A true anarchist is not a knee-jerk reactionary against social convention for it's own sake. Not the one who screams 'no rules!', while trying to make everyone else follow theirs.
An anarchist has a code, a set of rules they hold themselves to, not anyone else. An anarchist is one who asks; 'who made this rule, and what purpose does it serve?' before deciding whether or not to follow it.
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An anarchist does not drive on the opposite side of the road just because what side to drive on has a rule. But they might treat a red light as a stop sign when there's little or no traffic.
Like models, rules are never universally right, but some are useful. Good rules are guidelines, that help keep us safe. Not policies to be policed, regardless of the likely outcome.
Following rules because they're rules is recorded in history as "just following orders". We know where that leads.
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A couple of days ago I posted about what being an anarchist means to me. Obviously given the way I defined it, I can't determine what it means for anyone else. A contradiction, yes. But one that holds space for flexible ways of understanding that can better respond to our constantly shifting situations.
One thing my freedoms-based definition didn't address though, was how I apply it to political economy. For example, do I believe that all legitimate anarchist politics is anticapitalist?
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So one thing I want to clarify is that although I see "anarcho-capitalism" as just fascism with better branding (Peter Thiel being an archetypal example of where it leads), I do accept that a person can be right-leaning economically, and still be an anarchist.
But there are limits, beyond which this becomes a contradiction in ways that are universalizing, and inflexible (again think of the neoreactionaries defending the freedom to deny others freedom).
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When people claim that property is an inalienable right - like freedoms of expression or association are - then "property is theft", as Proudhon famously put it. But as long as they accept that property is a social agreement, subject to negotiation and consensus, then "property is freedom" (a lesser known quote from Proudhon).
Having said that, being open to the idea of a place for markets in a free society does *not* make an anarchist right-leaning. It just makes them not a Stalinist.
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@cy
> So markets both cannot exist in a free society and a free society cannot persist with any sort of market in place
David Graeber covered this in Debt, better than I possibly could. If you haven't read that, I recommend you do. If you have, maybe time for a refresh?
But one argument against what you say here is that it's ahistorical. In his book Life Inc. Douglas Rushkoff pointed out that the importation of the tradition of the bazaar into Europe had a profoundly liberating effect.
@light
> I have a hunch that that's not the main freedom that @strypey was aiming for
Yeah, nah. See the clarification thread I just posted.
> more like the means by which we get the more valuable freedoms
It's more the other way around. The freedom to trade, and to make voluntary agreements about how to carry out transactions - whether via Gift Economy, bazaar money (see Life Inc.), credit vouchers, time banking etc - fall out of the more important freedoms, like that of association.
@cy
> What if those voluntary agreements include trading slaves?
Sorry to be grumpy. But again, you need to read in *context*. In this case, the context is right at the end of that same goddang sentence!
> fall out of the more important freedoms, like that of association
Please explain to me how slave trading is compatible with this?
If I hadn't had such a pleasant chat with you recently about P2P apps, I would be really struggling to assume good faith here.
Now get off my lawn : P
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@cy
> I just think we've followed different lines of reasoning, so much that I'm arguing in bad faith.
... aaaaand you're still doing it. You're talking to me like I'm some Melon Husk fanboy. Rather than someone who's been involved in radical left politics since the 1990s;
https://disintermedia.net.nz/indymedia-stories-3-rob-and-me/
I'm sure it's not intentional, but this is pretty dang insulting, and you're not the only one who's done it in this thread. So it's really grinding my gears.
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So let me be crystal clear. I stand up for all the rights and freedoms documented in the various UN statements on Human Rights, including the rights of indigenous peoples, the rights of the child, and so on. over the last 50 on universal rights. See my Core Principles here;
https://disintermedia.net.nz/about/
I do not support stockpiling weaponry, see the principle on nonviolence. I have been vegan for over 20 years and do not support lobster dinners. Although I do have a soft spot for lobste.rs.
This is the official blog of Disintermedia, a ... well ... a thing with a domain name. A project launched in 2008 by community developer Danyl Strype, using CoActivate, a now-defunct project management service. This version of the blog is a community-hosted instance of the Ghost software. Thanks to Dave Lane (@lightweight@
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> voluntary agreements, where you're agreeing to pay rent to the landlord so that his police don't throw you out on the streets?
