I can’t find a job.
Well I could but there doesn’t seem to be any jobs that fit.
Or if there are I can’t find them. (But I don’t think so)
The biggest problem is that I live in estonia and it seems there really isn’t a well-developed anarchist/socialist/syndicalist movement here. The IWW doesn’t have a branch and searching online doesn’t really yield any results (aside from a couple of socdem groups),
I don’t know how to search for a job that isn’t just doing menial labour for some company.
I would like to work for a global fully-remote anarchically managed tech syndicate. But I don’t think those exist and I imagine starting one is incredibly difficult. (Well starting it wouldn’t be difficult, but finding people capable and willing to work for something like that, while getting enough income, is.)
At the end of the day the means dictate the ends. Looking for a job in a capitalist way is going to land you with a capitalist job. I need to look for a job in a anarchist/socialist/syndicalist way, but how do you do that in an environment where those ideas aren’t widespread?
but how do you do that in an environment where those ideas aren’t widespread?
You don’t.
You are trying to escape the capitalist mode of production… but, unfortunately, there is nowhere for you to escape to.
Some people do, of course, get to live an “activist lifestyle” - but those are people who have the necessary privilege to do so. Something tells me you don’t have it - if you did, there’d be no need for you to ask on here, would there?
All that said, I’ve joined these guys recently https://patio.coop/ - you might find some team that’s aligned with you.
Things are not exactly hot there, but it’s the best lead I have right now. And sure upon joining, I immediately typed “anarch” in search window in their team chat and yeah, there is one political channel with very clearly defined topic.
After running mine for a long time I find the concept too formal of an organization - the best approach IMO would be to hold really tiny 1-5 person teams as cooperatives and share franchise/brand/reputation/network effects. Binding people to one group, pretty much exclusively, limits possibilities a lot - and redistributes responsibilities in a way that might be harmful and demotivating for less active members.
Ideally, every wizard should have a tower and a village, then they join their strengths as needed, submitting to none.
Would it be possible to become apprenticed in a trade, like an electrician, then when you are a journeyman, create your own electrician cooperative? I don’t know if there is much of a market in Estonia for solar, but a coop that installs solar or wind power sounds pretty anarchist (or solarpunk) to me :)
Actually, finding people who want to work on that sort of thing online is not hard. Worker cooperatives have better pay, better likelihood of success, and come with a cleaner conscience. People want that. Making it work legally is difficult: it’s difficult enough to manage books and build a business within capitalist legal structures while maintining consensus-based organizing without having that be across many national jurisdictions.
Why not work a regular job doing menial labor? The pay is shit? OK, fight for it to be better alongside your comrades. Isn’t that what the labor movement is all about? Idk, easy for me to say in a place with high minimum wage
Well, there is one important difference when it comes from manual labor to IT: the latter scales a lot. One person writes a silly piece of code, millions of copies get sold effortlessly, and that’s no limit. So much, that capitalists have no idea how to structure payroll - giving a dev fair share would make them rich enough to stop working immediately - so things like “competitive salary (with respect to your location)” are a thing - just paying enough so that you can’t be lured away by competitors.
But it’s not the perspective I want to highlight. What’s more important, is that value production in IT is so much distorted to benefit the capitalist instead of worker, that no matter how many unions you get in, how much you rob the system, you are collaborating with the bad guys at a scale that’s just on different level. Yes, the payment is often empowering enough to do good things with extra cash, but that’s the situation where taking care of ethics is more important than with “regular” jobs.
Same stuff could be said about finance and military tech, I guess. They scale madly too, just in different ways. So silly of me to get involved in all of these simultaneously.
I tried switching jobs to manual labor in the last month, but once people see my work history, they just freak out. I’d like to operate a mill or fix ignition electronics, but alas, they think I’ll be bored. People do not understand. Mentally relax on a job to have fun later - what a dream.
My main reason is ideological. Why should I waste my precious time working in a job that doesn’t advance my goals of creating a freer society? while also making pennies for some shareholder at the top? on top of that I get bored of doing the same thing over and over again. I want my work to have more variance.
