think this will lead to anarchy exactly, more that there will be less need for the sorts of services that governments provide. How many cops will we need when everyone’s entire life is recorded in high-definition? How many prisons will we need when if you steal someone’s car, they just shrug and get themselves a new one for the equivalent price of a box of cereal?
There will still be violent crime, but certainty of punishment is more effective than harsh punishment. Before a gang-banger works himself up to drive-by shootings, he’s been doing small-time crime for years. If he’s caught and counseled/punished for his pre-teen shenangigans, he’s never going to become a hardened criminal in the first place. And while we’ll still have sociopaths and such, they will be much easier to detect, and then isolated from the rest of us.
So we’ll still have crime, we’ll still have property, we’ll still have government, but it seems reasonable to me that these things will affect people a lot less.
And there will still be categories of goods and services that will be scarce, they aren’t making new land for instance. But the scarcity of land is driven by location. You can purchase acres of land in Nebraska for the cost of a few square feet in Manhattan or Tokyo. If there’s no economic need for people to live in a big city, if they can get the free/nearly free goods and services they want in Nebraska, they can have all the open space they need. But they won’t be able to simultaneously live in Manhattan and have acres of open space.
And anything that requires human labor or human creativity will still be scarce, although there’s probably a lot more of this available for free/nearly free than most people realize. After all, you guys here on the Dope entertain me for hours and hours every week, and I don’t have to pay you anything. How much will it cost to produce a summer blockbuster movie, if lots of people would be willing to contribute for free, just because it’s fun to make movies? And if special effects costs are pretty much limited by the efforts of the animators? On a planet of 9 billion people, most of whom don’t have to work for a living, there’s going to be a lot of excess capacity to produce entertainment. And since most people don’t really have to work for a living, they don’t have much incentive to engage in creative work unless it’s fun. But if it is fun, they put as much effort into it as they like, because they aren’t constrained by the need to work 80 hours a week in a sweatshop for their daily bread.
Anyway, none of this implies Anarchism. And it seems there’s very little distinction between the ad hoc non-hierarchical sorts of organization imagined by anarchists, and minimal government accountable to the people coupled with radical prosperity.
I’m loving the part where I write a song because Skynet made a bad CAT scanner.
I’m reminded thatUnited Breaks Guitars.
On a more serious note, I’m finding the ‘there is no heirarchy, it will organize itself’ idea very tough to buy. Why would someone go to school to learn to do a complex task? What will happen if the people involved in doing the CAT scan images just…suck at it. Are they fired? Do I write a ribald song?
Well, let’s think of it this way. What happens today when nobody wants to make CAT scanners? Do some government thugs go out and round up some engineers and force them at gunpoint to make CAT scanners, Soviet Union style?
No. Nobody orders anyone to make CAT scanners. Instead people want CAT scanners, and are willing to pay for them, and other people are willing to provide CAT scanners in return for little tokens that entitle them to other goods and services. No coercion involved. Is this anarchy? It isn’t anarchy in the sense that there is a government out there, and this government issues tokens that entitle you to goods and services, and if you don’t follow certain agreements the same government will order you to transfer some of your tokens to the other guy, and if you do certain other bad things the same government will lock you in a small room for a while.
But nobody in the government came up with the idea of CAT scans and decided to provide CAT scans to people, and made other people build the scanners. Only in the sense that free market capitalism requires a certain set of enforceable rules to operate did the government get involved.
Or, to make it simpler, without government involvement, how do people get lemonade on hot summer days? There are people who want lemonade, but why would anyone who has lemonade give them lemonade unless they are forced to?
Well, to be fair, dibble seems to resist pinning down exactly his argument entails. His original claim was something along the line of Star Trek replicators, which is why I assumed he meant the whole scifi thing, but now he seems to have backed away from that. It’s also worth noting that many “post-scarcity” advocates claim that we’ll reach a point with increased automation and nanotech that pretty much nobody will have to work and everything will be produced by our (benign) cybernetic overlords. But fair enough, we can run with your definition too.
The thing is, even then, that although it’s possible for cheap goods and services, it’s highly unlikely bordering on utopianism. Right now, for instance CD’s cost so little to make that, IIRC, they could make a profit selling them for a quarter, if not a dime. But the music industry has not only kept their pricing structure in place, they’ve used the law like a sledgehammer to prosecute violations of their IP. Likewise, T-shirts and such are already very cheap to produce, and that’s part of how Walmart makes so much money when it takes them and marks them way the fuck up. Even if we posit vastly increased automation (and who maintains the machines, and why?) and nanotechnology, that doesn’t eliminate the profit motive or the scarcity of time itself. Because unless our automated nanobot driven car factories can churn out enough cars to meet all the gathered demand, even the concept of “first come first served” will be a limiting factor.