Are you fucking serious? Any agreement made under duress - especially that level of duress - is by definition not a voluntary one. Nor is it compatible with any of the aforementioned rights, which includes the right to adequate shelter. Again, this shit is insulting.
It's like asking a vegan whether that really means they support eating humans (no, I don't).
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@cy
> I do think that markets in the past have included slaves
This is true. Also, fediverse software is routinely used to exchange CSAM, as is the net in general. Do you blame the fediverse or the net for that? Or do you blame the people who misused them to do things that violate other people's fundamental and inalienable fucking rights?
We've got beyond get off my lawn. At this point, without a serious fucking apology, it's get the fuck out of my neighourhood.
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@cy
> So you were not free to buy what you wanted, or sell what you wanted. It was something your tribe or clan decided.
You need to reread Debt. Because that's absolutely *not* what Graeber said, and is totally ahistorical. What he said - as did Charles Eisenstein in Sacred Economics - is that most transactions worked on mutual credit, not account-closing transactions like money payments. Those were only for strangers passing through town, who you didn't expect to see again.
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@cy
> With markets (and Persian bazaars) that freedom came to Europe
You need to brush up on your European history (or read Life Inc. it's really good!). Markets arrived in Europe in the Middle Ages, inspired by the Persian bazaars, which Europeans noticed while visiting the Holy Land during the Crusades (to kill the locals and take their stuff).
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The freedom that replicating the bazaar model brought to Europe was in beginning a long historical process of liberating serfs from landlords. By allowing them to trade amongst themselves, instead of relying on the landlord (be they aristocrat, cleric, or otherwise) to collect up everyone's produce and divvy it up, having kept the lion's share for themselves and their mates.
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The Enlightenment and the Rennaissance came much later. A few centuries later.
If Terrence McKenna is to be believed, it was drive at least in part by the arrival of tea and coffee in Europe. Again from people in the Middle East, who'd got it from China and Africa respectively. Consuming these meant some people stopped drinking alcohol all day (because safe drinking water wasn't available yet), and started thinking a bit more clearly ; )
Maybe you need a coffee or a tea? : P
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@cy Ok, now I've calmed down a bit, let me flesh out my point and see if it clarifies anything for you.
This turns on how we're defining "business". Does a subsistence farmer selling surplus veges in a bazaar-inspired medieval market, or a baker selling bread there, count as "business"? In the broadest sense, sure, but not in the sense that I think concerns you here.
For this explanation, I'll use 'bazaar' instead of 'market' to avoid confusion with other uses of 'market'.
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Were medieval bazaars free from central government interference (ie the King and the Crown)? Yes, as most governance functions in the Middle Ages were more localised. Nation-state scale government didn't become practical until the emergence of tech like national train networks and reliable postal system, which were originally inseparable from them.
Were bazaars unregulated? certainly not. For a start they existed by the grace of the local landlord and church authorities.
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Within that, a bazaar was a commons, run by and for the community that bought and sold in it. Like any sustainable commons, this required regulation, eg to avoid having stallholders selling poisonous food or faulty goods, or people stealing from stallholders, or anything else that would threaten the market's reputation.
The modern equivalent would be a supermarket run as a multi-stakeholder co-op, where workers, producers and customers all have a stake in ownership and decision-making.
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Is a bazaar or a co-op supermarket the ideal model for food exchange in a community too large to do it by trading veges over the back fence? The question makes no sense to me. There are no 'ideal' models, only what makes the most sense as a response to a given situation.
Gaining this understanding this is one thing that makes slogging through the dense prose of situationist writing worthwhile. Revolutionary Self-Theory isn't too hard a read, and is a good intro;
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/larry-law-revolutionary-self-theory
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Are Farmer's Markets (also inspired by the medieval bazaar) and co-op supermarkets an improvement on corporate supermarkets and their highly centralised, too-big-to-fail supply chains? I think so. Keep in mind that union-driven projects like this were used to build worker self-management in the lead up to the Spanish revolution.