And I guess while being truly international is kinda difficult it seems that it’s a lot easier within the EU and USA.
There is no individual solution. That cooperative of your dream will it be in the air out the planet earth in the eter of your imagination? Or will it be in the capitalist mode of production? In wich world do you live? What is the society who made you? You are a slave like or not. You’ll stay a slave whatever under democratic rules or fascist one in a capitalist enterprise or in a coop. Stop dreaming. Read Marx.
No thanks. I like my theory to be from the current century. You know the one where we have stuff like the internet, imminent climate disaster and the hindsight of the soviet regime.
Also starting a cooperative is no individual solution. It’s a first step towards establishing a collective economy. Which could fuel the collective spirit and start a political movement.
Stay in your theory then the reality is gonna refute you before you know it.
I would like to work for a global fully-remote anarchically managed tech syndicate.
And I assume you would also like to be paid well.
This is a lot of requirements for a job. You want to work in tech, and fully remote, and anarchist, and doing something meaningful, and get paid well. I would recommend starting off by getting the best job that fits your ideology and desires that you can get right now. After all, you still need to support yourself.
Once you have that part down, work on getting a different job that meets another of your desires. Eg, get a tech job. Any job in tech, even if it is shitty. Then get a tech job that is less shitty and pays you well. Then get a tech job that pays you well and lets you work remote part time. Then full time. Then get a fully remote tech job with good pay that works on something meaningful to you. Then get a job at a tech syndicate.
The problem you are running into is that jobs like the one you want are very appealing to many people. Most people want remote work. They want to get paid well. They want to do meaningful work. Etc. Thus, the positions that these employers have will be highly competitive. And you, therefore, must have a high level of skill in your niche and connections in the industry who will pass along your name and pass along opportunities to you. And while a good education in a field can serve as a strong foundation and get your foot in the door to start, most knowledge needed for most jobs is learned on the job - actually doing the work and interacting with other people who are working on the same problems. So to get your dream job, you need experience and connections, and to get experience and connections, you will need to work in less appealing jobs. And since almost all employers are capitalist, you will almost certainly need to work at a number of capitalist firms in order to achieve your goal.
I actually don’t care about the pay. As long as I can buy food and pay my bills I don’t care. I would be willing to work for less than minimum wage if it meant I could have a say in my workplace.
And honestly it doesn’t even need to be a tech syndicate. I would be willing to work for any syndicate, and most areas have some kind of IT.
keep looking for the perfect role but don’t die in a gutter for your ideology in the meantime.
You’re running into the issues behind prefiguration, or the idea that the kernel of the new world can and must be practiced in the world of the old.
Simply put, a girl’s gotta eat. You can and should work towards a better world, and engage with the theoretical traditions and backbones which have brought about great advancements in human dignity; but you also need to lay a working foundation for yourself to succeed well enough in life.
We struggle to make a better world not because the current world is full of people who simply don’t know better and could choose to do something easier and more convenient for them (I.e. a syndicalist workplace, etc); but because we are at war with the ruling classes of our country who use every trick in the book to impoverish our people and the people of the world. It will take much more to win against them than finding the right job; it takes mass organization and strategy which is something you’re best equipped to engage on when you’re in a more stable place.
This sounds typical but I recommend investing yourself into a career, either trades or college, and engaging with mass protest movements in your area like Palestine Solidarity movements at this time. That would be more practical for being able to create a new world.
Ill start one for you, but i have two hundred dollars and am not worth my socks or my energy drinks in any coding language.
I’ve reached that point where I’m good at programming but require to explain my ideas to someone or I just give up because it seems like too much effort for no benefit. So even someone who doesn’t really know any programming but can listen and think along would be a important.
I might actually be willing to do that for you sometime!
I know there’s some mostly anarchist tech coops in my country but even they are competing in a capitalist society. It’s still important to have these, kind of as a preparation for better times, but the economic framework surrounding them still sucks.
