Anagorism

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= Anagorism is the notion that the exchange paradigm can be overcome; that cooperation can supplant competition. [1]

Discussion

The problem anagorism is trying to solve

"In his introduction to “Non-Market Socialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries” John Crump said:

“... if we use words accurately, it is unnecessary to qualify 'socialism' with 'non-market' because socialism is, by definition, a marketless society. The market cannot coexist with socialism because socialism means that society owns and controls both the means of production and the goods which result from productive activity. For the market to exist, some sectional interest (an individual, a joint-stock company, a nationalised concern, a workers' cooperative and so on) has to be in control of part of the social product, which it then disposes of by entering into exchange relations with others. Exchange cannot take place when society, and none other, controls the means of production and the social product. Far from socialism being compatible with exchange and the market, the generalised production of goods for exchange on the market is the hallmark of an entirely different type of society - capitalism.”

But, in the absence of the market, how will a non-market socialist society make decisions about how to allocate scarce resources?

Ludwig von Mises and his followers, who came to be known as the Austrian school of economics, argued that it would be impossible for a non-market socialist society without recourse to a price-mechanism to make rational resource allocation decisions. This, they argued, would result in gross inefficiency with disastrous consequences for society.

How would a non-market socialist society avoid being faced with an insolubly complex puzzle when attempting to make resource allocation decisions?

What contribution can we in our sector today make towards a potential method of economic calculation in a society of free association tomorrow? " (http://non-market-calculation.wikispaces.com/)


Anagorism and Labor/Employment

"Anagorism, of course, seeks an alternative to property and markets, not just to employers and employees. How to implement an alternative to market employment? One tool I envision is One Big Database for matching people to “jobs.” One science fiction implementation is “Divab” in Ursula LeGuin’s novel The Dispossessed. They key element to such a scheme, as I see it, is transparency. The most odious burden the status quo labor market places on me is the necessity of networking, or maintaining the type of social contacts to know where at least some of the “unadvertised” openings are. The statist approach, of course, would be to require public posting of all vacancies. A dual power approach might start with the approach of acknowledging that for now, information about available jobs is insider information, but instead of seeking to become an insider through networking, seek to expose the information through crowdsourcing. If One Big Database can’t be created, at least a sort of distributed database should be possible; hopefully indexing a larger fraction of the labor market than proprietary engines such as monster.com, which makes people jump through countless hoops of saying “no, thank you” to for-profit “universities” in exchange for access to mostly low-value information.

I’m not sure what might be the ultimate goal of anagorism when it comes to matters of employment or alternatives to it. Sufficiently cheap technologies of automated manufacturing might mean total economic self-sufficiency for each individual, without the interdependence which necessitates push-and-shove venues such as trading in the market economy. High-tech modification of the humyn form might result in people getting by with physical inputs small enough to allow being self-supporting even on Mechanical Turk wages. Perhaps we will settle for a soft anagorism in which the market still operates, but more humanely, perhaps through extreme transparency, or better yet, partial satisfaction of needs through non-market activity." (https://anagory.wordpress.com/2011/05/31/is-100-self-employment-either-realistic-or-desirable/)


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