It was a revelation to me: to have flat structures, you not only need to make it possible to organize without hierarchy, but you also need a process to constantly weed out emerging hierarchies.

i’ve noticed this is a common source of disagreement i keep having with nonanarchists.

where someone thinks that i’m advocating purely for the organisational aspects of anarchism, but not also materially, socially, culturally, and politically. they’ll dismiss my criticisms of the current system or proposals for alternatives as ‘that would never work today’, and instead cite monolithic, mythological essentialisms like ‘human nature’ at me which is just their opportunity to mansplain capitalist logic to me and throw down some ‘might makes right’ moral argument. people who think tool libraries would never work because one time their underpaid coworkers kept stealing other persons’ food from the breakroom fridge or something and well that’s proof of the greed inherent to all human beings and no we will not interrogate what leads them to stealing food. material conditions? what’s that?

anarchism to me isn’t simply a worldview or a form of organisation: it’s a lifestance, a lifestyle, a way of being, a way of thinking and a way of acting — and i believe it works best when it is all of those things. social change is cultural change is political change. when i advocate for change, i’m advocating to change both the system and the people who recreate it.

‘but how will you prevent [insert consequence of hierarchical conditioning] from happening under anarchism?’

i already have a pet theory:

• the sick children are sick because they’re subjected to secret medical trials.
• rescuing the children means rescuing the research which means secret new booster.
• bonus: the children will die either way.

now, the booster doesn’t need to be good. it would just be really funny if the immaterial benefit of saving the children turns out to be materially beneficial in an almost eviler way than forsaking the children for the antitank mines. (pls give fire resistance)

now, if the booster is bad, that would be thrice as funny: antitank mines forsook and children sacrificed, for shitty research that amounted to nothing really helpful.

this all could also explain how they’ve managed to survive so long.

mine came with a battery defect and no longer turns on. i used it a total of four times.

postcovid prevents me from going to the library to print the RMA and then to the post office to actually ship the fucking thing, and i have no one to help me get rid of it. so now it’s a paperweight.

she’s alluding to the fact that these characters — the ‘soyjack’ and ‘gigachad’ — are historically, and still actively are, alt-right charicatures. together with their friends, ‘tradwife’ and ‘doomer (girl)’: they represent misogynistic, racist, antisemitic, and white supremacist tropes.

at which point your profit becomes linked to the degree to which you provide the functionality

except when the commodity is a basic necessity and there’s no alternatives. ‘the market’ can’t really ‘vote with their wallet’ on the cost and quality of shelter, particularly when price fixing is rampant.

sidenote: ‘voting with your wallet’ implies people with more money than you should have more say in what’s ‘more valuable’, because the rich can always outbid you, and homo economicus is only a thought experiment. (see: foreign real estate investment, conspicuous consumption…)

it should be normal, but it’s not common outside (northern) europe.

as someone who grew up poor in shithole places (both in and outside the Core): i can tell you everything went into general landfill. there was neither the time nor the infrastructure to do it any other way, and composting was either too heavily regulated — and/or required too much space (read: land) — to bother. hell, i’ve been in some northern european countries, too, where most of the compost and meticulously sorted recycling are just burnt as fuel, and the excess gets exported to SEA countries.

i was once in the usonian rust belt, where there was a better way. it was privately operated and required a car and a two-hour drive to the dropoff point or facility, and it wasn’t advertised (usually a B2B service). and you had to rent recycling containers. they wouldn’t accept your shit unless it was ‘correctly’ presorted into their proprietary containers. if some technician decided at a glance that it didn’t seem ‘correctly’ sorted according to their 16-page PDF guide: landfill. at least electronics could be dropped off at any office supply store…

after paying off the debt to mine and my partner’s physical and psychological health?

i’d take back up community organising. and music. i’d like to curate a library (of books and things) and run it as a community centre. i’d facilitate book clubs and popular education, give lectures, join research groups, and take up writing again. i’d design and run tabletop games and games clubs.

more materially, whatever oddjobs need done, and whatever my neighbours need help with. i have a lot of varied experience with ‘disability’; having experience in social work, having multiple disabilities myself, and taking care of people with them. i’d use my techn(olog)ical and mechanical experience to fix stuff, and to design, install, maintain and programme community infrastructure. i’d like to join a rewilding initiative and help to keep the local environment clean.

and i’d lean in hard on whatever hyperfixations strike me that month. (and maybe really have something to show for it.)