I think autonomic is kind of international, maybe getting in touch helps you, I think they have a matrix channel as well.
When we are recruiting for increased worker membership we will make a post on our blog. If you are interested in joining Autonomic but we are not currently recruiting, you are still welcome to send us your CV at boop@autonomic.zone.
It’s not Estonia, it’s the world. I’ve been running one of these in Finland for 5 years (yeah, with our burn rate), but things just degrade - can’t land any jobs now, it seems EU is funneling cash into the wars and all the capitalist thieves benefiting from it (I tried getting into supply chain, after all, there seem to be clear good guys and bad guys - but good guys are behind thieving government wall, so they just can’t pay), and US is just jerking off to their king. Trade is dead and something is about to happen, but my cooperative degraded into 2 people now, and maybe some who would return if I can feed everyone when something happens.
I’ve been doing lots of tech jobs for crypto people, as long as they keep doing liberal things, we kind of align. But they divided between those who can barely pay anything and those who lost last shreds of ethical behavior. Either way, I’m kind of known person in those circles and that does not help.
I tried to find some activists who might be willing to commission some work (as I said, I did some military things, sure there would be socialist liberals who need hardware and have some resources to help me stay afloat and build things), but no luck so far.
So it’s some global issue. I’m trying to ground now, get in touch with local community and build something out of it, more gift economy kind of vibe and screw them money if capitalists want to just rob us all. But really I’m as lost as you are, no matter how world class professional I am at what I do. Still, we need to hold onto our connections. My contact is in user profile.
it seems EU is funnelling cash into the wars
If it’s to provide opposition to Russian aggression, that is something that should be done. I am fully behind opposing fascism and imperialism.
and all the capitalist thieves benefiting from it
This is where the problems ooze out of the woodwork. Too many piggies at the trough, too many politicians linked to those piggies.
Build a tall wall between capitalism and state, like how we are (ideally) supposed to have total separation between religion and state.
And most importantly: start by eliminating all forms of corporate welfare beyond the ma-and-pa level of capitalism. If a company is “too big to fail”, it must, by default, also be too big to be privately owned, and must be nationalized or collectivized, with owners/shareholders seeing 100% loss in their “investment”.
If it’s to provide opposition to Russian aggression, that is something that should be done. I am fully behind opposing fascism and imperialism.
‘social’ patriotism is still fascism. the proletariat have nothing to gain in a war waged under capitalism. you can oppose the war without supporting the military-industrial complex. revolutionary defeatism remains as relevant today as it was a hundred years ago.
just as then, this clash of civilisations narrative is creating a left-to-right pipeline and disappearing comrades into militaries or (if they refuse) prisons. anticapitalism is being sidelined for ‘national unity’ and ‘social cohesion’. money that previously didn’t exist is now allocated to US-bound tributes and funding for corporations which are in the business of fucking killing people, to support the nationalist programme of a Banderite State as these two capitalist countries grind each other’s lower classes against each other. surveillance becomes a ‘necessity’ to defeat the Evil Nonwhite (read: Nonhuman) Hordes. the Bad Refugees need to be expelled to make space for the Good Refugees. housing and funding for refugees and integration programmes suddenly materialises, and these Good Refugees get expedited (and sometimes exclusive) access to such help. literal nazi ideology and dogwhistles are rehabilitated to make all this more palatable.
where is the antiïmperialism in this? where’s the antifascism? i am convinced militarist-patriotic ‘left’-ists don’t personally know any comrades from Ukraine.
- https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/evasions-on-the-left-over-ukraine
- https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/aotearoa-workers-solidarity-movement-the-betrayal-of-donbas-no-war-but-class-war
- https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-anarchist-antimilitarism-and-myths-about-the-war-in-ukraine
I said absolutely nothing about patriotism. Patriotism in many cases is toxic to humanity and peace in general.
And an aggressor like Russia will roll over Europe if there is no military opposition regardless of the system in place. Better to have a military-industrial complex providing viable opposition than having entire nonmilitary populations being forcibly exterminated as Russian forces are wont to do.
