Responding to Eric Weinstein - Why Green Anarchism is Game B

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Green / Vegan Anarchism is Game B.



Why?

Green anarchism is the full realization of our evolution as a social species. It is the system best equipped to manage the commons effectively. Green anarchism creates systems of local governance that eliminate rivalrous competition, multipolar traps, etc. --and green anarchism must also be synthesized with veganism, because a path toward a sustainable future must also eliminate animal agriculture out of the equation.

In green anarchism; most decisions are made on the scale of horizontal free associations called communes. Within the communes, goods are distributed from each according to ability, to each according to need. This means that in green anarchism; enterprises don't manufacture goods for market exchange. Instead, the communes produce goods for local consumption and also form contracts with each other through a system called mutual aid. Since production is driven by collective need instead of market exchange, it allows us the opportunity to manage the commons sustainably.

It has been overwhelmingly clear to us; the fact that we cannot manage the commons effectively in a market system, because of issues Schmachtenberg brought up like negative externalities. The incentive structure of a market causes too many problems.


Come join our side. Take the breadpill.

Last edited by RushKing on 28 Apr 2020, 7:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I guess to the above I'd ask the question any outsider would want to ask to get some sense of what's being offered.

Can you unpack that a bit?

To say a bit more from my end as far as what I'm curious about - I'm at 3:07:00 on the Daniel Schmachtenberger and Eric Weinstein podcast (had to pick at it while I was working) and I see the parameters of what Daniel's saying being a bit like this:

- Game B has to dig a gravity well of the sort that can at least draw a significant minority of the population off and keeps them there as long as it's offering more satisfying and viable solutions to that subgroup (perhaps a lot of people high in trait openness).
- That gravity well would be powered by the cultivation of a particularly high-functioning system of collective sense-making which would be cogent enough to not only solve stickier problems that Game A can't solve in the world by analyzing and acting but Game B would have to present a way of being beneficial without militarizing because the militarization in the works rekindles Game A.
- Game B would sell itself as a very powerful problem-solving unit and perhaps there might be some druid-like casts in some sci fi movies that would map onto this well (hopefully without the tyranny) and I'm almost seeing this maybe as a movement to create a sort of Game B Debrovnik where the mechanics of this game can be tested and its inherent weaknesses would be shored up.

In essence Game B sells itself for the power of what it does and only becomes a global replacement to Game A to the extent that it solves problems that Game A can't solve. If anything it would be like adding healthy quantity of Yin back to a world that's been running at Yang almost exclusively.

I could imagine Green Anarchism being something that a Game B community would decide to do but I don't see where Green Anarchism itself would be the selling point, it would be more of a side-effect.

The basic disadvantages of marketless systems - failure to reward or incentivise, failure to plan properly, failure to perform as well as market systems - have been well-discussed so I’m not going to go over them. Needless to say I think the cost to life, particularly in the developing world, would be huge and the transition would therefore not be worthwhile.

Veganism is an ideology that I find to be completely detached from any sensible formulation of animal rights and generally focused on being self-righteous rather than improving animal wellbeing.

So a few questions on the specific model proposed:

- You say communes will support each other through contracts for mutual aid. How are these contracts agreed and awarded?

- How is it established what my needs are?

- How is it established what my ability to provide is?

- Am I allowed to move to another commune that has a better reputation?

- Are you going to slaughter people’s pet chickens and ducks to stop them from eating their eggs?

- Are you going to slaughter dairy cows to stop people drinking their milk? Will you release millions of cows into the wild?

- How are being going to receive the protein that used to be provided by eggs and dairy? Are we burning the rainforest to make room for soy farms, then flying it around the world?

- This system will produce its own externalities. How will it address them?

- Decarbonisation requires changes to large-scale infrastructure. This will usually span even national borders. How will this be organised in an anarchist system?

- Does your system require explicit buy-in from participants?

- How will you deal with bad actors?

- You are making quite extraordinary claims - do you have any evidence that this system will work?

I realise that is kind of an obnoxious interrogation and we’re clearly so far apart that little agreement is possible. So please don’t feel obliged to answer any of my questions. I’d appreciate any answers you can give that you think I might find interesting (I’m sure many of my questions were very firmly not interesting!) or that might clarify some of my misconceptions, of which I am sure there are many.