But it’s taken to an aburd extreme here where it seems people want to live a care free happy life without burdens, yet at the same time expect life to continue as it currently is with all the benefits we all receive.

this is a strawman. you do yourself a disservice by fighting with scarecrows.

anyone but the ignorant or deeply unserious who want a world without work fully expect to labour to make that happen and to keep it running. the difference is they don’t want to be forced to do things — usually things no one but Moloch asked for, and that they don’t want to be doing — and then threatened with precarity and social murder because the skills they have aren’t profitable, or a machine has made them obsolete (when it should have freed them to do something else), or they have a ‘disability’, or the job they’re filling isn’t needed anymore (or, more likely, is eliminated to bolster the end-of-year profit numbers).

i think you’ll find people still want to do stuff and help each other when they’re not being atomised and forced to compete for scraps. if food and housing were a right, just as many nations in the economic core enshrine a right to life: the ‘rich pricks’ would lose their leverage. people could choose the type of work they want to do, and could do socially beneficial and necessary work that is ‘unprofitable’, because they’re no longer threatened with precarity for failing to bolster someone else’s already comfortable life.

i have never had a job i wanted to do, because i grew up in precarity and the types of things i want to do wouldn’t pay the bills, or pays too little to live on, or is too expensive to certify for, or there’s more than enough people doing them already. i can’t spend too much time looking for jobs, because i gotta eat, so i take the best of the first few of a handful of options, and the jobs (plural) are usually something that only exists to serve rich pricks and their extravagent, imperialist lifestyles, or to serve a need that only exists because everyone is too busy with their bullshit jobs to organise something better. then, when i have a job, that’s all i have time and energy left to do. i don’t have time left over to look at another job, or to learn a new skill, or take a course, or get to know my neighbours, or meet new people at all, or work on my mounting health issues. i don’t have time left over for my hobbies or my interests or to take care of my loved ones or make something useful for my community, because it’s 12 hours of attendance for work that could be done in four, or i’m expected to do more work than is reasonable in a single day and so most of it’s rushed and done to the minimum. and for everything i don’t have time to be doing, that’s more money i have to make paying someone else to do what i could already be doing for myself but i can’t because i’m not a fucking farmer and my apartment has no space for a balcony garden and zoning laws prohibit community gardens and the food banks only take the completely destitute or people willing to convert to their religion.

so imagine i work myself to the bone and now i’m practically disabled, but — and i’ve been thru this and i take care of people who’re going thru this — to be elligible for welfare i need to act like i’m borderline ascetic living at below-subsistence, and then i get to work a different fulltime job: the fulltime job of filling out all the paperwork, keeping an accurate accounting of all my activity, dealing with ‘lifestyle inspectors’ and housing audits, trying to comply with ever-increasingly complex living requirements, renewing my diagnoses several times per quarter and having monthly status calls to answer the question ‘so why aren’t you working’ for the millionth time. all while an entire government apparatus fulfils its primary purpose of making me feel like a parasite and a fuckup because i should be out there affording some guy his fifth yacht with my lifeforce. all that, and the cheque doesn’t even pay the rent.

meanwhile, i still do have time and skills to offer, but not in a way that makes someone else a 30% markup, or that fills an entire 8-hour workday with bullshit. and everyone around me is so taken by their own temporal enslavement to notice me, offering my services for a little bit of food. and the few who hear me are so brainrotted by money that they reject this lowly, mangy beggar, and because no one ever does a good job for no less than two digits of currency. and if it’s ever found out that i do anything with my life other than sleep and feel sorry for myself, or that i’m getting help from a neighbour, a friend, or a loved one: they take the money away and force me into a work programme on an assembly line that i’ll fail out of into homelessness, and refusal means i go homeless, or get put in jail for ‘welfare fraud’ so i can be released three years later into homelessness. in every case i end up homeless: i end up back in jail anyway because being homeless in public is illegal.

how much we could all collectively fucking save — on commuting, on groceries, on equipment, on time — if we shared responsibilities, brought the ‘work’ closer to home, and came together to ask “what does everyone need, and who can do it?”. when Marx borrowed the phrase ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’, he intended there to be a second part: ‘what one person can’t do can be done by another; what no one wants to do can be done by everyone.’

so, when you said in another comment:

[…] where everything works as it currently does with no one needing to bust their ass.

the way everything works now is that it doesn’t. if it works for you: great. it’s not working for me, and it doesn’t work for 6 billion other people. you talk about working plumbing and electricity; i didn’t have that for most of my life.

