I never said anything about abolishing property, just as I never said anything about abolishing money, even though both entities are just fictions with no basis in reality. But we do need to know that these things are fictions otherwise, we are captured by our own realism.
What you are basically asking is "How there be an economy without a market?"
The incentive for people to work, to engage in labor is the same as it has always been: the need to eat food and the pleasure of making things others will enjoy. Humans have, for thousands of years in all parts of the world been providing goods and services to one another without the kind of notion of property we have inherited from Roman Law:
"But by mid-century, Lewis Henry Morgan’s descriptions of the Six Nations of the Iroquois, among others, were widely published—and they made clear that the main economic institution among the Iroquois nations were longhouses where most goods were stockpiled and then allocated by women’s councils, and no one ever traded arrowheads for slabs of meat. Economists simply ignored this information."
Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Function). Kindle Edition.
So, Graeber offers one culture's solution to the quandry you pose.
Hey Malcolm! I’ve tried really hard to get clear about this small detail when it’s come to debate about anarchism vs socialism. In this example from Graeber, would an anarchist consider the women’s council a, governing body, and thus, an authority? Making that system socialist and not anarchistic? Always get caught up in that
Anarchism is a form of government. It is also "socialist," though "communalist" is a better term. While anarchists do set up governments, what they do not do is set up states.
It is important for us to understand the difference between government and state. The main point of departure between Marxists and Anarchists in the 19th century was over the necessity of the state. Anarchists dissented from Marx's insistence that the state as a necessary tool in the transition to his communist utopia.
The question comes, what is the difference between a government and a state? Glenn Wallace asserts that governments and states are not the same thing:
"What is “the state”? The first thing to say is that the state is not the government. This fact is of crucial significance because anarchism, contrary to its popular caricature, is not anti-government"
Wallis, Glenn. An Anarchist's Manifesto (p. 75). (Function). Kindle Edition.
He then answers the question, "What is a state? by citing the Encyclopedia Brittanica:
"[A state is] a form of human association distinguished from other social groups by its purpose, the establishment of order and security; its methods, the laws and their enforcement; its territory, the area of jurisdiction or geographic boundaries; and finally, by its sovereignty."
He then locates this modern concept of the state in the 16th century figures, Jean Bodin and Machiavelli, as well as Hobbes and Hegel. He summarizes his discussion of their ideas and clarifies the distinction between the state and the government.
"The state distinguishes itself from all other political entities through its assertion of ultimate sovereignty. The state, again, is not the government. The government is a temporary body that derives its power from the state."
Wallis, Glenn. An Anarchist's Manifesto (p. 77). (Function). Kindle Edition.
An anarchist government does not come from the state, as in liberalism as conceived by Locke, etc., Where does it come from? Āryadeva provides this answer: it comes from the consent of the governed, through consensus. He remarks that even kings rule by consensus, they just fail to recognize that fact.
The US, arrogates itself as the bastion of democracy. But it was a republic set up by wealthy English capitalists to a) gain control of tax revenue; b) continue to expand westward into native territory after the Crown forbade settlers to move into the Mississippi watershed, across the Eastern Continental Divide (1763); and c) to continue the practice of trade in the enslavement of human beings, which had also been abolished by the Crown in Britain itself (1772).
Because the architects of the Republic were educated, they first declared the principle of American sovereignty in the Declaration of Independence (1776), largely following Locke, and then created a government. In other words, a lawyer named Thomas Jefferson created American sovereignty by fiat. It is a fiction. There was never a time in American history where the government was created democratically. "We The People" meant English capitalists who held slaves and encroached Native lands. Those without property were not permitted to vote, also an idea from Locke. Nevertheless, a state also rules by consensus in the sense that as long as people permit it, it survives. But when, as in the case of British sovereignty over the colonies, that consensus is withdrawn, then that sovereignty is no more.
The women's councils, as mentioned by Graeber, are more like bursars in a monastic community. We can consider the original Buddhist renunciate sangha to be an early example of an anarchist society. Property was held communally, and decisions were reached through consensus. There were also bursars who managed the wealth of the renunciate community at large in each Vihara. These councils are not asserting sovereignty or ultimate power.
Native Americans in North America lived without a concept of sovereignty until they encountered Europeans. To be sure, they had territories and wars, but as we even see today, these regions are mainly defined through sacred places, often shared, and burial grounds where ancestors are interred. The idea of rigid territory was imposed on Native Americans, and other indigenous people by Europeans after the fiat development of the state in the 17th century.