One of the reasons I was hoping for an unpack and clarification is that communes can work and they operate on small scales within a politically liberal enough system that doesn't see them as a threat to power (ie. I don't know if it would work in places like China for that reason). To that end they're more like local experiments to see if anything can spark up to where a different way of operating in the world can be achieved. I don't at all think it's crazy for people to try it but I also think they'd be working on fine-tuning certain aspects of how communal living can work, say, with present technology and in what ways a working commune might even be pushed over Dunbar's number and still be operational. That's an adjacent goal to Game B perhaps, not Game B itself, but perhaps a group of people trying to craft a particular piece of this that Game B could use.

As far as the elimination of markets I'm not sure anyone quite knows what that means. Something like monetary valuation of things can't be avoided, large scale decisions can't be made without exchanges of value and some solid sense of metric, and so it seems like a launch point into the future would just be working to completely change our relationship to markets rather than disband them. Most likely I'm thinking this would mean that we'd do something like keep our liberal democracy but embrace a social style much more like the far East where everyone's more integrated and where are both far fewer truly unknown people, it's a trade-off of trust for autonomy (which is a double-edged sword, the question is might it be needed to help tighten the economics against multipolar traps or have a much more engaged populace?).

Daniel kept using the term 'autopoietic' and that's critical. A system that would replace the one we have would both need to be autopoietic and in recognizable ways better than the one we currently have. If a system is autopoietic then seeding it inside a host system that will allow said experiments shouldn't cause it to fail and if it's high-functioning enough to be sticky and even viral (in a good way) then, like open-source, it'll just get adopted by increasing numbers of people who've seen the benefit.

I know that in the US and Europe there's been some sort of movement toward 'authentic living', there's an activity called 'circling' where it's a bunch of people sitting in a circle openly sharing their feelings, enough people I respect speak highly of it, Sarah Ness was on an episode of Rebel Wisdom and she presented what that community was doing in reaction to Covid quite credibly, the only thing I'm not sure of is how much what they're doing actually grapples with and maintains what people can't change about themselves and how much it might simply be selecting, again, for people who are high in trait-openness, in which case it could be at most a high single-digit or low double-digit percentage minority of the population where when people have kids you have no idea whether they'll be staying on or leaving and such decisions would need to be handled very tactfully for anything like this not to end up like Scientology without the aliens.

What about intrinsic motivation?

On a local level?





That's not up for me to decide. I can't be a dictator.

You mainly decide. You select and grab what you need from communal stores, but the communal stores also have the ability to implement quantity restrictions by the direction of local governance entities.

Your level of education, physical abilities, willingness etc.

Yes

No

No

No, transition to a vegan society is going to be a gradual process. As time passes less cows will be breed into existence. Post-revolution the remaining cows may live the rest of there lives in sanctuaries where they will be cared for.

Plants

No, because and we wouldn't need as much land (and soy) if we consumed the plants directly, instead of feeding them to livestock.

Hoping I don’t mess the quotes up.

That certainly works for some thing but I think fairly few people - probably too few - are intrinsically motivated to produce the parts for pencils, or to remove fat from sewers.

On all levels. With a market system the flow of cash works surprisingly well although of course there are flaws. But I think you’ve addressed this quite well below.



That makes sense. I ask because what you have set out sounds a lot like a free market.

OK, so this makes some sense to me. I guess the issue is things that fall outside typical needs, like advanced medical equipment, or medicine, or food for people with specific dietary requirements. I suppose that if you have faith in this system holding up then you can quite easily imagine a communal pharmacy or similar, perhaps shared between several local communes.

I think this is a good thing - but it is also a market.

That’s a sensible answer. I guess I just don’t see the point of stopping eating animal products that don’t kill the animal. Keeping chickens can be a good source of recreation and beneficial to people’s mental health, it also allows a great source of protein to be produced locally. Similarly, there are many benefits to keeping small livestock. Goats provide milk and fertiliser, sheep provide wool and fertiliser.

I guess this was a bit of a stupid question. You’re right that increasing the plant content of our diets helps reduce the land required to feed us. I do think this approach is a little simplistic though. In this country for example, a large portion of livestock are raised on land where it is very difficult to grow plants. Complete sources of plant protein are only grown in small quantities here and it’s not clear that they can be scaled up - we’d need to continue to import quinoa, rice, soy, or chickpea from a long way away.

Ultimately while there’s a lot to like about your system in theory - decentralised, liberal, nobody starves - I think in practice you’re still going to see a chasm between supply and demand and you’re still exploiting market forces with all the failures that go along with it, with less room to correct for those without a central government.

Thanks for responding nonetheless.