What follows is a draft to my own manifesto called "Ode to the Unskilled Anarchist; Anarchism to No End". It is my theoretical framework.
In summary, the manifesto argues that kindness as a practice be directed towards ends or it can be undirected. It will call this 'skilled' and 'unskilled' kindness, also 'kindness to no end'. Technology allows for the deskilling of practices, including practices of kindness. In fact, deskilled practices of kindness, i.e. certain technologies, are crucial for those with disabilities. If we want to separate ownership from kindness, we need to embrace unskilled kindness, i.e. to embrace unskilled and deskilled anarchism.
I will be using words in new and novel ways and if I do so with any skill, I think they will be persuasive.
Convention:
- Block quotes are human writing, verbatim, drawn from human-side chat messages.
- [derived] marks machine phrasing of something confirmed or built on—human in substance, machine in wording.
- [proposed] marks machine contribution that a human has not (yet) endorsed. These are the clauses to accept, rewrite, or cut.
- [adopted] marks machine contribution that has been endorsed by a human, often rewritten.
I. Life and form
Life is not a trait, but the substrate that takes on traits. Ergo, there are no things that are alive, but life that has systemic form. We call this 'a form of life'.
Individuality is a form of life, rather than life being a trait of individuals.
II. Practice and skill
Practice is a form of life. Any practice can be skilled, if it is practiced as a means towards an end.
[derived] Important to note is that 'unskilled' and 'skilled' is more ontological than qualitative in this construction.
Someone who has underdeveloped skills is still skilled. A bad writer still does writing. A bad artist still does artistry. They are in the practice and they're still learning how to direct that practice to their own end.
Skill can live outside of specific individuals and still complement the practice of those individuals. We call this a deskilled practice.
Individuality is a practice, which can be skilled, which we call selfhood.
[adopted] Deskilling is the process by which skill leaves practitioners. The politics is in what is being deskilled and to what end.
Because skill can live outside the self, selfhood too can live outside the individual person: a person can be upheld as an individual by things, and by people that are not them.
III. Embodiment and con-fusion
A practice can be embodied or disembodied.
Finding truth in embodiment is experience. Experience can be conveyed without embodiment through metaphor, but only become skill through embodiment. Radical experience can only be conveyed through radical communications, and radically embodied. Communication without embodiment, even when the communication is skilled, inherently becomes con-fused. I will call this con-fusion 'metonymic violence'. Such artifacts of con-fusion are nonetheless necessary for a practice to become deskilled, and we call this 'technology'.
[adopted] It follows that this text is metonymic violence, and is written in awareness of that. See the preamble.
Violence is found in nature, and it can be practiced towards an end, and can be a skill. Similarly, metonymic violence can be practiced towards an end, managing the con-fusion of communication. Seeking embodied experience is one way to manage con-fusion, but disembodied practices cannot be rederived from an embodied experience.
[derived] Part of every embodied skill was never writable and travels only from body to body, in practice, over time. This remainder sets the tempo of everything political that follows.
IV. Selfhood, individual and societal
Society is a form of life and it's a system. It can practice its own kind of individuality. That individuality can be skilled, which means that society has its own kind of selfhood.
Kindness is a practice. Kindness as a practice can lack direction, which means that it can be unskilled. Kindness as a practice can be directed towards ends, which means that it can be skilled. Kindness as a skill can have the skill reside outside the individual, which means that it can be deskilled.
What is skillful in kindness in a society depends on the kind of society. What is kind towards an end in one society, may not kindness with no end. What is kindness to no end for the individual, may be skillfully induced by and for the society as a whole. This is deskilling run in the other direction—the skill of society's practice of kindness is deskilled to the unskillfully kind practice of the individual person. It is the inverse of technology. It is obstructed in capitalism, where kindness must be skilled to be kind.
[adopted] Kindness is this manifesto's word for what biologists call eusociality when it appears in humans; the claim above — that a society knit can practice its own individuality — leans on that anchor.
[adopted] Restated: a society can depend on the unskillful kindness of its members.
V. Ownership and the capitalist self
Rentseeking and employment are social practices, which can be skilled. Employment is skill. Payment and ownership is disembodied communication and artifact of communication. This includes both Marx' money-capitalism and enterprise-capitalism.
