You just described basic anarchism <3 though it may only work if currency is abolished
this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2024
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I feel like many forms of anarchism exist on a spectrum that contains communism as well. I'm not the most well read but I wonder if anarchism with some kind of currency can be established, or maybe just some kind of interim anarchism somehwere in that spectrum as the mode of production changes.
If everything is completely decentralized then it essentially means that each person is providing for themselves... including basic services like water and waste processing. Centralizing these things makes sense, they're more efficient when operated at scale, and there are significant benefits to task specialization. And frankly, you don't want decentralized medical care - you want big, modern, well-funded hospitals with the latest technology, which means centralized locations and management.
Decentralizing services doesn't make sense. Individual residence solar panels are substantially less productive than large-scale solar plants. Services like energy, water, medicine and waste handling should be concentrated and publicly funded - but then that means you need to collect public funds and then decide how to use them, and that means government. The larger the public project is that you want to build, the larger the government around it has to be.
Youβre assuming parts of decentralized entities canβt cooperate.
Well, no, certainly there could be cooperation. But operating a complex entity like a hospital or a sewage processing plant requires proper organization and a permanent dedicated staff. I don't see how you could do that in a decentralized way.
Parts of the communities interested in running a hospital can just band together and run a hospital. Decentralization doesn't mean no organization, but the freedom to move between and form organizations. (Anarchist contexts would also say "just no hierarchical organization".)
Sewage and stinky jobs are interesting problems. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-editorial-collective-an-anarchist-faq-full.html#text-amuse-label-seci413 offers a variety a solutions, including giving benefits to those who volunteer, community agreement on a rotation, etc.
They can. But often they don't, until it's too late.
"Often", as in this has happened many times before?
You are making good points, but I'd say there is a point in "size" which no longer a centralised entity makes sense, and it must be divided in order to provide better, independent service.
Everything has a critical size. It would be terrible if there was a "hospital" city for an entire country instead of a hospital per X amount of citizens.
Or it would be terrible to power the entire world from a single power plant, for many absurd reasons.
Yea ofc there is allways a too big. But energy makes a lot more sense over a big area. Not in form of a big power plant, but in a big energy network. If it's sunny in one region and they make a lot more power than they can use and at the same time a different region has a power shortage, because it's a cloudy day it only makes sense to share the energy. The larger the skale of your network the more efficient is your energy production. Less recources get wasted.
Absolutely, a single hospital for an entire country would not work. But also, small clinics on every street corner would not work because none of them would be able to support more complex/expensive functions like surgical wards, FMRI or biochem labs. The hospital needs to be scaled so that it can support those things, but then it only makes sense for it to serve a larger community because it's going to need a large staff and a substantial budget - so it needs to be at least locally centralized.
As you said, there's a critical size.
Decentralized governments: already a reality in most places, with a clear hierarchy (federal, state/province, city). Local communities aren't always formed, but can coexist
Decentralized power sources: kinda there already? The thing is that it makes more sense economically to have a small number of big power plants than spread then thinly, especially due to industry needs that can be much larger than what residential lines typically transmit
Decentralized market: I mean, open fairs and small, corner markets are still a thing, no? Or what kind of market do you mean?
Decentralized currency: crypto kinda does that? There's no central authority issuing whatever-coins. In more real-life terms, decentralized currency is deeply tied to local economy and you can look at history for how something like that used to work: small kingdoms almost always wanted to mint their own coins, then whenever conducting trade with external markets, some exchange rates would be set based on supply/demand.
How would you decentralize physical infrastructure like roads, rail, power lines, sewers etc.? Someone will need to be responsible for maintenance, and you can't exactly switch out which sewer is connected to your house in case you're unsatisfied with whoever is running that show. I'm imagining 20 identical roads running in parallel from A to B so people can choose which one to associate with. And a hundred different internets cramming the already limited electromagnetic spectrum we have because there's no central authority to regulate them.
Everything is already decentralized if you think about. There is no central Earth government.
We may be thinking about what size we want communities to be. My answer is that it depends on the community. Climate change council? Probably needs to be a global community. Street cleaning? City level community. And so on.
You just described real life.
I mean in smaller scale than countries.
Anarcho-syndicalism?
Exactly the first thing I thought of after reading the post. OP sounds like they'd enjoy reading about syndicalism.
