Reddit reviews Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid
We found 6 Reddit comments about Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
If one wants a deeper understanding of Peter Kropotkin's ideas, I recommend taking a look at the book Kropotkin: The Politics of Community by the anthropologist Brian Morris (If anyone here has a PDF of Morris' book please share it on libcom.org):
Kropotkin: The Politics of Community: https://www.amazon.com/Kropotkin-Politics-Community-Brian-Morris/dp/1591021588
If you want a book that uses Kropotkin's work for sociological analysis Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid by Andrej Grubacic and Denis O'Hearn, that book gives a very good idea what "mutual aid" actually means:
https://www.amazon.com/Living-Edges-Capitalism-Adventures-Mutual/dp/0520287304/
As for anarchist thinkesr who are close to Kropotkin, I recommend taking a look at:
Caffentzis book critiques John Locke, not Adam Smith, if you want a book on Adam Smith there's The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation by Michael Perelman, which is very good.
If you're looking for books on societies that are (trying to) live completely outside capitalism I recommend taking a look at the book Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid by Denis O'Hearn and Andrej Grubacic.
It takes a bit of effort and previous knowledge to completely understand it, but it's a pretty good book, you can find it here: https://www.amazon.com/Living-Edges-Capitalism-Adventures-Mutual/dp/0520287304
The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital by Massimo De Angelis also adresses the misconception you seem to be bringing up (that capitalism is a totalizing system), Massimo De Angelis comes out of the same grand tradition as famous Italian autonomists like Negri, Lazzarato, Virno, etc, but where the latter all seem to have sunk into a common obsession with the notion of "real subsumption", that there is nothing and noplace outside of capitalism, De Angelis argues exactly the opposite. In fact, he insists that it would be better not even to talk about "capitalism" as a total system (as opposed to as an ideology - as an ideology it obviously does exist), but rather, to talk about capital, and capitalists, and capitalist value practices (using money to make more money), but that these capitalist value practices are never the only game in town. There are always other ones. True, the capitalist ones are dominant at the moment, but there is a continual struggle going on, where on the one hand, the market sets everyone against each other, sets the livelihood of people in Africa against those in Germany, of one city, town, enterprise, community, occupation against another, so that even every invention or discovery that was originally intended to eliminate scarcity and improve people's lives ultimately gets diverted to the purpose of creating new forms of scarcity and keeping people in desperate competition against each other. In reaction, those motivated by other values (solidarity, community, ecology, beauty, security, tradition...) are constantly creating new forms of commons, of shared and collectively managed resources, and political forces aligned with capitalism are always attempting to break them up and appropriate them with new enclosures. Thus, what Marx called "primitive accumulation" has never ended. At the same time, the capitalists are always trying to create "commons" of their own, what they like to call "externalities", fobbing off the costs of production onto other people, communities, or nature. Much of the political struggle of the last twenty or thirty years, De Angelis explains, can be understood precisely as battles over the creation and enclosure of different sorts of commons, and behind it all, lie battles over the nature of value itself.
Look you seem to have good intentions but you're completely immersed in the neoclassical economics bullshit.
So, I recommend taking at this particular book:
The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community by Harvard Economics Professor Stephen A. Marglin, who is also a reformed/ former neoclassical economist.
Philip Mirowski's book Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science, his book More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature's Economics and his latest The Knowledge We Have Lost in Information: The History of Information in Modern Economics deal with a lot of the bullshit coming from economics.
You can find a more anti-capitalist critique in [The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital](http://www.lamarre-mediaken.com/Site/COMS_630_files/Beginning%20of%20History.pdf
) (I included a PDF to it).
As for books on what communism might look like:
https://www.amazon.com/Living-Edges-Capitalism-Adventures-Mutual/dp/0520287304
https://www.amazon.com/World-Gift-Jacques-T-Godbout/dp/0773517510
https://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-Economy-Sharing-Thomas-Widlok/dp/1138945552
The economic mechanism that Thomas Widlok talks about in his book is very to what Peter Kropotkin calls "mutual aid" and David Graeber calls "everyday communism".
If you want to talk about "production for use":
Look David Graeber's "human economies", you can find some of it in this essay: Turning Modes of Production Inside Out, or, Why Capitalism is a Transformation of Slavery.
Or Peter Linebaugh's Stop, thief!: The commons, enclosures, and resistance.
For a critique of high-modernist bullshit like "planning" and "market" I recommend:
Seeing like a state - James C. Scott.
This new book continues a lot themes that Scott started:
Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid by Andrej Grubacic and Denis O'Hearn.
"Planning" and "planning boards" has nothing to do with original "socialism", the concept of planning was created by social democrats in Vienna (like Kautsky, other assholes) who called themselves "marxists" but were big believers in neoclassical economics and they were big believers in managerial capitalism they wanted to get rid of "markets" by transforming the state into a big corporation.
Graeber has another book where he treats this stuff in more detail, it's his first book "Toward an anthropological theory of value: The false coin of our own dreams".
You can find here: https://monoskop.org/images/3/36/Graeber_David_Toward_an_Anthropological_Theory_of_Value.pdf
Or here: https://libcom.org/library/toward-anthropological-theory-value-false-coin-our-own-dreams/
There's also some stuff in his "Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion and Desire", which you can find here:
https://monoskop.org/images/c/c9/Graeber_David_Possibilities_Essays_on_Hierarchy_Rebellion_and_Desire_2007.pdf
You can find all of his books here: https://monoskop.org/David_Graeber
If you like Polanyi, you're going to like this one:
https://www.academia.edu/23497370/Capitalism_mutual_aid_and_material_life_Understanding_exilic_spaces
https://www.amazon.com/Living-Edges-Capitalism-Adventures-Mutual/dp/0520287304
It's neither necessary nor desirable.
James C. Scott has a good critique of this kind of stuff in Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed , are you familiar with it?
It mainly focuses mainly on agricultural societies, so it doesn' directly address capitalism, although it has this nugget in the Preface:
“…as I make clear in examining scientific farming, industrial agriculture, and capitalist markets in general, large-scale capitalism is just as much an agency of homogenization, uniformity, grids, and heroic simplification as the state is, with the difference being that, for capitalists, simplification must pay. A market necessarily reduces quality to quantity via the price mechanism and promotes standardization; in markets, money talks, not people.
…Put bluntly, my bill of particulars against a certain kind of state is by no means a case for politically unfettered market coordination as urged by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. As we shall see, the conclusions that can be drawn from the failures of modern projects of social engineering are as applicable to market-driven standardization as they are to bureaucratic homogeneity.”
If you want a follow-up to that, that addresses capitalism, and the exitsing attempts to go beyond it, I recommend Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid by Andrej Grubačić and Denis O'Hearn.
Since you're to be against bureaucracy, Graeber's The Utopia of Rules is a good critique of bureaucracy: https://libcom.org/files/David_Graeber-The_Utopia_of_Rules_On_Technology_St.pdf
There's also this one on "democracy": https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-there-never-was-a-west