Five

I agree and I'm aware it has negative connotations -- it is inseparable from modern methods of administering power. Without records, how can you demonstrate you're distributing resources equitably? I recognize that my role as admin is basically an anarchist bureaucrat -- approving applications, responding to reports, writing reports on progress for the community each month; it's done digitally now, but it's the stuff that would otherwise be the paperwork for which bureaucracy was made famous.

Bureaucracy was invented in France during the reign of kings, in hopes that it might quell the frequent revolutionary uprisings. It used to be that the only way you could get a license to do anything was through an audience with the king, or access via one of his courtiers -- a role similar to modern lobbyists. This exclusivity of access meant the richest and most well connected were granted corporate charters, business licenses, or land titles, creating extremely stark class division between the bourgeoisie and even the petit bourgeoisie.

The role of bureaucracy (named after the drawers where they kept the mountains of paper this activity generated) was to 'democratize' distribution of licensing and grants to everyone based on meeting the same requirements and paying the same fees. It was popular enough to get grafted into the organs of the new republic once one of the uprisings hit the mark.

It was 'democratic' in the same sense that electoral 'democracy' is democratic - that is, it is closer to the ideal of freedom than autocratic rule. But citizens are still vulnerable to the whims of tyrannical bureaucrats. Even at the local level and at small scale, a bureaucrat can do a lot of damage if there isn't popular power prepared to resist him.

For example in Chennai, the Zero Rupee was invented to build popular power against a culture of compulsive bribery that is endemic to all levels of the state bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is a burden that's accepted because the alternative is clearly worse, like the French kings of old. But all bureaucracies are not the same, and merely making them smaller or 'distributed' does not solve the problems that can arise when they are not open to public challenge.

The primary purpose of distribution centers is to serve capital, and there are plenty of private libraries. In the case of a library or dispensary, a bureaucracy can definitely increase the equanimity of the distribution of wealth in a society, but that relies on both the bureaucrats and the public they are supposed to serve to be willing to fight for that ideal.

I think wider discussion of micro-bureaucracies would be valuable. During the November meta, a member requested some kind of vote on our descision to defederate nazi instances, which I think was adequately discussed and concluded. It stood out to me that the member objected to my description of voting in this manner as 'bureaucratic' -- a word I felt I was using descriptively, but was interpreted as pejorative. I think it's interesting that different people have different definitions of bureaucracy.

What is bureaucracy?

I'm glad you said something. I don't mind so much when pieces that are critical of solarpunk or a corruption of the aesthetic are occasionally posted here because it gives the community an opportunity to define itself against those representations. I tend to skip over them myself though. I think introspection and criticism are core to the Solarpunk ideal, and I'm glad this essay was a fresh carafe of that tea.

Monoculture is a terrible idea, even in a robotic vertical farm with sterilization. Decentralization is key, but brexit tyrants like Dyson will never share their automation technology or research with the public. Open source sharing is the only way to bring the price down to the point it can be decentralized.

Also, his vertical farm would not be profitable without his biodigesting power plant that gets free high-quality fuel from his non-vertical farm empire.

I wish this weren't newsworthy. Accolades to Scotland for recognizing that organized political speech against genocide does not the amount to murdering civilians to achieve political goals. What a low bar.

Where are the social anarchist economists?

This is an interesting question. It think it is actually two related questions.

• Where are the economists with social anarchist politics?
• Where are the experts on forms of economics associated with anarchist politics?

Academia has filters to exclude anarchists

I can't think of anyone I'd describe as an anarchist economist off the top of my head, but all of the great anarchists have dabbled in it, and had interesting things to say about it. Mutual Aid by Kropotkin, for example, is a combined work of zoology, anthropology, political theory, morality, and economics. Anarchists aren't known to respect artificial borders between states, nor should they be expected to respect the artificial categorization of knowledge into distinct and separate fields of study. Academic economists prefer to isolate their study from the world of politics. Instead, they launder their politics through the allowable questions they ask, the conclusions that pass the filters of publication, and the underlying assumptions of their schools, such as which activities qualify as productive economic activity. There is no such thing as apolitical economics, despite the lie that economics and politics are separate fields. Academic economists turn up their noses at 'ideologically motivated' economic works, but ignore that academic economics is a peculiar subset of ideologically motivated economics.

If you don't accept the lies, you are unlikely to go far in a university economics department, and if you accept the lies, you are unlikely to be an anarchist. This is aside from all of the other social and economic barriers that filter anarchists from hierarchical institutions of learning and the academic credential economy. This may be one reason why the answer to the first question is "I don't know."

Economics is irrelevant to (most) anarchists

Economics is strange among the social sciences. It has many schools, and the writing of those schools are the religious texts for factions of bureaucrats that control the monetary levers of government. David Graeber writes in Against Economics,

There is a growing feeling, among those who have the responsibility of managing large economies, that the discipline of economics is no longer fit for purpose. It is beginning to look like a science designed to solve problems that no longer exist.

The world has changed significantly since the time the theories and priorities of respected economists were relevant. I think there's a significant and well-founded undercurrent among anarchists to reject the entire field as irrelevant. I don't entirely agree. Nassim Taleb teaches in The Black Swan how revolutionary change can be not easily predictable despite it being inevitable. His statistical arguments are tailored for markets, but could just as easily be applied to forms of social organization. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, psychologists who've won the highest prize in economics for their work on the limits of human rationality, have a lot to say about buying preferences, but even more to offer those looking to loosen the bounds of biases and prejudices that restrict our individual possibilities. To the extent that economics is a combination of applied statistics and human psychology, it will always be relevant.

