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accursedCursive

A stable form of anarchosocialism

Mar 1st, 2018
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  1. The following text describes a more stable and efficient nation, following simple anarcho-socialist rules.
  2. By nature, it shuns any attempt to form a nation-level government, and the economic rules allow complex supply chains to be made where each population centre has an economic input and output that can be abstracted so far from each other that contributing to one supply chain can be rewarded with the output of a completely different supply chain; like capitalism, it allows the work of a population centre to be rewarded with things completely unrelated to what that work was, but unlike capitalism it enjoys all the convenience of communism.
  3. Population centres can govern themselves however they like, and would presumably practice small-scale communism.
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  6. CONTEXT
  7. Standard nations follow a very assymetric structure: The government owns all land, all military, says what people are and aren't allowed to do and enforces it, takes as much money as it wants from the people, and is so far up the power pyramid that no individual citizen can have their voice heard by the government which leads to the government making avoidable mistakes or ignoring crucial opportunities that citizens were well aware of.
  8. The government has no incentive to do a good job other than winning elections, and there's no balance of power; you're either in a party that got a lot of votes, or you aren't.
  9. The government can abuse a small portion of the population for as long as they like, as that small population has zero power to protect themselves; it can also abuse the entire population until the end of its term through the introduction of harsh new laws, and those new laws will usually remain in effect even if the government changes.
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  11. This is clearly not ideal, but to solve it one must first understand why governments exist.
  12. The reason a government should exist is to make every person benefit the country without reward, and make the country benefit every person without cost, achieving things that capitalism cannot.
  13. The reason a government does exist is because power vacuums will always be filled.
  14. These two qualities are not exclusive to governments though.
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  16. Picture an African country where the government is not very far reaching, leaving plenty of villages ignored by the government.
  17. These villages are self-governing and (usually) self-sufficient, however they cannot achieve much due to the phenomenon of "economy of scale"; to do anything efficiently requires a lot of people doing that thing, and an independent village cannot dedicate a lot of people to one thing.
  18. This problem is usually solved with capitalism, and on rare occasion large-scale communism, but both of these lead to an extremely powerful government with little accountability.
  19. Say that one tiny village can make lots of charcoal, another produces metal, and a third produces metal tools.
  20. Capitalism would have the charcoal producers sell to the other two villages, the metal producers sell to the toolmakers, and the metal tool producers sell to the other two villages and keep some for themselves. For this to work requires agreements on price, and in more complicated systems all the money will trickle to one place, eventually forming a power and thus a government.
  21. Communism would have everything produced belong to the government, being taken and redistributed as necessary. The overbearing government doesn't form naturally like in capitalism, it's simply already there.
  22. There is a third method of redistribution though, and that's for villages to willingly donate to an organisation, on the basis that the organisation will indirectly reward them for their contribution.
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  25. RULES OF ANARCHO-SOCIALISM
  26. A volunteer organisation running off of donations can replace communism and capitalism by acting as a supply chain. Like a communist government, it's a centralised exchange that takes from and gives to villages without equal trade, but unlike one it should have no power over its suppliers and any number of organisations can exist.
  27. In the three-village scenario previously described, an organisation might exist that supplies people with tools. It requests regular contributions of charcoal and metal from villages, gives it to the toolmakers, then takes the tools and distributes them to all its suppliers. If there were instead three hundred villages, and some villages decided not to contribute to the organisation, then they would not reap the reward of tools.
  28. Obviously, the organisation would have requests not relevant to its function, requests that are simply necessary for the organisation to exist. While it could make these requests from individual villages, a lot of complexity is avoided if an organisation exists to supply organisations with their necessities.
  29. This is where measuring contribution becomes difficult though. Say there is an organisation that feeds and clothes the tool making organisation. A village that makes clothes would be expected to donate to this organisation without reward. And the tool making organisation would be expected to donate to a village that does not directly contribute to it. This is where endorsement comes into play.
  30. "Endorsement" means that when entity A (a village or organisation) gives something to entity B even though entity B gives nothing back, they say that entity B should reward entity A by giving entity C (or many smaller entities) free stuff. In this case, the tool-distributing organisation would be endorsing the clothes-distributing organisation so that the clothes-distributing organisation can take clothes from clothing makers. The clothing distributors would then endorse the clothing makers, so that the clothing makers can take tools from tool-distributors.
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  33. EFFECT OF RULES
  34. Simple rules like this can create huge supply chains where everyone receives exactly what they need.
  35. But what about the power vacuum?
  36. Obviously, to prevent anyone from trying to take over the region, one of the organisations must be military; volunteers from the villages join the organisation to protect the region. But what if that organisation tries to take over the region and become a government? It's simple: make more military organisations, which can be called militias for short since that's what they are. Village leaders responsible for supplying these militias cannot control who goes into what militia, so they cannot stop a miltia from having more members than every other militia combined. However, they can refuse to adequately supply an oversized militia, meaning that the only way for a militia to have enough power to become a threat to everyone is if most village leaders support the idea of one militia having that power; and as village leaders, they should know better than that.
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  38. Interestingly, the larger and more diverse a region that governs itself in this way is, the more stable it is; which is exactly the opposite to normal nations. A generation of people born under this exotic system of government may not appreciate how great it is having no overarching governing body yet all the benefits of one, and think "I don't like how a lot of villages rule themselves, there should be a government to prevent their sins". When people like this become leaders, they may abandon the socioeconomic ideology I describe in favour of facism, providing a single militia with abundant resources.
  39. However, if the region contains many cultures and ethnic groups, this facist territory will never represent a large enough percentage of military power to be a real threat to the much larger anarcho-socialist territory it just split from. The most it can do form an independent, conventionally-governed nation and hope to not be reclaimed.
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  42. OTHER CONSIDERATIONS
  43. A truly fair supply chain is very complex to maintain, and can sometimes have drawbacks. In this system, it doesn't really matter if a village is giving a bit more than it takes or taking a bit more than it gives, unlike capitalism where competition means that unfairness leads to the unfairly-advantaged company thriving.
  44. All that matters is that everyone has what they need, no one is freeloading, and great contributions give great reward. The looser a system of trade is, the easier it is to ensure everyone has what they need, but even loose adherence to the rules of the supply chain is enough to prevent an entire village from freeloading and reward that village for contributing more than others.
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  46. Organisations may be corrupt or greedy, but when two organisations do the same thing, because neither organisation owns much and is merely moving people and supplies around the better organisation can quickly replace the worse one.
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  48. Also, an organisation may sometimes give something to or do something for a poorly-performing village without even the most indirect returns, for two reasons:
  49. 1) If the organisation's free contributions are responsible for the village eventually doing well, that village will like that organisation. In an economy where the currency is reputation, that's a big deal.
  50. 2) A poorly-performing village may dissolve as people seek better lives elsewhere, even if it is a bad idea in the long-term. Donation keeps it stable.
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