There’s different ideas, roughly distinguished between market and council-based, with less and more central planning. The CNT in Spain had a quite market-based approach, for example, but OTOH you see council-type structures even in today’s capitalism: The development of lithography technology and machines for that, for example, quickly hit a brick wall, none of the (gigantic) companies working on it were actually large enough to do it so they started cooperating. The label on the machine might say “ASML” but really they’re only a systems integrator: They’ve worked with a multitude of other companies to develop and build exactly the stuff that will be necessary, there’s no competition between say Corning and Zeiss who’s going to make a particular lens or such: They’ve agreed, together, to build a certain technology, divided up the work according to their specialities – including “make money with the machine”, that’s TSMC’s area of expertise. Roughly speaking: The less commodified a particular erm commodity is the more likely it’s not actually directly bound by market forces, even in our current economy you get these islands of horizontal cooperation within the larger shark tank. You’ll pay money for those machines but money alone might not buy you one, you might need to be part of a syndicate.
But I agree with you (or I think that’s your implication) that pure mutualism will not work for these kinds of “put a man on the moon” projects, it’s not structured enough and without structure no planning (centralised or decentralised). And frankly speaking the theory around this topic is kinda lacking, first off because much of the theory about it is old, where “big industry” meant “a steel mill”, secondly because Anarchism has ceased to plan ahead details: We don’t have the necessary knowledge and information to pre-empt the decisions of people down the line, and we shouldn’t attempt to, either. They will organise those projects as they see fit in some democratic manner, what’s up to us is to grow democracy within the economy to a degree where more and more economic actors jump on the ship, as well as develop abstract frameworks, a body of ideas and approaches in line with Anarchist principles, that they can pick and choose from as they like and circumstances dictate, and develop further. And most of all we need to kill off hierarchical realism, that is, the idea that nothing ever works without an imposed hierarchy even though everyone sees it working all the time when friends get together to have a grill party. Are there scaling issues, sure… but hierarchies have scaling issues, too, even insurmountable ones (mostly around information processing complexity and perverse incentives) and we don’t discount them on that basis. There’s a strong cultural bias and blind-spot, there.
In a nutshell, it’s the old leftist problem: We know exactly what’s wrong and also know how things ought to look like to be better, but details, man, details. In the end, in practice, there’s no perfect, there’s only less bad.
Thanks for the long reply. I also took the time to read the wp on mutualism. Proudhon has been on my reading list forever because of his great quotes, but other things were always more relevant.
But I agree with you (or I think that’s your implication) that pure mutualism will not work for these kinds of “put a man on the moon” projects,
I would never judge a school of ideas based on a few minutes of youtube. But I admit, I was thinking it and I would not have been motivated to spend more time on it without your reply.
I’m not concerned about stuff like putting a man on the moon. I’m thinking about feeding 8 billion (and rising) people, most of them living in cities. This takes an uninterrupted stream of food and water from strangers to strangers. As it goes today, you need fuel and spare parts, replacement machines. To grow the food you probably need fertilizer, maybe pesticides and so on (I’m not knowledgeable on agriculture).
We do this through markets. This decentralized method seems superior to central planning. Obviously, we can do very well without overt hierarchies. As we know, behind most markets is a government enforcing laws and possible intervening to impose fixes for perceived problems.
You may lose your farm if you don’t make enough money to pay the bills. This can be framed as simply circumstance; predefined rules operate without any individual decision and thus without hierarchy. Or one may point to the individuals involved who still make the choices to enforce contracts or laws in the specific case.
If the farm passes to someone who makes more money with it, then that hopefully means that it is better at meeting the needs of other people. We don’t need to discuss the flaws in the market system, but a system should have a way of ensuring that the meets of other people elsewhere - of strangers - are met. Scarce resources need to be put to a use that meets the needs of the many.
I have to think of crowd crush disasters. No one in such a crowd does anything very bad. They may even try to help other people if they can. They do the best they can with the information they have. But when 100s or 1000s of people are all pushing just a little, then the guys at the front get squished by the collective force.
