People who use their own tools and own their own product (EG artisans in Marx’s time) are members of the Petite Bourgeoisie. I think a Marxist analysis of the class dynamics would be fruitful here, but it’s beyond me.
Please don’t. Marxists, at least Marxist-Leninists, tend to start talking increasing amounts of nonsense once the Petite Bourgeoisie and Lumpen get involved.
In any case the whole thing is (as Marx would tell you, but Marxist ignore) a function of one’s societal relations, not of the individual person, or job. That relation might change from hour to hour (e.g. if you have a dayjob), and “does not have an employment contract” doesn’t imply “does not depend on capital for survival” – it’s perfectly possible as an artist, or pipe fitter, to own your own means of production (computer, metal tongs) and be, as a contractor, in a very similar relationship to capital as the Lumpen day-labourer: To have no say in the greater work that gets created, to be told “do this, or starve”, to be treated as an easily replaceable cog. That may even be the case if you have employees of your own. The question is, and that’s why Anarchist analysis >>> Marxist analysis, is whether you’re beholden to an unjust hierarchy, in this case, that created by capital ownership, not whether you happen to own a screw driver. As e.g. a farmer you might own millions upon millions in means of production, doesn’t mean that supermarket chains aren’t squeezing your bones dry and you can barely afford your utility bills. Capitalism is unjust hierarchy all the way up and down.
Well, you can’t remove an image from a trained AI model. It’s not in there (if everything has worked). So what now? If that means that the model becomes illegal, then you just can’t have a model trained on such a database.
I also can’t possibly unhear this, doesn’t mean that my mind or any music I might compose is illegal. If it is overfitted in my mind and I want to compose music and publish that then I’ll have to pay attention that my stuff is sufficiently different, have to run an adversarial model against myself, so to speak, if I don’t want to end up having to pay royalties. If I just want to have it bouncing around my head and sing it in the shower then I might be singing copyrighted material, but there’s no obligation for me to pay royalties either as many aspects of copyright necessitate things such as publishing or ability to damage the original author’s income.
Well, Marx believed that the Petite Bourgeoisie would disappear. Their members, unable to economically compete, would become employed workers. Hasn’t happened, though. He also observed that this class emulated the outlook of the Haute Bourgeoisie, the rich. IDK more about that. I find it interesting how vocally in favor of right-wing economic policies some artists are, even though these policies massively favor the rich. The phrase temporarily embarrassed millionaire comes to mind. I’m curious about that, is all.
I like how empathic your anarchist take is but I’m not really sure what to do with it.
The economics are an unworkable mess but I don’t mind having sent him some ad money. Do have anything on how an advanced economy with a high degree of specialization could coordinate production and logistics?
There’s different ideas, roughly distinguished between market and council-based, with less and more central planning. The CNT in Spain had a quite market-based approach, for example, but OTOH you see council-type structures even in today’s capitalism: The development of lithography technology and machines for that, for example, quickly hit a brick wall, none of the (gigantic) companies working on it were actually large enough to do it so they started cooperating. The label on the machine might say “ASML” but really they’re only a systems integrator: They’ve worked with a multitude of other companies to develop and build exactly the stuff that will be necessary, there’s no competition between say Corning and Zeiss who’s going to make a particular lens or such: They’ve agreed, together, to build a certain technology, divided up the work according to their specialities – including “make money with the machine”, that’s TSMC’s area of expertise. Roughly speaking: The less commodified a particular erm commodity is the more likely it’s not actually directly bound by market forces, even in our current economy you get these islands of horizontal cooperation within the larger shark tank. You’ll pay money for those machines but money alone might not buy you one, you might need to be part of a syndicate.
But I agree with you (or I think that’s your implication) that pure mutualism will not work for these kinds of “put a man on the moon” projects, it’s not structured enough and without structure no planning (centralised or decentralised). And frankly speaking the theory around this topic is kinda lacking, first off because much of the theory about it is old, where “big industry” meant “a steel mill”, secondly because Anarchism has ceased to plan ahead details: We don’t have the necessary knowledge and information to pre-empt the decisions of people down the line, and we shouldn’t attempt to, either. They will organise those projects as they see fit in some democratic manner, what’s up to us is to grow democracy within the economy to a degree where more and more economic actors jump on the ship, as well as develop abstract frameworks, a body of ideas and approaches in line with Anarchist principles, that they can pick and choose from as they like and circumstances dictate, and develop further. And most of all we need to kill off hierarchical realism, that is, the idea that nothing ever works without an imposed hierarchy even though everyone sees it working all the time when friends get together to have a grill party. Are there scaling issues, sure… but hierarchies have scaling issues, too, even insurmountable ones (mostly around information processing complexity and perverse incentives) and we don’t discount them on that basis. There’s a strong cultural bias and blind-spot, there.
