[HN Gopher] Camus, Albert and the Anarchists (2007)
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Camus, Albert and the Anarchists (2007)
Author : TotalCrackpot
Score : 111 points
Date : 2024-04-26 17:45 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (theanarchistlibrary.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (theanarchistlibrary.org)
| spxneo wrote:
| Camus and his views remind me of a certain political spectrum in
| Western society that is very popular.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _a certain political spectrum_
|
| Which one would that be?
|
| Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7qT-C-0ajI
| hn_version_0023 wrote:
| Please be direct and name what you're referring to?
| reocha wrote:
| I had no idea Albert Camus was an anarchist, I've read some of
| his work (The Myth of Sisyphus and The rebel) and it shouldn't
| really surprise me to find out he is a socialist of some form.
|
| Edit: If it isn't clear Camus is a fantastic writer and you
| should definitely check out some of his work, and more articles
| from https://libcom.org/ if you have the time!
| ughitsaaron wrote:
| At the very least, even if you haven't read Camus, I expect
| that any programmer of any experience should already have some
| intuitive sympathy with "The Myth of Sisyphus."
| reocha wrote:
| One must imagine Sisyphus happy working within an extremely
| obscure and undocumented micro services architecture
| VelesDude wrote:
| Fixing one bug only to find the fix reveals another bug.
| Repeat til the end of time.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| If staging is sometimes debugged in sorrow, it can also take
| place in joy, for the struggle itself to release to prod is
| enough to fill a dev's heart.
|
| Lagniappe: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/29
| wcarron wrote:
| Really? I think he was very open in his admiration for some of
| the anarchists mentioned in The Rebel, calling Kaliayev & co,
| 'men of the highest principles' and refers to other anarchists'
| "profound considerations for the lives of others".
| reocha wrote:
| I either forgot about them or didn't make the association,
| its been a while since I've read it.
| lordleft wrote:
| Camus famously broke with the french left over (certain aspects)
| of Algerian Liberation, for the simple reason that his mother
| continued to live there. He famously quipped:
|
| "At this moment bombs are being planted in the trams in Algiers.
| My mother could be on one of those trams. If that is justice, I
| prefer my mother."
|
| ...which won him no small amount of censure. I always think of
| this moment when I am asked to co-sign, wholeheartedly, the
| measures endorsed by certain movements.
| omeze wrote:
| Yes, generally people side with their family and loved ones
| over principles. My fathers family had their house aerial
| bombed by the french, so a few tram bombs just sounds par for
| the course of an independence uprising. But your main point is
| correct - violence is always ugly, and we have to be careful
| when rationalizing it to achieve pragmatic goals.
| incompatible wrote:
| We can also generalize beyond our families, and make it one
| of our principles not to harm innocent people. This puts
| random bombings of trams or housing off-limits. How likely is
| it that these acts will achieve pragmatic goals anyway?
| sevagh wrote:
| Well the Algerians successfully overthrew the French
| colonizers after violent uprisings.
| jhonof wrote:
| He also was Algerian so meant that quote literally rather than
| figuratively, and consequently he had a lot more skin in the
| game when compared to Parisians like Sartre.
| pcmaffey wrote:
| Aujourd'hui, maman est morte.
| freedomben wrote:
| Tangential, but one of the things I am most excited about as AI
| gets "human level" good at audio book narration is the ability to
| turn things like the Anarchist Library into audio books. There
| are _so many things_ that I want to read that I just don 't have
| time for (there and other places) but are far too obscure to ever
| get a professional narration. And yes Librivox has quite a few of
| them, but the quality is ... a little distracting (or at least
| was in the late 10s when I last checked).
| dotsam wrote:
| Me too. I've been impressed with some essays I've listened to
| via Open AI TTS. Much better than the librivox ones I've
| occasionally suffered through, and it's only going to get
| better.
| jilijeanlouis wrote:
| Did you try other providers such as 11labs or open source
| like voice craft or openvoice
| throwup238 wrote:
| I too can't wait for my first ASMR napalm recipe! Finally I'll
| be able to get a good night's sleep.
| ufocia wrote:
| Anarchist Library not The Anarchist Cookbook, silly.
| throwup238 wrote:
| Drats! Foiled by reading comprehension, once again!
