Anarchy Works.pdf - Infoshop.org

economy
Anarchy Works
affects the whole community's standard ofliving, so there is group
pressure to work hard; members work where they choose, and gain
satisfaction from their work; people develop a competitive pride if
their branch of work does better than other branches; people gain
prestige from work because labor is a cultural value.30 As described
above, the ultimate decline of the kibbutz experiment stemmed
largely from the fact that the kibbutzim were socialist enterprises
competing within a capitalist economy, and thus subsumed to the
logic of competition rather than the logic of mutual aid. A Similarly
organized commune in a world without capitalism would not face
these same problems. In any case, unwillingness to work due to lack
of wages was not one of the problems the kibbutzim faced.
Many anarchists suggest that the germs of capitalism are
contained in the mentality of production itself. Whether a given
type of economy can survive, much less grow, within capitalism is
a poor measure of its liberatory potential. But anarchists propose
and debate many different forms of economy, some of which can
only be practiced to a limited extent because they are wholly
illegal within today's world. In the European squatter's movement,
some cities have had or continue to have so many squatted social
centers and houses that they constitute a shadow society. In
Barcelona, for example, as recently as 2008 there were over forty
occupied social centers and at least two hundred squatted houses.
The collectives of people who inhabit these squats generally use
consensus and group assemblies, and most are explicitly anarchist
or intentionally anti-authoritarian. To a large extent, work and
exchange have been abolished from these people's lives, whose
networks run into the thousands. Many do not have wagedjobs, or
they work only seasonally or sporadically, as they do not need to
pay rent. For example the author of this book, who has lived within
30 Melford E. Spiro, Kibbutz: limture in Utopia, New York: Schocken
Books, 1963, pp. 83-85.
this network for two years, has survived for much of that time on
less than one euro a day. Moreover, the great amount of activity
they carry out within the autonomous movement is completely
unwaged. But they do not need wages: they work for themselves.
They occupy abandoned buildings left to rot by speculators, as a
protest against gentrification and as anti-capitalist direct action to
provide themselves with housing. Teaching themselves the skills
they need along the way, they fix up their new houses, cleaning,
patching roofs, installing windows, toilets, showers, light, kitchens,
and anything else they need. They often pirate electricity. water,
and internet, and much of their food comes from dumpster-diving,
stealing, and squatted gardens.
In the total absence of wages or managers, they carry on a
great deal of work, but at their own pace and within the logic of
mutual aid. Besides fixing up their own houses, they also work
for their neighborhoods and enrich their communities. Some
social centers host bicycle repair workshops, enabling people to
repair or build their own bicycles, using old parts. Others offer
workshops on carpentry, self-defense and yoga, natural healing, as
well as libraries, gardens, communal meals, art and theater groups,
language classes, alternative media and counterinformation, music
shows, movies, computer labs where people can use the internet
and learn email security or host their own websites, and solidarity
events to deal with the inevitable repression. Nearly all of these
services are prOVided absolutely free. There is no exchange-one
group organizes to provide a service to everyone, and the entire
social network benefits.
With an astounding amount of initiative in such a passive
society, when squatters regularly get the idea to organize a
communal meal or a bicycle repair shop or a weekly movie shOWing,
they talk with friends and friends of friends until they have enough
people and resources to make their idea a reality, and then they
spread the word or put up posters and hope as many people as
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