what a bad faith take, to look at this forum or this thread and come away from it thinking that the dispossessed are just too uneducated to get it, that they don’t expect a fundamental shift in our way of thinking and the way society is organised. you see an effortful comment and you superimpose the strawman over it. ‘they’re just lazy,’ the WASP cop in your head says. ‘they just want everything for nothing. they’ll just live like pigs, and worse yet they’ll like it!’ you give selective, low-effort retorts. you claim they don’t ‘understand’, but then ignore real examples of a different way of living because ‘that’s not how it works in the here and now’ (no shit!). you’re given ideas of how it might work, and then say ‘well if it’s so great why aren’t we doing that already?’.

not everything constructed under capitalism is capitalist; just as a book written in a café isn’t a sandwich. capitalism doesn’t get to take credit for everything just because the person who put in the labour ate at McDonalds for lunch that day, or because someone’s expressive art can sell for $100 on eBay. people can want to do things for more than one reason, and people can have multiple priorities, and those priorities aren’t always the same as yours, and we know that people can be motivated by things other than money when the money isn’t essential to unlocking the hierarchy of needs.

if you really care about improving anything more than the shit-eating grin on your shitty boss’s face: you might want to stop fighting scarecrows and make a real effort to engage your imagination for once. if you just came here to say ‘i like capitalism; i don’t want anything to change’, you could just say that instead of pretending to care. if you only care about keeping your treats and ‘valour’, and dangling them over everyone else: your time would be better spent JAQing off to a mirror. reproducing shitty beliefs because ‘well that’s what everyone believes’ and purity testing every idea for change against the majority is circular reasoning that ensures the shitty belief and associated shitty behaviour continues unopposed by deliberately shutting off your heart and mind to the idea for irrational reasons. your majoritarian nonsense is cowardice, and you deny others as much as yourself the possibility of a better society.

if you want there to be tokens and prizes for extra effort: great! that’s fine. but don’t lock belonging and love in a storage closet, and don’t put essential food and shelter on the same fucking shelf as the teddybear and the bouncy ball.

Would you work your whole life to just create FOSS?

yes, if it has social value and brings meaning to my life.

you can drop the word ‘just’: i wouldn’t just do any one thing, and neither would most people if given the opportunity to do more than just their 9 to 5.

there is more to life than feeding the mute compulsion for private wealth and fame. the driving force of most people is to be comfortable and to belong, and the two are intertwined. in our current society, private wealth and fame are the path to comfort (it’s debateable whether the wealthy have any sense of ‘belonging’).

a lot of people really do want to do things just for the joy or intellectual stimulation of doing it, and to do so without having the joy sucked out of it by economic imperatives enforced from on high by a nepotic sadomasochist in a suit. there is nothing more humiliating than being forced to play a game you had no part in making, that you can’t say say no to, and that exists only as a form of power imposed on you.

Linux powers the majority of servers, supercomputers and embeddeds. Apache HTTP Server and nginx power over 70% of websites, and used to account for almost 100% of all web servers. PHP is used by 80% of websites. MySQL is most likely the datastore for those websites. Git, Subversion, and Mercurial make up the majority of version control systems used for software and research. Python is the language of choice for machine learning and other data sciences. chances are that most websites you connect to via HTTPS are using OpenSSL. Hadoop and Kubernetes powers ‘big data’. core protocols like DNS, HTTP, SMTP, TCP/IP were developed as FLOSS. in their respective industries, there’s also Android, Audacity, Blender, Firefox, GIMP, InkScape, Krita…

i’m going to preëmpt your use of the word ‘free’ here. all of this required a great deal of time, effort and infrastructure. developers still need to eat, and that means the money came from somewhere. it is ‘free’ in the sense that: it is given, not sold; that it was a collaborative volunteer effort; and that you can do whatever you want with it. just because some developers receive some sort of compensation — or work a dayjob and have to survive in a capitalist system — does not mean we need fixed-schedule, ass-in-seats, top-down hostage wage labour to accomplish anything valuable at scale.

if your argument is ultimately ‘i don’t want anything to change’, you could’ve just opened with that instead of JAQing off.

good post. two notes:

Not sure if this is the original intent, but I personally see it as not requiring individuals to work a standard work week to survive.

that is what antiwork — and thus the meaning of this community — is: the critique of work, where work refers to wage labour and performative toil, as this wholly separate sphere of/from life, and its origins as a system of control, and the psychological, physical and environmental harms it brings. it is not against labour conceptually; it is fundamentally anticapitalist.

this community has a way of ragebaiting bad faith, law-and-order liberals browsing All; who don’t read the sidebar, who have fully internalised the Protestant work ethic, and who think ‘work’ refers to both ‘all labour’ and ‘wage labour’, and who think dispossession and wage labour are necessary to prevent everyone from getting depression or turning into Fallout raiders.