In a nutshell, it’s the old leftist problem: We know exactly what’s wrong and also know how things ought to look like to be better, but details, man, details. In the end, in practice, there’s no perfect, there’s only less bad.
Thanks for the long reply. I also took the time to read the wp on mutualism. Proudhon has been on my reading list forever because of his great quotes, but other things were always more relevant.
But I agree with you (or I think that’s your implication) that pure mutualism will not work for these kinds of “put a man on the moon” projects,
I would never judge a school of ideas based on a few minutes of youtube. But I admit, I was thinking it and I would not have been motivated to spend more time on it without your reply.
I’m not concerned about stuff like putting a man on the moon. I’m thinking about feeding 8 billion (and rising) people, most of them living in cities. This takes an uninterrupted stream of food and water from strangers to strangers. As it goes today, you need fuel and spare parts, replacement machines. To grow the food you probably need fertilizer, maybe pesticides and so on (I’m not knowledgeable on agriculture).
We do this through markets. This decentralized method seems superior to central planning. Obviously, we can do very well without overt hierarchies. As we know, behind most markets is a government enforcing laws and possible intervening to impose fixes for perceived problems.
You may lose your farm if you don’t make enough money to pay the bills. This can be framed as simply circumstance; predefined rules operate without any individual decision and thus without hierarchy. Or one may point to the individuals involved who still make the choices to enforce contracts or laws in the specific case.
If the farm passes to someone who makes more money with it, then that hopefully means that it is better at meeting the needs of other people. We don’t need to discuss the flaws in the market system, but a system should have a way of ensuring that the meets of other people elsewhere - of strangers - are met. Scarce resources need to be put to a use that meets the needs of the many.
I have to think of crowd crush disasters. No one in such a crowd does anything very bad. They may even try to help other people if they can. They do the best they can with the information they have. But when 100s or 1000s of people are all pushing just a little, then the guys at the front get squished by the collective force.
Please don’t. Marxists, at least Marxist-Leninists, tend to start talking increasing amounts of nonsense once the Petite Bourgeoisie and Lumpen get involved.
In any case the whole thing is (as Marx would tell you, but Marxist ignore) a function of one’s societal relations, not of the individual person, or job. That relation might change from hour to hour (e.g. if you have a dayjob), and “does not have an employment contract” doesn’t imply “does not depend on capital for survival” – it’s perfectly possible as an artist, or pipe fitter, to own your own means of production (computer, metal tongs) and be, as a contractor, in a very similar relationship to capital as the Lumpen day-labourer: To have no say in the greater work that gets created, to be told “do this, or starve”, to be treated as an easily replaceable cog. That may even be the case if you have employees of your own. The question is, and that’s why Anarchist analysis >>> Marxist analysis, is whether you’re beholden to an unjust hierarchy, in this case, that created by capital ownership, not whether you happen to own a screw driver. As e.g. a farmer you might own millions upon millions in means of production, doesn’t mean that supermarket chains aren’t squeezing your bones dry and you can barely afford your utility bills. Capitalism is unjust hierarchy all the way up and down.
I also can’t possibly unhear this, doesn’t mean that my mind or any music I might compose is illegal. If it is overfitted in my mind and I want to compose music and publish that then I’ll have to pay attention that my stuff is sufficiently different, have to run an adversarial model against myself, so to speak, if I don’t want to end up having to pay royalties. If I just want to have it bouncing around my head and sing it in the shower then I might be singing copyrighted material, but there’s no obligation for me to pay royalties either as many aspects of copyright necessitate things such as publishing or ability to damage the original author’s income.
Well, Marx believed that the Petite Bourgeoisie would disappear. Their members, unable to economically compete, would become employed workers. Hasn’t happened, though. He also observed that this class emulated the outlook of the Haute Bourgeoisie, the rich. IDK more about that. I find it interesting how vocally in favor of right-wing economic policies some artists are, even though these policies massively favor the rich. The phrase temporarily embarrassed millionaire comes to mind. I’m curious about that, is all.
I like how empathic your anarchist take is but I’m not really sure what to do with it.
