David Rolfe Graeber (/ˈɡreɪbər/; February 12, 1961 – September 2, 2020) was an American anthropologist and anarchist activist. His influential work in economic anthropology, particularly his books Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Bullshit Jobs (2018), and The Dawn of Everything (2021), and his leading role in the Occupy movement, earned him recognition as one of the foremost anthropologists and left-wing thinkers of his time.
Question from someone uninformed on anarchism. How would an anarchist society do something huge, like for example get to the moon. It seems like that requires an intense pooling of resources and a level of coordination accross multiple industries, scientific disciplines, manufacturing techniques, etc.
Turns out you can get stuff done without a huge mega corp or government robbing everyone to pay themselves and justify it as being for everyone's own good. Just listen to the absurdity of the argument that you need a state: "Hey, I'm going to forcibly take 30% of everything you produce, but don't worry, after I pay myself and my staff, I'll build you a poorly maintained road and send someone to the moon. You'd like that wouldn't you?"
What would the opposite of that be?
Free associations of workers would work on that, if they want to do it, if there is a need for it. Tbh I don't see much need for going to the moon in this moment.
i just don’t see that happening for fundamental science… these are big things that don’t mean a whole lot to the average person: going to the moon, discovering the higgs boson, ITER
you could convince scientists and engineers to work toward that goal pretty easily because they understand the necessary of pushing boundaries even when you’re not sure what you’ll gain from it, but i’m not sure you’d be able to convince people more removed from the academic world
the type of projects we did in the past to advance our knowledge of the universe were relatively simple compared to our modern science and engineering… we have grown to the point that no single person would be able to rebuilt the tools required to complete modern science from scratch, let alone how to use those tools
i’m not saying it can’t work, but i think that modern science is hugely complex, and the mechanism by which we manage that complexity is via government. i don’t see loosely connected groups being able to solve that issue
Yes, science is complex, infrastructure is complex.
these are not "loosely connected groups", it's not a group of friends doing a party, it's a complete industry.
thing is to change relations in production and to work according to needs and with solidarity towards each other and other communities. try to look at it as complete system, not just pinhole view at just scientists interested in particles or whatever scifi there is. that federated system would have to solve food, housing, medicine, education and through solving that and enabling others to work in fields they are interested in would in the end enable space travel, or whatever scifi other there is.
i would say that within that system it would be easier to develop science and more pleasant and beneficial to society than in current capitalist one
I posted more about this below, but I think it would work, it would just take much longer. Coordination takes more time, but if there isn’t a time constraint (which I think can be true in a functionally post-scarcity world) then that is much less of an issue.
Maybe it would take several decades to do what it would have taken 5 years before. But if the fundamentals are covered in the meantime, why is that an issue?
i’d argue that slow scientific progress is morally questionable… people live longer and quality of life increases dramatically with new scientific research. to extend that time would need a pretty big offset to that to make up for it
I dunno, I feel like rushing forward and making hasty generalizations and doing shoddy science is also morally questionable, and also ultimately gets worse results. And I see a lot of that in the tech industry anyways.
Just a had a convo today with one my mentors about javascript framework benchmarks, and how the main ones don’t actually measure accurately at all because of the way the engine inlines and optimizes things. He went through all the trouble of building a tool to make it easier to do rigorous measurements, because engineers at the company had been doing these shoddy benchmarks, using it to justify shipping “optimizations”, getting a nice raise, and then he would come in and realize that they had really just moved the work elsewhere and it actually caused a regression here or there.
And nobody really cared in the end. They used it for a while, then it fell by the wayside.
Real scientific rigor isn’t really respected in the same way it used to be, if it ever was. It’s more about marketing, finding an angle you can sell. Because when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric, everyone starts gaming it. And money and productivity have become the ultimate metric.
and none of these big projects that we’re talking about are shoddy science. they’re highly structured, complex, peer-reviewed affairs with thousands of people involved. we could use far more money towards these things and peoples’ lives would get significantly better
Yeah, we could. But the structures of capital as they are currently running are funneling money away from that, and toward what makes profit. Look at what they’ve done to Boeing, once an engineer led giant, now a hollow shell.
