haungack

fuck

didn't like the meme when it was a thing, but now i couldn't be happier to see it again

I agree i might have been a bit presumptuous.

I think an interesting read might be the section I.3 What could the economic structure of anarchy look like?

That is precisely what i was hoping to find, thank you.

Maybe you could explain why you would prefer to use that instead of ideals like “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs” or “well-being for all”.

1. I don't personally favor the ideal i stated, i just stated that it is reasonable, presuming it to be the default for most people, and so i put it into the premises to generify this discussion. It also provides a compatibilistic default, more on that in 3.

2. I did not mention it here, but from unrelated but intertwined radical environmentalist ideals, i see almost all forms of labor, beyond what basic necessities (housing, food, education, healthcare) require, as evils in and of themselves. Excess labor should either not be performed or obligatorily used to compensate deficits elsewhere (=> donations, welfare, community funding, science, etc). Aka non-profit for all. Just to advertize the idea, I would also invite you to look into how AT&T burned their excess when they were regulatorily obliged to - Bell Labs was born, and the 21st century was invented.

3. To elaborate on what i stated in 1, chosing the most challenging/constraining (to the end of providing welfare for all, which i kind of implied with "converting labor and resources into improving everybody’s quality of life") ideal would yield us a model that is most robust, and more agnostic to more specialized ideals (eg what i stated in 2), which can still be implemented afterwards.

That you for those recommendations.

but it’s also about creating a culture rooted in cooperation

In my opinion, anarchist projects only truly thrive when there’s a strong cooperative culture in place first.

I fully agree with you. That is one of the main problems in my own attempts to conceptualize an anarchist and intelligently labor/resource-allocating economy. When there is no tangible reward for investment, what motivates people to invest into local or shared projects? It should be a shared will to improve e.g. the standards of living of the community - whichever level of community (neighborhood, village, township, state, etc) is under consideration.

It should be obvious and expected, if we take a step back to consider what anarchism is generally about. Not all administration is optional, and in the absence of any some will emerge naturally in suboptiomal ways. Abolished centralized authority needs to replaced, it cannot just be removed, and the replacement favored by anarchists is voluntary cooperation and good will. But humans aren't saints, and the hard compromize to be made is in deciding what needs to be centralized and delegated (and how, and to whom).

And in the economy, it feels like every major attempt (to try something new) made by anybody so far has been a failure in at least some major way, including capitalism and communism.

There’s real work to be done.

I agree, and it's challenging to even theorize. It seems easier on the purely administrative end, and serious proposals have existed for a long time. The real challenge seems to be the economy, which is (or can be, as in the quasi-aristrocracy (if not political, then still in the control of resources and labor) that we live in) a quasi-administration.

Yes, and not only Ukraine. I would like to draw attention also to the Soviets' efforts to erode, or outright kill, Siberian native populations, which happened in the same political context as the Soviet Union's genocide against Ukrainians.

To name only one example, which here on wikipedia is misrepresened:

The Buryats rebelled against the communist rule and collectivization of their herds in 1929. The rebellion was quickly crushed by the Red Army with loss of 35,000 Buryats.

The misrepresenation is in wording it as "crushing a rebellion." There lived around 215k Buryats in Buryatia at the time. 35k, the number reportedly killed when "crushing a ('nationalist') rebellion," is 16.3% of all Buryats in Buryatia at the time.

Later

Fearing Buryat nationalism, Joseph Stalin had more than 10,000 Buryats killed.

Another 5%. Up to over 20% Killing one fifth of a peoples isn't "crowd control," it's genocide.

This is only one peoples of many that the soviets attempted (or succeded) to eradicate. And i'm not even touching on planned famines, dispersion, or using natives as cannon-fodder in wars. This is ongoing even in modern Russia - native Siberian peoples are overrepresented in the invasion forces in Ukraine:

In the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine since 2022, the Buryats have been reported as one of Russia's ethnic minority groups suffering from a disproportionally large casualty rate among Russian forces, reinforcing the processes of assimilation and Russification.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buryats#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buryatia#Ethnic_groups

Again, just a single example of many. And not just Siberia, but no non-Rus peoples in or near Russia is spared from this. It'd be worth several dissertations to go into any detail on all sides of the Soviets' (and now Russia's) colonization and rusification efforts. Of course, i recognize that the West also has very many bodies in its basements, and i don't mean to distract from that, don't get me wrong - it's just that Russia's crimes are much less often talked about, i feel particularly emotionally invested, and Russia (formerly Soviet Russia) is routinely representing itself as oh so anti-nationalist or anti-nazi, even as some of the same policies are ongoing in 2025.

I didn't see this before i posted an adjacent discussion. As somebody else already mentioned, there's the concept of worker cooperatives which is similar to what you are writing.

To prevent the usual overexploitation and degeneracy, i believe a worker cooperative would also need to be non-profit. And there's of course the issue of how to decide/regulate management salaries, especially if non-profit.

AFAIK (correct if i'm wrong), non-profit coops have a better track record at keeping companies afloat for a longer time, since they care more about stable employment, and obviously don't consider "sell shares, and abandon the sinking ship" to be a viable strategy.

With strong enough regulation one wouldn't need the additional incentive "to do a better job" (as a manager/chief) from owning a significant portion of sales (which as previously stated isn't even such a strong incentive long-term). I believe most people, if competent enough, would try to do a good job. And for the rest, regulation such as anti-misconduct laws and punishments, ensuring qualifications and etc, but that leads into the obvious question of where and how such regulations should be decided upon and enforced.