Could there be a place for them in a society run mostly on anarchist principles? On what basis could we suppress them without becoming Stalinists or Red Guards?
while i agree with the goals here and am in favour of street markets and bazaars and farmwrs markets and mutual aid networks and worker co-ops and so on...
...i would step back and wonder what are prerequsites for those?
certainly all of the above have in common that they use money owned by the capitalists and billionaires, who would love all the above and then print money for themselves to buy the most popular ppl and products who are happy to receive lots of money we all work for
@light @KevinCarson1 @strypey @cy imho that has been tried by a project called "Ripple" and it didnt scale so that turned into XRP.
The best or closest system to that today is imho bitcoin lightning and its amazing.
Maybe theres a way to scale the original idea, but it requires imho open supply chain and a massive amount of people keen to try hard to work with this and even then its unclear. if it works we can still switch to it, but bitcoin lightning with open supply chains could get us there
@cy @light @KevinCarson1 @strypey
feel free to get it started.
i think its super hard and having a transparent supply chain and maybe an app that supports this kind of economic relation might help it to exist in practice.
so far i dont see anyone trying and succeeding.
ripple tried and they stopped.
..if it was a good idea, anyone can start, because since XRP there is now room for somebody picking up the original ripple idea 🙂
i personally think it could be a complementary system to bitcoin
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@serapath
> When you try to minimax the whole world you're opening the door to scammers
This! This is what the design of ATProto tries to do, and why it can't scale without oligopoly;
https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
> there are arguments for lax accounting even between people you're helping directly
In the context of an ongoing relationship, as Graeber points out in Debt, trying to balance the books is like telling someone you don't want to know them anymore.
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@light
> What about Thomas Greco's "credit clearing" institutions or perhaps a decentralised equivalent?
A guy I know tried to build something like this. They called it "Cashless", which was ... not great, but the concept and the UX design was really good;
https://github.com/CashlessSociety/cashless
They chose SSB as the transport protocol. Which ran into all the same problems most SSB software has. Maybe DAT would be better for this kind of experiment? Don't know.
hm.. its web3 scam.
atproto or bsky is as much decentralization theather as ethereum.
the thing you linked uses ganache and infura (owned by consensys) ... basically its trash.
everything with web3 in the name is essentially trash 🤷♀️ ....sadly
Just for context, the repo I pointed to was an early alpha. Most of the work done was on concept, UX and SSB. The ETH-based prototype was just a PoC.
The goal for Cashless, as with Taler, was for it to be usable with any form of backing. Currency, crypto-tokens, time credits, surplus veges for that matter, whatever people chose to back their time promises with. But unlike Taler, no backing was actually needed. Someone could accept a promise of future work on reputation alone.
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@serapath
> dont really understand how its supposed to work
The best person to explain it would be the founder. They gave a talk at a blockchain conference in Te Wanganui-a-Tara when the project was live. I'll try to dig up a recording.
FYI we met through the Aotearoa Indymedia email list. They were involved with the NY group too (the Indypendent, etc), while doing a tech job at a Wall St clearinghouse back in the late 1990s/ early noughties.
Basically, imho what you propose does not scale, but i tink its a good mechanism and should be embraced local first by people, but imho when different communities interact we need something that scales beyond friends and local communities and imho bitcoin seems perfect 🙂
if we all adopted it, the divide between poor and rich would start to reverse and no military in the world could do anything about it. its all in our hands and we dont have to beg anyone, we just adopt it
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@serapath
> imho what you propose does not scale
You state this as if it's self-evident. It's not, you need to show your working.
> when different communities interact we need something that scales beyond friends and local communities
This is Cashless was for, and why the backing with other sources of value was being built. If it was friends only, no app would be needed. If it was local-only, reputation would be sufficient backing and a timebank would be fine.
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Another thing my friend's app could maybe have made some use of is the Interledger protocol. Are any of you familiar with this?
"ILP is an open, currency-agnostic protocol for transferring funds based on TCP/IP, the protocol that defines the Internet. It was designed for sending packets of money across different accounting ledgers."
https://interledger.org/open-standards
I know the founders used to work at some dodgy places. But I don't judge the Matrix protocol by anything that AmDocs does.