I advocate dealing with the aggression first, and then figuring out an ideal system moving forward afterwards, rather than bikeshedding away any advantage that may currently exist.
TL;DR: Use the tools that you have right now, and figure out something better once you have the breathing room to do so. Because right now, Russia ain’t planning on providing Europe any breathing room. It would gladly retake all of Eastern Europe given half the chance.
i see. so we must escalate the security dilemma and bolster the capitalist military to defeat the Oriental Hordes to protect our managers’ very peaceloving and democratic ways of life. only once the capitalists have installed someone nicer to manage the Orient can we hope to return to begging the capitalists to relinquish their weapons and their power, of which they now have more of, and which many more people have been integrated into. in the meantime, leftists need to put their shit on hold. none of this will contribute to the rise of the far right or stoke xenophobic tendencies. i’m not a nationalist; joining the military is simply the forward-thinking thing to do. military service very famously attracts good people with good intentions. this is definitely not a right-wing position based in false consciousness and a Tom Clancy-esque view of geopolitics. this posturing has no relation to how we ended up in this situation. the fact that all of this benefits international capital is merely a coïncidence. mutually assured destruction means nothing to me.
with business going so well for the MIC, Gaza beach resorts should be open just in time for the postwar economy to swing back around! we could all use a little time in the sun after making everything worse.
/s
Use the tools that you have right now, and figure out something better once you have the breathing room to do so.
the military is not my/our tools. it’s the state’s tools.
our tools are being torn at to make way for a war economy, for a war that isn’t ours.
and if you tell me you’re not advocating for joining the military, then who does?
so we must escalate the security dilemma
There is no escalation dilemma here. History is overflowing with examples of countries with good militaries stopping much larger and more powerful countries from invading.
You think Switzerland just told the Nazis “pretty please don’t invade”?? No, their entire population was armed to the teeth and the entire country was geared for war and a strong defence, along with defendable topography. Had Nazi Germany actually invaded, it would have likely crippled itself from the attempt.
Now, maybe that would have been a good thing, historically speaking, but bullies are only stopped by people they think they cannot easily bully. And for countries and unions of countries, that means a strong military and leaping to each other’s defence.
Conversely, Russia only invaded the Ukraine because it saw that country as weak and an easy invasion target. Europe failing to back Ukraine tells Russia that it can walk over Europe, taking out countries in sequence, and no-one will make any serious attempt to stop it until it is too late.
Your comment seems to be steeped in reality-free ideology, and bereft of practical history.
To focus on political structure when Europe is under immediate threat of an emboldened Russia is bikeshedding at its worst.
Given a choice between enlisting for a country in it’s defence - or the defence of the entire continent of which it’s a part of - and being exterminated by the invader who threatens all countries there, I’ll take the former any day of the week.
The greater evil is the imperialistic-driven extermination of you and everyone you love, not serving in the military for a war that you would prefer not to be in.
That is true - by capitalist rules, if someone reduces someone else’s risks, they should also reduce their shares/profits. But then there are indirect dividends, so the system is kind of capitalist-sound.
As you might’ve noticed from my recent activity here, I’m also working on applied political science from unpopular freedom-humanitarian point of view side.
And indeed, there is little worse - from both capitalist and freedom points of view - than corporate wellfare, it kills both economy and people. But it’s existence is indeed in local energy minimum, so it’s here to stay with us at least until the next big upheaval. (Ironically, if Russia wins, then moves on and barbarians plunge the world into dark ages, that would be an upheaval; hopefully, we’d find better options?)
And the issues you describe are inevitable in current state of capitalism. They seem to be inevitable in any kind of capitalism. And according to my recent findings (I’m sure there were others who came to similar conclusions, so I’ll be digging the literature now), it is all inevitable with current laws of universe.
Which we, humans, are quite capable of bending. So the rebellion is bigger then class war or opposition to power, it’s rebellion against the world. We are doomed to win, whether for good or for bad.
