this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2024
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Anarchism and Social Ecology

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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.

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Partial Common Ownership: A New Model for Ownership - A new alternative to capitalist private property that addresses scarcity in the small

Partial Common Ownership (PCO) is a flexible template for reconfiguring property relations, which has inspired many of us at RadicalxChange because it opens the door to a different kind of conversation about capitalism.

https://www.radicalxchange.org/media/blog/pco-a-new-model-of-ownership/

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

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