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.

@cy
> The freedom to do business without government interference.

This is some serious reading out of context. Did you even read the thread you're replying to? By what tortured logic did you extract that conclusion from references to Graeber and Rushkoff FFS?

@light

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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'.

@light

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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

(5/5)

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?

@strypey

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

@strypey

... that IS the centralizing/consolidating/bullying effect @cy mentioned, but imho misleadingly associated it with any kind of market in general, ...its in the money we use.

@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.

@cy @light @KevinCarson1

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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.

@strypey

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.

@light @serapath

@strypey @light

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