Sorry, you’re talking to a pacifist. But there’s nothing for the bandits to steal, anyway - no property, remember.
OK, sorry, they’re not our cows. You’re right.
So, what’s for dinner? Hmm, the sheep are gone , the potatoes “changed hands” .
anything left for us to eat ?
Now there’e a vision to strive for. Hang out in trailers surrounded by trash, shoot off guns, don’t have a school, get fed by a neighbouring non-anarchist community’s food bank, cash government cheques to pay for gas for old gas guzzlers, and sit about and smoke weed. That anarchist community only survives by the grace of non-anarchist society.
I’m always curious as to where people like you think they would get all their clothes, homes and other material items we take for granted if no one worked on anything. Somehow I don’t see you making all your stuff yourself.
Now there’e a vision to strive for. Hang out in trailers surrounded by trash, shoot off guns, don’t have a school, get fed by a neighbouring non-anarchist community’s food bank, cash government cheques to pay for gas for old gas guzzlers, and sit about and smoke weed. That anarchist community only survives by the grace of non-anarchist society.
Stone soup.
Fuck it.
I’m gonna take the last ammo and go ver to the next village to uhmmm, persuade them that we should eat the cow they wanted to eat.
If the people in the next village over are employed, you can eat them, because they are sheep.
Do you know what stone soup is?
Bouillon de silex avec creme de boue ?
Communication.
DVD players are not brought into existence in our world today as a direct consequence of vertical hierarchies of people with power over other people; they are brought into existence in our world today as a direct consequence of communication. (That the relationships between people is indeed structured according to power-over doesn’t change that).
What this means for anarchy is that if we are not going to have a structure of power over other people, we nevertheless need to have a structure of communication of SOME SORT. Nine neighbors can run a neighborhood yard sale without anyone being “in charge” or any structure to speak of, but nine hundred skilled workers, even if they ARE devoutly enthused about anarchy and really love doing their part, aren’t going to design and assemble this year’s new and improved DVD players and distribute them to the people of the world who want DVD players without a structure.
So the bottom line is: think about how you would structure communication other than by putting some people in charge with authority over other people.
(My own notion for startoff structure is a hierarchy of meeting SIZES, an associated hierarchy of how often a given meeting OCCURS, and a hierarchy of how permanent a consensus decision is and some kind of structured process for modifying or revoking a decision, deliberately taking longer to do so the more officially “permanent” a decision is).
If I were funding an “anarchy experiment” I’d want to try out several dozen “startoff structures” and let them modify themselves according to their own startoff rules, with an initial agreement to avoid modifications that reinstate power-over but other than that to use anarchic structures to come up with better anarchic structures etc.
Near my place there is a tiny river canyon where very thin lawyers of slate drap down in a curtain, with the water seeping through it sprakling with the colours of the rainbow.
I’ll be damned if I’ll let some anarchists cook it up and eat it.
AHunter3, you’re simply setting out one approach to Organizational Behavior 101 from first year commerce. Nothing new there.
Sorry, but I think you’re wrong if you think that it is the boss’s orders that make people build DVD players. It is not because of the power of the boss but because the boss pays them money for shitty jobs.
I can understand that it would be enough reward in and of itself to build Jim over there a new barn. Half the village joins in and afterward we eat soup for which we all brought the ingredients.
Lovely.
But I would not start making 40.000 tiny pieces of plastic with a little hole in them for someone in Reijkavik who is going to assemble them, together with tons of stuff other people made, into DVD players.
You would never get that off the ground.
I can see people still don’t grasp what a post-scarcity society would be like. No-one’s going to be working on any assembly lines.
But it’s the authority of the US Government and the power of its officials to arrest you if you start printing your OWN US currency that makes the concept of “paying them money” a viable concept. No power-over, no money system. (Or if there is, it’s indistinguishable from barter, consisting not of US bank notes but of AHunter3 IOUs. Not the market economy as we know it at any rate).
I disagree with you about the willingness of people to do work that benefits folks other than folks they know personally. Especially if you free up their time so that they have no need to work for whoever will employ them in order to amass currency, but there’s a generalized social expectation that you will want to do things so as to carry your own weight etc.
It’s like trying to explain the possibility of elected representatives and universal egalitarian suffrage to a time traveller from the 12th century. Or even to some of the founders of the United States from a mere 2+ centuries ago.