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I was just thinking about this recently. There's an obscure
| book I can get on ebook but not audiobook. Does anyone know the
| state of the art for producing an audiobook with a text to
| speech network?
| jilijeanlouis wrote:
| It fun that this question comes today, last night I was
| saying to myself that all audiobooks from audible sounded the
| same. But AWS TTS quality is bad so the closest would be
| play.ht, 11labs and lately open source voice craft and open
| voice
|
| https://huggingface.co/pyp1/VoiceCraft_830M_TTSEnhanced
|
| https://research.myshell.ai/open-voice
|
| The main issue is the time and sentiment.
|
| It shouldn't take long before someone takes openvoice and
| start taking books and tts them on a platform.
|
| The main issue will be legal to negotiate right with
| copyright owners this is where the game is... purely lawyers
| bschmidt1 wrote:
| That is an incredibly good LLM app idea. Book-to-cinematic.
| Thousands of years of content ready to go
| anaccount342 wrote:
| Well, he met Gaston Leval, who wrote about CNT's economic
| successes within the Spanish civil war/revolution (primarily in
| the books called "Collectives in the Spanish Revolution" and
| "Collectives in Aragon"). Anyone who has read those accounts in
| good faith can not help but seriously consider those ideas as
| their own.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The Rebel is a very interesting piece of work - you can randomly
| flip it open to any page and find tidbits like this:
|
| > "When we are assured that tomorrow, in the natural order of
| events, will be better than today, we can enjoy ourselves in
| peace. Progress, paradoxically, can be used to justify
| conservatism. A draft drawn on confidence in the future, it
| allows the master to have a clear conscience. The slave and those
| whose present life is miserable and who can find no consolation
| in the heavens are assured that at least the future belongs to
| them. The future is the only kind of property that the masters
| willingly concede to the slaves."
|
| However, even after reading the book the notion of anarchism
| remains unclear. I couldn't tell you how an anarchist would go
| about setting up a steel factory (or any other activity requiring
| highly coordinated human effort) in line with anarchist
| principles, for example.
| piloto_ciego wrote:
| Check out the CNT in Spain.
| incompatible wrote:
| In principle, the steelworkers would be like any group of
| people working together without hierarchy. How would a group of
| friends decide where to go in the afternoon? If there is more
| than one option, but only one can be taken, then either they'd
| split off into multiple groups, or they'd vote on which option
| has the greater support, perhaps with dissenters leaving.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Some positions in a complicated workflow do require far more
| experience and skill than others, so it would seem a
| hierarchy of some kind would naturally arise? You really
| wouldn't want someone with just a few months of experience
| making potentially catastrophic decisions, for example.
| incompatible wrote:
| I suppose any kind of hierarchy would need to be informal,
| based on workers following the examples set by other
| workers who they trust to have the right expertise. But
| unlike in a typical formal hierarchy, this wouldn't need to
| be those who have simply worked there the longest, or have
| the greatest drive for power over others, or those who have
| the best connections with the owners. There wouldn't be any
| fringe benefits (payment) for having greater influence
| through expertise.
| atoav wrote:
| As someone who has written a work anarchist political
| theory 15 years ago, my understanding is that many
| anarchist theories argue among the lines of: The political
| question is not about whether there are hierarchies, but
| how to organize them in a way that:
|
| 1. hierarchies are not set in stone and won't get people
| stuck in one space
|
| 2. power accumulation and corruption through power is
| successfully prevented both in the short and the long term
| (ideally while still keeping the whole thing very mobile on
| small matters and more stable and careful on grand matters)
|
| 3. hierarchies are not steeper than absolutely necessary
| and there should be a high mobility between hierarchical
| layers
|
| 4. anarchy is about an absence of centralized ruling
| structure, not about an absence of rules. This might seem a
| weird distinction, but having a ruler and no rules is not
| the same as having no ruler and coming up with a set of
| clear rules
|
| Most anarchist theorists would therefore have argued the
| notion that anarchy requires a higher sense of order and
| does not represent "chaos" as it is often described. One of
| _the_ most important prerequisites for that was good
| education, at least in the CNT educating yourself was seen
| as one of the prime duties of an anarchist, because if
| everybody comes into the role of the decider, it is good if
| you know what you are doing.
|
| Democracy is also a system that tries to deal with the way
| power is given, transitioned by giving the people a vote.
| In most anarchist or anarchosyndicalist systems voting is
| also pretty important, it is just much more self-organized,
| more bottom up than top down and came with ideas like
| strict term limits and rotations for all positions of
| power. Often councils where proposed to gain some
| continuity, with members of these councils often leaving
| and new ones coming in.
|
| Please note that I describe that CNT flavoured anarchism
| from the top of my head, there are different notions
| elsewhere (e.g. less collectivist and much more libertarian
| ones in the US).
| pdinny wrote:
| Thank you for this edifying comment. As someone who has,
| at best, an extremely surface level understanding of
| anarchism, I found some aspects of what I understood
| quite appealing but I thought that it may be impractical
| or too idealistic. This has sparked my interest to
| actually go deep.
| TotalCrackpot wrote:
| I very much suggest you watching some Anark video essays
| on YouTube, I think he is a very good resource to better
| learn the theory.
| toofy wrote:
| if me and a group of friends are on a sunny weekend
| building a house together, we're going to show much more
| deference to the person who has 20 years of electrician
| experience when it comes electrical work. and the same
| would go with plumbing and a plumber. etc... etc...
