Where are the social anarchist economists?

This is an interesting question. It think it is actually two related questions.

• Where are the economists with social anarchist politics?
• Where are the experts on forms of economics associated with anarchist politics?

Academia has filters to exclude anarchists

I can’t think of anyone I’d describe as an anarchist economist off the top of my head, but all of the great anarchists have dabbled in it, and had interesting things to say about it. Mutual Aid by Kropotkin, for example, is a combined work of zoology, anthropology, political theory, morality, and economics. Anarchists aren’t known to respect artificial borders between states, nor should they be expected to respect the artificial categorization of knowledge into distinct and separate fields of study. Academic economists prefer to isolate their study from the world of politics. Instead, they launder their politics through the allowable questions they ask, the conclusions that pass the filters of publication, and the underlying assumptions of their schools, such as which activities qualify as productive economic activity. There is no such thing as apolitical economics, despite the lie that economics and politics are separate fields. Academic economists turn up their noses at ‘ideologically motivated’ economic works, but ignore that academic economics is a peculiar subset of ideologically motivated economics.

If you don’t accept the lies, you are unlikely to go far in a university economics department, and if you accept the lies, you are unlikely to be an anarchist. This is aside from all of the other social and economic barriers that filter anarchists from hierarchical institutions of learning and the academic credential economy. This may be one reason why the answer to the first question is “I don’t know.”

Economics is irrelevant to (most) anarchists

Economics is strange among the social sciences. It has many schools, and the writing of those schools are the religious texts for factions of bureaucrats that control the monetary levers of government. David Graeber writes in Against Economics,

There is a growing feeling, among those who have the responsibility of managing large economies, that the discipline of economics is no longer fit for purpose. It is beginning to look like a science designed to solve problems that no longer exist.

The world has changed significantly since the time the theories and priorities of respected economists were relevant. I think there’s a significant and well-founded undercurrent among anarchists to reject the entire field as irrelevant. I don’t entirely agree. Nassim Taleb teaches in The Black Swan how revolutionary change can be not easily predictable despite it being inevitable. His statistical arguments are tailored for markets, but could just as easily be applied to forms of social organization. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, psychologists who’ve won the highest prize in economics for their work on the limits of human rationality, have a lot to say about buying preferences, but even more to offer those looking to loosen the bounds of biases and prejudices that restrict our individual possibilities. To the extent that economics is a combination of applied statistics and human psychology, it will always be relevant.

In The Cathedral and the Bazaar, an early philosopher of the free software movement describes early iterations of open source software development (and through inference corporate closed-source software mega-project development) as building a cathedral - requiring extensive planning, blueprints, management and coordination. He compares the development style of Linux (and the software projects inspired by it) to development of a bazaar - a structure that is built horizontally, but is no less complex, coherent, and stable than the structure of the cathedral.

When this metaphor is applied to the economies of states, economics is the science of building cathedral blueprints; while bazaars do have generative rules, they bear little resemblance to the precisely measured stone templates for cathedrals. Perhaps the applied science that would increase the efficiency of markets of labor or status or kindness, or whatever it is that an anarchist society uses to distribute resources, bears so little resemblance to modern economics to render it inapplicable, irrelevant.

The religious texts that economists use to manage the cathedral-like state economy has just as much relevance as blueprints for buttresses and great domes do to the participants of a communal participatory market. So perhaps another reason I’m not familiar with any anarchist economists is that what is widely categorized as economics is not relevant to the daily practice of anarchists, or the structure of the societies they hope to build.

Anarchism is irrelevant to (most) economists

The 0th law of economics is that scarcity exists, and distribution of scarce goods must be managed or society will experience crisis. Without this fundamental assumption, economics loses not only its mooring, but also its importance as a field of study. Gift cultures are not speculative fiction or utopian dreams.

Gift cultures are adaptations not to scarcity but to abundance. They arise in populations that do not have significant material-scarcity problems with survival goods. We can observe gift cultures in action among aboriginal cultures living in ecozones with mild climates and abundant food. We can also observe them in certain strata of our own society, especially in show business and among the very wealthy.

Abundance makes command relationships difficult to sustain and exchange relationships an almost pointless game. In gift cultures, social status is determined not by what you control but by what you give away.

Thus the Kwakiutl chieftain’s potlach party. Thus the multi-millionaire’s elaborate and usually public acts of philanthropy. And thus the hacker’s long hours of effort to produce high-quality open-source code.

(From Homesteading the Noosphere also by ESR)

Gift economies exist now and the entire platform of free software our modern world is built on (and happens to be running this site) are a direct result of their existence. Despite adding a reported 9 trillion dollars to the world’s economy, it does not seem to be a subject of interest to mainstream economists. One would think an ‘unideological’ field like economics would not suffer such a glaring blind-spot.

This should re-enforce the point I made earlier about academic filters, but is also an answer to the second question. Experts usually exist due to demand for their expertise and financial support for their specialization. When neither exists in academia, their numbers are few. Capitalism thrives on crisis and scarcity, there will always be an abundance of resources when it comes to the study of scarcity and capitalist economy. Under capitalism, there will always be a scarcity of resources for the study of abundance and anti-capitalist economics.

Anarchism defies capitalist limitations

Despite these factors, anarchist economists exist. None of this should discourage you from following that field of study if you desire. Learning the rules of a game are a prerequisite for breaking them well. The ability to use the tools and language of economists to talk about anarchist economies can spread anarchist ideas to previously insulated audiences, and the mathematics and methods of economics are not useless in a post-capitalist world. But by the same token, having a surfeit of experts is not a prerequisite for an economic transition. Experts arise from experience, and if a large-scale transition between forms of economy is organic, gradual, and transparent, there will be plenty of opportunities to learn from mistakes, develop best practices, experiment, and improve.