Because we live in a state, and because so much of our discourse is driven by liberalism, it is almost impossible for us to imagine a "society without a state" contra Hobbes ("There is no society as distinct from the state"). When we trace why liberalism and statism are one and the same thing, it is because the power of kings was gradually being limited and so the notion of sovereignty was transferred from the person of the king to an abstraction of ultimate power created by jurists {aka lawyers). In other words, the state is yet another fiction, like money and property. We can go so far to say that perceiving such things as the state, money, and property is just like the imputed I-habit. They do not exist, but their imputation is very powerful in samsara.
Thank you been looking for a clear answer to this for years. I love the idea of communalist living. I to some extent think the social contract now versus historical communalist societies, is so different that it’s not possible to have a healthy communalist society without screening and excluding people who are not good citizens. Would love your thoughts on that. Thank you again for the time and thoughtfulness you put into these replies.
It has never been possible for people to live in any kind of community without evaluating the conduct of its citizens. As I said, anarchism is not anti-government. It is not anti-law. Every society must have a code of conduct and a means of governing itself.
I fully recognize that we cannot live in an anarchist society in the present day. But one can follow anarchist principles in one's life as much as one can. That has to suffice for now. Samsaric utopia is impossible.
Fascism, in its essence, is authoritarian, elitist, and nationalist. Liberalism is democratic (with qualifications), internationalist, and egalitarian (within limits). Obviously, from an anarchist perspective, the latter is much preferable to the former.
Sorry, me again… what you say about subsistence economies not using money was known by my wife in her childhood in 80s rural east Thailand. They could go for ages without using money, and had minimal amounts of it and no concern for it whatsoever. I won’t bother blathering on about their sense of contentment, lack of stress etc. beyond saying that pushing nations and peoples into the money system is *the* royal road to stress, corruption and misery.
I’ve held this view since middle school (although obviously not as refined) when I failed to reconcile Christian morality and the “progress” of humanity with genocide and slavery in the story of cowboys and Indians we were taught in Texas history class.
Another thing I’ve always thought—related to the idea that lacking imagination limits “reality”—is that we are actually the primitives, and trying to think outside this paradigm is like asking someone born deaf to imagine music. There must be an experience free of the conceptual hierarchies that dominate us and justify our one-up, one-down way of life, which assumes we all want basically the same things but that some of us are worth more than others in terms of what and how we are able to acquire. Realizing anything outside of this structure would be akin to acquiring a new sense faculty.
Sadly, for those who believe they benefit from our current modality, a life where the inner world supersedes its outer expression is unconscionable. We are like flies stuck in shit who, due to some far-distant karmic trace, dream of the taste of honey.
"What if the sort of people we like to imagine as simple and innocent are free of rulers, governments, bureaucracies, ruling classes and the like, not because they are lacking in imagination, but because they’re actually more imaginative than we are?" At some point the thought occured to me that First People are not at all primitive and underdeveloped, that in fact their societies are highly developed (especially socially). That is, that they did not fail to reach a particular stage (or age, as defined by Eurocentric models), but that they actually chose to develop the manner in which they lived. Contrary to popular opinion, First People did not live a harsh and precarious existence, but one of abundance and leisure. I thoroughly recommend Marshall Sahlins' book "Stone Age Economics" for data reagrding the quality of First Peoples lives.
"At some point the thought occured to me that First People are not at all primitive and underdeveloped, that in fact their societies are highly developed (especially socially)."
Yes, I completely agree. I think Graeber outlines this poverty of the European model of thinking, asserting that it was fabricated as response to what he and Wengrow term "the indigenous critique:
"
One thing that will quickly become clear is that the prevalent picture of history – shared by modern-day followers of Hobbes and Rousseau alike – has almost nothing to do with the facts. But to begin making sense of the new information that’s now before our eyes, it is not enough to compile and sift vast quantities of data. A conceptual shift is also required.
To make that shift means retracing some of the initial steps that led to our modern notion of social evolution: the idea that human societies could be arranged according to stages of development, each with their own characteristic technologies and forms of organization (hunter-gatherers, farmers, urban-industrial society, and so on). As we will see, such notions have their roots in a conservative backlash against critiques of European civilization, which began to gain ground in the early decades of the eighteenth century. The origins of that critique, however, lie not with the philosophers of the Enlightenment (much though they initially admired and imitated it), but with indigenous commentators and observers of European society, such as the Native American (Huron-Wendat) statesman Kandiaronk."