|
| this doesn't really have anything to do with how an
| anarchist would view hierarchy. i think most people would
| show deference to domain knowledge, but this wouldn't
| suddenly make the electrician "the boss".
| huytersd wrote:
| It would make the architect the boss because he would
| tell you what needs to happen next. That scenario with a
| client deadline means the "architect" is going to push
| you to finish before the deadline, prod you to get back
| to work if you're lazing around and generally fulfill the
| role of a foreman. Anarchism is a theoretical mental
| exercise with no basis in anything in the real world.
| True anarchism is just current day Haiti where there
| strong rule over the weak because anarchism doesn't
| provide any solutions as to how to build and maintain a
| society without hierarchies.
| lukan wrote:
| "It would make the architect the boss because he would
| tell you what needs to happen next."
|
| But he would have no formal power and there would be no
| underlings. The other people would voluntaritly accept
| his leadership based on his skills. (Or they would not
| and leave). So he cannot treat them bad just because he
| feels like it.
|
| That is a different approach to power and I have seen it
| working in the real world (think of the friends example).
|
| But yes, I also have not seen it working stable and
| consistent enough to base all of society on it.
|
| So the explicit anarchistic projects I have seen,
| definitely had (informal) power structures.
|
| So I really love the consensus approach of anarchism when
| it is working. It is really awesome working together with
| people who all do it because they want to, not because
| they have to. But the hypocrosy regarding power is
| turning me off. Because in reality there are no true
| equals and also in anarchistic projects there are people
| having way more power than others. Which I don't think is
| bad, but it is bad pretending this isn't the case.
| incompatible wrote:
| Your reasoning seems a bit tangled. In one sense,
| "anarchism" is just the absence of government, so is
| often used to describe the state where a government has
| collapsed and various groups are vying violently for
| power. But they aren't trying to create an anarchist
| society with an absence of hierarchy, but to simply
| reinstate the power pyramid with themselves on top.
|
| As for an architect somehow becoming a boss because they
| are the only one who knows what to do, I can't even
| imagine this happening. Anarchists would walk out instead
| of being bossed around. Lazing around can be acceptable
| in anarchism, since maximising production (with most of
| it taken by the rich anyway) isn't the goal.
| toofy wrote:
| again, in this scenario that wouldn't magically make the
| architect "the boss", at least according to the US idea
| of "boss", it simply means he's leading the project.
|
| ive been fortunate enough to know quite a few adult
| anarchists, professionals who are very very respected in
| their fields. engineers who you have probably heard of.
| im not referring to college age kids still on wobbly
| legs, young bambis who are still trying to find their
| footings. actual mature professionals. and i hesitate to
| put words in their mouth but ill give it a shot.
| apologies in advance if im off, anarchists please
| absolutely correct me:
|
| i suspect they would say something like you have to
| distinguish between a leader and a boss. you also have to
| distinguish between someone who is an "authority in their
| field" vs "authority figure." one is an expert who is
| well respected, they're an authority in their field, they
| have wisdom and expertise in some subject. their words
| have more weight in that subject. that isn't the same as
| an authority figure, someone who has power to cause
| negative outcomes for you personally. we see a lot of
| noise about "anarchists are anti-authority", but they
| absolutely are not anti-wisdom or anti-expertise. they're
| anti-authority_figure.
|
| from what i've seen anarchist projects have no problem
| with team leaders and they certainly have no problem at
| all with someone being an expert authority in their
| field. for example they have no problem at all with the
| concept of a team leader because if the project 'leader'
| is an obnoxious dickbag, they can just all pick up and
| move the meeting next door and leave the obnoxious person
| behind. we do this kind of team organizing everyday
| outside of work without bosses, whether its a camping
| trip amongst friends, a family reunion, hackathon, lan
| party, etc... etc...
|
| to an anarchist, someone being good at something doesn't
| mean that im not good at something else. and both of us
| being good at different things doesn't magically give
| either of us the right to be a dickbag to each other. for
| groups of people organizing to complete some random large
| project, leaders _need_ someone to do x, y, and z just as
| much as the team needs organization. and if the leader is
| awful the team is always free to metaphorically move the
| meeting next door and leave the awful person behind.
| there is no shortage of organizing that happens outside
| of a boss /employee relationship where the person
| organizing knows they can't be a dickbag because no one
| would help them. if no one wants to help them, they can't
| realize their project.
|
| anyway, anarchists, again, sorry if anything ive said is
| entirely wrong. please please correct me.
| kaskakokos wrote:
| >Anarchism is a theoretical mental exercise with no basis
| in anything in the real world
|
| You can expand your universe if you search this:
| Anthropology Egalitarianism
| andoando wrote:
| The main idea behind anarchism is free association, meaning
| a group of people can freely decide who leads them. It isnt
| too far fetched an idea. There are several working
| implementation of worker owned democratic workplaces, of
| which the Isreali kibbutz communities are one the largest.
