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.
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