All this said - I have no idea if this will work out positively, highly doubtful it could happen at a large scale, recognize there is likely 1000 holes here and new problems to arise, and don’t fully believe it’s feasible nor that I’m remotely intelligent enough to claim this has any real grounding.

political imaginaries don’t need to be completely fleshed out ten steps in advance. it’s enough just to identify a problem. it’s more than enough to start imagining the first steps to solving those problems. you don’t need anyone’s permission to imagine.

the implementation details are not important at an abstract level. those would reveal themselves as a natural consequence of implementation, and the details would be unique to every social and cultural environment.

Uber eats

oh no! my treats! /s

so, if people don’t have the conditions of life held hostage by labour-buyers, the world would end? …why would the water be poisoned? what did i say about conflating ‘work’ with ‘labour’ or ‘doing literally anything [at all]’?

there would still be people who want to operate public utilities[0]. there would still be electricians. and plumbers. and what about microgrids?

this also wouldn’t happen overnight, which you make it sound like it would. or is this like when someone suggests phasing out fossil fuels? and some lemmy.world username says ‘if we suddenly abruptly instantly instantaneously directly rapidly CTRL+A-CTRL+X’d all oil in the world right now it’d be just like in the Mad Max!’

less than 27% of paid labour is serving real needs[1]. there is a lot of shit that we don’t need, that provides no social value, and that we could do without[2]. the individualist ratrace separates us from our communities, which are perfectly capable of taking care of us, even and *especially* in a crisis[3],[4],[5]. a managerial class is not necessary to operate public utilities[6].

if people want electricity, or running water, they will arrange for it. if absolutely nobody in the community knows how, they find someone who does and they make a deal.

most ‘work’ would probably be automated. automation is really more viable in a postcapitalist setting because there is no profit incentive getting in the way of the time for innovation to make reliable, longevous systems that aren’t intentionally cheap and intended to break within 2 – 5 years.

so, i don’t really see how ‘EVERYTHING would grind to a halt’ unless ‘EVERYTHING’ is ‘precisely the way things are now in whatever the present moment is’.

everyone would have more time to support each other, pursue their interests, and do other things that really matter.

don’t conflate ‘work’ with ‘labour’ or ‘doing literally anything’.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narodniks

syndicalism is a tendency of libertarian socialism. it was anarchists engaging in — typically violent — direct action that bred the popular labour movement, women’s suffrage, the abolition of racial segregation, and others.

How did a philosophy of minimized government involvement contribute to the regulations and enforcement mechanisms around our labor laws?

… because we live in a society? the State needs labour, but if all the labourers refuse to sell themselves until labour-buyers stop X, then the State may decide very graciously to abolish the practise of X. so the theory of syndicalism goes: rinse and repeat till you have eroded all the power of labour-buyers, and you can seize the workplace and cut out the State.

the same ‘literally nothing’ that currently stops us from ending starvation, poverty, homelessness, war…

people and ideology create the institutions which (re)produce and enforce a status quo. this is not inherently bad, and it would not be significantly different under any other ‘system’. we are all the state so long as we do nothing different.

what a harmful, elitist, high technocratic, economistic, no-true-scotsman take: someone who doesn’t view the world in pure quantitative terms and understand precisely a dialect of jargon has no valuable insight?

why ‘productivity’ specifically? why not GDP? or GPI? or SPI? or HDI? or HPI? or GBMI (Goodhart’s Bad Metric Index)?

you’re right that this character wouldn’t be part of a ‘solution’, under current conditions, because it would be formulated by a well-funded political thinktank, specialising in number-go-big policy, tacked to the end of a dredged report with absolutely no involvement from measly imperial subjects.

this assumes that:

1. all workers are ‘producing’ anything.
2. all workers are serving real needs.
3. the difference between supply and demand is really so low that any dip in ‘productivity’ would harm anything more than an executive’s RoI.
4. that the threat of this financial ‘harm’ necessitates more work.

with the increase in ‘productivity’ over the last century, if we reduced our expectations, and stopped letting monopoly money run our entire society, and stopped burning surplus resources because it’s ‘unsold’ or would drive down prices: we wouldn’t need to work even 20% what is expected of us now.

this assumes that:

1. dependence is inevitable if Europe is not the most competitive.
2. that economic competitiveness had anything to do with natural gas imports.
3. that our economic system and its basic dynamics are unchangeable.
4. that our needs are unchangeable.

the natural gas situation wouldn’t have been avoided if Europe were more ‘competitive’; neither would any other geopolitical situation. instead the EU should have — and is currently — diversifying its domestic energy sources. the EU could also work on energy coöperation and reducing energy usage.

interdependence works for everyone. independence is a destructive mindset.