Joining us today is Emmi Bevensee. Emmi is a senior fellow at the Center for a Stateless Society and currently organizing the Mutual Exchange Symposium on Decentralization and Economic Coordination. They identify as a solarpunk mutualist and research disinformation and fascism on the internet as a Mozilla Open Web fellow and data scientist. In this discussion, we discuss Emmi’s lead essay in C4SS’ recent Mutual Exchange Symposium on Decentralization and Economic Coordination. This is a rich discussion about a complicated issue that anarchists of all stripes, and political theorists more generally, need to take on: how do we get the goods delivered to where they need to be in society. Emmi expresses a sense of skepticism about claims social anarchists have made that communes can economically coordinate in the absence of markets. We also discussed the lead essay of and their reply to another essay from the exchange which tried to give a mathematical formulation to social anarchist attempts to work around the calculation problem by Aurora Apolito. This was an interesting informative discussion, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed having it.

Also stay tuned for the next episode! It will feature a discussion between Aurora Apolito and William Gillis. Even though they agree on some essentials, they are vehemently opposed on other points. The upcoming conversation will make up for an interesting continuation of this episode’s content, adding a commentary by William Gillis and Aurora herself to the exchange.

You can find the essays mentioned here:

• Social-Anarchism and Parallel Economic Computation by Emmi Bevensee
• The Problem of Scale in Anarchism and the Case for Cybernetic Communism by Aurora Apolito
• In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You by Cosma Shalizi on Crooked Timber

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