That kind of unstructured group can advocate for (say) women, but if you add enough structure it becomes a group that writes checks to Democratic candidates. The most effective activist organizations I've been with have been temporary and deal with the structure/structureless/sustainability problem of melting into the crowd and reforming when necessary.
(I suspect one can find under-interpreted arguments in Graeber that support your unpopular claim but...)
In contrast, what seems really interesting (to me, &/or not just HN-blasphemous) is the alternate framing that
Free markets can be extreme left-wing
>That essay is important
In order to NOT be distracted by Freeman's essay, consider that it most likely hasnt ever crossed their minds that markets that look free can have much more intricate structure than the most uh thoughtful institution? Whether structure correlates with sentience is then the nub?
Then there's the apparent counterpoint of a field known as "institutional econs"; not quite as friendly a framing to schizos :(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber
?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21535498
(The HN just for completeness; didn't see any remarkable dismissals there.. ntheless some (schizoid?) comments seemed worthy of being kept in my background eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21548795 )
https://archive.is/latest/www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/12/0...
>After such a catastrophic embarrassment, orthodox economists fell back on their strong suit—academic politics and institutional power.
I don’t really want to follow through the rest of your thesis.
One problem I've been thinking of is how community organizations can stay in touch with people online without centralized social media. The backdrop is here [2] and a good example of an anti-social media local organization is [3].
I'd trust a rag-tag group of web developers working on their own account to have a good chance of doing a good job of building out and promoting this kind of platform. If you could just pay people without having an organization or fundraising, $500k would go a long way. If a big non-profit, say the United Way, gave it a try, it would value groupthink more than competence and I think would struggle to develop an effective team and the budget would stretch into the $5-50M range. It would certainly spend more on overhead than it would on action. Worse yet, a group like that might solicit grants, but grants would go to people who are good at getting grants, not good at making web sites, so you might as well piss the money away.
"Sustainable" is the word non-profits use for "profitable" and if there is a big risk in non-profits it is that they are every bit if not more niggardly than billionaires yet without the profit motive you can't approach management and say "we can improve our process efficiency by 5% and pocket the improvement" (radical when repeated) or "here's a new venture that could expand our market by 30%"
I don't understand his situation completely, and I can also understand that making this into a real business (profit or not) is necessary to make it sustainable, but I can also see the fear of creating a monster [4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Join_or_Die
[3] https://fingerlakesrunners.org/
[4] Oxfam, Bill Gates, and company will do anything for Africa except help them develop a real economy that the state can tax and provide services