Flippant Anarchism. A lighter take on social criticism with the aim of agitation.
Post humorous takes on capitalism and the states which prop it up. Memes, shitposting, screenshots of humorous good takes, discussions making fun of some reactionary online, it all works.
This community is anarchist-flavored. Reactionary takes won't be tolerated.
Don't take yourselves too seriously. Serious posts go to !anarchism@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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Absolutely no right-wing jokes. This includes "Anarcho"-Capitalist concepts.
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This is an anarchist comm. You don't have to be an anarchist to post, but you should at least understand what anarchism actually is. We're not here to educate you.
Join the matrix room for some real-time discussion.
More important than opposition to the current system is the prefiguration of an anarchic one. So much online discourse is about attacking, a lot less is about building. I drew this to remind myself and others that confronting the state is only a part of the puzzle and building new systems without it is also important.
Licence (as always): CC-0, No rights reserved.
No and no. Since I took food as an example I'll use that because we all need food and it's the most important product that needs to be addressed. The way we produce today industrially is 1) centralized, 2) profit-driven, and 3) heavily dependent on exploitative labor and fossil fuels. In contrast, the model I’m proposing would decentralize food production, it would be very emphatic on local autonomy, and be organized around mutual aid and shared responsibility rather than trade or barter.
Instead of massive monoculture farms and supply chains thousands of miles long, food would be grown close to where people live - through networks of community gardens, small-scale permaculture farms, and cooperative distribution. The tools and materials needed, (yes, even some that are industrially produced) could be made in worker-run, federated workshops where production is democratically planned and prioritized based on need, not market demand.
So no, it’s not barter. It’s not trade. The example that I tried to give was not fully "you give me X, I give you Y." (I know, I did a shit job of explaining it) It’s a gift-based, need-based economy rooted in reciprocity (what we already see in disaster response and indigenous food sovereignty projects). It’s about building systems where everyone has access to what they need without having to earn it or bargain for it.
True, but food is also the easiest one. Food sovereignty is not the only kind of sovereignty an anarchist society would require in order to be viable. There is also energy sovereignty, mineral resource sovereignty, technological sovereignity and more - and I rarely see anarchists engaging with those... perhaps because they are not as easily dealt with as food sovereignty.
Monoculture farming has more to do with colonialism than profiteering - the latter is merely the method preferred by imperialist and sub-imperialist states to ensure the accrued power and privilege resulting from it stays with those land-owning elites who support the status quo. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with monoculture - certain things will simply be better cultivated that way, even in a decolonised society. Democratised food systems would be nice, though.
This is unavoidable if you intend on having any kind of industrialised society. You can't expect an anarchist farming community to also build and design it's own agricultural machinery - and that doesn't even take into account the raw materials needed for production.
This would make trade inevitable. Not all crops can be grown everywhere - and that means people will inevitably start trading for the things that aren't locally available to them. That is, unless you violently prevent them from doing so - but doing that also means your revolution has already failed.
Let's be clear - this...
...does not food sovereignty make. When it comes to food production, an anarchist society is going to need far, far more sophisticated and better-supported food production infrastructure than what you are imagining.
I have no interest in a society where the height of technology is only the machinery necessary to produce a spade. In order to be viable, an anarchist society won't just need workshops - it will require factories and large-scale industrial complexes, supported by well-established (and extremely large) scientific and technological institutions. Only a relatively small amount of all of this can happen in a localised matter - even in a fully-democratised and socialised society (which is what an anarchist society would have to be).
You did a shit job of explaining it because you don't understand it well enough - just like Einstein famously said. I would go further than that - I'd also say you also don't understand the world in which this proposed economic system would function well enough.
You know, there was this absolute doomer - Mark Fisher - who opined that imagining the end of the world was easier than imagining the end of capitalism. I disagree - imagining the end of capitalism is not so hard... as long as you stop obsessing over replacing capitalism and begin understanding that a post-capitalist society will, instead, be built on top of a capitalist society. Ie, a historical process that actually has precedent.