(Part 2) Top products from r/Anarchy101

Great post OP! I haven't seen the video in question (sorry) but as an anarchist I do feel confident in giving some of my views. First off, there are no right answers to these questions. Even within the same school of anarco-socialism, you'll likely get different answers to these questions from different people (ask 10 anarcho-socialists and you'll get 11 different answers) and in my view, that's a strength, not a weakness. However because I haven't seen the video, I don't know how much of what I'm about to say is addressed by it. I'm sorry!

I personally don't believe that lazy workers are as much a problem as you believe they will be and I base this on my personal experience. I have visited anarco-communes and also "temporary utopias" like climate camps and anti-globalization convergences. And, no, they were by no means perfect. In anarchist households dishes often don't get done to the extent that it's kind of a running joke. But there are lots of reasons for that. Houses aren't designed with communal living in mind. Under capitalism most of us suffer from depression and anxiety and it's hard to be motivated with that kind of thing when you're worried about your next deadline at your unfulfilling job or paying the bills by the end of the month. A more collectivist society could do things like ensuring no one ever has to do menial jobs alone (even by the simple provision of bigger sinks and bigger kitchens--ever notice how classically houses in western society were designed for use by a single-occupancy gendered labour force; my kitchen is barely twice the size of my wardrobe, but the living room, where the man of the house was expected to spend his off-labour time, is huge). And ultimately I would expect that anarchist societies would not only have a good working understanding of the sexism of gendered labour (most menial jobs are traditionally performed by women) but also be more lenient around all labour. Like maybe you can skip the washing up for that day if it's your period or if you're nursing, both of which are labour neglected by capitalism, just to choose a stereotypical and thought-provoking example. Going back to my own experiences, there were plenty of problems with places like the convergences and anarchist camps, but they never actually suffered from not having clean toilets because people understood that cleaning them was as important an activity as any other type of labour which needed to be undertaken. Ultimately, I agree with the point raised by the WNDWU (youtube link--above): "So you're asking me, who will do the dishes when the revolution comes? Well I do my own dishes now and I'll do my own dishes then. Funny that it's always the ones who don't, who ask that fucking question."

There are a lot of different thoughts about how economics can work in anarchist societies at large-scale. Most likely there would be several different economic models, possibly even within the municipal area, but certainly within different ones. In the future, Kim Stanley Robinson describes a system where small consumptive goods are created in situ, then optionally exchanged as gifts with traders. Underlying this, potassium is used as an exchange of hard currency and reserve, regulating the flow of resources throughout for the production of goods the solar system. Meanwhile, Ursula Le Guin envisaged a society organised by collectives (syndicals) where work was undertaken out of a sense of duty. Less speculatively, David Graeber has done a lot of good work documenting the use of gift economies throughout human history and it's hard to believe there's nothing there, given the overwelming preponderance and importance of gift economies to advanced human societies so far.

But I myself am not an advocate of gift economies. Michael Albert and co. have done a lot of writing on how non-gift participatory or democratic economies could be run and I highly recommend checking out his work. Albert's work is pretty much the closest to what I would like to see myself, I think and he also talks a lot about the psychological benefits of job rotation, e.g. a system where doctors also clean toilets. There is also a form of anarchism known as mutualism in which productive work is carried out by coops instead of companies or conglomerates owned by shareholders or an owner or owners. A coop can be structured along purely democratic grounds, where every decision requires a consensus meeting from relevant workers, through the whole gamut to a system with middle managers and bosses basically being like a company except that the workers form and control the board instead of vice versa. After producing goods, they are exchanged through a free-market mechanism as under capitalism. I myself am not a mutualist but really even mutualism would be a huge step forward compared to what we have under the current system, where productive labour is essentially organized by unaccountable and undemocratic corporate oligarchies.

The invention thing is quite interesting, I think. Just as in an anarchist society you might get several economic systems, so today we actually have several economic models under capitalism as well. One which I am quite familiar with as a software engineer is the open-source model of software development. Last year I invented a new and pioneering method for installing Wordpress websites using a fairly obscure collection of deployment software. The mechanism I invented is so niche that even I struggle to develop the enthusiasm to explain its benefits even to people within the same field but I was excited enough to develop it that I spent three months of my free-time doing that, and now that it is done I am still pleased with the effort even though no one uses it. So basically I invented something and released it for free which was the very definition of a project for which I receive no thanks: no economic compensation, no fame within my professional circles, etc. And yet I was still happy to create and distribute it for free, even allowing others to modify it if they found it useful. So I think that when you are very invested in a particular problem field it's actually very easy to develop the enthusiasm to figure out an invention for a better way of doing something, even if you know you'll receive nothing for it but the personal satisfaction of having simplified a particular problem. And of course in an anarchist society you could expect that most techniques and methods are open-source, and able to be modified and improved upon for free by any interested party. Receiving fame among one's professional peer group, being invited to prestigious conferences within your field to talk about your invention, maybe even being interviewed by the news media--these are all extremely good motivations for creating something, arguably a lot stronger than money actually. (Considering most invention these days is IP-protected and ultimately owned by corporations, I'm kind of surprised the myth of the solo inventor made rich by his own success succeeds actually.) And this happens a lot in software. The most common operating system software globally across all devices? By far, Linux. Windows only leads in the desktop, and that only because of entrenched capitalist user lock-in paradigms.