Graeber, David. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (p. 5). (Function). Kindle Edition.
His thesis is that we have never recovered from this mistaken view. It is one of the great historical lies Marxism too never questions.
It is important to note that Anarchists do not oppose personal property, they oppose private property, ie property used to extract profit via the exploitation of surplus labour value.
Well, ideally no one would work for wages But that is not the reality of our present situation. The problem is getting from here to there. Absent a source of limitless free energy, as in the Star Trek Universe, where there is no money, no one works for a wage, and everything one wants comes out of replicator, at least on a starship, we really need to imagine how that can possible. Right now it is difficult to imagine getting to that point. And even in the Star Trek Universe, they cannot imagine a society without hierarchy.
I have been pursuing the wisdom in the quote I just asked if you could find the source of.
"So long as people believe that some deserve to have more than others, there will be suffering." - Author Unknown.
This quote has haunted me for over a decade, now I intend to pass that on to you as well. I have come to the realization that money is a fungible token of deservedness. That one's income is in direct proportion to how much value one's occupation has as a metric measured by those that have money, power and property. In other words, one is given a salary based on some characteristic that measures deservedness. In out culture deservedness is a market function when considering money. (There are other measures of deservedness that are equally problematic as money)
So the belief that some deserve to have more than others is not just about deservedness, it is about the belief system that employs deservedness. In short, an ideology.
Deservedness ideology is what underlies all of the dominant cultures of today. It measures a person's moral worth in terms of money, the token of how deserving a person is.
I am looking for people to engage in dialog with about this, and considering my own Buddhist and Daoist background, and your article Apocalypse of Ignorance, It seems that you might be interested in the same topics.
May you be Safe, May you be Happy, May you be Healthy
"So long as people believe that some deserve to have more than others, there will be suffering." - Author Unknown
About 10 years ago, I came across this quote and promptly forgot who said it. While it seems to be of Buddhist origin, it could just as easily be Daoist (Taoist). Any thoughts?
New Buddhist Coalition for Democracy launches, issues Call to Action
“As Buddhists, we are called upon to witness, respond to, and resist the ongoing systematic destruction of norms and institutions that allow free societies to flourish,” the Buddhist Coalition for Democracy’s Call to Action reads.
Very interesting take on property and mental dualism - the new Elite Monarchy seem to be the antithesis of this. Also Great history lesson going back to 1493.
Great read Malcolm, in the interest of debate I would argue that catastrophism can be used as an excuse to further consolidate centralized power. I’m wondering if this apocalyptic discourse is a recycling of millenarianism and other eschatological impulses in our culture, especially in light of 20 century predictions that never eventuated. Is it that bad?
The question I have in response is this is: are we not in the throes of full scale environmental disaster that is worsening every year? And isn’t this state of affairs a result of ignorance?
Climate change can at once be real, worthy of action and not the end of times. Activists often characterize climate change as an existential risk, which reflects subjective values and worldviews rather than scientific judgments of real-world risks.
For example (throwing numbers around!) is a mass mortality event of 25% of the global population (roughly 2 billion ) likely from climate change? What published study has suggested the possibility of a singular mass-mortality event of this magnitude? Im not aware of evidence of an indirect mechanism, such as collapse of global food supplies or climate-mediated pathogenesis, that would result in such high rates of mortality. Even with cumulative losses over a century, mortality would not meet these thresholds. The emotive language used in climate change discourse (and other environmental issues), implies this scenario is only a few years away, the last quarter of the 20th C included many predictions of the above.
