Tag: Decentralization
Mediazione e Propagazione Memetica: Strumenti dell’economia Diffusa
Di Siddharth Sthalekar. Originale: Memetic Propagation and Mediation: Tools for the Distributed Economy, 6 luglio 2020. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna. L’ordine di stare a casa imposto durante la pandemia mi è tristemente famigliare. Mi ricorda il mese di coprifuoco durante le rivolte di Bombay, quando avevo undici anni. La vita comunitaria dominava la nostra società…
Maximum Viable Economic Planning: The Basis of New Economies
A tweet jokingly showing James C. Scott centrally planning his small chicken farm.  Even in his devastating critiques of high-modernist central planning, James C Scott acknowledges the benefits to planning and the levels at which it can occur with relative safety. The author M Black also challenges us not to fetishize decentralization in such a…
De/centralization, Discretion, and the Anarchist Movement
Anarchists have long made decentralization a core demand for the structure of our organizations and have placed tremendous faith in the decentralization of our organizations as a means by which to prevent the generation of hierarchies and abuses of power, among other issues. However, this faith is based on very little, and anarchists can stand…
The Implications of Institutional Limits in a Complex World
Let me begin by stating how happy I am that this exchange is happening. As information technology has come to saturate our lives over the last two decades we’ve seen the debate over non-market economies remerge. A recent essay published in The Economist1 both summarizes the discourse and speaks to its increasing prominence. In the…
Does Anarchism Skirt the Calculation Problem?
Now it may surprise some, but unlike many fellow freed market anarchists at C4SS, I am not a market anarchist because of the economic calculation problem. While I do think the economic calculation problem rightly points out that top-down command economies cannot adequately produce and distribute goods to meet the needs of society, anarchist economic…
Memetic Propagation and Mediation: Tools for the Distributed Economy
There’s an eerie familiarity to the stay-at-home orders issued during COVID-19. I can’t help but relate this to my experience as an 11 year old during the month-long curfew after the communal riots of Bombay.  Growing up in India, communal life dominated our lives. While the state functioned along the lines of rigid, monopolistic, soviet-socialist…
Action Is Sometimes Clearer Than Talk: Why We Will Always Need Trade
Is it possible for our enemies to discover actual insights? The impulse to deny this is universal. The third reich dismissed special relativity as “Jewish physics” and lost significant advantage. The USSR worried that accepting Darwin’s insights in evolution would open the floodgates to capitalist social darwinism and so they hurt themselves by sticking with…
Mathematical Optimization and the Economic Calculation Problem
In 1939, Leonid Kantorovich, a Soviet mathematician, came up with a formulation for optimization problems called linear programming (LP) after being tasked with planning production in the plywood industry during World War 2. A linear program is a constrained optimization problem with a linear objective function that is maximized or minimized subject to linear equality…
C4SS Mutual Exchange Symposium: Decentralization and Economic Coordination
Mutual Exchange is the Center for a Stateless Society’s effort to achieve mutual understanding through dialogue. In this fecund moment of global political collapse and upheaval, amidst pandemics and police repression, there are also seeds of a better world being planted. It is in this spirit that we open this Summer Mutual Exchange on Decentralization…
Coronavirus: Why Mutual Aid Is Important
It’s a very difficult time for any person. And this is not war, it is not just an economic crisis, it is not just mass poverty or catastrophe. This is a pandemic, in some ways a cross between all these things. Ordinary people are at great risk, like all the major capitalist companies. The poor…
Anarchism and Pandemics
Anarchists face the question: Without nations and states wouldn’t a free society be especially ravaged by pandemics? Who would enforce quarantines without rebuilding a centralized institution of violence? It’s a fair question. Anarchism isn’t about a finite goal, but an unending vector pointed towards increasing liberation. We’re not in the habit of “good enough” compromises,…
Reputation Markets: Reality, Dangers, and Possibility
Trust is the backbone of not just economies, but also the social fabric more broadly. With it, new worlds are possible, and without it, collapse is inevitable. Trust is built on dynamic and complexly layered reputations. We each have our own methods of building trust, and different communities have their own systems for developing reputation….
Una Rivoluzione Verde Decentrata
Guida anarchica all’ambientalismo Di Logan Marie Glitterbomb. Originale pubblicato il 23 agosto 2018 con il titolo Decentralizing the Green Revolution: An Anarchist Guide to Environmentalism. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna. Davanti al problema dei cambiamenti climatici o di altre forme di inquinamento, abbiamo solitamente due strade: da un lato l’individuo con il riciclaggio, le luci spente,…
Decentralizing the Green Revolution: An Anarchist Guide to Environmentalism
When looking to solve the issue of climate change and other forms of environmental damage, people tend to look at two kinds of solutions: those targeting the individual, such as recycling, turning off your lights, bicycling, and unplugging your electronics when not in use, or more statist solutions, such as banning plastic straws, carbon taxes,…
Review: Walkaway
Cory Doctorow (2017). Walkaway. New York: Tor I. The story opens at a communist party in an unspecified post-industrial town in Ontario sometime in the late middle of this century, from the first-person perspective of Hubert, Etc. A communist party, you should understand, is not an institution but a social event: something like a rave at…
Defying Power: Different Views on How Best to Understand the Evolution of the State (Part II)
In Part I of this article, I responded to William Gillis’ review of Worshiping Power: An Anarchist Vision of Early State Formation. I wanted to give special attention to what I found to be his most interesting critique. Gillis takes me to task for focusing too much on the anthropological definition of the state, analyzing…
The Future of the Dakota Access Pipeline
In a PBS segment Oct. 24, Judy Woodruff asked “What will Dakota Access protesters do if final pipeline restrictions are lifted?” Her guest William Brangham, who’s been covering the confrontation for PBS Newshour, elaborates: People don’t exactly know what’s going to happen. If the Army Corps agrees to this last permit and says to the…
Lunga Vita all’Anarchia: Intervista con Robert Anton Wilson (II parte)
[Trascrizione di Chad Nelson. Originale pubblicato su Center for a Stateless Society il 12 ottobre 2016 con il titolo Long Live Anarchy: An Interview with Robert Anton Wilson (PartII). Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.] Questa è la seconda parte di “Long Live Anarchy!”, intervista con Robert Anton Wilson trasmessa da Pacifica Radio. La trascrizione della prima…
Lunga Vita all’Anarchia: Intervista con Robert Anton Wilson (I parte)
[Trascrizione di Chad Nelson. Originale pubblicato su Center for a Stateless Society l’otto ottobre 2016 con il titolo Long Live Anarchy: An Interview with Robert Anton Wilson (PartI). Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.] Ad un certo punto tra la fine degli anni cinquanta e i primi sessanta, Charlie Hayden di Pacifica Radio intervistò l’inimitabile Robert Anton…
Long Live Anarchy: An Interview With Robert Anton Wilson (Part 2)
The following is Part 2 of Pacifica Radio’s “Long Live Anarchy!” interview with Robert Anton Wilson. Part 1’s transcript can be read here. The interview ends abruptly, and unfortunately Pacifica was unable to find additional reels in their archives. –cn Hayden: How do you answer the charge that anarchism’s an outmoded political belief? That it…
Anarchy and Democracy
Fighting Fascism
Markets Not Capitalism
The Anatomy of Escape
Organization Theory