Below is my usual list of introductory material. It is not really what you want. I like your idea of a reading list which starts from the fundamentals, but I don't know of any. In your case I would recommend the first volume of Marx's Capital which is surprisingly accessible and still a very good description of capitalism. If you are unfamiliar with Marxist terminology, reading something like David Harvey's Reading Marx's Capital along with it could be useful.

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Online introductions:

• The Wikipedia entry for libertarian socialism actually gives a pretty good overview.
  
  
• An Anarchist FAQ is dense but has good material -- it is especially good at differentiating traditional anarchism from US-style libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism. You will find many references to other works in the FAQ.
  
  Books:
  
  
• The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin. It is old, a classic, but it provides examples rather than formal/philosophic arguments so it is still quite readable and relevant today. It will give you a good idea of where modern anarchist communists are coming from.
  
  
• A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn. It is long and sometimes repetitive, but each chapter can be read independently so you don't need to read it cover-to-cover. It provides a view of American history from a working-class perspective including the many contributions of anarchist and other socialist movements.
  
  
• A book like Paul Eltzbacher's The Great Anarchists: Ideas and Teachings of Seven Major Thinkers which provides an overview of the various anarchist founding philosophers is a good idea.
  
  
• I think Peter Gelderloos writes clear introductory material. I've not read his latest (The Failure of Nonviolence), but you can read Anarchy Works online.
  
  
• John Holloway's Crack Capitalism [pdf] is an introduction to a libertarian Marxist approach to resisting capitalism and the state. It might be too "lifestyle" for some people's tastes (he suggests reading a book in a park instead of going to work as an anti-capitalist action, for example).
  
  
• It's a bit outside the main thrust of the anarchist tradition (which is often focused on class struggle), but one of my favorite books is Crispin Sartwell's Against the State: An Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory which provides counter arguments to several justifications for states, especially the various contract theories.
  
  Other reading guides:
  
  
• Phoenix Class War Council's Recommended Reading
  
  
• Libcom.org's reading guide

This is something I originally learned in undergraduate economics classes. I hope they still teach it and, if so, it would probably be introduced in most online courses on modern economics at some point. Unfortunately, my primary reference since then was a Berkeley undergraduate course that was turned over to iTunes a couple years ago (which I refuse to use or endorse), so I can't reference the more comprehensive and professional history of the studies that lead to such conclusions.

In brief from what I recall, econometric studies by folks like Mansfield (Mansfield, E. et al., 1991. Academic research and industrial innovation. Research Policy 20, 1–12.
Mansfield, E., 1998. Academic research and industrial innovation: an update of empirical findings. Research Policy 26, 773–776. Mansfield, E., Lee, J.Y., 1996. The modern university: contributor to industrial innovation and recipient of industrial R&D support. Research Policy 25, 1047–1058.) have tried to put a quantitative number on the exact rate of return for public investment in basic research and pegged it around 28%, suggesting that it is underfunded in most modern economies despite outperforming general private R&D investment over time. However, these kinds of studies have been widely considered as much too limited in their scope, with many authors suggesting that they neglect less quantifiable benefits such as trained researchers, improved instrumentation and methodologies, the development of a tacit knowledge, and fostering of national and international networks. This suggests that the social rate of return for public investment is probably much higher than the capital rate of return, but also that it is inextricably complicated thus nearly to impossible to accurately tease out. The best summary and jumping point I have at the moment at the moment is on page 159 of Technology, R&D, and the Economy, the conclusion to Chapter 6 by Bronwyn Hall, which can be found on page 20 of this pdf as it outlines and compared the private rate of return to that of public investment by multiple proposed metrics. I hope that helps.

Grab yourself a copy of Anarchy and Christianity by Jaques Ellul. The guy is brilliant and lays out the how and why of being a Christian and an Anarchist, and will give you some serious ammo when you have to explain it to people.

