And what happens when a bubble bursts? Did the internet die when the dotcom bubble burst, or is that just when it really started to get going?
I share most of your sentiments against AI, but a bubble popping won’t make it go away, and it won’t even rectify it to be more to people’s likings (i doubt it). It takes more than just waiting around to accomplish that.
When workers are exhausted and strapped for time they become politically inert and easier to predict/control (because they are fucking tired).
I would also add: Engineered financial struggle also gives the illusion of instability, lowering the average will to take a revolutionary risk. And of course, besides the stability/crowd control aspect, people also just work harder for mainly other people’s riches.
As a concrete example of the “life is hard, we’re practically always on the brink of collapse”-lie: There was major hysteria in Germany about the apocalypse that would totally ensue if Russian gas imports were suspended. That continued on until the gas pipelines were literally blown up (thanks, to whoever that was), and gas imports ceased for different reasons anyways.
Nothing came of it. Minor dents here and there, which were quickly hammered out. The rich so blinded by numbers, that’s what they stirred all the drama and made all the fuss about, manipulating the entire nation and its gullible/corruptible politicians. Germany didn’t turn of Russian gas voluntarily, that decision had to be made for Germany by others, and it’s embarassing.
I wouldn’t say this (mass manipulation and oppression) is even a conspiracy theory. The main reason i just switched platforms to lemmy, and likewise for other social media apps, is algorithmic control/censorship. Algorithmic cursing of anything that is political, deemed “inciting”, or even just “negative” as an AI would define it. “Advertizability” is an easy excuse for censorship. Remember the web chaos in the 2010s? People were raising massive, nationwide protests over copyright minutia. We don’t have that anymore, even though now we’ve got much better reasons to protest. I digress - my point is that even our western nations aren’t strangers to mass manipulation and oppression, at all.
I agree i might have been a bit presumptuous.
I think an interesting read might be the section I.3 What could the economic structure of anarchy look like?
That is precisely what i was hoping to find, thank you.
Maybe you could explain why you would prefer to use that instead of ideals like “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs” or “well-being for all”.
I don’t personally favor the ideal i stated, i just stated that it is reasonable, presuming it to be the default for most people, and so i put it into the premises to generify this discussion. It also provides a compatibilistic default, more on that in 3.
I did not mention it here, but from unrelated but intertwined radical environmentalist ideals, i see almost all forms of labor, beyond what basic necessities (housing, food, education, healthcare) require, as evils in and of themselves. Excess labor should either not be performed or obligatorily used to compensate deficits elsewhere (=> donations, welfare, community funding, science, etc). Aka non-profit for all. Just to advertize the idea, I would also invite you to look into how AT&T burned their excess when they were regulatorily obliged to - Bell Labs was born, and the 21st century was invented.
To elaborate on what i stated in 1, chosing the most challenging/constraining (to the end of providing welfare for all, which i kind of implied with “converting labor and resources into improving everybody’s quality of life”) ideal would yield us a model that is most robust, and more agnostic to more specialized ideals (eg what i stated in 2), which can still be implemented afterwards.
Rents and work hours are crazy. The former is a reflection of the fact that a free economy is not always self-regulating. I don’t deny self-regulation universally, but i recognize that certain conditions must be met for it to actually go into effect: Competition, optionality (of the product/service), consumption (the product is removed upon consumption, or expires in some other way), possibly others. Housing fails to meet all three of these basic conditions. Local monopolies, housing is not optional, and houses don’t get consumed.
And IRL this manifests as periodic housing shitshows. This isn’t the first, and this won’t be last, not unless this problem is solved.
As for work-hours, correct me if i’m wrong, but AFAIK our hunter-gatherer ancestors worked an average of 4 hours a day. And these estimates are based on hunter-gatherer communities that still exist, which are also playing a much harder game (small game in remote regions, such as islands and deep in rainforests) than most our ancestors did (large game in the open grasslands, our “natural habitat”). You’d think that in the modern world, and with our modern technologies, we’d have to work less, not more. Something in the system is broken.
That you for those recommendations.
but it’s also about creating a culture rooted in cooperation
In my opinion, anarchist projects only truly thrive when there’s a strong cooperative culture in place first.
I fully agree with you. That is one of the main problems in my own attempts to conceptualize an anarchist and intelligently labor/resource-allocating economy. When there is no tangible reward for investment, what motivates people to invest into local or shared projects? It should be a shared will to improve e.g. the standards of living of the community - whichever level of community (neighborhood, village, township, state, etc) is under consideration.
It should be obvious and expected, if we take a step back to consider what anarchism is generally about. Not all administration is optional, and in the absence of any some will emerge naturally in suboptiomal ways. Abolished centralized authority needs to replaced, it cannot just be removed, and the replacement favored by anarchists is voluntary cooperation and good will. But humans aren’t saints, and the hard compromize to be made is in deciding what needs to be centralized and delegated (and how, and to whom).