I wonder if this catastrophizing is explained by "innate fears" humans have relating to the natural environment, eg evolution has predisposed humans to fear of nature as survival instinct , that underlines this long existing cross cultural apocalypse narrative and may explain why worse CC scenarios are embraced with a fervor. Every extreme weather event is attributed to CC often ignoring that these events are still within the boundaries of past variability. In the case of wild fires in California how do you untangle increase population, urbanization / GDP , environmental regulations, fire service funding/training, management of forests/bushland vegetative fuels, increase in SAT from CO2 and how that warming might amplify or de-amplify Santa Ana Winds or drought ? You would have admit that attribution studies and claims could easily be swayed by bias. Some good news on micro plastics:
All I can say is that you’ve somewhat missed the point of my post. Now, onto facts: The weather is not the climate, but there is no doubt that the latter is having negative impacts on the former, just as there is no reasonable doubt that hydrocarbon extraction is poisoning our water, air, soil, and bodies. There are many worlds that are ending in the present environmental state of affairs, all of them due to,our ignorance, greed, and even malice, for instance in the vigorous repression of indigenous peoples. Now, if one has no problem living in a concrete monoculture, sure, climate change is no big deal, as long as one doesn’t live to near coastlines. Part of the climate crisis is people moving into sensitive terrains, where human presence exacerbates normal climate patterns through creating conditions for accelerated erosion, etc. I’m 63, all of the sugar maple trees where I live are falling apart because it is becoming too warm. I am talking about trees that I have observed for 56 years. There are ticks where even twenty years ago, there were virtually none. You may not take these anecdotes seriously, but our world is heading towards environmental,collapse, and whether it happens in 50 years or 500 makes little difference. As the cliche goes, there is no Planet B.
Fantastic piece, thank you. It looks like it will all collapse very soon… but what happens then is sobering to contemplate…. Many pundits are saying that the collapse is being engineered to force us on to CBDCs and total surveillance capitalism.
Are you still on Facebook, Malcolm? I tried to search for you there, but no trace… did you delete your account?
It won't collapse that soon, well, lets hope not, because it will be a bloody violent mess and no one is prepared for that; at least, certainly not me. As for Meta, I have scrubbed myself from all Meta products. I can only be found here for the time being, that is until Substack is eventually compromised by a buyout they cannot refuse.
As for Central Bank Digital Currencies, this is a bad idea, which is why it will never happen. It will crash the economy. Money is already created by digital fiat, key strokes on keyboard, whenever the Federal Government needs to spend money it is not getting from taxes (which is most of the time). CBDCs are like the gold standard, and we left the gold standard because bullion-based currencies are a bad idea and always have been.
Why are bullion based currencies a bad idea? Is it because, in restraining government spending (because money value is locked down to gold availability) governments cannot finance their spending plans? Would be interested to know why you think that. I always thought it basically kept govts “honest” (ha ha - well, financially at least…)
Bullion-based currencies are a bad idea, for example, because they depend on the stable value of a rare metal, such as gold. This makes such currencies very vulnerable to inflation:
"When gold and silver from the Americas was exported abroad, the effects on the rest of the world were tremendous. In Europe, and in Spain especially, the imports of these precious metals caused lasting inflation. In China, foreign supply overcame a previous scarcity of silver, transforming the composition of the local money supply. In time, Spanish and Mexican pesos came to be widely used in trade with China and the coins even became ubiquitous. Indeed, the Chinese yuan was even based on this Spanish-American coin."
Interesting, thanks. So that makes me wonder why the BRICS etc countries are hoarding so much gold - it's for a gold-backed currency, no? Many ppl say that's unlikely to work across such disparate countries, finance cultures and geographic regions (hell, not even the Euro has worked in closely-linked Europe), so I wonder why they are hoarding.
One guess is that the economists in these countries do not really understand economics, since they do not understand money. The glaring hole in neoclassical economics is their exclusion of money. This is why we have so many financial crises.
By definition, a "right wing anarchism" cannot exist since anarchism is based on communalism and by definition the right wing thought spectrum runs from liberalism based on property rights and so called "free markets" to absolute monarchy at the far end. There can be socially conservative anarchists, however, people opposed to same sex marriage, abortion, and so on, who nevertheless accept the essential anarchist values outlined above. Libertarianism as an ideology is state-based, it simply holds that the core function of the state is solely to protect markets and borders. An classical and sophisticated statement of libertarianism is Robert Nozick's "Anarchy, State, and Utopia." Worth reading.
Hi Thomas
I never said anything about abolishing property, just as I never said anything about abolishing money, even though both entities are just fictions with no basis in reality. But we do need to know that these things are fictions otherwise, we are captured by our own realism.
What you are basically asking is "How there be an economy without a market?"