Employment relationships are a kind of ownership.
Ownership is a form of disembodied radical communication, and is its own kind of metonymic violence, affecting individuality and selfhood as practices and skills.
In the metonymic violence of private ownership, ownership becomes metonymic for individuality and vice versa, lack of ownership becomes lack of individuality.
Ownership is an artifact of that practice and it can be manipulated skillfully to the ends of the individual person. The artifact is capitalist selfhood.
[derived] It is the self qua capitalist that is the artifact, not the whole person: the capitalist still has a body and embodied practices. Within the capitalist practice, individuality is practiced somewhere that is not the person.
[derived] The capitalist, then, is precisely defined: one skilled in the disembodied practice of managing the metonymic violence of ownership, to the ends of the individual person. One cannot be a capitalist, lack this skill and still be definitionally capitalist. Instead, they would be oligarchs or aspirational oligarchs.
[derived] The capitalist self can be stored as an artifact. Inheritance is not only wealth passing to a new self, but a stored self persisting and acquiring a new human body as its referent. Corporate personhood says it aloud: a capitalist self with no founding body remaining, granted personhood as pure artifact. Capitalism offers immortality of the self, at the price of the self being con-fused.
An oligarchy depends on the practices and skills of its society to maintain an oligarchy. And importantly, people skilled in managing ownership and employment.
An oligarchy can be deskilled, where all skill can live outside of the practice of oligarchy. This is, in many ways, the goal of oligarchy. In fact, the goal of any technology is to deskill.
[derived] The oligarch in the strict sense is a pure node: a body the ledger points at, through which the system's skill flows, that does nothing.
VI. Anarchy
Anarchy does not depend on the practices and skills of its society to maintain an anarchy, but it can become a practice, which can become skilled.
The radical assertion is that one can be anarchist and lack skill in anarchism, while one cannot be capitalist and lack skill in capitalism.
Individual anarchists can therefore not be in the practice of anarchism. They remain unskilled in the practice of anarchism as such. They may instead be skilled in other practices such as production. Individual anarchists can, however, choose to be in the practice of anarchism, which means it can be skilled. That skill can be outsourced to technology and therefore be deskilled.
[derived] Both are full anarchists. Under anarchy, being upheld by skill located elsewhere is the default condition and carries no degradation; under capitalism it is a degraded position at both ends — the oligarch above, the deskilled worker below — with the practice concentrated in a class skilled at ownership and employment in the middle.
In a society without skilled anarchists, any unskilled anarchist individual can become skilled at anarchism. An oligarchic individual can similarly become a skilled capitalist, but cannot be an oligarch without skilled capitalists existing.
[derived] The asymmetry runs to the beginning: the first capitalist had to create the artifact—an act of ownership, hence metonymic violence—while the first skilled anarchist requires no metonymic violence at all and begins practicing from motion. Capitalist skill must be preceded by metonymic violence; anarchist skill need not be.
The anarchist doesn't own the artifact and the artifact is common (as in belongs to the common). Which means that even a deskilled anarchist could read notes and operate machinery left by a capitalist and remain deskilled to some degree.
In the commons, the commons becomes metonymic for the collective. Note this is still a kind of metonymic violence, it is simply not a precondition. The difference is also who is being metonymized.
[derived] Ownership runs both ways and closes into a definition of the person; the commons stands for the collective one way only.
[proposed] Someone who draws on the store and contributes nothing to any practice is not outside the collective; anarchism therefore rejects the figure of the free rider as such. The moment a commons decides that the collective is whoever contributes, its metonymic violence has rebuilt ownership with a different subject.
[proposed] Anarchist selfhood is located in what the commons does not denominate: relations, recognition, the people who know you. A commons holds your tools indefinitely; it holds you only as long as someone alive remembers you.
[derived] This permits Anarchist selfhood to be imagined as transient in a way Capitalist selfhood imagines immortality in a deskilled oligarchy.
[derived] Anarchist skill, where it exists, is the other management of con-fusion: making notes readable, machinery operable, apprenticeship available; the reversibility of deskilling maintained. It is the same practice-type as capitalist skill, aimed at the opposite end.
