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The Tyranny of Social Capital? | Andrewism (www.youtube.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/breadtube@slrpnk.net
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Video description:

Social capital affects nearly every aspect of our lives, from employment and education to friendship and organising. By understanding how it operates—both its emancipatory potential and its capacity to reproduce domination—we can cultivate social relations that move us closer to anarchy.

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[–] [S] 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (4 children)

As a good companion to this video, the excellent book The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin explores how social capital may arise in a negative way in an Anarchist society, and how that may need to be challenged.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    I don't think Anarres was ever anarchic. The system was built to perpetuate hierarchy from the start by founders too afraid of their descendants to treat them as equals.

    They attempted to achieve anarchy through disempowerment of individuals such that they can only conceive of the current social-political arrangement.

    It's fundamentally bureaucratic. You aren't meant to understand the choices the state makes, only to obey. An unpopular programmer of the central computer's internal logic has more power than a village hero. State-assigned role is more important than social standing.

    The state chooses your profession and place of living or labels you as a bum/criminal, and popularity in open defiance of the state gets your family bullied and socially isolated as part of the bureaucracy socially maneuvering you into voluntary exile.

    It starts from childhood, where thinking for yourself rather than for the group is the sin of egotizing. Where the language has the same word for disloyalty to the bureaucracy and being a bum who doesn't do their share of the work and being a repeat sexual assaulter. Where hierarchy is a boogeyman people are made afraid of rather than something people are helped to understand so they can challenge it whenever it arises.

    The frustrating thing is that the original Odonian vanguard must have been a living counterexample. They formed an anarchist(ish) society by choice with all the trappings of hierarchy still stuck in their mind. But rather than perpetuating their revolutionary mindset to their descendants, they built a bureaucracy to subjugate and conform their descendants to their opinions even after their death.

    Anarres is as anarchic as state communism is communist.

    This is not a condemnation of the book, which is about a character who resists the state anarchist bureaucracy. It makes me wish for a book about a proper anarchic society, or at least one that gets closer, and that's LeGuin's point.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

    It's been a while since I read it myself so it's likely I'll misremember some stuff, but from what I can remember, the central computer that assigned things was due to the extreme scarcity of resources on annares, to the point where they were reliant on following the computer's optimized planning just to avoid starvation. I also seem to recall that the assignments from the computer were still voluntary, it was just that there was that social stigma you mentioned if one opted not to take the assignment given.

    In most ways, Annares is structured in a very anarchist way societally, with the exceptions of the council and some positions of power within the education/research sector. The rest of the problems on Annares are mostly social and cultural oppression, which is why I think it's a good example of a work that explores the concept of an Anarchist society that is going awry, making it a good companion piece to the video.

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    • [–] -2 points 3 months ago

    Feces Capital.

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