The incentive for people to work, to engage in labor is the same as it has always been: the need to eat food and the pleasure of making things others will enjoy. Humans have, for thousands of years in all parts of the world been providing goods and services to one another without the kind of notion of property we have inherited from Roman Law:
"But by mid-century, Lewis Henry Morgan’s descriptions of the Six Nations of the Iroquois, among others, were widely published—and they made clear that the main economic institution among the Iroquois nations were longhouses where most goods were stockpiled and then allocated by women’s councils, and no one ever traded arrowheads for slabs of meat. Economists simply ignored this information."
Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Function). Kindle Edition.
So, Graeber offers one culture's solution to the quandry you pose.
Hey Malcolm! I’ve tried really hard to get clear about this small detail when it’s come to debate about anarchism vs socialism. In this example from Graeber, would an anarchist consider the women’s council a, governing body, and thus, an authority? Making that system socialist and not anarchistic? Always get caught up in that
Anarchism is a form of government. It is also "socialist," though "communalist" is a better term. While anarchists do set up governments, what they do not do is set up states.
It is important for us to understand the difference between government and state. The main point of departure between Marxists and Anarchists in the 19th century was over the necessity of the state. Anarchists dissented from Marx's insistence that the state as a necessary tool in the transition to his communist utopia.
The question comes, what is the difference between a government and a state? Glenn Wallace asserts that governments and states are not the same thing:
"What is “the state”? The first thing to say is that the state is not the government. This fact is of crucial significance because anarchism, contrary to its popular caricature, is not anti-government"
Wallis, Glenn. An Anarchist's Manifesto (p. 75). (Function). Kindle Edition.
He then answers the question, "What is a state? by citing the Encyclopedia Brittanica:
"[A state is] a form of human association distinguished from other social groups by its purpose, the establishment of order and security; its methods, the laws and their enforcement; its territory, the area of jurisdiction or geographic boundaries; and finally, by its sovereignty."
He then locates this modern concept of the state in the 16th century figures, Jean Bodin and Machiavelli, as well as Hobbes and Hegel. He summarizes his discussion of their ideas and clarifies the distinction between the state and the government.
"The state distinguishes itself from all other political entities through its assertion of ultimate sovereignty. The state, again, is not the government. The government is a temporary body that derives its power from the state."
Wallis, Glenn. An Anarchist's Manifesto (p. 77). (Function). Kindle Edition.
An anarchist government does not come from the state, as in liberalism as conceived by Locke, etc., Where does it come from? Āryadeva provides this answer: it comes from the consent of the governed, through consensus. He remarks that even kings rule by consensus, they just fail to recognize that fact.
The US, arrogates itself as the bastion of democracy. But it was a republic set up by wealthy English capitalists to a) gain control of tax revenue; b) continue to expand westward into native territory after the Crown forbade settlers to move into the Mississippi watershed, across the Eastern Continental Divide (1763); and c) to continue the practice of trade in the enslavement of human beings, which had also been abolished by the Crown in Britain itself (1772).
Because the architects of the Republic were educated, they first declared the principle of American sovereignty in the Declaration of Independence (1776), largely following Locke, and then created a government. In other words, a lawyer named Thomas Jefferson created American sovereignty by fiat. It is a fiction. There was never a time in American history where the government was created democratically. "We The People" meant English capitalists who held slaves and encroached Native lands. Those without property were not permitted to vote, also an idea from Locke. Nevertheless, a state also rules by consensus in the sense that as long as people permit it, it survives. But when, as in the case of British sovereignty over the colonies, that consensus is withdrawn, then that sovereignty is no more.
The women's councils, as mentioned by Graeber, are more like bursars in a monastic community. We can consider the original Buddhist renunciate sangha to be an early example of an anarchist society. Property was held communally, and decisions were reached through consensus. There were also bursars who managed the wealth of the renunciate community at large in each Vihara. These councils are not asserting sovereignty or ultimate power.
Native Americans in North America lived without a concept of sovereignty until they encountered Europeans. To be sure, they had territories and wars, but as we even see today, these regions are mainly defined through sacred places, often shared, and burial grounds where ancestors are interred. The idea of rigid territory was imposed on Native Americans, and other indigenous people by Europeans after the fiat development of the state in the 17th century.