That might be because I didn’t give a single bit of advise regarding praxis :)
I’ll just leave a link to one of Anark’s videos here, though the overall tl;dr of everything is “build the new in the shell of the old without fucking up”.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
I’ll just leave a link to one of Anark’s videos here
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
The economics are an unworkable mess but I don’t mind having sent him some ad money. Do have anything on how an advanced economy with a high degree of specialization could coordinate production and logistics?
There’s different ideas, roughly distinguished between market and council-based, with less and more central planning. The CNT in Spain had a quite market-based approach, for example, but OTOH you see council-type structures even in today’s capitalism: The development of lithography technology and machines for that, for example, quickly hit a brick wall, none of the (gigantic) companies working on it were actually large enough to do it so they started cooperating. The label on the machine might say “ASML” but really they’re only a systems integrator: They’ve worked with a multitude of other companies to develop and build exactly the stuff that will be necessary, there’s no competition between say Corning and Zeiss who’s going to make a particular lens or such: They’ve agreed, together, to build a certain technology, divided up the work according to their specialities – including “make money with the machine”, that’s TSMC’s area of expertise. Roughly speaking: The less commodified a particular erm commodity is the more likely it’s not actually directly bound by market forces, even in our current economy you get these islands of horizontal cooperation within the larger shark tank. You’ll pay money for those machines but money alone might not buy you one, you might need to be part of a syndicate.
But I agree with you (or I think that’s your implication) that pure mutualism will not work for these kinds of “put a man on the moon” projects, it’s not structured enough and without structure no planning (centralised or decentralised). And frankly speaking the theory around this topic is kinda lacking, first off because much of the theory about it is old, where “big industry” meant “a steel mill”, secondly because Anarchism has ceased to plan ahead details: We don’t have the necessary knowledge and information to pre-empt the decisions of people down the line, and we shouldn’t attempt to, either. They will organise those projects as they see fit in some democratic manner, what’s up to us is to grow democracy within the economy to a degree where more and more economic actors jump on the ship, as well as develop abstract frameworks, a body of ideas and approaches in line with Anarchist principles, that they can pick and choose from as they like and circumstances dictate, and develop further. And most of all we need to kill off hierarchical realism, that is, the idea that nothing ever works without an imposed hierarchy even though everyone sees it working all the time when friends get together to have a grill party. Are there scaling issues, sure… but hierarchies have scaling issues, too, even insurmountable ones (mostly around information processing complexity and perverse incentives) and we don’t discount them on that basis. There’s a strong cultural bias and blind-spot, there.
In a nutshell, it’s the old leftist problem: We know exactly what’s wrong and also know how things ought to look like to be better, but details, man, details. In the end, in practice, there’s no perfect, there’s only less bad.
Thanks for the long reply. I also took the time to read the wp on mutualism. Proudhon has been on my reading list forever because of his great quotes, but other things were always more relevant.
What you’re describing about industry sounds perhasp like joint-ventures? It also sounds a lot like a cartel. Zeiss, along with other lens makers, was fined in 2010 by german antitrust enforcement because they had conspired to overcharge consumers.
I would never judge a school of ideas based on a few minutes of youtube. But I admit, I was thinking it and I would not have been motivated to spend more time on it without your reply.
I’m not concerned about stuff like putting a man on the moon. I’m thinking about feeding 8 billion (and rising) people, most of them living in cities. This takes an uninterrupted stream of food and water from strangers to strangers. As it goes today, you need fuel and spare parts, replacement machines. To grow the food you probably need fertilizer, maybe pesticides and so on (I’m not knowledgeable on agriculture).
We do this through markets. This decentralized method seems superior to central planning. Obviously, we can do very well without overt hierarchies. As we know, behind most markets is a government enforcing laws and possible intervening to impose fixes for perceived problems.
You may lose your farm if you don’t make enough money to pay the bills. This can be framed as simply circumstance; predefined rules operate without any individual decision and thus without hierarchy. Or one may point to the individuals involved who still make the choices to enforce contracts or laws in the specific case.
If the farm passes to someone who makes more money with it, then that hopefully means that it is better at meeting the needs of other people. We don’t need to discuss the flaws in the market system, but a system should have a way of ensuring that the meets of other people elsewhere - of strangers - are met. Scarce resources need to be put to a use that meets the needs of the many.
I have to think of crowd crush disasters. No one in such a crowd does anything very bad. They may even try to help other people if they can. They do the best they can with the information they have. But when 100s or 1000s of people are all pushing just a little, then the guys at the front get squished by the collective force.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
this
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.