This, however, starts to get a little bit more dicey. How do the services become free? We have automated nanobot factories making shirts and DVD’s and cars, and what have you… but you want me to sit in a hot, stuffy office and research some legal matter? Or spend years getting and education and perform delicate surgery that only 3 people in the world can manage? Or get down on my hands and knees in the dirty, grimy interior of a nanobot factory in order to perform maintence… and the services are supposed to be essentially free? Some services might be, but I’d wager that they would be the extreme minority; things like creative endeavors might be free if the creators had no real material wants, but certainly many necessary services would not be. You say that some categories will remain expensive, things that require human labor and creativity… I’d argue that in any age you’ll be talking about the bulk of human activities.
Who says we’ll get to universal high def surveillance? Don’t you think that many people would go absolutely berserk at the thought of this (terrorism bugaboo aside)? And who says that items like cars will necessarily be cheap or plentiful enough for this to take hold? To get a (tiny bit) hyperbolic, there’s a limited amount of mass in the world. When we get to the point that everybody wants their own luxury yacht, spaceship and mansion, and the population of the planet has reached X billion, where do all the raw materials, all the energy and all the time for this construction come from?
All that being said:
This is spot on. But then we’re back to hunter’s anarchomagicalism where we just don’t have any enforcement of any rules/laws or dibble’s pure democracy where we just get mob rule on the level of “the collective” and call that good, once human nature is totally different, of course.
Yeah, just let me set my cheap replicator technology for stun and I’ll get right back to that point.
So another “and then a miracle happens!” step in the proof, coupled with the argument that, what, those who don’t see the inherent logic of Step 6: Miracle, just don’t have the proper belief in how wonderfully human nature can change?
So instead of “the state” instead we have the (3/4 majority of whatever) who make all the rules and decide how they’ll be enforced. Congrats, you’ve just set up new rulers. And what happens when someone goes against “the will of the [del]people[/del] collective”, maybe even decided that they think drunk driving shouldn’t be a crime? Well, then the collective assigns people to deal with such violations. Sounds awfully like the monopolization of force to secure state power. But I guess the monopolizatio of force to secure the will of the collective is totally different. And, of course, if we’re dealing with a massive land mass stretching several time zones and hundreds of millions of people, and some folks would rather do things then spend all day voting, they might even delegate people to support their views. We might even call them representatives.
And, of course you’re still ignoring that whatever collective we’re dealing with can simply vote gays off the island, or what have you. Except for that miracle that happened and people won’t be mean like that anymore, I guess.
The first flaw in your argument is that you assume that corporations would not develop a coercive apparatus. There is no reason to believe this, in fact there is reason to believe the opposite. How much is the corporation willing to put into protecting assets? Obviously there would be wars going on between corporations. What is to stop one corporation from hitting the supply chain of another corporation? Why not steal your competitors goods while they are being shipped to the market? Just raid their warehouse and take their stuff, re-brand it and voila, it’s your widget not theirs.
The idea that corporations would not be coercive is the point at which anarcho-capitalism breaks down.
I don’t make the definitions - what you are arguing against is a tedious literalist strawman, not post-scarcity society as it is understood in Sf and futurist circles. Argue against it all you want, but it’s got *nothing *to do with what I’m suggesting could lead to viable grounds for anarchism.
I disagree with AHunter in that I think you can have *collective *enforcement of criminal laws and still be an anarchist society. The collective empowers temporary law enforcement officers. That collective being the community, or the syndicate, or the factory, or whatever unit is relevant to the task at hand.
I claimed nosuch thing. I said: “radical change in manufacturing like cheap replication tech”. But there’s more to replicators than Star Trek, right now. Both additive and subtractive techniques are in active development and refinement, often in the academic and open source communities.
Well, a system of social organization where rival corporations regularly use violence to settle disputes isn’t exactly capitalism anymore, it’s feudalism. Why would Bill Gates make money by selling operating systems and office suites, when he can just order everyone in his territory to pay him tribute or he’ll send goons over to their houses and break their kneecaps? And why would Bill be accountable to shareholders, when he can just have the shareholders shot?
Capitalism requires some system of enforcement of the rule of law, without the rule of law capitalism is impossible. This doesn’t necessarily have to to be state enforcement, although it seems that in the real world it almost always is.