Because we live in a state, and because so much of our discourse is driven by liberalism, it is almost impossible for us to imagine a "society without a state" contra Hobbes ("There is no society as distinct from the state"). When we trace why liberalism and statism are one and the same thing, it is because the power of kings was gradually being limited and so the notion of sovereignty was transferred from the person of the king to an abstraction of ultimate power created by jurists {aka lawyers). In other words, the state is yet another fiction, like money and property. We can go so far to say that perceiving such things as the state, money, and property is just like the imputed I-habit. They do not exist, but their imputation is very powerful in samsara.
Thank you been looking for a clear answer to this for years. I love the idea of communalist living. I to some extent think the social contract now versus historical communalist societies, is so different that it’s not possible to have a healthy communalist society without screening and excluding people who are not good citizens. Would love your thoughts on that. Thank you again for the time and thoughtfulness you put into these replies.
It has never been possible for people to live in any kind of community without evaluating the conduct of its citizens. As I said, anarchism is not anti-government. It is not anti-law. Every society must have a code of conduct and a means of governing itself.
I fully recognize that we cannot live in an anarchist society in the present day. But one can follow anarchist principles in one's life as much as one can. That has to suffice for now. Samsaric utopia is impossible.
Fascism, in its essence, is authoritarian, elitist, and nationalist. Liberalism is democratic (with qualifications), internationalist, and egalitarian (within limits). Obviously, from an anarchist perspective, the latter is much preferable to the former.
Sorry, me again… what you say about subsistence economies not using money was known by my wife in her childhood in 80s rural east Thailand. They could go for ages without using money, and had minimal amounts of it and no concern for it whatsoever. I won’t bother blathering on about their sense of contentment, lack of stress etc. beyond saying that pushing nations and peoples into the money system is *the* royal road to stress, corruption and misery.
Thanks for writing this
I’ve held this view since middle school (although obviously not as refined) when I failed to reconcile Christian morality and the “progress” of humanity with genocide and slavery in the story of cowboys and Indians we were taught in Texas history class.
Another thing I’ve always thought—related to the idea that lacking imagination limits “reality”—is that we are actually the primitives, and trying to think outside this paradigm is like asking someone born deaf to imagine music. There must be an experience free of the conceptual hierarchies that dominate us and justify our one-up, one-down way of life, which assumes we all want basically the same things but that some of us are worth more than others in terms of what and how we are able to acquire. Realizing anything outside of this structure would be akin to acquiring a new sense faculty.
Sadly, for those who believe they benefit from our current modality, a life where the inner world supersedes its outer expression is unconscionable. We are like flies stuck in shit who, due to some far-distant karmic trace, dream of the taste of honey.
"What if the sort of people we like to imagine as simple and innocent are free of rulers, governments, bureaucracies, ruling classes and the like, not because they are lacking in imagination, but because they’re actually more imaginative than we are?" At some point the thought occured to me that First People are not at all primitive and underdeveloped, that in fact their societies are highly developed (especially socially). That is, that they did not fail to reach a particular stage (or age, as defined by Eurocentric models), but that they actually chose to develop the manner in which they lived. Contrary to popular opinion, First People did not live a harsh and precarious existence, but one of abundance and leisure. I thoroughly recommend Marshall Sahlins' book "Stone Age Economics" for data reagrding the quality of First Peoples lives.
"At some point the thought occured to me that First People are not at all primitive and underdeveloped, that in fact their societies are highly developed (especially socially)."
Yes, I completely agree. I think Graeber outlines this poverty of the European model of thinking, asserting that it was fabricated as response to what he and Wengrow term "the indigenous critique:
"
One thing that will quickly become clear is that the prevalent picture of history – shared by modern-day followers of Hobbes and Rousseau alike – has almost nothing to do with the facts. But to begin making sense of the new information that’s now before our eyes, it is not enough to compile and sift vast quantities of data. A conceptual shift is also required.
To make that shift means retracing some of the initial steps that led to our modern notion of social evolution: the idea that human societies could be arranged according to stages of development, each with their own characteristic technologies and forms of organization (hunter-gatherers, farmers, urban-industrial society, and so on). As we will see, such notions have their roots in a conservative backlash against critiques of European civilization, which began to gain ground in the early decades of the eighteenth century. The origins of that critique, however, lie not with the philosophers of the Enlightenment (much though they initially admired and imitated it), but with indigenous commentators and observers of European society, such as the Native American (Huron-Wendat) statesman Kandiaronk."
Graeber, David. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (p. 5). (Function). Kindle Edition.
