To be clear, I am an anarchist.
This is a real and develop political ideology that is important to understand beyond the propaganda we have all been taught.
I believe that our future is one of a political ideology of anarcho-syndicalism. However what distinguishes the form of syndicalism that I see is not one of labor, or worker’s unions—but value itself.
Sound familiar?
Sounds a bit like anarcho-capitalism..
Ironically it both is and is not. As it is not about capital acquisition, but Bitcoin or perhaps even more widely ‘crypto’ acquisition.
And by crypto I do not mean shitcoins, but like darknet market infrastructure and p2p privacy services.
My eyes always glaze over when someone says syndicalism... I guess I'll go look it up for the 30th time...
Classically it has been to organize revolutionary struggles based on worker’s condition and labor unions, and using that to smash the state.
Smashing the state has it's appeal, but there's a logical fallacy imbedded in it... If the workers were independent enough to be able to survive without the state, they wouldn't be in the union in the first place, so as soon as the state is smashed, they just make a new state.
Here's how I think we should do it. It'll still involve collective bargaining, but there's no need for coercion. We all buy up adjacent land and incorporate as a city. But instead of doing normal city stuff, like roads and water, we have classes to teach how to do it for yourself. Then make public works illegal in our colony. And it is a colony, because we're gonna use our collective bargaining power to tell the tax man to pound sand. Think, a brand new free city in the Holy Ramen Empire. We're not fighting anyone, but we can fight if pushed, and we renegotiate our deal with the empire. Then we make another... And another... Until this model is most of everything and in space.
Sigh... Now I remember. This isn't the way. But I would agree that simply returning to a free market isn't enough. If this is inspired by the longshoremen strike, that only works because government has constrained the shipping industry with all kinds of permits, fees, licenses, and basically making it impossible for a competitor to open a seaport. If shipping can't work as a free market, then it will have to automate everything, and then the union will be out of a job. The full answer is, we need strong enough property rights for new shipping companies and new ports to open with a reasonably low barrier to entry. Another possible answer is stock ownership - owning a company is a much better solution than unionizing and extorting. There's ways to work around this. (Not that I think we will)
I thought the whole anarch-syndicalist thing was prefaced on collective bargaining and unions to 'smash capitalism'?
Uhh, what do you think we are doing against fiat?
Bitcoin doesn't exactly appeal to most left wing anarchists from what i can tell. Most have some idea of taking capital from the capitalist to re-distribute to the masses. Bitcoin doesn't really lend itself to that. Bitcoin is going create a new system, I agree. But not one that's void of strict property rights.
Lets write a new Manifest for a world of freedom and pacifism. And a world where power is something one needs to be careful with.