I think worker collectives and more distributed decision making would slow things down at first, but in the long run would lead to more stability, more ownership, and eventually in the long term, more speedup as we build out infrastructure. I also don’t think we’ll ever get to a fully decentralized society, for a variety of reasons. But the first step in that direction would be something like more democratic company decision making and ownership (e.g. like the German model where workers elect a board member on large companies).
totally agree that at the smaller level more democratic decision making is the way to go. on the larger scale though i think there needs to be more direction and planning. if you take that small organisation-level decision making and make it plan for others, then you essentially have a government department
i think that small groups are great for small groups but big and complex achievements are just big and complex, and need appropriately sized infrastructure (including human and organisational infrastructure) to properly manage and complete. society is kinda past small achievements - the things we have to learn are big and complex
thus, we need appropriate big and complex organisations… the structure of those i’m not sure, but they’re always going to be somewhat autocratic - you can’t just have small groups decide not to cooperate because they don’t like something that they don’t agree with. sometimes people have to do things that aren’t in their best interest because it’s in the best interests of others… NIMBY is the antithesis of a functioning society - we all give up something so others can be better off, and others give up lots of little things so we are also much better off
Agreed on necessity. I just mean, would having such a federated society allow for that kind of thing at all, or would it put an upward limit on how far society could go? I mean it's all speculation I guess. Thanks for answering.
i doubt about that limit, think capitalism puts more limit on science now, i replied to some other comment in more details regarding this
i agree, to achieve conditions to enable forming of free associations of workers first capitalism(capitalistic relations etc.) must be abolished which is hard thing to do already
Agreed. Capitalism is interested in developing things that help capitalism acquire. Look to the pharmaceutical monstrosities in the US and see what they put their money into. Non- curative solutions that improve quality of life for chronic diseases. A truly free science might have solved a lot of these problems if funding weren't so selective.
Burn it all haha.
I think it’s more that it would take more time and coordination to do larger things. Like, you need to get all of the people on board, you need to convince them to work on it without coercion (either force or money), so it takes a lot longer. Everybody is going to want their basic needs met and their problems dealt with first.
But when you step back and think about it, with our current level of technology, that would be fine. Like, if I went to a hundred engineers and was like “hey I wanna build a rocket, who’s with me?” And they said “sure, once I have free time, but can we figure out food/water/shelter/entertainment/comfort first?” That would be reasonable. Maybe it takes a few decades or longer to figure those things out in a sustainable way, but at scale in society it could definitely be done.
Think about electricity. It is currently functionally limitless (yes, there are limits, but we don’t treat it like that in day to day life). And to keep it that way is relatively low maintenance, once we figure out renewables (or nuclear, or both) anyways. Same with the internet, once it’s built it’s fairly easy to maintain, and we’re at the point with fiber where it’s fairly difficult to overuse it, so giving it to everyone as baseline would be easy.
Once we had a better system for the basics, one that essentially is low maintenance and ensures everyone gets everything they need (with choice and freedom too, if everyone is fed but all we have is potatoes, the next question would be “ok how do we get more variety?”), then there would be a lot more time to focus on large efforts.
Those still would take longer, because even when we have all of the basics handled, it would take much longer to make decisions, there would be long, frustrating debates, somebody might storm off, etc. It might take a lifetime. But there wouldn’t be urgency either, because we all have the basics, plus luxuries, essentially our modern lives as they are. Just without the need to produce more every second of every day.
All of this could be decentralized too. It’s not like I’m saying there would be a command economy, necessarily. In fact, it shouldn’t be centralized too much ideally, that could over concentrate power.
Where this falls apart is game theory essentially. If I choose to be less productive and focus on that basic infrastructure, and take my time, that lets other players get ahead. If that goes on long enough, those other players may have advanced enough that they can dominate the game. It’s a literal arms race in that sense, this is playing out with AI right now. For it to work, everyone would need to agree to slow down, all at once.
This is a major issue because what’s happening is we’re hitting artificial maximum’s because of this strategy. I deal with this all the time working on software infrastructure. People want to push for product non stop, and then their code turns out completely unmaintainable. Infra comes along, analyzes, figures out a better pattern, and eventually we fix it, but not before the damage is done and it takes years to fix, or we just rewrite it all. If we had taken the time to build it the right way the first time, it would have likely been a much faster process. BUT, the startup may have folded in the meantime, because someone else put together a dumpster fire, spruced it up to look real nice, and got a bunch of people to choose them instead. And now they won.
So yeah, I think about this a lot haha 😅 we are, technologically speaking, capable of being post scarcity. Why are we still acting like technological advancement is about life and death? Why do we have to race to the bottom?
Edit: Oh, speed also does matter for coordinating in emergencies, so there is an argument for “we don’t have time because the environment will fall apart or we have an asteroid incoming, etc.” but like, re: the environment, that is not only happening, but the productivity arms race is making it worse! That’s an example of an artificial maximum’s there.
Thanks for this well thought out post. Given me a lot to think on. This was a substanial work, so genuinely thank you for taking the time.