His thesis is that we have never recovered from this mistaken view. It is one of the great historical lies Marxism too never questions.
It is important to note that Anarchists do not oppose personal property, they oppose private property, ie property used to extract profit via the exploitation of surplus labour value.
Well, ideally no one would work for wages But that is not the reality of our present situation. The problem is getting from here to there. Absent a source of limitless free energy, as in the Star Trek Universe, where there is no money, no one works for a wage, and everything one wants comes out of replicator, at least on a starship, we really need to imagine how that can possible. Right now it is difficult to imagine getting to that point. And even in the Star Trek Universe, they cannot imagine a society without hierarchy.
Imagine there's no heaven...
Glenn Wallis is amazing. A good friend too.
Malcom.
I have been pursuing the wisdom in the quote I just asked if you could find the source of.
"So long as people believe that some deserve to have more than others, there will be suffering." - Author Unknown.
This quote has haunted me for over a decade, now I intend to pass that on to you as well. I have come to the realization that money is a fungible token of deservedness. That one's income is in direct proportion to how much value one's occupation has as a metric measured by those that have money, power and property. In other words, one is given a salary based on some characteristic that measures deservedness. In out culture deservedness is a market function when considering money. (There are other measures of deservedness that are equally problematic as money)
So the belief that some deserve to have more than others is not just about deservedness, it is about the belief system that employs deservedness. In short, an ideology.
Deservedness ideology is what underlies all of the dominant cultures of today. It measures a person's moral worth in terms of money, the token of how deserving a person is.
I am looking for people to engage in dialog with about this, and considering my own Buddhist and Daoist background, and your article Apocalypse of Ignorance, It seems that you might be interested in the same topics.
May you be Safe, May you be Happy, May you be Healthy
Hi Ronald, I have no idea what the source of your quote might be.
"So long as people believe that some deserve to have more than others, there will be suffering." - Author Unknown
About 10 years ago, I came across this quote and promptly forgot who said it. While it seems to be of Buddhist origin, it could just as easily be Daoist (Taoist). Any thoughts?
New Buddhist Coalition for Democracy launches, issues Call to Action
“As Buddhists, we are called upon to witness, respond to, and resist the ongoing systematic destruction of norms and institutions that allow free societies to flourish,” the Buddhist Coalition for Democracy’s Call to Action reads.
Lion’s Roar Magazine:
https://substack.com/@johnshane1/note/c-103768094
Very well written and precise. Everyone needs to read this. We don’t need to take action.
Very interesting take on property and mental dualism - the new Elite Monarchy seem to be the antithesis of this. Also Great history lesson going back to 1493.
Great read Malcolm, in the interest of debate I would argue that catastrophism can be used as an excuse to further consolidate centralized power. I’m wondering if this apocalyptic discourse is a recycling of millenarianism and other eschatological impulses in our culture, especially in light of 20 century predictions that never eventuated. Is it that bad?
The question I have in response is this is: are we not in the throes of full scale environmental disaster that is worsening every year? And isn’t this state of affairs a result of ignorance?
Sorry I had to edit it :
Climate change can at once be real, worthy of action and not the end of times. Activists often characterize climate change as an existential risk, which reflects subjective values and worldviews rather than scientific judgments of real-world risks.
For example (throwing numbers around!) is a mass mortality event of 25% of the global population (roughly 2 billion ) likely from climate change? What published study has suggested the possibility of a singular mass-mortality event of this magnitude? Im not aware of evidence of an indirect mechanism, such as collapse of global food supplies or climate-mediated pathogenesis, that would result in such high rates of mortality. Even with cumulative losses over a century, mortality would not meet these thresholds. The emotive language used in climate change discourse (and other environmental issues), implies this scenario is only a few years away, the last quarter of the 20th C included many predictions of the above.
