A line isn’t significantly better than a point when you’re talking about summarising away the infinitely many dimensions of possible narratives. Why not just compress all works of speculative fiction into a pair of coordinates?
It all smacks to me of the sort of dorm-room conversation where someone describes a book to someone else who’s twitching to interrupt with “oh right, yeah, communism, I know that word” and subsequently pretend to have read the book.
The book is an expansion of an essay of the same name the author wrote several years ago. I haven’t read the book yet, but the essay should be a pretty good summary of what’s in the book.
I’ll have to read this, but I already see some major problems with it. The price system isn’t capitalism. Capitalism doesn’t exist except as a rebranding of the aristocratic, elitist death cult of systemic scarcity. Nor does socialism imply going “beyond” the price system, nor does it require scarcity.
Something’s missing here.
Sure, you can have cooperatives within a capitalist system.
Note that the Zapatista co-ops are still selling and being paid by trade from that system. Of course, the Soviet Union and other nations traded and sold as well. But still the bulk of their resources were supposed to come from within that system, and they were supposed to be at least mostly independent from capitalist nations. So I don’t see the Zapatista coffee cooperatives as a full communism, from that angle. Any more than a family might be considered a full communism, if the adults must earn wages from capitalist ventures to keep the family going.
Also from a quick googling, I have yet to see that all of the Zapatista workers are paid the same amount and have the same resources - which also seems to be a necessary part of communism.
So from that, I think the Zapatista coffee cooperatives are more of an example of a trade syndicate, so at most Democratic Socialism, or perhaps Anarcho-Syndicalism.
The author chose them to be intentionally provocative, as imagined potential futures both require and are shaped by present political projects. So linking possible outcomes to "freighted one-word labels’ in the present is necessary to get people to think about how we go about building those other narratives with the raw materials we have at hand. The scenarios he gives are meant to be broad and not exhaustive, but they’re all meant to reinforce the point that achieving the world we want is primarily a political issue.
It’s not the same as what you just said.
Anarcho-syndicalism IS communism. That’s why the anarcho-syndicalist flag is identical to the anarcho-communist one.
But there’s two lines, creating a grid.
why not both?
No, Anarcho-syndicalism is not communism. Among other important differences,
“In contrast with other bodies of thought, particularly with Marxism–Leninism, anarcho-syndicalists accept the denial of a workers’ state, or a state which acts in the interests of workers, as opposed to those of the powerful, and posit that any state with the intention of empowering the workers will inevitably work to empower itself or the existing elite at the expense of the workers. Reflecting the anarchist philosophy from which it draws its primary inspiration, anarcho-syndicalism holds to the idea that power corrupts.”
OK, I have now completed the set.
I have had different people here tell me that my political beliefs are neither libertarian, anarchist, socialist or communist.
As all of you seem to know better than 200 years of political theorists, can you please tell me what my beliefs actually are?
Oh and go and tell everyone at libcom.org. I’m sure they’ll love you for telling them that you are right and they are wrong.
I don’t know if we are necessarily “right”, but, come on, they are libertarians . . . they ARE wrong. QED
Maybe your beliefs really are none of the above. : ) Or alternately, a mix of all of them.
Personally, I consider myself a rational anarchist. Which is not an Ayn Randite, libertarian, An-Cap or similar.
But in science fiction, alternatives to market economies abound
Does the “equality and abundance” type future actually require an alternative to some sort of market economy though? There are pretty good reasons to think centrally planned economies won’t work, and “market economy” is a broad enough notion that it still leaves room for systems very different from our current one, like market socialism. Even a substantial basic income with a market economy would be very different from what we have today, since no one would be forced to take a job they don’t really like just to avoid becoming destitute. And in an age of great abundance where all mass-produced goods were made by automated factories or 3D printers that could themselves self-replicate, mass-produced goods would tend to become very cheap (imagine you have a 3D printer that can make a copy of itself, and the cost of the raw materials and energy needed come to $100–if lots of different people have the idea to make and sell them, competition is going to drive the price down to barely more than $100). So the level of taxation needed to give everyone a basic income that would allow for a pretty comfortable middle-class lifestyle might not even be very large.
Maybe the robot factories would even be run by the government rather than private corporations–we could call this “robosocialism”–but there would still be a market economy for intellectual property, like computer programs and works of art and blueprints for physical goods that could be fed to the robot factories (or home 3D printers). And if the main money to be made is in creation of intellectual property, for the most part expensive “means of production” aren’t needed for this, just creators who know what they’re doing along with some widely available tools like home computers. In the case of a current IP product like software, I think the main reason the system is still dominated by capitalists who pay programmers a salary and then own the rights to profits from the software, rather than more market-socialist-like firms where the programmers all get a share of the profits, is that the average programmer needs a monthly salary while the capitalists can afford to put money into a project that won’t be finished and start turning a profit for years. But if everyone was receiving a comfortable basic income, this would no longer be true–and so in this case I imagine we might see a sort of natural transition to something closer to market socialism where corporations with huge amounts of capital to spare didn’t play such a central role, and profits from new art, programs and technological patents mainly went to the “workers” that came up with them.
Libertarians are so frustrating to me. In some ways it seems that they almost get it - but they just seem to entirely resist the obvious fact that corporations can be just as tyrannical and abusive as any other human institution.
I see no stopping the rich from getting richer, gaining more power over government and media, and forcing our laws to benefit them above all others. The rest of the populace will fall back on private communes, pooling money to buy cheap land, provide home-schooling and vegetables, and probably trade with other communes. So a bifurcated world of ultra-wealthy royalty and small self-sufficient villages. Kinda like the late middle ages.
Anything automated is the opposite of anarchism.
Pure capitalism, (everything available to exploitation), with no federal government is also a form of anarchism.
But I dont think this is neo-liberalism.
I don’t see automation as the opposite of anarchism. From what I can see, Anarchism isn’t against order, it’s just against masters. Anarchism is against groups that exercise oppression over other groups, and is against individual people having power over other people who effectively can’t be removed from their positions or held accountable.
edit: clarity
A fan favourite but boy, what a creep. He should’ve been kicked out of starfleet for making those holodeck fantasies using the likenesses of crew members… and then sent to therapy.
All I want is to call myself libertarian-communist like Joseph Déjacque did 160 years ago (100 years before any capitalist called themselves libertarian), or libertarian-socialist, or even anarcho-communist, and not have the conversation turn into the Hague Congress.
Karl Marx didn’t invent communism, and the US Libertarian party did not invent libertarianism (They did hijack the term though)
That sounds like feudalism. If people are controlled by others through social laws then it is not anarchy.