There’s different ideas, roughly distinguished between market and council-based, with less and more central planning. The CNT in Spain had a quite market-based approach, for example, but OTOH you see council-type structures even in today’s capitalism: The development of lithography technology and machines for that, for example, quickly hit a brick wall, none of the (gigantic) companies working on it were actually large enough to do it so they started cooperating. The label on the machine might say “ASML” but really they’re only a systems integrator: They’ve worked with a multitude of other companies to develop and build exactly the stuff that will be necessary, there’s no competition between say Corning and Zeiss who’s going to make a particular lens or such: They’ve agreed, together, to build a certain technology, divided up the work according to their specialities – including “make money with the machine”, that’s TSMC’s area of expertise. Roughly speaking: The less commodified a particular erm commodity is the more likely it’s not actually directly bound by market forces, even in our current economy you get these islands of horizontal cooperation within the larger shark tank. You’ll pay money for those machines but money alone might not buy you one, you might need to be part of a syndicate.
But I agree with you (or I think that’s your implication) that pure mutualism will not work for these kinds of “put a man on the moon” projects, it’s not structured enough and without structure no planning (centralised or decentralised). And frankly speaking the theory around this topic is kinda lacking, first off because much of the theory about it is old, where “big industry” meant “a steel mill”, secondly because Anarchism has ceased to plan ahead details: We don’t have the necessary knowledge and information to pre-empt the decisions of people down the line, and we shouldn’t attempt to, either. They will organise those projects as they see fit in some democratic manner, what’s up to us is to grow democracy within the economy to a degree where more and more economic actors jump on the ship, as well as develop abstract frameworks, a body of ideas and approaches in line with Anarchist principles, that they can pick and choose from as they like and circumstances dictate, and develop further. And most of all we need to kill off hierarchical realism, that is, the idea that nothing ever works without an imposed hierarchy even though everyone sees it working all the time when friends get together to have a grill party. Are there scaling issues, sure… but hierarchies have scaling issues, too, even insurmountable ones (mostly around information processing complexity and perverse incentives) and we don’t discount them on that basis. There’s a strong cultural bias and blind-spot, there.
In a nutshell, it’s the old leftist problem: We know exactly what’s wrong and also know how things ought to look like to be better, but details, man, details. In the end, in practice, there’s no perfect, there’s only less bad.
Thanks for the long reply. I also took the time to read the wp on mutualism. Proudhon has been on my reading list forever because of his great quotes, but other things were always more relevant.
What you’re describing about industry sounds perhasp like joint-ventures? It also sounds a lot like a cartel. Zeiss, along with other lens makers, was fined in 2010 by german antitrust enforcement because they had conspired to overcharge consumers.
I would never judge a school of ideas based on a few minutes of youtube. But I admit, I was thinking it and I would not have been motivated to spend more time on it without your reply.
I’m not concerned about stuff like putting a man on the moon. I’m thinking about feeding 8 billion (and rising) people, most of them living in cities. This takes an uninterrupted stream of food and water from strangers to strangers. As it goes today, you need fuel and spare parts, replacement machines. To grow the food you probably need fertilizer, maybe pesticides and so on (I’m not knowledgeable on agriculture).
We do this through markets. This decentralized method seems superior to central planning. Obviously, we can do very well without overt hierarchies. As we know, behind most markets is a government enforcing laws and possible intervening to impose fixes for perceived problems.
You may lose your farm if you don’t make enough money to pay the bills. This can be framed as simply circumstance; predefined rules operate without any individual decision and thus without hierarchy. Or one may point to the individuals involved who still make the choices to enforce contracts or laws in the specific case.
If the farm passes to someone who makes more money with it, then that hopefully means that it is better at meeting the needs of other people. We don’t need to discuss the flaws in the market system, but a system should have a way of ensuring that the meets of other people elsewhere - of strangers - are met. Scarce resources need to be put to a use that meets the needs of the many.
I have to think of crowd crush disasters. No one in such a crowd does anything very bad. They may even try to help other people if they can. They do the best they can with the information they have. But when 100s or 1000s of people are all pushing just a little, then the guys at the front get squished by the collective force.