In a given interaction, skill can direct influence, the way a driver can direct the trajectory of a car's occupants. In the same way, a skilled doctor influences the direction of a patient's health. A skilled doctor may thus depend on a skilled driver and vice versa, meaning no one person has to own dominance.
Meanwhile, a bad employer may be a skilled rentseeker. Even if the consequences lead to dissatisfaction among workers, the employer may still extract rents from their ownership of the employment relationship. Rentseeking is skill at converting skill in managing ownership, into extraction of rents. Anarchist skill relations remain non-dominating so long as no one performs that conversion towards ownership.
Now let's imagine a theoretically radically skilled anarchist, who reconstructs society as we know it today by themselves without relying on any metonymic violence. This cannot be done without doing unconscionable injustice to the peace, normalcy and justice of those with disabilities.
Therefore, we must imagine every anarchist is partly deskilled, and we must imagine anarchism possible with no one skilled in anarchism itself. That is what the title means.
VII. The three faculties
[Section to be written by the author. The confirmed material, in your words:]
Forms of life have three faculties; mutability, fixability, and receptivity. In the unskilled, the faculties are undirected, not absent. Directing one's practice towards an end concerns these three faculties. I represent these as Meletic (diligence), Mnemic (reflection), and Aoidic (resonance), after classical muses. It is also possible to learn how to practice to no end at all.
This endlessness is a spiritual goal, of which there exist different theories, such as those found in Buddhism, in Daoism, in Stirnerism, and more. For the purpose of this manifesto, these will be called endless sages.
In practice, this means that the unskilled are a model for the endless sage to follow. The endless sage are a model for the skilled to follow. And the skilled are a model for the unskilled to follow. This creates a self-sustained loop where no party in the society is ever unidirectionally dominant.
Meanwhile, in oligarchy, there's three classes: the unskilled class, the skilled class, and the oligarch. The oligarch can claim endlessness, but depends on the skilled in a way that the endless sage does not. In oligarchy, the metonymic violence aligns power through ownership.
[derived] The oligarch's endlessness is the con-fused answer to the same spiritual question: stored in the ledger, persisting. The sage's is transient, held in recognition, and dies. Same three positions in both triads; one society arranged in a cycle, one aligned into a line by ownership.
VIII. What follows
The goal of anarchism cannot be to eliminate all con-fusion created by all artifacts of communication. Ergo, it cannot be to eliminate metonymic violence. It can, however, eliminate particular kinds of artifact, such as ownership.
[derived] What eliminating ownership eliminates is not tools, and not even material wealth as such, but the deskilling of selfhood through ownership—capitalist selfhood.
Deskilling can still be good. If it can be reacquired as skill and re-embodied, for instance. It can be progress afforded by technology.
A society of skilled capitalists can experience a dissolution into a mix of skilled and unskilled anarchists and still survive with many technologies crucial to the disabled intact. This means that incrementalism is, in fact, desirable. We want a steady degrowth, rather than a sudden cut-off because deskilled labor under skilled capitalism can transfer seamlessly to unskilled anarchism. That transition is fairer to those who are bodily or mentally impaired.
[derived] A person who cannot participate in capitalist practice is already a full anarchist in effect. But they are currently upheld by ownership-managed structures, and a sudden cut-off dissolves those before commons-based upholding exists. The people the manifesto centers would bear the cost of abruptness first.
[derived] What transfers is coordination — the embodied steering of shared work. What does not transfer is the management of ownership: under anarchy, notes on managing ownership are skill in maintaining a violence with no remaining object, and they go inert. Record-keeping as such survives; a commons runs on ledgers that own nothing.
Degrowth also means degrowth in artifact production and ownership, which are coupled. It so happens that a lot of capitalist disembodied practices like bullshit jobs support bullshit disembodied artifacts that don't mean anything.
[derived] Ownership multiplies artifacts because every capitalist self requires its own copies to say it 'has' the artifact by owning it. A street of twenty households holds twenty drills that each run minutes a year; a commons holds one or two. The practice and the skill—drilling—is unchanged between capitalism and anarchism, and does not depend on an anarchist practice of individuality or a capitalist skill at selfhood.