He covers it from both the perspective of being an Anarchist, and not so much trying to convince the Anarchist to be a Christian, but why they should allow Christians among their ranks, and why it makes sense that Christians should be Anarchists, and illustrates the Bible as the source for Christian Anarchy. It's quite well written and it's one of my favorites.

It also contains an interpretation of Romans 13:1-2 by Karl Barth in favor and Anarchism, which should give even the most staunch theological scholar you come across something to chew on. You would be very hard pressed to find someone willing to flat out say Barth is wrong.

And yeah, time. Time is pretty much the only thing that will prove to others it's not a phase.

Anarchists tend to leave this pretty vague and open-ended, because it's difficult to create a blueprint that will work in all cases for all communities (which speaks to one of the reasons why anarchists don't like the state). Generally speaking, anarchists tend to roll with the principles behind Restorative Justice.

There are lots of examples of alternatives to learn from too, including indigenous societies (taking care not to fetishize them), past anarchist experiments, and other attempts to find a more humane path to justice.

AFAQ, for example, holds up juries as a good starting point:

> In terms of resolving disputes between people, it is likely that some form of arbitration system would develop. The parties involved could agree to hand their case to a third party (for example, a communal jury or a mutually agreed individual or set of individuals). There is the possibility that the parties cannot agree (or if the victim were dead). Then the issue could be raised at a communal assembly and a "court" appointed to look into the issue. These "courts" would be independent from the commune, their independence strengthened by popular election instead of executive appointment of judges, by protecting the jury system of selection of random citizens by lot...

Kristian Williams talks about alternatives to policing in his book Our Enemies in Blue (PDF). He adapted a few chapters from it for publication elsewhere, including:

• A Look At Feminist Forms Of Justice That Don't Involve The Police, which looks specifically at community response and prevention around assault, abuse, and rape
  
• Civil Rights with Guns, which looks at alternatives to police from the Black Freedom Movement
  

The ABC's of Political Economy: A Modern Approach

From Chapter 1: Economics and Liberating Theory:

>The liberating theory presented in this chapter attempts to transcend historical materialism without throwing out the baby with the bath water. It incorporates insights from feminism, anti-colonial and anti-racist movement, and anarchism, as well as from mainstream psychology, sociology, and evolutionary biology where useful. Liberating theory attempts to understand the relationship between economic, political, kinship and cultural activities, and the forces behind social stability and social change, in a way that neither over nor underestimates the importance of economic dynamics, and neither over nor underestimates the importance of human agency compared to social forces.

And then he uses liberating theory throughout the book, but it definitely has a focus on economics.

Would absolutely recommend. It actually changed my mind on a few things.

Also, I highly recommend this book Anarchy Explained to My Father. Anarchy Explained to My Father https://www.amazon.com/dp/1554201373/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_fZJoDbZHSPH2T It talks about how libertarianism used to be more synonymous with Anarchy before the definitions slowly changed and democracy as a definition changed as well. I would say this book is part of why I really buy into Anarchism. Nonetheless, hope you get the time to check it out.

I like Markets Not Capitalism: http://www.amazon.com/Markets-Not-Capitalism-Individualist-Inequality/dp/1570272425

Edit: down-voted but no reply? Why? Markets not Capitalism is a very good book.

Storming heaven: class composition and struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism, Anarchy in Action, Adorno on the Culture Industry, Society of the Spectacle, Fighting For Ourselves, Veblen Reader and others such as 'Pedagogy for the Oppressed', Bell Hooks and 'Teaching to Transgress', Martin Buber's essays on 'State and Society', Jonathan Gershuny's 'After Industrial Society', Alan Ritter's 'Anarchism: A Theoretical Analysis', Stuart Henry's 'The Hidden Economy', Joel H. Spring's 'A Primer of Libertarian Education', Kirkpatrick Sale's 'Human Scale' and perhaps the anthropological work 'Tribes Without Rulers'.

Also a good helping of these

An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States by Charles Beard. It's seminal history text that does just what you're looking for.

https://www.amazon.com/Economic-Interpretation-Constitution-United-States/dp/0029024803

For an intriguing (though psychoanalytic) look at how coercive parenting can aid the creation of an oppressive society, you may be interested in For Your Own Good by Alice Miller.

I don't know how available this book is in the US but I think it's very close to what you're looking for: http://www.amazon.com/Babylon-Beyond-Economics-Anti-Capitalist-Anti-Globalist/dp/0745323901/

Also check out Alfie Kohn's Unconditional Parenting: http://www.amazon.com/Unconditional-Parenting-Moving-Rewards-Punishments/dp/0743487486

David Montgomery - Fall of the House of Labor

David Montgomery - Worker's Control in America

The idea you have of what the police does is a myth. Read this book.

