- cross-posted to:
- anthropology@mander.xyz
- cross-posted to:
- anthropology@mander.xyz
David Rolfe Graeber (/ˈɡreɪbər/; February 12, 1961 – September 2, 2020) was an American anthropologist and anarchist activist. His influential work in economic anthropology, particularly his books Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Bullshit Jobs (2018), and The Dawn of Everything (2021), and his leading role in the Occupy movement, earned him recognition as one of the foremost anthropologists and left-wing thinkers of his time.
Is there a reason why anarchists couldn’t build these infrastructures?
The fact that this is one of the areas that anarchist communities historically struggle with?
Can you give examples? I’m not aware of any historical precedents where these attempts failed.
Here’s an example from Rojava
“ The village asked the Rojava government for help, but were told the authorities can’t do anything. They lack the money, expertise, and the personnel. This is a common refrain in the autonomous region of northern Syria where the Kurdish-led administration has built a quasi-state but is hemmed in by neighbours with whom relations range from frosty to openly hostile.
Rojava is, to a large extent, dependent on the benevolence of foreigners to fund and oversee big-budget projects like waste management. Officials across Rojava said they have shown representatives of European organizations the problems they face, like lack of water treatment facilities, and were given promises of help. But they have seen little results”
https://www.rudaw.net/english/middleeast/syria/21032019
This is by no means unique. Anarchist societies IRL frequently lack the expertise needed for these projects because the skilled people who can do them tend to work in places that compensate them better than others for their work.
This is why the Dead Kennedy’s have that line “Anarchy sounds good to me until someone says ‘who will fix the sewers?’”
This just goes to show that theory heavy anarchists and other leftists need to bring that theory to the blue collar working class who works the water treatment plants and other infrastructure. A lot of them are union jobs it shouldn’t be too hard to get people down with anarchist concepts if explained in a way that’s not theory heavy.
Which means you are hoping they are motivated by altruism and I don’t believe everyone is.
This is less an example of how anarchism can’t do this or that, but rather that you can’t have your insular little utopia if you’re surrounded by powerful entities whose interests directly oppose yours. There is no right life within the wrong one.
I still don’t see why a sewage system is cathegorically out of the question when the problems here are less “you can’t organise the construction of a sewage system” and more “we still live in a globalised system which is fundamentally based on competition.”
Did you miss the quoted bit where they talk about how they lack the of resources and expertise are a common problem? That’s the problem anarchists face IRL. The people that have these skills are incentivized to leave anarchist societies for ones that compensate them fir these skills.
workers crave wage slavery ?
Skilled labor will pursue higher compensatiom in many cases. Humans are humans after all and many are not motivated purely by altruism
Says who ?
That is not exactly a credible source. To quote the wikipedia on it:
And besides, you are really arguing that a semi-functional, mostly representative organ in the middle of a civil war doesn’t have the resources to maintain sewers?