Camus, Albert and the Anarchists (2007)

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/organise-camus-albert-and-the-anarchists

by TotalCrackpot • 2 years ago

118 56 2 years ago

theanarchistlibrary.org

spxneo• 2 years ago

Camus and his views remind me of a certain political spectrum in Western society that is very popular.

0823498723498722• 2 years ago

a certain political spectrum

Which one would that be?

LⒶgniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7qT-C-0ajI

hn_version_0023• 2 years ago

Please be direct and name what you’re referring to?

reocha3• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.”

reocha3• 2 years ago

One must imagine Sisyphus happy working within an extremely obscure and undocumented micro services architecture

0823498723498722• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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".

reocha3• 2 years ago

I either forgot about them or didn't make the association, its been a while since I've read it.

lordleft• 2 years ago

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.

omeze2• 2 years ago

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.

incompatible6• 2 years ago

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?

jhonof• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.

freedomben• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

jilijeanlouis2• 2 years ago

Did you try other providers such as 11labs or open source like voice craft or openvoice

throwup2382• 2 years ago

I too can't wait for my first ASMR napalm recipe! Finally I'll be able to get a good night's sleep.

ufocia• 2 years ago

Anarchist Library not The Anarchist Cookbook, silly.

TaylorAlexander• 2 years ago

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?

jilijeanlouis2• 2 years ago

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

_akhe• 2 years ago

That is an incredibly good LLM app idea. Book-to-cinematic. Thousands of years of content ready to go

anaccount342• 2 years ago

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.

photochemsyn4• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Check out the CNT in Spain.

incompatible6• 2 years ago

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.

photochemsyn4• 2 years ago

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.

ItCouldBeWorse• 2 years ago

One of the dissenters is the chemistry experts, setting the charges in the steel factory, his specialization is something he can hold hostage and he takes it with him. Now you have a crew with no idea, producing low value steel, maybe even destroying the steelworks in the process. Once the factory is worn out, they all decides its to much hassle to run it and go fishing. Societal complexity does not hold up without external pressures.

TotalCrackpot4• 2 years ago

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.

huytersd2• 2 years ago

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.

keybored3• 2 years ago

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.

photochemsyn4• 2 years ago

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.

Sorrop• 2 years ago

Anarchism does not exclude division of labour.

That tidbit is very interesting

Camus, Albert and the Anarchists (2007)

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