LSE Terra Society was pleased to present David Graeber, who discussed some of the ideas set out in 'Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology' as part of Indigenous Genius week at the London School of Economics.
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Peer2Politics
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on peer-to-peer dynamics in politics, the economy and organizations
Curated by
jean lievens
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It's a great paradox that the moment the United States needs government the most, we don't seem to have one anymore. As a student of public administration, like many of my generation, I was motivated by John F. Kennedy's call to public service. I "asked not what my country could do for me" and, despite my concerns about the direction of our foreign policy in the 1960s and 1970s, I went to work for the Environmental Protection Agency in the late 1970s asking, "what can I do for my country?" Six months into Ronald Reagan's term, after he defined government as a problem rather than a calling, I was gone. I was not alone; many left and many who were needed never arrived. State and local governments continued to attract the best and brightest of our young people, but fewer and fewer seemed interested in working in our nation's capital. Most headed for private nonprofits and for-profits. In Washington, public service went out of fashion, replaced by the ambition-fueled revolving door. 
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Perhaps parallel to the physical enhancement of human ability and longevity through technology, enhancements to civilization must also have cultural and political forms. By far the most important of these could be the neglect and final dissolution of borders and “nations”.
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Is this the year in which populism defeats the two-party system, when the US stops borrowing to finance waste, and when the NSA debacle outrages the American people to the point that they call for a radical overhaul of the government?
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The Aadhaar project, with its enormous potential of surveillance, alters the relationship between citizen and state. It tilts the balance so steeply in favour of government that a citizen whose biometrics are controlled by the state is permanently condemned to submission.
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C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of Kevin Carson’s “The Free Market as Full Communism: Two Essays on Mutual Ownership & Post-Scarcity Market Anarchism“ that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Kevin Carson’s “The Free Market as Full Communism: Two Essays on Mutual Ownership & Post-Scarcity Market Anarchism“.
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James C. Scott’s fascinating and seminal book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, examines how, across dozens of domains, ranging from agriculture and forestry, to urban planning and census-taking, a very predictable failure pattern keeps recurring. The pictures below, from the book (used with permission from the author) graphically and literally illustrate the central concept in this failure pattern, an idea called “legibility.”
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The particular character of what Hugo Chávez called the Bolivarian process lies in the understanding that social transformation can be constructed from two directions, “from above” and “from below.” Bolivarianism—or Chavismo—includes among its participants both traditional organizations and new autonomous groups; it encompasses both state-centric and anti-systemic currents. The process thus differs from traditional Leninist or social democratic approaches, both of which see the state as the central agent of change; it differs as well from movement-based approaches that conceive of no role whatsoever for the state in a process of revolutionary change.
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Thanks to technological change, over the past few decades the capital-intensiveness of emerging successor infrastructures has been collapsing faster than the existing infrastructure itself. The classic example, from Buckminster Fuller, is replacing a transoceanic cable system emdodying God only knows how many thousand tons of metal with a few dozen communications satellites weighing a few tons each.
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We are governed neither by angels nor demons. The value of the state cannot be measured in percentage points or balance sheets. To govern is to wield power: understanding how that power can be channelled for the good of citizens is what politics is fundamentally about. By reducing the debate to one of size and numbers, our politicians do us a disservice.
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With rapid urbanization under way, cities want to call their own shots. Increasingly, they can.
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This paper suggests the democratic direction in which the right of freedom of expression should be conceived and applied. In the first two sections it suggests some counter-examples to, and diagnoses of, the libertarian and liberal conceptions of freedom of expression, taking Scanlon (1972) and Scanlon (1979), respectively, to be their chief proponents. The paper suggests that these conceptions cannot take into account clear examples, like fraudulent propaganda, which should not be legal. The democratic conception takes it to heart that the pillars upon which the right of freedom of expression is founded are individual and collective autonomy, the right to know facts of public interest and information necessary for effective democratic control of government. The paper suggests that in a time when private powers seriously threaten these pillars, it is correct for the government to step in to provide the framework in which genuine discussion geared toward fulfilling the objectives of these pillars can take place.
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Note: What follows is a compilation of links exploring the differing theories on the class nature of post-capitalist societies. Different wings of Trotskyism refer to these societies as either deformed/degenerated workers’ states, state capitalist or bureaucratic collectivism.
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Perhaps parallel to the physical enhancement of human ability and longevity through technology, enhancements to civilization must also have cultural and political forms. By far the most important of these could be the neglect and final dissolution of borders and “nations”.
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”That which is for me through the medium of money – that for which I can pay (i.e., which money can buy) – that am I myself, the possessor of the money. The extent of the power of money is the extent of my power. Money’s properties are my – the possessor’s – properties and essential powers. (…). I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of the women. Therefore, I’m not ugly, for the effect of ugliness – its deterrent power – is nullified by money”[2]
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From
c4ss
The problem is, the low-overhead business model I described above for the informal economy is, in almost countless ways, illegal. Take the restaurant/brew pub example. You have to buy an extremely expensive liquor license, as well as having an industrial sized stove, dishwasher, etc. And that level of capital outlay can only be paid off with a large dining room and a large kitchen-waiting staff, which means you have to keep the place filled or the overhead costs will eat you alive. These high entry costs and the enormous overhead are the reason you can’t afford to start out really small and cheap, and the reason restaurants have such a high failure rate. It’s illegal to use the surplus capacity of the ordinary household items we have to own anyway but remain idle most of the time, because of zoning and “safety” regulations which make it prohibitively expensive to sell a few hundred dollars surplus a month from the household economy. You can’t do just a few thousand dollars worth of business a year, because the state mandates capital equipment on the scale required for a large-scale business if you engage in the business at all.
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Bitcoin’s success has the potential to disrupt a lot of ideas about money. According to Stephen Mihm, “Anyone who thinks that Bitcoin will triumph has to believe that it will succeed where earlier generations of private currencies failed — that Bitcoin will, improbably, manage to overthrow more than century’s worth of accumulated state power, jealously guarded and ruthlessly enforced. That’s a preposterous fantasy — and a dangerous one, if you’re an investor. Indeed, people who believe that governments of the world will let a stateless cryptocurrency usurp their hard-won monetary prerogatives aren’t forecasting the future. They’re living in the past,” the University of Georgia professor wrote in an article on Bloomberg News.
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Separatist movements are growing in certain European countries and regions -- but what would be the impact if these areas gained sovereignty?
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As austerity continues to affect public spending, governments are struggling with the implications of ageing populations and increased demand. The Trust argues that a new model of public services, based on a new relationship with citizens and communities, is required. Based on almost 200 research reports, policy analysis papers and government documents, the review highlights the shift from the welfare state to the enabling state.
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The British people are not stupid. They know that neoliberal, neoclassical ‘free market’ economics does not work, even if they don’t use those terms. In a survey by YouGov, the leading public opinion pollsters in the UK, more than two-thirds of those asked wanted the railways, the energy companies (gas, electricity) and the postal service (Royal Mail was recently privatised for a peppercorn price and is now controlled by American offshore hedge funds) renationalised.
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The government shutdown is teaching us a lot about the “public sector” — mainly that it doesn’t exist.
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