Read Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. It's a first-hand account of his time fighting alongside anarchist militia during the Spanish Civil War, and provides some good insight into how anarchists function during a wartime/revolutionary scenario.

In most of the world this has been the case in the last few decades yes, real incomes tend to increase over time (not sure if the trend is reversed anywhere) - some publications such as Monthly Review have questioned this idea and argued that much of the world is getting poorer but i won't get into them as i don't know how strong their case is. What i'll focus on pointing out instead is that we have to be very careful not to take GDP-per-capita and median income statistics at face value and lose sight of the concrete relationships the data is abstracting away from and lose sight of the bigger picture.

For example: Many economists correctly point out that, if sweatshops that are prevalent in many regions of Asia and Africa were removed, the median income of the workers living there would fall as they would lose their jobs and the only alternative is even worse activities. However, simply presenting the data like this gives the false impression that the people in Southeastern Asia were already poor and sweatshops came out of nowhere and gave an entirely new option to them (as if they were a boon or something), which is simply not the case: The truth is that previously existing stable economic arrangements were brutally smashed by political forces over time in order to create a mass of dispossessed that can act as cheap labor, then sweatshops entered the field presenting themselves as the only available option in order to exploit that cheap labor. The economic, political and sociological externalities of sweatshop labor prevent any decent non-sweatshop alternative from propping up, maintaining the condition of subjection to horrible exploitation under untenable conditions perpetual. And while their incomes may be rising, their lives become more and more insecure and precarious the more they work for sweatshops.

Another example: In The Moral Economy of The Peasant, Yale profesor of anthropology James C. Scott gives a great analysis of how peasant relationships work in Southeastern Asia and what have been the effects of breaking up those relationships in order to introduce growth-centered practices and market-based economies. Peasant communities are predicated on the fact that the worst case scenario is starvation, so they build complex webs of mutual-aid and reliability that aim to be stable and keep everyone alive. The attempts to introduce competition, profit maximization and "growth for the sake of growth" in these communities has eroded this base of mutual-aid and while it has caused real incomes to rise it also introduce most of the population to huge insecurities and created large poverty and exclusion where it didn't previously exist as well as increase social conflict; generally making people's lives more precarious, dangerous and insecure - starvation has indeed become a real risk now. Would this be considered a rise in living standards? If the only thing we look at is GDP growth then sure we would think so, but in reality it makes the peasants way worse off (and hence why they strongly resist the introduction of market-based insecurities into their communities).

In other words: The existence of sweatshops and of capitalist "growth" has technically increased real incomes over time, yes. Does this mean that the conditions that give birth to sweatshops and the resulting sweatshops themselves have translated into better living standards? Certainly not. Trying to legitimize sweatshop exploitation by appealing to GDP growth or real income growth and arguing that sweatshops are the only alternative with out putting the information in it's proper historical context is a terrible, disingenuous defense of the brutal exploitation of millions of people; and the sycophants who engage in this shitty discourse (and Jesus there are many, every single Neoliberal think-thank has dozens of articles praising sweatshops) should be fucking ashamed of themselves.

And this is not true just of sweatshops. This is true of "growth" and "income" just about anywhere, not just where sweatshops are present.

I apologize for the long-text but here is a tl;dr:

• Rising income and GDP growth is not necessarily the same thing as better living standards.

The Price of the Ticket: Barack Obama and Rise and Decline of Black Politics (Transgressing Boundaries: Studies in Black Politics and Black Communities)

>In The Price of the Ticket, Harris puts Obama's career in the context of decades of black activism, showing how his election undermined the very movement that made it possible. The path to his presidency began just before passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, when black leaders began to discuss strategies to make the most of their new access to the ballot. Some argued that black voters should organize into a cohesive, independent bloc to promote both targeted and universal polices; others urged a more race-neutral approach, working together with other racial minorities as well as like-minded whites. This has been the fundamental divide within black politics ever since. At first, the gap did not seem serious. But the post-civil-rights era has accelerated a shift towards race-neutral politics. Obama made a point of distancing himself from older race-conscious black leaders, such as Jesse Jackson- and leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus-even though, as Harris shows, he owes much to Jackson's earlier campaigns for the White House. Unquestionably Obama's approach won support among whites, but Harris finds the results troublesome. The social problems targeted by an earlier generation of black politicians--racial disparities in income and education, stratospheric incarceration and unemployment rates--all persist, yet Obama's election, ironically, marginalized those issues, keeping them off the political agenda. Meanwhile, the civil-rights movement's militancy to attack the vestiges of racial inequality is fading.