My personal wet dream would be the street you live on making the decisions for that street like building a traffic light, the block making decisions about say, the plumbing.
everyone voting in a direct manner every week or month via app. Our representative democracy has been corrupted a long time ago so it is time to change that.
How would financing these projects work? Would taxation be on a street level, too? Are you willing to pay for everything that your street needs? A new traffic light or fixing pitholes sounds cheap, but it does get expensive as you scale up. I had to replace four 5x5-foot squares of sidewalk in front of my house a few years ago, and it cost me $5k. Imagine how much it would cost to re-pave a road for an entire block.
Voting purely for your own self-interest is also a double-edged sword. How sure are you that your neighbors will vote to pay for fixing a ruptured pipe that is next to your house if it doesn't impact theirs? I once lived in a condo that had a leaky roof over my apartment alone, and the remaining 20+ units kept voting against paying to fix it literally for years. That's one building. You mtiply that by a.few hundred buildings on a given street, and absolutely nothing will get done, ever.
Thats a really good question! Thank you.
This idea is part of a larger premise so Iβd need to establish a VERY different reality that most of us live in now. Funny enough, your point of people acting out of pure self interest is one part that would go first because these people would not survive the world Iβm imagining.
Federation is part of anarchism and in most interpretations Iβve heard and read so far, communities would work for their shared benefit so of course you fix your neighbors roof, otherwise they will not help you in the future.
so of course you fix your neighbors roof, otherwise they will not help you in the future.
You know what they say about common sense.
Back to my condo story. A few years into my fight with them over the leaky roof, a radiology office opened up on the 1st floor's commercial space. Very quickly the 2nd floor residents came to find out how loud those MRI machines get, and wanted everyone to chip in for installing soundproofing. At that point 3 other units on my floor also began experiencing leaks on their ceilings because turns out water doesn't stop at apartment boundaries. The people who were voting down fixing the leak were very angry at us for voting down installing soundproofing. They just couldn't wrap their brains around the idea of shared benefit until it hit them in the face.
Well that's certainly ominous
You've just described an HOA.
This was what I came here to say.
My HOA is thankfully decent, but I know many have but had positive experiences.
When we're talking Lemmy instances, packing up and moving is one thing, but when we're talking residence, who's going to want their local dictator running things?
People like to hate on things like McDonalds or Budweiser and so on, but with that massive oversight and standardization, you gain a consistent product. With laws and their enforcement, it's nice to have that consistency.
Worry about red/blue states is bad enough, let alone if we're talking red/blue streets! Some things are better big and boring.
I wish. Sadly, voting on issues that directly impact you is not a reality yet.
Have you ever lived in a building block?
I don't know in other countries. In Spain we have horizontal property law, that means that a building block is managed by all it's members. Probably the same in other countries but IDK.
The thing is that it is a NIGHTMARE. We have not one, but two of the most famous spanish comedy shows are about how hellish building block communities are.
I know cases were old people have to walk stairs everyday because other members of the block refuse to put an elevator. I wouldn't want to know what would happen if a few buildings could just choose not to put plumbing, or not to put traffic lights.
And if I'm correct the US equivalent would be this communities in the suburbs that make "law" that you cut your lawns at 3 inches tall exactly every sunday a 7:03 am, exactly. And become extremely anal to everyone complying to their ridiculous aesthetic ideas.
People in small communities can be incredibly shitty. I feel like bigger communities tend to grant more rights to people and ensure those rights are applied.
That's totally unworkable. Almost everything in society would completely stop functioning
Okay. How did you arrive at this conclusion?
Because there are enough people who are selfish, short sighted, or disinterested, and an enormous number of things in society require coordination, long term thinking, and decisions made every single hour of every single day.
Okay, thanks for elaborating.
I agree. There are many selfish people out there. But they dont live in a vacuum. In a world where you have the repsonsibility for your surroundings, many people could rise to the occasion. Also, if a water pipe breaks in front of my home and you decide to vote against fixing it together, what do you think will happen to you, either when you need help or if Iβm vindictive, sooner?
We dont have anything to compare our living conditions to because we have never lived any different than now. We dont attempt to test self governed communities. What do you think why that is?
One hint that shows me that it works are coops. They work without central oversight because its not the oversight that makes us interact but our own intellect.
No.
I can recommend the book Daemon which explores that Idea