“What? You’d let everyone vote on who gets to be in charge? And they can put ANYONE in charge, basically? Yeah, like that’s gonna work. First election out the door, the lazy and the poor and the criminal class and the uneducated will elect one of their own who will set loose mobs who will immediately ransack the coffers and turn landowners off their land so they can come stomping in with their pitchforks and pee on the carpets and steal all the gold and silver and then torch the place. No one will work because they’ll all be drunk on gin and raping noblewomen and nuns and roasting all the livestock right in the middle of the town square. Then next winter everyone will starve”.
“But…!?? These underclass folks would no longer have any reason to behave that way, they would be voting citizens and it would be in their best interests instead to change the laws so that everyone has to work but everyone has an equal opportunity to own a mansion or at least a nice town house. There will be no reason to steal the silver candlesticks because after awhile anyone who wants a silver candlestick will be able to buy one”
“Yeah right. If everyone had a town house, who would buttle? Who would be a serving maid? Who would muck out the stables?”
“Maybe some roles and tasks would not be done quite the way they are done within the feudal division of labor but if there is work that needs doing, a person will be found who will do it as soon as you raise the wages high enough to make it appealing to take such a job”
Not that it’s unique to matters of economy and politics. It’s a broad-scale imagination problem: most people have difficulty imagining a full-scale modality change; they tend to try to imagine ONE THING changing while assuming everything else stays the same. Tell our 12th (or 18th) century time traveller that 8 million people will be occupying the city of New York some day and they’d say “Impossible! Just imagine the depth of the horse droppings in the street!” You explain automobiles. “Impossible! They’d scare all the horses!” You re-explain automobiles. They say “Impossible! Look at the math! No way you could pack in people at such a density!” You explain skyscrapers. “Impossible! Who could climb such stairs?” Elevators. Electricity. “Impossible. People would need to leave this Super New York you’re describing to go to Boston some time and THEN they’d need horses”. You explain that the horselessness of transporation and the existence of highways and cars is universal, not local to New York. “And how do you get this ‘gasoline’ for all of them? You’d need horses to haul the gasoline barrels!” You explain that gasoline powered vehicles haul the gasoline. “Yeah and any time the gasoline runs out you can’t deliver any more gasoline because there’s no gasoline!” It’s all just impossible. Sorry, never gonna happen. All those horse-loving high roller society folks would never surrender their coach-and-fours anyway.
What’s impossible is for them to wrap their minds around a complex matrix of interwoven changes and see how the entire constellation of those fits together.
Such a society would be so radically different from our current one that it would be difficult to discuss here.
Actually you are free to print your own money (ie promotional programs by various stores and whatnot) or issue IOUs. The problem is that are generally not universally accepted as a medium of exchange.
In any event, it would be very difficult to have any sort of economy in an anarchist system because there would be no courts or other mechanisms for settling disputes. For example, what if I decide not to perform the work once I have received payment?
Back to the magical replicator (not to mention scarcity of non-physical things, such as skills.)
Look, replicators are at least an admission that our technology and economy would have to change radically before something like what most anarchists would call anarchy would work. And of course, given replicators, our ideas about how the economy has to be run would be out the window.
But AHunter’s assertion that in the future we’ll have everything worked out, but that our 21st century minds are too primitive to understand, is kind of annoying.
We know our modern liberal capitalist democracies work because we live here, and they turn out to work. We can’t just assert that a strictly anarchic social order will work better, because, well, it hasn’t been shown to work better.
The objections to liberal democracy were shown to be specious because liberal democracies eventually triumphed over several alternative models, as the bloody history of the 19th and 20th centuries show. Liberal democracy was challenged by feudalism, by communism, by fascism, and so on. And it turns out that people prefer to live in liberal democratic states rather than under tyranny. But lots of people in the 1930s were convinced that liberal democracy was a passing fad, and the future belonged to one form of authoritarian system or another.
All our theories about why liberal democracy works are ad hoc attempts. We know it works, but our ideas about why and how it works are tentative. And all sorts of people have tried to theorize about why it won’t work, and why other systems of organization are superior. And the reason we don’t immediately jump on the anarchism bandwagon is that all the other 999 people who complained about why liberal democracy is so terrible have been proven disastrously wrong, so why should we expect the 1000th critic to be right?