@strypey @cy @light @KevinCarson1
yeah, i mean no question, bsky is decentralization theater🤷♀️
@cy @light @KevinCarson1 @strypey
ATproto is just another web3/cRYpt0 scam 🤷♀️
https://mastodon.online/@mastodonmigration/116257600186799092
Bluesky Reveals Massive Hidden Investment Today #Bluesky revealed that in April 2025 they received a whopping $100M venture capital investment lead by Bain Capital Crypto and that they KEPT IT A SECRET. https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-19-2026-series-b So the answer to the big mystery Who Owns Bluesky? (https://mastodon.online/@mastodonmigration/116025246450023071) is finally out. Crypto VCs. Now, we should be asking why did this company that prides itself on transparency and "decentralization" decide they needed to hide who owned the company?
@KevinCarson1 @light @strypey @cy
i think that is a misunderstanding
1. bitcoin is not backed by something and "proof of work" is just a mechanism to defend the network against attackers trying to rob everyone
2. money is never scarce. the wording is misleading - i agree. only goods and services can be scarce. a limited money supply does not make it scarce, it just standardizes it - is 1kg or 1m as a standard measurement unit scarce? ...would you want constant change in what 1m or 1kg means?
@KevinCarson1 @light @strypey @cy
i am saying this, because if you had more or less money in circulation and everything else stays the same (e.g. demand and supply of services and goods) then prices just adapt and you keep the same buying power.
nothing here is scarce and therr is no problem.
problems appear under fiat where the epstein class constantly prints money to defraud us, hence the growing divide between poor and rich. bitcoin inverts this by ending money printing to pay for upkeep
@KevinCarson1 @light @strypey @cy
nah, the measurement are prices.
you measure prices in a currency, but if the denominator changes, its a futile exeecise.
the money is just what you measure with.
price stability is a ridiculous concept invented by mad men, it shields ppl from feedback about growth or decline of the economy by seeing prices around them.
@serapath
> price stability is a ridiculous concept invented by mad men
Theoretically defensible, but politically sociopathic. As monetary policy, it says;
Keeping the value of a $ stable, as an objective measure of the value of things sold in markets, is more important than whether people can afford enough food to stay alive.
This is '#neoliberalism' and its hands-off central banking in a nutshell. Obsessed with controlling inflation, regardless of the effects.
@cy @KevinCarson1 @light @strypey
only bitcoin ends monetary inflation and generally will cause deflationary prices as long as the global economy grows, so everyone gets a UBI by having their buying power increase, no matter how little bitcoin you hold...... pretty dope imho
@strypey @KevinCarson1 @light @cy
I think this is just absolutely idiotic or even borderline evil.
If there is fixed monetary supply in an economy then price changes will give real feedback to people. Price changes will tell people whether the economy grows or shrinks or stays the same.
If ppl start hoarding, then prices will deflate, good for everyone, if ppl stop hoarding prices will inflate temporarily until nobody hoards and the maximum is in circulation.
@strypey @KevinCarson1 @light @cy
playing around with money printing just means defrauding people and taking signal away, because now you cant know ...did they print or did the economy shrink or did somebody stop hoarding... its impossible to tell anything anymore... its ridiculous
@KevinCarson1 @strypey @light @cy
i think hoarding is not a problem, because money is never scarce.
thebproblem is some print to buy everything and we pay the bill.
if some hoarded we would get more wealthy because prices would drop
@cy @light @strypey @KevinCarson1
prices are the measurements, but you want to use a ruler or scale or in this case currency, that doesnt change in essence between measuring, because that makes all your measurements useless
@KevinCarson1 @light @strypey @cy
if you mean backes by nothing, then mostly yes.
...but comm9n understanding of "fiat momey" is a money that can be printed at will by certain parties to enrich themselves and their friends and causes on the account of the rest of us which is the vast majority of ppl
Strypey
Cy
Light
𝓼𝓮𝓻𝓪𝓹𝓪𝓽𝓱【ツ】☮(📍🇨🇦)
Kevin Carson