Anarchism and Social Ecology
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A community about anarchy. anarchism, social ecology, and communalism for SLRPNK! Solarpunk anarchists unite!
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Anarchism
Anarchism is a social and political theory and practice that works for a free society without domination and hierarchy.
Social Ecology
Social Ecology, developed from green anarchism, is the idea that our ecological problems have their ultimate roots in our social problems. This is because the domination of nature and our ecology by humanity has its ultimate roots in the domination humanity by humans. Therefore, the solutions to our ecological problems are found by addressing our social and ecological problems simultaneously.
Libraries
Audiobooks
- General audiobooks
- LibriVox Public domain book collection where you can find audiobooks from old communist, socialist, and anarchist authors.
- Anarchist audiobooks
- Socialist Audiobooks
- Social Ecology Audiobooks
Quotes
Poetry and imagination must be integrated with science and technology, for we have evolved beyond an innocence that can be nourished exclusively by myths and dreams.
~ Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom
People want to treat ‘we’ll figure it out by working to get there’ as some sort of rhetorical evasion instead of being a fundamental expression of trust in the power of conscious collective effort.
~Anonymous, but quoted by Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us
The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
~Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.
~Murray Bookchin, "A Politics for the Twenty-First Century"
There can be no separation of the revolutionary process from the revolutionary goal. A society based on self-administration must be achieved by means of self-administration.
~Murray Bookchin, Post Scarcity Anarchism
In modern times humans have become a wolf not only to humans, but to all nature.
The ecological question is fundamentally solved as the system is repressed and a socialist social system develops. That does not mean you cannot do something for the environment right away. On the contrary, it is necessary to combine the fight for the environment with the struggle for a general social revolution...
~Abdullah Öcalan
Social ecology advances a message that calls not only for a society free of hierarchy and hierarchical sensibilities, but for an ethics that places humanity in the natural world as an agent for rendering evolution social and natural fully self-conscious.
~ Murray Bookchin
Network
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No offense but this sounds more like anarcho-capitalism than anything else ( specifically because of the collecting fees in perpetuity part of residual rights and the idea that you might need an AI to set tax rates in a community. )
But other than that I don't trust a website that has a board member that is the founder of ethereum and is supported by the Rockefeller foundation to be a good guide to a society beyond capitalism.
Source: https://www.radicalxchange.org/about/
Edit: Also I've realized that I haven't really given an alternative so this is something more concrete
https://neilhacker.com/2021/03/25/governing-the-commons/
~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~
Ok I read the article you linked I agree it is a good article, but it isn't really saying that it is a full alternative to what is proposed in the article I linked. It specifically notes in the end that:
"She highlights how conventional models may be useful for predicting behaviour of large scale CPRs."
I was aware of Elinor Ostrom's work before. I'm definitely excited to do a deep dive into it.
The model described in the article I linked could be very useful in those cases @anarchism
I think part of the reason why she doesn't give specific solutions is because in her research she found that the solutions that the community used was dependent on the kinds of people in that community which made the solutions to diverse to just boil down to one thing.
Instead she came up with general principles that you could see show up consistently in all the solutions that were studied.
~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~
I guess that's fair for the situations where she says conventional models aren't useful.
We don't have to treat the described institutions in the article I linked as one-size fits all model, but rather as an example of solutions that make sense under a certain set of conditions for large-scale communities.
Glen Weyl is aware of Elinor Ostrom's work:
https://www.radicalxchange.org/media/blog/2019-01-14-j73qnz/
@anarchism
Also sorry for coming off a bit antagonistic. Didn't get much sleep.
~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~
It's all good. You sent me a great article that reignited my desire to a deep dive on Elinor Ostrom and raised good points
If you read their work, they emphasize that the residual rights should belong to a democratic community. The whole idea is to share wealth with communities that help generate it and collectivize property at the community level rather than capitalists owning it. The funds are for facilitating cooperation.
Ancaps are opposed to common ownership.
What does AI have to do with ancap.
Your statement is a genetic logical fallacy.
Describe why you disagree with the proposed structure
@anarchism
Ok, the core of my disagreement is that they are creating a system that needs money (or some form of currency) to function even though we already have techniques to solve those problems on the scale that they are describing them without it.
And ancaps are usually more individualist but some do believe in common property. To me what makes this anarcho-capitalist is that they are making the use of the space still dependent on capital and is impersonal which makes the system exploitative since the person that has the most funds gets to decide on how a space is used.
Edit: grammar
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As I mentioned in my other comment, there are situations that Ostrom acknowledges where conventional models make sense. We can just take the proposal to be addressing those sorts of larger-scale low interaction communities where agents are relatively autonomous
Your second objection is acknowledged in the article, and the authors actually address it in another article. A solution is not to use money, but rather non-trasnsferable vouchers
@anarchism
Ok maybe it I understood the article incorrectly then. I thought it was trying to setup an economic system within a community with a lot of strong ties already. In that situation I believe this system would be a detriment.
When dealing with inter-community ties I still believe that the system would need to be clarified a bit more to show how the currency wouldn't be unequally distributed. Even with non-transferable vouchers if the system of distributing them is a meritocracy then it would still lead to some community having an imbalance of power over others. But fundamentally I agree with the article that there is a problem with weak ties between communities and would need different solutions than would work inside of a community.
Edit: grammar
Edit2: Just realized you were the one that described it being able to be used between communities not the article. Brain is slow today.
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Yeah, we are using "community" differently. I agree that with strong ties this would be irrelevant. There are degrees of how coordinated actors can be. Capitalism misses that with its false dichotomy of total economic planning as in the firm, and full autonomous action as in the market. What we want is a gradient
The spectrum is:
pure market → large-scale communities with collective ownership using PCO → Ostrom-style CPR → firms
Here is the voucher stuff:
https://www.radicalxchange.org/media/blog/plural-money-socially-provided-goods-and-the-principal-agent-problem/
@anarchism
To be honest I am still having a bit of trouble understanding what a firm and a pure market is but either way I think the problem that occurs when you scale these interactions to larger communities are informational problems. You start to run into problems relating to Dunbar's number and how many meaningful relationships you can maintain. That is where elinor ostrom's method would need to be improved.
However I don't believe currency would actually help resolve it because it is too detached and doesn't provide enough information to actually build meaningful relationships between communities and people therefore would still have to deal with the tendency for people to dehumanize/exploit processes that can be turned into numbers.
An alternative that I think was shown (but I'm not sure because I haven't read the second book) was something from the Monk and Robot series which is a nice solarpunk book that I recently got into. There were instances when a traveling tea monk (therapist with tea) went to a few different communities and "bought" a lot of herbs for their teas and "sold" their services as a tea monk by tapping their phones (which they called something like a box computer or whatever) together.
The thing is that it was never explicitly stated that it that they were exchanging money so I interpreted it as it just being an activity log between the people that are doing the exchange so that if you were doing business with them again you would have a pseudo-memory of your relationship so you can make the decision of whether or not it is worth interacting with them or not.
I liked that solution because it actually is tackling the root of the problem (not being able to build trust with limited memory) and doesn't have the exploitative nature of regular currency being roped in at all.
~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~
A worker coop is a firm. A pure market is trade between people that have no direct social ties prior.
Weyl's mechanisms become relevant in larger communities where Elinor Ostrom's method doesn't work as well. Currencies can be community oriented by having build in fees that go into the community fund that scale with social distance. They can emphasize a logic of commitment
Capitalism emphasizes the logic of exit to the exclusion of the logic of commitment. This is dehumanizing