In The Cathedral and the Bazaar, an early philosopher of the free software movement describes early iterations of open source software development (and through inference corporate closed-source software mega-project development) as building a cathedral - requiring extensive planning, blueprints, management and coordination. He compares the development style of Linux (and the software projects inspired by it) to development of a bazaar - a structure that is built horizontally, but is no less complex, coherent, and stable than the structure of the cathedral.

When this metaphor is applied to the economies of states, economics is the science of building cathedral blueprints; while bazaars do have generative rules, they bear little resemblance to the precisely measured stone templates for cathedrals. Perhaps the applied science that would increase the efficiency of markets of labor or status or kindness, or whatever it is that an anarchist society uses to distribute resources, bears so little resemblance to modern economics to render it inapplicable, irrelevant.

The religious texts that economists use to manage the cathedral-like state economy has just as much relevance as blueprints for buttresses and great domes do to the participants of a communal participatory market. So perhaps another reason I'm not familiar with any anarchist economists is that what is widely categorized as economics is not relevant to the daily practice of anarchists, or the structure of the societies they hope to build.

Anarchism is irrelevant to (most) economists

The 0th law of economics is that scarcity exists, and distribution of scarce goods must be managed or society will experience crisis. Without this fundamental assumption, economics loses not only its mooring, but also its importance as a field of study. Gift cultures are not speculative fiction or utopian dreams.

Gift cultures are adaptations not to scarcity but to abundance. They arise in populations that do not have significant material-scarcity problems with survival goods. We can observe gift cultures in action among aboriginal cultures living in ecozones with mild climates and abundant food. We can also observe them in certain strata of our own society, especially in show business and among the very wealthy.

Abundance makes command relationships difficult to sustain and exchange relationships an almost pointless game. In gift cultures, social status is determined not by what you control but by what you give away.

Thus the Kwakiutl chieftain's potlach party. Thus the multi-millionaire's elaborate and usually public acts of philanthropy. And thus the hacker's long hours of effort to produce high-quality open-source code.

(From Homesteading the Noosphere also by ESR)

Gift economies exist now and the entire platform of free software our modern world is built on (and happens to be running this site) are a direct result of their existence. Despite adding a reported 9 trillion dollars to the world's economy, it does not seem to be a subject of interest to mainstream economists. One would think an 'unideological' field like economics would not suffer such a glaring blind-spot.

This should re-enforce the point I made earlier about academic filters, but is also an answer to the second question. Experts usually exist due to demand for their expertise and financial support for their specialization. When neither exists in academia, their numbers are few. Capitalism thrives on crisis and scarcity, there will always be an abundance of resources when it comes to the study of scarcity and capitalist economy. Under capitalism, there will always be a scarcity of resources for the study of abundance and anti-capitalist economics.

Anarchism defies capitalist limitations

Despite these factors, anarchist economists exist. None of this should discourage you from following that field of study if you desire. Learning the rules of a game are a prerequisite for breaking them well. The ability to use the tools and language of economists to talk about anarchist economies can spread anarchist ideas to previously insulated audiences, and the mathematics and methods of economics are not useless in a post-capitalist world. But by the same token, having a surfeit of experts is not a prerequisite for an economic transition. Experts arise from experience, and if a large-scale transition between forms of economy is organic, gradual, and transparent, there will be plenty of opportunities to learn from mistakes, develop best practices, experiment, and improve.

I appreciate you, @alsaaas@lemmy.dbzer0.com, but I don't appreciate this energy. The 'bread' in Breadtube is related to Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread -- a seminal anarchist work. It doesn't deserve to be quoted when referring to actual anarchists. Calling people who dedicate a lot of energy to producing educational videos 'terminally online' is demeaning, and thowing stones from glass houses considering how active we both are on Lemmy.

This is not a 'debate an anarchist' or Anarchy101 community, and I'm not eager to pivot in that direction either. I think those kind of communities have value tho, and I'm disappointed your !AnarchismVsMarxism community hasn't taken off.

If you're coming from Marxism, your reference for anarchism's position is probably "On Authority" by Engels. A good response to that rhetoric is probably JudgeSabo's Read On Authority, I've posted it in your com.

I'm going to lock this thread, but anyone who wants to meet Alsaaas where she is I suggest you post similar texts for discussion there too.

Not that it matters, because I didn’t make a whataboutist argument in the first place.

I agree that you didn't make an argument.

That's some really low-effort whataboutism.

The tactic is an old favorite of the Soviet Union, and Marxists/the far left in general; the strategy was originally used in the form of "And at your place, they hang black people." The term 'whataboutery' itself, however, only dates back to 1974 with its use in The Troubles in Northern Ireland, whereas the term 'whataboutism' dates back to 1978 with reference to the Soviet Union.

In recent years, whataboutism made a comeback in Russia under Vladimir Putin's regime (since they seemingly learned all the wrong lessons from the Cold War), and has also seen a rise in usage by Donald Trump, his support base, and the rest of the far-right.