I wonder if this catastrophizing is explained by "innate fears" humans have relating to the natural environment, eg evolution has predisposed humans to fear of nature as survival instinct , that underlines this long existing cross cultural apocalypse narrative and may explain why worse CC scenarios are embraced with a fervor. Every extreme weather event is attributed to CC often ignoring that these events are still within the boundaries of past variability. In the case of wild fires in California how do you untangle increase population, urbanization / GDP , environmental regulations, fire service funding/training, management of forests/bushland vegetative fuels, increase in SAT from CO2 and how that warming might amplify or de-amplify Santa Ana Winds or drought ? You would have admit that attribution studies and claims could easily be swayed by bias. Some good news on micro plastics:
https://www.nature.com/nature-index/article/10.1126/sciadv.aay8493
All I can say is that you’ve somewhat missed the point of my post. Now, onto facts: The weather is not the climate, but there is no doubt that the latter is having negative impacts on the former, just as there is no reasonable doubt that hydrocarbon extraction is poisoning our water, air, soil, and bodies. There are many worlds that are ending in the present environmental state of affairs, all of them due to,our ignorance, greed, and even malice, for instance in the vigorous repression of indigenous peoples. Now, if one has no problem living in a concrete monoculture, sure, climate change is no big deal, as long as one doesn’t live to near coastlines. Part of the climate crisis is people moving into sensitive terrains, where human presence exacerbates normal climate patterns through creating conditions for accelerated erosion, etc. I’m 63, all of the sugar maple trees where I live are falling apart because it is becoming too warm. I am talking about trees that I have observed for 56 years. There are ticks where even twenty years ago, there were virtually none. You may not take these anecdotes seriously, but our world is heading towards environmental,collapse, and whether it happens in 50 years or 500 makes little difference. As the cliche goes, there is no Planet B.
Fantastic piece, thank you. It looks like it will all collapse very soon… but what happens then is sobering to contemplate…. Many pundits are saying that the collapse is being engineered to force us on to CBDCs and total surveillance capitalism.
Are you still on Facebook, Malcolm? I tried to search for you there, but no trace… did you delete your account?
It won't collapse that soon, well, lets hope not, because it will be a bloody violent mess and no one is prepared for that; at least, certainly not me. As for Meta, I have scrubbed myself from all Meta products. I can only be found here for the time being, that is until Substack is eventually compromised by a buyout they cannot refuse.
As for Central Bank Digital Currencies, this is a bad idea, which is why it will never happen. It will crash the economy. Money is already created by digital fiat, key strokes on keyboard, whenever the Federal Government needs to spend money it is not getting from taxes (which is most of the time). CBDCs are like the gold standard, and we left the gold standard because bullion-based currencies are a bad idea and always have been.
Why are bullion based currencies a bad idea? Is it because, in restraining government spending (because money value is locked down to gold availability) governments cannot finance their spending plans? Would be interested to know why you think that. I always thought it basically kept govts “honest” (ha ha - well, financially at least…)
Bullion-based currencies are a bad idea, for example, because they depend on the stable value of a rare metal, such as gold. This makes such currencies very vulnerable to inflation:
"When gold and silver from the Americas was exported abroad, the effects on the rest of the world were tremendous. In Europe, and in Spain especially, the imports of these precious metals caused lasting inflation. In China, foreign supply overcame a previous scarcity of silver, transforming the composition of the local money supply. In time, Spanish and Mexican pesos came to be widely used in trade with China and the coins even became ubiquitous. Indeed, the Chinese yuan was even based on this Spanish-American coin."
https://tontinecoffeehouse.com/2024/07/08/pesos-in-china/
As it stands now, there isn't enough gold in the world to back US currency (27 trillion dollars) let alone the currency of the rest of the world.
Interesting, thanks. So that makes me wonder why the BRICS etc countries are hoarding so much gold - it's for a gold-backed currency, no? Many ppl say that's unlikely to work across such disparate countries, finance cultures and geographic regions (hell, not even the Euro has worked in closely-linked Europe), so I wonder why they are hoarding.
One guess is that the economists in these countries do not really understand economics, since they do not understand money. The glaring hole in neoclassical economics is their exclusion of money. This is why we have so many financial crises.
I don't know about the others, but there is a rumor floating around that Putin sold 100 tons of gold out of the Russian treasury.
By definition, a "right wing anarchism" cannot exist since anarchism is based on communalism and by definition the right wing thought spectrum runs from liberalism based on property rights and so called "free markets" to absolute monarchy at the far end. There can be socially conservative anarchists, however, people opposed to same sex marriage, abortion, and so on, who nevertheless accept the essential anarchist values outlined above. Libertarianism as an ideology is state-based, it simply holds that the core function of the state is solely to protect markets and borders. An classical and sophisticated statement of libertarianism is Robert Nozick's "Anarchy, State, and Utopia." Worth reading.
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