|
| Imagine replacing corporate entities with structures where
| the employees all have share of the company and have direct
| access to vote in leadership, or decide some other kind of
| structure (as Valve supposedly does). Theres some
| challenges to work though but I dont see why any new
| startup cant take this approach.
|
| If I ever get a successful product going Im going to give
| it a try.
| nanomonkey wrote:
| There is a difference between a hierarchy of control, and a
| hierarchy of capabilities. Think of a student driver and
| instructor scenario. The student driver is in direct
| control of the car, while the instructor has more
| experience and is a better driver than the student. The
| instructor can mentor the student and provide safeguards so
| that the student does not kill themselves while obtaining
| knowledge. It's accepting these sorts of hierarchies in
| humanity that allow us to make better decisions, and listen
| to experts, while not giving up control over our own
| actions.
| TotalCrackpot wrote:
| You can choose delegates with some sphere of autonomy in a
| horizontal way, but in anarchist association you can instantly
| recall them in a horizontal way too. This helps mitigate
| creating hierarchy while giving someone autonomy and making it
| possible to divide labor.
| huytersd wrote:
| Who can instantly recall them? A group vote or an individual?
| Because one of them is just democracy and the other is
| utterly unworkable. The first time someone doesn't want to
| work, they're going to "recall" the boss.
| TotalCrackpot wrote:
| Direct democracy, ranging from majority vote to some kind
| of consensus or consent. Considering someone not working -
| in anarchy you can always pick with whom you associate with
| so you can just not associate with a persons who you feel
| is too lazy.
| keybored wrote:
| > However, even after reading the book the notion of anarchism
| remains unclear. I couldn't tell you how an anarchist would go
| about setting up a steel factory (or any other activity
| requiring highly coordinated human effort) in line with
| anarchist principles, for example.
|
| You've lost the ability to imagine freedom.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Freedom is one of those words subject to endless
| manipulation. Freedom of action, for example - does that mean
| people should be free to enslave others? Freedom to
| expropriate (steal) the product of another's labor? Freedom
| from the physical laws of conservation of energy and
| momentum?
|
| Take the bicycle - an optimal transport solution for the
| anarchist. Everyone has a bicycle, everyone is free to ride
| the bicycle - but how does the bicycle factory work? How do
| all the factories needed to supply the bicycle factory with
| rubber, steel, aluminum, precise machine tooling, etc.
| fulfill those tasks? In turn, how do they get raw materials -
| ores, etc. - that they need to produce these materials? Do
| they sign contracts with each other? If one party fails to
| deliver on a contract, is there a penalty and who enforces
| that penalty?
|
| Certainly the situation can be improved - I'd argue for
| fixing the highest salary to be no more than 10X the lowest
| salary, and that gradations should be entirely merit-based
| (not inheritance-based) - but is that against anarchist
| principles or not? Flattening hierarchies is possible, but
| eliminating them?
|
| I think if you try to eliminate hierarchies, you just replace
| them with sneaky covert hierarchies that are gamed by the
| usual manipulative personality types to their own benefit.
| keybored wrote:
| See for example Chomsky's[1] anarchism.[2]
|
| > authority, unless justified, is inherently illegitimate
| and that the burden of proof is on those in authority. If
| this burden can't be met, the authority in question should
| be dismantled.
|
| Authority/hierarchy are interchangeable in this context.
|
| [1] The guy most known in computer science for his "Chomsky
| hierarchy".
|
| [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarchy101/comments/ss7eze/whe
| re_do...
| photochemsyn wrote:
| That doesn't answer the covert hierarchy problem, which
| is what plagued all those 1970s anarchist communes. Some
| group would arise within the commune, it would work to
| control resources or exclude 'undesirables' and so on,
| leading to a lot of cult-like situations with a
| charismatic manipulative individual gaining control and
| authority.
|
| Consider also the enforcement of contracts between
| parties issue. Now, I understand that the anarchist
| position would be that if someone fails to deliver on a
| promise, then you can simply stop associating or doing
| business with that person - fine. Then they come into
| your workplace at night and steal everything you've made.
| You can say, I'll take my goods back by force, but then
| it's just a question of who has the greatest capability
| for violence, right?
| keybored wrote:
| Para 1: If this refers to "Tyranny of Structurelessness"
| (maybe that was just feminism) then modern anarchism has
| plenty of structure. If not: I guess it doesn't work.
|
| Para 2: It would be great if we would get to a point
| where we have to live up to these high-minded ideals.
| Like if pacifism is possible.[1] Meanwhile these "what if
| an unstoppable anarchist met an immovable anarchist"
| thought experiments aren't interesting.
|
| [1] Not that pacifism is an anarchist position. So
| relevance?
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