cyb3rd4ndy

cyb3rd4ndy OP wrote

Reply to comment by subrosa in From Marxist to Anarchist: Sartre 1972-1980 by Alfred Betschart by cyb3rd4ndy

I haven’t dug too deeply into him, but he has published some other works in English related to Sartre. This text was just translated by René Berthier and permission given by Betschart last night. That said, I read the rough drafts already and have studied this topic extensively myself for years. I have much the same opinion as Betschart in this text. Make of that what you will.

I’ll try to find out more about him. Please let me know if something unfavorable turns up.

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cyb3rd4ndy OP wrote (edited )

Reply to comment by !deleted34351 in Introduction. Anarchism and the national question—historical, theoretical and contemporary perspectives by José A Gutiérrez, Ruth Kinna by cyb3rd4ndy

This is just the introduction (released early) for the next issue of this journal that contains other anarchist authors. You can see some of the other articles here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14698129/0/0

Emojis are based.

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cyb3rd4ndy wrote

Reply to UNHINGED: A Guide to Revolution for Nerds & Skeptics by AnRel

These are my thoughts after 40-min… I’ll post more if I have more…

First of all, I really enjoyed this and I love that you used Portal in the video. Since I don’t want to waste space telling you everything I agree with, I’ll just waste space with some things that I don’t agree with …more or less completely …probably less completely.

Motivation: Motivations for doubting anarchist proposals… I think a big reason why people have a hard time with anarchist proposals is that the cooperative movement has been dog shit at marketing. For instance, there isn’t any co-op only shopping platform that is as easy to use as amazon.com is for the capitalist economy.

Freedom (Free Will?): Projection (imagining goals) is itself a type of freedom. A nerdy way to think about this is to look at how probability works with time. Basically, the further into the future one attempts to predict something happening, the harder that prediction becomes. Y’know, like predicting the weather. One way that we deal with this as human beings is to imagine a future and attempt to guide what happens in the present towards such a future. This makes prediction less of a problem, though it doesn’t eliminate the problem. Anyway, this ability to imagine a future isn’t determined from what I can tell. As in, one can really imagine whatever future. Maybe what someone imagines can be psychologically primed, but I think that a long-term commitment to perfecting what one imagines works against the multitude of past influences that tend to determine more short-term behavior.

Unfortunately, I think that many people’s imaginations are thwarted as the develop… by schools, by pop culture, etc.

Why Hierarchy?: Authoritarianism and Hierarchy are often a response to dire circumstances, especially war. Besides studies that have shown that people’s attitudes become more authoritarian when there is a threat to their safety, there is an information problem that hierarchies and authorities are thought to solve. Oddly enough, that information problem is exactly this notion of “objectivity” that you begin the video discussing. Hierarchies are an attempt to institutionalize information collection and command structure so that a reliable group of agents can have a more objective view of a situation, from which they are capable of overcoming the limits of most others’ individual perspectives… their subjectivities. From that knowledge that is produced through said information collection efforts, it is assumed that effective strategies can be developed and those without such knowledge can be commanded to carry out said strategies. Various intermediary forms of control are then put into place to ensure the commands are carried out and new information can be passed up the chain. This is especially seen in war situations because large numbers of individuals can’t be relied upon to select important targets to defend and attack since none of them, even in small units, have a total view of the battlefield.

There’s also the issue of knowledge that one would want to make sure the enemy doesn’t acquire…

Similar justifications are used for commerce, also competitive, and also conducted in complex fields of social relations. Whether it’s the manufacturing process, marketing strategies, investment strategies, etc. hierarchies are relied upon to develop a “big picture” of the commercial field to inform such strategies.

This is the challenge to anarchists… which I believe anarchists can meet. First and foremost, by looking at how knowledge production and strategy (planning) can be done (or has been, or is done) without hierarchies.

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