Anarchists Should Learn Sales
And no, I don’t mean becoming an AI-slop driven LinkedIn psychopath.
Anarchists talk a lot about the means of production.
Who owns them, who controls them, who profits from them, who gets exploited through them, who should seize them, how they should be distributed etc.
But very few seem to want to talk about something much less fun:
Who is going to buy what you produce? Given that market anarchists reject (anarcho-)communism, there is no central authority that governs what gets distributed and/or bought.
Unless the plan is to force people to take your products, use your services or finance your project, someone eventually has to convince another person that what they created is worth something.
And that is, pretty much, Sales and I think anarchist should learn it!
I know this might sound weird at first, when I first started to get into anything “business”, I really disliked the idea of sales. There’s this picture of sales that we may have in our mind, which really comes from modern day capitalism; That being of Sales through manipulation and coercion.
Not as some temporary evil. Not because everyone should become a grindset entrepreneur posting about waking up at 4am to dominate the market or whatever.
Look, I don’t want you to turn into a “hustler” that’s #grinding 24/7, posting AI-slop to LinkedIn to try and get the next Uber to work.
But, realistically, sales is a central part of building anything that can survive without coercion.
Sales does not have to be coercion
I think a lot of people hear “sales” and immediately imagine manipulation. And I mean rightly so, I did think this way for a long time too.
And it’s not unjustified either, modern day “capitalism” brought up a lot of actors that fall in that category.
A company manufacturing insecurity so it can sell the cure, cold calls, fake urgency, dark patterns, aggressive persuasion, people being pressured into buying things they don’t need.
All of that exists!
But coming to the conclusion that sales is inherently coercive because coercive sales exists is kinda like saying communication is inherently abusive because people can lie.
At it’s core, sales is pretty straight forward:
Someone has a need, you have something on offer to fulfill that need. You somehow bring that offer into the eyes of the other person and they decide whether it’s worth it for them or not.
They can take you up on it or not, as I like said to say: everyone welcome, no one forced.
Now... if you are bad at explaining your offer, or if the offer is genuinely bad, or the other person simply has no need for it, the sale will probably not go through.
But it does not have to include manipulation or coercion! It can be a completely voluntary exchange.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to reduce the entire economy to two happy people exchanging bread and shoes in a village - I just want you to at least considering being more open of the idea of sales in general.
Obviously there are power differences, unequal information, artificial dependency, monopolies and all kinds of situations where the word “voluntary” gets much more complicated. But the basic act of making someone an offer is not morally corrupt.
As always, it’s more complex and more nuanced than many make it out to be :)
I came to the conclusion that, in my humble opinion, it is one of the least coercive ways you can get someone to support what you are doing.
Someone still has to bake the bread
I like this phrase, because to me it explains the absolute basics of living together: someone, at the end of the day, has to produce something that other want to consume, be it merely for survival or for recreational uses.
I think one of the biggest gaslightings in the modern era is that of money and markets being the evil. Just HOW the hell did we get to a point where this is considered “common knowledge”?
Leaving the worst of the worst of humanity to freely take over anything market and money related, because they simply couldn’t care less for anything but themselves.
Someone has to grow the food, maintain the machines, write the software, repair the pipes, transport things, organise people, clean the buildings and do all the other boring work that keeps a modern society alive.
Note: I completely reject ideas like anarcho-primitivism and similar “de-growth” ideas.
Simply having the “correct” political beliefs does not produce anything.
Being “anti-capitalist” does not create any food.
Blaming your landlords, no matter how justified, does not build more housing.
Posting about corporate exploitation does not create a better workplace.
And knowing who is responsible for a problem does not automatically give you the ability to replace them... do you get where I’m going to?
This is the part I think many anarchists don’t take seriously enough. Competence is incredibly important and we can’t just go from today’s world into anarchy (or similar).
Hell, most people wouldn’t even know how to organize and survive!
And imho, it would be very good if more of the people doing them had strong values and morals.
When people who care about dignity, equality and freedom refuse to enter business, business does not disappear... we just create the exact same world that we are currently living through...
People who should run businesses, aren’t running businesses.
And yet we act surprised that so many businesses are run by people who see workers as costs, customers as resources to extract and communities as markets to capture...
...make it make sense, please.
Create the means of production
I can’t hear it anymore, all the tankies going:
“seize the means of production”
We should spend much more time thinking about how to create our own means of production.
We should learn how do we build our own businesses, coops, tools, infra and institutions?
Build networks through which people can produce things, earn money and support one another without having to wait for permission from politicians, corporations or some future revolution (that ultimately will leave us worse off than before).
Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying existing ownership and power structures don’t matter, obviously they do. Neither am I saying that you can entrepreneurship your way out of every structural problem. We won’t be able to fix everything by opening a nice cooperative coffee shop and putting a pride flag in the window - but it IS a good start!
Sales forces you to deal with actual people
A lot of political thinking happens inside groups where everyone already agrees on the basic language.
You can say “mutual aid”, “abolition”, “capital”, “hierarchy” or “the commons” and people have an idea of what you mean.
Sales does not actually give you that comfort.
The person you are talking to might not share your worldview and they probably don’t care about your internal terminology.
They are also not looking for a lecture about why your organisation is morally superior.
They want either their problem, need or want solved.
So they’ll ask:
What does this do for me?
Does it solve my problem?
Can I trust you?
Is it worth the money?
Why should I choose this instead of the thing I already use?
Those are important questions that you’ll to answer in order to make the sale and that is not easy.
Over the past year or so I learned that doing sales forces you to listen.
It will force you to understand what people actually need, rather than what you think they should need...
Further this will also force you to explain your idea without assuming the other will agree with you. If you get someone to pay their money for something you offer, that is incredibly powerful!
Just think about this for a moment, and what that really means.
Yet, you will most often hear a no from the other side and I think this kind of feedback is incredibly valuable for anyone who seriously wants to build alternatives!
So yeah... let me know your thoughts, I’m very curious as to what you think!