And in the economy, it feels like every major attempt (to try something new) made by anybody so far has been a failure in at least some major way, including capitalism and communism.
There’s real work to be done.
I agree, and it’s challenging to even theorize. It seems easier on the purely administrative end, and serious proposals have existed for a long time. The real challenge seems to be the economy, which is (or can be, as in the quasi-aristrocracy (if not political, then still in the control of resources and labor) that we live in) a quasi-administration.
Yes, and not only Ukraine. I would like to draw attention also to the Soviets’ efforts to erode, or outright kill, Siberian native populations, which happened in the same political context as the Soviet Union’s genocide against Ukrainians.
To name only one example, which here on wikipedia is misrepresened:
The Buryats rebelled against the communist rule and collectivization of their herds in 1929. The rebellion was quickly crushed by the Red Army with loss of 35,000 Buryats.
The misrepresenation is in wording it as “crushing a rebellion.” There lived around 215k Buryats in Buryatia at the time. 35k, the number reportedly killed when “crushing a (‘nationalist’) rebellion,” is 16.3% of all Buryats in Buryatia at the time.
Later
Fearing Buryat nationalism, Joseph Stalin had more than 10,000 Buryats killed.
Another 5%. Up to over 20% Killing one fifth of a peoples isn’t “crowd control,” it’s genocide.
This is only one peoples of many that the soviets attempted (or succeded) to eradicate. And i’m not even touching on planned famines, dispersion, or using natives as cannon-fodder in wars. This is ongoing even in modern Russia - native Siberian peoples are overrepresented in the invasion forces in Ukraine:
In the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine since 2022, the Buryats have been reported as one of Russia’s ethnic minority groups suffering from a disproportionally large casualty rate among Russian forces, reinforcing the processes of assimilation and Russification.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buryats#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buryatia#Ethnic_groups
Again, just a single example of many. And not just Siberia, but no non-Rus peoples in or near Russia is spared from this. It’d be worth several dissertations to go into any detail on all sides of the Soviets’ (and now Russia’s) colonization and rusification efforts. Of course, i recognize that the West also has very many bodies in its basements, and i don’t mean to distract from that, don’t get me wrong - it’s just that Russia’s crimes are much less often talked about, i feel particularly emotionally invested, and Russia (formerly Soviet Russia) is routinely representing itself as oh so anti-nationalist or anti-nazi, even as some of the same policies are ongoing in 2025.
I didn’t see this before i posted an adjacent discussion. As somebody else already mentioned, there’s the concept of worker cooperatives which is similar to what you are writing.
To prevent the usual overexploitation and degeneracy, i believe a worker cooperative would also need to be non-profit. And there’s of course the issue of how to decide/regulate management salaries, especially if non-profit.
AFAIK (correct if i’m wrong), non-profit coops have a better track record at keeping companies afloat for a longer time, since they care more about stable employment, and obviously don’t consider “sell shares, and abandon the sinking ship” to be a viable strategy.
With strong enough regulation one wouldn’t need the additional incentive “to do a better job” (as a manager/chief) from owning a significant portion of sales (which as previously stated isn’t even such a strong incentive long-term). I believe most people, if competent enough, would try to do a good job. And for the rest, regulation such as anti-misconduct laws and punishments, ensuring qualifications and etc, but that leads into the obvious question of where and how such regulations should be decided upon and enforced.
I would say i find that very optimistic, but that is clearly also your point:
It’s both inspiring but also disillusioning. It does seem like something impossible.
Education would be a great start, but i am doubtful it would be even near sufficient. Even under the strictest conditions, beyond education also nurture, indoctrination from a young age, i believe enough people would remain fallible and/or misguided to make a system that does not rely on authority stable long-term. That’s the difficulty with ideal anarchism in general, is it not? But i’m not trying to counter hope and optimism, actually i’m trying to come up with a solution.
Our most ancient ancestors lived in, for the most part, big families. Authority didn’t go much beyond basic family authority. Matriarchs and patriarchs, smart aunts and uncles, unruly young, each contributing will to a final decision, in different ratios depending on domain.
Why were no great kingdoms founded 100 thousand years ago? Why are even the largest settlements no larger than a handful of big families?
Apologies for letting a different ideology of mine seep into this problem, but perhaps one could culturally emulate, even if at just an abstract level, those conditions that prevented the emergence of large, central authority for hundreds of thousands of years before urbanization. Not outright primitivism, not if it can be helped. It’s more of a psychological and behavioral investigation, really, and mostly just to augment different strategies.
Or perhaps the better solution is to just curb my expectations for anarchism, and accept a partial implementation for a start. Jeez, i’m already halfway towards primitivism again.